The most important skill that any student can learn from her experiences in college is to be able to think critically about all topics and to learn how to teach herself content material through critical reading and thinking. Critical thinking involves being aware of one's own cultural biases and assumptions, looking at any issue from as many perspectives as possible in an open-minded fashion, and using logical reasoning in coming to conclusions. Critical thinking in literature also involves an awareness of various schools of criticism (historical, psychoanalytic, sociological, reader response, marxist, structuralist, feminist, ethnic). The meaning of a literary work then becomes the most logical interpretation of the work, using details from the work as support, which the reader can understand. Great literature is ambiguous and lends itself to many different interpretations, all of them valid if they are supportable. Class discussions involving the many possible interpretations of a work of literature should help a student to develop his critical thinking skills. Writing about a work of literature will help a student learn to support her own critical interpretation about that work fully and logically. In this class we will be focusing on works written by and about women, especially in the mystery genre. We will be interested in how women writers have handles and perhaps changes the conventions of this genre.

Writing is a form of critical thinking. It is a skill which can be taught. But composition teachers do more than just teach students how to put down words on a piece of paper without making many errors, in some meaningful fashion, for some rhetorical purpose. The teacher should also be helping students learn how to think, recognize interesting and original thoughts, and express these thoughts in an effective manner, because then the resulting essays will be significant, relevant, meaningful, interesting, creative, and profound. This is the harder of the two tasks to perform.

To help students know what to expect in this class I would like to review my philosophy about writing and what makes good writers and what I hope to accomplish for my students. Writing is a process which generally proceeds from some form of prewriting, to writing the first draft, to multiple revisions and proofreading, to a final copy and a final proofreading. It is usually more successful for the student or non-professional writer to concentrate first on content itself (generation of and choices of what to include), then on organization and development of these ideas, on awareness of audience and purpose, and only after all this (and usually after several drafts to improve the communication), on grammar and diction.

Writing is a combination of a writer, an audience, a subject to be discussed, and the form or style in which is it presented (poem, play, essay; cause and effect, narrative, argument; informative, ironic/humorous, satiric). Good writing should concentrate on all aspects, certainly content and meaning, but also structure, emphasis and interest (and how they affect content and meaning). Students should be taught how the two interact--not just that bad grammar adversely affects the perception of content or meaning but also that well-organized structure and effective emphasis can enhance the possibility that the audience will understand and accept the message. Thus to the triad of writer-subject-audience, I always add form. For an advanced composition or literature class, all essays should be argumentative in style, using proper referencing of the work.

In this class we will read only a small sampling of short stories and novels by J. R. R. Tolkien. However, the skills which are developed in this class should be applicable to other fantasy short stories and novels and to works of any another genre as well. The small group discussions will be designed to analyze how the work fits the conventions of the fantasy genre and how it may challenge or surpass or change those conventions. The purpose of these discussions is not to discover one Truth about the work, but to identify many possible interpretations which are defendable and discuss the details in the work which would support each interpretation. From this discussion and further reading on the part of the student, she can come to her own conclusions about the meaning of the work and its relevance to herself. In evaluating the overall questions which we raised about fantasy writers in specific and in our society today, we should be able to make the writings we read in class relevant to our own experience, or if they are not, to understand our own experience differently and more completely to allow us to live our lives to their fullest potential. We also hope to understand the importance and popularity of the fantasy genre.

The essays are individual learning tools which allow each student to explore one specific topic about a short story, essay, or novel and to develop her own argument/interpretation using logic and details from the text in support of her claims. By the end of the semester, each student should have her own rubric in mind, a list of critiria which she believes makes for a good/effective critical paper. Students should write to fulfill the requirements of their own rubrics, not to please some instructor. The student should have fulfilled the goals she set for herself at the beginning of the semester.

The creative project will allow a student the opportunity to explore one of our works of literature in a creative way. However, the creative project should illustrate in a non-verbal way a particular interpretation of the work of literature. For example, drawing a picture of one scene in a short story would suggest that the scene depicted was a pivotal scene, or might illustrate the relationship between two characters. Putting one of our poems to music would illustrate how the student felt about that poem. A group of students might choose to act out a scene from a short story or novel.