Hildegarde

So, the first set of papers came in for my Lit and Comp course, and I have been walking around them ever since, nearly astounded.

You’ve got to note this:  this is not a remedial class.

And my students are NOT adolescents.

They’re adults with jobs and families coming back to get a degree.

Lit and Comp is a distribution requirement for these people, and it’s got all the drawbacks in design that I’ve noted before.

But what I want to note here is this:  on the very first day of the course, and then again on the day I made the paper assignment, I was very clear to give them the following instructions:

1) You NEVER EVER tell me, in an English paper, that something was “interesting.”

2) You NEVER EVER tell me that something was “good.”

3) You NEVER EVER tell me that you “liked” what you’re reading.

4) You write on a theme–the concept of evil in “Young Goodman Brown,” the extended metaphor of “A Rose for Emily.”

And, to make this even clearer, I included on our Blackboard page a sample of the kind of essay I was looking for.

What I got was book reports, liberally laced with “interesting” and “like” and all the rest of us.

And a lot of incredulity and indignation that they couldn’t tell me what they found “interesting.”

I also discovered something else.

In spite of my ALSO explaining this several times, they think that in any work of fiction or poetry using the first person, the narrator MUST be the author.

I discovered this last last night, when I found that they universally assumed that Robert Browning was writing about the death of his own wife in “My Last Duchess.”

Which made it at least understandable that they didn’t figure out that the narrator was talking about murdering the woman in the poem.  After all, they’ll all Googled Robert Browning, and found that he and Elizabeth Barrett were love birds all their lives.

I know I’ve said some of this before, but bear with me.

These are not esoteric literary constructions I’m talking about here.  The fact that the first person narrator of a story or poem is NOT the author but a character created by the author is about as basic an understanding of how fiction works as you can get. 

On top of it, unlike my remedial students, most of the students in this class read.  They read a lot. 

They read things like the Twilight series and the 50 Shades of Grey stuff, but they read.   They tell me they don’t want to think when they read, but they read.

It had never occurred to me, before now, that people who read on a regular basis would not know something as simple and basic as the fact that fiction in the first person is being told by a character and not by the author.

There is a lot of discussion here about whether or not we should include this kind of literature or that kind of literature in English classes, but that is much less important than this:

No matter what kind of literature you assign, you should be getting the basics of literary conventions across to the class. 

I should not find myself in the position of having to explain this kind of thing to people over the age of 30.

On the writing of English papers as being about what they found “interesting” and what they “liked,” I have a little more sympathy.

But only a little.

In that case, I know what happened.

That was the kind of English paper they remember having written in high school, and that most students still write in high school.  There’s no analysis.  There’s no working through ideas or technical structures. 

There’s just a recap of the story and comments about how this was interesting and that was interesting and they liked this other thing.

And, because they remember doing well enough in high school, they never read the sample essay.

They thought they already knew what they would see.

I find myself, once again, stuck at a place I don’t know how to negotiate.

On the one hand, these are people majoring in things like finance and human resources management. 

What they’re looking for is not an education but certification that they’ve been trained in their field and are therefore good prospects for employers looking to hire. 

They’re never going to need to write another English paper in their lives after they leave my classroom. 

I’m not sure what good I’m doing them to insist that they hand in standard college English literature papers.  I’m not sure if it matters if they know how to write them.

I am sure it matters that they understand things like the nature of narration, and that they understand that there are other ways of reading than skimming through the literal level and thinking whatever they want to think.

Yes, this is the same class that said writers write to “express themselves.”

And midway through the class last night, once we had figured out that Browning was not talking about himself in “My Last Duchess,” I listened to them conduct an amazed discussion of why anybody would want to do that. 

Why would a writer want to write a story in somebody else’s voice?  Why would he want to present a character’s ideas that were not his own–that he might even disagree with entirely?

It’s not just that they think writers are all writing to “express themselves.”

It’s that they have no idea why writers actually write at all.

I don’t care if they read Hemingway or Twilight.

I care that they understand what’s going on with the things they read, why the writers write, what the reader can get from the writing that isn’t just a lot of subjectivist mush.

Because, right now, it’s a very cramped and airless little world they live in.