I guess the biggest temptation students face when they are assigned the task of interpreting a work of literature is to fall into the evaluative mode. The fact is that evaluation is one of the ways of writing about works of art; it is most often used in journalistic criticism of literature, film, architecture, museum exhibits and the visual arts in general to give readers a quick read of at least one writer’s opinion of the work or works of art being evaluated. This sort of evaluation is not what students at the college or high school levels are being asked to perform.
Evaluation is useful to provide a record of how people are receiving a work of art: what the short term and contemporary views of a work when it is first being introduced, or when it is being revived, or when a new translation is introduced and published. It provides, as I say, a record of personal responses to a work of art. Evaluation is not nearly as useful however in reading literary works for classes; that is works that have been assigned for study in college and high school courses.
Works that are assigned for scholarly study by college and high-school teachers are being studied for other reasons. Usually it should be taken for granted that works assigned by educators are considered worth studying by those who are assigning them. Books like Márquez’ novel have almost always already been vetted by numerous reviewers and even prize committees (I refer our students to the Nobel Prize committee’s introductory speech, which is just such an evaluative essay: see the link to the right of this page). If this is so, then a student who has been assigned to read a book is wasting his or her time to say that the work is good, or bad, or pretentious, or poorly constructed, or beautiful, or flawed. Such evaluation does not contribute to the interpretive dialogue between the book and people who are being asked to think about the book.
Instead a student in college or high school should assume that the book is worth studying, and set herself the task of really dissecting the text to find out such things as how it works, how it is constructed, how it depicts a world, and what the author is saying about that world. Students should look at things like the things I have already listed in my earlier postings: things like plot, conflict, patterns, images, repetitions, rhythm, or structure or some combination of these things. My point is that when you are assigned to study a work of art, your task is to dedicate yourself to understanding the work and to the task of arriving at an original thesis about the work which will lead to a good piece of critical writing about the work.
One way of picturing the task is to compare it to a biology assignment. No one faced with the task, for example, of dissecting a plant in a botany course, would have completed the assignment by saying: it is an ugly flower, or it is a pretentious flower, or it’s really pretty. That would be to fail to grasp the function of the assignment which involves sharpening scientific skills such as understanding the structure of the organism, the functions and interrelationships of its parts, and the relationships of the parts to the whole, as well as the way the plant functions in a world of other plants. Students who understand the nature of the assignment would also try to sharpen their analytical skills, their ability to reason in the face of the unknown as well as their skills in dissections, in the handling of the tools of the botanist.
I have written much below about what we hope students will do with One Hundred Years of Solitude. I and our other teachers are hoping for a sincere grapple with the task of dissecting this piece of literature and coming up with something complex and thoughtful to say about it.
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2 comments:
The comparison of studying a novel to the dissection of a flower in a biology course strikes me as crude -- is a student really supposed to remain as detached to a novel as a biology student does to a dissection subject??
If our "task is to dedicate yourself to understanding the work and to the task of arriving at an original thesis about the work", how can a student reach a genuine understanding of a work of art without having being emotionally connected to the work? If there isn't any emotional connection, can the student really think the work is very good?
To say that students are wasting their time in thinking that a work is "good, or bad, or pretentious, or poorly constructed, or beautiful, or flawed" is to treat the students inherently stupid and incapable of original thought. If students aren't critically evaluative of the works they encounter, will they ever become interesting people with opinions and ideas?? Let alone be good students?
I feel that the last comment is somewhat harsh and dismissive of some very good points I made in my posting. I don’t believe the metaphor of dissection is crude at all. The fact is that, while a student of literature inevitably either likes or dislikes a work of literature which is assigned in a course, the task of a student of literature actually has very little to do with merely saying what the student feels about it. I myself am a student of literature and no one should feel talked down to by my use of the term student in this context. When I teach, I try to share my struggles as a student of literature with my students. I speak and write and think as one who is also, like my students, engaged in the struggle to understand writing and writers: one who has been doing it a long while and has something to offer in the way of advice and insight, but not as one who has ceased to struggle with understanding what I read.
To become a true student of literature requires a high order of skill, logic, and judgment, and that is just what I am trying to teach in these postings. As far as one’s emotional connection to a work of art, of course my emotional investment in a book is my first and perhaps most authentic layer of response, but it’s merely true that that response simply doesn’t get me very far in terms of understanding the book. Because of this, I inevitably have to go deeper and adopt an analytical and logical attitude which very much resembles the scientific analysis required in dissection, and which operates alongside of the emotional and aesthetic experience. Dissection is equally required to talk about why a book raises a particular aesthetic response; so, even if that is what I am studying, I must still dig in and pull the artwork apart. Dissection is such an old and apt metaphor for literary analysis that I felt I was taking the risk of sounding slightly hackneyed, but not crude.
I guess the harshest thing said in your comment needs addressing, and that is the charge that I would treat my students or any student of literature as “stupid and incapable of original thought.” I have to say that this is as far from my intention as it could be. At every point I try very hard to honor my students’ views and their ideas. It takes courage to express a point of view, especially in writing, and I value and respect that courage. Moreover, would I waste so much time writing about how to work with the artwork if I thought the people I am writing to, my fellow students of literature, were as limited as you say I seem to feel they are? I certainly would not. I write what I write so that students will benefit from my experience and learn how to be stronger writers and more successful students. This would be a hopeless task if I thought that I was writing to people who were so limited. Rather I feel strongly that I am writing to an unusually intelligent, even gifted, group of students who can learn from my experience as a student of literature if they take my words as seriously as I take their intelligence and originality.
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