The most important skill that any student can learn from his experiences in college is to be able to think critically about all topics and to learn how to teach himself 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, feminist, ethnic, and structuralist). 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 his own critical interpretation about that work fully and logically.
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 in a writing class. 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 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 poems, one play, and one novel. However, the skills which are developed in this class should be applicable to other short stories, poems, dramas, novels, or films. The small group discussions will be designed to evaluate our own cultural, gender, racial, or generational biases as they may affect the understanding of the work under discussion. We will also try to evaluate the work using any appropriate schools of criticism. The purpose of these discussions is not to discover one Truth about the work, but to reread many possible interpretations which are defendible and discuss the details in the work which would support such an interpretation. From this discussion and further reading on the part of the student, he can come to his own conclusions about the meaning of the work and its relevance to himself.
The essays are individual learning tools which allow each student to explore one specific topic about a short story, poem, or the novel and to develop his own argument/interpretation using logic and details from the text in support of his claims. The student may try to write a specific kind of criticism (using one specific school of criticism) or may combine two or more possible interpretations.
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, play, or novel.
The term paper is a work of significant length which is researched, on a topic narrow in scope (narrowed to the actions from one act), and well-supported from the primary text itself as well as from the secondary research. The research itself will be done cooperatively in a group. The rationale behind this is so that students will learn to share ideas and sources, rather than feel they must be competitive and hoard information. The assumption is that in "real life" projects, workers often have to work together, learn to split up the tasks based on individual strengths, and assemble a report based on the efforts of several people. The teaching of a specific act from Hamlet should help these groups bring together the information they have gathered.
Each student will be asked in the workbook to evaluate his own papers before they are turned in and to evaluate their strengths and areas of possible improvement based on the comments made on the paper. By the end of the semester, each student should have his own rubric in mind, a list of critiria which he 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.
If I have done my job well, by the end of the semester, each student should have sufficient skills of critical thinking to be able to look for cultural, gender, racial, or generational assumptions which might influence a sense of meaning in interpreting a work of literature; she should be able to choose which school of criticism would be appropriate in interpreting this work; he should be able to develop in writing an argument about that work of literature critically, clearly and logically; she should be able to research a topic of literature and include critical material with her own interpretation and details from the text. If by the end of the semester, each student can think and write critically and logically on his own, then I have done my job well and made myself no longer neccessary.
