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Content INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 LITERARY INTERPRETATION AND THE STUDENT READER Volume I by Kevin Keith O'Connor A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirem ents for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) August 1995 Copyright 1995 Kevin Keith O'Connor UMI Number: 9617130 Copyright 1995 by O'Connor, Kevin Keith All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9617130 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007 This dissertation, w ritten by Kevin K eith O'Connor under the direction of h.Xs Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re quirements for the degree of D O CTO R OF PH ILOSOPH Y D ean o f G radu ate Stu dies Date . A ^ . s > ..I?.?.?. DISSERTATION COMMITTEE C h airperson Table of Contents Volume I Abstract........................................................................................................................ iv Introduction...................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 -- The Interpretive Act............................................................................12 Chapter 2 -- The Practice of Teaching Literature............................................... 28 Chapter 3 -- Interpretation From the Perspective of Professor and Student: Initial Observations..............................................................49 Chapter 4 - Interpretive Talk: Professors and Students C onverse..............110 Chapter 5 - Students and Tutors Address Interpretive Issues......................166 C hapter 6 -- Interpretation in Action: Student, Tutor, and Professor Readings of an Excerpt from Toni Morrison's Sula........................... 210 Chapter 7 - Free Interpretation: A Student Construct.....................................270 Chapter 8 - Toward a New Pedagogy of Interpretation................................. 284 Bibliography............................................................................................................ 302 Volume II Appendix Survey of Professors Teaching Introduction to Literature Courses, Version 1 .....................................................................................310 Survey of Professors Teaching Introduction to Literature Courses, Version II....................................................................................317 Beginning-of-Sem ester Interviews with Students Enrolled in Introduction to Literature Courses......................................339 Tutorials for Introduction to Literature C lasses................................ 508 End-of-Sem ester Interviews with Students Enrolled in Introduction to Literature C ourses.................................... 674 Volume III Appendix (continued) Student Office Visits with Introduction to Literature Professors...750 Interview with Student Following the Student's Office Visit..........783 Interview with Professor Following the Student's Office Visit 789 P apers from Professor Carol Proctor's Introduction to Poetry C lass............................................................................................. 809 An Excerpt from Toni Morrison's Sula............................................... 875 Interviews Based on Students' Reading of an Excerpt from Toni Morrison’s Sula............................................................................... 879 Interviews Based on Tutors' Reading of an Excerpt from Toni Morrison's Sula............................................................................... 950 Interviews Based on Professors' Reading of an Excerpt from Toni Morrison's Sula............................................................................. 1005 Visits to Introduction to Literature C lassroom s.............................. 1033 1993 Freshm an English Placem ent Essay Prompt....................... 1076 Excerpts from 766 Freshm an English Placem ent E ssays.......... 1078 Abstract Teaching literary interpretation to college non-English majors is frequently a discouraging endeavor. More often than not, the experience d oes little to develop the student’s interest or ability in reading literature. This presentm ent is especially disturbing when one considers it alongside the current flowering of literary theory and practice. While theory has unquestionably enriched interpretation for the professional reader, i.e., the literature professor, it has minimally influenced the inexpert reader, i.e., the literature student. In researching and writing this dissertation, my primary ambition w as to learn more about how college and university students, in particular non-English majors, conceive of and practice literary interpretation. I would argue that through observing and interviewing this group as well as professors and tutors of literature, there em erges herein a descriptive analysis-based on over seven hundred pages of transcripts and supporting data-w hich m akes clear that several commonly held assum ptions in the field of literature do not find explicit expression in our classroom s or in our conversations with students: first, that literary theory informs the teaching of literature; second, that literature teaches itself, that is, once trained in literary theory and research, the graduate student has been prepared to teach the subject; third, that problems encountered in teaching literature are largely due to cau ses "outside" academ e; and fourth, that reading and interpreting literature is an intrinsically enriching experience. Most disturbing of all is the recognition that students--and their professors--have little insight into their respective interpretive behaviors and are vague as to why they com e together to read literature. Overwhelmingly, my research reveals that professors of literature, regardless of their explicit interpretive preferences, read student papers from a New Critical perspective and, on occasion, structure the classroom dynamic similarly. Subsequent critical theories, those which are considered more relevant, politicized, an d /o r sensitive to gender, race, and ethnicity, seem not to have supplied the professor of literature with a substitute set of critical/interpretive tools. In response to this pedagogical scarcity, I offer the notion of interpretive revision. In its broadest sense, interpretive revision assum es that interpretation is process-dynam ic rather than product-static, that interpretation is evolving and plastic, its own m etam orphosis constantly pivoting on the reader re-approaching a text and re-examining his or her own evolving interpretive perspectives. It is time-demanding and labor- intensive. Interpretive revision further assum es that interpretation is multiple rather than finite or fixed and, most importantly, is dialogic. Without intending to, professors of literature, more often than we might realize, act as neutralizing agents in the process of literary interpretation. More often than we might think, we discourage literary interest and com petence. Without a new pedagogy of interpretation, will continue on this troubled course. vi we Introduction "Well, I wish I could m ake something out of those signals. What do you suppose he means?" "He don’ t m ean anything. He’s just playing." (Crane, "The Open Boat" 731) Interpretation of text, especially a literary text, has received considerable academ ic attention since the 1930’s, both at the theoretical and applied levels. Yet while hermeneutic theories and the journals in which they find expression abound, scant attention has been paid to the act of text interpretation as it is conceived of and practiced by students. While reading theory has focused on a generic description, it has not, with any consistency or thoroughness, examined the interpretive acts of average readers. Instead, research has viewed readers as driven by non-interpretive purposes, overwhelmingly characterizing them as information seekers. Just as the paradigm shift in composition--the movement from static to dynamic m odels--had powerful implications for theory, research, and pedagogy and, m ost importantly, our understanding of writing, so too, our understanding of text interpretation, in particular the interpretation of literary texts, can grow when the subject we examine is primarily the individual in the act of interpreting the literary text rather than the literary text itself. Although my research focus is on the student reader, my investigation w as carried out and is reported against a background of literary and reading theory. Therefore, it w as surprising to discover that the literary theory m ost pervasive and visible in the classroom s I visited and am ong the students and professors I interviewed is New Criticism. I find its unexpected presence ironic for two reasons; first, current literary theories, despite their respective differences, view literature from perspectives outside the text--this, in contrast to New Criticism, which "decontextualizes" the text--and second, the literary establishment prom otes literary studies in an environment increasingly sensitive to diversity and plurality, certainly not one of New Criticism’s strong points. Wanting to learn m ore about how the inexpert or student reader interprets a literary text reflects a three-fold interest. First, by learning more about the process as conceived of and practiced by student readers, I am simultaneously obliged to learn more about the reading practices of two other important, related groups: literature professors and peer literature tutors. Second, the exchange that takes place between and am ong these three groups offers valuable insight into not only the interpretive process itself but also the ways in which the interpretive process is currently taught by professors and encouraged by tutors. And third, by learning more about how these three groups practice and represent the interpretive act, light is shed on literacy, another of my interests. By literacy, I m ean a fluent literacy, the sort desired in college- level literature courses. More specifically, I use the term "fluent literacy" to describe the kind of literacy that requires analytic skills, in particular, those necessary for interpreting a text, as well as the spoken and written skills necessary for conveying to others the individual’s interpretation. My interests have their origins in the classroom. A common situation in literature courses involves the professor addressing textual interpretation issues with a student, each trying to understand the other. This interaction, regardless of from w hose perspective it is viewed, is oftentimes a disappointing one. In learning or writing centers, it is not unusual for the student to describe this kind of exchange, which frequently takes place during an office appointment, as not having aided the task of textual interpretation. Anecdotal evidence suggests that professors’ assessm ents are similar. "The O pen Boat," a short story by Stephen Crane, dramatizes the failure of two groups to understand each other. To som e extent, this story corresponds to the oftentimes frustrating exchange which takes place when professors and their students attempt communication. In one of the more dynamic scen es of the story, survivors from a sinking ship, adrift in an open lifeboat, see a group of people on the shore. The two groups m ake visual contact. At first, those in the open boat assum e that the people on shore, by way of their actions, have understood the survivors’ dilemma. It soon becom es apparent that this is not the case: "What’s that idiot with the coat m ean? W hat’s he signaling, anyhow?" "It looks as if he were trying to tell us to go north. There must be a life-saving station up there." "No! He thinks w e’re fishing. Just giving us a merry hand. . . ." "Well, if he’d just signal us to try the surf again, or to go to sea and wait, or go north, or go south, or go to hell-there would be som e reason in it. But look at him. He just stands there and keeps his coat revolving like aw heel. The ass!" (Crane 731) The people on shore do not recognize the serious position of those in the lifeboat. Basically, the two groups-those on shore and those in the lifeboat-have m ade contact but have not communicated. They connect, but meaningful exchange does not occur. In som e ways, the situation is similar in the learning center, in the classroom , and in the professor’s office. Like the man on shore who "just stands there and keeps his coat revolving like a wheel," the professor oftentimes is quite limited in his communication with a student. The student, too, operates under limitations. I would suggest that in more instances than we would like to recognize, the two g ro u p s- professors and stu d en ts-sp en d a great deal of time speaking to but not really understanding each other. The people in the boat desperately need direction from those on shore-specific direction. So, too, students need something more helpful than the waving of "a merry hand." Moreover, one wonders how often either the professor or the student, much like the survivors in the open boat, leaves the exchange muttering the words, "The ass!" In speaking informally with professors about their experiences teaching introduction to literature courses, I observe disappointment, frustration, and, in som e cases, outright hostility; they lament that too many students simply do not know how to interpret literature, and, although they occasionally address the issues I raise, there is no focused, formal dialogue or research. At a recent Modern Language Association conference, only nine sessions of over 740 dealt explicitly with the subject of teaching literature.1 Or, to put it even more dismally, only one percent of over 2,000 papers read directly addressed this topic. More and more, however, these issues are gaining serious attention. The recent work of the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature at SUNY, Albany, is an encouraging counterpoint as is the research of Harold Vine and Mark Faust, Situating Readers: Students Making Meaning of Literature. Addressing both the practical and theoretical sides of literary education is Deanne Bodgan’s Re-Educating the Imagination: Toward a Poetics, Politics and Pedagogy of Literary Engagement. Her work offers valuable frames for situating literary 1 PMLA 108.6 (1993): 1297-1412. pedagogy, in particular, for understanding Northrop Frye’s New Critical legacy and the ambivalent influences it at times places on us. Yet even som eone as thorough and impressive as Bogdan looks to student readers--when she does--for their interpretive products rather than their interpretive processes (123-127). In contrast to literature professors, professors of composition, when faced with similar difficulties, entered a period of self-examination which produced several important insights; not the least of these w as the recognition that composition is dynamic rather than static, as much steps, m issteps, and interactions as final products. The resulting changes which took place when the model moved from a static to a dynamic one enlivened the teaching of composition. I would argue that professors of literature, were they to launch their own examination, would m ake equivalent discoveries valuable to the teaching of literary interpretation. But before composition specialists recognized their need to examine the act of writing, pedagogy was mired in the reading and emulation of admired prose m odels-a product-centered praxis. Students were told what w as correct or incorrect, acceptable or taboo, and were largely left to them selves in finding a way to move from the unacceptable to the acceptable. Pedagogy for textual interpretation is similarly mired. The teacher of literature overwhelmingly focuses on analyzing the literary 7 product. The student reader and her/his process of literary interpretation rarely warrant consideration. Yet only by exploring the process of interpretation as practiced by students as well as by professors and peer tutors can we construct a realistic picture necessary to our formulating a more successful pedagogy of interpretation. In exploring the process of literary interpretation as practiced by the three aforementioned groups, I have examined various assum ptions: for example, that literary theory informs the teaching of literature; that literature teaches itself, that is, once trained in literary theory and research, the graduate student has been prepared to teach the subject; that problems encountered in teaching literature are largely due to cau ses "outside" academ e; and that reading and interpreting literature is an intrinsically enriching experience. To appraise these assum ptions, I spent two years observing novice readers of literature, more specifically, university students enrolled in introduction to literature courses, their professors, and peer literature tutors. My observations took several forms, primarily interviews with the three groups but also surveys and the analysis of student writing, both writing already com m ented upon by the professor as well as writing which had not been a sse ssed by the teacher-reader. In light of my research being ethnographic, I would argue that my subjects are representative of college and university students, professors, and tutors at m ost American post-secondary institutions. Although the university with which I am affiliated is a small, private, denominational school, its students reflect the varied dem ographics of our region. Approximately fifty percent of our students are Caucasian; nineteen percent, Latino; fifteen percent, Asian-Pacific Islander; and six percent, African-American. Fifty-five percent are female. Academically, SAT cumulative scores range from 750 to over 1300, with high school grade point averages between 2.8 and 4.0. The seventeen students included in my study mirror the above-described diversity. Our English departm ent professors, in particular the ones I interviewed and observed, p o ssess Ph.D.’s, have at least a decade of university teaching experience, are well-versed in literary theory, pursue research, and publish. The literature tutors w hose appointm ents are included in the Appendix are undergraduates, while the tutors who read and responded to the Sula p assage are enrolled in graduate programs. In my first set of interviews with students and with their professors, my questions were often general, perhaps influencing responses which tended to be general as well. What I learned, however, w as disturbing: stu d en ts-an d their professors--have little insight into their respective interpretive behaviors and are vague as to why they com e together to read literature. Consequently, the second research phase required all three groups-students, tutors, and professors-to read a specific literary text--an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s novel Sula-a n d to answ er the sam e set of text interpretation questions. It w as from this second research phase that I learned more about students as readers of a literary text, for example, their difficulty in grasping literal m eanings a s a pre-condition for creating meanings which are personal, metaphoric, or associative. Completing my research were visits to the classroom and analysis of conversations between professors and students, instructor com m ents on student essays written in an introduction to poetry class, and over seven hundred essays written by incoming freshm en to my university. It w as in this last set of d ata-th e seven hundred essay s-th at the notion of free interpretation becam e most evident, the assum ption that the reader is free to construct meaning, even if it is inconsistent with a text’s either explicitly or potentially limiting interpretive boundaries (1079-1103). While I recognize that there is no single solution to the difficulties we experience teaching interpretation in introduction to literature courses, I offer the notion of interpretive revision as a possibility. Interpretive revision encom passes not only how literary texts are read but also how interpretive positions are developed; interpretive revision implies a dynamic process which hinges on the professor’s recognition that interpretation is multiple and dialogic and that for students to articulate an interpretive position, they must be encouraged-if not required-to 10 re-approach and re-examine a text. At its m ost applied or practical level, interpretive revision puts fewer texts in front of students and gives them more time in which to read, assess, discuss, and formulate understandings and appreciations for specific poem s, plays, or novels. After analyzing hundreds of pages of collected data, I was bewildered as to the best way to organize my findings. Finally, I m ade the decision to present the research as it naturally occurred, that is, to discuss it chronologically rather than thematically. This decision was difficult but I think correct. While a thematic arrangem ent is friendlier for the reader, a chronological presentation allows one to observe the situational unfolding of the project. Given that few of us who teach literature are ethnographers, there is the belief am ong m ost that this sort of research is territory best left untraveled. Yet research similar to mine can be done by anyone with an interest in the question rather than only by those with developed skill in analytical m ethods or approaches. Had I arranged my research thematically, this important point could have been lost. I am deeply indebted to all of the students, professors, and literature tutors who participated in my research. During the two years that I collected data, they were more cooperative than I either expected or could have hoped for. Each participant knew that my research interest was in literary interpretation and w as aware that what he or she 11 had to say on the subject would be grist for my analysis and possible criticism. Their willingness, collectively and individually, to open them selves to my scrutiny im presses me and su ggests that there is perhaps a willingness am ong professors of literature to open themselves to one another and, consequently, to discover m ore about the process of reading literature from a novice perspective. One hopes for this, given the current situation. My own research and findings in som e sen se function as a prolegomenon. For our profession to teach literature m ore wisely, sensitively, and effectively, a community of like-minded scholar-teachers must em erge, each dedicated to discovering more about the interpretive act as practiced by all readers, not the least of whom are our students. Chapter 1 The Interpretive Act Reflecting on my own interpretive process, more specifically its origins twenty years ago, I keep coming back to one of my undergraduate history professors, Joyce Appleby. At first, this surprised me. After all, I w as an English major; history w as not my primary subject. I kept asking myself, "Am I shortchanging my literature professors? Aren’ t they, after all, the ones who taught me the process of interpretation?" After careful, additional consideration, I have not changed my initial position. What is different, however, is that I can now say more clearly why it is that a history rather than a literature professor m ost influenced my skills as an interpreter of texts. Although the word "intertextuality" w as never used by Professor Appleby, the notion w as implicit in every class session. Overwhelmingly we read primary rather than secondary sources, and as we sat in class discussing what we had read, Professor Appleby reminded us that these texts--these historical voices--speak to one another as well as to us. Seeing and using texts dialogically and organically w as new to me, certainly a concept absent in my literature classes. Without uttering the phrase "indeterminacy of meaning," Professor Appleby assum ed that texts could be variously interpreted. That is not to 13 say that our interpretations were accepted willy-nilly. While they had to be argued, justified, and reasoned, there was, nevertheless, the assum ption that meaning w as not solitary or determinate. This w as a liberating notion. I had been bred on the assum ptions that history was a set of undeniable facts and that sound historical m ethod w as nothing more than apprising oneself of the facts and arranging them logically and coherently. Simultaneously, the new notion brought along with it a sobering responsibility. As a reader-interpreter of texts, my role w as more consequential. I saw myself as part of a meaning-making process. I w as not reading texts solely or primarily for the information to be found therein, but rather for the uses to which I could put that information. In a sense, Joyce Appleby saw her students as "actual" readers--not as "ideal" or "implied" readers (Iser 27-30). In contrast, my literature professors were steeped in a text interpretation model which w as static and deterministic. If intertextuality w as at all present, it cam e at best through focus on genres, periods, and m ovem ents and how they possibly influenced one another. Texts, nevertheless, were unique; my professors directed much of my interpretive energy toward understanding and identifying that uniqueness. W hether it w as their intention or not, my literature professors gave me the impression that texts, in addition to their being unique, were meaning-determinate artifacts. And I, as a reader, m ust aspire to 14 becom e the "ideal" reader, an unattainable goal toward which I foolishly limped. I should add that my literature professors seldom shared these assum ptions with me or my fellow students, despite the fact that pedagogy and assessm en t were rooted in these things. Another difference between my literature professors and Joyce Appleby is that she encouraged me as if I were a colleague. Regardless of interpretive method or praxis, a professor’s attitude toward his or her students can be powerful and influential. Professor Appleby always assum ed that her students had something to say, something to offer. She and I had conversations in which it w as suggested that I pursue for publication ideas already developed in papers. I can still recall standing bleary-eyed outside her doorway turning in a p ap er-late-an d her looking toward me and saying, "You anguish so over these." To me, her tone and expression were m ore than just solicitous; they com m unicated her respect for my serious efforts. I still have a reprint of one of her articles on which she wrote, "To Kevin, from whom I’ve learned so very much." For Professor Appleby and others like her, learning and knowledge are malleable and contingent, and interpretation is based on a plurality of texts and viewpoints. Not so in my literature classes. These were more like natural science courses in which I w as presented with a fixed set of information to be absorbed; when creativity cam e into play, it w as as though my discoveries must simultaneously anticipate and 15 conform with intrinsic, text-bound meaning. That is to say, I w as m ade anxious over whether my meaning was consistent with the meaning. It is difficult to say if my experience is representative or not. My uncertainty is indicative of how little we really know about what is happening inside literature classroom s. In turn, that we know so little about the goings-on of the literature classroom can be linked to a tradition of academ ic freedom and the assumption, as challenged by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, that "individual instructors were competently trained" and "could be left on their own to get on with teaching and research, with little need for elaborate supervision and management" (7). What about literary theory and its influence on classroom practice? While interpretive homogeneity reigned suprem e when I w as an undergraduate, today interpretive hegem ony pervades m ost English departm ents. In and of itself, this is a good thing. Unfortunately, there seem s to exist a gentleperson’s agreem ent, an implicit understanding that adherents of one interpretive perspective will let alone adherents of another. While this com pact has done much to foster civility in English departm ents, it has done little to encourage a dynamic, well-argued conversation on the subject of literary criticism or the teaching of literature. If we were truly on speaking term s with one another, each of us would be forced to examine our particular interpretive and 16 pedagogical views far m ore thoroughly, critically, and effectively. Furthermore, such dialogue might produce a set of shared assum ptions valuable not just to ourselves but to our students as well. While professors of literature expend great energy in understanding fictive characters, many of us sadly seem disinterested in understanding ourselves or our own students. In addition to the questionable influences of literary theory on classroom practices, I would suggest that we appear even less sure about the ways we individually or collectively view our world. For example, when Nietzsche asserts that knowledge is a social, cultural, and linguistic creation, in som e sense, he is simultaneously arguing the importance of the enthymeme which is based on contingent knowledge and probabilities rather than absolute knowledge. Yet while the twentieth century has, in many respects, increasingly em braced the Nietzscheian belief that knowledge is relative, a social construction, the students and professors I have interviewed fail to reflect this shift. If one assum es that knowledge is absolute, that knowledge precedes language, and that the spoken word has more importance than the written word, these assum ptions would naturally influence how one reads literature. The obverse, that knowledge is contingent, incomplete, and constantly evolving, is a different set of assum ptions and one which can only produce a different interpretive perspective. Certainly, in teaching literature to students, the former assum ptions are easier to apply pedagogically. When meaning is viewed as determinant, teaching literature is enormously simplified (and distorted). The challenge in teaching literature in an environment that sees knowledge as contingent is essentially the challenge of trying to mediate between those interpretive viewpoints which are more doubtful and those which are m ore likely. This is no easy task. Throughout this century, reason, logic, and critical understanding have com e to play an increased and, more recently, a debated presence in literary schem es. So, too, the enthymeme can be seen as central to the process of interpreting literature in that literature overwhelmingly relies on informal rather than syllogistic reasoning. Although little has been m ade of this distinction, in particular to the teaching of literature, the work of Chaim Perelman (The New Rhetoric) and Stephen Toulmin (The Uses of Argument) systematically explore the ways in which practical reasoning can be developed and strengthened. In the simplest of term s, literary interpretation in the classroom com es down to a student being asked what he or she thinks about a story, its characters, their ambition, m ethods, and situation-basically, Kenneth Burke’s Pentad: Act, Agent, Purpose, Agency, and Scene. Act "names what took place, in thought or deed"; Scene, "the background of the Act, the situation in which it occurred"; Agent, "what person or kind of person performed the 18 Act"; Agency, "what m eans or instruments he used"; and Purpose, the "why": Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to nam e the act itself. But be that as it may, any com plete statem ent about motives will offer some kind of answ ers to these five questions: what w as done (act), when or where it w as done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose). (A Grammar of Motives xv) One of the difficulties for students in discussing, much less evaluating, a text is the increased responsibility contingent knowledge places on the individual. With no shopping list to go by (e.g., no "commonplaces" or Pentad), any reader, much less the inexpert one, is hard put to develop a sound interpretive viewpoint, one which is well-grounded in enthymemic reasoning. Although much overlooked, the work of Kenneth Burke is of clear value to our understanding of literature, both from the perspective of students and professors. Taking Burke’s work collectively, there is little doubt, at least in my mind, that his is an exceedingly organic account of the communicative act. I have already mentioned his Pentad. Seen a s a com ponent of Dramatism, the Pentad also works in explanatory, heuristic, and evaluative fashion. It can be used to describe human 19 motivation and action; it can be used to discover motivations and relationships heretofore unrecognized-perhaps best through the P entad’s ratios: Scene-Agent, Act-Agency, etc.--and it can be used to a sse ss the ethical dimensions of what we d o -p erh ap s best through Burke’s notion of human relations in A Grammar of Motives (323-338). Burke, also a post-Nietzschean, has devised a theory of human motives which simultaneously ad d resses contingent and probabilistic knowledge. If we refer to Roman Jakobson’s communication schem a ("Linguistics and Poetics" 350-77), code addresser—-m essage—-addressee contact context we see that Burke anticipates each of Jakobson’s com ponents. Let me explain. Looking at only one of Burke’s notions, identification (A Rhetoric of Motives 19-27), we see that it accounts for a mutuality between addresser and ad d ressee that has been established through a shared code (linguistic, literary, or even non-linguistic, e.g., clothing) in a shared context by way of a m essage that has initiated contact between the two. In som e sense, identification is very Aristotelian in that what we have is a p rocess in which one finds and uses all of the available m eans of "communication." Today, more than ever before, teaching literature to undergraduates is an exercise in identification. Rhetoric, linguistics, as well as the works of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, E. D. Hirsch, and Allan Bloom have all in their own ways attem pted to grapple with the shifting sands of cultural relativism, another interpretive influence. Looking at Greek and Roman rhetoric, we find a set of cultural and educational assum ptions articulated far m ore clearly than what we presently have. Even acknowledging the differences between the Sophists and Plato, there was far more that connected the two than separated them. In spite of the fact that Plato criticized the Sophists on ethical grounds, there was nevertheless the assum ption that ultimate truth existed (if either looked for or found) and that living in society w as overwhelmingly a morally-infused endeavor. It w as on the issue of m eans or m ethods that Plato criticized the Sophists who, more than Plato, were interested in probabilistic truth-the enthym em e-rather than absolute truth-the syllogism. But even embracing contingent truth w as far easier then than now. An elaborated system of education based on the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) imbued all with a familiar, shared background of knowledge. In fact, the enthymeme, a truncated syllogism, as som e would call it, is able to delete the middle term precisely because of this reservoir of common knowledge. Two 1987 publications, Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, address the issue of shared, received knowledge. Interestingly enough, although these books attracted wide 21 and popular attention, they were overwhelmingly condem ned by the academ ic community as elitist, normative, and prescriptive. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the authors’ viewpoints, these two books are important in that they dramatically illustrate the tensions which arise in a culture grown increasingly fractionalized.1 But in order for rhetoric or linguistics or literary theory to be more helpful to our understanding the responses of students and professors to literature, these disciplines must acknowledge and examine the various com ponents of knowledge, most specifically, the act of reading. Wolfgang Iser, Umberto Eco, Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Norman Holland, and David Bleich all have things to say on the subject of readers of literary texts. Iser, in his 1978 text, The Act of Reading, see s the reading of literature as an act of impletion in which the reader fills the blanks in the text. Umberto Eco, in The Role of the Reader, describes literary texts as either open or closed; the latter are those texts which are more determinate in meaning, such as a detective novel by Raymond Chandler. Stanley Fish, perhaps the best known in the group for his reader-oriented theories and criticism (Self-Consuming Artifacts: Seventeenth Century Literature), views the reading and interpretation of 1 I am reminded of "The Virgin and the Dynamo" in Henry Adam s’ 1907 work, The Education of Henry Adams. literature from the perspective of the sentence, the reader constantly constructing meaning in linear fashion as he or she reads from word to word, from sentence to sentence. In Is There a Text in This Class?, he elaborates upon (and defends) this position, asserting that chaotic reader interpretation is avoided through something he calls the "interpretive community." Jonathan Culler, in Structuralist Poetics, has argued that although reading is a highly idiosyncratic process, it is guided and m ade more coherent by the reader’s impulse to find unifying structures of meaning. Norman Holland, in Readers Reading, takes a psychological approach, suggesting that we are at birth imbued with a "primary identity" which we use when reading and interpreting literature. These identity them es influence our understanding of literary texts. David Bleich (Subjective Criticism), again with a strongly psychological approach, offers the theory that subjective life experiences significantly influence literary interpretation. If these theorists are right in what they say about the act of reading a literary text, and if we, as professors of literature, are making an effort to connect theory and praxis, one should reasonably expect that in conversations with students or professors or peer literature tutors, their influence would be evident. Sadly, it is not. Several current reading theorists, including Robert Scholes in Protocols of Reading, see interpretation as an "inter-textual activity" (11). Scholes defines this phrase as a conversation am ong texts. I agree. Not surprisingly, one of the challenges in teaching literary interpretation to undergraduates is that they have few texts in their repertoire from which to com pare one text to another. Furthermore, they usually fail to see that they should or could do this. In several important respects, Scholes’ notion could be com pared to that of a palimpsest, a parchm ent used several times, previous texts having been erased. While the reader encounters the m ost recent text, others, those which have been erased, are faintly present--like ghost images-influencing and informing the reader. Somewhat similarly, Jacques Derrida on occasion writes a large X across a term he wishes to put into question, placing i t " sous rature," or "under erasure." Derrida’s motive is to illustrate the difficulty in erasing the cultural effects of crucial terms; the X, the "under erasure," tells us to disregard the term while the trace, the palimpsest, reminds us of the very thing we are to forget. More experienced readers are perhaps more adept at sensing, understanding, and using these ghost texts. It is probably the case that there is seldom a time when we are not writing or reading under erasure. Yet identifying the traces of previous texts is not something all readers do or do equally well. It takes a highly trained eye to recognize "pentimento" in a text, even when it is m ost explicitly present, such as in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. That the field of literature is changing is both good and exciting. Yet these changes oftentimes are being m ade without a plan for assessing our own evolution; we assum e that what we are doing is right, best, or correct, but do we know so? In the field of composition theory and practice, there cam e a time to examine and challenge long-standing assum ptions about the teaching of writing. This examination, taken up by literally thousands of professors, resulted in major changes in the way writing was taught. The time is ripe for a similar assessm ent in literature. Thankfully, English departm ents have changed significantly over the past decade or so. Their professors now include m ore women and persons of color. Literary theories are more num erous and more eclectic. Reading anthologies increasingly reflect diversity in race, ethnicity, socio-econom ics, gender, and sexual orientation. Our students have changed as well. Even private, expensive universities, once predominantly white and upper-class, mirror the racial and econom ic differences of their region or state. I heartily support these changes. What concerns me is that, in the midst of these timely alterations, so little research is spent examining how any of these changes are influencing what professors actually do in their classroom s and, as a consequence, what students are learning. Specifically, my interest is in knowing more about literary interpretation from the student’s perspective. When changes are m ade in what we teach our students, such as which texts we select for them to read, efforts should be m ade to a sse ss the effect these changes have on the students we teach. If a revised canon has beneficial effect or impact on our students, where is the research to indicate this? I wonder how often mere change is interpreted as improvement. It is my judgm ent that student-centered curriculum decisions are being m ade without research which focuses on the student, leading me to question the appropriateness of these decisions. Professors of literature m ust examine their students; they m ust do serious scholarly research to find out who their students are a s readers of literature, what impact reading literature has upon them, and how their individual processes of reading literature vary. Without doing these things, many of the decisions and choices we are making are unintentionally elitist. The irony, of course, is that these and other changes are m ade in a genuine atm osphere of student-centeredness. Obviously, serious research and assessm en t are needed. If we are really to have a diverse, student-centered approach to education, we need research and assessm ent to help us shape and revise what we are doing. Otherwise, many of the changes we are making are egocentric, appealing to our own sen se of doing the right thing. Do we know, for example, if students will be more receptive to or better interpreters of a piece of literature which specifically ad d resses that reader’s race, gender, or socio-economic condition rather than one which does not? Does 26 reading a translation of a Greek play hold as much sway with a student reader as a novel by Toni Morrison? I do not pretend to know the answ ers to my questions. What I do know, however, is that we are building important academ ic decisions on unexamined assum ptions. We share an additional obligation to a sse ss the efficacy of our choices and to be ready when convincing evidence is presented either to continue in our present course or to make modifications. Naturally, this implies a very different way of looking at our roles a s professors of literature: seeing ourselves as a community of scholar-teachers. The scholarly forces, however, m ust change, incorporating students and their lives as learners as a proper scholarly domain. When m ost scholarship fails to impact our announced goal of educating students, we must recognize our misdirection and change course. Wayne Booth and Gerald Graff both view research and the teaching of undergraduates similarly. In his 1979 work, Critical Understanding, Wayne Booth had this to say: "[Our] profession has, for complex reasons, developed a strange capacity to generate a kind of research that is not only irrelevant to society but irrelevant to the interests of the researcher" (129). It is not that research or scholarship ought to be overthrown or that teaching fill its place, but that both focus on the student. Again quoting Booth: "[How] can we justify a national educational system that rewards and encourages scholarly 27 specialization . . . , often at the expense of simple essential m atters like teaching the young how to read and write?" (125). Thirteen years later, Gerald Graff, in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, echoes Booth’s concerns: "So the question . . . ’is not whether we are specialists but how we specialize-in what, for whom, with whom, and to what en d ’" (347). In addition to agreeing with what Booth and Graff have to say, I applaud the way it is said, particularly Graff’s Burkean, Pentad-like construction. While so many of our scholarly and pedagogical questions are obscure, if not esoteric, few are basic. Booth and Graff remind us that not only our teaching but also our scholarship should be for a particular audience and with a specific purpose in mind. Too often, research and teaching operate in isolation, and when research is applied to the classroom , the application is oftentimes more an afterthought than an inspiration. While research quite legitimately is em barked on for the researcher’s own interest and edification, it should not be so often at the exclusion of a very real and important audience and subject-our students. Chapter 2 The Practice of Teaching Literature Criticizing on e’s profession is a dangerous business. I am reminded of an anecdote in which a visitor to Winston Churchill’s country estate took critical notice of a masonry wall running through the property-a wall Churchill had spent years building. Upon inspection, the guest had observed, as would anyone, the many flaws in its construction: in places, the wall was uneven, with bricks and mortar laid haphazardly. Upon the guest’s remarking on its various defects, Churchill is said to have retorted, "Any fool can see what’s wrong. But can you see w hat’s right?" Like the person in this anecdote, I have gone out and examined the wall and returned with more than a few criticisms. Naturally, I am apprehensive that my observations will be received, a s in the instance of Churchill, with a snap. Over the past several years, in interviewing undergraduate literature students, analyzing their observations about literary interpretation in hundreds of transcript pages, and discussing with professors and tutors their respective jobs, I have com e away with a sen se that, like Churchill’s wall, our profession at times m eanders. Certainly, an ambling stone wall in the English countryside has its charm. Perhaps this is one aspect that Churchill was suggesting his observer had overlooked. So if I am to learn from the anecdote, I would 29 com m ence by saying that the profession of literature offers much that is worthy of admiration and compliment. Having said this, however, there are things about the teaching of literature to undergraduate students that bear inspection and, once inspected, bear criticism. In a nutshell, the profession simply is not doing a good enough job encouraging literary interpretation am ong undergraduate students. Yet it would be unfair to characterize the profession as being insensitive to these responsibilities. Certainly, the Dartmouth Conference of 1966 is a solid example to the contrary. Joseph Harris, in a 1991 College English article, "After Dartmouth: Growth and Conflict in English," not only explores the impact of Dartmouth but also articulates the two clearest positions taken by the attendees: the first and more entrenched, a transm ission model based on conveying skills and knowledge about a subject, in this case literature; and the second, a growth model emphasizing the student and how he or she is shaped by and uses language (634). While Harris m akes clear his preference for the growth model, nowhere does he acknowledge any of the problem s this model has experienced over the past twenty years. Instead, he spends considerable rhetorical energy pointing out deficiencies in the transm ission model. The problem with Harris’ thinking and the thinking of many in our profession is that it is basically a bifurcated view of 30 teaching English, that is to say, a view of teaching English as an either/or proposition: either it is a transmission model or it is a growth model; either it is teacher-centered or it is research or theory-centered. I do not think it naive to believe that the teaching of English is all of these things. It is about what one teaches as well as how one teaches it; it is a s much about the student of literature as it is about literature. The growth model is quite correct in emphasizing the importance of understanding how our students use language; my interest in finding out m ore about how they read a literary text indicates my own belief in this. However, that students have the vocabulary, the skills, and the techniques necessary for reading literature is equally important. Recently, I visited a literature classroom in which the students were divided into groups to discuss individual poem s. The group I observed had a difficult time understanding Coleridge’s "Ode to Dejection." The fact that each of the four students took the word "dejection" to mean "rejection" exemplifies the interpretive problems which occur when students have failed to acquire essential information, in this case, a correct definition (1058-1059). Despite my having several differences with Harris, one of his com m ents bears out my own research quite conclusively: ". . . the Dartmouth ideas seem to have failed to have much practical effect on what actually goes on in many English classrooms" (632). Regardless of 31 what the professor believes he or she is doing in the literature classroom , the evidence I have collected-in interviews, both with professors and students, in observations of classroom s, and in taped conferences between professors and students-overwhelm ingly illustrates that the professors are teaching a transm ission model which, by their own positions published elsewhere in journals and scholarly works, is an ostensibly outm oded one, namely "New Critical." Explicit in Harris’ article and in the thinking of many of my colleagues is the notion that "research and teaching address competing needs and audiences" (635). Harris see s the two in "conflict" (634). Again, the bifurcation presents itself. I would suggest a revision to Harris’ statem ent: that research and teaching are perceived to address competing needs and audiences. It is precisely because of this pervasive belief that the two are so often practiced a s mutually exclusive activities. I think my own research dem onstrates the connection between research and teaching. Even more persuasive than my own research would be the over twenty years of research in composition which has radically informed and modified how this related subject is taught in most classroom s. Gerald Graff’s analysis of English departm ents and their growing Balkanization in Professing Literature accounts for many of our divisions, including the split between research and teaching. B ecause our 32 professional culture and image are more narrowly defined than ever before, professional discourse has becom e more insular. Deconstructionists, for example, seldom -if ever-explore, take issue with, and debate New Historicist perspectives. And when a m em ber of one group--such as a gender critic-does take aim at the membership of another, it is usually for the reason that the first group perceives that the second group has som ehow trespassed on or threatened its intellectual territory. For an interpretive community legitimately to call itself that, rigorous dialogue between and am ong groups is essential. The alternative, however, has been for one interpretive cam p to have little to say to their hermeneutic cousins. Scant attention is paid to integrating opposing interests, designs, or agendas. Balkanization obviates compromise. The pact goes something like this: "I do not have to accept, modify, or reject opposing viewpoints; I must only let them exist. In the bargain com es my freedom to pursue my own slant, untrammeled by my colleagues’ objections or concerns." Our gentleperson’s agreem ent eliminates more than interpretive compromise; it eliminates the need to connect research and teaching. Had theories and agendas been actively argued from one cam p to the next, an articulated, overarching set of assum ptions might have evolved. Instead, adherents pursue dogm a over eclecticism. Part of the Balkanization process, a s Graff points out, is an implicit agreem ent that the factions will respectfully allow other cam ps their ground. The dialogue that does exist is self-referential; like true believers, the interlocutors only debate am ong them selves and then, only on issues of marginal significance. While Balkanization has avoided much departm ental and professional infighting, it has likewise deprived theoretical perspectives and agendas of the healthy criticism only the outsider, the non-true believer, can offer (I am reminded of the outlander, Alexis de Tocqueville, and his insightful Democracy in America). As a profession, rather than arguing through our apparent differences, we choose to give one another wide intellectual berth. The plot ought to be far more interesting and valuable than this. By becoming intellectually "covetous" of one another’s work, we promote the rigor of theory building. I have already mentioned the prominence of New Critical m ethods in the classroom s I have observed. In trying to account for this, I realize that one of the possible advantages of the New Critical perspective is that it offered something concrete for professors of literature in their roles as interpreters and teachers. Additionally, New Criticism gave the profession a driving force and perspective, one which m any-m ost?--once believed in and advocated. New Criticism gave literature professors a method, a vision, and a sense of intellectual community. 34 The years following the decline of New Criticism have been filled with a profusion of literary theories and professional agendas, including Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, New Historicism, Gender Criticism, and Multiculturalism. While these things have enlivened and enriched us professionally and personally, what seem s lacking are shared assum ptions about what we are trying to accomplish and where we might be going-som e of the positive things New Criticism offered a previous generation. Currently, we seem out of touch with the basic questions: Why are we teaching literature? How are we teaching it? What impact does our teaching have on our students? Who are our students as readers of literature? Is there a generic profile of the novice reader? Are interpretive processes, like com posing processes, simultaneously uniform and idiosyncratic? Basically, these are not questions we ask ourselves, m ost certainly not large num bers of us. Returning to the Dartmouth Conference, I think it can be said that the transm ission model looks at what we teach; the growth model looks at how we teach it. I do not see these as being on a collision course. Harris see s not only research and teaching as diametrical but also "traditional notions of literature, criticism or culture" as inherently antithetical to more m odern notions, including those of the growth theorists (641). Harris’ strategy is typical of many in our profession: to co n test-th e verb Harris himself u ses-rath er than to integrate. But 35 regardless of how I characterize Harris or like-minded colleagues, I am sure that their Manichean views have divided and compartmentalized our work to such an extent that we fail to connect even the most basic and necessary pedagogical constituents, such as what our students actually do with the literature we ask them to read with what we as professors assum e our students do as interpreters of literature. In observing a poetry classroom, I listened as a student explicated Emily Dickinson’s "There’s a certain Slant of light." Initially, the student’s strategy w as to assign extra-textual significance to each line; assigned m eanings seem ed to have no explicit correspondence with the literalness of the poem. The professor, realizing what was awry, sensitively urged the student to explain the concreteness of the poem ’s language and images. When focusing on the line, "There’s a certain Slant of light," the student had trem endous difficulty describing this image (1068-1069). It struck me, as I sat in the back corner of the classroom , that the student perhaps had no similar experience from which to understand what Dickinson, in a strongly imagistic and straightforward way (to me, at least), is telling her reader. It was as if this novice interpreter of literature had never taken notice of the waning sunlight on a late winter afternoon. In teaching literary interpretation to a lower-division non-English major, one is constantly confronted with the learner’s gaps-experiential ones, intellectual ones, emotional ones, historical ones, sociological and econom ic ones. In part, E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy only addresses what each one of us knows to be true: most literature assum es an underlying, shared context with its reader. "There’s a certain Slant of light" assu m es its reader has observed the last hour of light on a winter afternoon or listened to a cathedral tune, the kind com posed by Bach, the kind described by Dickinson, the kind "That oppresses." The student I referred to in the previous paragraph seem ed to lack these experiences, this knowledge, or if she had seen "a certain slant of light," the kind described by Dickinson, she was unfamiliar with the way one could express that familiarity and, therefore, was at a terrible disadvantage in trying to explain the poem or share her appreciation for it. Som e might suggest that by having our students read texts which are closer to their own experiences, we might avoid these interpretive problems. There is an intuitive reasonableness to this suggestion. Consequently, in my own efforts to observe how students read and interpret literature, I chose an excerpt from a Toni Morrison novel. Much to my surprise and disappointment, my choice seem s to have had little impact on bridging the gaps, even for the African-American participants. Apparently, som e of the important gaps we observe in our students might not necessarily or substantially be due to racial, ethnic, or gender differences. While it is true that much of what we know about ourselves and our world is acquired through individual, day-to-day experience, much is not. At issue, therefore, is the appropriateness of professors filling the gaps so that a student can understand and appreciate everything from Julius Caesar to the Autobiography of Malcolm X. If we continue to believe that altering the canon will eliminate the gaps, we will do little or nothing to improve our students as interpreters of literature. Literary interpretation requires both transmission and growth. It requires a developing repository of knowledge and experience, som e of which is acquired second-hand. In my interviewing students, one of the m ost surprising observations was the perception that professors exhibit two personae: the classroom persona and the text response persona. In the former role, the professor presents him/herself as nurturing and open to students’ thoughts, ideas, and interpretations. My classroom visits confirm this. Conversations and discussions are relaxed and non- judgmental. In the latter role, the text response persona, the professor is far less nurturing and open to what the student has to say and, in fact, is at times quite strident in his or her disagreem ent. Marginalia or endnotes on a student’s paper or exam bear this out (810-874). Students are confused by this duality, as well they should be. By assum ing the two personae--and by alternating between them rather than incorporating them -professors have it both ways. In class, they can be non-judgmental, non-censorious, an open, receptive, nurturing person and teacher. In many respects, this persona reflects the growth theorists’ model. When the professor reads a midterm, final exam, or student paper, the transm ission model em erges. That is to say, the professor is now assessing the student for what s /h e d oes or d oes not know, for what is right versus what is wrong, for what is acceptable interpretation over bogus interpretation. When the professor is a reader of the student’s interpretations rather than a listener, stances, viewpoints, and observations are evaluated on the assum ption that there is an accepted or normative interpretive position. The problem is that "scene" triggers the roles in a unidimensional way. Were we to use Burke’s Pentadic ratios in analyzing our own behavior as professors, we would soon realize that the dual personae are flat. Purpose, when connected with Scene, would remind us that although our classroom persona ought to encourage a more participatory interpretive process in our students, it should not be without our redirecting them when they enter cul-de-sacs. And our text-response persona, even though it must, of necessity, identify interpretive snarls, should suggest a way out. 39 But what about more recent theories? Sharon Crowley’s superbly synoptic A Teacher’s Introduction to Deconstruction offers its reader what he or she needs to understand the basics of Deconstruction as well as a possible redirection. But even in the chapter titled "Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy," there is little of the practical, the kind we need in order to translate theory to the classroom. Crowley and others like her give us enthusiasm --at times even passion--but what many of us need alongside the enthusiasm and the passion is concreteness. For example, in trying to discuss literature with my students on a Thursday afternoon, how do I take into account their various perceptions and experiences while simultaneously infused by my own? How do I mediate between my desire to encourage individual self-expression and discovery and my own different-possibly m istaken-notions of life, of literature? As much as my students need to be redirected, so do I. Theory m ust offer me som e practical advantage a s a professor of literature. It must simultaneously untangle pedagogical snarls and guide me out of hermeneutic cul-de-sacs. At risk of being labeled a reactionary, I would venture to say that New Criticism, despite its obvious drawbacks, is one of the few literary theories that gave us something valuable to talk about in our publications as well as in our classroom s. Although people like E. D. Hirsch and Harold Bloom and William Bennett are easy to skewer and caricature, they nevertheless reveal our need for the practical. Unfortunately, the m ore one’s position is filled with specifics, the easier it is to garner criticism and even ridicule. With respect to criticism, much of what w as directed at Hirsch and Bloom and Bennett w as healthy and enlivening and wholly due to their detailed discourses. Many of the rebuttals their ideas stimulated were equally precise. In fact, the ensuing dialogue was infused with the kinds of basic questions necessary to our profession’s health. Temporarily, there w as a sen se that we were again interested in our students and why and how and what we taught them. Really, what all of this com es down to is an historical insensitivity to the reader of literature. In an article by Gunnar H ansson, "Readers Responding--And Then?", the author m akes the point that the history of literature needs to be rewritten (138). He b ases his position on the argum ent that the history of literature has had nothing to say about the role readers have had in that history. Basically, literary history is what contem porary readers think of historical texts. As classroom professors, we operate in much the sam e way. Our genuine interest seem s not to be so much in the process of our students becoming interpreters of literature but rather in their interpretive products. Our real investment is in being text-response critics, and, unfortunately, even in this role, we frequently com e across a s Draconian. 41 In one section of his article, H ansson says som ething that is striking in relation to my own research, in particular, my interview with a student nam ed Jessica (751-764). Hansson, in a paragraph preceding the one I excerpt below, describes the differences in interpretation between high school and college students and, by way of extension, the differences between either of those two groups and professors of literature: . . . students [are put] in situations where they either have to protest or argue against the analysis, or have to accept the analyst’s statem ents-saying for instance: OK, this w as said or written by an expert; I cannot see what he saw in the text, but that’s because I am a bit stupid and a bad reader of poetry. (144) This is amazingly similar to many of the statem ents m ade by students I have interviewed, even down to the use of the phrase, "OK." It is also similar to the interview I had with Jessica and, m ore particularly, her office interview with her professor. In both those instances, Jessica kept saying, "OK," "OK," "OK," as if to imply her own inadequacy as an interpreter which, in turn, prom pts slavish deference to the expert reader, her professor. Again, I find a connection between this docility on the part of the student and what H ansson is saying in his article. That is, the growth model w ants to banish disagreem ent; it sees language developm ent as natural, free of the pedagogical externals setting it in motion. These 42 theorists assert that the situation itself encourages the kind of inherent growth which, if not squelched, develops intuitively. More to my point, the growth model, perhaps out of its desire to allow for natural, intuitive developm ent of the individual learner, discourages differences of opinion or conflict in the classroom. I believe that students sen se this reticence to address our differences. Several I have interviewed infer that while all opinions in the classroom are treated as if they were equal, this is not the case on paper. The professor’s dual p erso n ae-th e classroom persona and the text-response persona--re-em erge. I agree with H ansson’s second point that we need to revise the descriptive and analytic language we use when writing and talking about literature (143). While I agree with his observation, he offers no substitute vocabulary. Furthermore, he suggests that there is an existing methodology on which to work. But in order for a new and bona fide descriptive and analytic language to em erge, research on the interpretive process of actual readers must com e first. In his third argument--that we need new models for analyzing literature--he cites Sw eden’s requirement that high school students complete an essay as part of their fulfillment of graduation requirements. In examining almost one hundred years of these essays, a researcher w as able to place them in three basic groups: the first, idealistic--those essay s in which the author is described as a prophet or seer; the second, historical empirical--in which the author is a skilled craftsman w hose works depict the outer and inner world; and the third, psychological symbolic--in which the author is a highly sensitive person who uses symbolism to express both inner and outer realities. Even with such an extensive time frame, only three interpretive trends appear to have found expression in the writing of Swedish students. Quite rightly, H ansson decries the fact that so few interpretive trends can be found and that these trends not only take so long to find their ways into schools but also, once there, seem to prevail for lengthy stretches of time. H ansson’s observations offer corollary support for my own research findings that, in spite of the number of literary theories having been discussed and developed in the past twenty years, introduction to literature courses esp o u se either directly or indirectly a supposedly outm oded form of literary interpretation, namely objective or New Critical. Regardless of the impact of the Dartmouth Conference, transm ission versus growth models, or literary theories since the 1950’s, it is clear to me that none of these things has generated a set of questions professors of literature can use in teaching literature to their students. It strikes me that if my research does anything, it might be that it leads us eventually to discover the set of questions we ought to be asking the students who read literature in our classes. 44 Earlier, I com pared composition and literature in that I suggested, while the former had em barked upon a rigorous period of self- assessm en t accom panied by the kind of research which focused on student writers, the latter had instead chosen a very different path, one which focused not on students in the process of learning to be readers but on professors honing their skills as interpreters. A primary result of com positionists’ self-assessm ent and research has been a much improved understanding of how students behave as and becom e writers. Consequently, a set of questions exists which compositionists use when talking with a student about his or her text, a set of questions about purpose, context, audience, scene, etc. Most importantly, these questions reflect what is now known about writing as a process. Certainly, Thom as Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions also has som e relevance to the teaching of literature in that nothing less than a pronounced paradigm shift can extricate us from the apparent doldrums of teaching and learning about literature. The example of composition and the dramatic turn it took when the product model was abandoned for a process model illustrates the need for literature to analyze its basic essen ce and motives; one can only assum e that such a process would result in a new paradigm. It is hard for me to imagine myself sitting down with a student to discuss a paper and not employing the kinds of implied questions one 45 finds in Mina Shaughnessy’s landmark work, Errors and Expectations. While my conversations will vary from student to student, there is a commonality in that th ese dialogues are intensely focused on the student and his or her process as a writer and thinker. In contrast, my conversations with a student who is responding to a literary text are far less predictable. Because I know little about how other individuals actually read literary texts, my questions do not address nearly so well students’ interpretive processes. Composition research w as so very valuable because it offered a set of questions to ask students about them selves as writers. The theory and the research was student-centered. We were interested in learning more about how novice writers write. What are their behaviors? What do they think? What are their concerns? And it is because so many people took this focus with their research that we cam e to a collective set of information about novice writers that w as powerful and impressive. Shaughnessy taught so many people in composition the kinds and quantities of questions to ask their students. Similarly, we need to develop a set of operating questions which are always on our minds when we work with students who are reading literary texts. We really do not have this. What we fall back onto is a grab bag of questions, a hodgepodge, a ragtag collection-idiosyncratic, unsystematic, and overwhelmingly reflective of the professors’ experience 46 of reading literature. So our questions tend to be the kinds that m ost students probably do not find terribly helpful to them in their own attem pts to understand better the literature they are reading. Oftentimes, they react much like the people in C rane’s open boat, angry with our "just giving [them] a merry hand." Without intending to, professors of literature, more often than we might realize, act as neutralizing agents in the process of literary interpretation. More often than we might think, we discourage literary interest and com petence. According to Gerald Graff, it is disappointing that "the idea still remains powerful that students are best introduced to literature by being put in ’direct’ contact with texts themselves, with a minimum of contextualizing interference" (Professing Literature 10). My research supports this. As a corrective, Robert Scholes contends in Textual Power that teaching the "cultural text" is as important as teaching the literary text. Basic linguistic or communication models such as Jakobson’s support Scholes’ assertion. Text and context, if not always equal in importance, are equal in our need to consider them as informing constituents in a communication channel. When context or any other constituent in a communication model is dismissed, the communication channel is disrupted. I am again reminded of the unfortunate souls in C rane’s open boat. In visiting classroom s and interviewing professors and students, one of the important observations I m ade w as the prominence New Critical thoughts, assum ptions, and m ethods still have in introduction to literature courses. This observation is not terribly surprising when one considers New Criticism in light of its successfully bringing m ethod and rigor to the study and interpretation of literature. New Criticism gave us a way to read literature, to understand it, to interpret it, and to speak about it with another person. Overwhelmingly, the transcripts contained in this dissertation reveal that professors of literature, regardless of their explicit interpretive preferences, read student papers from a New Critical perspective and, on occasion, structure the classroom dynamic similarly. Subsequent critical theories, those which are considered more relevant, politicized, an d /o r sensitive to gender, race, and ethnicity, have not supplied the professor of literature with a substitute set of critical/interpretive tools. Present literary theories, although rich in insights and perspectives, have not supplied us with an alternative method and vocabulary nearly as accessible to either professor or student. While New Criticism tends toward the universal--at least, m ethodologically-post-m odern theories tend toward the idiosyncratic. With all respect to Deconstruction, any of us would be hard-pressed to find half a dozen colleagues who could craft an equivalent num ber of definitions, one approximating the others. Whatever one’s reservations about New Criticism, it offered common ground on which we could all talk and teach. It offered--and, for som e, continues to offer--a concreteness that infused theory and praxis. 49 Chapter 3 Interpretation From the Perspective of Professor and Student: Initial Observations New Critical or objective theories gave us, in addition to theory, a method or praxis which led to very real and usable classroom pedagogy. As literary theories have becom e increasingly m ore philosophical in their outlooks and construction, they have simultaneously lost, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, a concreteness which can be imported into the classroom. I have observed in my own research the duality of a teacher investing, outside of the classroom , in one critical theory and simultaneously applying, inside the classroom, a different critical theory and its tools. Certainly, one explanation might be that with these more philosophical, contem porary theories, there is not a sen se that the theory can be easily used in the classroom. I acknowledge that there are exceptions, i.e., som e professors teach courses that directly address Deconstruction, New Historicism, feminist perspectives, etc., but, to the best of my knowledge, I have not observed these theories explicitly or successfully addressed in lower-division introduction to literature courses. I hear from the student’s perspective, in their conversations and comments, a sen se of not having a foundation for what it is they are being asked to do; for them, there is no stretch of ground on which they can stand and then move forward as interpreters of literature. While the humanities, literature specifically, cannot becom e precise and prescriptive 50 as with the natural sciences, certainly it must identify through careful observation and research a set of interpretive assum ptions that give students a clearer sen se of this thing called literary interpretation and simultaneously give us as professors of literature greater skill and su ccess with our students. The teaching of undergraduate students at m ost American colleges and universities is a strange concoction taught by a variety of persons, from teaching assistants to professors with decades of experience. It is unclear precisely what this variety of persons expect the course to teach. If the majority assum e that the experience of interpreting literature is intrinsically enriching, they overlook saying this--to me, in my interviews, and to their students. More importantly, they fail to articulate in their syllabi the course’s aims or purpose. Disappointing too is my observation that they seem to know even less about students as learners and certainly as neophytes to literary interpretation. So as not to be unfair in my characterizations, this group is simultaneously am ong the m ost enthusiastic and dedicated of university and college professors. From my own research observations, I can say with assurance that professors have a genuine concern for students as individuals and exhibit a real love of literature. Unfortunately, because m ost of us seem to know so little about our own students’ view of literary interpretation, and because of our own murky ambitions in the literature 51 classroom , there seem s to be misdirection and confusion both am ong students and professors. To promote our students’ personal and intellectual growth and, more specifically, out of concern for their ability to read, understand, and take pleasure from literature, we must discover more about the process of reading literature--not only from our own perspective but also from theirs as well. Such inquiry leads to a shared foundation of assum ptions, attitudes, values, and beliefs about literary interpretation and its teaching. At present, there seem s to be little information or consensus, and while heterogeneity of viewpoints and approaches is often prized in academ ic circles, it has its disadvantages. I would respectfully suggest that current heterogeneity has ham pered our ability to teach literary interpretation to undergraduate students at American institutions. The professors I have studied fail to see that they have several roles to play. And certainly their role as a professional reader of literature who is conversing with a group of like-minded peers is not the role m ost appropriate in the undergraduate literature classroom. Selecting a purposeful role is undoubtedly an important consideration in m ost endeavors. In teaching literature, our ambitions frequently go unsaid. Is it to groom students in becoming quasi-professional interpreters of literature? Is it to introduce them to the heterogeneous conversation of professional interpreters of literature? Or is it something quite different from and much simpler than these things, such as reading for pleasure and the appreciation of particular texts? Is it to understand the influence of literature as it relates to society or culture? Is it to use literature in a more personal way, that is to say, to see how literature can help an individual better understand her/himself? In m ost literature classes, purposes or goals are not articulated. This is a major oversight. Furthermore, my research fails to corroborate the assum ption that literature teaches itself or that the graduate student, once trained in literary theory and research, has been adequately prepared to teach the subject. And what do we really know about our students? The general sketch that em erges from my data is just that, a sketch-incom plete, insubstantial, and stereotypical. Most often, the words we use are sharply pejorative, the catalogue waxing lengthy in its description of students’ deficiencies as learners. While there is little doubt that many arrive on college cam puses ill-prepared for the academ ic rigors they face, there is no advantage to savaging their undernourished state. My interviews with students support this description; clearly, our assum ption that problems outside academ e are causal is borne out in my research. Given the reasonableness of the assumption, we must address our students first as literal readers, as com prehenders, before we can develop them as interpreters. Time after time, the students I asked to 53 read an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s Sula, when questioned, illustrated their difficulty in first understanding the literalness of the text. Although none of us wishes to teach reading com prehension, we m ust confront the necessity. Compositionists have worked for years in their attem pts to understand better the specific skills their students lack and must consequently acquire in order to m aster the expectations of college-level prose. Professors of literature, including those in my study, have not attem pted a discovery of their students’ interpretive status, thereby identifying in a more system atic way specific interpretive deficits and impediments. Compositionists have used the com posing process essay as an avenue for discovering more about their students as writers. Office appointm ents with writing students are typically filled with questions which aim to learn more about the student’s habits as a writer and his or her likes, dislikes, concerns, fears, and apprehensions about writing. I wonder how often any of us ever ask our literature students if they are fearful or apprehensive about reading literature. While we acknowledge there is something called "writer’s block," we are seemingly insensitive to the possibility that there might be something called "reader’s block." An established strategy am ong compositionists is to determine a student writer’s strengths and w eaknesses, to encourage the strengths, and to 54 substitute new strategies for weak ones. In my own research, I have not found it to be the case that professors of literature do the sam e. While encouraging students to discover something about the text, literature professors ironically are disinterested in discovering much about their own students as texts. The sophisticated herm eneutic skill of the professor-reader illuminates fictive characters but not actual characters-- literature students. While the literary text is central to what we do in a classroom , our students should be just as much a point of focus. Consequently, we should be spending much of our time trying to find out m ore about them as readers of literature, and the only way we can do that is through questions, dialogue, conversation, and research, and I em phasize vigorously the last item in this list. But in order for us to do this--to discuss literary interpretation with them in such a way that we are aware of their own processes--w e also have to know a great deal more about the interpretive process ourselves. Intuitive knowledge m ust be m ade explicit. At present, we have in place a sen se of the structural com ponents of interpretation, from the m ost general-level things such as character, theme, plot, point of view, etc., to m ore sophisticated approaches which contextualize text in literary, social, and historical frameworks. Not to take away from the importance of these things in conveying an enhanced sen se of literary interpretation or appreciation, I would argue that they are not the sum total. These com ponents or 55 aspects of literature in no explicit way reveal the process of interpretation from the reader’s perspective. What we lack a s professors of literature is a paradigm for teaching literature, or to put it differently, an interpretive paradigm with heuristic implications for pedagogy. Survey of Professors Teaching Introduction to Literature Courses. Versions I and I I After deciding to pursue the question of how novice readers of literature interpret such texts, I spent considerable time trying to construct a research m ethod that would shed light on that question. B ecause of my familiarity with the research designs compositionists used to learn more about the com posing process, it w as natural for me to gravitate toward a similar method: interview, observation, and analysis. The bulk of my research falls into these categories. One of my first steps w as to contact literature professors teaching introduction to literature courses in the English departm ent at the university where I work. I announced my research interest and invited their participation, both directly and, indirectly, by way of their students. I w as fortunate that several professors indicated interest in my concerns and agreed not only to participate in the project them selves but also to allow me to go into their classes and m ake a brief presentation to the students. 56 In each literature classroom I attended, I announced my interest in learning more about students as readers of literary texts. I described that a random sam ple would be chosen from each class and letters would be written to those who were selected, inviting them to call me and schedule an interview appointment. This process worked surprisingly well, with a student response rate to my letter of invitation of nearly one hundred percent. It should be noted that although my university is a small, private, church-affiliated institution, there is impressive diversity am ong its students. Fifty-five percent are female, and forty-one percent are minority. The student interviews were conducted both at the beginning of the sem ester and in follow-up sessions toward the end of the term. For the professors, I utilized a written survey-tw o versions- again administered at separate times in the sem ester. Simultaneous with my focus on the classroom professor and his or her students w as my interest in learning m ore about the dialogic exchange between literature tutors and students. Several of the literature tutors in the tutoring center at our university, along with the students whom I interviewed and invited to participate in tutoring, were approached and agreed to have their sessions tape recorded. Also, because the interaction in the classroom and in the professor’s office are frequently quite different, two professors allowed their student office visits to be recorded. Som e of my research is based on these exchanges. In addition to analyzing these office visits, I arranged follow-up visits with both a student and a professor in which I played back the recording of the office visit and, in separate interviews, asked the student and the professor to respond to the exchange. These turned out to be very informative. B ecause it w as becoming clear at this point in my research that two distinct professor personae were operating--the classroom and the text response p erso n ae-l looked at student essay s which had been evaluated by a professor to corroborate the accuracy of my observation that, indeed, the text response persona is in significant ways different from the classroom persona. These essays are also included in the Appendix (810-874). In this chapter, I will be discussing much of the above data. An important initial point: while familiar with research m ethods employed by compositionists in their efforts to discover more about the com posing process, I had not conducted similar research previous to the dissertation. In the two-year process of collecting the data contained in this dissertation, I learned much about this kind of inquiry, especially the need to respond to the ad hoc, evolving nature of the endeavor. In reviewing all of the data, it is clear to me that it can be broken into three groups: the first-contained in this and the following ch ap ter- includes my opening efforts and observations; the second set, what I now consider to be a m ore focused approach, required students, professors, and tutors to read and answer questions about an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s Sula\ and then a final set of data, in Chapter Seven, which supports observations which cam e out of the first two groups of research data--such as the notion that students perceive the interpretation of a literary text as a process only marginally dependent on the literalness of the text they happen to be reading. My admitted research naivete is probably responsible for the data set being so expansive; it is also what forced me to refine my approach, inadvertently am assing additional support for my view that the interpretive process of student readers can be observed and that interest in the process must be considered a key issue for the profession. One of the first things I did in commencing my research w as to question the literature instructors themselves: 1. Have you taught this class before? classes similar to it? 2. What have you observed about the skills and aptitudes of the students who are enrolled in each section of your course? If individual students com e to mind, please com m ent on them. 3. At this point in the sem ester, can you indicate whether the students in each section of your course appear to be unaccustom ed to or underprepared for what they are being asked to do? How d oes this effect your teaching of this course? 59 4. Has either section of students dem onstrated special com petence or talent? If so, can you describe what you have noticed? 5. What do you think will be the m ost challenging aspect of your course for m ost of your students? 6. If you were to em phasize one or, at most, two sentences of your syllabus as m ost important, which sentence or two would you underscore? 7. With respect to your goals for this class, is there perhaps something that is not included in your syllabus but which is nevertheless essential to what you expect your students to do? 8. If you have taught the sam e course or one similar to it, how do the students enrolled in your current sections com pare with students enrolled in sections from previous sem esters or years? Initially, I w as surprised that one professor noted in response to question two that students believe "poetry can be anything you want it to mean" (315). At the beginning of my research, this com m ent did not have the significance it now carries. It w as not until the very end of my research that I began to realize that there are many students who believe that literature can m ean anything the reader wants it to m ean (1079-1103). This interpretive assum ption is significant and needs to be taken into account by professors of literature when teaching introductory courses. For example, the particular professor whom I quoted in observing the "free" interpretive approach of her students went on to say that she tries to steer them away from this freestyle interpretation without squelching their creativity. While I acknowledge the need to maintain a creative, communicative channel with students, interpretive opinions must, of necessity, coincide with the text. Another instructor com m ent m ade in reaction to the question on students’ skills and aptitudes is illuminating: "Generally, the writing and analytical skills of the students are inadequate. They are also deficient in vocabulary and lack a sound sen se of history (literary and general)" (313). My in-class visits confirm the accuracy of this statem ent, especially the observation regarding deficiencies in vocabulary. In my analysis of a student presentation, much of the novice reader’s inability to get at the meaning in the poem is due to basic vocabulary deficiencies (1058-1059). Again, the sam e professor, in response to question three, m akes the observation that the students’ deficiencies as readers and as writers has led to her having to reduce her own expectations and requirem ents in these introductory courses. This professor is well aware of the problematic impact of her having done this. In responding to question four, she m akes this remark: "2 or 3 students in each section carry the bulk of the discussion. These few generally have been much more stringently taught in high school, have had to do a great deal of reading 61 and writing, and are comfortable with analytical thought" (313). What she is suggesting is that the students who perform more effectively have an established interpretive foundation. The professor has used the phrase "stringently taught." It is hard to say if what she is observing is a student who has been taught and has learned well the interpretive m ethods of objective criticism. Contrast this to the professor’s com m ents about the free interpretation perspective of many of her students. My research indicates that m ost students fill either one of these two categories, the text-centered or the text-free, the majority fitting into the latter. After completing my initial survey, I drafted a second one, referred to in the Appendix as Version II, which contains six questions: 1. When teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic goals? 2. How do you communicate these goals to your students? 3. To what extent do you think these goals are achieved? 4. How do you imagine your students would answ er the question: Why are you taking a literature class? 5. How do you imagine they would answer the question: What did you learn as a result of taking this course? 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? The items included in Version I I were prom pted by my initial conversations with the students. Consequently, the first five questions reflect issues which had been raised in the first set of student interviews, issues I w as curious to see from the professors’ perspectives. For example, questions one to three reveal the students’ sense that they w ere unsure of the course’s goals; questions four and five, the students’ view that these kinds of classes are requirements and their enriching aspects--if at all p resen t-are minor. Professor answ ers to these questions indicate that while they incorrectly assum e that their goals are understood by their students, they have few misperceptions about the reasons or rewards students ascribe to introduction to literature classes. Probably the m ost revealing response, however, cam e from the last item, the one in which the professor is asked to describe how his or her reading of a literary text might differ from that of the student’s reading of a literary text. Generally, the professors cite differences in their attitude toward a text, more specifically, their greater comfort with ambiguity or their disinclination to be put off by texts that are inconsistent with their own values or beliefs. By way of contrast, the professors see student readers as simplistic and literal. What my research m akes clear is that professors fail to realize that many, if not most, of their students have great difficulty grappling with the literalness of a text and, therefore, are at a strong 63 disadvantage in simultaneously approaching a text-in contrast to their professors--for m eanings which recline upon and arise from a text’s "literalness." If examined as a group, the professor responses vary both in term s of com pleteness as well as the support they give to the notion of heterogeneous purposes in literature classroom s. But there are also similarities. Overwhelmingly, the professors perceive that their students are enrolled in their classes as a requirement and that students as readers of literary texts are operating at a very literal level, this in contrast to the professor-reader who is attempting a layered, sophisticated reading, comparing one text with another or others, classifying the text as to its genre, period, or author, and analyzing its structure in term s of plot and theme. Stylistic considerations take on additional importance to many of the professor-readers while only of marginal or non-existent interest to m ost of the student readers. Most striking, however, is what is not said in the professor responses to either the Version I or Version I I survey. The professors imply a model of student readers of literary texts that is probably an accurate one if a superficial and externalized description of the novice reader is the best we could hope for. How their students actually grapple with a literary text at the level of the sentence or the paragraph is left undescribed in their responses. I am forced to include myself as one 64 who has little idea as to how the novice reader grapples with a literary text at the syntactic level. Certainly the kind of readers the professor group see them selves as being--undoubtedly an accurate description~is quite different from the readers they encounter in their students. This confirms, I think, the com m onsense recognition that a major difference exists between these two types of readers, professors and students. Yet the professor group seem s not to account for this difference in how they teach literature. Survey responses--and interview com m ents-confirm this. Much like the outm oded product-centered praxis of composition, their approach focuses almost exclusively on analysis of textual icons and uses the professor’s interpretive model as the one students should acquire and employ. I wonder if this is a reasonable goal for a non-English major for whom this particular literature class will probably be the last one this person ever takes. Most importantly, is it reasonable given that m ost students dem onstrate difficulty as com prehenders of literary te x ts-as much or more than as interpreters. Clearly, most students are at a great distance from achieving the interpretive goals their professors imply. Therefore, assisting them as com prehenders of literary texts m ust be a readerly activity we address. I recall my own experience in an undergraduate literature course, a Faulkner class specifically. Each morning, the professor would ask 65 several questions regarding a short story we had read for that session. The questions were always quite literal, often focusing on the corporeal reality of the story, i.e., basic com prehension questions. To answ er the quiz questions correctly, a very careful, close reading of the text had to have occurred. Regrettably, the professor never m ade clear to any of us what seem s clear to me now: his desire to teach a course in close reading and to encourage our understanding a writer, in this case, Faulkner, w hose texts move inductively and are, therefore, trem endously difficult for many to grasp, even for the literalness of such things as plot or characters. Yet given that the professor did not make any of these purposes explicit, I only realize their value retrospectively. Nevertheless, I w as forced to attend to text in a much more careful way, scrutinizing it at the level of word, sentence, and paragraph--a process I was not encouraged to follow by other literature professors. Oftentimes, I found myself underlining specific sentences that I knew were key to my building a working com prehension of a particular story. I had to return to those highlighted sentences, and only through repeated efforts, in som e ways very similar to one’s lexical struggles with a poetic phrase, did they finally make sense. I was also forced to work inductively as a reader; certainly Faulkner forces all of his readers to do this. But those quizzes which confronted us at the beginning of each session were, in som e respects, 66 the modus operandi which produced in me a more careful reader, a reader more willing to grapple with the "literalness" of the text and not rush interpretive issues before the "reality" of the text w as in place. Professor responses to my survey are probably typical of rem arks being m ade at m ost college-level institutions. Opinions are generally that students are poor readers and weak writers. Higher marks are given in many cases to the students’ verbal abilities, at least their abilities to discuss literature in a classroom setting. My concern is that the students’ higher verbal assessm ent is because of the less judgmental classroom persona of many professors. And despite the importance of literary theory to our lives and our reputations am ong our peers, there is little talk of theory and its place, actual or potential, in the undergraduate classroom. Student Interviews In arriving at an initial set of student questions, I gave considerable thought to reading theories. The works of Iser and others suggest the complexity of reading and imply that while reading is at root a cognitive processing skill, it is also operating under considerable situational, psychological, and social influence. Consequently, the questions I arrived at are grouped into several categories which reflect possible influences on the reading of a literary text. They also reflect the 67 complexity of the reading process, that is, the assum ption that the more proficient or skillful the reader of a literary text, the more likely that reader is drawing upon a variety of cognitive, psychological, and social p rocesses in the course of analyzing a literary text. Henry Jam es’ short story, "The Figure in the Carpet," is in many respects illustrative of these likely influences. Perhaps even better than "The Art of Fiction," "The Figure in the Carpet" gets at literary interpretation in its "situational" arena. The story’s narrator, a literary reviewer for various high-brow journals, com es in contact with a well- known contem porary author, Hugh Vereker. Assigned to review his m ost recent book, the narrator coincidentally m eets Vereker at a w eekend retreat and discovers much to his chagrin that he has m issed the author’s "little point" (155). What com es through in every paragraph of "The Figure in the Carpet" is the difficulty of literary interpretation, even for the m ost sensitive, educated of read ers-th e literary critic. Similar to Robert Scholes’ notion of literary interpretation as a palim psest or Derrida’s view of text underlying other text~"under erasu re"-Jam es’ analogy of the figure in the carpet is equally powerful, suggesting the teasing quality of interpretation-the notion that the "little point," the secret, is there in plain sight of day, exposed on the page yet hidden like the figure in the carpet or the palimpsest or the vague outlines of letters 68 having been erased, all there yet simultaneously so camouflaged and veiled as to be indiscernible. What all of this has to do with literary interpretation from the perspective of the student reader is quite obvious: if even the m ost attuned and super-subtle readers such as literary critics can be so frustrated by text interpretation, consequently, what level of frustration m ust the neophyte reader experience? And for those neophytes so completely uninitiated as to be immune to even the sense of frustration, their distance so great a s to be "unfrustrated," how foolish perhaps the notion that an introductory course in literature ought to or should move readers to Jam e s’ devilishly uncomfortable point of interpretation. Jam e s’ narrator clearly exemplifies the dark side of interpretation. Interpretation is seen more as curse than enlightenment, more Sisyphean nightmare than herm eneutic epiphany. Toward the end of "The Figure in the Carpet," the narrator discovers yet another misinterpretation: his view that his friend’s wife had shared the "secret" of Hugh Vereker’s work with her second husband. Sadly, we find misinterpretation operating at the level of text, person, and situation-all uncomfortably analogous to our own misinterpretations of these three as professors of literature. Consequently, in my first set of student interviews, I wanted to develop a general picture as to how students in introduction to literature 69 courses felt about taking these sorts of classes. I wanted to know more about their habits as readers, writers, and thinkers and, hopefully, to get a sen se of how they go about reading literature, with what attitudes, feelings, perceptions, or assum ptions. The following are the questions which guided each of the first set of student interviews: Affective Domain How do you feel about being in this class? Have you taken other classes similar to this one? If you have, what w as your experience? Analytic Thinking What do you think the teacher wants you to do in this class? Is what the teacher wants you to do stated som ew here on the syllabus or course description? Has it been stated orally? What do you think is the single most important skill for su ccess in this class? Why do you think this? Do you think you p o ssess this skill? To what degree or extent? Reading Habits Do you enjoy reading literature? Describe your reading habits: What do you read? how often? why do you read? etc. Why read literature? Writing Habits Do you enjoy writing? If so, do you have a preference for certain types of writing? When teachers read your writing, do you think their assessm ents are accurate or fair? Explain. When they are critical of your writing, what sorts of things do they usually say? Have their com m ents ever been helpful to you as a writer? Why write? Analytic Thinking Do you enjoy solving mental/intellectual puzzles? Making sense out of things, situations, and people? Can you supply a recent example? When you’re in the process of solving an intellectual puzzle, do you follow any procedure? Do you adhere to any habits? Do you ever use conversation with other persons as a problem/puzzle-solving strategy? Explain. Do you ever use this conversational strategy when solving academic questions or problems? Self-Reflection Do you ever spend time wondering about things or daydreaming? Are the sorts of things that you wonder about or question, ever academ ic things? Things that relate directly to your classes? Have you been spending any time thinking about, asking questions about, wondering about your literature class? Explain. Listening Habits How would you rate yourself as a listener? Are you a good listener in a classroom ? What m akes for a good classroom listener? Are listening skills 71 important to your success in this literature course? Speaking Habits Do you ever contribute to classroom discussion? Have you participated in any of the conversations which have occurred in your literature class? What w as your role? Do you think these discussions are important? Do you think they impact your understanding of the material? your grade? Dialogic Tutoring Do you think that a student would find it helpful if h e /sh e were to meet with som eone for one hour per week to talk about what is being read, discussed, and written about in a literature class? How so? If som eone, perhaps som eone like me, were to m eet with a student in a literature course once each week, how might I spend the time with the student so that the sessions were helpful to what the student is doing or is being asked to do in class? Can you be specific? Would you be interested in meeting som eone for one hour per week to discuss the things you’re doing in your literature class? Moreover, I grouped the questions into several descriptive categories so as to reflect the diverse influences on interpretive skills and to assess, by way of the set of interviews, categories which might have special significance. Another of my research concerns is to ascertain why we teach literature, that is, what is its academ ic purpose; a common assum ption is that the reading and interpretation of literature is an intrinsically enriching experience, one that connects to larger social issues. If there is a purpose--a higher o n e-it eludes the students. In all of the interviews with this group, I found a vagueness or fuzziness as to what the classes really are about. Or, to put it a little differently, the students saw these classes as basically mechanical ones: you attend classes, are expected to read the assigned material, take a certain number of exams, write several essays, and actively participate in class discussions. It is noteworthy that the students answ ered the purpose question by enumerating course requirements--"You are required to do these things." In all of my student interviews, I never had the sense that the students understood the purpose behind the requirements, if indeed there is one. I should add here, with som e disappointment, that in my survey questions and follow- up conversations with the professor group, they, too, failed to communicate their sense of a larger purpose in the teaching of these courses. Similar to their own students, they focus on the class’ mechanical structure and their disappointment with students who do not m eet their requirements. In my first interviews, I tried pinning students down, encouraging them to be more definite and detailed, concrete or exact in their responses; admittedly, I was only infrequently successful. 73 Interview with Paul Averv In my interview with Paul Avery, he indicates that he has never had a class in high school that exclusively focuses on literature. I found this remark surprising in light of my own high school experience more than twenty years before, for I realized if this student’s experience is typical, curriculum has significantly changed. For me, all four years of high school English concentrated exclusively on reading literature and writing about it. Basically, the kind of high school English class I took is what college students are now being offered in introductory college literature courses. Paul’s description reinforces the assum ption that problem s encountered in our teaching literature are in part due to causes "outside" academ e. Paul indicates that one way a person/student can becom e a reader with greater com prehension is just to read more often. If I use my own experience as an indicator, I would say Paul is right. But reading without direction or focus probably is not going to result in increased com prehension. In addition to indicating the importance of reading more, he also indicates that it would be important to read more closely and carefully. Paul characterizes this as looking for "oddities in the reading" (344). Perhaps he has in mind the kind of Faulknerian sentences which I described earlier. I can only speculate. 74 In response to my question about how his reading might have progressed or developed in the past year, he responds, Most of the time when you read a book, you’re not really looking for things. You’re just reading for enjoyment or whatever. You kind of have to be careful about what you’re reading. You have to understand why things are, you know, in certain ways and look other than just reading, read the story. (344) This word "careful" com es up in Paul’s interview as it does in several others. For Paul, reading literature in the context of a university introduction to literature course is to read with care. Yet he never articulates a specific strategy for doing this, and when he indicates that his main purpose in reading literature is for enjoyment, his m ost recent selection the previous sum m er being a Stephen King novel, Eyes of the Dragon, he asserts that enjoyment and serious reading of literature can co-occur yet without saying how this happens (345). In looking at Paul’s responses to my questions regarding writing, it strikes me that he sen ses that instructor com m ents are helpful to him, but he has real difficulty supporting that notion with any evidence. He does recall that, with one instructor, com m ents regarding the need to improve the clarity of his writing were present, but he really does not say with any assurance that these teacher com m ents led to different writing, more specifically, clearer writing on his part. 75 In the categories "Analytic Thinking" and "Self-Reflection," Paul’s responses are very general. He indicates that he enjoys mental or intellectual puzzles, making sen se out of things, situations, and people, but he cannot give instances of when he has recently done that. In responding to the "self reflection" questions, he says he is a daydream er, and only after repeated pushes on my part does he talk about his literature class and the fact that, when reading The Color Purple, he did actually reflect: " I guess I can say sometimes, imagine living the kind of life in the book or whatever and . . . I like to see things in my head when I read them" (350). I think Paul is confirming that visualization in reading is important and is a process important for all kinds of readers, from the m ost elementary to the more sophisticated ones. In responding to questions about listening skills and being a good classroom listener, Paul stresses the importance of the class being interesting. "Interesting" is one of those words that the students use to explain too much inadequately. When pressed, he indicates that he will answ er the professor’s factual questions regarding the story, its plot, or characters, but that " I almost never ask questions in class" (352). Yet he values classroom discussion. He has this to say: "They [classroom discussions] get the students thinking about it rather than just listening to the teacher and copying down everything that she says. You get to put 76 in your own input and listen to input of other people and see it from maybe a different perspective" (352). In the final section on a dialogic tutoring model, basically the invitation to the student to participate in a weekly tutorial session for the literature class, Paul had something surprising to say and not about dialogic tutoring but rather the interpretive process: " I guess you can ’ t really have a wrong opinion about interpreting different things" (353). As I have said earlier, this was, for me, one of the key revelations in all of the research, that is to say, students assum ing that interpretation is basically free, unrestricted, and untrammeled. The students assum e that they have little or no need to be bound to the text. Interview with Kelly Bush In responding to the analytic thinking questions, Kelly, too, throws out the word "interesting." She see s this as one of the purposes the teacher has in mind--to get the students interested in what they’re reading--and the student argues that if the reader is interested, she will then understand better and be excited about what it is she is reading. Kelly also indicates that her understanding of what the teacher wants is not based on the professor’s syllabus because, quite candidly, she says, " I didn’ t read the syllabus" (355). This student, in contrast to the previous one, has had more experience reading literature. In fact, she indicates that she is familiar with a lot of the poem s that are included on the reading list. She also describes herself as being above average as a reader of poetry and indicates that she loves to read. Kelly reinforces this assessm en t by saying that she reads every single day and indicates that m ost of her reading is for pleasure. In responding to why one would want to read literature, she indicates that "it helps your vocabulary and spelling" and "you pick up facts that you just wouldn’ t know otherwise" (358). When pushed to be even more specific, the student says, I think it [reading literature] expands your horizons a lot. You learn about, say, different cultures from reading a book and . . . Even if you are reading for pleasure, you are using your mind instead of watching TV; you’re kind of vegging out. (358) Kelly’s com m ents coincide with the assum ption that reading literature is an enriching experience. When pushed, this student indicates that her real pleasure and excitement in reading seem s to be historical fiction and rom ance novels. She indicates "you also get involved, I don’t know, you get involved in the characters and you can ’ t wait to read and see what happens" (360). For Kelly, pleasure reading is apparently escape, involvement in other people’s lives and romantic entanglem ents. This tends to be a reading 78 motive that we devalue and trivialize, perhaps unreasonably so or unfairly. Kelly indicates in the section of questions regarding her writing and its assessm en t that professor assessm ent of writing is idiosyncratic and som ew hat arbitrary and that, while one professor reader might value a student’s style, another might not. In my interview with Kelly, she describes herself— l think reasonably so--as an above-average reader and writer. She is m ore articulate than many of the other students I interviewed, yet when trying to resolve academ ic questions, problems, or puzzles, she admits to avoiding bringing those problems to others or asking assistance from others, quite contrary to the way she handles more personal problems, where her tendency is to seek out others openly for advice or resolution. This might have bearing on how we should present literature to students, perhaps encouraging them to see literature as a form of problem resolution. "Interesting" com es up again in this interview, but in a different context. Here, Kelly uses interest or the lack thereof to explain her propensity either to daydream or not in class. More generally, this is brought up relative to her skills as a classroom listener. Just as som e of the students indicate that being interested in the literature is important to their process of reading it, so, too, Kelly indicates that being interested is important to her process and skill as a listener. 79 On the subject of classroom discussions and their value, Kelly indicates that the conversations allow the students to express them selves. She says, "You have a lot of ideas and you want to find out if they are right or just express them. I mean, as far as learning, it probably do esn ’ t really m ean that much" (367). Like Paul, Kelly values classroom discussion, but unlike him, questions its im portance to learning. More suggestive is what she says about the professor’s role in this process. That the students can express their ideas is what Kelly see s as the value to these discussions. She goes on to say, "And som etim es they’re right, and som etim es she [the professor] says, like, ’Yeah, I hadn’ t thought about that’" (367). Without giving too much weight to this remark, I think this is the kind of professor feedback that I discovered in my classroom visits— the kind that can mislead som e students into thinking that their varied interpretations, regardless of content, are always valid or appropriate. Like many of the students, Kelly perceives that her p ro fesso rs- when scoring an exam or reading an essay--see that there are acceptable versus unacceptable interpretive positions. Her view, which em erges when discussing dialogic tutoring, seem s to reflect her own experience with the professor’s text-response persona: [l]f you interpret a poem different than she [the professor] did, you could m ake the person get a wrong answ er on the test. That 80 has happened before. I have gotten help from som eone who w asn’ t my teacher, and my teacher d o esn ’ t agree with them. You probably have to be careful about what you say. (368) Interview with Maria Castro Maria stands in high contrast to the previous student. W hereas Kelly loves to read, describing herself as som eone who reads every day, this student indicates that reading is boring and that it is not her favorite thing. She describes herself as som eone who does not enjoy reading literature. She nevertheless describes her professor in very positive term s and, when asked why, has this to say: She’s a really fun person, and sh e ’s got a great sen se of humor, and she kind of puts a humor in the reading assignm ents where, when we discuss it, she allows us to say what we want to say and we go from there. She never tells us, like, "No, what you read is wrong," you know? She kind of says, "Well, what did you understand?" and if I say, "Well, I thought this w as what the author was trying to say," she will say, "Why did you think that?" rather than say, "No, you are wrong." She will say, "Well, show me." (371) Based on this set of remarks and som e other com m ents by this student, it is clear that a fine line is being walked here by the professor, who, on the one hand, is encouraging open conversation and, on the other hand, 81 is trying to channel or focus the students into explaining and justifying their interpretive positions. When asked what her purpose is in reading literature, Maria assum es that learning to appreciate what is read and to understand it is the goal. She further indicates that critical thinking is the vehicle or the process which a person would follow to articulate this appreciative and com prehensive notion of literature. Again, Maria, like m ost of the other students, indicates she has not read the professor’s syllabus, so whatever assum ptions she does make about why she is taking the class are inferential, observational, and anecdotal. Maria identifies writing as the key to this course. Her response is different from the other students’. Upon reflection, I think that she is probably correct. That is to say, writing is the skill that is m ost a sse ssed and m ost determ ines the final grade a student receives in an introduction to literature course.1 Maria describes her motive for reading as largely a social one; she uses the situation of being left out of a conversation because she is not familiar with a text the conversants are familiar with and share: Like, you know, when you have, there is a group of people talking and everyone says, " I have read that book" and then they talk about it. I don’ t have anything to say because I 1 Maria’s view is consistent with Alan C. Purves’ view as expressed in "Testing Literature," Literary Instruction: A Focus on Student Response (1992). 82 haven’ t read. . . . And that kind of, like, bothers me. So after that I decided that I wanted to read because I want to know what people talk about when they talk about literature. (376-377) Maria’s claim that this kind of experience has motivated her to want to read literature, so that she can be part of the conversation, I find understandable in that much of a person’s desire for literacy is due to the social gratification which com es from entering into conversation with others. Although she d oes not describe herself as a reader, she does describe herself as a writer, a journal writer and a letter writer. Describing her writing and how her professors a sse ss it, she indicates she is criticized m ost often for not developing her ideas with sufficient exam ples or depth, but is generally complemented for her good ideas. She also answ ers in the affirmative that she will seek out others’ advice on things academ ic, that she engages in conversations in order to resolve academ ic problems, and that she daydream s and cogitates over her classes and the ideas and material connected with those classes. She rates herself as just an average listener in class, w hereas she sees herself as a ten-out-of-ten out-of-class listener (384). In the section where I talk about classroom conversations, Maria indicates that she does not contribute. She reasons that she is not "going to say something very smart. And I don’t want the professor to 83 say, ’ W rong’" (386). Maria also indicates that reading carefully is important. Again, the word em erges. She says, "If I had paid close attention, I would have said the sam e thing" (387). Interview with V anessa Darnell V anessa indicates that a difference between her high school AP English class and her introduction to literature class is that with the former "you have basically the professor’s idea of his interpretation of the play and that’s basically what we have to regurgitate. In here, we basically can get our own ideas, which I’m not used to" (390). V anessa’s notion of the class is "to understand her [the professor’s] interpretation and, at the sam e time, com e up and formulate our own ideas; that way we can explain them to her when she asks us" (391). As with so many of these interviews, when the students are asked where they get their assum ptions from, specifically if these assum ptions are based on what is stated in the syllabus, overwhelmingly, they say no, as d oes V anessa. She indicates that she infers this because, instead of getting the professor’s interpretive view and having it delivered in the class deductively and emphatically, in this case, the professor d oes not state her views necessarily at the beginning and, as the student says, "left it up to us to com e up with our own meanings" (391). The student also seem s still to be in the process of discovering what the professor wants 84 in the course. But the uncertainty all rests on the issue of interpretation, and, of course, there is som e understandable confusion here for the student; she seem s to be waffling between the security of a single specific interpretation advocated by the professor and a m ore open interpretive view in which each student finds, discovers, and argues for his or her own interpretive stance. V anessa indicates that she enjoys reading literature. In describing her habits, she says, " I do n ’ t read for a meaning at first. I just read for, you know, to see the plot structure and what happens. And then usually I have to read it twice to find out som e of the author’s intentions and stuff like that" (392). V anessa also indicates that she reads novels and murder mysteries for pleasure, Agatha Christie and rom ance novels, to be more specific. Sydney Sheldon is one of the authors this student mentions. She indicates that when she reads she does ask herself questions as she approaches and deals with the text. In responding to questions on her writing, she indicates that she enjoys writing, m ost especially creative writing, but she has trouble with timed writing and cites the poor quality of her handwriting as being the problem to teacher-readers. The criticism from her professors--and she seem s to accept it as valid--is that she starts off on one topic on a longer piece of writing and ends up with perhaps, as she puts it, "two separate theses" by the end of the paper (396). 85 In response to the questions regarding solving academ ic puzzles, she indicates occasions when she becom es engaged in solving these kinds of problems and is the sort who will use conversation to find answ ers. She also indicates in this exam ple-citing her theology class and questioning som e of the Bible stories and their veracity-that, in addition to making conversation with others, such as professors, she engages in internal dialogue with herself: "I had to question myself" (399). Although V anessa indicates that she is a good listener and cites social exam ples for good listening skills, she does not rate herself as highly as an academ ic listener. She explains that when a subject interests her, yes, she is a good listener, and if it does not interest her, no, she is not a good listener. That marvelous word "interest" com es up again. She also does not indicate whether the literature class is am ong the more interesting courses she is taking. Her theology course seem s to be the one that has caught her attention. In the questions addressing her class participation, she describes herself as the sort who contributes both in response to teacher-directed questions as well as questions generated by herself. In that context, she says the following about other students’ remarks and her propensity to respond to their comments: I usually don’ t [react to student comments] unless I feel like I disagree or something like that. Usually I’ll ask or bring up som e 86 com m ent that if . . . I mean, it’s not to say that I’m telling them that they’re wrong, but maybe, you know, a suggestion that I didn’ t see it that way; I saw it as this, this, and that. (402) It strikes me that V anessa is hedging her bets here, if you will; that is, if the student com m ent that she has heard is right or wrong, convincing or not, acceptable or not, she seem s to dodge the differences as though, "Well, you’re entitled to your view; I’m entitled to my view. You saw it that way; I see it this way." Again, even in this first group of interviews, som e of the students seem to see interpretation as being varied and, for the m ost part, open-ended. She indicates also that the tutorials will be helpful in assisting her and other students in answering the professor’s unansw erable questions, for example, why a character did something. Interview with Sarah Eam es Sarah indicates she is enjoying the class. It is in high contrast to all of her other classes, which are in the field of marketing. Also, she enjoys the imaginative aspects of being able to conceive of the costum es and the settings in the play she is reading. Although she indicates that the course is an enjoyable one, very early on in her interview she states that she has a reading disorder. In point of fact, Sarah has a learning disability and is receiving accom m odations from the Disabled Student Services office on our cam pus. 87 In response to the question, "What d oes the instructor want you to do in this class?" Sarah’s response is quite simple, "To think" (406). She elaborates on that; part of the thinking about the play would be to take what w e’re given, reading, and examine all the, uh, I don’ t know what the word is for it, things also involved with the play--the environment at the time . . . Why w as the play written? Who w as the play written for? . . . maybe the different them es, you know, something that’s not necessarily stated and something that sh e’s not going to tell us. (406-407) On this subject of the teacher’s intention for the course, Sarah, upon reviewing the syllabus, indicates that not only this particular teacher but "most teachers don’ t want you to regurgitate what they’ve told you" (407). She adds, "They want you to be able to . . . ’OK, I’ ve given you a sample; now let’s see what you can do with it in this type of situation’" (408). And she kind of wraps up this notion by saying, "And if the teacher doesn’t do that, then the class is a w aste of time" (408). It strikes me as significant that Sarah’s assum ptions-again, consistent with the other student rem arks-are nowhere stated in the instructor’s syllabus. In trying to identify the primary skill that would bring su ccess to som eone taking an introduction to literature course, Sarah says, "I think being able to imagine, kind of setting up in your own mind, how things were, . . . the setting, the costum es, and how it all kind of ties together. 88 Maybe that" (409). After several conversational turns, she says, "But it’s to be able to imagine how things are set up yet be able to relate them back to things" (409). Sarah also describes herself as som eone who enjoys reading literature. She reveals som e unusual reading habits, perhaps due to her reading disability. One is to read material that is grouped in the sam e category in particular accents; for example, material in one category or subject area Sarah would read with an English accent. Also, she plays particular music while reading, and that helps her, along with the accents, to recollect material that she has read. As to why Sarah reads, she says this: "You get to, again, like, imagine, use your imagination, urn, kind of make assum ptions, conclusions on your own, kind of challenges your brain, you know, constantly as you read" (413). According to Sarah, professors criticize her writing for incomplete thoughts or lack of elaboration. She indicates as well that coaching on her writing from professors has been helpful. One suggestion in particular-that she infuse her writing with her own personality-has been a successful strategy when applied. As she puts it, "Maybe one person out of, say, ten has said negatively, ’Don’ t do that’ or ’ That’s a little bit too m uch’" (415). When I question Sarah as to whether she uses conversations as part of her puzzle process, she answ ers rather emphatically that she 89 does. Part of the conversation for Sarah is the listening. She describes herself as an avid listener to others’ conversations and relates that she learns much from this kind of listening. We get the consistent correlation between listening and interest. Sarah indicates that being interested in a subject is pivotal. Again, hopefully not extrapolating too much from the remark, but in answ er to my question as to whether or not there w as a dialogue between professor and students and between and am ong the students, Sarah has this to say about the class and her professor: I think every day it’s kind of engaging in that she [the professor] mentions the plot, or, "What do you think of this? What do you think was m eant by this?" And everybody kind of, you know, "I thought it was this or this," and what everybody is saying kind of m akes you think, "Yeah, I thought the sam e thing at first, but then I also thought about this." (422) This remark certainly reinforces the notion that students see interpretation as multiple rather than fixed. Of course, it does not address the issue of whether various interpretations can be reasonably supported or argued. In the last set of questions, which consider a dialogic tutoring model, Sarah responds very positively. She agrees to the possibility of weekly tutoring. Her com m ents reinforce the sen se that the dialogic model and the conversation that goes with tutoring is an opportunity for the student to think out loud, to study out loud, and in curious ways, its 90 process ties in very specifically with Sarah’s own unusual way of reading, i.e., using voices and accents to underline or categorize material. She indicates in her interview that it is her peers’ com m ents in class that enable her to rem em ber more information because, again, there are more voices, more accents, and she recalls all this. Sarah also observes that many students are relying very heavily on the auditory process for learning. This seem s consistent with other observations about students’ abilities as interpreters, especially the difference between their interpretive skill when speaking versus writing. Interview with May Fukumoto May indicates that the introduction to dram a course she is taking is difficult, m ost especially due to the am ount of reading, as com pared to the am ount of reading she did in other literature courses, and to the fact that she has to read all of these plays on her own w hereas in som e of her other classes, the plays were read aloud in class, with students taking particular roles-another example of the increasing role of auditory learning in classroom s. As with all of the students I have interviewed, May infers the thrust of the class not from what is stated in the syllabus but rather in a kind of murky, impressionistic way from what she finds herself actually doing in the class. And according to her inferences, the goal of the course is to feel comfortable with various styles, authors, and language; to m ake connections between the different plays that are read; and to com m ent on their them es. May indicates that m ost of her inferences com e from office conversations with the professor and the fact that these are the sorts of things the professor discusses and seem s interested in; May’s inferences are probably correct. The single m ost important skill, according to May, is com prehension. She has difficulty, however, really defining what she m eans by com prehension. Maybe the closest she ever gets is when she says that "there’s literal meaning and there’s different kinds of meaning to a lot of action in the play" (427). She indicates she likes reading literature. Why? Again, the phrase: because it is "interesting" (427). She describes herself as som eone who engages in pleasure reading. She cites her favorite book as Taipair, historical fiction is her favorite genre. She also describes herself as doing a fair am ount of writing. She enjoys letter writing and keeps a diary, but her preference is for writing letters and, next, short essays, least of all, research papers. In describing what she recollects are professor criticisms of her writing, she indicates that her ability to formulate a thesis that is "not too broad or too narrow" is one as well as "supporting exactly what my thesis says" (431). Perhaps her dislike for writing research papers, as noted early in the interview, coincides with the professor criticism of her 92 ability to write a thesis with an appropriate focus and then to stay on track and support her thesis. She says, "Sometimes I like to com e out with my opinion, which is oftentimes good, but som etim es I’ll do that m ore than I should instead of supporting my thesis with facts and evidence" (431). May also indicates that she believes her professors’ criticisms to be accurate. In the set of questions in which I try to determine whether this student is the sort who spen d s time figuring out puzzles and, if so, eliciting a description of that puzzle-solving process, I find May to be short on indicating how she goes about solving problems, other than for her to tell me that she tends not to use conversation with others as part of this process and that she instead internalizes the problem. Her procedure, at least as she articulates it to me, is to keep going "until I figure it out or until I know that I’ ve improved or until I can feel happy or confident with what I’ve gotten out of it" (433). Musings is perhaps a better word to describe the ways som e readers personalize a text. I am inferring from May’s answ ers that she d oes not spend a great deal of time ruminating over intellectual puzzles. Her ruminations tend to be m ore managerial than philosophical. That is to say, she appears to spend most of her time thinking about what has to be done in a closed-ended, task-oriented way rather than in an open- ended, problem-solving manner. 93 It did com e as a bit of a surprise, given the simplicity of her previous responses, that with one of my questions--"Do you ever think about the plays themselves?"--she answers, "Actually, I have been because I think I’ve picked my idea for my paper, which is catharsis and how when som ebody reads a tragedy, how they’re affected by it" (436). After a re-focus on my part, she says, "So I’m trying to think, ’When I read this play, do I feel this way? When I go over this and when I am supposed to feel this way, do I?’ You know, som etim es I’ll think that" (436). I find this description illuminating in that she is indicating that she is measuring herself as a reader against a standard, in this case, an Aristotelian standard of catharsis. At this point, I went on and asked her another set of related questions; in retrospect, I wish I had pushed her further on this point, that is to say, at the very least, to have discovered w hether she feels that catharsis is a process operating within her as a reader/interpreter. May indicates a very real frustration when reading a literary text as a part of the classroom experience: I’ll just try to figure it out. Like, in King Lear, I just try to look at the words and read it and it w on’ t make sense, and then sh e’ll [the professor] move on and start talking about something else, and so then I’ll still try to go back to that p assage because sh e ’s already talking about the next one, but I still don’ t understand that one and it m eans something to this one. So I’m, like, "Who’s 94 this?" and I don’ t understand who the person is o r . . . "Why are they outside?" o r . . . Then I just get frustrated and, towards the end, I’m just confused and I’m sort of, like, "OK, I have sort of found other things to think about." (436) What May is saying here is similar to what I have observed in classroom visits and even in som e of the conversations which took place in the professors’ offices. That is to say, the student reader, in this case, May, when talking about her role as a listener, describes literal meaning as the primary trouble. Her questions in the preceding quote are very basic ones, literal ones: she is trying to identify a character in a play, figure out setting, and determine why these characters are outside. These are not highly interpretive questions; that is, they don’ t involve great subtlety or symbolism nor are they richly allusive. Nevertheless, to May, they are important questions; they are certainly important points of misunderstanding for her with respect to this particular text. She is also indicating that her questions are not being answ ered or addressed; May and students like her leave their m isunderstandings uncorrected and move on to other things that dem and or attract their attention. The word that crops up frequently with May is the word "interest" and its synonyms and variations. May is one of those students who seem s to indicate that the degree to which she does well in a class relates highly to the degree to which she is interested in the content of 95 the class or the degree to which she finds the professor to be an interesting person. In contrast to several other students I interviewed, May d oes try to explain her process of interest as it applies to learning or as it operates in academ ic settings: You could stare at a person all you want and you can try to focus your attention on them, but you can’ t really take in much if you don’t think about it or think about how that applied to you m aybe or just try and make it kind of interesting in your mind. Most of the time, that should happen without trying to do it. Like, in philosophy, it’s interesting and you think about, well, "Do I feel this way?" It’s easier in those kind of classes. (437) May seem s to be implying that personalizing content material, thoughts, and ideas is key to making them more interesting. I would certainly agree with what she says. What is problematic is the fact that on e’s ability to personalize material no doubt varies greatly from individual to individual, and as a metacognitive process and certainly an introspective one, we cannot readily observe its presence or operation during the time a student reads a piece of literature. May indicates that listening skills are very important to her as a reader of literature because it is through her listening in class that she can get what is going on because I don’ t in the reading. I do n ’ t really understand the reading one hundred percent, so when she [the professor] says it, I go, "OK. I rem em ber that. 96 That is what I w as confused about. Here’s what she m eans. This is what is m eant by the storm." Something like that. (437) My own experience working with students, m ost especially in tutorial sessions, would indicate that they rely heavily on the professor a s the text interpreter, the professor’s remarks and com m ents working as a barom eter by which they gauge their own interpretations and, as we see from May’s comment, not just a yardstick to m easure one’s own interpretation, but rather an opportunity through an auditory process to take on the professor’s interpretation of a p assage when the student is unable to discern meaning. These kinds of com m ents also indicate that classroom discussions are nearly as valuable to the student as active listening. May seem s to argue this as a result of her seeing the professor’s "take" on the literature as a central focus and student com m ents and responses as marginalized in com parison (437-438). Interview with Jerry Garner Jerry responds to my question asking him what he thinks his instructor wants him to do in her class with this response: I’m not really sure. I think, I think she wants us to understand drama, and by that I mean, like, to be able to interpret dramatic them es or just look below the surface of them es rather than just reading the play and go, "Hey, that’s about this." Not just the surface. (442) 97 Very few of the students whom I interviewed are able to say with a sense of assurance what the professor wants them to do in the course or what they are supposed to achieve by taking the course. Their answ ers overwhelmingly are general. I do not really blame the students or fault them at a syntactic, intellectual, or linguistic level for their generalized responses. Using the professor surveys as a point of com parison, I think it fair to say that many professors are not clearly articulating their desires and assum ptions about introduction to literature courses. I think there is a trem endous problem when the raison d'etre of introduction to literature courses is not adequately explored by the professor and his or her students in an open, communal way. As I stated in an earlier chapter, the profession of teaching literature seem s reticent to re-address the basic question as to why students should be required to take introduction to literature courses, that is, to answ er the simple question, "Why read these texts?” Jerry indicates that he is reading the play Oedipus Rex for the second time, the first reading having occurred in high school. He elaborates by saying that he has an increased sen se of understanding the play the second time around. Again, consistent with his student colleagues, Jerry does not m ake clear what he m eans by the word "understanding" nor is he sure that the professor has, at least in his mind, m ade clear the stated goals for the class, even though Jerry 98 describes to me his inferential sen se that the course is about reading below the surface for dramatic them es. Consciously, Jerry does not believe that these goals have com e directly from the professor. In response to my question, "Are these goals in the professor’s syllabus?" he responds, "I can’ t really remember, to be honest with you" (443). When I asked Jerry what he thinks is the m ost important skill to be successful in this class, he says without hesitation, "Good writing skills" (444). I find this a powerful response in that it underlines what we know to be true: readers of literature are evaluated on their abilities as writers on literature. In fact, as is evidenced elsewhere in my research, many of the students find that their professors are in som e sen se two persons: the classroom persona and the text-response persona, the text-response persona being the more punitive, unyielding, fixed, and judgmental of the two. Another telling remark from Jerry com es when he is describing his own skill as a writer as average; he has this to say about his frustration with not doing well on papers he had written in his introductory composition course the year before: "But it just seem s like the English teachers always have something else in mind than what I, you know, have in mind" (444). There is a clear sen se both to me and to the students whom I have interviewed that professor/student miscommunication is common. When students and professors lack a 99 shared set of information and goals, the basic su ccess of an introduction to literature course is in jeopardy. Jerry indicates that in reading a tex t- and he is, at this point of our conversation, discussing academ ic texts-- he frequently asks questions, that there is an interrogative monologue, if you will, operating in his head as he reads. Jerry also indicates that the importance of literature classes would be in developing on e’s interpretive or analytical skills. He gives a nod to the developm ent of communication skills as well. Describing his writing, he says that m ost is in response to academ ic assignm ents. He does cite occasions when he writes letters. And in describing professors’ reactions to his prose, he says this: They say I inflate my prose. Seem s like they all say that. Which, I really can ’ t help it. It’s just, like, the way I write. I don’ t know. Big words or something. Instead of saying it an easy way, I say it a harder way. (448) Jerry, like m ost of the other students, does not extend puzzle- or problem-solving to the realm of interpreting literature. When I asked him if he enjoys mental or intellectual puzzles, he indicates in the affirmative and elaborates that, " I consider it a challenge" (450). Yet, he finds difficulty finding a specific example, and even when I steer him to his introduction to dram a course as a possibility, he says, "Just maybe reading a play, trying to understand what its meaning is and what its relevance is actually. I try to understand its relevance but I think 100 interpreting the play is probably what I try to do" (450). Instead of seeing interpretation and puzzle solving as equivalent or complementary, he seem s to see them as two different things. In trying to describe his own puzzle-processing style or approach, he indicates it is one in which he tries to find facts to back up the thesis. Again, like so many of the other students, he does not use conversation as an approach to problem solving skills, instead preferring to resolve questions in a solitary way. Jerry indicates that he d oes not use dialogue or conversation with others for solving academ ic problems or puzzles, but admits the likelihood to use this m ethod for personal problems, issues, or concerns. Jerry further describes himself as som eone who listens well and indicates that "paying attention . . . is hard if you are not interested in the subject" (453). He, too, brings up this celebrated word "interest" as being pivotal to student su ccess in general, as well as with respect to reading literature. One of the reasons Jerry believes that listening is important is that it allows him to identify information that is important to o n e’s su ccess in the class: " I think the answer would probably be on how many times she repeats the, her information. She d o esn ’ t repeat it very much so you kind of do have to pay attention because when she says som ething she d o esn ’ t really go back to it" (454). Basically, he is using this com m onsense strategy to determine the likelihood that material will resurface on a test. 101 Jerry also doubts that the student’s active engagem ent in classroom discussion is really as important as the instructor indicates it is. He says, "She says that participation is part of the, part of the requirement. But I don’ t think that that is true" (456). When I ask him to elaborate, he says, "Just because she grades . . . She has the essays and she has the exams. I think that is what she is going to base her grade on. I don’ t think she really b ases it on how many times a person talks in a class or not" (456). Jerry is probably correct in his assum ptions. Interview with Amy Heine Amy is singularly articulate in describing what she thinks the professor w ants her and her colleagues to do in her introduction to poetry class. In Amy’s own words, To be able to identify specific authors in the poem s and be able to understand poem s, the different types there are, and to be pretty well- knowledgeable if som eone brings up an author, to be able to associate the author with the poem and what they’re trying to say. (459) In answering my question as to what is the single m ost important skill for a student to have to be successful in this poetry class, Amy says: I need to have an open mind in the poem s and not take it so . . . Like there’s so many meanings in the poem s and to be open- 102 minded to other people’s suggestions. Two people could interpret it entirely different. I think that’s, she stresses that a lot ’cause she [the professor] always tells us every class that her opinion isn’ t the right opinion just ’cause sh e’s the teacher. Everyone has their own opinion. (460) This remark by Amy is well-corroborated in som e of my final research m aterial-the excerpts from freshman placem ent essay s-in that Amy is indicating that interpretation is multiple, in fact, that there are as many interpretations as readers. This is the kind of sentence that concerns me; given elaboration, Amy’s remark could be developed in an acceptable way or it could be the kind of statem ent that invites interpretive cacophony. Amy also describes herself as an avid pleasure reader, from pulp fiction to respected authors such as Steinbeck. She also indicates that she asks herself questions as she reads a text and questions the meaning of the text and what the words are saying. Amy has a fair am ount to say about herself as a writer, her experience taking courses in which writing w as important, if not central, and the kind of feedback she has gotten from her writing instructors. Generally, she describes herself as som eone who finds it easy to put her thoughts on paper; writes on her own, citing travel diaries and journals as one form of writing she has used for many years; and, with respect to criticism from writing professors, indicates the m ost frequent one is poor 103 use of punctuation and, at times, a need to write more concisely. In the course of describing all of this, she cites occasional frustration or displeasure with her writing or with her English professors and perhaps not coincidentally cites interpretive problems, that is to say, instances in which her stance is at odds with the professor’s: " I don’ t think he [the professor] and I understood the sam e things, like, we looked at things very differently" (464). Amy indicates that she takes great interest in puzzle or problem solving when it is interpersonal, noting her psychology major a s a support for this preference. Amy, like the other students, correlates her course grade with the extent to which she is interested in the course: "You could tell the subjects I liked. I would get an A. In the subjects I didn’ t like, I’d get a C or a B just because I didn’ t put too much effort" (466). Amy indicates that she carries conversation and dialogue with others into her approaches to coursework, not limiting it to interpersonal problem solving. She also indicates that she spends time reflecting on material from her classes, in particular, her poetry class. Amy places great value in classroom listening not only to her professor and the points the professor m akes or repeats during class but also to her fellow students and, in fact, indicates that what the fellow students say has a mnemonic function for Amy, helping her to rem em ber points or observations that 104 were offered in class. In answering questions regarding her role as a classroom participant, Amy also com m ents on her professor’s ability to mediate between unfounded student opinions and those which are supported by the text: I give my opinion and I usually back it up because I know my English teacher; she is big on backing up. I mean, sh e’s totally open, but if you can ’ t support it, sh e’ll totally shoot you down in a good way. (470) I com pare this com m ent to one Amy m ade earlier in which she articulates the need to be open to a poem ’s "many meanings." It is hard to know if these are contradictory or simply reflective of the classroom and text personae. Interview with Mary Inman Mary, in describing her experiences in literature courses, indicates that understanding poetry is either something you have or do not have. She uses the word "intuition" and then, several responses later in our conversation, seem s to substitute the word "interpret." In fact, a direct quote: "Interpret it is the word I am looking for" (474). Although it is not Mary’s intention, her com m ents suggest the view that the ability to interpret literature is intuitive or innate. This is an important point to consider. If, as professors of literature, we assum e that interpretive ability is a talent, we must question the wisdom of literature courses as a 105 requirement for all students. If it is primarily skill--fec/7/ie--then the m andatory nature of th ese courses, while appropriate, introduces the nagging question of why it is that so many of us teach literature as if interpretive ability were intuitive rather than acquired. Mary describes a previous introduction to poetry course as a w aste of time in that it w as a rehash of the things she had done in high school. In attempting to answ er my question regarding what her current professor w ants students to take away from the course, Mary says: To take a book and look at it from a deeper perspective than what you just see by reading it. I think she wants to go more into the symbolism, more into being able to interpret it at a different level, like, I think you could call it a little m ore intellectual, be able to com pare books, for example, like what they are letting us do, comparing one narrator to another narrator, draw similarities between different things. (475-476) Also, the student indicates quite candidly that she really has not read all of the professor’s syllabus and, therefore, is not sure w hether these professor intentions are stated in the syllabus or not. She also confirms what several other students say, that is, writing well is probably the single m ost important skill for being successful in this course. Mary describes herself a s an average writer who has an easier time with som e written assignm ents than with others, indicating less su ccess in writing the types of papers required in her English class. The 106 paper she w as working on at the time of our interview w as a com parison of two books, her main complaint being that there is too much possibly to say, and, therefore, the problem is having to condense so much into three or so pages. In answering the question, "Why do you think anyone should read literature?" Mary says, "To make them familiar with the past, like historical background, I think. It does bring you vocabulary and, you know, understanding certain things. It’s a good way to describe things to you. You don’ t have the time for som eone to sit there and explain it to you verbally" (478). In responding to questions regarding her writing and teacher response to her writing, she indicates that there are, broadly speaking, two categories of teacher responses: the first, the teacher who recognizes that a student may not have expressed him/herself particularly well but recognizes the value of the paper’s content, and the second, the professor who recognizes the poor writing and, according to Mary, discounts the content. Mary indicates dislike for the latter type of professor, although this might be too harsh a characterization. This com m ent serves another purpose in that it connects with findings elsewhere in my research that students perceive, I think correctly so, that their writing is the key skill on which their assessm ent as readers of literature is based and that how professors respond to students’ writing in literature classes is key to that assessm ent. 107 She describes her problem-solving process as one that requires time: "To think about something before I say it, I really think and concentrate a lot on what I’m going to do as far as decisions are concerned" (480). Her response indicates that she is very much the sort of person who uses conversation to solve problem s or to address issues both personal and academic. She indicates a s well that she occasionally daydream s in class. These daydream s, at least as described by Mary in my interview, when in class, tend to focus on organizational aspects of the course or external features of the class, for example, the possible grade on an assignm ent or a reminder to herself that som ething is coming due soon, but not the kind of reflective or meditative thought about the particulars of the class, most especially the text that is being read and considered. Again, Mary supports the student perception that class participation and the skills that go with that, such as listening, are not central to a student’s grade success: "If you didn’ t show up for class and you just read the stuff and showed up for the quizzes and did the papers, you could get a B" (485). That word "interested" crops up again. This time, Mary is responding to my request for her to describe her role as a discussion participant: "When I am interested, I will discuss; when I am not, I won’ t" (486). I applaud Mary’s succinctness. What is always 108 the difficulty here is trying to know from the professor’s point of view what will or will not interest the student. Interview with Mara Jovanian Mara, more than any of the other students I have interviewed, describes emphatically and explicitly the dual professor persona, the classroom and the text response roles. Early on in her interview, she says this: I always participate in the class, and what I liked is that she never said to anybody, "Oh, no, that’s totally wrong." She accepted everybody’s point of view. But when it com es to quizzes, sh e’s looking for a particular answer. It’s no longer this "Throw at me what you think." So then it becom es all of a sudden . . . You know, in class participation, there is a lot more room for imagination, w hereas in the quizzes, all of a sudden I feel limited ’cause then I feel like, "Oh, sh e’s looking for this one answ er.". . . (489-490) Like many of her student colleagues, Mara has difficulty describing the professor’s expectations for the course. Despite her saying this, she supplies significant information about the sorts of things she has been doing in the class under the professor’s guidance. Mara describes herself as "a very slow reader" (494). She realizes, however, that there are times when this is an advantage: "It could also contribute to good habits because I read for detail" (494). In 109 the context of seeing the conflicting roles of her professor, Mara describes her reticence to com m ent on other students’ interpretations, even when she believes they might be incorrect ones: Not so much in that class because, in that class, really, I feel you’re just throwing your own ideas of what you think or you don’ t argue with another person’s interpretation because theirs could be right in their mind and you just say, "Well . . It could be, you know, they’re taking X and you can say, "Well, I think that’s Y," and you don’ t say, "Well, I think you’re wrong," w hereas in other classes, you could say, you know . . . (504) Toward the end of our interview, Mara returns to the notion of the contradictory professor roles. She says: [l]n classroom discussions, I feel that there is a lot more room for you to be right. But when it com es to a test answer, sh e’s looking for this one answer, and there’s no more variety any more. There’s just one particular answer, and it’s either right or wrong, and therefore, it kind of, in a way, contradicts itself. (505) 110 Chapter 4 Interpretive Talk: Professors and Students Converse No doubt, my own experiences as a student have much to do with this dissertation. I still recall a particular instance: visiting a professor in his office, admittedly confused by a written assignm ent. I am sure I was doing a poor job explaining why I was having difficulty with the paper. At som e point in this "unburdening" process, I realized that the professor w as no longer looking in my direction, but w as instead gazing out the window. Perhaps he w as thinking about what I was saying; perhaps he w as thinking how he might respond, how he might put me on a clearer track with my paper. But that was not how I took it--not then. In a word, I w as devastated. Unlike the pathetic survivors in C rane’s open boat, who at least had a group on shore waving flags and arm s in their direction, it struck me that I lacked even that. It struck me that I had indifference, apathy. Although very brief, the encounter had a powerful impact. Initially and m ost importantly, it led me to devalue my own abilities as a student, as a thinker, and as a writer. Years later, the scene reconfigured itself; this time my "take" was less self-deprecating. The professor had now becom e the object of my disappointment; I was angry with the "professorial" sort. In the midst of my dissertation research, I have had occasion to revisit that office scene and construct, I think, a gentler and, no doubt, 111 m ore realistic picture of what took place that afternoon. Rather than insouciant, the professor w as probably nonplussed. After all, how does one get a student like myself on course, a student who is completely adrift in an open boat with little resources available for reaching shore? In the office visits included in this chapter and the discussion of them, a m ore comfortable exchange is taking place between the professors and the students--m ore comfortable, certainly, than my experience in my own professor’s office quite a few years before. Nevertheless, a similarity exists, a disturbing one. Though less extreme or dramatic than the scenario I have described, a gap still exists between the professors and the students. Contact is made, but does real communication take place? Jessica O rbach’s Office Appointment with Professor Carol Proctor The discussion in the professor’s office focuses on Spenser’s Sonnet 75. The professor invites Jessica, the student, to "tell me, first of all, what you have pieced together with the poem, and then I can help you" (745). As the student begins to explicate the poem, she acknow ledges having difficulty. Their conversation focuses on lexical items, in particular, the word "paynes" as well as the word "prey." The professor is helping the student to understand the meaning for the first word and also drawing the student’s attention to the spelling of the second and its consequential meaning difference. 112 This focus on the student quickly changes. The professor is asserting her understanding of the poem and pushing Jessica into the background: OK. Animals can prey on other people or hunters prey . . . So in other words, the tide is making his efforts their prey, right? The tide’s prey. In other words, the tide attacks or conquers his efforts. So what are the efforts here that the tide conquers? (752) The student answ ers this question in a tentative way: "Urn, washing the nam e away?" (752). The professor confirms the correctness of the student’s assumption--"Right"--and then goes on to say, The nam e in the sand. His pains, these efforts he took to write her name in the sand. The tide com es, kind of personified here as this hunter, right, that can com e and take the prey away, or to prey on the nam e in the sand. Now here is a question. Why is he writing her nam e in the sand? (752) Jessica answers, "Because he loves her probably, and he can ’ t have her maybe" (752). The professor responds with an "OK" and moves on (752). Jessica’s response contains two interpretive positions, each with an indecisive tag-"probably" and "maybe." If Jessica reads the poem as suggestive of the male persona’s love of the female persona, what evidence is there to support this? And what evidence is there that might suggest that her interpretation is only probabilistic rather than absolute? Similarly, that she su p poses the male protagonist cannot have the female 113 is based on what lines of the poem, what evidence? Jessica’s response indicates an interpretive position, however tentative. Had the professor addressed the two interpretive declarations and addressed their inconclusiveness by referring the student to the text, an opportunity might have been had to understand better how the student had "pieced together" the poem. Throughout their office visit, a distinct conversational pattern exists: the student acts as a reflector or a confirming agent in the professor’s poetic explication. An example would be this exchange: P OK. She is walking with him. S Oh, she is? (752) The student’s rising intonation indicates that she w as not aware of this before the professor stated that the female is walking by the side of the poem ’s male persona. Rather than stop and address what the student thought and why, the professor again moves ahead: P Which leads us to believe that, you know, he is probably courting her, but the fact that she is at least not turning him down . . . She is walking with him on the beach because she is going to talk next, right? S OK. (752) The professor seem s not to be making an effort to look inside Jessica’s head, to com e to know her interpretive process. However incomplete or 114 flawed or incorrect the interpretive vision might be, there is a process underneath it, informing and guiding it. But instead of searching for this process, we find a monologue in which the professor is telling the student what the poem m eans. And so Jessica spends m ost of this conversation metaphorically--and perhaps literally-bobbing her head in agreem ent. When the professor finishes her analysis of the first quatrain, Jessica has been left in the interpretive dust, so to speak. The professor has been explaining the significance of the quatrain and also, without being unduly harsh, pretty much ignoring the student’s viewpoint or sense of the poem. Jessica does have a sense of the poem, perhaps one different from the professor’s, perhaps even biased, partial, flawed, or erroneous. But it strikes me as essential that the professor first understand the student’s interpretive process, and only after that has been attem pted should the conversation go in the direction of the professor’s interpretive stance. In answering the professor’s question-"W hat does he think is so great about him self?"-Jessica replies, "He thinks that just by writing her nam e in the sand, that it is going to say that he loves her, but that d o esn ’ t really show anything?" (754). At this point, the professor could have asked a series of questions aimed at getting the student to develop this interpretive perspective. Instead, the professor confirms the correctness of the student’s interpretation--"Right"--and then g oes on to her own elaboration rather than to tease out the student’s: "And in other words, what we are saying here, is that he is vain, he is conceited, because he thinks that he can immortalize her. One thing I want you to pay attention to is that isn’t it kind of interesting that she talks here?" (754). So the professor elaborates to a degree and extent she thinks is appropriate for herself and then brings up another topic which is clearly of interest to her, the professor-reader: the fact that this sonnet is a dialogue and that we have a female speaking in the dialogue. The student, up to this point, has not observed that this is either the case or that it has any particular interest or interpretive value. Unfortunately, operating here is the assum ption that what the professor finds interesting is categorically of interest to the student. Much to the professor’s credit, she recognizes that lexical difficulties in the poem are presenting interpretive ones for Jessica. She assists the student in better understanding the language of the poem and, in trying to delve into the meaning of the second quatrain, focuses on the mortality discussed by the female and attem pts to confirm that Jessica understands the issue of mortality as well as who is being discussed as the mortal individual. In time, there is a confirmation that the student understands: 116 P OK. A human. So who is the mortal being or thing, the human that he is talking about here that he is trying to immortalize? S The woman. P Right. (755) Until now, the professor has been paraphrasing the poem and using m odern English a s the vehicle for summarizing S penser’s original. This strategy is not consciously discussed or addressed by the professor. I am of the opinion that the strategy is an excellent one, and were it repeated, the student might infer the strategy and put it to use herself. Better, however, that the strategy receive conscious attention; the professor is revealing a potentially helpful mechanism, one which the student can apply and a sse ss for its effectiveness in developing an interpretive stance. At the professor’s suggestion, Jessica describes the female persona in the poem: She seem s kind of, like, down-to-earth, . . . S he’s not self-centered; sh e ’s kind of the opposite of this guy. Where he seem s, like, material, he kind of seem s like the type of guy that would be materialistic just because he . . . You know, it’s the vanity; he’s vain. (757) The professor confirms in the subsequent response that the student is essentially correct but rather than getting the student to qualify what she has said, the professor answ ers or again interprets for the student: "He’s 117 not vain about his looks or materials; he’s vain about his poetry in that he thinks that he can immortalize her, right?" (757). Instead of putting a finer point on Jessica’s interpretation, the professor elicits agreem ent with her own thoughts--"Right?" As their conversation continues, they are once again fixed on a lexical track; at this point, the professor pulls out a dictionary, possibly a good approach to guide the student into seeing connotations that would be more appropriate to the poem and its context. But in reading the various m eanings for the word "base," the professor, definition by definition, rejects those that she thinks are inappropriate to the particular line of the poem rather than getting the student to attempt that determination. At this point in the office visit, it is clear that the professor and the student are on different tracks. Here is a set of consecutive student responses randomly selected from one transcript page: Well, urn, live on. Like, to make . . . His poetry about this woman. Her virtues. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. 118 People will . . . I mean, your family . . . It m akes me think, just like the famous, people will remember. . . Mm-hm. Contrast this with what the professor says on the sam e page: "My verse shall eternize your rare virtues." So what does that m ean? My poem s are going to do what? What is going to live on? And specifically what is he going to talk about? Her virtues. And that they are rare virtues. B ecause rem em ber that he said that baser things are going to "dy in dust." She is better than other people and other things, right? S he’s got these rare virtues. And then he says that his verse in the heavens is going to write her glorious name. It’s not exactly skywriting. I mean, h e’s writing in the sand before, right? But why in the heavens? Why is her nam e going to be written in the heavens? What does that m ean? . . . Obviously you see the parallel because first he was writing in the sand, on the ground. On the earth. Now he is going to be writing in the heavens. If som ething is written in the heavens or it is written in the stars, what does that m ean? Like, if your nam e is written in the stars. Right. And you also think about, you know, the heavens. It is eternal and all that. There is this notion again that he is going to make her famous, right? (760) 119 The two monologues, the student’s and the professor’s, though artificially produced, reveal important interpretive differences; we see that the student is acting as a reflector. When she does attem pt to articulate a response to a professor inquiry, her com m ents are rambling, at best, and there is no actual reformulation or rephrasing of the first rambling utterance. In contrast, the professor’s remarks are guided by a direction, a theme, a path. Syntactically, they show som e sophistication, and, rhetorically, argum ent is being offered and developed in the set of professor remarks. Soon afterwards, the professor extrapolates on a point: "Because when we are reading this poem right now, we rem em ber their love, so it renews their love. What else could it m ean? What else happens when we read this poem ? What can it do for us?" (761). The student responds, answering the series of questions this way: "Well, we look at their love and we see how much . . . We see if they were really in love or if it w as just him or her." The professor responds with "Mm-hm. . . . So what does it do for us in reading the poem ? It gives them new life, but what does reading this poem do for us? What does it m ean that it renews?" (762). What has occurred here is that the student has taken the professor’s set of questions, formulated a response, and within that response, generated a reader-response issue, if you will— the issue of whether the love is mutual or not. This seem s not an unreasonable 120 response to either the professor’s questions or to the poem itself. The professor, though, ignores the student’s focus and returns to her own point, her own interpretive stance. I think there is an opportunity lost here for the professor to realize that the student has an interpretive position at this point or a focus but, unfortunately, the professor does nothing to encourage its exploration. The professor, in answer to her own question as to why would we want, to read this poem, responds this way: It renews us to a certain extent because we were saying in class that poetry kind of m akes connections between us and people who lived centuries before us or maybe people that are contem poraries of ours. . . . reading about their wonderful love. (762) What is obvious here is that, for the professor-reader, this is one of the meaningful aspects of this particular sonnet. What we have no inkling of, however, is why the poem is important to the student. During this entire office appointment, the student has not been encouraged to explain what value she might place on the poem. Instead, the student is merely there as a hanger-on, grasping to the interpretive coattails of the more experienced professor-reader. After a digression, again engineered by the professor as to whether this is an English or an Italian sonnet, there is a wind-down in 121 conversation, a closing off. Again, the professor is setting the param eters: P What other questions do you have about it [the poem ]? S That was just those. I was trying to go through it and it w as just very confusing. (764) A review of the transcript reveals that Jessica really had few questions; m ost all were the professor’s. Furthermore, little w as done to answer her questions or find out what other related ones she might have. Certainly, her questions--actual or potential--should be the focus of their meeting. Consequently, the professor’s query--"What other questions do you have about it?"— is sadly ironic. Basically, the student seem s to have com e into the office not understanding this sonnet. Their conversation appears on target when they look at the language of the poem; as com pared to the student’s, it is antiquated and unfamiliar. The time spent helping Jessica understand S penser’s vocabulary and bring it into the twentieth century is altogether appropriate. I have already mentioned that the paraphrasing that resulted from this process might have worked better if that process had been discussed as a conscious strategy and if the professor had asked the student to do more, if not all, of the paraphrasing herself. What we find, though, are questions about this literary text which are the 122 professor’s, not the student’s. So what we really find here is a more revealing description of how the professor goes about reading this particular poem; one is able to learn little about how Jessica has "pieced [it] together" (751). Most disturbing of all is that the professor never allows the student to attempt a full explanation of the poem, similar to allowing a writing student to reveal her draft in progress. The professor might learn more about the student’s reading of the poem and her process of interpretation and, subsequently, might have been able to proceed with conversation ultimately more helpful to the novice interpreter had she allowed, and encouraged, Jessica to wade into the sonnet. Anna Quincy’s Office Appointment with Professor Bianca Robinson In the opening of this conversation, Anna, the student, apparently has com e to ask questions about A Clockwork Orange, the novel the class has been reading. The student’s first question has to do with a dream sequence. She asks, "Does that mean anything or is it just something they added to the story o r . . . ." The professor jumps in: "Oh, no. It does have significance. Let’s see" (765). From that point on, the professor spends several minutes paraphrasing the passage. After summarizing the content of the first dream passage, the professor turns 123 their attention to a second dream sequence, this one from the perspective of the main character’s father. It is soon clear that the professor is summarizing and interpreting the novel for Anna. Regarding the student’s initial inquiry as to the significance of the passage, instead of the professor eliciting the student’s sen se of its significance, she gives her own interpretive version of its importance. There is no attempt to get Anna to explore the dream sequences. Clearly, the dynamic is all wrong. When Anna mentions her observation that the main character did not care about the girl he com es in contact with, the professor again m isses an opportunity to draw her out and allow her to develop her point. Instead, the professor uses the student’s brief remarks, frequently interrupted by the professor, as a stimulus for her own commentary on the text. Not much later, the professor goes on to express her view that the main character is failing to take responsibility for what he d oes and instead rationalizes his raping by blaming the young women for the fact that, had they been in school where they were supposed to have been, none of this would have happened. Interest in Anna’s reaction or, at the very least, the notion that she might see this p assag e differently eludes the professor. Notice Anna’s next response: "They [the women who are raped] were both very drunk and could hardly feel very much, though. 124 They didn’ t feel bad" (767). While the professor is focusing on the main character, a "he," the student is focusing on a "they," the young women. Clearly, in discussing this scene, the student and the professor are viewing it from different perspectives. The professor is looking at a particular character, Alex, while the student is looking at two, a collective rather than individual view of the scene. In term s of interpretation, this is consequential to their respective views; this difference needs to be recognized and addressed. Some possibilities might have been for the professor to ask the student to focus on Alex rather than on the women, to explore the scene from the perspective of the group, or to explain why one should view the scene from a solitary or multiple vantage, suggestive of Burke’s ratios. None of this happens, however. Continuing with this part of the conversation, the student m akes an astute observation: "Why does he [Alex] want to do that? I mean, since he loves it so much, why would he even need to justify it?" The professor responds: Isn’ t that strange? It’s interesting, isn’ t it? I don’ t know. I think that it is one of the things that m akes him more complex psychologically. That is never really explained, you know; we never have a statem ent saying that I need to justify this because o f . . . I mean, that’s just never addressed, so, urn . . . But it is an interesting thing, isn’ t it? (768) 125 The professor acknow ledges the astuteness of the student’s observation. But again, the professor fails to prod the student. While the professor might feel that there is not an explanation in the text for Alex’s outlook and behavior, it could very well be that the student has som e hypothesis. The professor does not question the student to find out if that is, in fact, the case. Notice Anna’s next response which is interrupted by the professor: "Yeah. . . . I don’ t know, it seem s like they don’ t feel any rem orse about it, so he wouldn’ t need to . . ." (768). Again notice the use of pronouns. The student is still looking at the group interaction--7/?ey do n ’ t feel any rem orse about it"— rather than focusing on just Alex-"he." The professor still fails to realize that the student is seeing this passag e from a different vantage point. What occurs over the next few exchanges between the professor and the student is, on the part of the professor, a recognition that the student has m ade a thoughtful observation about Alex and his behavior, and, on the part of the student, a demonstration that she is thinking carefully about the story and its characters. It is clear from the interview that the professor is deeply involved in what she teaches, has a great love for literature, and is also (as illustrated on the auditory transcript) enthusiastic and lively. This all 126 com es through most vividly in the p assag e where Beethoven’s Ninth is discussed. First, if there is something to criticize in this office interaction, it is that the professor m isses so many opportunities to draw out the student. The professor says with reference to Beethoven’s Ninth and the plot which it accom panies: "And, urn, it’s interesting that he picks that to rape two little girls to. That’s a little ironic, wouldn’ t you say?" (770). The student responds--"Well, it’s kind o f . . ."-and the professor interrupts: "But that’s what he m eans here when he says . . ." (771). I cannot tell, because of the interruption, whether or not the student w as going to agree with the professor that this is indeed ironic and, in agreeing, perhaps share som e interpretive insights, or by way of insight, describe something about her own interpretive process. But all of that is lost because of the professor’s interruption. Second, the professor is demonstrating that she p o sse sse s more textual information than the student and, in turn, that the professor’s richer context gives her a fuller understanding of and appreciation for this particular text. This is a specific example: P [T]hat is basically what the song or poem is saying at this moment, so . . . S OK. That was really good. I should have read it more closely. 127 P Well it m akes more sense if you just happen to be familiar with the music. (771) The professor goes on to ask the student if she has seen the film version of A Clockwork Orange, and the student responds, "No. I haven’ t" (771). So, once again, we see that the professor not only has a literary text--A Clockwork Orange-th a t she is familiar with from the onset but also a film text. In addition, she has a musical text--Beethoven’s Ninth-and a poetic text by Schiller. So there are more informing layers for the professor, layers the student reader lacks. Several minutes later, the professor and the student are discussing Alex’s relationship with his father and the sen se that he has intimidated his father and his family, that they are to som e extent fearful of him and fearful of som e possible physical abuse that might com e their way should they try to discipline or even criticize Alex. The professor says this: "I mean, they must be kind of afraid of him." The student’s response is, "Mm-hm. It seem s kind o f . . ." Again, the student is cut off and the professor jumps in: " I mean, think about it. They are probably physically no larger than he is; maybe even sm aller. . ." (773). This is yet another example of the professor failing to listen to the student and find out what the student is about to say. The structure of the fragment sentence, "It seem s kind o f . . . suggests that a com parison or explanation was in the offing. Of course, this is all lost. 128 The familiar pattern of the professor doing all the talking and the student merely agreeing with or confirming the professor’s commentary is clearly evident. On som e pages, the m ost the student is saying is "Right," "OK," "Mm-hm," "Yes" (773-777). Next, the professor goes into a rather lengthy explication of how Alex lacks insight not only about himself but also about others and, ironically, although seeing himself as a great leader, lacks the creativity to be the kind of exceptional leader he thinks he is. What is clear to me is that there is no indication from the student that this is why she has com e to the office to discuss the book; although the professor is spending a great deal of time on this point and develops it quite well, it is not clear to me, observing this conversation second-hand, how it is necessarily helping the student. The professor’s explication could have been dialogically presented with the professor leading the student, through a selection of questions, into a recognition or at least a verbalization of Alex’s lack of insight and his w eaknesses as a leader and how all of this reflects on him and the general situation of the novel. None of this occurs. Toward the end of their visit, the student reveals that she has not quite understood the literalness of a p assage the two are discussing. This seem s to be a recurring them e with respect to students’ interpretive processes, that is, the novice reader fails to understand the literalness of 129 a passag e or a text and, therefore, has little chance of understanding potentially symbolic or extratextual meanings. In this particular case, Anna has failed to understand that Alex’s eyes have been injured by one of the gang m em bers, Dim, this being done so as to incapacitate Alex and make him more susceptible to being apprehended by the police who are soon to arrive at the house they have just burglarized. Without this knowledge, Anna’s likelihood of recognizing other related them es such as revenge or retribution is reduced. If the goal is to encourage symbolic or extra-textual meaning, com prehension gaps like this should be carefully addressed. The student postulates that perhaps Alex’s anti-social behavior is due to basic insecurity. She uses an example of an acquaintance of hers and briefly describes how this person might in som e sense be com parable to Alex. The student’s last remark in this vein is "somewhere inside he might be insecure about it or something o r . . ." The professor immediately responds with this sentence: "I’m trying to think of a place where he seem s insecure" (778). lnstead--or in addition-the professor might have asked Anna to find textual evidence for her hypothesis. Almost at the end of the conversation, as they com pare this book to Truman C apote’s In Cold fi/ood-another text in the professor’s context-the professor briefly summarizes C apote’s work for the student. Anna has this to say: "It’s like ultimate control ’cause I m ean . . ." (781). 130 Again, the student is interrupted by the professor. The professor, as in m ost interruptions, although agreeing with the student’s remark, or what little she has heard of it, is merely using the student, either catapulting over or springboarding off of her remark: "Right. So it’s like being God or something" (781). Obviously, the professor thinks that these characters--Alex in A Clockwork Orange or the m urderers of the Clutter family--are playing God-like roles. But what about the student reader? Does Anna see it that way? Again, we do not know. On the positive side, the student’s remarks during this office interview indicate that she has appreciated the conversation with the professor. It is clear that the student has been able to witness and listen to som eone with a fuller, more knowledgeable understanding of this text and others, som eone who can discuss or explicate a text in front of her in a very personal way. I would not for a moment discount the value that this can have. Certainly, much of our learning is mimetic; much of what we learn, we learn through an osmosis-like way. Clearly, this professor offers herself as an example of som eone who is interacting in an engaging way with the text and weaving that text into other texts, literary and non-literary ones. For the observer, in this case, Anna, there is a possibility that such a "performance" can be emulated. So, in that sense, there is potential value in this exchange between the professor and the student. What I would like to see present, in addition to what I have just described, is an appropriate interrogation in the dialogic sense, of the student, her views, guesses, hunches, and hypotheses, as they relate to this book under examination. The professor seem s not to be actively engaged in ferreting out the student’s view of this text and, more generally, the student’s processes as a reader of literature. 1 find that what is occurring in this office appointment is com m onplace among professors. There is no question in my mind that, frequently, when I discuss a piece of literature with students, I behave much in the sam e way myself. Interview with Anna Quincy about Her Office Visit with Professor Bianca Robinson The purpose of this interview was to learn what the student thought about the office appointment I have just described. At the beginning of my meeting, I asked Anna to read the transcript of her appointment. From her answ ers to my questions, it is clear that she places great value on this office appointment and a sse sses it as important to her understanding of A Clockwork Orange. It is also clear that she feels comfortable with the professor and regards her as som eone with whom it is easy to talk. 132 In answ er to my question-"lf there were something you could change about the office interview, what might that be?"--the student responds, " I don’ t know. . . . Actually, I got more than I expected just because we ended up talking about something completely different than the book and it w as kind of fun just because I got to know her a little bit better than just seeing her in class" (786). The student’s remark is to som e extent consistent with my own observations about the office appointment; that is, since the professor was doing the majority of the talking in this appointment, it is an opportunity for the student to "meet" the professor in a non-classroom setting, allowing something important to occur, a greater sen se of intimacy or connection with the professor. Key to my interview with this student is her first reaction after reading the transcript: "Well, I thought it w as good. It m ade me rem em ber what we actually said. It m ade me think that I hadn’ t said very much. You know, that I didn’ t really say anything that was . . ." Ju st as the professor in the interview, I interrupt the student here and say, "Well, there’s a lot of talk there, so who w as-" (787). The student jumps back in: "She w as talking more than I. I was, like, ’Yeah. Uh-huh. G ood.’ [laughter] I didn’ t realize . . ." (787). What I found surprising is that, although the student recognizes that the professor did so much of the talking and, as the student says, the professor "had big blocks of 133 conversation," in reflecting on this, the student, nevertheless, places value on the lopsidedness. This is the student’s reasoning: Because if it was the other way around, I guess I wouldn’ t have gotten the sam e out of it. If I had been the one that was talking more often and she w as going, "Right, OK," you know, I probably wouldn’ t have learned as much. (787) I would disagree with the student’s assessm ent. I think the student assum es that sh e learns more by listening than by speaking; she assum es this perhaps because she does not realize that she could have been participating more productively in the conversation, her contribution more reflective of careful thinking prompted by the professor’s careful questioning. Interview with Professor Carol Proctor Regarding Her Office Appointment with Jessica Orbach After the professor has listened to the transcript of her office appointm ent with the student, she m akes these observations: I tend to dominate in the classroom and I tend to dominate in a conference so one of the things that strikes me is that I’m saying everything and sh e ’s just saying, "Uh-huh, yeah, okay." And when I would ask her a direct question, she wouldn’ t know or sh e’d, like, wait. And I notice as I was reading along, it’s later on--probably because I was super conscious that it was being tap ed -th at I was more aware of, "Well, let’s wait and see what she has to say." But I w as conscious of " I 134 d o n ’ t want blanks" in this tape. I don’ t want these huge gaps in time. That kind of concerned me. I w as trying to m ake her say something, to m ake her feel uncomfortable enough that she would say something in response to me. And the couple times that I did try it she just kind of sat there. The professor g oes on: But then again, I don’ t blame her considering that in the conference I’d already primed her for me, jumping in rather quickly and saying, ’Well, okay, how about if we looked at it this way? Well, you don’ t get it that way, let’s look at it this way. Have you ever heard this?’ and using all kinds of analogies. So I guess, in a sense, I feel super-conscious that I maybe stepped in too much and didn’ t put enough of the responsibility for the conference on her. (790-791) The professor seem s to recognize current views on student conferencing and recom m ended techniques for making them a more effective learning experience for the student. She also, quite interestingly, discusses her own experience in office conferences as an undergrad and describes them as being, for the m ost part, intimidating and unsatisfying, indicating that her professors in so many cases gave her little direction, that although talking a lot, said not enough. The professor also reflects on her background learning to becom e a more fluent reader of literature. A professor who was strongly stam ped with New Criticism had an important impact on her. She su ggests that som e of the New Critical tenets of understanding the text, i.e., taking it 135 line by line and understanding the literalness of the text, are objectives that inform her own teaching of literature. As for more current theory, she indicates that, with particular texts, at times she brings in theoretical perspectives that seem to meld with that text, for example, using a feminist approach when talking about sonnets so as to question the male perspective in the poem s or using historical evidence and information when teaching Spenser. But for the m ost part, she describes herself as "’old school’ when it com es to the way I teach things in the classroom" (794). The professor m akes an observation that seem s altogether reasonable. That is, when she asks questions in a classroom setting that pertain to a literal understanding of the text, she is more apt to get responses from students than when she asks questions that elicit associative responses, that is, how does this text relate to you, your experiences, or the people you know. She continues by observing that these latter responses, while seldom forthcoming in the classroom setting, are frequently forthcoming in an office appointment. She also m akes an observation that is fully buttressed by another segm ent of my research, specifically the freshm an placement essays: "They all com e up to the classroom thinking that poetry can mean anything they want it to mean; it can be anything they want and they can manipulate it anyway they want" (795). Much to this professor’s credit, she recognizes this 136 interpretive assum ption am ong students and, therefore, is addressing it in her own classroom and her conversations with them on interpretive issues. I wonder how many of our colleagues consciously realize that their student interpreters take such an open view of the process? In answer to my question, "What do you think m ost of your students would say when asked the question, W hat is literary interpretation?’" the professor offers two versions, the "on a good day" response and the "on a bad day" response. The latter describes the student who tries to make the professor happy; that is, mechanically supplying the professor with whatever s/h e thinks literary interpretation is. The "on a good day" version goes like this: [T]he speaker of the poem ’s not necessarily the poet, but som etim es the poet’s life will influence our reading of the poem. And so they’ll talk about how it’s a gathering of information about style and historical background based on the evidence of the poem. They’ll talk about how you bring in a lot of different ideas, but you have to base it on textual evidence and that’s predominately what they’d be saying. Plus you could bring in your own speculation as a point of interest but always being aware they are speculations, as long as you present them as such. But that speculation is good provided that it’s announced as speculation, which is probably what they’d say. (796-797) The professor assum es that, for her students, the biggest challenges to literary interpretation would be 1) a literal understanding of the text and 2) 137 trying to determine how much context-historical or biographical, for exam ple-is necessary for on e’s understanding of a particular text. The professor indicates that the issues she believes drive the interpretive assum ptions of both groups of stu d en ts-th e "pleasers" and the "herm aneuticists"-are issues that she explicitly ad d resses in her own classroom . She refers to language in her syllabus which suggests steps or, if not steps, activities each student should complete before a class discussion of a particular poem. These things include looking up vocabulary words the student is not familiar with, reading the poem seven or eight times, annotating the text with questions and notes, and working collaboratively with at least two other class m em bers when interpretive questions arise that a fellow student could help address. I ask this professor to postulate assum ptions her students might have about her as a reader of poetry and in ways she might be different from her own students as a reader of poetry. One of the first differences, according to this professor, might be that m ost students assum e that she has no problems with vocabulary and, therefore, has a clear grasp of the literalness of the poem as well as a special emotional responsiveness to the poem. She suggests that her students probably do not always believe it when she tells them she is som etim es unsure of what a particular poem might really m ean or that her reading of a poem is a reading shared by many other readers. The professor assu m es that 138 students believe that the reading she prom otes as a consensus reading is, in fact, her own reading. When I ask the professor what it is about students that m ake them poor at poetic explication, she generalized from my question to include explication in the broader sense; she sees the w eakness in student interpretation as a w eakness in their ability to analyze. When I posited the question why literature is seldom taught as a dynamic process, the professor responded in this way: "Okay, here are the great works of literature. W e’re going to teach them to you." This is what they mean: "Memorize them; write som e papers for us; take a regurgitating midterm and final and, here you go, you’re out the door." That’s what your liberal arts education is supposed to give you so you can chat intelligently at cocktail parties about the Shakespeare sonnets. But it do esn ’ t teach them anything about the process of reading. (803) I shared my observation based on num erous student interviews that the hook to reading literature for many is the student’s individual sen se that a particular text is of som e personal interest. The professor agreed with this observation and, from her own experience, was able to say with more concreteness som e of the textual qualities which increase interest: sex, shortness, and the absence of morbidity. 139 Realizing that end-of-sem ester interviews with several of the students I initially questioned might permit my seeing more detailed or m ore clearly articulated views on interpretation, I invited several to discuss with me their classroom experiences that sem ester. These interviews follow. Follow-up Interview with Sarah Eames On the first page of this transcript, the student indicates that her process for reading a text is to "get a general overview of what it is, pick up on key things, and maybe then concentrate just on those certain passages" (675). The student expresses frustration because what she is asked to do in the class is to discover "some new perspective that you get from the play" (676). What the student indicates she would rather be doing is answering the question, “How does this apply to everyday life? Why am I reading it?" (676). And these questions are, as the student expresses it, "Not what sh e ’s [the professor] looking for" (676). After a digression as to the student’s next paper and how she might address that, Sarah starts to describe her approach to reading--in this case, reading a play-and why it is a very time-consuming process for her. What she describes is similar to subvocalization only, in this case, the subvocalization involves using distinctive voices or accents for the different characters in the play that she is reading. The reading 140 process is also extremely slow; according to Sarah, she m anages to read only two to three pages in an hour. The benefit, as she describes it to me, is that once she has read something, she knows it very well. To illustrate this, she indicates that for the one play during the sem ester that she has read this way, The House of Bernards Alba, she discovered the significance of color. She goes on for several pages of transcript to describe-articulately and persuasively--the role of color in the play. Next, we com pare The House of Bernarda Alba with The Glass Menagerie. In the latter play, the student indicates little sympathy for the characters. Even though she finds, on the one hand, a rebellious similarity between the one daughter in Bernarda Alba who commits suicide and Tom, the son in The Glass Menagerie, Sarah finds the daughter’s rebellion more purposeful than the so n ’s. In fact, she describes the characters in Williams’ play as "wimpy" (683). This conversation leads us into a discussion of overarching suppositions which might influence why she finds more likable or engaging one piece of literature--or character-over another. It narrows to a view similar to pragmatic criticism. As Sarah states it: She prefers literature that is "able to relate to reality" (684). When we try to craft a definition of literary interpretation, the student pays hom age to the sense that reading literature and the process of literary interpretation are useful to becoming a well-educated 141 person. As she puts it, literature "has maybe an historical, sociological, anthropological value" (685). She refers to a recent play that the class has addressed, The Sandbox by Albee, and indicates her liking of it, especially its directness. What is perhaps more revealing to me is that in this case and in all other cases, when the student becom es engaged with a piece of literature, it is primarily for personal reasons: It leaves you thinking, you know. Then you start thinking about your life, how it applies to this, how, you know, have I been in a situation where I subjected myself to this kind of thing? Did I do the right thing? Am I doing the right thing? How would I handle this when I . . . (686) Sarah is articulating a theory of practical criticism. Also noteworthy is that she incorrectly assum es that her professor does not see these aims as goals of literary interpretation. When I ask Sarah to describe the professor’s interpretive model, she has difficulty. She does focus on sentence-level and lexical issues, basically describing the professor as being primarily concerned with issues of style: "She’s more on the imagery and how every intricate word that was chosen . . . It w asn’ t just written; it was chosen for a purpose. And every character’s nam e w asn’ t ju s t. . . Let’s call him John or Bill. It w as chosen for a specific purpose" (686). Although the student recognizes the importance of these things-"Just like when som eone designs clothing, they don’ t just pick a button out of a box and say, ’ This 142 is gonna go on here.’ Everything, every specific thing w as chosen carefully: the collar, the sleeves, the length"; she admits that these things don’t "interest" her (687). As different as this student is from som e of the others I have interviewed, there is a common thread. When I try to force Sarah to explain why she is not interested, she throws the question back to me and says, "Why aren’ t you interested in designing clothes?" Of course, I am not interested in designing clothes: "Touche" (689). Surely, in teaching literature to undergraduates, we com m ence from a position of w eakness: individually and collectively. Yet despite Paulo Freire’s sense that the educational structure unfairly overwhelms the student, much of my research indicates that many students are actively resistant to classroom pedagogy. Clearly, my interview with Sarah suggests this opposition. In addition to stylistic concerns, Sarah reveals that the professor also focuses on placing literature in a biographical or historical context. When asked to describe the expectations of an introduction to literature course, Sarah--like the novice readers-reveals a recurring and primary observation: that texts must be read carefully. The contrast between professor and student expectations is vivid: From the student’s perspective, reading literature is more or less satisfying as to the degree the student is interested in the text while, from the professor’s 143 perspective, reading literary texts is to read with great care and attention. Frequently when the students elaborate on this point, they describe attention as it relates to lexical items or sentence-level issues. In response to my question, "What do you think the professor felt the purpose of the course was?" Sarah answers, "To understand why this play w as written in the first place, the time period it w as written in. Why are we still reading it now? What significance does it have, does it offer?" (693). For several pages of transcript, the student and I go back and forth. My aim is to find an interpretive position or observation that is more or less genuinely the student’s. We do identify one possibility: the student’s sense that the family in The Glass Menagerie is individually and collectively passive. We then move from there to a set of questions intended to reveal how Sarah would develop her interpretive stance or, in term s of the process, disassem ble the interpretive stance so as to articulate how it w as originally developed. Rather than focusing on stylistic issues, Sarah uses plot as her main evidence for formulating an interpretive stance. In The House of Bernarda Alba, which she has determined is a story about individuals and a family in rebellion, particular behaviors and plot incidents both inform and support her interpretation of the family. When Sarah is asked to identify something that could make this process of literary interpretation an easier one for her or her fellow 144 students, she suggests that the teacher might preview a text, giving the students a sen se of the characters by using descriptive language which would encapsulate their attitudes and behaviors as well as define them according to types. At the conclusion of this conversation, Sarah describes an incident, a quiz, in which the professor’s question was, "What do you find m ost appealing and m ost appalling about a particular play?" Her answ er has Freireian overtones. Sarah lists "rebellious" and "passive" as her two response terms, but she transposes their assignm ent, at least in contrast to how she assum es the majority of her fellow students would respectively assign these two terms, "passive" and "rebellious" to "appealing" and "appalling" (700). This is noteworthy in that the student see s her professor as som eone with predetermined notions, views, and interpretations which are resistant to opposing views: "They don’ t like you to question their judgem ent here, and I think that’s wrong. Very few teachers believe in, accept that, in their classrooms" (700). She finishes our conversation with even a stronger restatem ent: "Teachers don’ t like you to challenge. They have in their mind a set way of thinking and this is how it’s gonna be" (701). Reflecting on this student interview, I am reminded of her example of a clothing designer and the inherent purposefulness of the designer’s activity. While Sarah readily sees the necessity, the importance, for the clothing designer to select the materials--the buttons or the length of the 145 sleeve-this sam e student has difficulty understanding the similarly purposeful nature of a literary text and its composition. While I am troubled that she can appreciate the one but not the other, I am forced to ask myself the sam e question. Do I appreciate the purposefulness of all activities and their inherent products equivalently? The answer is no. Why do I, for example, respond with great interest to a literary text? Why do I find interesting its composition, its purposefulness? And, on the other hand, why is it that other individuals find the purposefulness of a literary text not the least bit interesting? In the history of literary criticism, there have been periods during which literature was discussed in the context of universal, civilizing, and ennobling aspects. If, as teachers of literature, we are to overcom e what is perhaps an expected situation, the situation of many of our students not being a priori interested in understanding a literary text, one avenue is for us to discover ways to engage students with literary texts. Some of those ways might be to create the interest in literary texts that for so many students simply is not there. More basic, perhaps, is an initial discovery of how students read literary texts. It could possibly be the case that students are them selves misunderstanding a lack of interest in a literary text with a difficulty in understanding it, that difficulty in understanding the text, in turn, predicated on a difficulty in reading literary texts. 146 I am reminded of my primary research interest-discovering more about how a novice reader or even an accomplished reader goes about reading, understanding, and interpreting literary texts. Initially, I admit to not being terribly interested in the purposefulness of creating a suit of clothes. Were I to know more about the process, it might well be interest would materialize and grow. For example, there is something called the rhetoric of clothing. If I understood better how clothing is read or interpreted by others, how clothing can have influential outcom es in term s of decisions and goals, the subject, which initially I find no real interest in, might reveal itself to be one having significant cachet. Follow-up Interview with Jerry Garner In response to my first question as to the student’s current view of what the professor has been expecting from students during the course of the sem ester, the student answ ers this way: "It’s analyzing the work w e’ve read" (702). Jerry elaborates: To analyze, like, what we think the author’s trying to say, what we think the author is trying to write about, whether it be suicide or the American Dream. Like Death of a Salesman and The Glass Menagerie would be one example of how the American Dream is beneficial or not beneficial to be successful or is plausible to som e people. (702) 147 While the student indicates in this quote that meaning com es out of the author’s intention, he also says something that seemingly contradicts this remark: "There’s really no right or wrong answer to interpreting these plays" (703). He elaborates on this remark and either backtracks on what he said or, depending upon how one wishes to see it, conforms with his first remark: "There’s really no right or wrong answer to interpreting these plays, you know, unless the author says it m eans one thing, and they [hypothetical students he might be tutoring] think it m eans something different" (703). Much of our conversation at first focuses on hypothetical questions the student might ask a fellow student if he were in a tutorial session with that student and then on specific questions intended to flesh out the meaning of particular texts--Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. But how do we know which questions to ask when approaching a literary text? It seem s clear that Jerry is familiar with the kinds of questions one would often hear asked about texts such as these. When I ask Jerry as to where these questions and observations com e from, this is his response: It’s so em bedded in the culture. Things we see all the time, books we read, like history stories, Andrew Carnegie, you know, ju s t. . . History and right now I’m thinking sociology, also the accepted m eans. Education is like the accepted m eans to get money. (705) 148 What em erges, at least with respect to these two texts, is the centrality of them e to the interpretive process. Jerry has identified a particular theme, in this case, the American Dream, and has then used it to achieve a better understanding of the play and what he assum es the author intends the play to represent or say to us as readers or as an audience. At a more camouflaged or em bedded level, the student seem s also to be suggesting in his catalogue of history, sociology, and education that the ability to understand a literary text is connected to exophoric knowledge as well as experiential or personal knowledge. I am reminded of the heated debates over E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and its assum ption that understanding is enhanced through shared knowledge. Here, in my interview, the student seem s to be suggesting that his sen se of a larger context outside the confines of the text has enabled him to understand better this particular text. At one point in our conversation, Jerry articulates his perception of the differences in how literature is taught at the high school and university levels. He focuses on the need to analyze text as the key difference in describing the latter, the university course. When I, in turn, try to pin him down as to what he m eans by "analyze," he says this: " I think the differences in high school they want a specific answ er and [his professor], she, like, she do esn ’ t really want a specific answ er because 149 there is no specific answer" (707). When I questioned the student--"Why is there no specific answer?"--he responds: Because the questions she asks are, they’re different, like, what we think the play is about versus what we think the teacher thinks the play is about. . . . [I]f I’m doing a paper, as an example, she says, "Okay, you pick a thesis on your paper. You pick a thesis, you write a thesis, you bring it by me, and then w e’ll go from there." Well then, I can pick anything I feel. (707) In discussing Jerry’s selection of a particular them e to analyze in his paper, I challenge him to explain his process. In responding, he hypothesizes the possibility that there is "a personal aspect" (711). He elaborates by saying: When I was reading Death of a Salesman, it just becam e obvious to me that the American Dream was kind of being challenged. It’s not being . . . They don’ t have, like, a revolutionary idea that the American Dream is no good, but it’s kind of being challenged in both plays. And that kind of struck me maybe because, you know, like, that’s why I go to college. That’s one reason why I go to college: so I can get knowledge and money and stuff, you know? So maybe it’s personal. It’s like something personal is the reason I picked those. (711) I am prom pted to wonder if this student is elaborating on the interest "theme," that is to say, the question/response pattern: "Why did you prefer one play or one poem or one novel to another?" "Because this one interested me." Jerry’s variation couples interest and a personal 150 agenda, in particular, his reasons for being at college. College and the su ccess it might bring him are personal issues which make success or the lack thereof in The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman particularly interesting or attention-getting and, in turn, lead to why he selects these plays for his paper. Throughout this interview, I try to get Jerry to be more precise in explaining what "analysis" m eans when it com es to literary interpretation. This is the closest I get: I underline a lot, like, what I think the author’s trying to say. But then again, that’s subjective. That’s just my opinion of what the author’s trying to say. So usually when I’m reading the play and, som etim es I think about the plays, like when I’m not reading them. When I’m reading other works, I can go back and think about the play which I’ve read. (712) Still not satisfied, I suggest that Jerry use what he has com e to know about his com posing process as a possible model for his attempt to analyze and describe his interpretive process. At that point, things seem to work a little better. He says: Maybe that’s the sam e thing in . . . analyzing. Getting . . . Like when you, when I read the play, I think, "OK, it m eans the American Dream." Then when I go back over the play, I see possible argum ents to solidify my argum ent that it is about the American Dream or it’s about, you know, religion or whatever. (713) 151 My hypothesis that the student is using "interest” as a workable synonym for "personal aspects" seem s verified with this response: I can kind of think of how I did it [writing a paper]: I found an idea that interested me-- both papers I found an idea that I was interested in--and then I kind of developed, like, a question possibly. There w as my thesis and then I tried to answ er that question . . . is basically my process. Maybe I’ll use an outline or something. Sometimes I will; som etim es I won’ t. (713) Having described his process for writing a paper, I then encourage him to describe his interpretive sequence. He says this: Think it’s important you read it once, get the idea, maybe the basic idea of what the play is about. Then you read it again and you could pick out, like, with the second time, you pick out a lot m ore things that you didn’t catch the first time. (714) Jerry indicates that his first run-through is to understand the plot, then afterwards, in a second reading, to identify som e kind of a them e: "So you read it through the second time, have maybe a sen se of the whole, so you’re able to attend to other things that you couldn’ t attend to in your first reading" (715). Jerry’s remark coincides with what we know about learning and cognitive processes. We only have so much attention to give something, including the reading of a text, more specifically, the reading of a literary text. Quite correctly, the student acknow ledges that in the first reading, there is only so much he can 152 identify, recognize, understand, only so much significance that can be articulated. If we com pare Jerry as a reader to the previous student, Sarah, we recognize that Sarah is trying to derive an interpretive stance on, at best, a partial reading of a text. Jerry suggests that multiple readings of a text are important; he recognizes that in order to best understand a literary text, multiple readings are essential. He also describes a selective subsequent reading, the kind of reading that is done for the purposes of identifying argum ent to support a thesis or a theme. When I ask Jerry where he learned how to do these things, he answers: " I think I just learned how to do this. Like, maybe in high school, they try to prepare you to think a little bit, and in college they kind of require you to think, I guess" (717). I keep trying to push him to say more about what analysis m eans, since he has identified analysis as the key synonym ous term for interpretation. Finally, we com e down to the word "reasoning"; that is to say, reasoning is inherent in literary analysis (718). I again press Jerry to articulate his sen se of the difference in how literature is taught in high school and the university; he has this comment: "The teacher kind of had the responsibility to teach you. Now you have the responsibility to teach yourself" (719). Jerry surm ises that his professor has accomplished this through her open- ended questioning. A supplied example is from the play 'Night, Mother. 153 In response to the question, "Did Momma like Jessie?" the student says this: There’s no real answer ’cause you could probably . . . You can maybe find two ways with, like, she cried in the end when she realized her daughter’s gonna kill herself. But she also, she also, you know, maybe didn’t respect her daughter very much. She said she had fits and she wouldn’ t call them seizures and she said sh e ’s kind of abnormal and she just maybe . . . You can kind of see that maybe sh e’s bitter towards her daughter for not talking to her as much as she liked. S he’d always talk to the father, just sit with the father. So maybe, maybe that’s a question: Did Momma like the daughter? (719-720) When I ask the student how he responds to one of these open-ended questions, he indicates that he goes to the text looking for evidence. With respect to the question for 'Night, Mother, he indicates he would examine the text for quotations supporting the hypothesis that either the m other loved her daughter or she did not. The student wavers between seeing single meaning in a text or multiple meaning. When I ask Jerry the value of literary interpretation outside of the classroom , he gives the example of a shooting in Los Angeles of a young African-American girl by a Korean grocer; the way he describes this incident and applies it in response to my question indicates that what he is learning in the literature classroom , what significance he places on plot, action, behavior of characters, can be 154 carried forward to how one relates to real-life situations and further supports the student’s view that meaning and interpretation are multiple. Although much of what these two students, Sarah and Jerry, have to say is different, there are striking correspondences. For example, Sarah indicates a pragmatic approach to interpretation. In som e sense, Jerry is echoing this sam e pragmatism, that the reading of literary texts can help us to read actual or real texts as in the example he supplies in his conversation with me as well as his notion that "knowledge and money" coincide and argue for his being in college (711). At one point, I say to Jerry, "So maybe what you’ve been doing in [the professor’s] class m akes you more sensitive to how you react to something, like this incident in the case of the young girl being shot by the grocer?" (722). The student responds: "Yeah, more sensitive. In fact, trying to get maybe all the evidence to get an answer and not just maybe, you know, like, your first reaction" (722). His com m ent supports what the student said earlier about the necessity of reading a text more than once-first, just getting your sense of the plot, basic information; and then an additional reading to get at the detail. So real texts and literary texts, the student would assert, are similar in that, in important cases, they need to be studied and looked at with care and with repetition. Jerry suggests that time spent on a text is important to the fullness of on e’s understanding of that text. Certainly, no one would have any disagreem ent with this. Yet, case in point, seldom do students spend much time on a literary text. Most of them believe that they have little time to read a text thoroughly even once, much less twice or three times. The best model Jerry suggests he follows in his own process of literary interpretation ends up being a basic, Socratic one. Follow-up Interview with Amy Heine Amy expresses som e disappointment with the way things have gone in her introduction to poetry course. For example, in a second paper that has been returned to her, her professor’s com m ents indicate that her explication was not what the professor expected it to be. In this section of our interview, Amy offers a striking remark: "She feels like I didn’t understand, like explicate the poem the way she would of, and I don’ t know if that, there’s a correct way to doing it, and I always thought poetry is whatever you decided what it was" (727). Amy’s com m ents reflect a strong them e that com es through in another section of my dissertation research-freshm an placem ent essay s-th is notion am ong students that interpretation, or rather meaning as a com ponent of interpretation, is subjective and multiform and, based on direct student statem ents, frequently has little to do with what the author intends or what is on the page. I use what Amy has just said to explore her interpretive process. She describes it, with respect to a 156 poem, as a line-by-line process. She then goes on to say this: "The problem with these explications is if you miss one thing, you miss--it’s like math--you miss everything" (728). A disarming yet appropriate analogy. Coincidentally, in my previous interview with Amy, there w as a discussion in which interpretation and its process w as com pared to math. Again, she uses the analogy and elaborates: "And so you can ’ t, you know, if you totally interpret it wrong, you could have everything grammatically right and it sounds good; it’s just not correct. So, that’s the hard thing about it" (728). Pushing further into her interpretive method, Amy indicates that her process is to go through the poem line by line looking for a m essage or a them e and getting a sen se of what the whole poem is about. Without making too many inferences, it would appear for this student that, at least with poetry, she follows a more inductive method, looking at the parts to discover what the whole is about. In contrast, Jerry, the previous student, obviously with a different genre, drama, reads the whole and gets thematic suggestions from a first reading and then goes back for a more detailed look. Another of the issues which has em erged in my research is the dilemma, both for student and professor, of a wrong interpretation. For the professor, how d oes one identify doubtful interpretations without squelching the student’s incentive to reformulate? And, for the student, 157 how d oes one refine an interpretive process if wrong interpretations or cul-de-sacs are not identified by the professor? Amy has something to say on this subject. It com es in a discussion of explications and the difference between hearing something from the professor versus hearing it through group discussion: If you get in a group, students kind of can give their own ideas, not feeling kind of threatened that the teacher’s gonna say, "Oh, you’re wrong." She’s [the professor] not like that, though, which is really a good thing about her--that she would never say that to you. But certain teachers are like that. (729) As with several of the students that I have interviewed, Amy describes her professors as both the type who "would never say that" and yet-with respect to paper com m ents-is described as "like that" (729). What is worrisome is the thought that there are times when professors recognize that a student’s interpretive position is incorrect, weak, or doubtful and yet fail to communicate this in an acceptable fashion to the student. An additional aspect emerging in this interview is the situation of divergent interpretations--the student’s and the professor’s. The student asserts that in her paper on "The Ruined Maid," she has supported her interpretation of the poem, backing it up with quotations and looking at it very specifically at the lexical level. The professor’s rem arks indicate a view contrary to Amy’s as to the significance of the poem ’s title. Amy announces her intention to visit the professor in the next few days to 158 discuss the paper. Her strategy is to see if a com prom ise cannot be struck; that is to say, Amy will attem pt to persuade the professor of the legitimacy of her opinion and, at the sam e time, try to understand the professor’s stance. When we try to dig a bit deeper to uncover Amy’s interpretive process, the notion of repeated readings of a text com es out. The second point she m akes is the importance of vocabulary, more particularly that the reader understand all vocabulary, and third, the importance of taking notes. Amy seem s to be suggesting class notes rather than page annotations. I ask her to describe her professor as an interpreter of poetry and the process she follows. Amy indicates that the poem is read aloud, that it is taken stanza by stanza, and that, as the poem is read through, rem arks are m ade regarding specific parts of the poem, relating those parts to "the big theme" (732). The professor- classroom explications, according to Amy, begin with a description of historical background, the poet, biography, and the poet’s lifestyle rather than a statem ent of the poem ’s them e. If the poem is biographical or autobiographical, statem ents relating to that follow, and finally a discussion takes place of appropriate technical terms, describing the poem as to its genre and style. Rhythm and poetic term s seem also to be discussed in looking at the poem ’s technique and its use of the technical material of poetry. Unfortunately, Amy assum es that the 159 presentation of an explication is synonym ous with the process which produces it. That she assum es this correspondence is reasonable. That we, as professors, fail to distinguish between the two, is not. In response to my question-"W here is the meaning, where d oes it lie in the poem?"--Amy has this to say: I think it lies in the way . . . We were just talking about this in class today, what m akes a poem and the, the use of the language itself, like the words itself and what kind of image that creates in the reader, and I think how the words are placed on the page and the way they’re organized is what a poem really is. It’s how, what kind of m essage, by using the way it can phrase, the way it can put itself on the page, how it relates to the reader, and I think that’s what w e’re, she said w as poetry. (733) What the student appears to be doing here is reciting, in a kind of stream -of-consciousness fashion, her recollections of a classroom conversation one would assum e w as coming primarily, if not exclusively, from the professor. Although I follow up, asking Amy if she agrees with this (she answ ers in the affirmative), I am doubtful that the student would have answ ered my question this way had it not been for this recent classroom conversation on the sam e topic. When I ask Amy about her tutorial sessions, she indicates that they had been helpful, and rather than look at a particular poem in depth, her sessions have been more, as she puts it, "conversation[s]" about a num ber of poem s in any particular session (733-734). Amy reports that in class she does not feel that she has been given a model for interpreting poems: I don’ t think I’ve been taught one because I have a really hard time reading poem s and being able to grasp the meaning. Like, som e I can ’ t. Som e just seem that they’re really easy for me to understand but other ones just. . . I have no clue what they’re saying. (734) She goes on to say that one method--at least with respect to poetry-- would not be sufficient or adequate because of the diversity of poetry. At best, only a "very general method" might be useful (734). When I am trying to elicit from her whether or not the poetry class has given her any new perceptions about poetry, specifically ones different from those she might have had in high school, she responds enthusiastically in the affirmative and uses as an example the high school setting in which the poetry classes were more or less being able to identify lines, the title of the poem, or the poet, while in her university course, the professor really thinks about it, like she m akes it as, like, part of our everyday life, and it w as kind of refreshing. It kind of m ade poetry a little more refreshing to look at than as something dull and dry just to pick apart and look at. I like that about it, so my attitude got better. (736) Later, Amy reveals her frustration with what I have described as the dual professor personae--the classroom persona and the text- 161 response persona. Throughout my interview with her, the issue of a paper she has turned in and the professor’s opinion that Amy’s interpretation was flawed has repeated itself several times. Amy says this: I know, like, they say one thing and do another, and I know it’s probably frustrating for her ’cause, I mean, I think she felt bad giving me this paper. She didn’ t want me to get upset about it, but. . . And I’m not the type of person to get upset over a grade, it’s just. . . I get frustrated when I think, like, they said, "Oh, well, we’ll grade you on how you . . ." You know, your interpretation. Here, I get this C-. I’m like, I’m all, "What are you talking about?" you know? So I got to clarify that. But I think that it’s hard for a teacher to do that. There has to be som e line of, you know, what’s right or wrong or else what are you gonna grade on? So that’s a problem, I think. (737) Although this is not a seam less articulation of the problem, it is certainly to be admired that the student recognizes and genuinely sympathizes with the professor’s dilemma-trying to support the student, encourage interpretation, and, at the sam e time, fulfill a role as guardian of correct interpretation. With this student and with so many of the students I interviewed, I tried to encourage them to think about not only the interpretive process taught to them but also any ideas they might have as to possible 162 procedures or aids for achieving easier, more correct literary interpretations. This particular student has this to say on this subject: I wish I could think of a way that would’ ve m ade it easier for me to interpret the poem s because just reading them over and over, that’s a good way of starting out and maybe you will grasp it. But what are you supposed to do when you have a poem and you have no clue what it says unless you go in and talk to the teacher? I mean, there really is no way o f . . . You can ’ t m ake yourself understand it. (738) At this point, I encourage Amy to imagine what the interpretive process might be like for her professor-teacher: I wonder if they’ve gone over it so much ’cause sh e ’s had to go through so much poetry classes. If you go over a poem so many times, you’re gonna get to a point where you just know it. I mean, I wonder if it’s just that you talk about it so much that you end up knowing it. Maybe she started out having just as hard a time understanding the poem and hating it just as much as I did. But just because she was interested in knowing why she couldn’ t understand it the first time that sh e’s able to tell us. She’s gone through it, you know. (738) There is no question in my mind, given that literature professors immerse them selves in the texts they select for students to read and are eminently familiar with these texts, that there is a great deal of truth and insight in Amy’s remarks as well as in her implied suggestion that, since the professor reader is so familiar with these texts and their meanings, there 163 is probably a gulf between where the students are with respect to their understanding of a text and where the professor has already arrived. Also, the recurring word "interest" rears its head in Amy’s previous response. She is suggesting that interest is the motivational force that produces a positive outcome--or a successful interpretation. Amy imagines that even if the professor-reader at som e earlier point was finding difficulty understanding the poem, possibly even hating it, that interest in solving the problem is the pivotal point and is what spurs the reader, what is eventually to becom e a professor-reader, to interpreting the poem: " I just do n ’ t think all poetry teachers are, like, innately born with an ability to read poem s. I think they just gain it after going over it so many times and having to write so many papers and poems" (739). The student is stating an argum ent of recursiveness, familiarity, the repetitiveness of an act as being influential to how well one can eventually perform the act. The student also assum es, and I think quite correctly, that " I don’ t think everyone can understand every poem that w as written because, for som e reason, they w eren’ t meant to understand it" (739). This has a very philosophical sound to it. I m ean that quite seriously. Perhaps the sister phrase to being interested in something is being able to relate to it. The student hypothesizes that poem s that the professor perhaps seem s to understand best are those poem s she relates to and likes best. Given the hypothetical that the professor- 164 reader has assigned a poem that she is having difficulty understanding, the student imagines that the professor’s response in that kind of a situation would be to forge som e kind of an interpretive stance. The reason that the professor-reader can do this, according to the student, is that she has a familiarity with poetics and with poetic language and expression that would enable her to find something to say about the text. Amy uses as exam ples such things as phrasing, lexical choices, syllabication, rhyme, sound, tone, theme, voice, and rhythm. In the last pages of this interview, Amy and I spend time looking at a Robert Frost poem, "Stopping by the W oods on a Snowy Evening." She is familiar with Frost and, in fact, in a few days, the professor was to introduce the poet with som e biographical background. She w as not, however, familiar with this particular poem. She took som e time to read it. My motive in the subsequent conversation was to encourage her to draft a tentative interpretive position. Although Amy started out indicating that she did not understand the poem, through the back-and-forth dialogue, through my questions and prodding, she com es up with a good attem pt at understanding the poem. Toward the end of our exchange, I ask her to a sse ss why, in just a few minutes, she has been able to move from indicating that she does not understand the poem to articulating a respectable interpretive position. This is what she has to say: 165 Maybe that, like, since you ask a question, it sparks for me to, like, look in the poem to find an answer. I mean, like, if you say, "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?" Maybe that’s why those, like, little group things help so much because what she would do is she would put the poem and then she would be, how about this? She would put the poem and then sh e’d ask, like, "What’s the title m ean? What’s the them e of it?" Da-da-da-da. Like, she asks four questions and w e’d have to write it out. (748) What so much of my research indicates is borne out in the final part of this interview, that is, that dialogue--a kind of Socratic, probing dialogue-- can be helpful to the formulation of an interpretive stance or position. Chapter 5 Students and Tutors Address Interpretive Issues To learn more about how students go about interpreting literature, I have assum ed that conversational setting and participants would likely reveal different perspectives on the process. It was primarily for this reason that I decided early on to invite several of the students whom I had interviewed to participate in tutoring sessions and, with the permission of student and tutor, to record those sessions. The following is an analysis of these appointments. In the first of the student/tutor appointments, the conversational dynamic is different from that of the professor/student office interviews in that generally the student directs the conversation and m akes decisions and observations while the tutor listens and reflects, guiding the conversation but not controlling it, as is the case with the professors in the student office interviews. Kelly Bush’s Tutorial with Lara Kinevskv - Undated On just about any page of the first student/tutor dialogue, Kelly, the student, can be observed doing most of the talking, while her tutor, Lara, uses liberal am ounts of phatic speech, indicating "I’m holding the conversational line open with you" with responses like "OK," "Mm-hm," "Yes," "Yeah" (511). These sorts of responses were frequently the kind 167 of utterance coming from the student in the student/professor office interviews. With the professor, the student plays a conversationally passive role, yet in the student/tutor conversations, the student takes on the more active conversational role, and the tutor, in contrast to the professor, guides, questions, reflects, and rephrases the student’s ideas. Also, the tutor occasionally encourages the student to write down her ideas, taking possession of her observations and thoughts more fully, regardless of whether they have initially com e as a result of the tutor’s questions or prompting. In the office interviews in the preceding chapter, the students fail to announce many of their concerns, either with respect to interpreting a literary text or writing about it in a paper. The student’s behavior is much different in the tutorial. In the latter scene, the student directly expresses her composition concerns and questions with the tutor. Using this one dialogue as an example, you see that Kelly, the student, openly expresses concern for organizational issues, especially decisions as to which material she should include or exclude in addition to what constitutes a sufficient num ber of examples. Kelly and her tutor, Lara, also take time to look at a model paper which the professor has given her students, and from the student/tutor conversation, it becom es clear that they use this paper as a template. They notice, through the tutor’s observation, that this is not a five paragraph paper. Also, they use the sam ple paper to observe that there are multiple examples used in each paragraph of argument. Most importantly, in this session, the student, not the tutor or the professor, is interpreting out loud; the text is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. Much to the tutor’s credit, she listens and, again, through phatic responses like "Mm-hm," indicates her active listening (516). The student has been saying, OK, well the meaning is just OK. The basic meaning of the poem is that, even though she is not all the beautiful things that m ost men want, he thinks that their love is better than anything. I don’ t really understand the last line: "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any woman m isrepresented with false comparison" [sic]. Well, that m akes sense. (515-516) This is a marked contrast to the professor office interviews. Here, the student identifies the specific line with which she is having interpretive difficulty, introduces it directly into the conversation, and then, after reading it aloud, indicates that she has an initial understanding. The tutor responds with an "Mm-hm" (516). Then the student continues by saying, So I guess he’s saying that at least their love is true. He is telling the truth about her, but he still loves her, so the meaning is, um, he c an ’ t, I guess, can’ t com pare her to beautiful things. Well, he kind of is, but. . . (516) 169 Again, the tutor continues to maintain phatic contact, throwing an "Mm- hm" back to the student (516). This dialogue between the student and tutor is important because the student is actually analyzing the text, working through her own puzzles and questions, and positing hypothetical responses to her own questions. Again, to the tutor’s credit, she is more reflective, and instead of jumping in, which is very tempting to som eone with a fuller understanding of the text, she holds back and indicates that she is maintaining that listening posture with the student. At this point, Kelly is getting at the heart of the sonnet, that is, her observation that there is a contradictory, oppositional dynamic; this is key to her appreciating the sonnet’s ironic, almost hum orous meaning which, in turn, can lead Kelly toward addressing, in her essay, issues of genre, one of the professor’s expectations. Further along in their session, the tutor becom es more directive, probably a bit too directive, not giving the student sufficient opportunity to develop her recognition of the poem ’s oppositional force or power. Thankfully, though, the tutor pulls back, and we get very simplistic responses from her, such as "Yeah," and then, after the student m akes the observation, "So he can ’t describe her with beautiful things, but he loves her and he thinks that their love is true because, at least, it’s honest," the tutor responds in this way: "Do you think that it would be a 170 good idea to write something about that this is the way he see s her, that he se e s her like it’s not all foggy to him?" (516). Two significant strategies are em bedded in the tutor’s response. First, she reminds the student that this is a task that should conclude in a piece of writing and so encourages Kelly to memorialize her thoughts. Second, she repeats, in an appropriately reflective manner, what the student has said. As a consequence of the tutor’s turn and redirection, the student’s next remark yields a robust interpretation: "Yeah, yeah. OK, and he thinks that their love is true ’cause he sees her for what she really . . . But he loves her anyway. I guess he do esn ’ t have any, like, false im ages about her or anything like that" (516). Again, the tutor is in the reflective role, responding "Mm-hm" (516). We return to the more appropriate pattern: the student developing her ideas, the tutor reflecting on them. Here is a good example of how the tutor responds to the student’s direct question: S OK, so this should probably still be the second paragraph, though, huh? Or do you think the imagery and language should go in the sam e paragraph or should I split them up? T I don’ t know. What do you think? (517) 171 I know this tutor, and I would say that she indeed knew which would probably be the preferable way but resisted saying and, again, put the decision-making process onto the student. The student’s response: "Well, I g u ess it is the language that he uses that, like, m akes the imagery, so maybe they should be in the sam e paragraph" (517). The tutor pulls out the student’s ideas further by saying, "You want to show the link between the two of them?" (517). The student says, "Well, I g u ess it’s kind of ironic that he uses beautiful things to describe an ugly woman"--a very important interpretive statem ent on the part of the student (517). Mara Jovanian’s Tutorial with Holly Lee - Undated In this tutorial, the student is paraphrasing the quatrains of Sonnet 79 by Edmund Spenser and putting into her own words what she perceives to be its meaning. Some time is spent on vocabulary, which is appropriate. The tutor’s responses are simple ones; the student’s com m ents are elaborated. Here are som e sam ple tutor responses: You did the right thing, though, by looking it [a word] up. Usually you’ll get the definitions. But in this case it’s like h-u-e. Perfect. Mm-hm. The life, the beauty. 172 I would say both. If he’s saying that the body is subject to corruption and her spirit and inner beauty is not, and so that’s permanent. (530-531) In contrast, the student commentary is far more elaborated and developed: Urn, all the rest however fair it be . . . Urn, everything else, no matter how beautiful it is, will turn to nothing and. . . At first I looked up "hew," urn, and it said "to strike forcibly with an axe, sword" or whatever, and it just d o esn ’ t fit in here. And then, "hew," if it’s meaning of h-u-e, maybe color. So this is what I wrote for the first one: Men call you beautiful and you do deserve it. For you, yourself, see it everyday. This is the way I put it. But the true beauty is the gentle dem eanor or character and the virtuous mind, that which encourages you to be, that which encourages you to be virtuous. Those are what I praise to be beautiful. Inner beauty is more worthy of praise than outer beauty. And then the second quatrain I put: Everything else, all the physical attributes of beauty, no matter how beautiful, shall turn to nothing and lose its color. When I first went over it, the poem, I looked at it on a much more spiritual level. The way I looked at it the first time was that, "But onely that is perm anent and free / From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew." "Ensew," it said, "To follow an order." And "flesh ensew," what follows after flesh would be the spirit. You know, like after once you die, what follows after the flesh is the spirit. I thought maybe here is where it’s leading into the spirit aspect of the poem, the religious aspect. . . . 173 I don’ t know if that’s wrong for me to do that because I would say the body breaks down, it disintegrates, but the only thing that is perm anent and free would be the soul or the spirit. But I don’ t know if I’m just pulling that out of a hat. I mean, that’s the feeling I get, but I don’ t know that’s what I should be seeing in that. (530-531) This is as it should be. Not far into their tutorial session, Mara, the student, questions her interpretive process. Actually, she is skeptical of its appropriateness: Yeah, the only problem I had w as whether I should stick with what is really . . . You see, for me, I felt like maybe my imagination is already taking off a few miles ahead of me or whether I should wait until it actually mentions the "divine" and the "heavenly seed" and all that. But for me, automatically when I got to this quatrain, I was already thinking of spirit. (531) While the skepticism is healthy, especially for a novice interpreter, it is also quite natural and appropriate that the student is following a proleptic process or schem e and is using particular diction within the poem to corroborate her interpretive assum ptions and guesses. I am also struck by Mara’s use of the word "imagination": "My imagination is already taking off a few miles ahead of me." In another section of my research, I found that a significant percentage of incoming freshm en believe that interpretation is primarily an imaginative process; that is to say, the reader can make whatever meaning he or she so 174 wishes. I find a variation in Mara in that her "imagination" is harnessed by way of textual evidence and confirmation. The student goes into another quatrain. She reads aloud and then paraphrases her interpretive problems with this part of the poem. I notice that the tutor is both directing the student’s interpretive process as well as sharing with the student the tutor’s own interpretive difficulties. This is probably one of the reasons that peer tutoring can be more effective than professor-student conversation in that the peer tutors tend to be open with the students they work with, expressing their own difficulties mastering content or subject matter. Although, at this time, Holly, the tutor, takes a stronger role or lead in the conversation, the session appropriately com es back to Mara, the student; that is to say, Mara once again asserts predom inance. In fact, it is Mara who interrupts the tutor in this passage: T Like, you, everything that you are com es from something that is spiritual instead of coming from an earthly seed, that is like from the world. So t h a t . . . S So h e’s looking at hum ans as being, like, a miracle of God, like a product of God. T Right. S The heavenly seed m eans that you’re a product, like a source from God. (533) Once again, the student is carrying the interpretive ball. 175 At another level in this tutorial session, I observe the importance of working out word and phrase meanings. Much of the interpretive difficulty for the student is understanding the literalness of the poem. Of course, this task is m ade more challenging due to the fact that the poem is not written in modern English or, certainly, an English more familiar to the student. Nevertheless, I have observed in professor/student and classroom conversations that the interpretive endeavor is much fostered and enhanced if, at the foundation of things, there exists a literal understanding of what the author is saying. Going back to the student/tutor dialogic process, the student continues to transcribe important com m ents and observations coming from the tutorial session: "OK, let me write that down" (533). In addition to focusing on vocabulary, punctuation is a composition element that these two are cognizant of and use to help them in the interpretive process. For example, the student says, You know, like, maybe she do esn ’ t think of the virtuous mind and the gentle wit and sh e’s just very vain and very, you know, just taking care of her outside and not looking in, and he’s almost like a teacher telling her what it should be. I mean, that’s what the colons kind of tell me. (533) Simultaneous with my observation that the student is using punctuation to assist her in the interpretive process, she also constructs an analogy 176 to help her understand the poem, comparing the speaker in the poem to "a teacher telling her what it should be" (533). While this particular analogy is, of course, a helpful interpretive device, it is interesting that it also confirms som e of my own observations about the role of the professor in interpretation; that is to say, the professor is perceived to be the person who tells us "what it should be." This sen se of the professor’s role on the part of the student is very consistent with the second of the two professor roles I have identified in my own research, that is to say, the text-response persona, where there is a sen se of absolute meaning and that the professor, or the teacher, as the student uses the word, is in touch with and is the source of this absolute meaning. Holly then reminds the student of the importance of not only coming to term s with individual definitions for key words but also constructing meaning-chains, that is, words that have relational associations. An example: ”[G]o through and look at words that tie into each other. Like I was saying, ’divine’ and ’heavenly’ and ’Spirit,’ and, you know, anything like that" (534). What follows is an engaging exchange which reveals the student’s interpretive difficulty with the poem ’s temporal m essage. Much of the interpretive direction in the student-tutor conversation has been toward an understanding of the two personae, the young woman and the speaker of the poem, the former being counseled by the latter to recognize that there is more than outer beauty, that an inner spiritual beauty is important and ought to be cultivated. The student indicates to the tutor that she is having difficulty understanding 1) how there can be an argum ent here because she, the student, see s the m essage of the poem occurring at the moment of utterance--not as a reflective experience, thought about, com posed, and sent to the implied reader of the poem, in this case, the beautiful young woman; and 2) how that reading and that meditative or reflective process of the intended reader could encourage conflict and possibly argument. In other words, the student has revealed her inability to recognize certain poetic conventions, a sen se of artificiality that goes with all poetry and the fictive experience, that there are lags and delays, parries and reposts between and am ong the various players. The reader, in this case, the student, naively assum es that the poetic utterance and its reception, not only by the explicit audience, the beautiful young woman, but also by the implied reader, are occurring simultaneously. The tutor works to explain to the student that this just is not the reality of the creative and interpretive experience. Perhaps an important interpretive difficulty is being revealed here. That is, Mara, the novice interpreter, is, by revealing her assum ptions to the tutor, gaining an opportunity to see that literature allows for temporal 178 manipulations that cannot occur in face-to-face conversations. She is becoming aware of an important aspect to literature: that temporal sp aces can be stretched and curtailed and that interpretation is not always a linear, temporal process controlled by external forces of time and physics but rather a recursive, uneven process in the hands of the reader-interpreter. In a nutshell, the interpreter is able to take time and work it in a variety of ways conducive to understanding, pleasure, and enjoyment, all of the above leading to a richness in experience and interpretation. The student has something of an interpretive epiphany. She says, " I see here, like, there are two beauties involved almost. There are three ’ fayres’ going on here but each one, I mean these last two I see as being different, but I only think it’s because I want it to be" (540). The last few words of what this student says, in addition to the entire quoted segm ent, is important. The student is indicating the role of the individual reader in interpretation. The "because I want it to be" suggests that readers are, quite legitimately, m akers of meaning. Our interpretive acts are at times intentional acts, constructive acts in which we determine the shape and the form and then, in an evidentiary sort of way, go about constructing the proofs which support our interpretive intentions. The entire quoted passage, however, is important in that it dem onstrates the 179 student’s understanding of the poem ’s argumentative stasis, the point or place on which the poem ’s argum ent turns. After several brief exchanges between Holly and Mara, the student says this: "Now I see it. OK, I don’ t know why I felt that way but that’s w h a t. . . Thank you" (540). And then the tutor responds, "No, thank you. Now I understand it, too--the other ’fayre’" (540). This too is a significant exchange in that both the tutor and the student appear to be reaching better, fuller perspectives and interpretive stances with regard to the poem under examination. There is strong mutuality occurring here; a debt of gratitude is being exchanged from the student to the tutor and then quite genuinely from the tutor to the student. Mara Jovanian’s Tutorial with Holly Lee -- November 18. 1991 Mara begins by reading a section of "The Scholars" by Yeats and then launches into what she thinks it m eans. She focuses on recurring words such as the use of "all" as well as images, one in particular, bald heads. An interpretive act is in process--she is recognizing a pattern, in this case, a lexical repetition ("all"), and she is trying to ascertain whether or not that repetition is significant and, if significant, of what? She says outright, "I don’ t know if all of these ’alls’ m ean anything" (550). The tutor assists at this point by asking the question, "Do you see any symmetry there?"--referring to the lexical repetition--"Or do you get 180 anything from the fact that it keeps saying all, all, all?" (550). The student replies, "No, I can’ t except that I take it very literally. I can ’ t see beyond why" (550). This, too, is perhaps an interpretive pattern-grasping the literalness of a p assage before one can assign metaphoric or connotative meaning to the passage. In this tutorial session, the tutor is taking a more active role at times, perhaps an overly active interpretive role. The student, though, is asking questions and is engaged in the dialogue in a "constructing" way. Mara reads another poem by Yeats, "The Second Coming," and indicates to her tutor that she has, in her own words, "lost it here on the last part" (553). She goes on to say, "So are there three points to this or two parts to it?" (553). Another interpretive process is being revealed, that is, making meaning out of form or shape and using parts or segm ents as an interpretive guide. Also present is the mutual recognition that, just as an author uses structure and meaning units, so too does the reader, the interpreter looking for these meaning units in order to construct an interpretive position. In addition, Mara paraphrases with the tutor to confirm that her understanding is accurate or acceptable. For example, she quotes from the poem -"’ Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’"~and then says rather matter-of-factly, "So that’s all explanatory" (553). She quotes from the poem again and says, "So, 181 like, all the good deteriorates and the bad reigns?" (553). The tutor confirms this interpretive paraphrase: "Right. It’s the coming of evil and the drowning of innocence" (553). In som e ways, much like a Rogerian, therapeutic experience, the tutor returns the student’s sen se of things using language similar to that of the student. Because Yeats’ poem is richly allusive, som e of the student’s interpretive difficulties are due to a contextual deficiency. Several of her questions and adm issions indicate this, for example, her statem ent that she is not Christian and, therefore, has difficulty with the rich Christian allusions of the poem. Another example is her difficulty with a phrase such as "twenty centuries" and what that m eans in term s of history. Neither the student nor the tutor recognizes the "twenty centuries of stony sleep" phrase. As the dialogue continues, Mara tries to understand what this new order will be. She attem pts characterizing it in term s of its degree of g oodness or badness; she quotes from a section of the poem: Twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour com e round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (556) 182 After reading this section, she remarks, " I hear sarcasm there. ’What rough b east,’ like . . (556). The tutor jumps in: "That’s interesting. That’s a question, too" (556). The student responds: That’s the thing. B ecause it’s a question, the only way I can read it is as if it was sarcasm . Because there is no other way, I can ’ t read it so that there is just the straight question. It’s like he ends it with a question. It’s almost like . . . I think that he sees no hope. (556) When the tutor reminds the student that the last two lines are a question, it seem s to inspire her to realize that her reading of the line as sarcastic is appropriate. Maybe a better choice than "sarcastic" would be "rhetorical." That is, Yeats’ question is a rhetorical one; the poet understands that the "rough beast" that "slouches towards Bethlehem" is something evil, and although he explicitly questions what this creature is, he knows the answer. By waxing rhetorical, he asks his reader/interpreter--for now, Mara--to respond to the question and to realize that there is only a single answer. Mara Jovanian’s Tutorial with Holly Lee -- November 26. 1991 In this session, Mara has given Holly a piece of her writing, has asked her to read it, and awaits her response: T Good. That’s good. S I mean, of course this is not the whole introduction, because what I want to do is, like, say another statem ent or something. I mean, of course, I think it’s odd to just jump from here and start another paragraph and start talking about. . . Or is it? T It wouldn’ t strike me as unusually odd. (558) In som e of their other sessions, Mara begins by expressing her concerns for a paper that she is in the process of writing, a paper illuminating her understanding of a particular work. In this conversation, it is a poem by Emily Dickinson. Some of the student’s questions are very direct, having to do with grammatical questions and a who/whom question. This time, she also focuses on her draft of an introductory paragraph and how explicitly she ought to state the paper’s intention. After these composition concerns are addressed, the student and the tutor turn their attention to the poem. As they get into the explication of another poem, Wilfred Owen’s "Dulce Et Decorum Est," it again becom es clear that the student’s interpretation is ham pered by her lacking a rich context, the allusiveness a reader needs to attain a basic, much less optimal, understanding of the poem. B ecause Mara is not sure that this poem is about World War I, the tutor directs her to this observation and confirms it (562). In som e of my classroom visits, I noticed that the students were experiencing the sam e difficulty of poor lexical understanding and limited experience, 184 making it difficult for them to deal with the literalness of the p assag e or the work. Since Mara does not understand the use of mustard gas in World War I, the tutor has to explain this to her. Consequently, the scene that the poet vividly describes is a scene the student has great difficulty conjuring--even something as basic as visualizing the soldiers’ efforts to put on their gas m asks before breathing the mustard gas and dying. So the frenzied activity of the soldiers as described by the poet is not understood by the student nor is it clear to her why one soldier is described as yelling out and stumbling. It is the tutor who has to rescue Mara with a literal understanding of the passage, making clear to her that one of the soldiers was not able to get on his mask in time. The student erroneously assum es that the problem with the soldier is that he could not get his m ask off. Again, literalness becom es an issue. Mara next puzzles over whether or not this man who was not able to put on his gas m ask in time is alive or dead in the back of the wagon. W hether the soldier is alive or dead is not the point; he is clearly in the process of dying, a revolting image of interpretive importance and impact. In this tutorial exchange, the tutor is perhaps taking the strongest, m ost intrusive interpretive role in any of the dialogues the two have shared. Probably to understand this poem best, one would have to begin reading it with a clear understanding of war, and the typical 185 assum ption that fighting in war is lofty, glorious, and ennobling. The poem ’s concrete, visceral images are in direct contrast to these assum ptions, m ost especially the prevailing assum ptions at the time of World War I. B ecause the student clearly does not have this kind of context at the beginning of her interpretive endeavors, her interpretive difficulties are m ade many times more troublesome. The student retrieves herself rather well late in the conversation as they discuss W. H. Auden’s "Musee des Beaux Arts.” T Exactly, because it’s not glorious. S Right. OK. About suffering, they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While som eone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. OK, so what I get out of this is that, urn, the Old Masters were the painters for the people who . . . The artists, they really understood what suffering w as all about and they were able to capture it in their paintings. At the sam e time, it’s kind of ironic that while suffering is happening in one place, other people are just going about their casual ways of just, like, eating or opening a window. (567-568) 186 Paraphrasing is being put to good use here by the student; Mara verbalizes a reasonable understanding of the p assage and its m essage, and the tutor responds by saying, "Perfect" (568), again, in a confirming way, encouraging the student with her correct interpretive stance. V anessa Darnell’s Tutorial with Lara Kinevskv - O ctober 15. 1991 In this tutorial, the agenda is a paper V anessa, the student, is to write in her introduction to dram a course. V anessa has chosen Shakespeare’s King Lear, and instead of doing a p assage explication or som e other approach to the play, she has elected a textual approach, looking at sources from which Shakespeare might have drawn in writing his version of King Lear. In part, what is different in this tutorial is that the tutor is the most assertive she has been in any of the appointm ents discussed thus far. In fact, ten pages into the transcript, I find a conversational pattern that is similar to the conversational patterns of professor/student office dialogues. That is, the student is doing less of the talking, the tutor, more, and the student’s responses tend to be more phatic. For example, the student says, "OK," then the tutor elaborates. The student responds, "OK," and the tutor elaborates. The student responds, "Urn, let me see," and the tutor elaborates (581). Although the student com es 187 back with a response of her own, it is parried by the tutor’s response of about equivalent elaboration; next, the original pattern returns: S OK____ Tutor-elaborated response S Um, it is, and then when you read the other one, you wonder why he would even change it. (581) While the agenda in this tutorial is not so much coming to an understanding of a written text as it is to organize a paper, the dialogue is instructive, nevertheless, and reminds us of the importance of letting the student assert him/herself more fully in the conversation. Also revealed, and in contrast to the previous dialogues, is the fact that one learns little about this student as a reader of literature. This might in part be due to the tutor’s overweaning role in the conversation but also in part to the very agenda of this tutorial which, as I said previously, is less on interpretation and m ore on compositional organization. During this appointment, the tutor overlooks an opportunity to question the student more thoroughly and await more patiently V anessa’s responses as to how she might discover on her own additional categories for comparing and contrasting sources for Shakespeare’s King Lear and the finished play. Instead, the tutor supplies all of the categorical entities for organizing V anessa’s paper. 188 The conversational imbalance is evident in this set of student responses: Yeah. This is kind of an explanation of why he did all of this. The time changes. So that could be . . . Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hm. OK. Mm-hm. Yeah. (583-584) Consequently, the tutor m isses an opportunity to discover more about the student. By employing a dialogic method to draw out V anessa or by asking her to paraphrase as another technique, the tutor could discover more about what V anessa is actually thinking and could confirm the degree to which she does or does not understand. The phatic-like "Yeah" and "Mm-hm" responses might not always be accurate indications that the student truly understands, much less that the student understands as fully or as completely as she needs to in order to write her paper. 189 Although V anessa indicates, in an agreeable sort of way, that the session has been helpful, one of the tutor’s final remarks m akes me wonder: T Just because you will have something concrete in front of you. You know here they kind of give you one or two quotes but this kind of helps you understand what they are talking about because you get background, but you are probably going to need the actual raw story. S Oh, OK. . . . This helped a lot. T OK. Good. S The concrete stuff. T I’m glad. (584-585) I have little assurance that V anessa has com e away from her tutorial with as much as Mara, the previous student. V anessa Darnell’s Tutorial with Lara Kinevskv - October 21. 1991 This tutorial agenda is less focused on interpretive issues than on preparing the student for a quiz. Of course, it engages in interpretation to the extent that som e of the conversation between the student and the tutor is spent trying to devise signifying statem ents for the characters in a play, all of this in preparation for both a quiz and a midterm in which identifying a character with a passage is important. 190 A good deal of the beginning conversation deals with m anagem ent issues; the tutor, Lara, encourages V anessa to approach the quiz and the midterm from an organized perspective. Also, som e time is spent reviewing the paper on King Lear, which had been returned by the professor, and going over som e of the professor’s annotations. But as I said previously, m ost of the tutor’s time is directed to the agenda of listing the characters in a play, The House of Bernards Alba, and trying to construct identifying phrases for each. Little of what the student says reflects interpretation of the play’s characters. Instead, V anessa spends m ost of her time talking about the characters in term s of the plot with which they are involved or associated. Perhaps one of the more interpretive m om ents is this: S [A]II of these people are old. You know, the maid, the mother, and there is the grandmother, and then the daughter is also older, you know. None of these people are under twenty. T Mm-hm. S And yet all of their actions are really juvenile. They are really, you know . . . The maid is sixty years old, and sh e’s associating with a twenty year old, and it’s like they’re two girls talking to each other. (593) In these remarks, the student is observing that the character’s behavior seem s, externally at least, to be out of place with her chronological age. 191 She has characterized that behavior as "juvenile" and has substantiated it with the phrase that they are like "two girls talking to each other." The tutor encourages the student in this line by responding, "Well, you know, that them e that you are bringing up, that might have something to do with your midterm. She might bring that out as far as an essay goes" (593). I am reminded of my interviews with Sarah Eames, who similarly used plot as an avenue for understanding and remembering the characters as well as their thematic importance to the plays. V anessa Darnell’s Tutorial with Lara Kinevskv -- November 11. 1991 In this session, the student and tutor are talking about the student’s work on a paper. V anessa has selected The Glass Menagerie and is trying to decide on her focus. There is to be an office conversation with her professor the following day; the professor has recom m ended that the student speak with her before commencing on the final draft of her paper. V anessa narrows her focus to one of the play’s characters, the mother, Amanda Winfield. Her opening attempt at constructing a thesis is this: I was going to show how she was an untraditional mother in the role she plays because it's almost as if she is the sister or brother in the family. And yet she is determined that her kids be successful and have som e kind of future. So she kind of contradicts what she says. (601) The tutor carefully reminds the student of particular directions in the assignm ent sheet supplied by the professor. For example, when the student indicates that Amanda Winfield might be contradicting herself, playing the role of the traditional m other as well as not playing the role of the traditional mother, the tutor suggests that this might be worked out by way of this part of the professor’s instructions: "In developing your paper, follow logical structure, acknowledging objections which may seem to disprove your thesis and answ er them if you can" (601). The tutor goes on to say, "You might just say that even though she is a mother. . . If, you know, if you are related to som eone, you want them to do well; it d o esn ’ t matter if you are their mother or their sister" (601). The tutor counsels the student in qualifying her statem ents. For instance, the tutor says, "Like the example I gave you. You are saying that she is kind of like a mother because she wants them to do well or be successful, but if you were a s is te r. . . Any family m em ber would want their family to do well." The student is writing and says, "OK." Then the tutor returns by saying, "Don’ t say ’do esn ’ t fit into any traditional m other’s roles’ because that way you’re opening yourself up to people saying, ’Oh, yes she d oes because she does this.’ Just say, ’D oesn’ t fit 193 in with many of the traditional . . (602). Here, the tutor is suggesting ways that the student can qualify her thesis and, therefore, overcome potential objections which a read er-h er professor-m ight have to an overstated argument. Next, the tutor encourages the student to supply adjectives which describe the mother. In response to this request, V anessa starts to analyze Amanda’s behavior as it relates to her children: S Because I was thinking that if they never did call her Mom or Mamma, you would think that she was a sister or brother, because when they talk, they talk about, urn, courting, and they sit around and . . . T So then the kids talk to her like she is their equal rather than if she was their mother. S Yeah. Yeah, because her and her son Tom get into many argum ents and you can tell, you know, that he is, like, "Get off my back." (604) Unfortunately, the tutor encourages or plants too directly initial ideas as well as interpretive views. The tutor suggests one approach might be to see them as a non-traditional family, that there is no father figure and that Tom, the son, has had to assum e the father figure role. At this point, though, the student follows the tutor’s cue, adding that there are implications in the play that suggest Tom will leave home--like his father. 194 Especially in the last half of this session, the tutor has asserted too much direction and authority over the tutorial and is really leading the student into a paper and into an assessm ent of characters that is the tutor’s rather than the student’s. This tutorial session is disappointing in that it has not dem onstrated the best of dialogic methods. Although the student might a sse ss the tutorial session as particularly helpful because, in the short range, it has given her a clear agenda with which to discuss her paper with the professor the following day, the tutorial has not served well at all the long-range developm ent of the student’s ability to read and interpret literature, articulate a thesis, and find evidence and argum ent to support it. Lastly, and consequently, we learn little about V anessa’s interpretive process. Sarah Eam es’ Tutorial with Sandi Marquez -- October 7. 1991 It is difficult to m ake any clear assum ptions about this tutorial session. It is not as focused as it probably ought to be. The intention seem s to be that the student consider som e questions regarding the end of Act III of King Lear, questions supplied by the professor which recom m end that the student select one of the questions regarding characters and construct som e kind of character analysis. Unlike the 195 previous tutor/student dialogue, the back-and-forth exchange in this one is fairly equivalent, at least in term s of the am ount of speaking done by each participant. It should be repeated that Sarah has a learning disability which influences her reading. One of the reasons that she frequently fails to do all of her reading is that, for her, com prehension is difficult without reading a text out loud, which of course slows the process considerably. If a generalization were to be m ade regarding Sarah’s reading process or the tutorial session, it would be that both focus almost entirely on a literal understanding of what is happening in the play. Very little of the conversation has anything to do with symbolism, significance, them es, underlying issues, or trends. It is only toward the end of the session that the tutor introduces som e literary terminology to assist in a characterization for Edgar. If a generalization were to be m ade regarding the tutorial dynamic, it would be that the tutor does allow the student to do a great deal of the talking, and, as I said earlier, the student m akes as many observations or drafts as many questions in this conversation as does the tutor. A ll in all, this reflects a healthy dialogic process. My only criticism is that the tutor is not as organized or pointed as she might have been with her com m ents and questions. 196 Sarah Eam es’ Tutorial with Sandi Marquez -- October 14. 1991 The conversation between Sarah and her tutor opens up much more directly, in a more purposeful way than their previous session. It appears that the student has been asked to write a five-page paper based on plays read thus far in the sem ester. At issue for the student is the fact that she has read many of the plays only partially. She finally identifies two plays that she is m ost familiar with, A Doll's House and Oedipus Rex. She also expresses concern for her ability to write a five- page paper on only one play. She has been hearing other students talk about their papers, particularly their plans for comparing or contrasting two or more plays. Allowing for the student’s concerns, the tutor and the student discuss the possibility of writing the five-page paper on a single play. The tutor appropriately steers Sarah to the play they have most discussed in their previous tutorial sessions, A Doll’s House. Once focusing on A Doll's House, the tutor reminds Sarah-through com m ents and questions-of the play’s main character, Nora, culminating in the student’s pointed assessm ent: "I don’ t think she was as passive and naive as she appeared to be. Maybe write it [the paper] on that" (620). Sarah has constructed a plausible and som ewhat original thesis statem ent for her paper. 197 But the student explores the possibility of another focus, one in which she would com pare Nora in A Doll’s House with the character of King Lear: I can almost see how I can tie in King Lear and A Doll’s House. It’s, like, the realization that cam e to Nora that who she thought she knew, her husband-w ho she thought she knew for x am ount of years and who she loved and everything-it was, like, the realization to her was the sam e that King Lear’s realization that his daughters . . . You know, they fooled him just as her husband fooled her. You know what I m ean? I could do that. (621) The student is struggling to find a thesis for her paper. Inherent in that struggle is a decision as to whether she will write on one or two plays; she pursues the latter. She then goes on to com pare and contrast in her own mind the characters of Nora and Oedipus, now wondering if this play and character might not be a better pair for her paper. It is encouraging that Sarah generates almost all of the conversation and ideas in this part of the dialogue. The tutor is far more reflective and is, for the m ost part, whether this is intentional or not, keeping the channel of communication going so that the student moves from thought to thought, idea to idea. Finally, Sarah seem s to have a better sense of her paper’s thesis: a com parison of the two characters, Nora and Oedipus. She says: " I think m ore she left because she realized that what she had in her 198 relationship with her husband was all a big fake, just like Oedipus was, O edipus’ life" (623). They then move back to the material discussed in a previous tutorial session, King Lear, and, toward the end, try to make use of literary terminology to develop the analysis. The tutor and the student use the term, "anagnorisis," as a way of finding similarities between the two characters, Nora and Oedipus. While the tutor seem s to be digressing, it is Sarah who brings them back to focus on Nora and Oedipus. As the student sees it, the strongest point of connection between the two characters is their dodging of the truth. She also brings the conversation back to the text and the need to support her observations with supporting material. Sarah articulates her m ost developed thesis at this point: S OK, he do esn ’ t want to believe the truth. Finally in the end when the truth com es out, I guess maybe he always knew. Just like in the beginning like she kind of feared. Oh, she constantly bragged that the wonderful is going to happen, but she never put it into action because maybe she was afraid that it w asn’t going to be like . . . In the beginning, he hears the truth in a riddle but he do esn ’ t question it directly; he d o esn ’ t question it directly because maybe he thought, "Maybe this could be true and I’m not going to respond by anything until I have more information. This is false." So, like, in the beginning, a seed was planted in their minds and they didn’ t realize and 199 they . . . How could I say? Do you know what I’m trying to say now? T Yeah, yeah. S Do you think this would work for a paper? (628) Quite appropriately, the tutor recom m ends that at the planned professor/student appointment that sam e afternoon, it would be better if the student merely brought in a page containing the thesis and som e rough ideas rather than to develop the idea with more specifics, leaving future developm ent until the professor has agreed on the thesis and perhaps has helped Sarah elaborate upon her ideas. Soon, a banter is noticeable between the student and the tutor; Sarah show s preference for a lexical choice, the word "inclinations," while the tutor indicates a preference for the word "truth." They go back and forth on this until the student finally incorporates both in this sentence: "Avoided their inclinations of the truth hoping that it wouldn’ t com e true" (630). The tutor once again com es back to challenge, in an appropriate way, the student’s dogged fascination for the word “inclinations." S In hopes of their inclinations . . . T In hopes of avoiding discovering their. . . That do esn ’ t make sense. S I know. Urn, avoided their inclinations of the truth in hopes of not discovering and confronting the real truth. 200 T That . . . S It’s like we got right words, but they’re all, like, in the wrong order here. Um, avoided their inclinations of the truth . . . T Well, because their inclinations . . . S For fear, for fear that they would com e true. Or for fear that their inclinations were right. You know what I mean, in other words . . . T Yeah, OK. Wait a minute. S In the beginning of both A Doll’s House and Oedipus, Nora and Oedipus avoided their inclinations of the truth for fear that they would com e true. See about that. T And then just explain to her [the professor] what you mean. (631-632) The student and the tutor are going fast and furious, trying to construct a workable thesis statem ent. They recognize the awkwardness of the construction and are working out these difficulties. Sarah Eam es’ Tutorial with Sandi Marquez -- November 4. 1991 The first half of this tutorial is spent discussing the student’s perform ance on an exam, mostly how well she did identifying specific passages, namely identifying the speaker of the p assage and to whom the com m ent is directed. They then segue to a discussion of The Glass Menagerie, the play she is currently addressing in the course. Like so many student conversations on literature, a great deal of time is spent on the literalness of the reading, identifying characters, understanding their basic, explicit role in the play, and paraphrasing plot. Yet there is also som e initial evaluative work going on with respect to understanding the characters’ significance. For example, the student says, "Yes, she is constantly . . . Like, the mother is a constant nag" (638). But, for the most part, the exchange between Sarah and her tutor is diffused, the two of them assembling the bare bones construction of plot and characters. They are also referring to a question, but they never make explicit the question which is stimulating their conversation and their analysis of The Glass Menagerie. They do recognize the potential significance of the glass unicorn and its similarity to the character of Laura and her fragile situation. Sarah Eam es’ Tutorial with Sandi Marquez - November 21. 1991 Largely due to her learning disability, which influences her reading com prehension, Sarah takes advantage of viewing video tapes, at times reading along with the text while she views the tape. She indicates that when viewing King Lear, she used the setting and costum es as a way to reinforce her understanding of the characters: 202 When I w as watching King Lear, Cordelia, out of all of them, was dressed the m ost down. I m ean she had a blue dress, not real flashy or anything like her sisters’ wore. And that’s how she w as in the play; she was kind of honest and "This is how I am; take it or leave it" kind of person. (646) Certainly, stage directions in a play or narrative description of setting, costum e, and appearance can be helpful to and reinforce interpretive assum ptions. The visual imagery, m ade even more apparent on the video tape, m akes it easier for this student to use these cues to further her interpretations. Amv Heine’s Tutorial with Carl Nall -- October 21. 1991 At the opening of this tutorial, Amy, the student, brings to it the basic task, which is to discern differences between two poem s, "On My First Daughter" and "On My First Son." As I have said in earlier analyses of tutorial sessions, what seem s clear to me is that the interpretive process in its m ost basic form involves a literal understanding of the text. Once the literal understanding has been crafted or at least the framework for a literal understanding is in control, then metaphoric, symbolic, extra- textual layers can be added to the literal foundation. The tutor directs the student to consider what he calls "obvious differences," and, as a consequence of his direct approach, the student immediately responds (648). The tutor perhaps gets too involved in 203 fostering an interpretive perspective, and rather than engaging the student in her own analysis and interpretive process, he opts instead to present his hypotheses. The tutor’s advancing of his interpretive viewpoint continues, and the student really is doing no more than trying to follow the tutor’s interpretive posture, as the student’s remarks indicate: "Mm-hm," "OK," "Right," "OK," "Like acceptance?" "OK," "Oh, OK" (649-650)--a string of phatic responses, much like the students in their professor office visits. The tutor is controlling the conversation and, in monologue fashion, advancing his interpretive perspective; the student is reflecting on the monologue, agreeing with and possibly absorbing what the interpreter-speaker is saying. Amy Heine’s Tutorial with Carl Nall -- October 28. 1991 In the second tutorial, at least in the first few pages of the transcript, the tutor is not being as intrusive as he was in the previous session. But, in time, he interjects his literal understanding of the poem, "Lord Randall," and its significance: T You would think that he’d [the character in the poem] been hunting and sustained som e kind of injury. S Uh-huh. 204 T . . . like a poison o r . . . You would think it would be something potent, physical, but it’s really emotional, and he com pares it, like, to being injured by love. S Uh-huh. T When you first read it, it seem s like he got injured hunting or something. (653) Just as the tutor opened his previous tutorial session, he presents his literal understanding of the poem, and, instead of asking the student what she thinks is happening through a dialogic method, the tutor unwittingly turns Amy into a reflector-respondent. Quickly, the tutorial moves to a better place; that is, the tutor recedes in the sense that he is now asking Amy to participate m ore in the making of meaning. He becom es more questioning. For example, the student understands that the poem ’s protagonist has been poisoned, literally, by his lover. The tutor asks the student to question this interpretation: T It seem s like he’s also sick at the heart. S Like he’s physically sick because of the poison. T Or is he sick because she did that to him? S Well, he’s sick from the poison, and h e’s . . . T Is he sick . . . He says that he is "sick at heart." Does that mean that he is sick because . . . He’s sick at the fact that she did that to him? He’s hurt because she poisoned him? S Yeah, because she w asn’ t what he thought she was. (654) Although Amy m isses the tutor’s point, his strategy is appropriate. Next, Amy expresses her difficulty in understanding a phrase--"the power of poetry"-from one of S hakespeare’s sonnets. Unfortunately, on this page of the transcript, the tutor--instead of trying to tease out the phrase with the student, coaxing her to grapple with an understanding of the phrase-m erely explains to her what he believes it m eans. The entire page is devoted to the tutor rather succinctly and carefully explaining the phrase’s significance. The problem, of course, is that it is very possible the student could have been led to an understanding of this phrase on her own through a more dialogic approach. When we find the conversation such that the student is not being asked to explore, analyze, and hypothesize, we learn very little, if anything, about the student’s interpretive process. This should not be surprising since there is no observable interpretive process in operation. By questioning the student and, at times, plodding toward answers, either the professor or the tutor can excavate the interpretive act and also get the student to do the sam e. The dialogic process allows the 206 person with the greater interpretive knowledge to discover a good deal more about the person with less interpretive knowledge and to understand increasingly how that person-in these cases, the stu d en t- goes about reading a text and grappling with its meaning. For example, in the tutorials with Mara Jovanian, I was able to learn something about her as an interpreter of literature, the kinds of questions on her mind, and the way she actually works with a text. Unfortunately, with so many of these other interviews, I learned little about the student’s process because the conversational flow seem s not directed towards that kind of a discovery. Amv Heine’s Tutorial with Carl Nall -- November 11. 1991 As with the previous tutorial appointments between this pair, the tutor, once the poem has been identified by the student--in this case, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge"--launches into his interpretive analysis. They then approach another poem, and this time the tutor initiates things by asking the student, "[W]hat did you get out of it?" (663). The student does a typical literal approach, at least as a first pass, identifying the basic plot of the poem, with som e interpretive ruffles added. In time, unfortunately, the tutor regains center stage and com m andeers the interpretive discussion: 207 T Exactly. He’s reflecting. In the beginning, notice the first stanza and the last stanza. Well, the last two lines are the sam e. S Oh, OK. T That shows you. First he states his situation and then he goes about justifying it, or justifying why he is in that situation, and then he com es back to the situation. S OK. T So the poem is an explanation of why he is where he is and of the situation he is in. S OK. T So he’s reflecting. It’s a period of reflection for the reader. S OK. (664) This is typical of what should not be happening in a conversation between either a professor or a tutor. That is, the student-reader is not being engaged adequately, is not being asked to interpret, but rather, to validate som eone else’s interpretation. Amv Heine’s Tutorial with Carl Nall -- November 25. 1991 In this tutorial, Amy has brought with her a rough draft of a paper based on an explication of Thom as Hardy’s "The Ruined Maid." Initially, Amy indicates that she has understood the poem. Yet at one point in 208 reviewing the paper and its analysis of the poem, it becom es clear that som e of the poem ’s basic vocabulary is still not understood by the student, suggesting that her understanding of the poem is not as secure as she had indicated at the beginning: S I w asn’ t sure. In this sentence, what does she mean by "sigh, and you’d sock"? What would "sock" m ean? T Maybe it is som e form of complaining? S Hm. OK. T You know, sigh and sock . . . S Yeah. OK. That’s kind of what I thought it might have been, but. . . T That’s the only thing I can perceive it as. S Hitting something . . . T Yeah. Maybe she was throwing stuff around. S OK. (670-671) This exchange between the student and the tutor suggests that the two of them are batting about possibilities but never do seem to get close to an assured understanding of what the word or the phrase is telling them. While the preceding tutorial sessions reflect diverse agendas and encom pass a variety of tutorial strategies, som e more appropriate than others, they nevertheless com pare favorably to the student/professor 209 office visits, especially with respect to the tutorials’ generally dialogic quality. In the tutorials, we witness moments when the students clearly vocalize their difficulties as readers of a literary text, identify a specific place or places in the text where the difficulty exists, and, m ost often in the context of paraphrasing a text, make clear that interpretation is primarily a hypothesis-building endeavor. Several of the reading theorists I mentioned in an earlier chapter, despite their differences, jointly view reading as a proleptic act which constantly requires the reader to combine context and text. At times, we see this occurring in som e of the preceding tutorial appointments. 210 Chapter 6 Interpretation in Action: Student, Tutor, and Professor Readings of an Excerpt from Toni Morrison’s Sula Despite my curiosity to learn more about the interpretive process, the conversations discussed in the previous two chapters deal more in the realm of interpretive product than process. My research reminds me of the work of others in composition and rhetoric and the inherent difficulty of unearthing an intellectual process, be it writing or the act of interpreting literature. Confronted by this realization, I set about to construct a reading experience for students, professors, and tutors which would allow greater access to their normally private interpretive processes. For text, I chose an excerpt from Sula, an early novel by Toni Morrison: In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to m ake room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when the black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, m aples and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossom s to passersby. G enerous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in 211 long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene’s Palace of Cosmetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothes will pry loose the slats of R eba’s Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn’ t rem em ber the ingredients without it. There will be nothing left of the Bottom (the footbridge that crossed the river is already gone), but perhaps it is just as well, since it w asn’ t a town anyway: just a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes, and, if a valley man happened to have business up in those hills— collecting rent or insurance payments--he might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of "messing around" to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees, and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested som ewhere under the eyelids, som ewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, som ew here in the palm of the hand, som ewhere behind the frayed lapels, som ew here in the sinew’s curve. He’d have to stand in the back of Greater Saint Matthew’s and let the tenor’s voice dress him in silk, or touch the hands of the spoon carvers (who had not worked in eight years) and let the fingers that danced on wood kiss his skin. Otherwise the pain would escape him even though the laughter was part of the pain. A shucking, knee-slapping, wet-eyed laughter that could even describe and explain how they cam e to be where they were. A joke. A nigger joke. That was the way it got started. Not the town, of course, but that part of town where the Negroes lived, the part they called the Bottom in spite of the fact that it w as up in the hills. Just a nigger joke. The kind white folks tell when the mill closes down and they’re looking for a little comfort som ewhere. The kind colored folks tell on them selves when the rain d o esn ’ t come, or com es for weeks, and they’re looking for a little comfort somehow. A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to his slave if he would perform som e very difficult chores. When the slave completed the work, he asked the farmer to keep his end of the bargain. Freedom w as easy -th e farmer had no objection to that. But he didn’ t want to give up any land. So he told the slave that he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land. He had hoped to give him a piece of the Bottom. The slave blinked and said he thought valley land was bottom land. The m aster said, "Oh, no! See those hills? That’s bottom land, rich and fertile." "But it’s high up in the hills," said the slave. "High up from us," said the master, "but when God looks down, it’s the bottom. That’s why we call it so. It’s the bottom of h eav en - best land there is." So the slave pressed his m aster to try to get him som e. He preferred it to the valley. And it was done. The nigger got the hilly land, where the planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and w ashed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter. Which accounted for the fact that white people lived on the rich valley floor in that little 213 river town in Ohio, and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks. Still, it was lovely up in the Bottom. After the town grew and the farm land turned into a village and the village into a town and the streets of Medallion were hot and dusty with progress, those heavy trees that sheltered the shacks up in the Bottom were wonderful to see. And the hunters who went there som etim es wondered in private if maybe the white farmer was right after all. Maybe it w as the bottom of heaven. The black people would have disagreed, but they had no time to think about it. They were mightily preoccupied with earthly things--and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack w as all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town w as all about, and what they them selves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom. (3-6) In all interviews, whether it be with a student, tutor, or professor, the individual is asked to read the excerpt from Sula. In all cases, none of the readers recognized the p assage or had read it before, which was my intention, that is, not to offer any one person or group the advantage of being familiar with the text so as to influence how the questions were answ ered. As to the questions, nine of them are loosely based on Kenneth Burke’s Pentad: 1. Now that you’ ve read this passage, could you tell me what happened? 214 2. Where did it happen? 3. Who was involved in what happened? 4. How did persons or things exert influence over what happened? 5. Why did it happen? 6. Describe why the story’s action was affected by its setting. 7. How did setting affect the story’s action? 8. What was it about the characters that influenced the action? 9. What was the relationship between character and setting? One or two additional questions were asked of each group: Students Why are you taking a literature class? What did you learn as a result of taking this course? Tutors How is your ability as a reader of literature different from that of the students you tutor and the professors from whom you take classes? Professors Do you think you understand your students as readers of literature? Do you think there are times when your students fail to understand you, and, if so, why? 215 Given that my objective is to learn more about how individuals and the respective groups-students, professors, and tutors--read a literary passage, these nine questions are not the only questions that could have been asked, but by making use of the Pentad, the experiment becom es more system atic and com prehensive-B urke’s intent in designing the five- part dramatistic model. It also served an additional purpose in allowing me to see how the different groups respond to the sam e set of questions and how they respond to the different types of questions am ong the nine, the first five, of course, being the simple points on Burke’s Pentad and the last four what could be called "ratios," that is, where two points on the Pentad are combined in a single question. I was curious to see if these last four questions-clearly more sophisticated by way of their structure-w ere answ ered differently from the previous five. Another purpose in my design was to be present when a text was read for the first time. The readers were all told that they could spend as much time reading the text as they wished and that the text could be referred to throughout our conversations. Since my interest is in discovering more about how various readers com e to understand a text at the point of reading it, Burke’s Pentad and subsequent ratios are useful in that there is an inclusiveness to them; these nine questions allow one to examine not only the Sula p assage but also any literary p assag e and to do so from a number of vantage points or perspectives. 216 I w as especially concerned that I not draft questions of a particular type or sort that might favor one reader over another. There is no doubt that sets of questions can favor a certain area--style, context, historicity, biography, symbolism. Therefore, the nine questions allow readers of various abilities, propensities, and perspectives to do as well as possible. What the transcripts do not indicate is that in asking the series of questions, I allowed ample time for the respondent to say whatever he or she wished and was careful not to rush into the next question, permitting generous pauses. I also was hesitant to do something that com es very naturally to me as an instructor; that is, I resisted the urge to use follow- up questions to prompt a more elaborated response. Instead, I let each person respond to the question as stated and, when the person had finished speaking and after a reasonable pause, went on to the next question. In comparing professor responses to the Sula text as well as observing the best of both student and tutor interpretations (that judgem ent solely my own and, to som e extent, a subjective and arguable one), I notice a similarity to other performative acts, for example, music. I am reminded of the accomplished jazz vocalist w hose bending of notes conveys to the listener a sense of authority and creativity. As the singer "reshapes" the notes, our attention shifts from the piece of music to the perform er’s voice. Similarly, literary interpretation can be a performative 217 act. In reviewing what my research participants have to say about literature, particularly about a specific literary passage, I detect occasions when the interpreter abandons the text and launches into a creative act which moves the listener’s attention to the interpretation itself rather than to the text; this creative shifting or bending transform s text to context. It is also my observation that while these interpretive perform ances can grab on e’s attention, re-direct one’s focus, and unquestionably enhance on e’s estimate of the performer, one wonders if the interpretive act has necessarily been m ade better, fuller, or more complete by the creative "bending" one has witnessed. I have no doubt that som e of the best pieces of literary interpretation which are oftentimes creative, if not wildly so, are not especially well-grounded in the text. Furthermore, it strikes me that those persons I interviewed who offered the least elaborated responses to the nine Burkean questions were in som e odd respect answering them in a more literal, text-centered way than those interviewees who were highly verbal in their responses. The latter group, even in answering the first question or two, frequently anticipated many of the subsequent questions, and their rem arks were demonstrably associative, embellished, and context-driven. 218 Interview with Student John Smith In my first interview, John, in responding to the question "tell me what happened" in this passage, expresses a sen se of confusion: I don’ t know who’s actually doing it and talking about it, and they kind of, like . . . they’ve actually, they have part of it. But, yeah it was, it seem ed that way. Maybe I m issed a word or something. But they were just reflecting back. Am I all right on that one? (881) As to the question about where the story takes place, the student identifies the state, Ohio, then the particular community, the Bottom, as well as the city of which the Bottom is a part, Medallion City. In answer to the question "Who w as involved in what happened?" this reader identifies the black people as well as "the farmers that gave land away" (881). None of the more specific characters is mentioned, not Reba, not Irene, not Sula or Shadrack. "Power and control" is the phrase John uses to explain how "persons or things exert influence over what happened" (882). He uses the example of the whites displacing the blacks in the Bottom, tearing down their community in order to build a golf course. That the setting is in Ohio surprises this reader, the reason being that he assum es whites in this state have historically had a more liberal posture tow ards blacks. He does not becom e more specific, however; that is, he keeps setting at the 219 level of the state, Ohio. He does not focus on Medallion City or, even more narrowly, the Bottom. Question seven, "How did setting affect the story’s action?" is one which stum ps this reader. He is unable to answer it: " I really do n ’ t understand how that would. It d o esn ’ t ring a bell to me, how the story’s action . . . There w asn’ t much action in what I saw in it" (882-883). An interesting aside occurs at this point in the interview. I sensed that John was having increasing difficulty answering the questions, and he says quite directly that he feels that he is answering them poorly, all of which leads us to talk about the fact that I might in som e ways be making it more difficult for the respondent in that I neither restate or rephrase the question nor add a series of tag questions to the first in order to produce a more elaborated response o r-a t least in the mind of the interviewee-a more correct response. The final four questions reflect Burke’s ratios, the putting together of two points on the Pentad. It is my assumption that they are more difficult to answ er than those which address a single point on the Pentad. Not to my surprise, John has more difficulty with the ratio questions, specifically the one regarding the relationship between character and setting. He ambles and rambles, sensing the vagueness of his own responses. 220 I ask each student two additional questions outside of Burke’s Pentad, the first being, "Why are you taking a literature class?" and the second, "What did you learn as a result of taking this course?" With respect to the first question, the student indicates two reasons: first, it is a requirement, and second, when selecting from courses in this required category, the literature course w as more appealing than the poetry. A final reason em erges: that the class has fit into his schedule. Reading more into the stories is what John thinks he is learning as a result of the course and not limiting his understanding to the teacher’s observations or observations culled from classroom discussions. At a more personal level in the interview, the student a sse sse s his reading skills as lacking. His direct statement: "I’m not a good reader" (886). He b ases his assessm ent on his sense that he reads too slowly. He attributes part of the slow ness in his reading to a tendency to wander from the text, as a consequence, losing himself in daydream s, frequently on personal topics or subjects. At one point, we discuss Jane Eyre, which he is currently reading in his literature class. John describes his experience with this novel as an engaging one, and in responding to my inquiry as to any difficulties he is having understanding the text, he mentions som e confusion as to the whole incident with the room. W hat’s going on in there? And, like, she refers back to it a couple of times but she never really talks 221 about it. I have a feeling the way sh e ’s talked about it, sh e ’s going to go more into detail about what actually happened or whatever. (887-888) That a reader is unsure a s to a character or even aspects of setting and is in a tentative or hypothetical state is, of course, part and parcel of the reader’s experience. One of the differences between less experienced and more experienced readers might be that the former find this situation or condition more frustrating, and they consequently infer poor reading skill. Further into the interview, the student credits the professor with understanding him and the other students as readers of literature. In support of that opinion, he says this: "she understands that there’s twenty-five people in the class and there’s twenty-five different views" (891). This is the kind of statem ent that I have, for lack of another phrase, labeled "free interpretation." In another area of my research--the placem ent essays written by incoming freshm en-this was to me, at least, a surprising assum ption shared by one-third of the eight hundred plus writers, that is to say, the assum ption that interpretation of a literary text varies from reader to reader. We see this assumption being voiced in this particular interview. Even more importantly, however, is the student’s assum ption that the professor recognizes as acceptable or legitimate the different views of each of the students. Of course, what 222 cannot be stated uncategorically is just how widely these different views vary from one another. Are we talking about variation in meaning or are we talking about significant difference in meaning? In a few exchanges later, John returns to this notion in even a more assertive manner: I OK. And it sounds like you consider that a good experience. S Oh, yeah. I That approach that she has, her assum ption that there are as many different readings of a piece of literature as there are readers. S Yeah. (891-892) I admit som e pleasure in the student’s response to my next question regarding what he thinks the purpose of this course is from the professor’s perspective. He identifies enjoyment as a key accomplishment. There is no question in my mind that the approach to literature in typical classroom s is predicated on neither the assum ption that the reader’s pleasure or enjoyment is primary nor a sense that pleasure and enjoyment can be enhanced through greater understanding of the text. Interview with Student Margaret Thom as The next student interview stands in strong contrast to the previous one. Margaret’s response to the very first question is highly 223 elaborated and, in fact, anticipates som e of the subsequent questions I intend to ask. This reader focuses on most of the key detail of the passag e and immediately moves toward a thematic approach, sensing that racism is a key them e in the passage. She realizes in response to the question, "Who was involved in what happened?" that there are many characters in this brief passage. A humanistic or literary response com es from the question "How did persons or things exert influence over what happened in this piece?" This particular reader mentions that there are a couple of things she is mulling over. The first thing she says, however, is "Man versus nature." She am ends that to "White man versus black man," and adds to that: "a time before modernization versus . . . I can’t think of the word right now" (897). The two of us resolve her tem porary difficulty in finding the right word or phrase this way: modern versus pre-modern times. In answering the next couple of questions, Margaret indicates that she has a fairly broad sen se of American history. She see s the sociological impact of the passage and has other texts, if you will, in her own frame of reference from which to com pare this one. Not surprisingly, these extra texts make her a much more comfortable interpreter of this particular passage. In a very sophisticated manner, Margaret understands that som e of the questions merge and, even more specifically than that, that som e points on Burke’s Pentad have the ability to transpose with other points on the Pentad. Specifically, she says, "So they are one and the sam e, the character and the setting." This remark is m ade by the student as a result of her observation that "if I w as to discuss the people w hose lives were going to change by the building of the golf course, I would say that Irene and Reba . . . are a part of that setting and are a part of the town" (899). The student has accurately recognized that people can becom e symbols of other things, symbols of the community in which they live, and certainly two of the symbols of the Bottom as described in this p assage by its author are Irene and Reba. While they are individuals, they are simultaneously symbolic of the community and its fabric. When we turn to the two general questions which are not text- specific, the student mentions the fact that she is "terribly fond of literature" and describes herself as a writer of short stories and "an avid reader" (900). Margaret’s profile echoes research which has indicated that adolescents who spend considerable time reading are frequently significantly better as writers as well as readers. In responding to the question as to what she might have learned from taking this course, her answ er indicates that part of her learning has been directed toward her interest in developing herself as a writer. Therefore, exposure to the various styles found in the pieces of literature the class has been reading has been of interest to her. Another thing mentioned in response to this 225 question is her observation that the course has dem anded that she attend to things she might not attend to as a reader on her own, that is, subject m atter-som e of it dark or gruesom e or depressing-w hich might have been avoided were she selecting the literary text. The student indicates that this is probably a good thing: "And it m akes me focus in on things that I don’t necessarily want to, but it gives me an enlightenment" (901). The notion of free interpretation or, put less sharply, subjective interpretation, com es through in this interview as well: "[0]f course, there are going to be certain issues and points that you as a writer or that writers are going to want to drive to the point, to the heads of the readers, but, you know, everyone has their own opinion" (901). The student goes on to describe an anecdote which took place at a public reading. In this arena, there are two individuals on the stage who have different views of a text. It is my opinion that the student rather sympathetically describes the interpreter who attacks the apparently weak interpretation of the other. From the perspective of this student, the point of the anecdote seem s to be that while reading is subjective, it is not open to all interpretive positions: "[Bjecause there is a reader, it’s subjective. But as a writer, I think that you want them to understand what you’re talking about so desperately" (902). What is being suggested here is that interpretation is to be found som ew here between 226 the text and the reader’s intentions for that text or between text and context. When this particular reader experiences difficulty understanding a text, she claims to reread it and also to seek out others’ interpretations by way of reference materials and, lastly, to discuss that text with other people who are familiar with it. At the conclusion of our interview, I ask Margaret to consider why she might be a different reader of literature from her fellow students. She indicates her age; she is probably four to five years older than the average student in her class. She also says, "[B]ecause of my experience, I can relate a little bit more to the issues than they can." Yet she argues that having a variety of life experiences and, as is the case for her, living in a lot of different places is not necessary to being a better reader of literature: I think that you can get the experience without having to go through som e of the pain. . . . I have a friend that’s in a severe manic depression. So I’m quite aware of manic depression. Urn, I don’ t want anybody to have to experience what h e’s going through right now. It’s a terrible, terrible thing. But, fortunately, if som eone could read The Yellow Wallpaper and see a little bit about manic depression and see what it can drive you to do, and certainly this is only one level of manic depression, it would be all that more helpful. (905) In response to my question "Do you feel, either in this class or other literature classes, that you have always felt that there is a clear line 227 of communication between you and the professor?" she answers, "Oh, certainly. And they’re very receptive to opinions different from their own, I thought. I think that’s good" (907). What this student-reader sen ses is the openness of the classroom professor persona, a sen se that the professor is very willing to listen to, consider, and--whether it is the professor’s intention or not--validate multiple interpretations. Interview with Student Svlvia Ullman Comparing the way this student or the first answ ered the question as to what happened in the passage with the second student’s response, one notices a trem endous difference. Margaret, the second student, offered a highly articulated, complex response to the question, "What happened?" The first and third respondents, however, are fairly typical of all of the other student responses; that is, the questions tend to be answ ered minimally rather than maximally, even when the student asks me or remarks, "I don’ t know how specific you want me to get," and I respond by encouraging the student to elaborate, if s /h e wishes. Sylvia’s responses are not terribly detailed. Her more consciously specific answ er to "Who w as involved in what happened?" is "if you want to get very specific you can go from the farmer and the slave" (908). Some of the particular characters, such as Reba, Irene, Shadrack, and Sula, are not mentioned. 228 Her response to the question "How do persons or things exert influence over what happened?" does not really deal with the "how." Rather, it identifies the person or things which exert influence and are the object of that influence. In responding to the question of why the story’s action w as affected by its setting, Sylvia digs a little deeper and discusses the symbolic value of the hills them selves, characterizing them as representing "the up and down that the blacks would eventually face" (909). In responding to the seventh question--"How did setting affect the story’s action?"--her answer is much more elaborated. She focuses on the Bottom, which is to say the top of the hills where the black community is located, and suggests that setting is influential to the story’s action in that it had the effect of bringing the black community closer together; also, by placing them in communion with the natural beauty of the hill, its trees, and terrain, they are put in closer communication with God, the premise being that the Bottom was closer to heaven. For question eight, Sylvia describes the blacks as passive, accepting of the change, and reticent to influence the future and contrasts them with the whites who have a more aggressive outlook toward the future, which eventually leads to their wanting to take back the Bottom and claim it as a golf course. Her response to the final question--"What w as the relationship between character and setting?"--is 229 well articulated. She se e s the blacks as being "very earth-oriented" and the whites as "more monetary-based" (911). When I ask this particular reader to draft a hypothetical question based on the text, she suggests symbolism as a possibility and, when pressed, puts the question this way: "One of the styles that the author used w as symbolism. Can you pull out two to three references of symbolism from the text?" (911). In the area of the interview in which I inquire as to any difficulties a reader has with this text and encourage a description of them, Sylvia indicates that she frequently spen d s a great deal of time with the opening portion of a text and, as was the case in this one, reads it at least twice. Another "readerly" habit is to give special attention to the end of a piece of literature, the concluding sentence or portion. This is what the student has to say about the concluding sentence in the prefatory section of Sula: I think this show s at the point in time where they were m ade to move, um, what exactly they did have and what they were losing and what the ramifications were of them growing up and living in that area, um, and whether the earthly things were more important than the materialistic, and what was going to be lost by building a golf course. Little shops and hom es and losing that land and the beauty of it. (912) 230 This summation on the part of the student seem s to dem onstrate a clear understanding of several of the important m essages in the passage. I was im pressed by it. I share with the student my observation that she is probably an above-average reader of literature and has perhaps had this acknowledged by her professors; for the most part, she agrees with the accuracy of my assum ption. She does indicate, though, that there is a divergence between the reception of her classroom com m ents and ideas expressed in her papers, the latter not being given the positive assessm ent of the former. She attributes this to her professor’s not liking "my style of writing. . . . My style of writing was different from her expectations, so I rewrote every paper" (914). Suggestions of the classroom and text professor personae em erge in this comment. Just as another student, Margaret, had indicated that when she has difficulty understanding a literary text, she pursues several avenues, including looking at what other people have said about that text, this student, Sylvia, mentions two of the more noteworthy or notorious ways of doing this, both Cliff’s and Monarch Notes. Some time is spent with the two of us talking about her sense that there is not enough time to read carefully all that is assigned in a literature class as well as som e of the coping strategies she has for this situation, including skimming a piece of literature but reading the introduction and conclusion carefully 231 and, as mentioned, supplementing her reading with published study notes. Toward the end of our conversation, the student m akes this remark: "[W]e had different perspectives and different views [in the class]. She [the professor] was always very open to different thoughts and feelings and .... You know, other meanings for symbolism, and that w as always good" (919). Unknowingly, the student is commenting on the professor’s classroom persona, the professor’s willingness to accept a wide array of interpretive stances. Interview with Student Jason Vernon This student’s responses to my questions are the least elaborated of any person I interviewed. To reiterate, this student, as all others, was allowed time to consider each question, and I was m ost careful to allow time for additional thoughts or elaboration. I did not move, in other words, from one question to the next before waiting som etim es thirty or forty seconds to be sure that the student was not on the verge of adding to whatever response he or she had just completed. In answering the question "Tell me what happened," his response is this: "It w as about a town that was being wrecked, that w as being leveled, closer to the suburbs. That’s basically it" (925). Equally brief are his responses to the remaining questions: I W here did it happen? S A farm somewhere. I Who was involved in what happened? S I can ’ t really say. . . . I don’ t remember. (925) Even when I suggest that the student might wish to refer to the text, his response is, even though he is at this point looking at the text, "It really d o esn ’ t say" (925). The next question--"How did persons or things exert influence over what happened?"--prom pts this question: "Could you explain that? I don’ t understand" (925). The answ er to the next question receives a more elaborated response: I Why do you suppose the things that happened happened? S Because the white people were giving black people land because they thought it couldn’ t be planted on, or it w as hard to plant on it, and they didn’ t think it would ever be prosperous. After the black people m ade the land prosperous, they decided to level it down . . . and take it back. (925) It is hard to make inferences about this student’s laconic responses, especially when I consider that his answ ers to the two tagged questions seem to be m ore easily offered and more elaborated responses. My only assurance in this interview is that he has recognized, quite correctly, that the p assage focuses on the relationships 233 between the blacks and the whites, the unfair advantage the whites take over the blacks, and the blacks, in the student’s own words, "being content with what they were given, not making a fuss" (926). Interview with Student Juliette Williams Juliette, in responding to the question which asks one to account for why things happened as they did, lists issues of race, advantage, and money as being influential to the action of the story. In the section of our interview during which I am attempting to encourage the student reader to formulate her own questions based on the text, she finally posits a thematic question which com es down to something like "What is the predominant them e in this passage?" Her answer to her own question com es this way: " I say the them e would be helplessness. . . . And other them es, deceit" (932). In looking at the text itself, nowhere do these two words appear-helplessness or deceit. Yet this is one of the things that happens when reading a literary text; that is, the reader brings to the text what Robert Scholes, in his schem e of things, would call a centrifugal reading. Juliette senses, through the narrative, the description, the basic deceitfulness of the "nigger joke" and also the failure on the part of the black people quite understandably to stop the move on the part of the whites to overtake and eventually dismantle their com m unity-the helplessness conveyed in the passage. 234 Juliette indicates that she has difficulty with the chronology of the passage and her ability, at least in her own mind, to construct time and location frames for what is taking place. She uses the example of the tearing down of the Bottom and being confused as to whether the black people are living there when the dislocation is taking place. Several of the students indicate that their reading rate is much slower when beginning a piece of literature, at times rereading sections or paragraphs. For this student, her approach is to read through a piece m ore quickly at the beginning as a technique for accumulating a general sen se of the who, what, where, why, and how of the story. In at least three places in this interview, Juliette com es back to her confusion as to whether or not the neighborhood called the Bottom is or is not a suburb. I am not sure I actually understand Juliette’s confusion, but what is important, I suppose, is that she is trying to construct an accurate understanding of relationships; somehow, the shifting from the valley to the Bottom, from the way it was to the way it is, and the description of things in a state of transition seem to have this reader confused and ill at ease. She has not been able to arrange in a comprehensive way a sorting of the particular elem ents of the passage. The student best articulates this confusion as being due to her thinking that the use of the word "suburbs" as the new nam e for the Bottom is the reason for her interpretive disorientation. The passag e m akes clear that 235 what w as once the Bottom is now the suburbs. Juliette is unsure that this is the case and is questioning whether or not the passag e is, in fact, talking about two different places--the Bottom and the suburbs--each being separate rather than one metamorphosing out of the other. In responding to my curiosity as to whether the student assum es her professor would answ er the questions differently, she says, "Oh, I think everybody would answ er them different. Um, I m ean that’s one thing I saw in the class. I don’ t know if so much different from me. Probably" (937). The student’s response again suggests this notion of the classroom as a free interpretation community in which everyone’s interpretation is uniquely o n e’s own. I would, at som e level, agree with this, but as I scour my research findings, I wonder if my notion of free interpretation is anything like the notion for these students. I am suspicious that my notion and theirs are widely different; that is to say, I would tend to view free interpretation or the uniqueness of interpretation as a chiascuro effect, a shading or subtle veining, reflecting difference of interpretation. I think the student view of this is far coarser, one in which widely different interpretations are the rule, not the exception, and are to be left untrammeled and unchallenged by other readers. On this sam e subject of various interpretations of a single text, the student m akes this observation: 236 You know, like Jane Eyre. So obviously Jane Eyre is, like, the story about this lonesom e girl’s search for love, and that’s not the thing that I saw at all, you know, but probably when I w as nineteen or twenty, I would have said, "Yeah, sh e ’s looking for som eone to love her." So I think it has to do with where you’re at. (938) Certainly, an individual’s subjective experience and on e’s place and situation in life at the time of reading a text are influential, if not central. My concern, a s stated above, is the degree or extent to which subjective experience can inappropriately influence the forming of an interpretive position. Interview with Student Mark Xavier Mark, in responding to the first question, "What happened?" answ ers with a fair am ount of specificity but, in contrast to Margaret’s interview, does not account for what has happened. I was interested that Margaret w as the only student in this group who effortlessly presum ed the majority of the nine questions in her response to the first one. In other words, she responded in a Burkean way to the first question. This student’s response, although full of detail, does not account in any way for what happened. Admittedly, the question does not ask for an explanation or an accounting. 237 In answering the "Who?" question, the student is more complete in his answ er than most of the other students, including the characters Irene and Reba, for example. In responding to the question "How did persons or things exert influence over what happened?" Mark describes the scene or, as the text calls it, the "nigger joke," but he really does not answ er the "How?" question. Maybe he assum es that the relationship of slave to owner needs no explaining, that by way of their essential roles, they offer an answ er to how this cam e about. His response to the question "Why did what happen happen?" is not as broad as som e answ ers; that is, Mark d oes not see it as an issue of power or one of have against have not. The scope of his response is more limited; he see s the unfair transaction a s the whites giving away the least they have in order to ap p ease another group. The student’s response to the question "Describe why the story’s action w as affected by its setting" is more sophisticated than his other responses. He sen ses the irony in the use of the top and the Bottom: So it seem s like the setting is really important where you have even the one kind of ironic passag e where it says that they get to look down on the white people, and you find that’s the only way that they can do that even though it just. . . I don’ t know what the word would be, not in real life, but just kind of an ironic way to look at it. (941) While som e of the student readers have seen the "nigger joke" as a serious offense, it is hard to know from his responses if Mark perceives the sam e. In describing the blacks at the Bottom, he has this to say: " I guess their willingness and drive and happiness at their opportunity to have their land and do with it as they want [is what influenced the action]" (942). I cannot help but think that the student has, to som e extent, misread the paragraph, misunderstood even with explicit direction from the text that the singing and the dancing as described in this passag e is in important ways a m ask for their sadness. I invite the student to consider what kind of question or questions he might ask about the text. His immediate focus is contextual. He expresses curiosity to know who wrote the passage, whether it w as part of a short story or novel. I invite the student to describe places where he had difficulty reading the passage. He mentions becoming lost in the second paragraph: [S]o I guess when I started reading it, I was trying to figure out, OK, well, there’s a city Midwest som ewhere. Talk about how it was, how it’s not going to be anymore, how they’re changing things around, a little bit about the specifics of it-used to be called the Bottom and now it’s the suburbs. Um, and then I just kind o f . . . When I really can’t get a grasp on what the writer is trying to say and if it d o esn ’ t really grab my interest, I can’ t really get too specific. But if I just don’ t get a feel for it, I just read the words and kind of gloss over it: "Well, I finished that paragraph." What 239 did it say? I couldn’ t tell you. Um, so it’s really hard to say about something like that. It’s ju s t. . . You just don’ t know what to get out of it. (944-945) The student is saying several things, not the least of which is the difficulty of the passage, especially its shifts in time and relationships. Another part of the p assage that gave him difficulty was the reference to Reba and her having to cook in her hat so that she could rem em ber the ingredients or the recipes for her dishes. At one point, the student says this: "But instead of fading in, I kind of faded out" (945). Instead of focusing more clearly on the passage, Mark admits to glossing over when he has difficulties. The student m akes an argument for why it is that som e readers relate well to certain texts and other readers do not: [Ijt’s the motivation of the person behind it and depending on, you know, how many things that the person has read and exposed to what kind of things they’re looking for, their whole general background, I would think a story like that, anybody with a background in English or a future in English, wanting to be a professor, writer, or whatever, that has so many things for them to get out of it than just, you know, an average reader, an average student. So it depends on, really, what you want to get out of it and what you enjoy. (946-947) In looking at the set of student responses to the nine Burkean questions based on the Sula passage, I have several observations. First, 240 their responses vary considerably, from the one reader who gave exceptionally minimal, unelaborated responses to several other students who offer detailed and developed responses to som e of the m ore basic questions. In term s of similarities in the set of responses, a majority of the readers indicated either through explicit statem ent or through my own inferential determination difficulty dealing with this p a ssa g e ’s chronology. Since none of the readers w as aware that this is an introduction to a novel, perhaps their conclusions about the passage or certainly their sen se that they needed to reach a full understanding at the conclusion of this several-page p assag e is quite different from the reader who concludes this text knowing that 150 additional pages lie beyond, pages on which answ ers to their "readerly" questions perhaps reside. While Toni Morrison uses the exceedingly vivid description of places and characters, there is a great deal of movement in time within these introductory pages. I would say that all readers would probably be challenged to sift and sort through the many shifts in time. While the imagery is vivid, its significance is not as clear. Even the significance of som e of the characters who are mentioned are intentionally m ade unclear by the author. This is part of the aesthetic experience in which the reader is encouraged to go further into the text to have his or her questions resolved at som e future point in the text. 241 Yet it is perhaps a useful p assage to have a variety of readers look at in that there is quite a lot going on in the several pages. In addition to what has already been mentioned, there is a clear sen se of the ironic, a sense that what appears to be one thing might be another. There is a curious sense of the Manichean in this text, certainly taking the most vivid examples of the slave versus the free person, the black versus the white, the top versus the Bottom, the fertile land versus the infertile land. The passag e is filled with opposites and contraries. While many of these things might be readily observed by a more experienced reader and less discernible to the inexperienced one, the passag e is yet again interesting as a selected paragraph for a variety of readers in that the m ost basic information in the p assage is not presented in a necessarily straightforward or clear manner. I have already mentioned the complex chronological patterns in the several paragraphs. Therefore, chronology, something that in many sophisticated pieces of literature is fairly straightforward, in this p assage is something to which the reader must give conscious attention. To som e extent, the technique Morrison has used in this novel is in media res, the prefatory material giving the reader in overture-like fashion a sen se of the place, the people, and the situation, but doing so in an incomplete, teasing sort of way. While I consider this an aesthetic strength, to the reader who is looking at the passag e outside of its novel 242 context, these things could of course be merely frustrating and confounding. In the next group of interviews, I ask peer literature tutors to read the passag e and answ er the sam e set of text-related questions. Interview with Tutor Guv Yaras Unlike the student responses to the first question, this particular tutor, Guy, in response to "Tell me what happened in the passage," is of the opinion that "I wouldn’ t really say anything happened along the lines of a plot. I would say the p assage is more of a personalization of Medallion and what they call the Bottom" (952). Given the passage, I certainly would not characterize this as an erroneous or incorrect response. Nevertheless, even in light of the unusual chronological shifts in the passage, the tearing down of the Bottom and its being replaced by a golf course qualify for something happening. His responses to the next two questions-"W here did it happen?" and "Who w as involved in what happened?"-are delivered without hesitation and with specificity, identifying Medallion City and the Bottom in response to the former and the black people and the white people in response to the latter. Somewhat surprising to me is the tutor’s response to "Why did it happen?" His answ er suggests that what happened in Medallion City, 243 more particularly, in the Bottom, is "a part of history" (953). But he does not really account for it in any way other than that. The majority of the students see race, inequity of power between blacks and whites, or economic motivation as their notions of why the trick, swindle, or "nigger joke" occurs. Interestingly enough, his response to the following question--"Describe why the story’s action w as affected by its setting"~is perhaps more responsive than any of the answ ers supplied by the student group. Guy indicates that if it had not been for the mere geography of Medallion City--the very fact that this fertile valley existed and the hill, although picturesque, was less easily farm ed-the swindle, the trick, the "nigger joke" would not have occurred. In all of the student and tutor responses to the ratio questions, there is a sense that the respondent really has not thought clearly about the specifics of the question at hand and that som e of the answ ers have not been particularly responsive. What probably has been occurring is that the question merely serves as an opportunity for the reader to say something more about the text, not necessarily that the additional com m ent is directly or specifically responsive to the "ratio." This tutor, however, does not see question seven as being in any significant way different from question six. The follow-up set of questions for the tutor group in part dealt with how the tutor perceives he or she is different from a typical student 244 reader and from a professor reader. With respect to the first comparison, Guy assum es that the typical student, if he or she were discussing the Sula passage, would probably only give the text a very basic reading and would probably say, "’ Well, nothing goes on.’" (955). In point of fact, this is not what most do. In contrasting himself with the typical reader, Guy actually expresses a similarity that was stated by several of the students I have interviewed, that is, the need to read a text multiple times. In describing differences between himself and the professor group, he has this to say: " I would say the professor already thoroughly understands the text and knows essentially what the criticism behind the text has been and his interpretation and his colleagues’ interpretation, and maybe he can get different interpretations from his students" (956). The tutor also indicates that none of the professors from whom he has taken classes has explicitly addressed an interpretive theory vis-a-vis an approach to a particular text. Some of the difficulties experienced by students interpreting not only the literary text but also a written assignm ent supplied to them by the professor is accounted for by this tutor as an unwillingness on the part of the student to engage in the task, either the task of interpreting literature or the task of writing a paper which represents an interpretation of literature. 245 In the section of the interview during which I attempt to engage the tutor in discussion of the professor’s ability to understand his or her students as readers of literature, it is clear to me that my questions have becom e more like statem ents, and I end up leading the tutor into accepting the premise that professors do not understand their students. Consequently, I question the validity or usefulness of what this particular tutor has to say in response to my questions. What Guy discusses in two distinct places in the interview is active reading (955). In neither case does he say explicitly what he m eans by this phrase. What is clear, however, is that for him active reading is a more sophisticated, involved approach to a literary text, one which separates novice readers from more experienced ones. When I posit the notion that literature professors might be using a static rather than process model in teaching literature to their students, that is, presenting exemplary pieces of literature and expecting the students, osmosis-like, both to understand and appreciate them, Guy disagrees with that assum ption and, in support of his disagreem ent, says this: It do esn ’ t seem to work that way. I mean, I rem em ber when I took fiction, "We’ll read these," the professor said, "and we’ll talk about them." There w asn’ t that model. "OK, what did you get out of it?" was kind of the question that you’ll hear in every English class wherever you go, and there was never a whole lot of any of that asking of us to look more carefully. (963) In pushing him to construct a model for more fluent reading of literary texts, his hypothesis is that a more fluent reading com es as a result of more practice, more reading: "Just reading; the more you read the better you get" (964). After much prodding on my part to get Guy to be more specific about his model of a more fluent reading of a literary text, he indicates that after he com prehends the literalness of a text and is comfortable with its basic understanding, he goes on to ask himself questions about the text. For example: I’m trying to ask myself, "What is going on in the narrative? What is going on in the story itself and why is he doing this?" And then I always try to ask myself, "Is the narrative here reflecting anything?" You know, and with the meditational poets— I’ll use that as an exam ple-a lot of times one of their agendas always seem s to be about the process of writing poetry itself. So I’m always asking, "Is he talking about writing poetry?" It depends upon the text itself, that I’m trying to ask myself those questions as I’m reading along. And that’s the best way I think I can explain it. (965) At the conclusion of this interview, I again find myself pushing too hard my own notions and, I think, biasing the tutor’s responses. In the previous set of interviews with the students, I did not feel that at any point I w as doing this. But in this particular interview with Guy, I found I had done this twice. 247 Interview with Tutor Peggy Zill Peggy’s responses are am ong the most developed of any of the persons I interviewed, including the professor group. Her answer to the first question as to what happened in the text takes in the several com ponent actions described in the opening, in particular, the way the town used to be versus the changes which are transforming it into a suburb. The tutor characterizes what has happened in this phrase: "So, it w as just basically a little anecdote talking about the past of this place that has now changed" (968). Like so many of the respondents, this particular one does not mention specific characters, although named, characters like Irene and Reba, at least not when responding to the question "Who w as involved in what happened?" Though the tutor offers a highly descriptive response to the question "How did persons or things exert influence over what happened?" she nonetheless fails to assert an answer. She describes what happens in even more detail than in her answ ers to the previous questions, but the closest she com es to answering would be this: " I mean, it’s kind of hinted at that maybe the white people from the valley cam e up and took over that land" (969). Her reply to the "Why did it happen?" question is responsive, certainly, to the "nigger joke" and how it serves as an explanation for how the blacks cam e to live in the Bottom. Yet it is in the last sentence of her answer that she probably focuses 248 best on the "why" aspect of the question: "It probably occurs due to, you know, racism or entrenched social issues that these people had no control over for their everyday lives" (969). Peggy’s responses are developed and descriptive. As to whether or not they are truly responsive to the questions is another issue. After we finish the nine questions and go into a discussion of the three groups in this study--student or novice readers, tutors, and professors-this particular tutor indicates that one of her normal approaches to reading a piece of literature is to "probably read through this, if I was just sitting at home, three times before I could really figure out and narrow down the specific points." She elaborates: [A]t the beginning I didn’t quite understand the fact that there is a contrast between the present and the past. But then, as I got more into the story, it becam e obvious that it was in the past. Then also, the one p assage toward the bottom of the first page that says, "A joke. A nigger joke. That was the way it got started. Not the town, of course, but that part of town where the Negroes lived." And it goes into the kind of history behind the foundation of this neighborhood. I got to the part where the farmer promised the freedom and land. That was finally when I understood what they were talking about. (971) It is clear that this is an above-average reader, yet she readily admits that on reading the passage, she was confused as to precisely what was being described and what point in time the description was taking place. 249 In saying how she might be different as a reader of literature from the students she tutors, she m akes the point that she is familiar with m ost of the texts her students com e to her to discuss or write about: "I’ve read before and I’ ve had time to think about it som e more" (972). She also describes her interpretive differences as something of an accretion or an additional layer of meaning, in her case, the positing of imaginative or creative questions about a narrator, in particular, his or her reliability, and the fact that these sorts of questions are the ones that take up most of her attention rather than questions dealing with the literalness of the text. Interestingly enough, she indicates that, in som e ways, this is a disadvantage for her and an advantage to students in that the students are "able to nail down that very logical, straightforward interpretation of the text that’s factual" (972). When she contrasts herself with the professor readers, she finds that they have an ability doing both, that is, logically and straightforwardly grappling with the literalness of the text, handling it in a very pragmatic way--her example being the ability to annotate certain them es with page num bers throughout a text-while simultaneously "creatively pushing the envelope of interpretation" (973). In trying to account for this difference between herself and her professors, the tutor surm ises that it might be due to the recursiveness of reading literature, the recursiveness of attempting to understand it, and that with more exposure and 250 experience, the analytical tools of the interpretive trade work in an automatic way, absorbing you even while you are not reading a text: "you think about it like when you’re driving a car. You think about it in all these different circum stances and you tie it into situations in everyday life" (973). Risk-taking is another difference identified by this tutor: [Professors] play with that and I think the students are afraid to do that a lot of the time. I think I play with things too much. It gets me into trouble, and I think a lot of other students I know are afraid to take chances with their readings of things. They’re afraid to draw an interesting and maybe difficult conclusion from something. Oftentimes, papers are always very direct: Discuss, you know, the use of wine in Falstaff’s reveries. Yeah, as opposed to som ebody saying, "Well, discuss why you think Falstaff is eating up the planet." I think the students tend to not take risks maybe because they’re not familiar with reading as much, or also they’re doing it for a grade, so they’re afraid of taking a chance and a) sounding stupid or b) not hooked on the assignm ent. (973) This tutor shares my observation that many of the respondents do not address the linguistic nuance of the ratio questions. She has this to say: Now I know how the students feel when I tell them something. Okay. I think-and this is the hardest for me and I think that this would probably be difficult for a student, to o - "Describe why the story’s action was affected by its setting?" versus "How did the setting affect the story’s action?" And I, very cursorily glanced over that and didn’ t quite, urn, catch 251 the difference. And I think that would be in a, like, an essay question or a question that the professor would ask that would go right over the student’s head because there’s a real nuance of language that’s very significant. Also, probably, I think a lot of times, students have problems with things, like comparative things-W hat was the relationship between character and setting?--because they oftentimes say, "Well, this is a man and this is dirt," you know? Like, what’s the difference? How are they tied together? Urn, you know, m etaphors, imagery, things like that. (974) The tutor also observes that in her own experience with students coming to her for help understanding literature and frequently writing papers on it, the students have difficulty articulating their confusion with or misunderstanding of a text. The tutor’s view of interpretation, which sees the interpretive act as a plastic process, is well summarized in this quotation: I think that if I were to teach a literature course, the first thing I would do for the first class every time is there’s no one correct interpretation; there’s a good argum ent and there’s a poor argument. And the poor argum ents are oftentimes not as good as the other ones because either they’re poorly structured or they’re not supported by the text or you don’ t know anything enough about the precedent, the history of what’s com e before . . . I don’ t think that students are ever told, and it took me a long time to figure it out, but nobody knows anything about any of this stuff for sure. You know, it causes a really nice mind-stimulating event. You do learn som e people’s interpretations of things and all of that, but you really have to find your own 252 view and you can’ t really prove a lot of things. (976) Probably som e of the m ost insightful things said in this interview by the tutor appear here. She relates an anecdote from one of her own classes in which the professor was, in a sense, musing out loud over the text and communicating to her students that what she was saying was probably not clear to them as well as taking responsibility for that lack of clarity. Peggy responded this way to the situation: Well, no. I think she had a really good point and very few of us could figure it out. I still haven’ t figured it out, yet. I just couldn’ t understand why she was digging in the text, and it was like a level that I just knew I could not reach at that point in my life or maybe my brain would snap. (978) Both tutors in this set of interviews have indicated that a more sophisticated, fluent form of literary interpretation is som ehow deeper. Next, the issue of being unable to understand a text or to feel comfortable with one’s interpretation is described very vividly by Peggy: [l]t was overwhelmingly a very negative, disquieting experience for me because it undermined my own sen se of ability as a reader, as a thinker, as a problem solver. Why am I not getting this? Maybe I took it too personally in retrospect. I tend to think a lot of students a lot of times feel this way in classes, in particular, maybe in literature classes where it’s sort of like you say: "Maybe I’ll be there in three years, but I’m sure not there now." And it’s right over the top of the head. (979) 253 The tutor also offers a strategy for handling those situations when what she is trying to communicate to the student she is working with draws a blank response. The technique she offers is to move into the realm of popular culture and icons that most students are familiar and comfortable with, and then suddenly, when the question or the scene shifts into this realm of pop culture, they becom e more relaxed, open, communicative, and readily able to answ er questions that drew blank responses before. At one point in our conversation, I postulate that there might be som e who are intuitively better readers than others and, as a complem ent to that possibility, that professors of literature treat the more able reader of literature different from the less able reader of literature. Peggy, in accepting this hypothetical, posits that conversation between the better readers of literature and the professors is, in her own mind, significantly different: It becom es almost a network in a way, kind of like a little club, not to impugn professors . . . I think that I have no capacity to do anything else, and I can ’ t even find my way around my own town. But I’m pretty good at coming up with crazy ideas about fiction. I’m very glib, and because of that, oftentimes, when I first cam e to college, I didn’ t do any work because I could just go and do this and I could, through divine intervention or whatever, just by a little chance get by without getting in trouble. And professors paid more attention to me, called on me more often than som ebody who 254 was really putting in an effort, som eone w ho’s going and looking up the references in the book, som ebody who had to work a little bit harder. (986) The tutor’s reference to "a little club" is highly descriptive of the socio- linguistic environment of the literary classroom . While she see s herself as an insider, m ost students whom I interviewed are clearly on the outside looking in. They lack the reading, interpretive, and contextual abilities to com e into the conversation as productive participants. Oddly, this tutor’s remark reminds me of the dilemma experienced by the survivors in C rane’s open boat: they see the signals from the group on shore but are unable to interpret them. Interview with Tutor Jake Aaron In responding to the question "How did persons or things exert influence over what happened?" Jake, although not specifically saying so, implies that the whites take advantage of the blacks, the advantage- taking pivoting on the blacks’ lack of education and sophistication, the "nigger joke" as the definitive example. In addition, he suggests that the whites as a group exert more influence than the blacks. He describes the blacks as "becoming m ore concerned with simply living life than trying to succeed in something or to make something more of their life but actually settle down and enjoy seeing things like singing and 255 dancing" (990). In answering the question "Why did this happen?" the tutor’s response attributes the tearing down of the Bottom and replacing it with a golf course to the whites’ insensitivity to the blacks’ culture, a failure on the part of the whites to recognize that "the former slaves had developed [a culture], but the white man didn’ t see that. A ll they saw w as an opportunity to build a golf course so they could retire in recreation" (991). The tutor responds probably better than anyone in my survey in describing why the story’s action was affected by its setting. He articulates quite well how the very geography of the Bottom and its ironic contrast to the valley below influenced the blacks who settled there and influenced their culture, their development, and eventually their being removed from the land. Somewhat similarly to the question regarding setting and its relationship with the story’s action, this particular tutor answ ers the following question-"W hat was it about the characters that influenced the action?"-in probably the m ost straightforward m anner of anyone who responded. The tutor argues that the blacks’ passivity has a lot to do with why the whites are successful, not only originally in duping them into accepting the Bottom as the better property but also later in allowing the whites to relocate them from the Bottom. The tutor also argues that character has been strongly influenced by setting. For the whites, it has meant greater contact with other people 256 along the river, greater opportunities for success. In contrast, for the blacks living in the Bottom, there is a greater sen se of isolation, producing "this culture which is more concerned with the everyday things of life, of what’s going on around them and their people, where they can take som e consolation in the fact that they’re overlooking the white man" (994). Once again, I am told that the most confusing aspect from the reader’s perspective is the p assag e’s shifting time frames: "So there’s several shifts in time, and I think for a reader that m akes it kind of difficult sometimes" (995). Also noted is the lack of information for the two characters mentioned in the final paragraph, Shadrack and Sula. The tutor assum es that his professors would not have difficulty "ascertaining exactly what’s going on. They'd recognize the shifts in time. They’d recognize the point of the piece" (996). A further distinction between himself as a reader of this piece and how he imagines the professor would read it has not as much to do with his understanding of the text as his ability to express his understanding of the text. He describes the professor group as lecturers on the subject of literature having a much easier time expressing their interpretive viewpoint and communicating it orally. The tutor also observes that professors are probably better able to express their understanding of the text through the recursiveness of reading literature, teaching about it, years of schooling, and the repetitiveness of expressing an interpretive viewpoint. This is very similar to what many of the students said; that is, better readers of literature are, for the most part, people who have spent more time reading literature. The tutor m akes clear that it is not naked repetition, but, as he puts it, repetition of reading and constantly trying to understand, repetition of thinking critically, repetition of reading and looking at the way the piece is written, the different techniques that the writer uses to express their point, um, being able to think with a critical mind, and the repetition that com es with that, with thinking constantly critically. (997) We go back to comparing both the professor and tutor groups with the student group; Jake postulates that "the biggest problem with students these days is that they don’ t think critically" (998). Some of the students’ problems, according to this tutor, are due to their failure to engage in critical thinking, their failure to engage in the critical assessm ent of a literary text. Instead, the tutor surm ises that many students merely want to get something done and forget about it. When I encourage the tutor to consider what it is professors are trying to get across to their students in introduction to literature courses, he indicates that the focus is primarily on the students’ writing and suggests that the focus is more on grammar or the structure of writing than on the interpretation found in the writing. In som e sense, this 258 relates to my own observation that we have two professor personae--the classroom persona and the text response persona. While in the classroom , conversation focuses on interpretation, and the conversation is typically open and free, unedited and untrammeled. When this interpretation is found in a student paper, the professor’s text response persona casts a more critical eye than in the classroom . The student papers found in the Appendix testify to this (810-874). Regarding the series of questions on the topic of teacher goals and the degree to which they are directly or indirectly expressed in a classroom to the students, Jake readily acknow ledges that course goals are not always well articulated or articulated at all by the professor but acknow ledges that structure can be found if the student is willing to look for it. Elaborating on the notion of structure in a class, the tutor states that som e withholding of information regarding the professor’s purposes and its delivery system or the way of achieving those purposes am ong his or her students is appropriate or acceptable. In a follow-up response with the student, I characterize this as a puzzle, a puzzle that som e students find appealing, involving, and intriguing. In the final section of this chapter, I interview two professors, asking each to read the Sula p assage and answ er the sam e set of text- response questions. 259 Interview with Professor Greta Brand In answering the first two or three questions, the professor, although in fewer words, gets at more of the detail of the passag e than any of the tutor readers. As with one of the tutor readers, Professor Brand u ses the first couple of questions as an occasion to convey other sen ses about the passage, other m essages she has extracted from the passage. For example, she makes note of the dancing which was described in the second paragraph and focuses on the pain behind the dancing, the singing: If som ebody cam e in, like a hunter or som ebody else, som e man in business from outside cam e in, he would notice the superficial manifestations of happiness through the dancing and all of that, but he would probably not perceive, you know, other more su b tle-a tactile touch of the hand-other more subtle indications of pain. (1008) In just a few sentences, the professor touches on observations that were only culled by the students or the tutors through responses to several questions. The question at hand is "How did persons or things exert influence over what happened?" The professor reader says this: I guess the first thing is there’s a plight. Again, development going on, when it’s being transformed into the suburbs. So, there’s that, whatever power structure was motivating that. And then there’s the initial farmer who gave the land to the slave. So, that initiated the whole development, the people and the way they established their lives there as it 260 gradually started to develop. I find a lot of it descriptive. The people seem som ew hat passive in response to what w as going on. It was like they were going to accept it. And so I g uess that w as their willingness to accept, you know, the fact that their town was being demolished. Obviously, the Emancipation Proclamation, where the slaves were freed, initiated the giving of the land. And now it says as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about. Shadrack. I really don’ t know what that reference m eans. (1008-1009) The professor’s response to "Why did it happen?" is answ ered in a very factual, explicit way: "because the whites wanted to build a golf course" (1009). She also adds that it happened, as well, because the people, the blacks, were not going to resist: " I mean, the implication is that they would passively accept it as part of the realities of their existence" (1009). When I ask the professor if there is anything else she wishes to add to that response or should we go to the next one, she replies in this way: " I can ’t see anything. I suppose that from a second reading I might" (1009). What she is saying here is that in order to get more of the text, she assum es multiple readings. This is consistent with what the other two groups have told me; that is, a deeper, fuller, more elaborated understanding of a text is almost axiomatically founded on two or more readings of that text. The professor’s response to the question "Describe why the story’s action w as affected by the setting," upon consideration, is in 261 many respects not responsive. Nevertheless, the response does indicate much about the reader’s sense of setting and action. With respect to the seem ing similarity between questions six and seven, the professor reader has this to say: "They are so ingrained and overlapping. The story’s action, in my way of thinking, is the process of changing one setting into another. In other words, they’re so closely linked in the action of tearing down one people’s culture" (1010). In answering the question concerning the characters and what it w as about them that influenced the action, the professor m akes a remark that w as m ade by several of the other readers, specifically about the blacks’ passivity. But the professor reader am ends that answ er in a way none of the others did: Not their passivity, but their conditioning as being the underclass, urn, their sense of having to take whatever was given to them so when the bad land w as given, they accepted that and did the best they could with it. And then when it was being taken away from them, they accepted that and did the best they could with it. And, of course, the callousness and insensitivity of the people in power who would do that to other people and also their lack of perception t h a t . . . they wouldn’ t see the pain beneath the laughter. (1010) She m oves her focus m ore specifically to the farmer: “ The trem endous ability to rationalize on the part of the farmer. He felt that giving anyone anything at all was an act of generosity since it was being given away" 262 (1010). What is occurring in this response is a reader who is thinking about the characters, their characteristics, their behaviors, and seeing how those things influence the action of the story, the action of the "nigger joke," the action of the tearing down of the Bottom and creating the Medallion City Golf Course. Finally, there is the last question: "What was the relationship between character and setting?" This is probably one of the more interesting responses for it looks at the characters as m em bers of a group, blacks or whites, and m akes what I think is an interesting observation--that the whites’ desire to transform the setting, to make it their own, is not seen as a sense of accomplishment but rather a lacking on their part, while the blacks’ comfort with the natural landscape, the natural setting, their ability to live with and around it with minimal transformation, is described by the professor reader in ways that draw it as a strength rather than a w eakness. The professor characterizes the whites as strategic and the blacks as spontaneous. Again, the polarities are respectively seen as a w eakness and a strength. The whites "had to have a golf course which is especially set aside for leisure w hereas the other people just danced in the street and responded almost spontaneously to whatever hit them" (1011). When I ask this particular professor to describe the extent to which she understands her students as readers of literature, she 263 describes journal responses she requires at the beginning of each class session in which the students are asked to express, very candidly, what they are thinking about the piece of literature that will be discussed. What she has learned from these responses over the years is that, generally speaking, the students like action over reflective passages, flesh and blood characters to cerebral ones. She sum s it up this way: "They very much want to be entertained. They don’ t see reading as an intellectual exercise in any way, shape, or form. They see reading as a form of enjoyment" (1012). The professor understands that intellectual engagem ent is not necessarily to be separated from enjoyment. She uses the example of her own reading of The Marble Faun and her own enjoyment from working through the intellectual challenges of the text. In other words, the professor finds enjoyment and work as coexistent, as mutual. The students, in comparison, "tend to want the enjoyment to be immediate. They want to like the story, the people, the action" (1013). Interview with Professor Joan Craft As with the other professor interview, this one reveals a reader who takes even a simple question, one without any Burkean ratios, and responds with a ratio-like explanation. The telling of what happened by this reader is also a telling of how it happened as well as the revealing of the reader’s opinion about what has happened. This professor’s 264 response to the question "Why did it happen?" reveals a reader making assum ptions based on the given text as well as assum ptions that are based on context outside of the text: It seem s like it’s being described as a natural or common occurrence, the evolution of social development, regardless of whether it is right or not. It’s sort of natural; man moved to take over the desirable hill land when farming is no longer the main reason for the land. So it happened because of economic improvements or developments, when whether the land could hold seed s was no longer important. It could hold enough to swing a driver. (1017) As the reader herself states, "whether it is right or not" is cast aside, and the explanation, the response to the "why," is described in a matter-of- fact or straightforward manner, much in contrast to the p assage itself, which is in many places filled with the sort of descriptions which tend to move a reader emotionally. In som e respects, the "why" of the question, "Describe why the story’s action w as affected by setting," is not answ ered by this response-"W ell, it’s all about setting. It’s about the valley versus the hill. So, the bottom and top are the action. That’s the movement of the people, and that’s the movement of the plot as well" (1017); the response does, however, identify action and setting as having central importance to this particular text, and in that regard, this response also sets itself apart from the responses of the students. 265 In the following question, "How did setting affect the story’s action?" the professor recognizes, as did any number of other respondents, that the two questions, five and six, are similar. A difference, however, is that although the similarity is noted, a response is forthcoming: [T]he groups, as we see with the people in the Bottom, are so related to their setting. The neighborhood that will be gone is visualized, is described, and we see action in there, and it’s the action that could only happen in that setting. The action of the black community and the laughter and the pain is a part of what m akes the Bottom the Bottom. (1017) One could take exception, however, to the extent to which the "how" in this question has been answered. It is more likely the case that this professor reader has used the question to extrapolate on setting and action but without really putting central focus on the explanation of the mechanism or vehicle or condition that would account for why setting has affected the story’s action. The professor’s response to the question "What was the relationship between character and setting?" contains one statem ent that probably best illuminates this question: "So where you are is who you are" (1018). I find this a powerful observation. The relationship between character and setting can be such that the logistics of one's life can have overwhelming influence on one’s character and vice versa. 266 In asking Professor Craft whether or not she thinks she understands her students as readers of literature, she answ ers without hesitation: "No, not at all" (1018). She elaborates on this response by using vocabulary deficiency as an illustration of those occasions when she recognizes that much can be missing for them when they approach a text. The professor’s observation on the issue of vocabulary deficiencies is well borne out in my own personal experience teaching literature as well as my interviews and my observations in the classroom s that I visited. The m ost striking response in connection to this question is the professor’s last sentence: "But as far as how they read literature, I really don’ t know" (1018). Looking at this question from the other end, "Do you think there are times when your students fail to understand you, and if so, why?" the professor readily acknow ledges that indeed there are these times. She realizes that these m isunderstandings are occurring by way of what she reads in their quizzes or papers, the recognition that things that she has said to them have not com e back in a form or a shape with which she is familiar. Interestingly enough, however, the professor indicates that this misunderstanding or inability to com prehend fully what she has said to the students is not "an entirely bad thing. I think som etim es I talk about texts in term s that they haven’ t construed them in, and I’m trying to show them ways that readers read texts that they may not be aware of" (1018). 267 As for the students’ reading processes, the professor does say this: "I think they tend to read them [texts] more sequentially and forget about what happened earlier, and I draw connections for them or help them see them, and I think very often that som e of them don’ t get that" (1018). The professor also suggests that mere repetition is a valuable learning tool, using her example of pointing out recurring them es or motifs in a text and doing this for readers whom she see s as more sequential and forgetful than she. This ability to recognize returning and contrasting ideas and them es is a process, if repeated for the students a sufficient num ber of times, they indeed might acquire them selves. In many respects, the professor’s notion of repetition being a necessary part of the learning experience is suggested several times over by many of the student readers and even the tutor readers; that is, literary interpretation is something that requires practice, and the process becom es a more comfortable, productive, and fluid one with considerable practice over time. In our discussing how student responses to this text might be different from hers or her colleagues’, Professor Craft hypothesizes that "the students are much more literal. . . . They are not looking at larger meanings; they are doing it very much line-by-line or very factual" (1019). 268 Professor Craft’s com m ent overlooks other readerly behaviors, for example, my own observation through the interview process that although som e students are indeed quite literal, at times cautiously so, there are other times when even the sam e student or another will wildly extrapolate meaning or conclusions from the text without supplying any real explanation for why the conclusion is a reasonable one given the text. I recognize that the professor responses frequently do this as well. The real difference is that when a more accomplished reader extrapolates from a text, her extrapolations are typically expressed more artfully and are supported either by the text or by extra-textual evidence that the reader assum es the auditor already p o ssesses. Argument needs to be elaborated or m ade explicit only when there are points of difference between two or more persons. The problem with som e of the "extrapolating" reader responses is that the conclusions or interpretive leaps that the more naive readers take are frequently, at least to my reading of the Sula passage, not well-grounded in the text or in shared extra-textual information. In other words, the more naive reader seem s not to understand that his or her interpretation is a more unusual or surprising one and, therefore, one which would require more evidence or support for others to understand and accept. The student readers are making all kinds of assum ptions, som e or many of which might actually be valid, but oftentimes they do not ground these assum ptions; they assum e falsely that their own assum ptions, context, and knowledge are shared equally by their auditors. Chapter 7 Free Interpretation: A Student Construct Although the Sula interviews could be analyzed from a num ber of perspectives, I have chosen three: to look at the responses in term s of the degree to which reading com prehension or literal understanding of text is dem onstrated; to examine them in light of the Dartmouth Conference and the differences between growth and transmission models; and to com pare the responses relative to interpretive theorists, including those mentioned in Chapter 1. Minimally, the Sula interviews as well as the initial set dem onstrate that m ost students lack the literal understanding of text we would either expect or want. For example, in m ost of the interviews, the students have significant difficulty understanding the p a ssa g e ’s spatial and temporal frames of reference. Their com prehension of "place"--a key focus in the p assag e-n ev er quite com es across in their com m ents. Chronology as well is a primary difficulty for the majority. Although most of Morrison’s sentences are vivid and imagistic, she bends spatial and temporal zones in ways confusing to a reader who follows a text word- by-word, sentence-by-sentence, and, through this process, takes up the text’s literalness. While a linear, literal reading style is perhaps one reason for why the Sula p assage was difficult for many of the readers, a paucity of extra- 271 textual information is another. Perhaps because the growth model has been preferred pedagogically, the students repeatedly reveal the kinds of information and experience gaps that hinder interpretation, the kind of gaps that might be less prevalent were a transmission model dominant. The students--even the African-American one-bring little historical and sociological context to their readings. On the whole, they speak hesitantly about the extra-textual environment surrounding Medallion City. I find it hard to imagine how I might interpret the p assag e were I to face it without sufficient foreknowledge of race and econom ics in America. Several of the student readers are no doubt struggling in this predicament. Therefore, what the students them selves say about and actually do with texts confirms that they read, as Fish argues is the case for all readers, in a linear, sequential direction, only infrequently breaking that linearity. Yet breaking from this pattern is at times necessary. Morrison’s text dem ands that her reader break with linearity so as to negotiate the recurring shifts in scene and time. For me to understand the Sula passage, I had to move between and am ong paragraphs and sentences in order to arrive at an initial understanding. Although linearity dominates, forays occur. The key ideas of several of the other reading theorists mentioned in Chapter 1 em erge less clearly. Holland’s "primary identity" them es, if 272 influencing their readings, do not becom e explicit or apparent. If, as Culler suggests, readers look for unifying structures of meaning, little evidence exists in my interviews to support this. Should reading be "an act of impletion," Iser’s view, many of the readers I have observed leave num erous blanks either vacant or erroneously filled. Perhaps only David Bleich’s notion that subjective life experiences significantly influence literary interpretation receives support in my research. The most dramatic and powerful evidence revealed in my research is precisely on this point of the reader’s subjectivity. I call this subjectivity "free interpretation." Each year, all incoming freshmen at the university where I teach are required to write an essay for the purposes of placing them in appropriate levels of expository writing. In 1993, the essay prompt was an excerpt by Harlan Ellison from a piece entitled "Books, TV, and the Imagination": Television, quite the opposite of books or even old-time radio that presented dram a and com edy and talk shows, is systematically oriented toward stunting the use of individual imagination. It puts everything out there, right there, so you don’ t have to dream even a little bit. When they would broadcast a segm ent of, say, Inner Sanctum in the Forties, and you heard the creaking door of a haunted house, the mind w as forced to create the picture of that haunted house--a terrifying place so detailed and terrifying that if Universal Studios wanted to build such an edifice for a TV movie, it would cost them millions of dollars and it still wouldn’ t be one one-millionth as 273 frightening as the one your own imagination had cobbled up. A book is a participatory adventure. It involves a creative act at its inception and a creative act when its purpose is fulfilled. The writer dream s the dream and sets it down; the reader reinterprets the dream in personal terms, with personal vision, when he or she reads it. Each creates a world. The template is the book. ESSAY ASSIGNMENT: In a multi-paragraph essay, summarize the chief criticism stated in the passag e and then present your own criticism or defense of television’s effect on the imagination as opposed to a book’s. Justify your position, using not only your own personal experience and observations but also the information in the passage. Out of 766 essay responses, 250 or thirty-four percent contain com m ents which suggest the view that literary interpretation is an open- ended endeavor and that interpretive positions or stances are only minimally influenced by a text. In many of the essays, assertions are m ade that the text serves merely as an interpretive springboard for the student reader; they disregard the text as a template. Com m ents such as the following are typical: Because all that the author presents to the reader are words, the reader can take those and build his own ideas. The author could state his idea one way while the reader would see it another. The result, an enjoyable experience for both. 274 So books present no limitations of how something is or isn’ t supposed to look like. (1081) These excerpts illustrate that many students use a text to build interpretive positions which exceed the bounds of a reasonable reader- response position. The following remark is representative: Dickens simply wrote the words [in A Christmas Carol] for me to interpret into my personal thoughts and visions. Although it is an extremely detailed and descriptive story, the characters and scenery were really left up to me to create and visualize as I wished. (1082) A remark such as "What you interpret may be entirely different than what w as intended" might be construed as insightful, but assum ing a text com m unicates clear intentions, the statem ent becom es a troubling one, possibly indicative of the student’s interpretive laxity or m isguidedness (1083). In looking at the set of 250 student com m ents (1079-1103), I reflect on my experience as a reader of literature at the undergraduate level and my assum ption-clearly, a w rongheaded o n e-o f the monolithic importance of the text; I realize this generation of student readers does not have a slavish relationship with the text. One wonders, based on their own com m ents, whether they at times have any relationship with the text. 275 Although I readily acknowledge that the reader brings much to the text and that the reader’s experience and knowledge significantly influence the interpretive act, I am mindful of the importance of the text and the need to incorporate within on e’s interpretive position the text at hand as well as the reader’s experience and knowledge of herself, her world, and other texts. Many of the student-written com m ents go beyond this kind of text-to-text, text-to-reader, reader-to-text exchange. I am reminded of Robert Scholes’ m etaphors of the line and the circle or, as he first fram es it, centripetal and centrifugal reading: Centripetal reading [the line] conceives of a text in term s of an original intention located at the center of that text. Reading done under this rubric will try to reduce the text to this pure core of unmixed intentionality. Centrifugal reading [the circle], on the other hand, sees the life of a text as occurring along its circumference, which is constantly expanding, encom passing new possibilities of meaning. (8) Scholes argues that interpretation is both centripetal and centrifugal. Yet despite what Scholes and other theorists have to say about the interpretive process, their ideas are absent in most introduction to literature courses. Although inundated with examination copies for introduction to literature texts every sem ester, I rarely receive one that focuses on theory and its application to the process of reading a literary 276 text.1 Were the student authors of the 250 essays which variously describe free interpretation presented with a variety of interpretive models, they and their like-minded peers would be m ade to question their views and interpretive practices. This would be an informing process for all concerned. The 250 essay responses and my classroom visits corroborate that few students recognize the need to balance their interpretations between the text and their own experiences and to develop their skills in examining both. Given the predom inance of the classroom perso n a-th e professor role that is nurturing and open to students’ spoken thoughts, ideas, and interpretations-it is unlikely that a first year college student who initially em braces free interpretation will throw over this notion. It is only when the text response persona asserts itself— the professor role that at times stridently disagrees with the students’ written thoughts, ideas, and interpretations--that the student is reminded of the text’s importance to the interpretive process. The implication for pedagogy is clear in that what we are doing in the classroom and what we are doing as respondents to our students’ texts are, in important ways, at odds with each other. They need not be for the two roles and their respective scen es can be cultivated so as to support and inform each other. 1 W. Ross and Geoffrey R. Winterowd’s text, The Critical Reader, Thinker, and Writer, is a notable exception. 277 Despite offering different models for teaching literature, the classroom s I visited were similar in that each offers free interpretation an environment in which to grow. In the first classroom I observed, the approach w as primarily lecture, the professor regularly referring to the text, discussing plot, characters, action, and the relative significance of these things, with occasional digressions and glosses. Rarely do the students in this model raise their hands, ask questions, or interrupt. In the second model, a more interactive one, the students take on a greater responsibility for having to make meaning from the text. This is done in several ways. One is through an individual student being asked to com e to class prepared to explicate a particular text, and another, a cousin, is for the students to be divided into small groups where it is the group’s responsibility to analyze and explicate a text and then produce a group presentation to their fellow class members. Although one could argue the advantages of either model--in the first, students are able to observe a seasoned reader in action, reacting and responding to a text; in the second, students have the chance to interpret in front of their student colleagues and receive the professor’s critique, should that occur-neither model as practiced adequately ad d resses the students’ interpretive difficulties, be they due to free interpretation or som e other interpretive lapse. 278 During my research, I observed and recorded several lecture- model sessions. I found Professor Robinson’s style to be lively and noticed that many of the students appeared to be listening attentively to what she had to say. In one session, a student interrupts the lecture on W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe to ask, " I don’ t understand the part where he becom es a player on the field. And then Ray says, ’I bet if I looked . . . I would see his nam e’" (1051). The professor responds by referring the class to the page reference. The student then elaborates: "Yeah, but how . . . How is that? Is that saying even though your dream s don’ t com e true in reality, if you truly believe it, it’s the truth?" (1052). In a curious way, the student’s specific question about this text is also a general question about interpretive assum ptions and behaviors. Is interpretation, after all, a seeking for the truth about a text, either truth residing in or coming out of our reading it? And when one engages in truth-seeking conversation or analysis, does one need to use reality to formulate and a sse ss hypotheses? The student suggests that reality— in this case, the text--can be dismissed: " I suppose if you get others to believe you, then they can think it’s true, too. I mean that’s why we believe something is true" (1052). The student’s remarks indicate a view of knowledge and truth that is contingent rather than absolute, idiosyncratic rather than collective. Furthermore, her rem arks indicate a 279 "Copemican" interpretive schem e in that it see s the individual and her dream s at the center of the meaning-making process. The professor really goes nowhere with this student’s particular remarks, despite their being at the core of why they have all com e together in the literature classroom . The professor m isses an opportunity for questions and conversation from the rest of the class, reflecting their perception of reality, how they as readers see reality being portrayed in this particular text, and how both of these things inform the interpretive process. Yet no matter how philosophical or speculative interpretive issues or questions might be, they cannot be engaged in productively without getting at the literalness of a text. The primacy of literalness to the interpretive process com es through in many places in my visits to Professor Brand’s classes. In sitting in on one of the small group discussions, I observed that the students were not operating with clear understandings of vocabulary basic to a particular text. In one vivid instance, a group of students place a false meaning to the word "dejection," a key word in the title of Coleridge’s poem, "Dejection: An Ode" (1058-1059). Thinking that the word has the sam e meaning as "rejection" hobbles their interpretation. At one point, there w as also a misunderstanding of the word "shroud" (1059). One of the students defines it incorrectly; the other three accept his erroneous definition. 280 Had the group proceeded with the correct meaning, they might have better understood this section of the poem. Even with poem s that the students had been asked to prepare before coming to class, their responses are unsure and poorly articulated. In the case of the student who explicates W ordsworth’s "Com posed Upon W estminster Bridge, Septem ber 3, 1802," it is clear from his comment--"[N]ot much is happening. The river is flowing slowly and calmly down. Everything is very relaxed. It is almost like a dead calm" (1055-1056)-that he has m isconstrued the poem ’s lexical cues. Perhaps because he has focused on cues describing the repose of the city in the early morning hours (i.e., "silent," "bare," "smokeless," and "calm,"), he has excluded others suggesting that, while on the outside, things might be quiet, a great deal is nevertheless happening, not in the sen se of action, but in term s of interior sensation, thought, and feeling (i.e., "splendour," "majesty," "bright," and "glittering"). At the conclusion of the student’s brief explication, the professor says, "OK, good. Anything else? No, that is great. The only thing that I would like to add is th a t. . ." (1056). This is a typical professor response to a student com m ent or, in this case, a brief student explication of a poem; that is, it reinforces the student for what he or she says, even though, in this case, the student’s interpretation is flawed. This student can only be misled by the professor’s comment, "that is great." The explication is hardly 281 "great"; it is hardly acceptable. The student’s response indicates a failure to have understood the literalness of the poem. The professor’s response unwittingly encourages free interpretation. What a professor could have done in this instance is to get the student to look at the poem line-by-line and cue the student into listing all the words that run contrary to his assertion that things are calm and quiet and relaxed and that there is a sen se of things being dead. This is a very "lively" poem, as I said before, lively in an interiorized way. Rather than getting the student to rediscover the language of the poem and realize how his reading could be reconsidered, the professor merely supplies approval and an additional layer of meaning the student has himself overlooked. When students complain that the professor’s text response persona seem s at odds with the classroom persona, it is due to scenes like the one described above. When professors validate weak or false interpretations--even when it is due to genuine pleasure for students putting them selves on the line, speaking to their peers about a passage-- ultimately, they do a disservice to their students. The second student to explicate a poem during this sam e class session does a better job than the first. But again, there is an opportunity m issed for the professor in that this student voices confusion or ignorance regarding two of the poem ’s references: "And then he 282 gives--l don’ t know why he did this-but he gives the image of two gods: Proteus and Triton" (1057). Certainly, the student could have looked up these words--m ost dictionaries include these two gods--and found out what they represent and, as a consequence, constructed an additional layer of meaning for this poem. But the professor merely answ ers the student’s question: "OK, well, they’re sea gods, num ber one. And also, it’s a reference back to the classical--by pagan, we can also say classical-creed" (1057). While the professor gives a lot of positive reinforcem ent-w e all want to do this in the classroom -the cold light of day by which one reads a transcript of a class session indicates that the praise is inappropriate considering what the students have actually said. The professor concludes the student explications with these thoughts: "OK, very good. I am very happy with your presentations" (1057). It struck me that her responses to the students who offered individual oral presentations were far more positive and approving than the rem arks I know she would m ake had the presentations been written ones. I recognize allowances one m akes for oral presentations, but it strikes me that the presentations were fairly superficial and her encouraging rem arks exaggerated. Regardless of w hether free interpretation is something the student already brings to the introduction to literature course or something that is inadvertently prom oted by extravagant professor com m ents, it is a danger, one we fail to either acknowledge or remedy. Furthermore, free interpretation is often exacerbated by basic reading difficulties, such as deficient vocabulary. I would argue that a new pedagogy of interpretation is in order, but for a new pedagogy to be better rather than different, it must be founded on a close inspection of our students and who they are as readers as well as ourselves and what it is we are trying to encourage. Chapter 8 Toward a New Pedagogy of Interpretation In m ost cases, students com e to introduction to literature classroom s malnourished as readers and as interpreters of literature; they voice no clear understanding as to the primary purpose of a literature class or the primary benefits they individually receive from having participated in such a course; and the professors them selves observe, at best, m oderate and, typically, minimal improvement in their students’ skill in interpreting literature. These realizations dem onstrate our need to reconsider what we are doing in introduction to literature courses, to question our and our students’ reasons for being there, and to discuss these things in a forum which encourages our discovering and agreeing upon unifying purposes for teaching literature courses in today’s culture. In commencing my research, I questioned four currently pervasive assum ptions: 1. literary theory informs the teaching of literature 2. literature teaches itself; that is, once trained in literary theory and research, the graduate student has been prepared to teach the subject 3. problems encountered in teaching literature are largely due to causes "outside" academ e 285 4. reading and interpreting literature is an intrinsically enriching experience In an unexpected way, the first of these assum ptions was both confirmed and denied. In Chapter 2, I concluded that New Critical tenets pervade the introduction to literature courses I observed. I have every reason to believe that the classes and professors I have observed are typical. On the one hand, my observation supports the notion that theory informs teaching but, on the other hand, denies the influence of subsequent literary theories--at least at the level of praxis. I find this troubling, in light of the am ount of professional focus placed on a raft of newer, ostensibly more relevant theories, yet understandable, when one contextualizes New Criticism as a professional response to charges that interpretation was overly subjective and unsystematic. Regardless of stated theoretical perspectives and despite the varied interpretive issues addressed in publications, many professors teach introduction to literature courses with a New Critical focus, frequently structure the classroom dynamic similarly, and read student papers with a New Critical eye. The second assum ption, that literature teaches itself, is not explicitly supported. Since literary theories discussed and practiced by graduate professors and their students appear not to trickle down into introduction to literature classroom s, one should legitimately question the notion that once trained in theory and research, graduate students are 286 prepared to teach introduction to literature courses. Part of the voiced frustration of the professors I interviewed had to do with the difference they correctly see between them selves as readers of literature and their students. Yet there is no defined or evolving pedagogy to address and reduce these differences. Certainly, the title of this chapter indicates my view that a new pedagogy is in order. The third assumption, that problems encountered in teaching literature are largely due to causes "outside" academ e, is only partially valid. My discussion of free interpretation in the previous chapter m akes clear that som e of the issues we confront in the introduction to literature classroom are not of our own making. Yet many are. For instance, our classroom behaviors are predicated upon the belief that students either p o ssess or should p o ssess reading skills sufficient for the task of interpretation. That some--or, quite possibly, m any-do not has done little to alter our methods. While m ost institutions systematically test incoming students as writers, few do the sam e in the subject of reading. And were an institution to conduct systematic reading assessm ent and, as a result, assign weaker readers to courses designed to remedy their deficiencies, those professors who eventually find th ese students in their introduction to literature courses will encounter students who, although improved as readers, are no doubt still deficient with respect to reading literary texts. In my classroom 287 observations, it was abundantly clear that insufficient vocabulary is a readerly deficit that can have significant impact on interpretive constructions. Historically, literature professors have neither been nor needed to be reading teachers. Yet given social, economic, and dem ographic changes in post-secondary education, we increasingly must acknowledge our students as they are rather than as we might wish them to be. Therefore, the issue of reading as a foundation skill for interpretation must be addressed, and decisions must be m ade as to whether or not the profession of literature is going to adapt itself and its pedagogy to its real audience or continue to deny issues which directly impact our ability to foster interpretive skill. Still other problems are due to our own making. The dual professor personae, the classroom versus the text response roles, are a case in point. Both roles have inherent value. The difficulty is in our failure to acknowledge the two roles and to recognize that, for the student, they are, at times, at odds with each other. The classroom persona no doubt responds to our desire to encourage students, to produce a classroom and learning environment that is open, communicative, dialogic. The text response persona brings objectivity and professionalism to what we do and to what we are encouraging our students to do-interpret literature in ways that are reasoned and 288 reasonable, insightful and persuasive. The ambitions reflected in these two roles can be successfully integrated if consciously considered. The fourth assumption, that reading and interpreting literature is an intrinsically enriching experience, is not convincingly borne out in my research. That any of the students I have interviewed have been enriched by the experience is not explicitly evident. Perhaps because professors of literature assum e personal enrichment is an inherent product of these courses, they neither articulate this as an objective nor a sse ss it as a result. For the most part, the students see these courses as a mechanical fulfillment of general education or major course requirements. I and others certainly could argue that personal enrichment is only one of many reasons to teach these courses or to take them. I would also argue that without individual and collective discourse on the purposes behind introduction to literature courses, our classroom ambitions and m ethods are blunted. If personal enrichment is the raison d ’etre, perhaps we should tell this to our students. But how would one go about analyzing and assessing introduction to literature courses? Burke’s application of the Pentad to human relations is just one tool for doing this (A Grammar of Motives xv). Already, I have dem onstrated that Purpose, one of the points on Burke’s Pentad, goes unquestioned. With respect to analyzing Act, what Burke calls what is taking "place, in thought or deed," the introduction to 289 literature class receives little or no attention. Scene, "the background of the Act, the situation in which it occurred," is shrouded in secrecy. While we assiduously scrutinize any number of professional topics, we discuss the classroom -the Scene--casually and anecdotally. As for Agent, "what person or kind of person performed the Act," we focus our attention on our students rather than ourselves, and with respect to the former, we fail to ask som e of the most important questions, such as how they go about the task of interpretive reading. And the "means or instruments [we] use," Burke’s notion of Agency, is seldom explored (A Grammar of Motives xv). Our culture of academ ic autonomy hinders this analysis; pedagogy and praxis are present but unexamined. Were I to offer a remedy for these ills as well as a tentative model for a new pedagogy of interpretation, I would base it on something I call interpretive revision. In its broadest sense, interpretive revision assum es that interpretation is process-dynam ic rather than product-static, that interpretation is evolving and plastic, its own m etam orphosis constantly pivoting on the reader re-approaching a text and re-examining his or her own evolving interpretive perspectives. It is time-demanding and labor- intensive. Interpretive revision further assum es that interpretation is multiple rather than finite or fixed and, m ost importantly, is dialogic. If one accepts the features of this description, one must accept revision as an essential com ponent to interpretation and interpretive pedagogy. A com parison to composition illustrates this point. Today, it is rare to find a composition classroom in which revision does not inform the subject, the way it is taught, and the m anner in which students practice it. Syllabi, texts, assignm ents, conversations, and dialogue are infused with revision and its central role in the act of writing. Yet, in the literature classroom , it is rare to find revision similarly present. In fact, a typical literature classroom discourages revision because of the very nature of interpretive pedagogy, a cycle based on students reading texts in rapid succession, quickly formulating interpretive ideas and opinions on each, and composing response papers which communicate their ideas. This cycle can repeat itself any number of times during a sem ester or quarter. Nowhere in the process is revision allotted conspicuous presence. For an interpreter to engage in revision, he or she needs the time to engage in revising behaviors. Literature courses seldom offer such breaks. The momentum is always to move to the next text and the next paper. The previous text and paper are normally put aside. Were revision an articulated com ponent in literature courses, fewer texts would be read, and those read would be read more slowly and carefully, allowing-demanding--that the reader re-read the text and reflect upon and strengthen evolving interpretive positions. The notion of paper assignm ents would be different as well. It might be the case that a 291 student would com pose three papers in a sem ester, each a more carefully developed analysis of an initial or selected text. One would assum e interpretive positions articulated in a first paper to be more tentative and incomplete than future drafts. Furthermore, classroom dynamics would force students to revise their interpretive positions. In recalling my interviews, I remember the students’ sen se of how professors differ as interpreters, a distinctive feature being that professors are more skillful as interpreters, this greater ability due to the significant amount of time they have personally given each text under consideration, carefully re-reading the texts and re-thinking their interpretive positions. I think this is a valid assessm ent. It implies that the professional reader follows a process predicated on an abundance of time, time the student neither has nor is given. Essentially, we are asking our students to becom e interpreters but are denying them an environment appropriate to developing the skill. If the professional interpreter, i.e., the professor of literature, requires significant time, reformulation, and feedback-usually from o n e’s colleagues-to move an interpretive position to the point of a com posed product, why should we assum e our students do not need the sam e? Equally problematic is the fact that we are inarticulate with respect to why we teach introduction to literature courses. Understanding why is debatable. Ambivalence is one answer. We seem uncertain whether the 292 aim in introduction to literature courses is transmission--to produce familiarity with genres, periods, authors, and styles--or growth--to encourage interpretive ability. The ambivalence produces confusion not only for ourselves but also for our students. Without arguing through this question adequately, we seem to have unconsciously decided to address both m odels and goals in our classroom. Elsewhere, I have argued that the growth and transmission models are unreasonably construed as oppositional. They are, however, different from each other. And just as one m ust consciously m ake a decision as to whether it is appropriate, based on what one sees outside the window, to carry an umbrella to work that day, one ought to know which of these two goals is being prom oted so as each day to bring the appropriate tools, strategies, and decisions to the class. The fact of the matter is that m ost introduction to literature courses attem pt to address both models and have little su ccess with either. To combine successfully the ambitions of the growth and transm ission models requires conscious acknowledgem ent and attention. This is not happening. Basic questions go unasked: Do we require students to take introduction to literature courses to develop their skills as interpreters or their knowledge of literary texts? If the answ er were both, are we adequately prepared to accomplish this com bined goal? Most importantly, however, a new pedagogy of interpretation m ust acknowledge that the four current and pervasive assum ptions I have 293 discussed in this dissertation do not find sufficient expression in our teaching or in the observable behaviors of our students. That literary theory seem s to influence the teaching of literature in only marginal ways or, as with the case of New Critical theory, from the perspective of hypothetically outm oded ones suggests that literary theory must enlarge its scope to address actual readers and do this through focused and system atic study. Since the kinds of theory and research undertaken by typical graduate students do little to prepare them for the realities of teaching undergraduate literature courses, a new pedagogy of interpretation would necessarily recognize this gap and, through careful research, attempt to fill it. A new pedagogy would acknowledge a priori that many of the problem s we encounter in teaching these courses are due to our own making. And last, as part of a requisite and on-going conversation on the subject of literary pedagogy, we would a sse ss the value--either desired or achieved--of such courses to our students. A new pedagogy of interpretation would be based on a new set of assum ptions about the reading of literature from the vantage point of a novice. It would recognize the importance of process to the interpretive act and would encourage revision as an essential interpretive behavior. Most importantly, perhaps, it would regard as unsuitable the notion that non-English majors ought to read literature in ways similar to the professor. Based on student-professor interview transcripts; classroom 294 visits; and conversations with students, professors, and literature tutors, it is clear that the goal in introduction to literature courses is to produce readers who can understand literature in ways similar to the more professional reader, i.e., the literature professor. Herein lies the rub. It is unlikely that the neophyte reader will transform within a sem ester into a skilled interpreter, regardless of pedagogical invention. A more reasonable and attainable goal might be appreciation--a tainted term in interpretive circles. While interpretation implies appreciation, what we ask our students to do with texts overwhelmingly focuses on analysis, in particular, on stylistic and thematic issues. Historically, appreciation has been construed as subjective and idiosyncratic, qualities we choose to minimize in the interpretive act. In fact, New Criticism was, in part, a response to this complaint. Yet, appreciation for a text can be encouraged in a m anner that is thoughtful, informed, and reflective of careful and focused reading. Furthermore, appreciation, as described, presupposes an understanding of the history, vocabulary, and tools of literary composition and criticism. Although literature has for som e time chosen to background appreciation, other arts have not. For example, in the fields of music and painting, introductory courses for non-majors so focus on appreciation that the very word is included in their titles. While interpretation and appreciation have a reciprocal relationship, there is no question but that in music and art courses, students are being trained to identify in the products of these respective art forms the presence or absence of distinguishing features, qualities, characteristics, and techniques. Appreciation is also synonym ous with identification: styles, genres, periods, artists, etc. These courses and their professors are not expecting that students craft unique or creative interpretations. Students are expected, however, to "read" art in a way that reflects their ability to recognize those things properly associated with a particular work of art. That their reading turn creative, yielding special insight into a painting or a piece of music, although welcome, is not expected. Therefore, is it not overly ambitious to think that non-major, introduction to literature students can be taught to read literature such that the student is able to identify qualities which are specific to or descriptive of a particular text while simultaneously interpreting literature which has becom e increasingly more uncertain or obscure in its inherent points, purposes, or m essages? The dramatic revision in the literary canon, although ostensibly inspired by issues of gender, race, and sexual orientation, has inadvertently led to our including texts which reflect an outlook and style which sees knowledge and meaning as contingent and idiosyncratic. There is no question but that, for the reader, these sorts of texts frequently make for more difficult reading. It 296 is ironic that revisions to the canon, while aiming to address the issue of social inclusion, might actually exclude many readers from "imbibing" the texts. The Toni Morrison p assage I selected for my own research dem onstrates this point. If art and music appreciation courses spent the bulk of their time focusing on contem porary works, most students in these courses would complete the sem ester more befuddled than enlightened, simply because contem porary art, like contem porary literature, favors ambiguity over straightforwardness. A new pedagogy of interpretation would recognize these differences and, if contem porary works were the focus, the notion of interpretive revision becom es more essential. To understand and eventually articulate an am biguous work requires a slower, more careful reading. Texts must be re-approached and re-examined, and interpretive perspectives must be seen as multiple and evolving rather than single and fixed. Yet I question the practicality of attempting to do these things in a sem ester or a quarter if student readers with dem onstrated w eakness in the reading com prehension of any text are being asked to interpret many texts for which ambiguity is a dominant characteristic. In a new pedagogy of interpretation, pleasure as well as appreciation ought to be considered. We assum e as professors the pleasurable side of reading literature. Yet when our students select genres such as rom ance and science fiction, we raise our eyebrows and 297 roll our eyes. Novice readers of literature are raw reading consum ers. They react to texts at an immediate and visceral level. Essentially, there is nothing wrong with this. The recurrence of the word "interesting" by the students I interviewed was most often used in an explanatory context for why they pursue or engage in one text over another or others. While m ost fail to explain why one text is more interesting than another, I would venture to say that accessibility is one reason. The very genres they frequently express preference for-science fiction, horror, and ro m ance- are, for them, ones that are reasonably accessible and pleasurable. I would not advocate a new pedagogy or an introduction to literature course based on the above-mentioned genres. Nevertheless, these genres should remind us that, as readers, our students choose texts that they can understand and that provide them with excitement and pleasure. In one sense, pedagogy must move them from this level to the next. But, for som e students, doing that is no minor undertaking for it can involve remediating basic reading deficiencies as well as impleting exophoric gaps, e.g., historical, cultural, and literary ones. In devising a new pedagogy, we would do well to recall when the teaching of expository writing changed its focus from product to process; as a result, writing classroom s, workshops, and tutorials were given the opportunity to becom e student-focused in a way that was natural and organic. The shift enabled those who were teaching writing to do so in a 298 way that w as far more helpful to the students themselves. Until literature professors thrash out their ambitions for introduction to literature courses and reach a consensus as to why they are in the classroom and what it is they are trying to achieve, we will continue to find that these courses will remain wishy-washy and misguided, only of marginal benefit to students’ intellectual growth, literary appreciation, or interpretive ability. My dissertation research has m ade clear that at the level of literal understanding of a text--in this case, literary texts--there is much work to be done. Many students simply do not have the discourse com petence to read a novel, a play, or a poem with an accurate understanding of even basic plot-the who, what, when, and where of a text. While I would agree that college-age students should enter our classroom s with a foundation in basic reading comprehension, my research indicates that, in many cases, this is not true. To continue as we do, complaining about this fact but not addressing it, is regrettable and, in som e ways, contradictory in that many of my colleagues focus on student growth. Although neither I nor other literature professors em barked on our careers so that we could becom e reading specialists in the sense of som eone who teaches vocabulary and basic com prehension, the reality of our environment suggests that we must nevertheless address these problems. 299 I find it ironic that while college professors as a group eagerly address their students’ social and behavioral assum ptions on a variety of culturally-appropriated subtexts, such as, gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity, they fail to realize that these sam e students also carry with them assum ptions about literature and the interpretive process. I can use myself as an unfortunate example in that while I have taught introduction to literature courses for many years, not once have I begun a course by asking my students the basic questions, "What is literature?" and "What is literary interpretation?" Had I asked these questions, I would have discovered som e time ago that students do have assum ptions about these things, and perhaps more surprising and disturbing is that som e of their assum ptions are exaggerated and erroneous. My research bears this out; thirty-four percent of incoming freshm en at my university believe that literary interpretation is equivalent to free interpretation; that is, the novice reader can make whatever meaning he or she wishes, and restraints on the page can be brushed aside. If we believe that many of our social issues necessitate a process of recognizing inappropriate attitudes and behaviors, modifying them, and thereby changing behavior, certainly a similar model is equally appropriate for the classroom professor. We need to find out what our students’ assum ptions are about literature and the process of 300 interpretation, and, if further research shows that som e of these assum ptions are counterproductive, harmful, or inappropriate, they need to be identified, discussed, and remediated, either partly or wholly. We must detect what is wrong and replace it with something that m akes more sense. As I have already stated, these approaches are not being practiced by me or by my colleagues. To develop a new pedagogy of interpretation, whether it is based on my notion of interpretive revision or not, our profession must first realize our overwhelm ing-and obsessive-tendency to look externally. We are a profession that annexes and adopts philosophical, political, social, and cultural issues and m akes their integration the supposedly enervating and enlivening force within the profession. My research indicates that, in the introduction to literature classroom , these avenues have little impact on what our students learn about interpretation. Instead of being a profession that is at the forefront, we are increasingly followers who annex the concerns and ideas of other disciplines to our own work. Just as important is an interiorized view which looks carefully at our students as learners, readers, and interpreters and at ourselves as professional readers, critics, and, on occasion, professors of introduction to literature courses. A new pedagogy of interpretation incorporates these roles and implies that research and assessm ent are key to what we do and how we do it. In concluding my research, I am struck by the notion that we know so little about our students as readers of plays, short stories, poem s, or novels. That we acquire this knowledge is essential. To do so implies changing our behaviors both outside and inside the introduction to literature classroom. In both settings, we would observe and question our students in ways that would encourage both their and our knowledge of how they go about reading literary texts. Interpretive revision is one possible way to change our classroom persona to one that is a s centered on the student as it is on the text. By encouraging interpretive revision, we can discover our students’ readerly and interpretive habits, and they can com e to understand literature more clearly and thoroughly. 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LITERARY INTERPRETATION AND THE STUDENT READER Volume II by Kevin Keith O'Connor A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirem ents for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) August 1995 Copyright 1995 Kevin Keith O'Connor ii Table of Contents Volume II Appendix Survey of Professors Teaching Introduction to Literature Courses, Version 1 ...................................................................................310 Survey of Professors Teaching Introduction to Literature Courses, Version II..................................................................................317 Beginning-of-Semester Interviews with Students Enrolled in Introduction to Literature C ourses..................................339 Tutorials for Introduction to Literature C lasses............................... 508 End-of-Semester Interviews with Students Enrolled in Introduction to Literature C ourses...................................................... 674 Survey of Professors Teaching Introduction to Literature C ourses Version I 311 BEGINNING OF SEMESTER QUESTIONNAIRE FOR LITERATURE INSTRUCTORS You may indicate your responses here or on a separate sheet. 1. Have you taught this class before? classes similar to it? 2. What have you observed about the skills and aptitudes of the students who are enrolled in each section of your course? If individual students com e to mind, please comm ent on them. 3. At this point in the sem ester, can you indicate whether the students in each section of your course appear to be unaccustom ed to or underprepared for w hat they are being asked to do? How does this effect your teaching of this course?' 4. H as either section of students dem onstrated special com petence or talent? If so, can you describe w hat you have noticed? W hat do you think will be the most challenging aspect of your course for most of your students? If you were to em phasize one or, at m ost, two sentences of your syllabus as most important, which sentence or two would you underscore? With respect to your goals for this class, is there p erhaps som ething that is not included in your syllabus but which is nevertheless essential to what you expect your students to do? If you have taught th e sam e course or one similar to it, how do the students enrolled in your current sections com pare with students enrolled in sections from previous sem esters o r years? 313 Response to Q u e s t i o n n a i r e 1. Yes; I ' v e t a u g h t E n g l i s h 172 t h r e e t i m e s b e f o r e t h i s s e m e s t e r . I have chang ed t h e r e a d i n g l i s t t h r e e t i m e s . 2. G e n e r a l l y , the w r i t i n g and a n a l y t i c a l s k i l l s of the s t u d e n t s a r e i n a d e q u a t e . They a r e a l s o d e f i c i e n t in v o c a b u l a r y and la c k a sound s e n s e of h i s t o r y ( l i t e r a r y and g e n e r a l ) . 3. I would say t h a t in ray e x p e r i e n c e , LMU s t u d e n t s who e n r o l l in 172 a r e no t a t a l l accustomed to (a ) r e a d i n g , e s p e c i a l l y r e a d i n g of l i t e r a t u r e , espec i a l 1v r e a d i n g of more than 5-10 pages a n i g h t ; (b) r e a d i n g with a n a l y s i s beyond s im p le p l o t l i n e in mind; (c) w r i t i n g a n a l y t i c a l e s s a y s ; (d) w r i t i n g about l i t e r a t u r e , w het he r si m pl e p a r a p h r a s e or a n a l y s i s ; ( e ) t a l k i n g a b o u t what they have read in c l a s s d i s c u s s i o n . I would say t h a t t h i s has had a d e l e t e r i o u s e f f e c t on my t e a c h i n g ; each s e m e s t e r s i n c e I have tau ght t h i s c o u r s e , I have lowe red both my e x p e c t a t i o n s of q u a l i t y and th e c o u r s e r e q u i r e m e n t s (in terms of q u a n t i t y ) . I have found t h a t my t e a c h i n g l e v e l is ben e a th th e s t a n d a r d aimed at by t e a c h e r s from o^ippr , more p r e s t i g i o u s u n i v e r s i t i e s ; I worry t h a t , a f t e r aiming f o r t h r e e y e a r s a t a lower and lower common d e n o m i n a t o r , I w i l l not e a s i l y a d j u s t to a s t u d e n t p o p u l a t i o n t h a t i s wel l p re p a r e d f o r c o l l e g e . 4. L as t s p r i n g , I had a s e c t i o n of 172 t h a t I c o n s i d e r e d "good" not so much b e c a u s e of a c t u a l p e r fo r m a n c e as bec aus e a l a r g e r p r o p o r t i o n of s t u d e n t s than usu a l were l i v e l y , a c t i v e p a r t i c i p a n t s in c l a s s d i s c u s s i o n . This s e m e s t e r , I seem to be back to the u s u a l : 2 or 3 s t u d e n t s in each s e c t i o n c a r r y the bulk of the d i s c u s s i o n . These few g e n e r a l l y have been much more s t r i n g e n t l y t a u g h t in hi gh s c h o o l , have had to do a g r e a t deal of r e a d i n g and w r i t i n g , and are comfortable with a n a l y t i c a l thought . 314 5. My u s u a l e x p e r i e n c e i s t h a t the most c h a l l e n g i n g a s p e c t of my c o u r s e i s (a) the heavy work load — I r e q u i r e t h a t s t u d e n t s read e i g h t nov el s t h i s s e m e s t e r ; an a v e r a g e of 50-60 pages b e f o r e each c l a s s m e e t i n g - - f o l l o w e d c l o s e l y by (b) the s t a n d a r d of q u a l i t y I a p p l y to w r i t t e n work. 6. The most i m p o r t a n t s e n t e n c e in my s y l l a b u s i s " I n t h i s c o u r s e , s t u d e n t p a r t i c i p a t i o n i s r e q u i r e d . " Although I a lw a y s u n d e r l i n e i t in my s y l l a b u s , s t u d e n t s g e n e r a l l y i g n o r e i t . 7 . My s y l l a b u s g e t s l o n g e r ev er y year be c a u s e I am c o n s t a n t l y being amazed at what I c a n n o t t a k e for g r a n t e d where LMU s t u d e n s t s a r e c o n c e r n e d . B a si c l i t e r a c y s k i l l s c a n n o t be t a k e n fo r g r a n t e d , f o r example, and s t u d e n t s r e s e n t b e in g graded on such m a t t e r s as s e n t e n c e s t r u c t u r e , s p e l l i n g , e t c . u n l e s s th e y a r e s t a t e d as co n c e r n s in the s y l l a b u s . I t ' s the same t h i n g wi th pop q u i z z e s . LMU s t u d e n t mythology h o l d s t h a t they a r e not r e s p o n s i b l e for r e a d i n g the a s s i g n m e n t s u n l e s s you s t a t e in the s y l l a b u s t h a t pop q u i z z e s w i l l be g i v e n . I have n e v e r seen a n y t h i n g l i k e i t . I e x p e c t s t u d e n t s to behave l i k e r e l a t i v e l y r e s p o n s i b l e , p r o f e s s i o n a l , f u n c t i o n i n g human b e i n g s . You'd be s u r p r i s e d how o f t e n I am d i s a p p o i n t e d . 8. I have t a u g h t s i x s e c t i o n s of 172 b e f o r e the two I am c u r r e n t l y t e a c h i n g ; of a l l of t h e s e , I have had one s e c t i o n t h a t I r e a l l y look ed forward to t e a c h i n g . The c l a s s d i s c u s s i o n was so c h a l l e n g i n g p and s t i m u l a t i n g , t h e d e g r e e of s t u d e n t intei^st so g r a t i f y i n g , the mix of s t u d e n t p e r s o n a l i t i e s so e x c i t i n g , t h a t I loved t e a c h i n g t h a t c l a s s . I miss i t t e r r i b l y t h i s y ea r. 315 BEGINNING OF SEMESTER QUESTIONNAIRE FOR LITERATURE INSTRUCTORS You may Indicate your responses here or on a separate sheet. 1. Have you taught this class before? classes similar to it? 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JV ue-U -v/T hl\j<L ptchto^.', iuvtyx C > • ■ ? ? cU ^ r'^>< sjy-<-'2 Z y y<J 7V y'/% rw w Chu.^ - f t ^ r ‘ u75<^ ididlc. ■ 1-rlunU- 7hi-y 'I'M -C^l ^ - , f £ y y u ^ . ) C if*'ii?%-vi^Jx. b y . i > i / J „ u -y -y -^ i i/t yi 73“ • ' 4. Has either section of students dem onstrated special com petence or talent? If so, can you describe what you have noticed? 3iyfln 'SzlhMi#. S)x: k r-y -/v /< ? < * ? '? '?_ ■ t Jt , 'Tb^y'v/t S-i^^Pc-tL n fy • 'S . -ftX-t ty.vy, -P o ’ ^ oh ^ rg- y y r* tn^GL I > j ^ L ^ t - b l',-, 7 ) '( .- c £ y 7 1 i . ■ ' • -V £>(04- ^CxH.5k «tu - f , - a*ii. U tc £& Xnd-d^Y- 316 5. W hat do you think will be the m ost challenging asp ect of your course for most of your students? l/^lftrvfr-TW &>-£/ Ay-A A ^ rU . ISMV SfrtOhSj- "y* lA JtU lU -* ‘ 'V' 'd ^ Y ' YY't JtUucX/s'l v -^ , 'f'^y c ^ ' x - a 0 1' T ^ ' y - y - fru'Y'bY ‘k v / 6. If you were to em phasize one or, at most, two sen ten ces of your syllabus as most important, which sentence or two would you underscore? — C c W - ( i- ~tv c!< ? x-? 'Z - p i ' & p T / ^ y X s y u c J L y p ? s > '- i i C ‘p n < -4 < -- — uUvist i/T-i- SacyyitOnxp S y^y^W ' , S C ~ i\s Y . / I i'W - f 'L - X * - ~ fo t C ^ Y ey^ p C X ji.. u/W /y-yY-y- y- y-P pS A U iA i/ty/ I 7. With respect to your goals for this class, is there perhaps som ething that is not included in your syllabus but which is nevertheless essential to what you expect your students to do? I cUvJ- £ y-pc-^f- VOiee*^ JAtue Ypy lsu ■ y ^ L f-i h n j- ) cU> e>Cf^cJ Xo c ^ d - ^ k A . O Y tiy ft^ ^ ^ r y . / iylvA Afv yiApir}^ ps£Tup ^ sp V tt^ X - T O v U . J ) y C / t - ? - ? - ------- T > t y \ J J f a d y ' 7 ^ y - ' f u 'u ~ ly i' Y iXyY j ^Aj Y — - - 8. If you have taught the sam e course or one similar to it, how do the students enrolled in your current sections com pare with students enrolled in sections from previous sem esters or years? 7W <c UXtlL* m t v ^ ^vLU->y^ To j-uu ^ fa n / o A o t> Outfit— r^esYt. (-y-y/— (Ty> t / z w ~fl y c XIy * 6 ~ U y^ I d t / J ^ < ? •p i, IX y, i( ,< — TU-u I'HtV'' A ' i<A.L iAta /; y-A y Tn c V -' yr z t-'i.-v - h> - y < £ ^ , ~ lv - b'\ H A ^ < ^ C t7 )c ^ trw t t 0~ l L h - Y Y - d s O - T ! ) .J Survey of Professors Teaching Introduction to Literature C ourses Version I I 318 Kevin O ’Connor 338-7702 Questionnaire 1. When teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic goals? 7 Z > M /J J p it/ f i t UUslJU^j M y lc C s )* M A j-t 5l'-TAtXJl^h M l LU\(£l'Utl'U~J>j LZ-l~n, -ryLpHo\o'i Jlm iji/Jdifi /V i -fU Uii-'ta-L-tj ^ -h? Q r tf d t d d i H tv cn^uh^n b o d fie ty t/d u ACLiftjft fcrd ll'Ufcl k'-? v-tirc-'h'-isz— ' ^ c ( alla 2. How do you com m unicate these goals to your students? l/lALctfcj j d t JfyVyfVU Ly.-M AJ.fk-txMd1 /vovl -f- autoM /> / a ^Lt -^1^-) . Hilo p'unj l/x c b 'te c M y C l j c o t u ^ k , a. d lu 1 1 frik. tjis'isiH'c\^i 'fL-i-T < - ~f LtfiM 7"[jt^n h > 'P-IAA' { j Q a J L & ■ 3. To what extent do you think these goals are achieved? a/i-l- i c ^ u kd-t.~t '/ y o j ~ ij;_ , t > _ • , t j . 6-A ^StP nh IJ.' i l v i c Vl/ i OWl fr-f i'YVl^} tyOaJx) 319 4. How do you imagine your students would answ er the question: Why are you taking a literature class? > ' ilO&U'W J -faire -fo..." *' ixsC '& tA sU ’ aLAcupi I ■ " / 3 ^ - i A flTmuA T T Ancn^a-^ A\' jiaA-k //i LnyJhcL tu-rfr, , 7/ 5. How do you imagine they would answer the question: What did you learn as a resuit of taking this course? " Tv /trri’ I'/'t) bet?A- 5 f " -Tb h M -fi? -h^Ak. tU-mut T (Al c l A u^ jl . 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? iAsUL-d'fi Lu-fb A C i/T c ^ P JLyi/ fUaC A / (J'/yi tuico£u./s / Ol?Tsh~0 j ^c/~ 'fT A a p On T j /W U Jji'rA ^ ~Tb LUjas c l d-G ct. J ‘ m A T o c b ^ j J A -o T a c a h - u a T T j A a o o j 5 T < T U ' ) A \ j - 4 A A A t / A a - j C -f CL' l L a [ t frCte Ajv (uA C u-.o.-IA \ hJsjo j T / ^ c i c l l c a (Act I -b/\j^ l A CA'i A n A 320 Kevin O'Connor 338-7702 Questionnaire 1. When teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic goals? p ft) &oPt>le Sf-uAevksfie/ia* U bske& M enSe/bes -h, Sdefi t h e ( j p p b it* /-comu^ue 5 f i b f r t l f l b l e . fo Looifeps- r/iey c 6 '^ e p t h e ^ • P l S t f c p t t h i S ( b i l l ^ftsQewIlf / i n p i % \ £ . g i b Q f to/ 2. How do you com m unicate these goals to your students? ( j £ p 4 ^ ■ 3 1 /wr p&Ouiciepy. IechtiO t J - C6teJlvo(Xpl 3. To what extent do you think these goals are achieved? 321 4. How do you imagine your students would answer the question: Why are you taking a literature class? Ct5Ae Cuqc.cul/lcoi fteywGemm-l- fit-th |/)y5A Peguif^m ew /^ 5. How do you imagine they would answ er the question: What did you learn as a result of taking this course? f b f i p p / z s a a h h t - feef /r-6«e (» p *h fceDaQ- 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? -P / T > p/3fc£rtb/v /?i6/ae Rvii u i oi I . / e 6 ^ i ' 6 Ufyeo/ivjejy (C,n6^ jwja/ ■ J Z ‘fy ] fT.oRB PU 0P 1 P & 01 PPhSl/C htrvtfiuB l£ c,£, ph'lo^p/mpiyop mbPVL 6 P CfrftP'APfGCS j-Plsil'.tPS 322 Kevin O ’Connor 338-7702 Questionnaire 1. When teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic goals? - £ h A jj-^ f du/fcufian) /< -) de.odU) £'>'inki.fyuLfk.hdnS> 4ti hi z U xmJ - ^ - yYUUO/U. C&7LMSC-dcTHj hi fd tc d ^ L U ^ k A J d ju * L j C f d u i t f c . £ d ? . J 2. How do you com m unicate these goals to your students? f r y Ctntdiu c -b 'tty i f 3 /* & . i/0#-ij Secx/tU-fL*? p t u fia fo fio m 3. To what extent do you think these goals are achieved? / / h > tUe.(//, -M s ' s vdkccf a m cuff lAJsyrif jfifU -nuX'U j / 5 c )Ul //u p a fx u n -f ifh c ^ fut Wbfk C U L K H Sd*? - 1 -fuStr, /i flu. CdU ct'zty p fy Jou^-f p tiiJfcip L i/n f n / ^ i&yLi-hue. h ^ d kA-pyii A. /) o h 5 . ^ A h t ^ J A f y 'T b U S . qX <lui^ ( -K&cM huhj. T »*y M j x a k f hd , 323 How do you imagine your students would answ er the question: Why are you takinq a literature class? J '-k a J -c (b tu , h o f tuxn-f- ia )-ziujL /- say * / A AJL^CXOtiJ. . 5. How do you imagine they would answ er the question: What did you learn as a result of taking this course? ^ ^ la r k A f k ju L C u u a u j L r- / u U A f 4p 'J x *- k L p - f - y JUsCJhuatl-e- J- f- - fk jr te l- ■ h c ta 'L j- tik . }s v \/ru ^ t- uwh'<Oh S & / U , / eWjUj O u u ^ u J b /'*,t*Li r u + ' W z ( dj-asb k rWLtua UfaAj-d_ S£Uj •^Aty LcCuaccJ— r6 ffV<, U k a ^ h ic -/ ; ' V^rf/r IT <y M y p r * J * . 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? O b v i i r O «_ f l A h , M J c L W U A +L a> I paflujdL^ 4c^JL f-c C try ^ p C ts O /'A fac h - A ^ aUlHH^p- )^ lc *-fu t~*'k'o-yC4' ftl^U AJjUU-tty A u y J u , Pu a j L / J L ^ p y ~Aa - WAnx, t ^OAAA^tUMy J Pi*7 /U T ?- (L^fyLjcrriPs h e . -kruAZx.it UMxAAp -kjC -4j Cxx-xJxiA /fo /%///tty\ _ J)ptA&XpU / nuyjkJ- bc -hnxTa^it SbtU-U^ Jx-f.Cxx't~. iAkcJ / C ix^ ItU f TAx 'cenx - U X ‘ A ^ u . A O p u - c k - * XMLiUAy 'JL kxA- hzxA m d j a~ cMxnA- tW - jX <s£- p r y • / ^ d b a y i r U VUAAVULj AjJ.<hA-< (h b 7 ^ T / < 3 * -* * - A # p la iio 72u lomeByux H U * /Hfc/O* *- ^ h u J jA C . A lz J x -fA a *. / kyx. — 324 RES P O N S E TO K E V IN O 'C O N N O R 'S Q UE ST ION N AIRE 1 . S p e c i f i c a c a d e m i c g o a l s i n l o w e r - d i v i s i o n l i t e r a t u r e c o u r s e s : a . How t o r e a d l i t e r a t u r e ( w h a t t o l o o k f o r , f a m i l i a r i t y t h e b a s i c l i t e r a r y v o c a b u l a r y , h o w t o e n g a g e w i t h t h e t e x t , c o n v e n t i o n s o f t h e p a r t i c u l a r g e n r e , e t c . ) b . How t o w r i t e a b o u t l i t e r a t u r e ( w a y s t o f o c u s a n a n a l y s i s , h o w t o u s e t h e t e x t t o s u p p o r t a s s e r t i o n s a b o u t i t , t h e f o r m a l c o n v e n t i o n s o f l i t e r a r y a n a l y s i s a n d d o c u m e n t a t i o n , e t c . ) c . I a l s o w i s h t o f o s t e r a n a p p r e c i a t i o n a n d e n j o y m e n t o f l i t e r a t u r e ; I l i k e t o h e a r f r o m f o r m e r s t u d e n t s t h a t t h e y a c t u a l l y r e a d f o r p l e a s u r e n o w w h e r e a s t h e y d i d n o t p r e v i o u s l y . d . F o r E n g l i s h m a j o r s i n l o w e r - d i v i s i o n c o u r s e s ( a s i n o u r p r e - m a j o r c o u r s e s s u c h a s t h e s u r v e y c l a s s o r t h e L a n g u a g e o f F i c t i o n / L a n g u a g e o f P o e t r y ) , t o g i v e t h e m t h e t o o l s t h e y w i l l n e e d f o r u p p e r - d i v i s i o n w o r k i n E n g l i s h : s o m e s e n s e o f t h e h i s t o r i c a l c o n t e x t i n t o w h i c h t h e i r l a t e r p e r i o d c o u r s e s w i l l f a l l , a b i l i t y t o s h a p e a n a n a l y s i s a n d s u p p o r t i t , s o m e s e n s e o f h o w t o u s e s e c o n d a r y s o u r c e s . e . I a l s o m u s t a d m i t t h a t , a l t h o u g h i t i s u n f a s h i o n a b l e i n t h i s d e c o n s t r u c t i o n i s t a g e , I h a v e a k i n d o f v a l u e - o r i e n t a t i o n . I r e a l l y b e l i e v e t h a t g o o d l i t e r a t u r e s p r i n g s f r o m d e e p l y f e l t h u m a n v a l u e s t h a t h a v e s o m e u n i v e r s a l i t y - t h a t r e a d i n g i t a l l o w s u s t o s h a r e i n w h a t M a t t h e w A r n o l d h a s c a l l e d " t h e b e s t t h a t h a s b e e n t h o u g h t a n d f e l t . " I t r y t o c o m m u n i c a t e t h i s t o my s t u d e n t s . 2 . How t h e s e g o a l s a r e c o m m u n i c a t e d : S o m e t i m e s o n t h e c o u r s e d e s c r i p t i o n ( w h i c h s t u d e n t s o f t e n d o n o t r e a d ! ) ; g e n e r a l l y i n t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n t o t h e c o u r s e o n t h e f i r s t d a y I t r y t o o u t l i n e w h a t I h o p e t h e c o u r s e w i l l a c h i e v e ; t h e n b y r e p e a t i n g e a c h t i m e I g i v e t h e m a n a s s i g n m e n t w h a t I h o p e t h e y w i l l g e t o u t o f i t , e t c . I ' m n o t s u r e t h e s e g o a l s a r e a l w a y s " c o m m u n i c a t e d " f o r m a l l y . 3 . T o w h a t e x t e n t a r e t h e s e g o a l s a c h i e v e d ? V e r y h a r d t o j u d g e t h i s ! C o m p e t e n t l y w r i t t e n p a p e r s b y t h e e n d o f t h e s e m e s t e r s u g g e s t t h a t m o s t s t u d e n t s a r e c a p a b l e o f d o i n g q u i t e w e l l o n m o s t o f t h e t a s k s ; c o u r s e e v a l u a t i o n s s o m e t i m e s i n d i c a t e w h e t h e r o r n o t t h e y a c t u a l l y e n j o y e d t h e e x p e r i e n c e . My f e e l i n g i s t h a t o n t h e l o w e r - d i v i s i o n l e v e l w e o f t e n a r e t e a c h i n g p e o p l e t h i n g s t h e y m u s t l e a r n t h e m s e l v e s w h e n t h e y a r e r e a d y - w h e n e x p e r i e n c e w i t h t h e l i t e r a t u r e o r l i f e a l l o w s t h e m t o s e e c o n n e c t i o n s , t o r e m e m b e r w h a t t h e y h e a r d i n s o m e " e a r l i e r l i f e " ! I t h i n k t h e g o a l s a r e o f t e n 325 a c h i e v e d a t s o m e d i s t a n c e f r o m t h e i m m e d i a t e e x p e r i e n c e . A s a t e a c h e r I t h i n k I h a v e t o b e l i e v e t h a t - o r I ' d b e s e l l i n g s h o e s a t t h e M a y C o . ! 4 . How d o y o u i m a g i n e y o u r s t u d e n t s w o u l d a n s w e r t h e q u e s t i o n : Why a r e y o u t a k i n g a l i t e r a t u r e c l a s s ? M a n y , m a y b e m o s t , w o u l d s a y t h e y a r e t a k i n g i t b e c a u s e i t i s a r e q u i r e m e n t . I ' m t a l k i n g a b o u t l o w e r - d i v i s i o n s t u d e n t s w h o a r e n o t E n g l i s h m a j o r s . I w o u l d h o p e t h a t E n g l i s h m a j o r s w o u l d r e s p o n d t h a t t h e y l i k e t h e s t u f f ! 5 . How d o y o u i m a g i n e t h e y w o u l d a n s w e r t h e q u e s t i o n : W h a t d i d y o u l e a r n a s t h e r e s u l t o f t a k i n g t h i s c o u r s e ? I d o n ' t k n o w - i f t h e y h a d j u s t r e c e n t l y t a k e n t h e c o u r s e I w o u l d h o p e t h e y c o u l d s a y , " I l e a r n e d t o r e a d a n d a n a l y z e f i c t i o n " o r " I l e a r n e d h o w t o w r i t e a p a p e r o n a n o v e l " o r " I l e a r n e d I a c t u a l l y e n j o y r e a d i n g p o e m s , " e t c . - i n o t h e r w o r d s , t h a t t h e y l e a r n e d w h a t w e w e r e t r y i n g t o t e a c h t h e m . I c a n i m a g i n e t h a t t h o s e w h o r e a l l y d i d n ' t w a n t t o b e t h e r e i n t h e f i r s t p l a c e m i g h t s a y t h e y l e a r n e d n o t h i n g ; o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , s o m e t i m e s t h o s e s t u d e n t s a r e w o n o v e r i n t h e c o u r s e o f t h e s e m e s t e r a n d a r e a c t u a l l y s u r p r i s e d t h e m s e l v e s t h a t t h e y e n j o y e d t h e c o u r s e a n d f e l t m o r e c o m p e t e n t t o d e a l w i t h t h e m a t e r i a l t h a n t h e y w e r e b e f o r e . ( I t ' s s o r t o f d e p r e s s i n g t o c o n s i d e r a l l t h e t h i n g s t h e y a c t u a l l y m i g h t s a y i n r e s p o n s e t o t h i s q u e s t i o n ! ) 6 . How d o e s y o u r r e a d i n g o f l i t e r a r y t e x t s d i f f e r f r o m t h a t o f t y p i c a l s t u d e n t s ? a . I r e a d a t e x t m o r e t h a n o n c e t o p r e p a r e f o r c l a s s ; I t h i n k m o s t s t u d e n t s f e e l t h e y h a v e d o n e t h e i r h o m e w o r k i f t h e y r e a d i t o n c e . b . I r e a d w i t h a d i c t i o n a r y a n d a p e n - i n o t h e r w o r d s , I c h e c k w o r d s t h a t a r e u s e d i n a n u n u s u a l w a y a n d I m a k e n o t e s i n t h e m a r g i n s . M o s t s t u d e n t s s k i p o v e r t h e w o r d s t h e y a r e u n f a m i l i a r w i t h ( a n d g l e a n t h e m e a n i n g f r o m t h e c o n t e x t ) a n d r a r e l y e n g a g e a l l t h a t a c t i v e l y w i t h t h e t e x t . c . I l o o k f o r p a t t e r n s , f o r s t r u c t u r e ( s a y i n f i c t i o n ) w h e r e a s m o s t s t u d e n t s c o n c e r n t h e m s e l v e s w i t h " w h a t h a p p e n s " ( t h e " s t o r y , " t h e p l o t ) . ( I t r y t o g e t t h e m t o a s k t h e m s e l v e s w h a t t h e " f u n c t i o n " o f e a c h s c e n e i s , t o s e e t h a t i t i s t h e r e f o r s o m e r e a s o n ; t h i s s e e m s t o b e s o m e t h i n g t h e y d o n ' t m u c h c o n s i d e r u n l e s s t h e s c e n e m o v e s t h e p l o t a l o n g . ) d . I t h i n k I p a y c l o s e r a t t e n t i o n t o s t y l i s t i c c o n s i d e r a t i o n s t h a n t h e y d o ; t h e y o f t e n s e e m a t a l o s s t o d i s c u s s s u c h t h i n g s . e . I am l e s s l i k e l y t o j u d g e a t e x t a s " g o o d " o r " b a d " d e p e n d i n g o n my a g r e e m e n t w i t h w h a t t h e a u t h o r s a y s ; I f i n d s t u d e n t s r a t h e r i n t o l e r a n t o f " d i f f e r e n c e " o f t e n a n d t h r e a t e n e d b y i d e a s t h a t d o n o t c o n f o r m t o t h e i r o w n . 326 f . I a l s o am n o t b o t h e r e d b y a m b i g u i t y t h e w a y s t u d e n t s a r e ; t h e y a r e n o t c o m f o r t a b l e w i t h t h e p o s s i b i l i t y t h a t a t e x t m a y b e o p e n t o m o r e t h a n o n e r e a d i n g ( a l t h o u g h , G od k n o w s , t h e y o f t e n c o m e u p w i t h s o m e v e r y b i z a r r e o n e s t h e m s e l v e s ! ) . O n t h e o t h e r h a n d , a n d h e r e i s w h e r e I g u e s s I am o l d - f a s h i o n e d a g a i n , I d o b e l i e v e t h a t w o r d s h a v e s o m e w h a t s e t d e n o t a t i o n s t h a t l i t e r a t e p e r s o n s h a v e a g r e e d u p o n a n d o n e c a n n o t a r b i t r a r i l y a s s i g n m e a n i n g s t o t h e m t h a t a r e c o m p l e t e l y d i f f e r e n t f r o m w h a t w e u s u a l l y t h i n k t h e y m e a n . I h a v e e n c o u n t e r e d s t u d e n t s w h o f e e l t h a t e v e r y t h i n g i s a m a t t e r o f o p i n i o n , i n t e r p r e t a t i o n , e t c . a n d t h a t t h e p o e m , s t o r y , e t c , c a n m e a n w h a t e v e r t h e y f e e l i t m e a n s r e g a r d l e s s o f w h a t t h e w o r d s s a y . ( L i k e H u m p t y - D u m p t y i n A l i c e i n W o n d e r l a n d ! ! T h i s r e s p o n s e , h o w e v e r , i s l e s s f r e q u e n t t h a n t h e d e s i r e t o h a v e " t h e t r u t h " s p e l l e d o u t o n c e a n d f o r a l l a n d t o g e t " t h e r i g h t a n s w e r " a b o u t t h e m e a n i n g o f a l i t e r a r y w o r k . I t h i n k t h a t ' s a b o u t a l l I c a n t h i n k o f r i g h t n o w . A r e y o u s o r r y y o u a s k e d ! ? 327 Kevin O ’Connor 338-7702 Questionnaire 1. When teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic goals? T o f a m i l i a r i z e s t u d e n t s w i t h A s i a n C u l t u r e s w h i c h i s i m p o r t a n t i n t h e u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t h e l i t e r a r y w o r k s . 2. How do you com m unicate th ese goals to your students? Bv lecturing and by giving them excerpts to read. 3. To what extent do you think these goals are achieved? W h e n t h e s t u d e n t s a r e a b l e t o a n a l y z e t h e s e w o r k s i n t h e i r c u l t u r a l c o n t e x t s . 328 4. How do you imagine your students would answer the question: Why are you taking a literature class? U s u a l l y , t h e a n s w e r i s : " t o f u l f i l l a r e q u i r e m e n t . " B u t , s o m e t i m e s , i t i s " b e c a u s e I am A s i a n , I ' d l i k e t o k n o w m o r e a b o u t A s i a n L i t e r a t u r e . " 5. How do you imagine they would answer the question: What did you learn as a resuit of taking this course? " I h a v e m o r e u n d e r s t a n d i n g a n d s y m p a t h y t o w a r d A s i a n C u l t u r e , " o r " Now I u n d e r s t a n d w h y my p a r e n t s h e h a v e d l i k e t h i s . " 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? I r e a d i t w i t h t h e a w a r e n e s s o f A s i a n c u l t u r e a n d h i s t o r y . I s e e A s i a n L i t e r a t u r e a s a r e s u l t o f o r v e r y m u c h c o n n e c t e d t o i t s c u l t u r e a n d h i s t o r y . M o s t A m e r i c a n s t u d e n t s ( i n c l u d i n c t n a t i v e b o r n A s i a n A m e r i c a n s ) w o u l d r e a d o r i n t e r p r e t t h e l i t e r a r y w o r k f r o m a 2 0 t h c e n t u r y W e s t e r n e r s ' p o i n t o f v i e w . T h e s e p o i n t s o f v i e w t e n d t o b e C h r i s t i a n r a t h e r t h a n B u d d h i s t , T a o i s t o r C o n f u c i a n . 329 Kevin O ’Connor 338-7702 Questionnaire ) I 1. When teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic S goals? I o > .f A /% - > A — ’ r ~ ^ ^ — < S - 2. How do you com m unicate these goals to your students? ^ '*~j ’ rw~ " ' !s^<- j* - " % ~h-J - j cf'4 _ AT ^ c < ~fcu^e^J^~ i X c.''*- To what extent d a you think these goals are achieved? > A ^ £ T L . A - ^ > L o < -c u. . j . , » v ,_£ J [ r J > A *" t-i ~ - 4 ~ £ * - A - — — /" * " / 330 4. How do you imagine your students would answ er the question: Why are you taking a literature class? 5. How do you imagine they would answer the question: What did you learn as a result of taking this course? / C. i r-z--Z L c J ^ K r ' G-'L.a&A. lL A L _ 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? 1 . "Krv<- ^ K i r-irLt-e-^l _ ^ 7 ^ T W O ^ ^ ^6-v— y< . ^ ^ {r~y , 7 / c ^ ^ , , , i r x .^ L t^ — = {J ( • * 0 -e_«=— ^ ^ ^ Kevin O ’Connor 338-7702 Questionnaire W hen teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic goals? -f~o r w .o - V r e . 'C e .o .c b—» . tonScrow ^i How do you com m unicate th ese goals to your students? To what extent do you think these goals are achieved? How do you imagine your students would answ er the question: Why are you taking a literature class? Q-Cdu^u. I Qov-a. -fo xe.ct.cS ■ 1 ‘ /'rw . /-fi \Q-QvuL-d How do you imagine they would answer the question: W hat did you learn as a result of taking this course? [b < J w i "Hx <^reatu Gjcua^i Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? •* 4 4 -[j Z u . b, Kevin O'Connor 338-7702 Questionnaire When teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic goals? £ IvJ Is I ? * a^r-^ • * - ) [ ^ > I tv-oc | ri/^ n l wvtL ^ x . < yo*s\ljvit) ) |s jh>5SiL'l|il'ic5 > How do you com m unicate these goals to your students? I f i y ^ j ' - j "k fh**- V K " f> y < * w '- wluJ-\n " ^ 4 ^ To what extent do you think these goals are achieved? y ifo rL tL - v . ^ j I c J - Ojill wijL 334 How do you imagine your students would answer the question: Why are you taking a literature class? X 1 '^ k ^ ^ ^ ^ 5 ' How do you imagine they would answ er the question: What did you learn as a result of taking this course? ^ly W ’ d ) I W n . u^rr) 5 ^ yxjxJ- 'H-'- 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? X Ar 4" V/)*|p(. 4 of VTW/wi'-^ 'f l y * * 4 ^ \y *C crJ-d 4 " WVuWj 4 335 4. a°terd atuy reU c!ass?ine StUd6n,S W ° U 'd a" SWer ,he c'uestion: WhV ara taking 5. ^ Z l S a Z g m S 7 ourS?m M a"S " er qU “ “°n: “ “ d“ wu laam as a * a from M of w S S S ? h°” "’ad‘’9 liKra,V texK di#8rs ’ tey^ s C X ? ') . ’T -Z S a u ^ x y > ( C ^ -'L s ' t S i ^ y i C s W Z !Z -C -a ~ (? Y C c -^ -Z Z ? * i< ? A-X^^xJ^u- ^leuj_,ja4>-rt,<uJL£t_y c j? ^ ? £ & ^ -* » « - ■ ' i / x L c -6 -i -% < J ii£ ^ -ci^zfe<-e-- ^ / * 336 4. How d o you imagine your students would answ er the question: Why are you taking a literature class? Most would respond th a t th e y 'r e ta k in g th e course because i t ' s re q u ire d . 5. • How do you imagine they would answ er the question: What did you learn as a result of taking this course? I HOPE my s tu d e n ts would say th a t they have a t l e a s t learned to understand how l i t e r a r y t e x t s are put to g e th e r and H O W to read such t e x t s . 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? Most s td u e n ts seem to want to id e n tif y w ith the c h a r a c te r s and s i t u a t i o n s in a novel. I f th e s i t u a t i o n or c h a ra c te r types a re a l ie n to them, they cannot "get in to " th e sto ry ; w hile t h i s may be tr u e to some e x te n t for more s o p h is tic a te d readersjlike m yself, the d if fe r e n c e i s t h a t we are w i l l i n g to "work" a t u n fa m ilia r language, unusual c h a r a c te r s , e t c . because we understand how th e se elem en ts i n ^ l i t e r a r y te x t fu n c tio n , and we have th e " p r e - t e x t s ” necessary to a p p r e c ia te a new t e x t . 337 Kevin O'Connor 338-7702 Questionnaire i i 1. W hen teaching lower-division literature courses, what are your specific academ ic goals? ). T & X -lrL 6 -* joy reniJft^ So yzUf is\t( wtfoi/ 4o rvtkl - 1 reAjfH^ a p + r t O-T Xf£*/r- Ii 'ym off#*- coKsy- 2 . SkjU Lou O 'L L h ' jjnepk- - h'-kury ■ i< .L tU ~ r< ,j fhinf>~uj i^JUrr, ijKJyk. cJho rto-i err a )rt'-te f^iitrr. f ir pleASU-r-C ------ p\aJ S fill? Il'fc -rtV ry 'l& lffa • 3_ G in S 7 hr,JbL-H cenuiyrb < t +0 uju listussrhj fich ) Mf> >* rh'i & r~ 4 / Mlcourv? , 2. How do you com m unicate th ese goals to your students? J. Qpnvty w W f aoJh ihtjO y fru^vt o f "tetH j 4 ~ry 4 o fe i<h £ '#*’"»* V % ujoM.il f r j y . 2 • h & tn e m s J r a L z CAJTHyi o f f h ^ c u S i t ' r ^ {UrtuyU Cicero*’ * df'lLUrSS^' < t k & h ~ e f . 3 . / w , 'fl-x- V O c*hu.l**y d h-lj> rj'Uo*. u -i* - >’ i f t ck$c~fh r t a J i y A t^W V ^ec ^ ■ 3. To what extent do you think these goals are achieved? I If(T > \> o .l> (y nt-f- rtA,l^y no > 1 - rt&JkrS \-CA~dt£~-s )f€*y offe* 2 . S $k**s r*y v i u^-ys s f K ^ /k f , I Vsf twl ojktr 0 tf*yk'> fkzd-r& b'c+ f , 3 • fniYty Successful, jY^j'/i^. by fLts t- ( lUt ijtc^Crs J fin *! 338 4. How do you imagine your students would answ er the question: Why are you taking a literature class? /. it'i * cU**. 5. How do you imagine they would answer the question: What did you learn as a result of taking this course? -".X l&k-nn&l a fo -^4 #***. zJ<r. -r]% jif '$ % £ . '! f Willi 4 '! '- fttnr ItA n rn ih ^ I'0 rZ A -d t ^ 6. Using your own observations, describe how your reading of literary texts differs from that of typical students? -fk,\11 s'h-d^n’h r^J- o^ * ntu-of j i k ^ l lb /el- f k t y cLo U i l ioW iis< * e j o f p U - *, J- j j ,* - C 6 n * u fo > * -S , $ -1 £ r tA - d , X £ly>\ < ? W ^ £ o f Ih& lH in-4 f o j f O n j f lOOn/s On (? t$$U-0S O-tfdoTS Socf fk e . o f O dw 'hx'b < h ~h »o-y It'-fe On fit- //V£r o f - j f t l t a,nO U .'rlA tn j . _ Z T (Jj-r. V i f l t / n j fny ^,-hiJjnn-h OnrZ aS C SO -S C.t’ ots-S o f Co H co^/ttn! 5ouy£> ■ jfa.l -ft-S- Itl&ron'y f u j i m r Beginning-of-Semester Interviews with Students Enrolled in Introduction to Literature C ourses Script for Beginning-of-Semester Interviews with Students Enrolled in Introduction to Literature C ourses Affective Domain Analytic Thinking Reading Habits Writing Habits Analytic Thinking How do you feel about being in this class? Have you taken other classes similar to this one? If you have, what w as your experience? What do you think the teacher wants you to do in this class? Is what the teacher w ants you to do stated som ew here on the syllabus or course description? Has it been stated orally? What do you think is the single m ost important skill for su ccess in this class? Why do you think this? Do you think you p o ssess this skill? To what degree or extent? Do you enjoy reading literature? Describe your reading habits: What do you read? how often? why do you read? etc. Why read literature? Do you enjoy writing? If so, do you have a preference for certain types of writing? When teachers read your writing, do you think their assessm ents are accurate or fair? Explain. When they are critical of your writing, what sorts of things do they usually say? Have their com m ents ever been helpful to you as a writer? Why write? Do you enjoy solving mental/intellectual puzzles? Making sen se out of things, situations, and people? Can you supply a recent example? When you’re in the process of solving an intellectual puzzle, do you follow any procedure? Do you adhere to any habits? Do you ever use conversation with other persons as a problem/puzzle-solving 341 Self-Reflection Listening Habits Speaking Habits Dialogic Tutoring Model strategy? Explain. Do you ever use this conversational strategy when solving academic questions or problem s? Do you ever spend time wondering about things or daydream ing? Are the sorts of things that you wonder about or question, ever academ ic things? Things that relate directly to your classes? Have you been spending any time thinking about, asking questions about, wondering about your literature class? Explain. How would you rate yourself as a listener? Are you a good listener in a classroom ? What m akes for a good classroom listener? Are listening skills important to your su ccess in this literature course? Do you ever contribute to classroom discussion? Have you participated in any of the conversations which have occurred in your literature class? What w as your role? Do you think these discussions are important? Do you think they impact your understanding of the material? your grade? Do you think that a student would find it helpful if h e /sh e were to m eet with som eone for one hour per week to talk about what is being read, discussed, and written about in a literature class? How so? If som eone, perhaps som eone like me, were to m eet with a student in a literature course once each week, how might I spend the time with the student so that the sessions were helpful to what the student is doing or is being asked to do in class? Can you be specific? Would you be interested in meeting som eone for one hour per week to discuss the things you’re doing in your literature class? 342 Interview with Paul Avery in Introduction to Fiction Interviewer How do you feel about being in P ro fesso r_____ ’s class? Student I like the class. I like the way she teaches, and, you know, she explains things real thoroughly and m akes it kind of fun. It’s a fun class. I Have you ever taken a class similar to hers before? S I mean, I’ve taken high school English where it’s been similar things, you know, a s far as reading books and discussing them like this, but I never just had a course just on, you know, literature. I OK. Would you say, then, that your experience in her class is in som e ways different from your experience in other literature- oriented classes you’ ve taken? S Well, I really haven’ t taken classes that are just literature-orientated so it’s — I Not even in high school? S English classes were basically, you know, there w as som e, there’s som e literature then there’s just, you know, som e, you know, just m echanics of writing and stuff like that, you know? So, yeah, it’s different than most classes that I’ ve taken. This is my first literature course. I What do you think P ro fesso r wants you to do in her class? S She wants us obviously to read our assignm ents and, you know, to get to understand the material so w e’ll be able to write good essays about it or be able to discuss it in class. I Is what P ro fesso r wants you to do, as you’ve just described it, stated in her syllabus? S Actually, I don’t rem em ber if it is or not. I Well, where did you get this information from then? 343 S That’s what it seem s like. You know, she talks to us about kind of her expectations and . . . I So, maybe through, at least through oral information- S Yeah. I Your careful reading of the syllabus. So this is based on maybe what you’ ve heard her say? S Yeah. I What do you think is the single most important skill for som eone to p o ssess to be successful in her class? S Her class . . . To be able to understand what you’re reading. You know, not just read it but understand what you’re actually reading. I And what skill do you need in order to understand what you read? What particular kind of skill is important to understand what you read? S Well, I don’t . . . In what way do you m ean? I Well, we can read. Sometimes we do read and we don’ t understand, and som e people seem to read and understand better than others what m akes for the kind of reading that leaves us with understanding. W hat’s the skill? S I don’ t know. I don’ t know. The skill would be: just have good com prehension skills, I guess. I OK. How do you have good com prehension skills? How can you encourage good com prehension skills? S By reading more. You know, trying to take the class like this and, you know, just since the beginning of the sem ester I think I’ve learned more about, you know, working in the reading . . . W e’ ve done The Color Purple. Now w e’re doing Jane Eyre. And, you know, it’s hard to s ta r t. . . 344 Are you approaching the reading . . . Are you reading differently now than you did before? Yeah. I’m reading more carefully. I’m looking, you know . . . You tend to look at more the things you normally wouldn’ t look at, just little oddities in the reading and stuff like that, so . . . Looking at details that maybe you would have overlooked before? Yeah. Definitely. Other things that maybe you notice? That maybe you are going about the reading in a way that’s a little different than maybe the way that you would have approached reading Jane Eyre a year ago? Urn, just a more careful reading, I think. You know, it’s just being, looking for things, you know? Most of the time when you read a book you’re not really looking for things, you’re just reading for enjoyment, or whatever, and kind of have to be careful about what you’re reading and try to understand why things are, you know, in certain ways and look-other than just reading-read the story. OK. Urn, do you enjoy reading literature? Actually, yeah. I have enjoyed the books so far. Good books so far. I like the books. OK. What about your reading habits in general? How would you describe them? I’m not usually a . . . I mean I . . . Like, I read a book this sum m er but I don’ t, uh, I’m not constantly reading a book, or whatever. If I find a book I like I will sit down and read it, you know, b u t. . . Can you tell me what you read this summer? I read Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King. OK. And this was something you selected to read on your own? 345 S Yeah. Yeah. Oh, actually it was a suggestion from a friend, but, you know, it was the kind of book that I like and . . . I It’s kind of scary. You are supposed to be scared. S No, it w asn’ t. This w as more of a kind of a fantasy type book, you know? It was set back in the, you know, medieval-type setting. It w as kind of more mysterious. I Isn’ t Christine one of his novels? The car that. . . The killer car. S I think. I Why do you think, generally, why do you think that you read? When you do read, what is you reason for reading? S Mostly I like read for enjoyment, as far as books and stuff, but for this class, you have to read the stuff to do well in the class, but I have been enjoying it also, so it’s kind o f . . . I Well, that’s a nice deal. S Yeah. I OK. Urn, do you enjoy writing? S Actually, that is one of my big downfalls. I got a B in, in, in--you know, the writing, you know-College Writing, but I, I typically don’ t like writing that much. You know, it depends on what I am writing about, too. Sometimes I’ll, you know, like writing a paper, but m ost of the time I do n ’ t like writing papers. I Why might you som etim es like to write a paper? What might. . . S It might, it’s, it’s . . . Maybe it’s a subject I’m really interested in, you know, something like that, you know, where it’s just real interesting to me. I What m akes things interesting to you? S Things that catch my interest. You know, all of a sudden . . . 346 Can you think of a paper that you wrote, maybe last year, that was one of these types of papers that you got interested in? Um, I’m trying to recall. Actually last year, urn, I had to write a paper for my theology class and I liked that class a lot and that kind of interested me. I found the whole class interesting, just to see a different perspective on Old Testam ent religion. That was kind of an interesting paper to write, you know. It w as long, it was like a ten-page paper, but it was kind of interesting to read, you know, do the research, to see how people interpret things so much differently than what you learn. Most of the tim e- So being, um, discovering things that were different from what you thought they had been, that was part of the reason you were interested? Yeah. I think so. OK. When teachers read your writing, do you think that their assessm ents are accurate or fair? Yeah, I think so, m ost of the time. I have one, a teacher that has really been, I thought w as unfair. And, I don’t know . . . I had for College Writing, and he’s a pretty good judge of papers, I thought. When, when teacher-readers are critical of your writing, what sorts of things do they usually say? Ah, um . . . Like . If he w as critical of your writing, som e of the criticisms you heard. Ah, som etim es it, it w as usually, um . . . Maybe that I didn’t explain things clearly enough, things like that, you know, not explaining things clearly enough, you know, not expressing myself in the right way. Um, just basically . . . That’s basically the biggest problem I had, is expressing things how I want them expressed, you know? Sometimes I have trouble with that. 347 I Do you think it’s a factor of your abilities as a writer, or might it be connected to other things as well? I mean, you were reading things for his class as well, correct? S Actually we didn’ t have a whole lot of reading in his class. A little bit, but um . . . I Mostly personal experiences? S Yeah, mostly stuff like that. Mostly personal experiences. I OK. Have teacher com m ents about your writing ever been helpful to you? S A lot of times, yeah. Um, there is always going to be som e little helpful things that they write on your paper, and you try to improve them by . . . I, at least, I try to improve them by what they, they tell me they think is wrong with the paper, you know? I What a b o u t ? What was he trying to get you to improve? S I just think my clarity and, you know, being able to express what I’m trying to say in a clear way. I Did it turn out to be helpful, his pointing that out to you when you turned things in to him? S Um, yeah, I think it helped a little bit. You know, it’s really kind of hard to say because you can’ t really sit there with som ebody and explain everything that you want them, when you have twenty people in class, so, I mean, his com m ents on the paper helped som ew hat but not completely, you know? I We’re going to shift into a different group of questions for a little bit. S OK. I Do you enjoy solving--and for loss of a better phrase-m ental or intellectual puzzles or problems? S Oh, yeah. 348 I Really? S Yeah. I Elaborate on that. S I just like figuring things out. A lot of times there’s som ething that’s som e kind of little mental puzzle or whatever. I’ll sit there and just try to think about it for a while and try to figure it out. If I don’ t figure it out then, maybe I’ll think about it m aybe som e other time or whatever, you know? But I like trying to solve little puzzles or whatever. I Can you give me maybe a recent example? S I don’ t, I don’ t know. I Something maybe in the past couple w eeks maybe that you’ ve been thinking about? Something that catches . . . S Things are . . . right now but . . . I OK. Generally, when you’re in the process of solving these kinds of puzzles, do you think you follow any kind of procedure? Do you have a process that you maybe follow? S Not that I can think of. You know, I just try to think, think the problem out, you know? There’s a little problem, I try to think it out. I Well, you did mention one thing already. You said if you can ’ t figure it out then and there, you leave it alone and com e back to it. S Yeah, leave it alone and com e back to it. I That’s part of the process. S Just trying to think, keep on the, you know, clear path, you know, try to just think the problem out through clearly, you know? I can ’ t really say a process that I go through. 349 OK. Do you ever use conversation with other persons when you’re trying to solve a puzzle or a problem? Maybe, sometimes. But I usually try, like, trying to figure out things on my own, you know, kind o f . . . Why is that? I don’ t know, just, that’s the way I am. I like figuring things out on my own. It kind of m akes me feel like I did it by myself and, you know, accomplished something of it and whatever, you know? A ll right. Are there som e things, though, that you do use conversation as a m eans of maybe coming to a conclusion, or is the wanting to get it taken care of on your own sort of a general way, that you’re generally that way and you don’ t tend to be the kind of person who wants to . . . I think I’m generally that way, the type who tries to figure things out on my own. Do you ever spend time, kind of like daydreaming? Yeah. I do that a lot. [laughs] Then you should have a lot to say on this, these questions. I’m a daydreamer. What sorts of things do you daydream about? I don’ t know, just maybe things that are, that are, you know, events that are coming up. I’m in a fraternity, stuff like that. Events that are coming up, or, you know . . . Like this was our rush week and, you know, just trying, you know, to sit there and thinking about maybe what it’s going to be like, what the guys who are rushing and everything will be like, how they’re going to think about the pledge periods, stuff like that, just things th a t. . . Maybe events that are coming up or, you know, maybe things that I would like to do but, you know, I haven’ t gotten a chance to do them. 350 Do you ever do that with your classes? Do you daydream about the content of your classes? Not usually. Actually, som etim es I’ll sit there and, like, at my philosophy class, I’ll sit there and think about things for a while, you know? That’s kind of a fun class, philosophy. Which one do you have? 160? Yeah. Do you h a v e ? D r. . I like him a lot. OK. Then som etim es you do, kind of, ponder or daydream. Yeah. But generally not. Well, I think I daydream about other things more . . . What about P ro fesso r ’s class? Have you been daydreaming about the content in her class? Maybe. Yes, som etim es I’ll think a b o u t. . . Like when we were reading The Color Purple, yeah, I guess I can say sometimes, imagine living the kind of life in the book or whatever and . . . I like to see things in my head when I read them. Visualize them. Yeah. How would you rate yourself as a listener? Actually, I think I’m a pretty good listener. . . . Well, som etim es I’ll go off and actually daydream in class or whatever. I’ll be sitting there and I’ll— Daydream about rush week, [laughs] 351 S Yeah, whatever, you know? I’ll just sit there and maybe doodle on a piece of scratch paper and not, kind of, pay attention to the class. I ’C ause that was my next question: Are you a good listener? And you said, "Yes." Then I would say, "Are you a good classroom listener?" S Yeah. Most of the time I am, but, you know, som etim es I’ll . . . If I’m preoccupied about something, you know, I’ll start, you know, wandering off. I But what m akes for a good classroom listener? Maybe could you describe the features, the qualities, the behaviors of a good classroom listener? S Of a good classroom listener? Well, I don’ t know about the good classroom listener, but as far as the class goes, you know, it helps a lot to have, to be in an interesting class ’cause I’ ve had certain teachers that just sit there and may just ramble on. They, you know, monotone, have nothing interesting to say, and, you know, I get really uninterested real fast. Kind of turns me off. I Do you ever contribute to classroom discussions? S Yeah. I do. I What about in ’s class? S Yeah, I contribute in her class. I What’s your role in these conversations, in these discussions? Could you define your role? S I guess, a lot of times sh e’ll ask a question about something, what you think something means, you know? If I have something to say, I’ll answer just maybe facts about the story or whatever that she asks about. "What happened here?" or whatever, you know? I’ll answer. I You answer questions. S Yeah. 352 Do you raise your hand and ask questions? Not usually. I usually do more answering than asking questions. Actually, I almost never ask questions in class. Do you think that these classroom discussions are important? Yeah. Why? ’C ause they get the students thinking about it rather than just listening to the teacher and copying down everything that she says. You get to put in your own input and listen to input of other people and see it from maybe a different perspective, and so I think it’s . . . Do you think that these discussions impact your understanding, then, of the material? Yeah, a lot of the time, yeah. The Color Purple, Jane Eyre. Yeah, I mean part of i t . . . Especially, like, in The Color Purple, there’s a few black students in the . . . You know, it’s kind of interesting to see their perspective, what they thought of it, you know? So I thought that was kind of interesting. Do you think these conversations impact your grade? Yeah, definitely, because a lot of the discussions will be on things that are on the quiz or, you know, topics today that are going to be on a paper that we have to write for next Friday. We were talking about, having a discussion about that. Do you think that a student would find it helpful if he or she were to m eet with som eone one hour per week to talk about what had been read, discussed, and written about in literature class? Yeah, I think so. B ecause it’s . . . Just in the discussions we have in class, I think it helps a lot. I mean, an extra hour a week or something, I think, would definitely benefit if the tutor knows the 353 material well. I g uess you can’ t really have a wrong opinion about interpreting different things, but if they have kind of a grip on the book, I think it could help. If som eone, maybe som eone like me, were to m eet with a student in a literature course, the Them es in Fiction class, to be more specific, for one hour each week, what advice would you give to m e? How might I be helpful to you or other students in this one hour per week? What things might I do, or what might happen in the session? I think one good thing would be that if, maybe point out certain things in the book that are important, ask questions, you get the person thinking and try to have them ask questions also, ’cause I know I don’ t ask very many questions and som etim es I’m kind of hesitant to ask questions in class. You know, maybe I wouldn’ t be so hesitant to ask questions about the book or things like that. Why do you think you are hesitant to ask questions in class? Well, I’m kind of a shy person, you know, a lot of times. In big groups especially, you know? Just naturally that way. C an’ t help it. I’m fine one-on-one b u t . . . All right. I think a lot of people share your view on that, feel that sam e way too. Would you personally be interested in meeting with an ENGL 172 tutor once a week for an hour to talk about the content? Yeah, I think that would help. Yeah. OK, super. 354 Interview with Kelly Bush in Introduction to Poetry Interviewer All right, you are in the poetry class, right? OK. How do you feel about being in this class? Student Oh, I like it a lot. I A ll right. Why? S B ecause I like poetry. I love the teacher. I think she is great. She’s really fun and, I don’ t know, I just like poetry. I think it’s interesting. And I like English. I Have you taken classes similar to this one before? S Well, every English class I took, English literature in high school, had a section that was poetry so . . . I So, you feel that you have similar experiences? S Mm-hm. I It’s not good for the interviewer to answer the questions, is it? But based on what you’ve already said, it sounds like you had good experiences when you studied poetry and literature in these other classes in high school, right? S Yeah. I OK, what do you think P rofessor wants you to do in this class? How would you describe it? In your own words. S You m ean about her objective things? I Yeah. S I think she just wants us . . . First of all, I think she just wants us to be interested in what we are learning because she always tries really hard to m ake it really interesting, which a lot of teachers don’ t do. So, I think number one she wants us to think it’s interesting, but I also think that she wants us to understand it, and I think she just wants u s to get excited about it. I think she thinks 355 that if we are interested in it and we understand it, we will be excited and we will learn. There is an excitement com ponent here. Yeah. I think she wants to . . . Because sh e ’s really excited about it, I think she just wants us to get excited about it. All right. And understand it. As you just described your understanding of the professor’s goals in the course of which she would like you and the other students to do, do you think she has stated these things explicitly in her syllabus? I didn’t read the syllabus. I don’ t know. Well, do you think she stated it orally? I mean, how did you get this impression, . . . " I think she just wants us to do . . ." You were very articulate; you said what it was. How did you com e by that information? From the syllabus? If not from the syllabus--you didn’ t read it--how so? I think she didn’ t actually com e out and say it, but she always says, "I hope you find this interesting and I’m going to tell you som e interesting things about the poets or about the poem itself." And because she is excited about it, you can tell that she wants the class to be excited about it because she always just gives us little anecdotes instead of just teaching it straight out of the book. So I think that it’s . . . Anecdotes a b o u t. . . About the poets. Or we were doing The Canterbury Tales, and she was telling us all the funny tales because we only read the Prologue; we didn’ t actually read the tales. I mean, she said, " I hope you find this interesting," but I don’ t think she has actually com e out and said, "I want you to be interested about this." So you are inferring this by way of other things, other evidence or clues or hints as to what she wants? All right. What do you think 356 is the single m ost important skill for su ccess in her class? What kind of skill? Can you nam e a particular one? S You kind of have to understand poetry. You have to be able to read and understand a poem because we have quizzes and they are kind of hard. But I had read a lot of poem s before so I already have analyzed them with my teachers, so I think that you have to kind of be good at reading poetry and understanding what the poet says. It’s kind of like, you have to have a sen se for it, I think. I A sen se for it? S I think if you were taking the class to take the class you probably wouldn’ t do very well. I think you have to like poetry and understand it in order to do well in the class. I So maybe have som e previous experience with poetry as you indicated you have had. S Or definitely look up every single word that you don’ t understand. I Then, reading the poetry--you seem to be telling me, if I hear you correctly-that m eans understanding the poetry. S Yeah. I Do you think you have this skill? S Sort of. I know what to look for so I can understand a poem, but I don’ t always understand it. I interpret it differently than it is supposed to be interpreted, I think, sometimes. But since I’ ve had som e of the poem s before, it’s not as hard for me. I OK. You are saying, "Yes, I think I have this skill of reading poetry." S Sort of. I Sort of. OK. That’s what I want to press you on: sort of your assessm ent of your own skill, the degree or extent to which you are skillful in reading poetry. How would you, kind of, rate yourself? 357 Like on a scale of one to ten? Sure, you could do it that way. On the scale of one to ten. I don’ t know. Maybe above average, but definitely not a ten; maybe, like, a seven. OK. Generally speaking, do you enjoy reading literature? Mm-hm. I love to read. OK. Since you love to read, what are your reading habits like? Do you have any reading habits? If so, describe them to me. Ju st in general or for school? You could talk about your reading habits generally and then you could go from there, if you can think o f . . . I read every single day. I mean, that’s my favorite thing to do is read. So my general reading habits are that I’m always reading. It’s a daily habit. Yeah, but I like to read for pleasure m ore than I like to read for school, which is why I like to take English classes because then I can combine them because usually the books are interesting and I read them for school and for pleasure at the sam e time. What m akes reading a pleasurable experience, then? I think if I can relate to it. It has to be something I can understand. If the vocabulary is Old English from the 1800’s . . . But you were just saying that you were reading Chaucer. They updated it. OK, so you are reading an easier translation. Yeah. If I’m having a hard time understanding the type of English it was written in, I don’ t like to read old literature. I like to be able 358 to read it, and I do n ’ t know, it just has to be interesting. I can ’ t explain it. I But you are doing a good job of explaining it. Why would you think it’s important for anybody to read literature? S B ecause you learn stuff when you read literature. You pick up facts that you just wouldn’ t know otherwise. I think it helps your vocabulary and spelling, and I think, I don’ t know, I just don’t understand why anyone would not want to read. I just think it’s all around . . . I But this question in som e ways . . . Som etim es when we know and answer in a way that is just intuitive, it’s hard to explain. It’s very clear from what you have already been answering that you are a reader and you enjoy reading. You like it. You are probably good at it. So probably in som e ways my question is harder for you to answ er than som ebody else: Why you in particular or why should anybody want to read literature? Push yourself on answering that one if you can. S I think it expands your horizons a lot. You learn about, say, different cultures from reading a book and i t . . . Even if you are reading for pleasure, you are using your mind instead of watching TV; you’re kind of vegging out. I Maybe if we get very specific, what has been the value of what you have read thus far in her class? Can you be specific? Have you learned anything? You are saying you learned things. S Well, I’m not sure if you learn something like it’s going to com e up in everyday conversation, but at the sam e time, when you are reading a poem and you like it, at the sam e time you have to think really hard in order to understand it, and then when you understand it, you learn something. I don’ t know what it is that you learn. I You store something. S Something, yeah, like maybe just the way they used to think. Like, let’s just say Shakespeare. I think it would be the way they thought back then. A lot of understanding a poem is knowing what the setting is of when the poem w as written. So if you 359 m aybe read that poem--maybe I read a Shakespeare poem and I understand it--then sometime later something is going to com e up about that time period and I’ll say, "Well, I rem em ber that Shakespeare wrote this poem in that time period," and I’ll know something about it, do you know what I m ean? Yeah, so it can have, maybe, usefulness in your contact with other persons. What about its usefulness to you personally? Forget about how you might share information with others. Does reading literature have a personal value to you, not necessarily a value that you have to share with anyone else? Oh, yeah. I think it m akes . . . I think it’s just because you read it, you get something from it. I don’ t know if you know, if I can tell you exactly what it is I get from reading a book that I really enjoy or reading a poem that I really enjoy. But you ju s t. . . It’s like som e sort of personal satisfaction, I guess, from reading something that you really like. Like, "Wow! I really enjoyed that," and so you have that enjoyment, do you know what I’m saying? OK. No, no, absolutely. Maybe as we go through other questions in our conversation, there might be an opportunity to com e back to that. It could be that you could think of a particular piece of literature when we experience the sensations, if you will, of it being pleasurable, but m aybe you could think of, "And I think I know why I felt those sam e things when I read this particular piece of literature." I’m kind of pushing you to be more specific, and I know I’m being tough. ’C ause I just finished a book that I just loved. I mean, I think that I would read it a million times because it just had every . . . I don’ t know, it just m ade me excited to read it. It had everything. It was so romantic, and it w as really educational. It was about the Congo back in about the early 1900’s and it w as all about South Africa and how apartheid started, but at the sam e time, it w as all these love stories, and it was like generation to generation. It was a sag a type book. And I just got excited when I read it because I w as learning stuff factually. An historical novel, in a sense. 360 Sort of, but then you also get involved, I d on’ t know, you get involved in the characters and you can ’ t wait to read and see what happens. Believe me, I understand everything you are saying. Well, I’m going to switch the subject a little bit away from reading and toward writing. Do you enjoy writing? Yeah, I like to write. Do you have a preference for writing certain kinds of things more than others? I like to write . . . I like to be given . . . I d on’ t write on my own, like I don’ t have a journal. Not the way that you read on your own. Yeah, exactly. But when I write for school, I don’ t mind writing a paper but I like . . . I don’ t like writing research papers and that type of thing. If the teacher gives me . . . I like to have a specific topic and then be able to do whatever I want with it, kind of be creative. That’s the best kind of writing I like to do. When teachers read your writing, do you think that their assessm ents are either accurate or fair? It depends on the teacher. Usually, because I’m an okay writer-1 m ean I do okay in English-1 don’ t struggle when I write a paper, but I’m not an A writer, but then . . . Like last year, my college writing teacher, she just hated me, and I thought she w as so unfair in the way that she judged my writing. So it depends on the teacher. Sometimes I think that they give me too much credit. I don’ t think they were that good and then they grade me high. Sometimes I work really hard and I really think it’s a good paper, and they don’ t give me a good grade. So it depends on the teacher and if they grade i t . . . I think it depends if they like my style of writing or not. Sometimes the styles of writing don’ t agree. How would you describe your style of writing? 361 I don’ t like to have to write where I have to say . . . I w as always taught also that you don’ t say, "This is what I’m going to talk about, and this is why I’m talking about it, and this is how I’m going to say it." You sort of imply because you are assum ing that the person reading is sm art enough to figure it out and a lot of teachers don’ t like that kind of writing. They want to know exactly what you are going to talk about and then, at the end, you have to say exactly what you talked about and I think that sounds too simplistic. I don’ t like that. So, sometimes, I have a problem with that. Do you think that teacher com m ents on your writing ability have been helpful to you? Oh, yeah. Definitely. Can you maybe elaborate on that? Give me an example or an illustration. Like, sometimes, let’s say, like, I would have trouble writing conclusions for som e reason, so if I write a conclusion and the conclusion is not good and the teacher says, "Well, this conclusion would have been better if you would have put this sentence this way and you had added these points," the next time I write a paper, I can look back and say, "Oh look, I forgot to do this and this and this." And then when I do it, I get a better grade. But I don’ t think it works from teacher to teacher. It would only work if I wrote another paper for that sam e teacher. So do you have a sense, then, that there isn’ t a pretty much agreed upon sen se of what is good writing? Mm-mm. You are discovering that with each professor you write for? Mm-hm. B ecause I had that sam e problem in high school, that each teacher I wrote for, I got different grades for writing the sam e types, or they taught, "You are doing this wrong; do it this way," and I would do it that way for the next teacher and they would say, "No, you are doing it wrong; you should be doing it the other way." But I especially noticed that when I cam e to Loyola Marymount after high school. 362 Sounds frustrating. Another topic shift here with my questions. Do you enjoy solving, and for loss of a better word or phrase, mental or intellectual puzzles? Sort of making sen se out of things, situations, people. I don’ t know exactly what you mean. Are you the kind of person who likes to solve puzzles? I don’ t m ean that you buy a book of puzzles. Puzzles of life, if you will, the puzzles that are presented to us maybe in an academ ic setting, a classroom. Yes, I like to do them. I can’ t always do them but I am trying, I try. Can you give me, maybe, a recent example of trying to grapple with or solve a puzzle, being fascinated or caught up with a puzzle? What w as it? I can’ t think . . . Could it be a personal puzzle? Could it also be an academ ic puzzle, a question, something you are curious about? And trying to figure it out? Yeah. I don’ t know. Maybe the most recent thing is trying to figure out my math homework. To me, math is a huge puzzle because I’m really, really bad at math. So it’s kind o f . . . I sort of had fun trying to sit there and figure it out, but it didn’ t help. But, like, on Friday, I was trying to learn my statistics, and I mean I had a good time because I thought I w as understanding it and going through and doing all the research I had to do to figure it out, how to do the problem. All right. That’s the m ost recent thing I can think of. When you were trying to figure out your math or your statistics on Friday, do you think that you follow a pattern when you try to 363 solve puzzles? You’ve got something that you are trying to figure out; do you have any kind of a pattern that you follow? Any kind of behaviors or p rocesses that you follow? I don’ t think so, I mean, unless it’s a pattern that I kind of jump all over the place. I’ll look at one aspect of it and I’ll try and figure out. Let’s just say math, for example. I’ll look at one formula and try and figure out what X in the formula is; but in doing that I’ll start wondering something else about it and I’ll jump to another, to a totally, not even on the sam e math topic, but something else that I have to know. So I kind of tend to jump around, like one thing spurs on another question, and then I’ll go to that instead of following systematically through with one formula and then the next one. So you tend to be an associative rather than a linear learner? Yeah. OK. What about som e of the more m undane aspects of what you do? Do you tend to want to get a solution? If som ething puzzles you, do you want to get it solved now, or are you the kind of person who teases out solutions to puzzles over lengthy periods of time? I think that I would rather get it done now. Do you ever use conversation with other persons as part of your possible process of getting answ ers to questions, figuring out puzzles? Oh, yeah. Tell me about that. I mean, I don’ t know specifically, but I g uess if I wanted to know something, like, a b o u t. . . I don’ t know. Well, let’s say I wanted to know something about you and I knew som ebody who worked here; I could direct a conversation without directly asking about you. I could turn the conversation around. To use conversation. 364 To find out something about you if I wanted to do that. To satisfy your curiosity. Yeah, without actually coming straight out and asking. I could do that. Or I could com e straight out and ask. That’s a good illustration of a curiosity that is not an academ ic curiosity. What about with academ ic curiosities? How do you satisfy them through conversation? What might you do? With academ ics, I try and figure it out by myself. Why the difference, do you suppose? B ecause . . . I do n ’ t know, actually. I think that for stuff like math, every time I have ever asked for anybody’s help, they get very frustrated with me because I just don’ t understand, and so I don’ t like to ask people for help when it com es to that sort of thing. Or I just don’ t get it and I get frustrated and so I would rather sit there and try and figure it out for myself. Very interesting. Because when you started to talk about using conversation to solve problems, you lit up and you just said, "Of course," and now we are seeing, though, that with an academ ic issue you are not using conversation; it’s more personal. I think I have never also . . . I have never done that. I mean, I never ask for help academically. I’m just not used to doing that, I think. OK. So it feels uncomfortable? Kind of. I think it might be that I’m just too lazy. I don’ t know. That could be it. I’m not sure. I’m not sure why I don’ t ask. We use laziness to explain a lot of things fairly or unfairly, I guess. ’C ause som etim es I know I need help, but I won’ t go ask for it. But tell me this: If you had a curiosity about something that didn’ t relate to your studies, your school, what you are doing here as a student? You would probably use conversation as a strategy to 365 find out what you wanted to solve--the question, the riddle, the puzzle--and very automatically you would do that? S Mm-hm. I This is kind of related to what we were just talking about, thinking about questions and problems. Do you ever spend time wondering about things or daydreaming? S Mm-hm. I Are the sorts of things that you do wonder about or question academ ic things? S I guess. I don’ t know what I daydream about. I g u ess I kind of do it. I That is a good daydream method. S But I know it is not academic. I OK, but you do admit to daydreaming? S Yes, I do daydream. I Why do you suppose that might be that you don’ t daydream about school stuff? S I guess because I think it is boring. I mean, I guess. I Now, let’s go back to P rofessor____ ’s class; you’re certainly showing a lot of enthusiasm for that class. You are finding it interesting and likeable, so let’s talk about her class. Have you been daydreaming about her class? S No. I think when I am not at school, I don’ t like to think about school because I can ’ t . . . I start getting stressed out. When I am, like, daydreaming, usually I am laying in bed and vegging out. I don’ t really know what I am thinking about. Usually school, unless I am worried about something; then I will start thinking about it. I will start wondering about, you know, if I am going to do OK on a test or something. 366 I Now, you are not worrying about P ro fesso r ’s class? S No. Since I enjoy it, I am pretty confident I am doing a good job. Just because it’s . . . I like to put enough time into it to m ake sure I am doing a good job. I How would you rate yourself as a listener? S I think I am a good listener. I OK. S If I am interested in what the person is talking about. I am not very good at listening in class. If I don’ t think the class is interesting, then I am not a very good listener. I can ’ t help it, but that is when I start to daydream. That is probably why I don’ t daydream about school, because . . . But, urn . . . I At least you admit to not being a good classroom listener if you are not interested in the content, the teacher, or whatever. Pushing away from yourself then, what do you think generally m akes for a good classroom listener? What might be the traits or qualities, behaviors of a good classroom listener? S I think it would be self-control. You have to be able to— I am not quite sure that is the right w ord-but you have to be able to force yourself to listen even when you don’ t want to, where I tend to think, "I don’t like listening, so I am not going to." I OK. Discipline, m aybe? S I think so, yeah. Self discipline, that is the word I w as looking for. I Do you think listening skills are important to your su ccess in P ro fesso r ’s class? S Oh, yeah. But since I am interested in it, it is easy for me to listen. So it is going to be good. I Do you ever contribute to classroom discussions? Generally, maybe, specifically in her class? S Yeah, in general, I participate. 367 I OK. Um, I am going to assum e again--in answ er to this next question-1 am going to assum e that you have been participating, then, in classroom discussions in P ro fesso r ’s class. How do you define your role in these discussions? S Not very major. I contribute ideas when have them, but I am not usually a real active part of the discussion. But I will make com m ents or ask questions, maybe once or twice every class. But, I mean, there are people in the class who have major roles in the class discussions and com e up with a lot of major ideas, and I am not really like that. I Do you think that these class discussions are important? S Mm-hm. I Why? S I think, well, I think they are important to the class as a whole because people, especially when you read poetry, you have a lot of ideas and you want to find out if they are right or just express them. I mean, as far as learning, it probably d o esn ’ t really mean that much; it’s not the kind of stuff you have to take notes on, you are not being tested on it. But, I think it is important for the students to be able to, you know, express their ideas. And som etim es they’re right, and som etim es she, like, "Yeah, I hadn’ t thought about that." And we talk about it and it becom es something that we have to know. But, generally, I think, it is just a way for the class to get, like, involved in the poem instead of her just saying, "This is what it is about; let’s go for the next one." I Then do you think that these conversations, these classroom conversations, enhance your understanding of the poetry? S Mm-hm. I Do you think they have a connection to the grade you will receive in the class? S Mm-mm. I don’ t think so. I Do you think that a student could find it helpful if he or she were to meet with som eone for one hour a week to talk about the 368 content of the course, talk about what is happening in the course, what is being read, what is being discussed? And maybe more particularly in a literature course, do you think a kind of weekly conversation with an informed partner is a helpful thing? S Yeah, if you have questions about it. I would think it would be helpful. If. . . I m ean, I guess it wouldn’ t be helpful if you didn’ t have anything to talk about with other people, but if you were curious about it or had som e questions or things you didn’ t understand . . . I If som ebody, m aybe som ebody like me, were to have a weekly conversation with students in your 170 course, what would you tell me I should do during that weekly meeting? How might I be helpful? What would my role be, as you see it? S You can answ er questions for a student. But even som etim es it gets hard in poetry because if you interpret a poem different than she did, you could m ake the person get a wrong answer on the test. That has happened before. I have gotten help from som ebody who w asn’ t my teacher, and my teacher d o esn ’ t agree with them. You probably have to be careful about what you say, but I guess if they just had questions or you just wanted to talk about it or didn’ t understand it at all, you could go over it with them and help them. I Well, let’s play out that idea--the student that d o esn ’ t understand a poem and com es in to talk to me. S Well, you could go over a poem with them, or say word for word and m ake sure, you know, how . . . The definitions and then, first, I think you should go through the whole poem until you understand exactly what everything m eans. And then you guys could probably discuss it and interpret what they mean, what is involved. But first you have to figure out what they are saying literally. I think that is why m ost students have trouble with it. So, I think you could help them with that. I First literally and then . . . S Then probably discuss. 369 Would you be interested yourself in meeting with an English 170 writing tutor every week for an hour to talk about what you were doing in P ro fesso r ’s class? Yeah. The conversations would be such that they would take up all aspects of the course: the poem s you read, midterm, a final exam, test preparation, writing. So, in other words, everything in the course is open to discussion, conversation, in the weekly meeting with the tutor. Yeah, I think that would be helpful. OK. 370 Interview with Maria Castro in Introduction to Fiction Interviewer I’ve just got a series of questions I want to ask you and one of them starts out just real generally: How do you feel about this class? It’s 172, isn’ t it? Student Right. I What do you think about it so far? S I think it’s fun. Um, I’m learning to read different literatures and appreciate them, and also I have learned that reading is not my favorite so . . . I Say more on that. What do you m ean? S I don’ t know. Reading is not my habit because I just don’ t concentrate. Like, I can read a whole book and you turn around and tell me, "What did you read?" and I’ll say, " I don’ t know" because I really don’ t focus on what I’m reading. I Not ever? S No. I think it’s boring. I Haven’ t you ever been interested in anything that you read? Surely you have. S Yeah, if I read a magazine or something that I want, but it’s different. I OK, so seriously there are times when you do focus when you read? S Oh, yes. I And I could say, "Well, what did you just read, Marytza?" and you precisely-- S Uh-huh. I have to. But not so much in literature, huh? 371 S No, I just never been interested in literature. I But that’s interesting. Yet you seem to be enjoying the class? S S he’s a really fun person, and sh e ’s got a great sen se of humor and she kind of puts a humor in the reading assignm ents where, when we discuss it, she allows us to say what we want to say and we go from there. She never tells us, like, "No, what you read is wrong," you know? She kind of says, "Well, what did you understand?" and if I say, "Well, I thought this w as what the author w as trying to say," she will say, "Well, why did you think that?" rather than say, "No, you are wrong." She will say, "Well, show me." I Have you ever had teachers who told you that you were wrong? S No, because I never speak up in class. And I don’ t speak up now either. I Well, then how . . . B ecause you don’ t . . . S B ecause I have seen other people say, "Oh, um, I think this is what happened," and sh e’ll say, "Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’ t think about that." You know? I So this is what you have observed in conversations she has with your classm ates? S Um-hm. I Well why don’ t you speak up in the class? S I don’ t like to. I Generally, in class? Are there any classes you do . . . S No, I don’ t speak up at all in any of my classes. I That surprises me. You strike me as a very outgoing person. What is it about the classroom that clams you up? S I think the professor intimidates me. 372 Well, maybe by the end of the sem ester you’ll be talking in ’s class. I better if I want to get a good grade. That’s right. Because class participation is part, isn’ t it, of the grade? Exactly. All right. What do you th in k wants you to do in her class? Um, I think she wants us to read the assignm ents when she tells us to and I think she is more interested in feedback. W hose feedback? Our feedback. Like, she gives us an assignm ent, she wants us to do it, and then she wants to know what we thought about it ’cause she wants to see if we are learning anything or if we are understanding what we read. Mm-hm. And help her out by making the class easier by participating and doing the work and she could see if sh e’s a strong teacher or a weak teacher; either we do the assignm ent or we don’ t. All right. Do you think, though, that in addition to all of those things you just mentioned she has something that she would like each of you to learn from the class? What might that be? I think maybe she wants us to learn to appreciate what we read and understand it. How might you learn to appreciate . . . You know, how you read something and you say, "Just toss it," but I think every time we read, she wants us to say if it was good, why it was good; if it w asn’ t, why it w asn’ t. And then we can leave it at that. But don’ t just say, "Oh, I finished the book" and that’s it. You understand what I’m trying to say? 373 I Sure, I understand. Can you think of what might you call that ability that you just described, I think, rather well. Is there a . . . S Critical thinking. I OK, sure. That’s what I was hinting at. Think critically. S Right, yeah. B ecause we had our paper due and I think I told you yesterday half the class is on their way to the Learning Resource Center. I And you did pretty well? S I got a B-. And she thinks that I have very good ideas but I just need to brush up on my writing and she said, "Most definitely, you will get a higher grade." I think basically what I need is the vocabulary to be able to express myself. I This ability to think critically that then you have stated is probably one of the major goals of the course fo r . S Oh, yeah. I think she wants us all to think and think deeply. I D id state this in her syllabus as a key com ponent in the course, critical thinking? S I think she did, but I really haven’ t looked at it so I don’ t w a n t. . . I You and a few of your classm ates from these other interviews that I’ ve had. How about in class orally? Has she communicated this goal of critical thinking in class? Where did you get this from, in other w ords? That’s what I’m trying . . . S Well, because, like, she will say . . . When we discuss a book, she will say, "Well, why do think the author put this particular event in this chapter?" I Yeah. S And we are, like, "Well, how do we know?" And she says, "Well, think. What did you read? Piece together what you read." And then sh e ’ll say something like, oh, "What do you think the psychological aspect of it is?" 374 So would it be accurate of me to s a y , your instructor, did not say on day two of the class, "Now, the thing that is most important for you to do in this class is to think critically, to develop your critical thinking skills." You pieced this together by way of the fact that she asks questions, that she pushes you, that this is important to her, and therefore important for you to do if you want to be successful in the course? Mm-hm. I’m not going to say she did or she didn’ t say it exactly. But you don’t have a clear recollection of her ever having m ade an announcem ent? No, because I daydream a lot in her class. Let’s get to that. I have daydreaming . . . You’re anticipating . . . You’ve heard about these interviews. No, I just do. I just kind of like . . . Because I have a good daydreaming question. We’ll get to that one. What do you think is the single most important skill for som eone to have to be successful in this course? Writing. Writing. B ecause som e people can speak very well but unless they can put it down on paper, it really d o esn ’ t count. You have to be able to do it both ways. Do you think you p o ssess this skill? No. How com e the B-? I know she is a tough grader. I know she is. And I’m very proud of myself. That’s a very good grade on the first paper. That’s right, because first grades are very low, typically, in her class. 375 S I’m telling you, half the class is on their way to tutoring. I mean, I w as shocked. I So here you are saying, "I’m not a good writer," and here’s an instructor who has a real critical eye for writing and she has given you a B-. How com e they seem to be contradicting each other, your opinion of yourself as a writer and your instructor’s opinion? S I guess I don’t think I give myself enough credit. Or either that or she gives me more credit than I thought she would. I All right. Let’s talk about your reading habits, those reading habits you said at the beginning you didn’ t have. You anticipated actually a lot of my questions, which is okay. You have indicated already without me even asking that you don’ t particularly enjoy reading literature. Is that correct, up till now? S Right. I Up till now. Maybe that will change this sem ester. S I think so. I Can you describe for me your reading habits? S I w on’ t read unless I have to. I Even those magazines you mentioned? S No, I will read the magazines when I am at the dentist office to kill time. I Do you ever read the new spaper? S Yes, actually I do read the paper. I How often? S Maybe once a week, Sundays. I OK. 376 S But it’s not like I will get up and say, "Oh, let me read." No, I say, "I don’t have anything to do; maybe I will read the paper." I What about the Loyolan, our cam pus paper? S Not that I read it. I What about the Intercom daily announcem ents? S Once. I All right. S I’m sorry. I Do you subscribe to any m agazines? S No. I did once to Sports Illustrated just so I could get the free telephone. I Oh, I saw that ad, too. Tell me this though: When you read, do you ever ask yourself questions? S I do, because when I am reading a chapter, and then I will say, "Oh, what did she m ean by that?" And then I will read it again. Or there is a word I don’ t understand, I will get up and look it up before I go on so I am not completely lost. I OK. So you do think. So asking questions is one of your habits? S Mm-hm. I As a reader? OK. Why read literature? Why should som eone read literature? You or som eone else in your class? What do you think? S I have no idea. I think . . . I I think you do. S Why do people read? Just to read because, first of all, I read because I want to expand my knowledge of different subjects. Like, you know, when you have, there is a group of people talking 377 and everyone says, "I have read that book" and then they talk about it. I don’ t have anything to say because I haven’ t read. All right. And that kind of, like, bothers me. So after that I decided that I w anted to read because I want to know what people talk about when they talk about literature. That is a real good reason. I w a n t. . . That is why I do it. Do you have any other reasons besides that one? Not really. Can you think of reasons why--maybe taking it outside yourself--in general why might people be well-advised to read literature? What value from it, if any, besides being able to connect with other people and share in common knowledge that one gets from reading literature? Can you think of other reasons? I don’ t know. I really . . . Like I said, reading is not my thing. I think that maybe we read literature to see what other people think, what they . . . Like, when you read fiction and we can look at the ability of som eone’s creativity. All right. So what the author thinks when the characters think. Well, gosh, that is a good idea, too. All right. Now we are going to get to writing. Do you enjoy it? I do because it allows me to express myself. What kind of writing do you do? . . . What sorts of writing? Well, I like to read through the journal and then I do a lot of analyzing, which I would like to be able to just m aster that like that. . . . And then I just write letters, basically. Nothing very fancy. But, it sounds like you are a writer. You write every week, no? 378 S Almost. I used to write more, but I really like to be able to write better. Much better than I do now. I Do you find that there are certain types of writing that you get m ost enjoyment from? S Oh, when I have to write like a narrative kind of thing because then I can be real creative. And I am a very creative person. I OK. Typically when teachers read your writing-1 guess for the m ost part this would be English teachers but not restricted to English teachers, just teachers who read your w riting-are there com m ents or responses that are typical? S Mm-hm. They all say that I have very good ideas but I need to be able to express them more and really go into it a little deep, examples and that kind of stuff. Because I go over it superficial. I All right. They typically encourage you to becom e more specific? S And give more of my personal opinion rather than talk about it in general. I All right. Would you say that these assessm ents are typical, then, accurate or fair? Do you agree with them? S Yeah, I take criticism very well. I A ll right. Do you think that these com m ents that you just described have been helpful to you in becoming a better writer? Are you done with the com m ents? S Well, my last English teacher, I always received A-’s on my paper. Never got an A. And then he would write very good; but I would say it’s not very good. I would get the A. And he would say stuff like, "Don’ t worry about it. You just need to put more of your own opinion, and when you analyze, stay within the text." But he never really showed me. I just kept doing the sam e thing over and over. Where she basically said, . . . "You can think. It’s there, but you just need more of a sophisticated way of expressing yourself." 379 Well, what is she doing to help you get more specific, if you will, stay within the text? What is she doing that the other professor didn’ t do? Oh, she basically told me to go to a tutor. Oh, she sent you over to us. Well, she wrote that she would suggest it. She said because she really wanted to give me a higher grade. Have you done that? Well, yeah. I cam e over and I m ade the appointment with you. OK. All right. And then I don’t . . . I didn’ t go over to a tutor yet because we haven’ t had a second assignment. All right. All right. Do you think that you are the kind of person who likes to solve, kind of, puzzles, all sorts of puzzles? Intellectual puzzles, situational puzzles, you know? Sometimes, because it gives me more incentive, support, like, "Well, if I can do it then I have the capability to be a smart person." You know, all I need is patience. But som etim es I don’ t because my patience is not there. Yeah. Can you think of an example of, that’s recent, in which you becam e fascinated by a question or puzzles, if you will, and locked in with it and tried to and perhaps were successful in solving it? It could be an academ ic question or puzzle or it could be more personal, but one that is personal that you feel comfortable describing to me. Can you think of anything that has kind of puzzled you of late, more recently that you locked onto? No. Well, personally I can; but I really don’ t want to get into it. But n o t. . . Only, like, the assignm ent that we had in the class, where she wanted us to develop the physiological purposes of the book. What w as the book? 380 S Jane Eyre. And I just had to really sit there and go, "What does she mean?" and then go back and forth thinking maybe this, maybe not. And th e n - I This is the paper you got the B- on. S Yeah. And I wouldn’t write the paper until I really thought I understood what the question was. And I would ask people and then I finally just thought that just maybe, well, maybe this. You know, she wants us to think why, you know? Think why other people do the things they do. Something like that. But, personally yeah, I have a lot o f . . . I take up a lot of time. I Well, that is good to hear. Tell me this, when you are trying to solve academ ic questions, not necessarily personal ones, is there any kind of procedure maybe that you follow? Any steps? Do you have a special way, as you think about it, of going back, getting a puzzle solved, academic? S Well, I would look at it once and then put it away. And then I would think about it during the day and then I will ask people, "Oh, com e let me ask you to do this. How would you approach it?" And then I think of that. Then I go back to it again and then I just put all my thoughts down and look at them and start piecing them together, then approach it. I You are so anticipatory. I love it. You have anticipated every question I w as going to ask. That is wonderful. S I’m sorry. I I am enjoying it. Why are you apologizing? I am complimenting you. S Thank you. I One of the things that I was going to ask you was that do you som etim es seek out conversation with others when you are trying to solve the puzzle? S Yes, I do. 381 Yeah, that is your method. OK. I would guess you would also do that when the puzzle or the question is now personal, you also seek out~ No. No? No, my personal is always my personal. You don’ t go consult: "And how would you handle it if this happened to you?" No. If it’s personal, you don’ t consult with others you don’ t have conversations with? Right. Academic, you do? Mm-hm. Interesting. Most people have it the other way, that I speak to. Yeah, but I always think that people always have advice, and everything is always easier said than done. And I just keep my personal to my self because if I can’ t develop within myself, no one is going to do it for me. Well, why don’ t you take that advice and apply it in an academ ic setting? How is the academ ic puzzle different? And why is it then more appropriate, and do you feel more comfortable and actually do seek out conversation of others on what they say about "How would you write the paper? Or what do you think she would m ean by psychological?" You see, people have similar experiences academically than they do personally. OK. 382 And it is something that is similar to everybody. Everybody, everyone has to go through this process of education. Som e do it better than others. And-- So, you are hoping the ones that you ask are the ones that did better than others, huh? Yeah, I think so. That is a good strategy. I like that one. OK. Here is the daydreaming part, okay? Do you ever spend time daydreaming? Yes, I do. I daydream. How about academ ic daydreaming? No. Do you ever have those? Yes, I do. Because I was daydreaming yesterday how I was going to m aster my midterm. Can you elaborate on that midterm. Well, we have a midterm tomorrow of five essay questions and we are supposed to write two, you know, and it’s sixteen chapters that we have covered. So, I am trying to think, "Well, how am I going to do it so that I can hit the spot, you know, and n o t. . ." Which class is this? Contemporary Africa. Mm-hm. So I was thinking of that. How do I approach my studying? OK. All right. Well, because . . . The reason I ask that question to everybody interviewed is that, a lot of times, people daydream at a very personal level; but it seem s from my interviewing experience, at least, a lot of people don’ t do it with things academ ic. And you do. I do. I am an academ ic daydream er. 383 S I do. I also think about my calculus class. Like, should I go for tutoring or not? Or drop it, retake i t . . . I And you are also trying to--from the previous question I asked you-- engage through maybe daydreaming in the questions or the puzzles of the course. S Mm-hm. I What does this m ean? What does she m ean here? What does the author m ean? What does the character m ean? Or what does the assignm ent m ean? OK, good. Is there anything in the literature class besides thinking about the paper on Jane Eyre that maybe have taken up your thoughts, in a kind of daydream ing? Where . . . And just so that w e’re clear on what I m ean by daydreaming, I would classify daydreaming when all of a sudden you realize, "Gosh, I have been thinking about that for the past three minutes." You didn’ t intend to think about it, and then you realize that you have been thinking about that for the past five minutes. Talking to myself about it. Do you ever do that with your academ ic subjects? You don’ t intend consciously to think about it, but you realize, "Gosh, I have been thinking about that." S Well, yeah in my theology class, I kind o f . . . The other day I was in there thinking about something, like, he told us. And then I kind of snapped and told one of my room m ates, "Oh, you know, the other day we were talking about this." She said, "Why are you thinking about that?" I said, "Because I--" First of all, it is a theology course an d -th e one I have for believers and non- believers-and if you were not a strong believer when you first cam e in the class, you were probably a non-believer. B ecause things get really down to the nitty-gritty in that class. And it is hard not to think and to think and to think, "Are they right or am I right? Which way are they right, and which way am I right?" So I do think, you know . . . I At odd times, at odd moments; not intending to, but nevertheless- S Right. When . . . Actually when I was thinking about stuff, I was cooking and I was thinking . . . I All right. How would you rate yourself as a listener? 384 S Hmm. I would give myself a five. I Out of ten? S Yeah. I OK. Average, then? S Mm-hm. I All right. Are you a good listener, or let’s say, are you a better listener in the classroom than outside the classroom ? S No, I am better outside the classroom. I always . . . I So you are only a 3 inside the classroom ? S Probably. No. Outside the classroom , I am a ten. I mean, I will sit down and listen if som eone to wants to talk all night and I w on’ t say very much. I let them talk. I Yeah. S But in the classroom , I say I won’ t pay that much attention because I can always go home and look over the material. Or I will go into other little things. I What m akes for a good classroom listener? What are the qualities of a good classroom listener? S Motivation to do well, and basically I think that is it. If you really want to do well and really want to understand what is being said, you have to pay close attention. And you really have to focus on it or you are not going to do very well. I So, a desire to be successful is, in your opinion, the key ingredient to listening? S Oh, yeah. And you will never know what you will learn by listening. The kind of insight you are going to get. I All right. Do you think good listening skills are important to your su ccess in the English 172 class? 385 S Oh, yeah. You don’ t do what she says, you are not going to p ass the class. She-- I Wow, this is harsh! S I think it is. B ecause she might say something that we might have to use later on and, unless we pay close attention, we w on’ t remember. And she could probably sit there and say this is the answ er to number four and later on she will ask that question. I So can you give me an example? I know it is tough. S Like, my math teacher. . . . She was reviewing for the test the other day, and she was giving us examples of what would be on the test but she had a paper in her hand, and I noticed that she kept looking at the paper and then doing it on the board. I figured that she had the test in her hand and she was changing it a little bit on the board. So when you get to the test on Monday, if anyone w as paying close attention, you would recognize that those are the problems that will— I I see. S No one pays attention. I You are a regular academ ic sleuth, Sherlock Holmes of the classroom . S No, I just kind of noticed it, that she pulled this paper out from her folder and she was giving us som e examples. I Have you had the test yet? S Yeah. I Were you right? S Mm-hm. Similar, yeah. I OK. All right. What about classroom discussion? I know there are classroom conversations or discussions in Becky’s class. You have indicated earlier that you don’ t contribute. 386 S No, I don’ t. I And why do you really think you haven’ t? S B ecause I don’ t think that I am going to say something very smart. And I don’ t want the professor to say, "Wrong.” I But you just told me that this professor isn’ t that way. S No, but I meant. . . I said, for instance, in my Marketing class, the teacher asked this guy a question and he gave the wrong answ er and she said, "I doubt it. Read the material." I thought, "Oh, my God." So I kind of like— I But don’ t you read the material? You wouldn’ t make a com m ent if you hadn’ t. S Well, I read one or two and then she will say, "Who said that?" And I won’ t say. I Oh, you chicken you. S B ut- I You are not going to get your participation grade if you keep doing that. S No, I am not. My theology professor already told me, "Unless you open your mouth, you aren’ t going to get a very high grade." And I know that you have good things to say because I read it in the paper. I Yeah. Do you think that these conversations or discussions in class are helpful even though you don’ t participate? S Yeah. B ecause it either clicks, whether you’re understanding what you read or not. I How can you tell? How do you do that? S Well, you say if you are way off and what the author is trying to say or whatever you read. And you get to discuss it with som eone and they say, "Well, no. This is how I perceived it." 387 Then you can com pare it-- what the two of you have perceived- and maybe com e to one conclusion. Or you can say, " I didn’ t see it that way. Maybe you are right." If you can take criticism well. If not, you are in trouble. You better take up another hobby. Do you think that these conversations that go on in the classroom are helpful to your understanding of the material? Sometimes. B ecause som etim es I am not sure of what I read. Can you give me a concentrated example, maybe, of when in Becky’s class that this has happened, when you think what w as said in class probably helped you to understand what you had read? Oh, like yesterday, she w as talking about. . . You know, we are reading The Handmaid’s Tale and then the girl . . . The author is describing the room, and she said there is no glass, no light, hook, or no doorknob or whatever. And then I took it as she was describing a room. And then she asked in class, "What do you think she is trying to tell us?" And then the whole class said there is nothing you can kill yourself with. She said, "Exactly." And I thought, "How on earth did they get to that conclusion?" And when I went back and read it, I noticed that they were right in the way that she w as describing the room; she would say, like, there are not sharp objects, and . . . Mm-hm. You know, if I had paid close attention I would have said the sam e thing. There w as a hint there that you didn’ t g e t . . . Mm-hm. Do you think that it would be helpful for a student to get together on a weekly basis to talk about the class? You know, to talk about what is read for that class, what is being discussed, papers, whatever? I do. I think it is always helpful to sit there and talk about things you have done or have to do. 388 I How might that kind of weekly meeting be helpful in a literature class, a class like ’s, the one you are taking? S Well, if you have a tutor, then you are not sure how to approach something or you can always discuss with them where your w eaknesses are and ask for advise for-- I But you can do that in class, couldn’ t you? S Yeah, but I would . . . If I had a tutor, it would be better for me because it is one-on-one. And if I don’ t talk to my tutor, she is not going to understand me, what I am saying. I A ll right. S But in class, it’s not one-on-one. I True. S And it is more intimidating when you have twenty-seven more people that just are sm art as a whip . . . I Is that what they are, your colleagues? S And it is kind of intimidating. Only because I don’ t speak in the class. I think a tutor kind of allows you to say what you don’ t say in class or teach you something that you haven’t learned. I Those are all good reasons for talking with a tutor about a course. I would agree. . . . Let’s turn the tables a little bit. If I were to be meeting with one of the students who is enrolled in your class each week for an hour to talk about the class, how might I be helpful to that student? What might I be able to do as a tutor to help a student enrolled in the English 172 class? S Well, if the kid didn’t like the class, then he could tell you and chances are that you . . . I We are back in business. You were telling me about how I might be helpful as a tutor to som eone who cam e each week. S Well, basically I think tutors are there to help polish up what you can ’ t do by yourself. 389 And how do you help a student "polish up"? Well, you criticize their work, maybe suggest alternative ways of doing things, and you’re just like a punching bag. I mean, you know, you com e in and you go, "Oh! I’m failing. I’m going to fail the class," and the tutor will say, "No, let’s sit down and talk about it." You sound like you’ve tutored. I know. Have you? Confess. No, I w as just a counseling assistant before at a local high school, and I’d have people say, "Oh, life is terrible!" So, catharsis is important in tutoring? So, then, I would allow the students to cathart with me, to tell me what they’re doing? A ll right. Well, here’s my last question; I saved the best one for last. Would you like to have weekly tutoring for your English 172 class? I would. Most definitely. Okay, good. 390 Interview with V anessa Darnell in Introduction to Drama Interviewer How do you feel about being in ’s class? Student It’s an interesting class. Kind of different from the usual classes I’ve had, more structured, and I think sh e ’s a little bit more, you know, she explores different avenues and lets us explore things that usually I’m not used to. I Have you taken a class similar to hers before? S In my AP English class in high school. I OK. Any of the material, then, in her class that you’ve read in other classes? S Yeah. I King Lear, m aybe? Or . . . S Not King Lear. Oedipus w e’ve read, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Death of a Salesman, there was another one. I Did you read A Doll’s House in high school? S No, I hadn’ t. I OK. Was your experience, then, in these other literature classes different from the experience you seem to be having in ’s? S Yeah. I How? Elaborate on that if you could. S Well-this is just in my opinion-som e of the things are more our ideas. The way I’m used to, with more structure, you have basically the professor’s idea of his interpretation of the play and that’s basically what we have to regurgitate. And here, we basically can get our own ideas, which I’m not used to, so that’s why I basically . . . That’s a big difference. 391 S Yeah. I What do you th in k wants you or any of the other students in her class to do? S Basically, to understand her interpretation and, at the sam e time, com e up and formulate our own ideas; that way we can explain them to her when she asks us. I Do you think th a t stated this in her syllabus? S No. I OK. Where did you get this idea from, then, if it’s n o t. . . S Probably after the second play, when I was still waiting to see what, you know, what was the meaning of certain p assag es and stuff, and she left it up to us to com e up with our own meanings, which was kind of side-tracking for us. I So you had to infer it from, by way of what didn’ t happen. S Right. Right. I What do you think is the single most important skill for su ccess in ’s class? S That’s what I’m still questioning. We just finished a midterm and a lot of us didn’ t do well because basically, probably, w e’re trained the sam e w ay-to regurgitate what she said -an d som e of the ideas were probably incorrect and so a lot of our essays were wrong, so . . . I’m still trying to find out what that is. I Well, it’s to find an interpretation and to be able to do what? Prove it? Demonstrate that it’s — S Yeah, to explain it because a lot of the term s that she had for us to use, we didn’ t use them because, of course, she thought that we as, you know, college students should be able to find them ourselves and interpret them, which we were still waiting for definitions and things like that, so . . . In a way, it was on our part to . . . 392 I OK. And I would g uess from the way you answ ered my question, as to what do you think the m ost important skill is, that you feel you’re trying to develop this skill as we speak and as you work through the course w ith . S Yeah. Yeah. I Do you enjoy reading literature? S Yeah. I What might be the benefits to reading literature? S Well, I’m a theater major, so . . . I You should like this course a whole bunch, then! S Yeah, so I just. . . I enjoy reading the different. . . All the way from Greek literature that, I like that, and then Shakespeare I’m growing to like because I’ ve been forced to read Shakespeare all my, you know, high school and college careers, so I’m . . . I just like the different way the writers, som e writers do, you know, Greek tragedies. They have this form, the way they write their tragedies, and then as you go more contem porary it’s more, less structured and that’s the way it is, so I find that interesting. I OK, so the historical evolution of the play is interesting to you. S Yeah. I The way it’s crafted, the way it’s put together. S Yeah. I OK, good. What about your habits as a reader. Could you describe those to m e? Describe yourself as a reader. Maybe you have no habits. S I just read . . . Well, I don’ t read for a meaning at first. I just read for, you know, to see the plot structure and what happens. And then usually I have to read it twice to find out som e of the author’s intentions and stuff like that. 393 OK. Not a bad strategy at times, especially if the language is in a style you’re unaccustom ed to. Sometimes just to figure out what’s going on is enough for a first reading. What about non-academ ic reading, when you’re not reading for a class? Do you read at all outside of class? Novels and m urder mysteries and stuff like that. That’s okay. Well tell me about that. I mean, do you read a lot of novels and m urder mysteries o r . . . I usually don’ t get a lot of, you know, outside reading during school ’cause m ost of my classes, that’s all I’m doing is reading. Sure. But then I do read most of, like, Agatha Christie-type murder mysteries and I also read som e of the rom ance novels and . . . Those kind that I see in the superm arket? Yeah, those kind. With the lurid covers? Well not, those d on’ t entertain me at all. Those are kind of boring after you read, like, one or two. Gosh, they look awful interesting from the covers! After you read one or two, they’re all the sam e. But Sydney Sheldon, som e of those types are . . . OK. So you do read on your own for pleasure. Yeah. What about, besides reading novels and mysteries and rom ance novels, do you read the new spaper? Yeah, I get the new spaper, L A Times and Newsweek. OK. And you read those pretty regularly o r . . . 394 Yeah. I usually . . . The new spaper? The new spaper I read daily, but Newsweek, it com es every week or something like that so I just . . . Basically out of Newsweek, I’d read the, the big topics and . . . OK. Other m agazines that you read? I have b e e n - Cosmopolitan'? Vogue? I have been known to go and buy those occasionally, but out of those magazines, my favorite is L.A. Style. I just like the artistic way . . . Isn’ t it a big format? Yes, the big one. It’s sort of like Interview. Do you know Interview? Yeah. It’s something like that. I like that. OK. When you read, especially maybe getting back to reading for , do you ever ask yourself questions while you’re reading? Yeah, like, "What’s going on?" Sometimes, well, and . . . Well, this is in another class. It’s all right. But we read Agamemnon, and we read the whole trilogy, and I w as kind of getting confused of who is speaking and who is . . . So I would have to go back and find out who these characters were that were speaking and then, you know . . . OK. So it’s not unusual for you to ask questions when you read. No, I do it all the time. 395 Well, good. How about the subject of writing. Do you enjoy writing? I used to. What happened? I kind of fell out from getting . . . Well, since I’ ve had AP classes and they want you to do these timed writings, and that’s . . . I have problems with, with having a timed writing assignm ent or something like that with . . . Like, the midterm, we had two essays which we did n o t. . . Well, me and som e other people didn’ t do that well in the essay. Two essays in fifty minutes. Two essays and twenty multiple choice. Wow! Fifty minutes. Keeps one busy. Yes. A ll right. Is there, when you were maybe enjoying writing a bit more, did you, w as there a certain kind of writing that you got m ost pleasure from? It w asn’ t in-class essays, I can tell that. No, it w asn’ t that. Just more creative writing; that’s more, I could sit down and write a whole story out with no problems. Did you do that in som e of your classes? Yeah, I had a creative writing class, and I enjoyed that. When teachers read your writing, are there sort of typical things that they maybe say about your writing? My handwriting. Oh, they like it? 396 S No, it’s kind of m essy, which is kind of hard with timed writing. I can’ t, I mean I can if I took my time, but I’m not used to . . . I’m a fast writer, so that might be my problem also, in formulating . . . I They really don’ t know what you’re saying if they can read it. S Well, they know . . . They . . . Yeah, that’s basically it, b u t. . . I What about your, the writing that you turn in that’s typed. What sorts of remarks do they make? S Other than spelling errors every now and then from typing--l’m not that good of a typist either, but... I guess som etim es in the longer writings, like the term papers and stuff like that, I som etim es tend, as I’m developing it, you have it end up with, like, two separate th eses or go on to a different subject as where I started off from, but that’s usually what that is for long papers. I Do you think that their, teacher com m ents on your papers, teacher com m ents on your papers when you were in high school, since you’ve been here in college, are they, do you usually feel that those com m ents have been fair, accurate? S For the m ost part, I think, unless they misinterpreted what I w as saying or something and they w eren’t sure where I w as coming from. Other than that. . . I Can you think of a time when you got a paper back and thought, "This just isn’ t correct or fair to have said this o r . . ." S There is just one time. It was basically an opinion paper but, you know, we had to back it up with facts in it. It was on a feminist something and I’m not a feminist so I wouldn’ t know, so . . . It was an English class and w e’re supposed to write in, like, a feminist opinion, and the teacher was a feminist so she kind of judged my opinions and statem ents really harshly. And I g uess I don’t know if she thought I was attacking, you know, that movement or what, but that was only out o f . . . I Ju st so that I understand. The assignm ent was to write a paper as if you were-- 397 OK. Were, yes. As if, where you, as if w e’re taking a feminist point of view on som e topic. I see. And so I did research on the feminist movement and tried as best my ability to get their mind thought and I guess I did it-- Well, you’re an actress! That should have been easy. So I guess I might have went a little overboard or, you know, m ade som e of the statem ents a little bit. . . That’s hard to do, though. Yeah. That w asn’ t an easy assignm ent. But for the m ost part, you would say when teachers make com m ents on your paper that those com m ents are fair, accurate. Have they ever been helpful to you? Yeah. How? Most of the time, they’re helpful with term papers because, after five pages, I tend to lose my topic and go on to something else. So usually, those are when I get the most helpful com m ents and ways that I can find other sources or other ideas I can bring in to my thesis statem ent. All right. Are you the kind of person who likes to solve mental or intellectual puzzles? If. . . I could say som etim es; it depends on if they’re challenging. If I get challenged and bring curiosity and I want, you know, I want to find out, then, yeah. Can you think maybe of a recent example where something has gotten your, you’ve been m ade curious by som ething? Could be academic. It could be an academ ic curiosity or it could be something personal, but personal that you feel comfortable talking about with me. Can you think something that maybe is recent? 398 S Only thing recent academically-wise was in my theology-- I’m Christian. I go, you know, "I’m not a Catholic," but som e of the things of— it w as the Old T estam ent-and som e of the things which I had, stories I had learned- I Yes. S And, like, Sunday school and Bible classes, which I found out were maybe not all the way true or som e of them were fiction. And to research and find out, you know, what actually happened, where som e of these, what events . . . So that, that w as . . . I liked the class, and I did som e research on one of the Bible stories to find out what actually happened and archaeological evidence and stuff like that. I OK. Great. When you’re in the process of solving an intellectual problem or taking on an intellectual challenge, however you want to phrase it, is there any kind of a process you tend to follow? Any preferred method for solving things? S Usually, I don’ t think. Not that I can ’ t think of any, like, certain process b u t. . . I Well, how about conversation? Do you ever use conversation as a problem-solving strategy? S Yeah. Well, with the, my research that I did, I talked to som e of the other professors, you know, other theology professors and find out what their opinions were. And I talked to my own pastor, you know, to find out, you know, from what he had learned, and then, you know, I went through different books and different authors and their opinions and researches and stuff like that. I So conversation with others might be one of your procedures or habits. OK. Do you ever make conversation with yourself? Do you ever have conversations, in a sense, with yourself about som e of these things? Like this issue of researching the origins of the Bible story and trying to find out really what is, sorting maybe historical— S Well, I kind of, I have . . . For the first time, when I, when we, ’cause it kind of, it w as som e stuff like, you know, w asn’ t true and all this, you know, other stuff that I was questioning my own 399 religion for a, for a time where I w as wondering, "Was what I really, you know, based all my religious beliefs, w as any of that really true?" Or, you know, had to in my own self see where, what beliefs and what, you know, the theories behind them and why they said the stories and things like that. So . . . So attempting-- I had to question myself. So then, would it be fair to say, then, that in your attem pt to answ er one question, you found yourself entertaining other questions? Yeah. Does that happen often, som etim es? Sometimes. Yeah, it depends, you know, if it’s something challenging and it brings up curiosity and I have to question it, you know? Has any of that happened in ’s class yet? No. Not. . . Basically, som e of the plays, besides Oedipus that w e’ ve read, the rest of them I hadn’ t read before, so the only questions I had is, you know, what basically is, what is the basic interpretation of it. But with Oedipus, I’ ve had, like, three different professors teach the sam e subject and som e of them had their own ideas of, you know, who is the tragic hero and what, you know, their qualities of a tragic hero were, and som e of them were a little bit different. But besides that, that’s about all. OK. Do you ever spend time wondering about things, you know, som etim es it’s called daydreaming. Are you a person who sort of, you know, you realize, "Gee, I’ ve been daydreaming here for five minutes." Usually not. If I’m daydreaming, I’m usually falling asleep, so not really. Or usually my . . . The only time usually when my mind w anders or gets off subject is when I have a lot of stress and have so many things to be done and my mind w anders off: "OK, how am I gonna do this?" And I go off thinking of ways I can try to do 400 this and then realize, "OK, I’m in English class. I need to pay attention." So, som ething like that. I All right--we’re going to go back t o ’s class--have the plays that you’ve read thus far, have the conversations maybe that have occurred in the class, the discussions, prom pted you to be, to think about those plays at times other than when you were either discussing them in class or actually with the text in front of you reading about them ? S No, except for A Doll’s House, I’ ve thought, I’ve thought about. . . That w as an interesting play. I had never read it before, and I thought that was interesting with the character Nora and things like that. I thought that w as interesting. In a way you could kind of, you know, relate it to som etim es times of today-- I Sure. S And I could see my grandm other in the position like that, where she w as doing everything as my grandfather said and then . . . ’C ause they, right now, they’re separated and they’d been together for, like, fifty years. But I could see that really today. I So did you find yourself actually then, in a sense, thinking about that play or thinking about other things because you read the play, about your grandparents at odd times or moments. S Yeah. I All right. How would you rate yourself as a listener? S I’m a very good listener. I Why? S Maybe because I’m the oldest of three and I’ ve been the leader of certain organizations and stuff in high school and I just. . . The positions that I w as in, a lot of people, for som e reason, I d on’ t know, they cam e to me with their problems and just got, wanted advice and stuff, and out of that I got, I guess I developed really good listening skills. 401 I All right. What about yourself as an academ ic listener? Are you a good academ ic listener? S Yes and no. If the subject interests me, yes. If it d o esn ’ t interest me, I know I can feel myself tuning out or doing other homework. It just depends. And I, and I’ve had different professors tell me that too, and my parents have told me from when I w as little. But for som e reason, if it’s something that interests me and challenges me, I’ll, you know, you have my attention for the whole sem ester, the whole year. But if it’s something that I’m not really interested in or don’ t find, for som e reason that I, it’s not important or something, then I tune it out. I Well, this fall it sounds like the theology class has caught your interest, or certain parts of that class. What a b o u t ’s class? S For the m ost part, except for, well, stuff that I’ve already learned and been drilled in my head, I kind of don’t see it as, you know, I kind of blow it off, reading the assignm ents, ’cause I’ve already read it three times or something like that or studied for it before. But other things that I know that I haven’ t read and are unfamiliar to me, then I kind of pay a little bit more attention to. I Do you think that-- Well before I ask that, maybe I should say what m akes for a good classroom listener? Can you think of maybe, describe som e traits or qualities of a good classroom listener? S Besides, you know, giving your attention to the teacher, I, it helps to listen to the other students. I know it helps me to listen to the other students’ ideas and their questions ’cause half the time, som e of their ideas are something that I may have thought of but w asn’ t sure that I w as right. And I’m the type of person where I write mostly everything that is said because that helps me when I’m going back to study because it kind of triggers certain things that, what was said in the, in the class and I’m reading my notes, then I rem em ber what was said during the class. So that helps me. I All right. Do you think that listening skills are important to a person’s su ccess in 's class? S Yeah. 402 I Why? S S he’s got a little sen se of humor which is funny. It’s different, but out of the sen se of humor, som e of the stuff she says, you know, you can apply to the stories and it helped me with the midterm, with thinking of som e little joke that she said about Oedipus, you know, and his mom and how funny it would be if . . . And so, when we were reading, when I was going through multiple choice, I rem em bered the joke and it helped me to answ er the question. That’s just for me; I do n ’ t know of anybody else remembering the joke. I Well, w e’re talking about your midterm, so if it worked for you, that’s good enough! Do you ever contribute to classroom discussions? S Yeah. I’m not a person that would just raise my hand and answer every question . . . but if I feel that I know what it is or if I think my interpretation or something, you know, is helpful, I would say it. I What about if you have a question about one of the plays you’ve read? Is it likely that you would go into the next class meeting and raise your hand, say, " I have a question about this or that"? S Yeah, I plan to at the head of the next class. About the midterm, though, yeah. If I’m . . . Especially ’cause som e of the ways she grades, I have a question of how she graded it and stuff like that so, yeah. I So you find yourself questioning, bringing up questions of your own making, not just answering questions the professor might ask. S Right. I Do you ever react to com m ents that are m ade by other students, their com m ents, their questions? S I usually don’ t unless I feel like I disagree or something like that. Usually I’ll ask or bring up som e comment that if . . . I mean, it’s not to say that I’m telling them that they’re wrong, but maybe, you know, a suggestion that I didn’ t see it that way; I saw it as this, this, and that. 403 I see. Do you think these kinds of speaking skills or conversational skills in class, in ’s in particular, would be helpful to you in how you do in her class or not? I would think so. OK. Why? Well, in just. . . As in class participation, it helps, too, you know? Kind of that, "I’m paying attention. I understand what you’re saying and I know where you’re coming from." Do you think that a student would find it helpful, just about any student would find it helpful, to meet with som eone for maybe one hour per week and, during this hour, to talk about the content of a course, the things that were being read in the class, the things that were discussed during the class meetings, the assignm ents for that class? Do you think that that would probably be a helpful thing for m ost students? Really, f o r ’s class, I think so. Why? B ecause the way . . . ’Cause, like I said before, she brings up ideas, and usually it’s up to us to kind of interpret them and, with the help of others, you know . . . I’ve done, two of us in the class have gotten together, basic . . . "OK, what does this mean?" You know, to help us understand the class so that we can understand the next class when sh e ’s explaining it. If som eone, maybe som eone like myself, were to m eet with one of the students in your class on a weekly basis to talk about the content of the course, how could I be helpful to that student? What might I do or say so that I would be helpful to what the student’s trying to do in the class? I’m asking for advice here. What do you think? Well for that class, usually som e questions; I’m sure there’s always questions that get asked b y that we have no idea what the answer is but most of us either say we don’ t know or just, you know, keep quiet and then we end up asking each other outside of class . . . Most of those questions are about what this 404 w as . . . With A Doll’s House, what w as m eant by Torvald saying something to Nora, when maybe we didn’ t pick up on? And just asking those questions, you know, can help us. All right. Can you think of anything else, maybe, besides asking the kinds of questions that are typically asked by the teacher? Anything else that might be valuable for me to do with the student in the meeting, the one hour weekly meeting? Explain to us why we have to write those one-page things that she always makes, one-page analysis or som e question o f . . . Like, we have a one-page typewritten paper of one of the questions of King Lear and out of the questions, they really don’ t seem important, you know? Why do we have to . . . I don’ t know . . . If I’m understanding you (I think I do), you’re saying that I might be able to be helpful to som eone to understand the importance of doing something. Yeah. That maybe you don’ t quite under-- See the importance. Exactly. Could we talk about it to discover the importance? Yeah. That seem s worthwhile. Would you be interested in meeting som ebody, one of our ENGL 174 tutors, for the remainder of the sem ester for a one-hour weekly appointment? Yeah. OK. Super. 405 Interview with Sarah Eam es in Introduction to Drama Interviewer OK. Um, one of the first things I wanted to ask you about w as how do you feel about being in ’s class? Just, just generally. Student Generally? I Yeah. And if you have som e specifics too, b u t. . . S Um, this sem ester, uh, I seem to enjoy it because I have all marketing classes. So this is one class that’s, you know, away from the marketing. I How’s it different then from . . . You said . . . S Well, this is more enjoyable. I How? How so? S Well, you’re, you’re, um, not only are you reading for the tests and whatever, it’s, you’re reading for enjoyment. I OK. The plays . . . S Right. Reading the plays for enjoyment. I I w as a literature major; I understand, [laughs] S Oh, oh, OK. Um, I mean, uh . . . I It’s a change of pace, if nothing else, from the other courses. S Right, right. And I did do som e art work before, with the marketing and everything, so this kind of gets me back to that kind of imagining what the costum es are like, what the setting is like . . . I Oh, I see. S All that kind of thing, back to the art. . . 406 OK, that’s interesting. Um, have you ever taken a class similar to ’s? In other words, have you ever taken a class maybe specifically that dealt with dram a? Mm, not on a college level. OK. What about classes maybe, um, similar in that, similar to ’s class in that they have you reading literature, responding to it? Never. I’ve always . . . I have a reading disorder problem, [laughs] Oh, really? Yeah . . . so I’ ve always, like, dreaded taking, like, English lit class because I figured, "Oh, there’s going to be so much reading." Yeah. And normally what I’ ve been doing is, I don’ t read. I’ ve gotten through two years of art and I really haven’ t read . . . [laughs] [laughs] Shh, you’re being recorded, here, you don’ t want to reveal-- [laughs] That’s right. So now it’s, now I’m more reading and I enjoy what I read. Well, w e’re going to com e . . . I have a group of questions that deal with reading, so w e’re going to com e back to that in a couple minutes. Um, what do you think wants you to do in her course? To think. Why? Basically, that’s it. Take what w e’re given, reading, and examine all the, uh, I don’t know what the word is for it, things also involved with the play-the environment at the time . . . Mm-hm. 407 Why was this play written? Who w as this play written for? Mm-hm. Um, kind of think of all the, maybe the different them es, you know, something that’s not necessarily stated and som ething that sh e ’s not going to tell us. A ll right. But to use our, maybe, our own experiences and maybe, kind of, go on that, but basically to think for ourselves. OK. All right. I think you’re right because I k n o w and, um, because I do know her and, um, I can confirm your notion that she does want her students to do those things. Is w h a t_____ wants you to do stated som ew here in her syllabus? In other words, what you just told me, that’s what you think is really what sh e ’s after. Is that stated in her syllabus? Um, I would have to, like, look at her syllabus again . . . Actually, I’ve got a co p y - Oh, OK. Um, it’s here. Well, uh, to provide an opportunity for continuing growth . . . Mm-hm. Um . . . And, by the way, I’m not trying to indicate that your assum ption is wrong about what sh e ’s . . . I mean, m ost teachers don’ t want you to regurgitate what they’ ve told you . . . Mm-hm. 408 They want you to be able to . . . "OK, I’ ve given you a sample; now let’s see what you can do with it in this type of situation." OK. And if the teacher doesn’t do that, then the class is a w aste of time. So that’s sort of an assum ption, you would think, that is prevalent in m ost university courses, an assum ption in ’s class. Right. Well, it’s, um, my own basic thing; if I can ’t relate to this, to reality in the real world, then why am I in this in the first place? So that’s . . . I kind of go into that. But you really, I mean, I read over her syllabus; she really d o esn ’ t say it outright. Well . . . How about orally? Do you think sh e ’s been conveying that to you guys in class by way of her com m ents? I think so, ’cause I, ’cause I know she, um, she mentioned one time before that " I was not up here because, you know, telling you this, so you can memorize this." All right. So, it w as kind of like . . . What do you think is the single most important skill for success in this class, one thing that you need to do that you personally or the other students need? What might that skill be? To get a good grade in this class or for, like, the real world? No, no. I g uess what my question is trying to elicit from you is, to be successful in ’s class, you’re going to need to do a variety of things, not just in term s of the assignm ents but, um, if you will, mental or intellectual skills. Is there a particular skill that you think is key to you or anyone else being successful in ’s class? An ability? What might be the nam e of that skill? 409 Uh, I don’ t know, like, a particular nam e of a skill but I think being able to imagine, kind of setting up in your own mind, how things were, um . . . Something imaginative? The setting, the setting, the costum es, and how it all kind of ties together. Maybe that. If you’re able to do that and think how the play is written, then other circum stances or other, I don’ t know, daily things that you com e into contact with might, you know, think o f . . . Like, we read A Doll’s House. Yes. Um, so, in certain . . . I have a stepm other w ho’s kind of kept and I constantly now think of the play when I think of her. A ll right. And how when she chooses som e things, and how Nora in the play chose som e things, I mean, how the two are kind of parallel in som e way, so I’m constantly thinking . . . Even though w e’ ve already read it, it’s done, I probably won’t need to review it before the, before a test. Mm-hm. But it’s to be able to imagine how things are set up yet be able to relate them back to things. Your own life, your own experiences. Right. OK. A ll right. Um, do you think you p o ssess this ability to imagine things? OK. Um, and to what degree or extent do you think you p o ssess this ability to imagine what you’re reading and to relate it to your own experience? Are you particularly good at this? Do you think you’re average, typical, below average? It’s . . . I think I’m pretty good. 410 I OK. Above average, [laughter] All right, here are som e questions that deal with maybe som e of your reading habits. S OK. I Um, do you enjoy reading literature? S Yes. I OK, um . . . S When I do. [laughs] I When you do, which you told me h asn ’ t been often, [laughs] Um, also I want you to maybe try right now and describe your reading habits. In other words, typically, what do you read? Where do you read? How do you read and, um, how often? What can you tell me about yourself as a reader? S For enjoyment or for school, or both? I Your choice. It’s up to you. S Um, usually when I read, uh, I try to read out loud because then it helps me hear; I rem em ber once I hear things. I OK. S Um, and I read very slow and I almost do i t . . . Like when I read a play, I read it as though they’re talking and I put the em phasis on certain words. That’s how I will read a text book; it will be the sam e thing. Um, doing a text book when I read something, like, I’ll read a, um, I’ll read a heading . . . I Mm-hm. S And I’ll read everything that goes underneath it. After I’ve read that, then I’ll go back and say, "OK, what is the heading? What question do I want to answer?" Then I’ll find the question and I’ll, like, establish an accent to that particular. . . Say it’s marketing research . . . I Mm-hm. 411 S For privately-owned enterprises. OK, I’ll go through, I’ll read it, soon as I find out what I need to get out of all the jumble, then I’ll say, "OK, this is going to be under an English accent." I Interesting! [laughs] S So, um, when I go back and I study, I know all the English accents are under this kind of thing, so when I take the test I reread it in a normal voice and I think, "Oh! That’s marketing research on privately-owned enterprises," and I’ll read in an English accent and I can rem em ber hearing what it sounds like. When I repeat the answer, I’m like, "No, that’s not right." I can kind of go back and do th a t. . . I OK, so it’s your own system for enhancing memory. S Right. Um . . . I It seem s to work for you? S Yeah. Really well. I OK. S Took me long enough to figure it out. Uh . . . I Well, no, the Greeks did things that were kind of similar. When they had to rem em ber a speech, um, the fancy word for that is "mnemonics," memory devices . . . And you’ve constructed your own mnemonic or memory device there. And the Greeks would use, for example, a room, maybe a room like my office, and it would be a room, of course, you’re very familiar with, like a room in your own home, a favorite room, one you’re comfortable in, and you would put things you wanted to rem em ber in the room. You know, m aybe you put something on the seat of the chair by the door, and then you’d put something on the table, this table that’s in front of us, and then something on top of the printer, and it’s a way, then, to recollect the speech, the parts of the speech that you were going to deliver to an audience. So I’m, d o esn ’ t sound too strange or bizarre to me . . . [laughs] 412 S Oh. Everytime I go through this, talking to the teachers, and they’re, like, "Oo-kay. Did you have to go som ew here to learn this?" I’m, like, "No." Um . . . I Other things about the reading you do in school? S Sometimes, I’ll put on music, like the music to Fantasia. I Mm-hm. S I’ll listen to that while I’m reading. Mostly, it’s when I’m reviewing and I’m looking around and I’m almost putting em phasis on the words and the accents. Um, I don’ t know if it has anything to do, like, going along with the music . . . I don’ t know. I A ll right. S Um . . . I What about. . . Do you find yourself doing any reading that’s reading outside of your classes for informational pleasure purposes? S I have read, um, a couple books for pleasure. Usually when I start on those books, I’ll find that I won’ t talk out loud because I don’ t need to really memorize a novel if it goes very quickly. I Read the new spaper? S Um, sometimes. I But you’re not a regular reader. S No. I Magazines? S Um, not really because who are these people? What, really, credibility do they have? I OK. Where do you get m ost of your current events information then? From radio or television? 413 S Um, radio, television. I OK. All right. Um, why do you read? You personally? What do you think? There’s an obvious answer. You read because you’re told to read in class, but maybe going beyond the probably obvious response, "Because I’m told to," why do you think you read? S Um.. . I What motivates you to want to read? What do you get from it? S You get to, again, like, imagine, use your imagination, um, kind of make assum ptions, conclusions on your own, kind of challenges your brain, you know, constantly as you read. I OK. That’s a good answer. S Oh. [laughs] I W e’re going to shift to writing. Do you like to write? S Um, it depends what I’m writing about. I Well, if you found yourself enjoying the writing you’re involved in, what kind of writing might that be? S Um, usually if I can write almost how I would talk, you know, add com m ents here and there. I Mm-hm. S It’s very enjoyable for me. I OK. So more, like, conversational writing, writing that has a style of conversation. S Right. Not, well, not really conversation. I m ean if, even if I had to write a term paper, um, as long as I can m ake my own com m ents, you know, even though they’re not probably called for. . . [laughs] I You want your thoughts and ideas . . . 414 S Right. I That’s what you’re saying. S Right. I OK. A ll right. That you’re there in the writing, your persona, who you are is there in the piece of writing. S So if, if, say you’ve known me for a year and you had a stack of a hundred papers. You’ve picked up my paper; you knew it was me. You automatically- I Start reading without seeing your name, I know. I know who wrote it. S Right. Right. Ju st because of, um, I don’ t know, the irony or the sarcastic remarks in it. I OK. OK. Um, when teachers read your writing, um, do you think their assessm ents of your writing are accurate or fair? What do you think? S Probably fair, [laughs] I All right. Can you elaborate? Why, why are they fair, accurate? S Uh, well, it’s, well . . . It’s like, um, up until this time, I never did a paper until the last possible moment. I Mm-hm. S And that would kind of be a challenge to me. Um, so I would have one shot to do it. That’s it. And I don’ t think now that I could actually do anything accurately, you know, doing, "OK, I’ve got three pages to write and two hours to do it in. Let’s go!" I Yeah. S And it’s one shot, you know. Go through and do it. So I think they’d be more fair than . . . [laughs] 415 I A ll right. So given the situation of com posing a paper, an academ ic paper, um, it sounds like you, you do a pretty good job. That’s what it sounds like to me. S If I . . . But in the past, if I did . . . There w as a couple papers I did spend a little bit more time on, um, and I did do, I did well. I OK. Um, when teachers are critical of your writing, what sorts of things do they usually say? S An incomplete thought, um, probably didn’ t elaborate fully, um . . . I Um, do you think teacher com m ents have ever been helpful to you as a writer? S Yes. I OK. S Um, I used to think that you could only write, like, in a structured form and I had a teacher one time and she said, "No. But, put your personality in your paper," and so that’s . . . If I have to write a paper, my com m ents are in there as well. I So your teachers have been influential in a positive sense. S Right. Since I have been doing that, I really haven’ t had . . . Maybe one person out of, say, ten has said negatively, "Don’ t do that" or "That’s a little bit too much." I All right. Your writing teachers would be pleased to hear what you just said, I’m sure. I just asked you a couple minutes ago, you know, why do you read? What do you get out of it? So now, I’ll basically ask the sam e question, but placing the em phasis on writing. Why write? Why do you think you write? What do you get out of it? S For the sam e reasons. I know when I have philosophy class and I would be writing in a journal and I would think of som ething and think, "Ah!" You know, even in som e things, where it’s kind of, like, when you’re doing art, you’re drawing som ething or you’re designing something, all of a sudden you think of som ething else 416 that would make it even better. I m ean it’s just constantly challenging your mind. All right. A full different set of questions here. Do you enjoy solving puzzles? You know, not literally puzzles, you know, the kind of puzzles that m ake the picture of the Grand Canyon, but mental puzzles. Yes. Situational puzzles, people puzzles, academ ic puzzles, you like that? OK. Why? Why do you suppose . . . Um, I don’ t know. I don’ t know. [laughs] Well, it’s a hard one to answer. Until things are solved, it’s like my mind d o esn ’ t rest. My mind constantly goes if I have a problem or if I have a situation, if som ething’s not settled, my mind will just constantly go and I will, you know, not sleep or, you know, find different ways to solve it, you know. Everything is, like, "OK, what if I try doing this?" So the tapes are going all the time. Constantly. Can you supply me a recent example of a puzzle that you’ve been working on, one that’s, again, d o esn ’ t breach a sen se of privacy. Is there something that maybe has puzzled you recently that would be an illustration of this process you’ve just described? Um, I might have been put into a financial position where, um, I might have the possibility of going back to work, of being financially cut from my parents. Um, so for a week straight, constantly, I really didn’ t sleep and I went through and exhausted every financial m eans that I had before working that I could get money. Um, I m ean down to finding out when is the right time to borrow money on a credit card or borrow money through the bank and having it for an extended period of days, um, every . . . Gosh, selling back, borrowing books from people who had the classes before me, returning that book and getting the money for that, uh . . . 417 I can tell you’re a business major, too. [laughs] Putting staples in all my checks when I send out the bills and just basically juggling around credit card bills. Well, I hope it d o esn ’ t com e to all those things. I’m prepared. I’m writing. That’s good. Um, do you think that when you are involved in solving these puzzles, the one similar to the one you just described to me, any of these kinds of puzzles that we encounter and try to deal with, do you think that there’s anything, a pattern to how you handle puzzles? For example, you just mentioned that with this one puzzle, you spent about a week on it, sleep deprivation . . . Is there something common, do you think, about how you as a unique individual go about handling puzzle-solving? F irst. . . OK, this is the thing; this is the problem. When does it have to be solved by? To what extent? And usually when I go into it, I don’ t stop until I get it done. So if it m eans . . . And it’s not by choice; it’s just by, because I don’ t sleep until I get it done. I’ll be asleep maybe twenty minutes . . . This is another way of doing something and it just, my brain constantly goes. So you don’ t put the puzzle on the back burner and let it sit and simmer and you go off and take care of other things. It tends to really be up front and center for you then? I would say that, but then on the other hand, when it com es to papers and everything, I wait for the last possible moment. It depends upon the type of puzzle, then. Yeah, I guess it is. If it’s dealing with money, I’ll jump right into it. OK. What about academ ic puzzles? I mean, I’m gonna be suggestive here, that part of what you’re doing in ’s class is obviously puzzles. Plays are puzzles, I guess, right? Characters, w e’re all puzzles, so we should assum e these characters in these plays from Ibsen . . . And you’re going to go back in time and then go forward. I saw the chronology is such. 418 S Right. I What about those kinds of puzzles, the kind of puzzles that you’re already dealing with? Do you have a way of handling those? Do you let those simmer? [laughs] They do n ’ t deal with money. S They don’ t deal with money. Maybe in the long run you could look at it that probably better grades without me, a better job, more money. Usually when it com es to a paper or something, it— I d on’ t know--maybe a teacher will say som ething at the last minute which would m ake you change your whole paper. It’s just like, "Why start it now when tomorrow I’m gonna have to change it?" I don’ t know why I do that. I get kind of, like, an anxiety, energy rush, and I like that. I Yeah, so the way you handle academ ic puzzles sounds like it’s pretty different from the way you handle m ore personal puzzles, especially puzzles where there’s an econom ic quotient, right? OK. A little bit more willing to push the solution to the puzzle back in time if it’s an academ ic puzzle. Would that be a fair statem ent or description of who you are? S Yeah, maybe because it’s not right then and there dealing with reality. I OK. All right. Do you ever use conversations with other persons as part of your puzzle process? Are you pretty much . . . S I do. I You do? Tell me about it if you can. S Um, I don’ t know if it’s a good habit or a bad habit, but I just listen to people. You can be in a classroom listening to two other students talk and learn a lot from that. You can be at the movies and listen to people. I used to waitress and just listening to people talk about certain things, you kind of, you evaluate how you’re approaching this puzzle. Um, also talking to people who have already been through this kind of thing. They’re more apt to tell you, "Look, I went through this. If I could do it over again, I would do it this way." 419 I Yeah. So do you som etim es actively seek out these conversations? S Yes. I And do you think they’ve been helpful to you in solving som e of the puzzles? S Sometimes they have. Um, som etim es they haven’ t. Then again, it’s just, I don’ t think maybe I researched the person enough. You know, why would he have wanted or chose this now? W hat’s the difference? Are our ambitions the sam e? I think m aybe that’s why som etim es in the past it’s failed. But I think on the overall, I still do it. I And you are then, just to confirm that I’ve understood, you do use conversation with others in solving academ ic problem s as well as more personal ones. You said just a while ago, why start the paper now when you might go to class tomorrow afternoon and just get this gem that’s going to take care of-- S That’s right. I Do you ever spend time--maybe this is a category of self- reflection--do you ever spend time maybe wondering about things, daydreaming, or are you not a daydream er? S No, I am. Um, yeah. I OK. Do you think that you have a propensity to daydream about certain things? You mentioned economic puzzles take a high priority. What about your daydream s, what do you . . . Without again being personal, invading your privacy, um, what about academically? Do you find yourself daydreaming about school? S I daydream when I will graduate. I don’ t daydream about the class; I daydream when I will be out, and kind of how I’m going to be able to put that to use. Then I start thinking, "Well, should I try taking a different class instead of this other one before I graduate and have time? Will this help me?" So then I’ll start evaluating classes that I have chosen or that I will choose to take and talking to different teachers. 420 So som e of your daydream s are more future-oriented. Little daydreaming, then, about things that are going on right now. I don’t think I daydream about things that are going on now. Um, what a b o u t ’s class? Do you think that these things that w e’ve just now been talking about-the engaging in puzzles, engaging in solutions to puzzles, possibly even the daydreaming, the wondering about things-is any of that going on thus far for you? I think each of the plays is a puzzle, and the daydream , I guess, could be related back to just thinking about it and pondering about it and then relating it back. Yeah, ’cause I don’ t want to limit how you respond to the question by way of the vocabulary. Like daydreaming, you just said, daydreaming is kind of just unplanned thought, you know, thought that just com es to us. I think this is already kind of, like, the seed s are already planted, the play’s already been, once you’ ve read it, once you’ ve kind of studied it a little bit, the se e d ’s already planted and then you do think about it when certain things arise, so I g uess it is kind of like, I don’ t know, daydreaming. It’s there. It’s there. It’s there, and so you might find yourself returning to > 4 Doll's House. Isn’ t that the first play you’ ve read? Right. And so you might think maybe tonight you’ll jump to that, som eone says something. Does that ever occur to you? That I would recall? Yeah. That something happens and you find yourself thinking about something else, like the play you read. 421 Right. Yes. OK. How would you rate yourself as a listener? Very good. All right. What about your. . . How would you rate yourself as a listener in a classroom ? That’s different because I’m watching the person. ’C ause if I listen, I rem em ber everything--not everything, but I would rem em ber m ost things. As long as I can sit up tow ards the front and I can see the person. For som e reason that has something, I don’ t know. Oh, all right. I would prefer the first few rows, too. I never thought about why. Maybe I’m like you. Um, what do you think m akes for a good classroom listener besides sitting up close? Um, being interested in the subject, um . . . I don’ t know. I need it to be quiet. A ll right. Do you think that good classroom listening skills are important to your su ccess in ’s class? Yes. Why? Because she may only mention something once and that one thing will help you realize something, like a whole different plot throughout the whole play. So if you only hear it once and you lose it, that’s it. OK. It’s not like a textbook, maybe, that you can go back to and review or it do esn ’ t have the bold headings in the text that you can go back to and formulate your questions from. It’s . . . Once it’s there, it’s there. Speaking habits, that’s kind of the next general area. Do you ever contribute to classroom discussions? 422 S Very . . . Not very often. I Not very often. Um, what about in ______’s class thus far? Have you m ade any contributions? S Some. I OK, without being intrusive, can you kind of quantify that? Once or twice this sem ester, o r . . . S There’s a couple days that, you know, I gave my two cents worth. I All right. Do you think that conversations are occurring in ’s class? Not just. . . Are students talking? Is there a dialogue, if you will, going on in her class between the students a n d ? Among the students? What do you think? S There is . . . You m ean about the plays that we are reading? I Yeah. S Yeah, there is. Um, I think every day it’s kind of engaging in that she mentions the plot, or, "What do you think of this? What do you think w as m eant by this?" And everybody kind of, you know, " I thought it was this or this," and what everybody else is saying kind of m akes you think, "Yeah, I thought the sam e thing at first, but then I also thought about this." I There seem s to be conversation. S Right. I Actually occurring in the class. A ll right. Do you think these conversations are important? S Yes. I OK. Why? S Again, it m akes you think. If you were to say something about Oedipus, I’d think, "Well, you know, I never really thought of it that way before," and I think also coming from a peer is m eant differently than just from a teacher who’s lecturing. 423 Why is the com m ent from the peer different for you if you hear that from a peer rather than from a teacher? Well for me, it’s a change in voice and I rem em ber different things with a change in voice. I think som e other people also . . . I m ean it’s, they can relate more to the peer. Interesting, your notion of voice and accents and all and the way of a memory device. I’m fascinated by that, [laughs] Um, do you think that these conversations that are going on in ’s class impact your grade? I would have to think so. OK. I mean, w e’re both familiar with her syllabus. She indicates that classroom participation is a factor. A little shift again in the set of questions here. Do you think that a student would find--any student--would find it helpful if he or she were to m eet with som eone for one hour a week to talk about what is being read, discussed, or written about in a literature class? Um, I think in any class it would help because you are kind of restating the information all over again, so it’s like you’re studying out loud. That’s basically kind of how I study. If som eone, maybe som eone like me, were to m eet weekly with a student in a literature course, how do you think I might be helpful with that student? What might I do in order to help the student with the content of the course, the content of the literature course? Um, I guess taking it by the plays. I mean you would probably want to find the overall them e and then kind of, I guess, question-- I don’t know, go by the scenes, whatever--but question why was this thing done? What do you think w as done? Why do you think that this w as done by the characters in the play? What do you think the audience maybe thought at this point? Um, I don’ t know, questions that wouldn’ t exactly be in the book but would have to m ake me think. OK, so questions that prompt the student to think. Right. 424 I To think about what he or she is reading about. Good. Um, would you be interested in meeting with a tutor once a week this fall for ENGL 174? S Sure. You would? OK, good. 425 Interview with May Fukumoto in Introduction to Drama Interviewer Well, first of all, if you can start by telling me how do you feel about the class that you’re taking? Student I like it, but I think it’s difficult. It’s a different kind of English. I How so? S I’ ve never studied in detail dram as, plays, and it’s, it is difficult. I You have studied dram as or plays, though? S Not in that. . . I have, but not in that detail. Just like, in my English class we would read maybe the Oresteia or something, and that would be the only play w e’d read all year. We’d read mostly, you know, other kinds of literature. I You’re sort of taking a play a week. S Right. A lot of reading. It’s hard. I So your experience with other classes in which you read and studied dram a was different if only that you had a lot more time to spend on a play, reading it, thinking about it. S Right. And also reading it in class, like the whole play. Having people read certain people. I You did this in your other classes. S Right, but in m ost of my other classes, I’ve never had to read a whole play, a whole twenty-five page play, like w e’re doing now. I What do you think wants you to do in her class? S To, as far as, like, keeping up with the work? Or just to get out of the class? I Yeah. 426 S I think she wants us to be able to feel comfortable with that style because King Lear's what w e’re reading now, and it’s hard, it’s hard to read that style of literature and to understand that and to be able to make connections between the different plays that we read, comment on them es . . . I OK. H a s stated what you just described as m aybe her goal for you and other students in her syllabus? S I believe som ething similar like that, but we should keep in mind som e of the them es that run from play to play. I OK. What about in oral presentations to the class? H a s ______ indicated what she wants you to do in the class in that way? S I don't really rem em ber her just outright coming and saying that. I How do you think i n ’s class, then, do you get a sen se of what she really wants? S Just because that’s pretty much what I’ ve gotten out of i t . . . Like, I’ ve gone in to talk to her a couple times on her office hours, and w e’ve just been talking about things like that and I can tell that that’s her interest and how she was glad that I’ ve gotten som e of the things that I have. I So you’re inferring som e of her, what she stresses as important by way of conversations you’ve had with her, what she seem s to take time doing in the class. A ll right. What do you think is the single m ost important skill for som eone to have in the dram a class to be successful in it? S Comprehension. I OK. Elaborate on that. S Being able to understand what you’re reading. It’s hard. At least for me it is. It’s hard to read plays and understand. It’s different than reading just a story . . . I Understanding what? 427 S Understanding the characters and the plot, the them es, all the them es. Maybe, like, there’s literal meaning and there’s different kinds of meaning to a lot of action in the play and there’s a lot going on in it. It’s just, I think it’s a lot different than just reading, like, stories. I OK. Do you think you p o ssess this skill? S Not as much as I hoped to. So far at least. I I’m going to ask you a more general question. Do you enjoy reading literature? S I do. I OK. Why? S Because it is interesting and I think that. . . I don’ t know, I like to because you learn about different times that you read. Like right now, learning about Greek tragedy, I think it’s interesting. I like learning about history. I So literature can be a way for you to understand other people, other times. S Right. I Can you think of other reasons why you enjoy reading literature? S That’s a hard question. Um, after I read a play, I feel good about actually finishing that thirty-page play that we have to take a test on in two days. I S ense of accomplishment? S Right. I Tell me about your reading habits. What are they like? Are you a reader? S I never really have been. I have always read, but I can ’ t sit down for a long period of time and read. I’ll have to break it up. Like, if a play would take me a total of five hours to read, if I read for 428 maybe forty-five, then go for a break or something, then sit down for an hour, maybe an hour and fifteen. I can’ t sit there and read for a long period of time. I What happens? S My mind starts to wander. I start thinking about other things that I should and could be doing. I OK. That’s how you go about reading things that are assigned to you in class. S Right. I How would you describe yourself as a reader of non-academ ic things, things that aren’ t assigned to you in class? S During the summer, I like to read fiction a lot. I mean, som etim es if I’m not doing much in a week, I’ll sit down and read all day. I have no problem with that. I And what sorts of things are you reading? S Let’s see, I like to read historical fiction a lot. I like to read . . . Like, my favorite book was Taipan. I love stories about history and interesting people, with plots that I can’ t put down, that hold my attention. I think that is the problem with drama. It d o esn ’ t do that for me. I Why do you suppose that historical novel, you find, it is so easy to be involved in and also read hours on end, but with the plays your attention w anes? S Because it’s frustrating to sit down and see a long passage, and I don’ t understand the words that are there, and the little subnotes that you have to go down and read and then go back and try to put them into the context of the sentence and say, "Well, d oes that make sense with this and . . ." I Did you start by reading A Doll’s House? S Mm-hm. 429 OK. Now that’s more modern. That w as my favorite. I really liked that one. I liked the discussions and I liked reading that one; it w as easy for me to read. OK. I read that one pretty much . . . You know, I enjoyed that one. I sat down and read it. So might I be correct if I said that part of your difficulty in reading plays other than A Doll’s House has been due to the language? Right. Definitely. OK. So maybe as you get into more m odern plays with more m odern language . . . Definitely. Things will change for you? Mm-hm. I think so. Do you read other things beside historical fiction? Magazines? N ew spapers? Do you read those? Magazines. A lot of magazines. I’m primarily into sports, so I like Sports Illustrated, and I like sports novels. I like new spapers. Do you pretty much read on a daily basis then? Like, during the summer, when you’re not in classes perhaps? Would you say that just about every day? How would you quantify the extent to which you read? Yeah, I read new spapers pretty much every day. Close to it. Or parts of it, of the sports section, or maybe just different sections. And at the sam e time, maybe after work, I’ll have a book that m aybe I’ ve been reading that will take me, like, a week to finish. I’ll read for, like, forty-five minutes before I go to sleep or something. 430 I OK. I would say that you’re a reader, then. You read. OK. How about on the subject of writing. Do you enjoy writing? S I like it, but it’s not one of my strong points, I think. Sometimes I have a hard time with just the basic sentence structures, you know, the basic English. I’ll be corrected in, like, matching the verbs, to the, you know . . . I Subject-verb agreem ent? S Right. Things like that. But as far as, like, writing essays, I’m pretty good at that. I think that because I have had a lot of writing in high school--l took, like, humanities and a lot of essay writing-1 like it. I like to write. I wish I w as better. I Do you write letters? S A lot. I’m from Seattle, so I write letters almost every other day. I What about, uh, have you ever kept a journal? S I have a diary. I haven’ t been able to write in it as much as I would like to but som etim es maybe I’ll find it and I’ll write in it every night for a month, or every other day, and I’ll read back and write. Just kind of read and look over and write in it. And then I w on’ t write in it for a month or two, but then I’ll find it again, read it, then write. I Of the different kinds of writing that you do, is there one that you like best? S Writing letters. That would have to be one kind, or just writing short essays, maybe like three page. Not research papers. I When instructors read your papers, might there be a com m ent or com m ents that are typical, that they make on your papers? You mentioned that the verb and the subject don’ t agree. S Right. Uh-huh. I Are there other things that have been typical in the way of com m ents? 431 S Good or bad? I Both. S Let’s see, maybe, like, formulate a thesis, a thesis that is not too broad or too narrow. Oftentimes I’ll have problems with that. And supporting exactly what my thesis says. Sometimes I have the tendency to wander a little bit. Sometimes I like to com e out with my opinion, which is oftentimes good, but som etim es I’ll do that m ore than I should instead of supporting my thesis with facts and evidence. That’s what my teachers have said about my research papers. I What about these com m ents? Do you think that they are accurate or fair? S Very. I Have they been helpful to you in becoming a better writer? S There’s a lot of teachers that I can think of that I’ve gone back to and gotten help, at least my high school teachers. They have really helped me out a lot. I What about here? S I tried last year in my English class, but I think maybe it w as more on the term s of the basic English, because it was the main English course that-- I English 110. S Yeah. And that w as pretty much . . . Like, instead of working on my thesis with me, he just helped me going back and proofreading. That’s the kind of help that he gave me. I Was that valuable? S It was. I got lazy, though, over the sum m er because I cam e back and sort of forgot all of that. 432 I I’m going to shift gears a little bit on the next few questions. Are you the sort of person that likes to figure out puzzles, those kind of mental or intellectual puzzles? S Yes, but I get frustrated pretty easily when I can ’ t figure it out. I And when you get frustrated, what happens? S Either it will stay on my mind until I figure it out and I’ll find a way to figure it out, or I will find a way not to think about it. I Distractions. S Right. I Is there something that you could talk to me about right now that would be a concrete illustration of your attending to a question, a problem, or a puzzle and trying to solve it, maybe successfully solving it? And it could be a puzzle, a question, or a problem that was academic, it could be personal. If your example was personal, of course, it would be an example that you would feel comfortable talking about. Can you think of something recently that maybe puzzled you and you wondered about it and tried to work through it? S I d on’ t know if this will work. It w asn’ t really a problem, but it was more like a challenge. I OK. S I do n ’ t know. I do n ’ t know. I can’ t think of anything right off my head. I How about if you were to think about the classes you have, especially ’s class. Has there been something that, because of that class or what you have been doing in that class, that you have had to figure something out, that took your attention, your time? That you puzzled over it? S Yeah, I had a quiz in that, and I didn’ t do very well. It didn’ t count but still, I walked out of there . . . I did the reading, and I felt, like, that I did the reading and I was there for the discussions, that I should be able to do pretty well on the quiz. And so when it cam e 433 time about a week and a half or two weeks later for the test over all four plays, I read it, like, twice, and I read it out loud and I thought about it, and I ended up doing pretty well on the multiple choice, which is the part that I thought that I wouldn’ t do very well on, like quotes, “ Who said what to who?" and "What does that mean?" and things like that. When you tend to find yourself trying to solve a puzzle of som e kind, do you have any kind of procedure that you tend to follow? Figuring something happened, a typical way you go about. . . I’ll just tell myself that I have to do it and I’m not going to stop until I figure it out or until I know that I’ ve improved or until I can feel happy or confident with what I’ ve gotten out of it. Do you ever talk to other people, trying to solve one of these intellectual puzzles? No. Not really. So it’s pretty much just yourself, trying to figure it out? Uh-huh. If the problem of the puzzle is personal, is it still the sam e way? You keep it inside of yourself--your resolving things on the inside, your not talking to others--or is that different? Right. It’s still the sam e? W hether it’s academ ic or personal? Right. Before, you mentioned that you do this, and I suppose we all do it. Do you ever spend time wondering about things, what they call "daydreaming"? Are you the sort of person that daydream s? Not really. Like, when I sit down and read, I w on’ t find myself daydreaming. No? 434 S No. I’ll find myself, like, thinking of other things I have to do at that time. I That sounds suspiciously like daydreaming. S It’s not really. I’ll be reading a play, and it’s at night. This is what happened last night. It’s, like, 9:30 and all of a sudden I thought, " I have to go work-out." And so I got up, I put the play down, and I went and worked out. And there’s other things that I thought that I needed to do. I So your example, then, is that something pops into your head . . . S Right. I Which is different from daydreaming. S Yeah, I think, I m ean . . . I I would define daydreaming as those times when all of a sudden we realize that we have been thinking about something for a long period of time and we didn’t intend to spend any time thinking about that thing. S Right. I Som ehow our attention shifted from X and went to Y, and w e’ve been attending to Y for the last five minutes, and then a light goes on and we realize, "Hey, I’ ve been thinking about Y for the last five minutes!" S It do esn ’t really happen that much, but of course it does happen when I’m driving or doing something like that. I It tends not to happen when you read though, you said. S Not really, I don’ t think. If I stop reading it’s because, at least because I get frustrated or tired or I want to get something to drink or I want to go call som eone on the phone or the phone rings or there’s a distraction, like, when my room m ates com e in, you know, things like that. 435 I OK. Do you think, then, that you ever take time, then, if not in a kind of daydream , but take time to think about what you are doing in a class? Do you kind of just ponder over it, and if you do, w hat’s going on when you do this? How would you describe the experience? S Well, I always think about. . . Like, for example, right now I am also taking Argumentation and Debate, and for the past, like, couple of weeks I know that I have a debate coming up. So I will always be thinking about som e of my argum ents, or I don’ t know what I am supposed to be doing, so what am I . . . Or a paper that I have coming up in political science. Just things like that. I Are these thoughts, these conversations, if you will, these interior m onologues, are they very short or do they stretch in time? S For the m ost part they’re not. They’re fairly short. I You don’ t find yourself sitting there thinking about the argum ents for your speech and find yourself doing that for ten minutes straight, then? S Maybe. Maybe if it were something that I would sit down and try to help myself think about it. Yeah. I probably would do that if it’s a big thing. I So it depends upon what you are thinking about? S What it is. Right. I It could be a brief thought or a reminder or it could be real extensive. S Right. I don’ t think that I would sit for ten minutes and think about King Lear and how I don’ t understand what is going on in that. I What about in ’s class? Do you find yourself ever thinking about the content of her class at odd moments, expected moments, or not? S Yes, because I think about, like, a test coming up or a paper, and I’ll try to think of a topic. Like, right now we have a paper that’s due next week, and I have to think of a thesis and something to 436 write about. I want to go in and talk to her about it, so I have to do it soon. So I’ll be thinking what will be interesting or what can I do it on. Do you ever think about the plays them selves? Like what they m ean to me? What you read about in the play: the characters, the plot, the situations . . . Actually, I have been because I think I’ ve picked my idea for my paper, which is catharsis and how when som ebody reads a tragedy, how they’re affected by it. And you were reading Aristotle, correct? Right. So I’m trying to think, "When I read this play, do I feel this way? When I go over this and when I am supposed to feel this way, do I?" You know, som etim es I’ll think that. How would you rate yourself as a listener? When it is interesting, very good. Some days I have three classes in a row, 9:00, 10:00, and 11:00. Some days I’ll think . . . Like, in my philosophy class, which is at eleven, that " I w as interested today." If all my classes were interesting and I got a lot out of them and I w asn’ t distracted because it helped my attention . . . But som etim es when I don’ t understand something, it can ’ t really hold my attention very well. I just get frustrated. OK. What do you tend to do when you are getting frustrated? I’ll just try to figure it out. Like, in King Lear, I just try to look at the words and read it and it won’ t make sense, and then sh e ’ll move on and start talking about something else, and so then I’ll still try to go back to that p assage because sh e’s already talking about the next one, but I still don’ t understand that one and it m eans something to this one. So I’m, like, "Who’s this?" and I don’t understand who the person is o r . . . "Why are they outside?" o r . . . Then I just get frustrated and, towards the end, I’m just confused and I’m sort of, like, "OK, I have sort of found other things to think about." 437 I Well, Shakespearean plays are rather challenging. S They are. I What do you think m akes for a good classroom listener? Any qualities? S Som eone who would be interested. I think that you have to be interested. I Can you m ake yourself or encourage yourself to be interested? S Definitely, I think. I How? S Just by thinking about it. You could stare at a person all you want and you can try to focus your attention on them, but you can’ t really take in much if you don’ t think about it or think about how that applied to you maybe or just try and make it kind of interesting in your mind. Most of the time, that should happen without trying to do it. Like, in philosophy, it’s interesting and you think about, well, "Do I feel this way?" It’s easier in those kind of classes. I So the interest can com e very naturally, but you can also sort of consciously encourage it. S Definitely. I OK. Do you think that listening skills are important to som eone’s su ccess in ’s class? S Yes, because a lot of time, we will go over the play and that is the time when I’ll pretty much get what is going on because I don’ t in the reading. I don’ t really understand the reading one hundred percent, so when she says it, I go, "OK. I rem em ber that. That is what I was confused about. Here’s what she m eans. This is what is m eant by the storm." Something like that. If I w asn’ t listening or concentrating on the lecture, I never would have gotten that information. OK. Do you ever contribute to classroom discussions in the 174 class? Sometimes. How would you define your role when you contribute? Are you answ ering ’s question? Are you . . . Right. I would, or I would be asking questions. OK. In addition, then, to asking your own questions or answering hers, do you ever respond, then, to com m ents m ade by the other students? Not really. Why not? B ecause I think that maybe they all know the play better than I do. I’ll either directly ask her about a part I didn’ t understand . . . So you feel comfortable doing that, making that sort of a comment in a class. Right. Well, a lot of times, I’ll wait for after class or go into her office hours. I’ve been there a couple of times and I feel more comfortable that way. OK. What about if you hear a student make a com m ent and you don’ t agree with it? Are we talking about in any of my classes? Well, thinking in term s o f ’s class, but it could apply to any class, sure. B ecause in her class I haven’ t ever done that, just maybe because I don’ t understand it well enough so I could m ake that. But in other classes . . . Definitely. Like, in som e history classes, if I have an opinion, I’ll say it. If I feel confident with what I am saying. 439 I So, then, I’m getting a picture of you are rarely contributing in a very full way to classroom discussions. You’re answering teacher questions, and if you feel confident with the material you will com m ent on, you will respond to another student’s comment. S Right, but mostly that hasn ’ t really happened. I don’ t feel confident, at least in the past couple of plays. Like, in A Doll’s House I feel like I really contributed and I felt comfortable talking about that play. I Have class discussions dwindled since A Doll's House? S I think so. I So might your experience be similar to som e of the other students? S Possibly. I Do you think that they are having difficulty with the language? S I think that it has changed. It’s not really a class that really relies on participating. But today we had, like, a reading response where we were supposed to go and get a paragraph and analyze the paragraph and talk about what it m eans to the them e, and so all period long that is what we were doing. We were participating. I Right. Which p assag e did you select? S The one by King Lear. Just how he w as talking about his daughters. I His awful daughters. S Yeah. I All right. I asked you if you thought listening, good listening, was important to the 174 class, and you said, "Yes." What about participation in classroom discussions? Are they really important to som eone’s su ccess in this class? S I bet that she would say "Yes" more than students would say "Yes." 440 I OK. Well, forget what she would say. What do you say? S I don’t . . . I think that most of the classes are just her talking about the play, and if a student does participate, som etim es w e’ll read maybe a tiny bit of the play and so people volunteer to be a person or a character, and I think that’s pretty much . . . I So maybe classroom discussion, a student participating in a classroom discussion, isn’ t maybe as important to on e’s su ccess in the class as is the good listening. S Right. I Would that be accurate? S Definitely. I Do you think that a student in ENGL 174 would probably find it helpful to m eet with a tutor on a weekly basis for about an hour to talk about the plays, the assignm ents, the discussions? What do you think? S I think so--that’s assum ing that the tutor knows about the play and understands the play. I Yes. If I were to be the person who w as meeting with you or one of your fellow students for one of these weekly sessions, what advice would you have for me? How could I be helpful to som eone who’s talking ENGL 174? What could I do? S Ju st asking about the reading and to see if they have any questions or problems with the reading itself and--we do reading responses--to see if we have any problem s with those, the reading responses. Those are important; we have to turn in maybe three of those a week. And basically just to concentrate on the reading. I What about the papers you have to write? S We have . . . I Could I be helpful? S Definitely. 441 How so? What might I be able to do there? Ju st to help . . . Coming up with a thesis that fits or a thesis, like, incorporating the plays in it, more than one play. I don’ t know, all three plays o r . . . All right. The question I ask everybody, the last question is would you like to have a weekly appointment with an ENGL 174 tutor? Sure. 442 Interview with Jerry Garner in Introduction to Drama Interviewer How do you feel about being in ’s class? Student I like the class. I really don’ t like English that much. I Well that’s quite a compliment, I suppose, to the instructor. You like the class but not the content. S Yeah. I don’ t think my writing skills are very good, that’s why . . . I Have you ever taken a course similar to hers? A course that focused on dram a? S Not necessarily focused on drama, but did have dram a in there. I Can you give me an example o f . . . S I’ve read Oedipus Rex before and I’ve read Macbeth and other plays like that. I And where did you read these things? S In high school. I In high school. A ll right. What kind of feelings did you have about those classes? Good feelings? Bad feelings? S Just like, a required-class-that-you-kind-of-have-to-go-to-it-to-go-to- college type feeling. I A ll right. You took your medicine. S Yeah. Yeah, I took my medicine. Exactly. I What do you th in k wants you to do in her class? S I’m not really sure. I think, I think she wants us to understand drama, and by that I mean, like, to be able to interpret dramatic them es or just look below the surface of them es rather than just reading the play and go, "Hey, that’s about this." Not just the surface. 443 I Now you’re rereading, then, Oedipus. Is that on her reading list or is it not? S Yeah. I It is, isn’ t it? I know, as I recall her reading syllabus, she had you first read Ibsen, A Doll’s House, and then you’re going back to, then you went to Oedipus? Is that what you’re reading? S Yeah. I So have you finished Oedipus? S Yes, w e’re finished Oedipus and then we read Lysistrata. I OK. Any difference between your reading Oedipus now and your reading Oedipus before in high school? S I feel, I feel there’s a difference because I feel like I’m learning more in college than high school. I Tell me how. What sorts of things, maybe, have you learned that you w eren’ t learning before? S I think I’m just m ore focused on the readings. Like before, I’d just read it, then I go, "OK, yeah, I’m ready for the test." And now I can read it and, even after the test, I know what I’ve read and I’ll still . . . Like, from classes last year, I understand what I read, and I understand the material more. I So an increased sen se of understanding. S Mm-hm. I Do you think, then, th a t_______ has stated her goals for the class in her syllabus? This goal that you’ve just described to me--to be able to read for dramatic them es, to read below the surface. Is that in her syllabus? S I can ’ t really remember, to be honest with you. I What ab o u t- 444 I rem em ber only her requirements. The requirements are we have exam s and, I think, a reading-below-the-surface type deal would be put into her exam and com e out in the essays on the exam and . . . So you might say you’re inferring the need to read below the surface by way of other things that sh e ’s asking you to do? Right. Right. Rather than her directly saying, "And it’s most important-for you to be successful in this class--for you to read below the surface." She hasn ’ t said that, then? No, she hasn ’ t said that specifically. OK. But you still think that’s what is m ost important in her class? I think so. I think so. OK. What do you think is the most important skill for a person to p o ssess to be successful in her class? Good writing skills. Good writing skills. A ll right. Do you think you p o ssess this skill? You said no, that you . . . I don’ t think so. I don’ t think I have them. How would you describe yourself as a writer? I think I’m about just kind of an average writer. Like in high school, I never really was prepared to write papers or anything, like papers we had to write were only one to two pages or research papers. And those were a lot different than writing for English papers. Like I’m recalling last year, for my Intro to English, Intro to Writing papers, I didn’ t do too well on those, and I did spend a lot of time on them. But it just seem s like the English teachers always have something else in mind than what I, you know, have in mind. 445 Hmm. Maybe w e’ll com e back to that. Do you enjoy reading literature? Yes. It’s not my favorite subject. Like, I’d rather read political science books, considering it’s my major. I’d rather read stuff about that than read . . . But I have no problems with reading these dramatic plays. I like, I like a lot of them. What about your reading habits? Do you have reading habits? If so, what are they like? Describe them to me. Yeah, I have habits, I think. I read . . . What are they? Well, like, do you m ean assigned readings? That, and is that all that. . . You know, som e people read when they’re told to read. Well, I do. I read all my assigned readings. Last year, I didn’t have anything unread that w asn’ t assigned. And plus, I do other pleasurable readings, like I read the paper or, over the summer, I read som e political science books. But. . . Magazines? Yeah, I read m agazines. Just basically like Life issues or stuff like that. OK. Popular magazines. Yeah. Do you ever read Newsweek, Time? Sometimes. It depends, like, if I’m sitting in the store, I see something I like and I’ll buy it. I’ll read it o r . . . How frequently do you read? And thinking it, answering the question maybe both in term s of academ ic reading and then non- academ ic reading. 446 S Academic reading I read all the time, which you kind of have to because of all the assigned readings. Non-academic reading I don’ t read as much. Probably half, less than half as much, I’d say. I Let’s say during the sum m er when you’re not taking classes, if you’re not taking . . . How much might you read during the sum m er? S I did read a book that was pretty long during this last summer, but I think that w as ’cause my job was so boring. I You don’ t read, then, necessarily daily. You’re not a daily reader. S No. I wouldn’ t say I’m a daily reader. I OK. Do you ever ask yourself questions while you’re reading? S Yeah, I do all the time. Like if I’m reading something, if I go back to political science, like if I’m reading something, it’ll say an issue then I’ll try to, som etim es I’ll say, "Oh, yeah, well maybe that’s why, you know, Iraq is the way it is today" or "Maybe that’s why there’s dictators, you know, being overthrown" and stuff like that. I Because you like political science, it’s your major, and you’re most interested in it- S Well that’s not the only subject I’m, I ask questions-- I What about Oedipus, you just finished, too. Were you asking yourself questions as you read Oedipus? S I asked myself questions like, "Should I try to g e t . . ." OK, I’m reading a lot of Oedipus. Something happened to Oedipus, and I’ll try to parallel that with something else, like maybe this issue is related to this issue. I just ask questions, like within the play. I do that a lot. I What are you reading right now? You just finished it. Have you started another play? 447 Yeah, we just finished Lysistrata and I ask questions like, "Well, what is she going to ask on the quiz?" I’m trying to say, "OK, is that important?" Let’s see, what other questions were there . . . But clearly you ask questions while you read. Yeah, yeah. I notice I do that all the time. Do you ever write them down anywhere? No. OK. So you don’ t jot— Maybe in the margins, I’ll do a lot of stars or asterisks and brackets. I do a lot of brackets. But you don’ t literally write the question down in the book. No. OK. Why do you put, what do you think the importance or value might be to reading literature. I suppose I should say, do you think there is a value or importance? If so, what? Oh, there’s an importance. Maybe, interpretive skills, I think, are probably one of the most important, especially for Intro to Drama, I think. Analytical skills, analyzing situations. I think those are probably the two pretty most important situations. Maybe communicational skills also. All right. Those are good reasons. You’ ve indicated that you don’ t think you’re a strong writer. Rather, probably, an average writer. Do you ever enjoy writing? Has it ever been pleasurable? You mean, to sit down and write a paper? Sit down and maybe write anything. You know, there’s n o t. . . I g uess w e’ ve divided reading into maybe two major groups-- academ ic reading and pleasure reading. Do you ever write because you want to write rather than writing because, maybe in the academ ic setting, you’ve been told you have to write? I don’ t think so. I think I usually, I think m ost of my writing is due to the fact that I’m assigned to write. OK. A ll right. You’re responding to a written assignm ent. Right. Or writing a letter, I sit down to write letters. That’s what I was going to ask. Do you write letters? To friends or relatives and stuff. I do that. How often do you write letters? Not very. I probably wrote five last sem ester. OK. Have you ever been a journal keeper? No. OK, diaries, journals, none of that. No. No. All right. When teachers read your writing, what sorts of things do they usually say about your writing in response to it? They say I inflate my prose. Seem s like they all say that. Which, I really can ’ t help it. It’s just, like, the way I write. I don’ t know. Big words or something. Instead of saying it an easy way, I say it a harder way. How long have they been telling you this? Real long. Real long. Do you think that’s a fair or accurate observation on their part? I kind of separate English writing from different types of writing. English writing, you have to . . . They want you to write like you speak normally, and I guess I really don’ t do that. Like, when I go to write a paper or something, I shift words, like, different phrases com e to my head when I’m just, say, like, talking to som eone else. 449 I think that’s where I run into trouble in English writing. That’s my main problem right there. But when the English teacher m akes this sort of a remark on one of your papers, that your prose style is too "inflated"--! think that’s the word you u se d -d o you think that that’s a fair statem ent? Do you, how do you react to that comment, that criticism? What’s your response to it? Kind of, it kind of m akes me mad because . . . I don’ t know. I’ve thought about that actually from my first English class. That really m ade me mad when he’d say things like that and . . . Can I assum e, then, that the comment did not cause you to change or to-- Oh, yes. I tried, I tried to, you know, look at something, say, "OK, well I’m just gonna say it simply instead of just trying to go around and say it," like a harder way of using bigger words or whatever, whatever I do. I try to, I have tried to tone that down. OK. I do take their advice. Yeah, that’s what I was kind of getting at. Would you say, then, that teacher com m ents on your writing have ever been helpful to you? Yeah, I think they are. . . . just said that to keep in the present tense when analyzing a drama, and I’ ve tried to do that. This last o n e-an d I kept it in the present tense for the first part of the paper--the last part I went out again and started using past tense and, of course, she caught me. I’m sure next time on paper I’ll, I’ll try to keep it through the whole way. OK, and so that seem s like a fair criticism, and you want to respond to it and you’re trying to and it might be helpful. Mm-hm. OK. I’m gonna shift gears a little bit here, the next sort of the set of questions are a little different, shifting away from your writing, 450 yourself as a writer. Do you enjoy solving, and for lack of a better phrase, mental or intellectual puzzles? Yeah, I think I do. I consider it a challenge. OK. Can you give me an example m aybe? Or maybe a recent example of a mental or intellectual puzzle you’ve engaged in and attem pted and maybe succeeded in solving? Mmm. Intellectual puzzle . . . A problem . . . I really can ’ t think of one right now. Let’s focus, you know, ’cause the whole point of our conversation really today is specific to your English 174 course. Have there been any intellectual puzzles or challenges presented to you there? Just maybe reading a play, trying to understand what its meaning is and what its relevance is, actually. I try to understand its relevance. But, urn, I think interpreting the plays is probably what I try to do. All right. OK. When you’re trying to solve the puzzle, one of these kinds of intellectual or mental puzzles, do you think you have the procedure, maybe, that you follow? Do you go about puzzle solving in a particular way? Things you maybe do to try and solve questions, riddles, puzzles, conundrum s? I don’ t think there’s any real . . . Steps. Yeah. I don’ t think there’s any real m ethod I use to solve a problem. Maybe just understanding the question and then trying to, "OK, I understand the question. Now m aybe try and get som e data to back that up to, urn . . ." Actually, maybe there is. About writing a paper, a lot of times, I try to get like a thesis and then back that up. I do n ’ t know, and m aybe it’s a m ethod step process I use. It’s a method. OK. So you have a general statem ent and so you try to assem ble som e facts, som e information that would support that statem ent? Is that what you m ean? 451 S Yes. I OK. Do you ever use conversation with other persons as a way to m aybe tease out an answ er to a puzzle? S Not really. Not really. I like studying alone. Like group studying, maybe, I think that’s what you’re getting at, or I don’ t know if . . . But maybe group studying. I really don’ t like that that much. I like, I like studying alone. Last year for D r. , I did study in a group. I ’s midterm and final questions. S Yeah. But I found out that I ended up doing all the work, so that’s the reason why I do n ’ t like studying in groups ’cause I don’ t like other people taking my work. ’C ause I do work hard. I I’m familiar w ith ’s class and his questions, so . . . S I know. I did almost all the final questions and two people in there, they only did two questions and it really m ade me mad. I Well, I hope you picked all, som e of yours and not the two they did. S Yeah, I picked one of mine and one of theirs. I What about if we shift from maybe academ ic puzzles to maybe puzzles that are more personal. If there’s something that you’re puzzling over in your own life, do you think in that situation, you engage in conversation with others as a way to figure out, "What am I going to do here? How am I going to handle this?" S Yeah. I think I do. My friends will talk about a problem or something, you know? We’ll have like a mutual problem or something like that and w e’ll talk about it. I So for things personal, you probably feel comfortable-- S Around my closer friends. I OK. Seeking out conversation with other persons to air the issues, what is it, listen to what they say? 452 Yeah. But not things academic, though. Not really academically. I don’ t think so. Not academically. OK. All right. Well, that’s not totally true. My one friend I talk to, he’s pretty smart, and som etim es w e’ll talk about. . . Like, he’ll have a class, like he h a d ’s class . . . Like, "What does she think about this?" or something like that. Maybe that’s cheating, I don’ t know, b u t. . . No. You’re collecting information, I would say. That’s a little different from puzzle solving, though. You’re trying to figure out Oedipus and who is he, what is he about, why d oes he behave the way he does? You could ask yourself all those questions and try and figure out answ ers to them on your own and, in addition to that, you could also talk to others. "What do you think Oedipus is all about? What do you think? Why do you think he does the things he does? Why do you think he d o esn ’ t heed the warnings?" You know? That’s what I w as getting at. And your answ er w as clear: No, you tend not to do that; you try and answer them on your own, you know. OK. Do you ever spend time, do you ever notice yourself or, you might say, catch yourself spending time wondering about things, maybe som etim es called daydreaming about things? Yeah, I guess I do sometimes. I’m going to assum e, like m ost people, you daydream about personal things, things that are personal to you. Yeah, or a lot of times I’ll think ahead what I’m going to be doiqg. I go, "OK, I got this to do, this to do, this to do. I have a half hour to do this." I do that a lot. So, then, do you som etim es find yourself, although you didn’ t plan to, you actually find . . . You realize you’ ve been thinking about something. You didn’ t plan to think about it, but you realize, nevertheless, maybe the last minute, you’ ve been thinking about it. 453 Yeah. Are those things that you think about som etim es academ ic things? Or sometimes, never, ever? Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes . . . Have you been pondering about things in ’s class? I usually try to ponder on what I think sh e ’s going to ask. Like, I have read the Poetics, and today I was thinking, in my dram a, in my, um--not my dram a class, but my debate class--l w as thinking, like, "I wonder what sh e ’s gonna ask?" and I was trying to remember, what I rem em bered about the readings. Mm-hm. Thinking about catharsis and . . . I’ll have to go back and . . . I realize I’ll have to go back and study that, so . . . Let’s move on to another section. How would you rate yourself as a listener? I listen well. What are the features, characteristics, or qualities of a good listener? Paying attention, maybe not daydreaming as much, which is hard if you’re not interested in the subject. But, I do tend to listen pretty well. Do you think you’re a good academ ic or classroom listener? Yeah. What are som e of the-- I try to pay attention to the teacher. I’m always staring at them. I bug them a lot. But that’s just the way I listen. It’s like I’ll watch them the whole time, and it keeps me focused on the subject. So, good visual contact you maintain? 454 S I think so. I OK. Any other things that you maybe do to promote good listening skills when you are in the classroom , other than this visual contact? S Urn. Not really. Not really. I OK. Do you think that listening skills really-m aybe good listening skills— are important to your or anyone’s su ccess in ’s class? Is that a really important skill to have in her class in order to be successful? Why not? S Um . . . Let me think. I think the answer would probably be on how many times she repeats the, her information. She do esn ’ t really repeat it very much, so you kind of do have to pay attention because once she says something, um, she d o esn ’ t really go back to it. There is only one thing I can think of that she has repeated a couple times, which is "dramatic irony." I Um-hm. S And, um, that’s . . . She do esn ’ t really repeat things very much. I OK. A good listener would also know that she had said that several times before. He might be able to figure out what from that? S Um, that it’s going to be on the test. I Yeah, [laughter] S When they repeat it— that’s another thing that I do--when they repeat it, like I try to write it down, when they repeat it again, I do write it down twice. Because when I am going through my notes studying, I go, "OK, this guy asked . . . He said this thing three times." You know, that is kind of obvious that it is going to be on the test. I OK. What about classroom discussions? Are you a contributor? S Um, sometimes. 455 ’s class? Um, if I know the answer. She asks a question- If I know the answ er I’ll raise my hand. So far she kind o f . . . She picks on me a lot. So I really don’ t have to-- How does she do that? I don’ t know. You’re right there. That’s why. [laughter] Maybe that’s it. I, um, I contribute, once in a while. I’m going to maybe assum e, then, correct me if I’m wrong, that you haven’ t been raising your hand to ask her questions. Or have you? No, I haven’ t really. OK. What about when other students either answ er her questions or ask her questions? Do you, have you ever, um, engaged in that conversation, jumped in: n Oh, I thought that too" or "I had that question," you know? No, I really won’ t. If I agree with the person, I won’ t say anything, but som etim es if I disagree, then I will say something. Have you, has there been any occasion to do that? Not in her class. Not in her class. But in my first English class I did that a lot. B ecause I didn’t agree with what he was saying. "He" being the instructor or a fellow student? The instructor. 456 The instructor. All right. So, given the right kind of situation, you might be the kind of classroom contributor who disagrees with what you hear said in the class? Right. But if I agree I probably w on’ t raise my hand and say, "Yeah, I agree." OK. Um, do you think that conversation skills, participation skills, are important to your success in her class? I think, I think that they’re . . . She says that they’re important. She has. She says that participation is part of the, part of the requirement. But I don’ t think that that is true. Why? Ju st because she grades . . . She has the essays and she has the exams. I think that is what she is going to base her grade on. I don’t think she really b ases it on how many times a person talks in a class or not. Besides the g ra d e - The reason I think that is the, my freshman English class. He said that participation counts a lot, and I raised my hand a lot, and I would talk and stuff-- But you were always disagreeing with him. [laughter] Yes, I did disagree with him a lot. You’ ve got to rem em ber that. At least I was one of the only people in the class that contributed anything, and then when it cam e to the end, he didn’ t . . . Like participation do esn ’t m ean anything really. It just gives them . . . If you participate, then all they think is, "OK, this guy has participated." Maybe get on their good side a little bit. But, you know, they’re not going to bump your grade up for it or anything. Is there anything else besides maybe helping your grade, or being told it’s going to help your grade, is there som e other possible 457 value to being a classroom contributor, taking part in classroom discussions? S It might help you listen, pay attention, if you’re going to get engaged, so you will be involved in the material. I OK. Anything else? Any other possible benefit? S Um . . . I Those are good reasons. I’m trying to see if there might be - something else. S I don’t think so. Besides the debating skills. I Do you think that a student, any student, would find it helpful if the student were to m eet with som eone weekly, um, sitting down with that person and basically having conversation with that person about the content of a course--what was being talked about in the class, what w as being read about, the assignm ents you were involved in, thinking about, and completing? S I think that that would help. I OK. S It would give a different view, like besides just my, my narrow view on the reading. Like another interpretation of the reading. I think that that might help. I Any other reason it might be helpful, besides another perspective? S Not that I can think of. I OK. If som eone were to work with a student-som ebody like me, for instance, a student in ’s English 174 class--what advice would you have for me, let’s say, in working with one of the students? What could I do to be really helpful to that student? Meeting the student every week to talk about the class? S Maybe ask the student questions about the reading, like, what they think about it, and then, I guess that maybe meaning, your 458 big perspective on the reading, and discussing the issues on . . . Maybe he’s closer to the real interpretation of the issue. I OK. I end all of these sessions by asking this question: would you be interested in having a weekly meeting with a tutor for English 174? S Um, yeah, I probably would. I OK. All right. The one thing I should say is that, the model that we promote in the Learning Resource Center, the tutoring model, is one based on questions. So that is to say, I think when you work with one of the tutors you might sense, "Well, I think I know what she thinks about she thinks about Oedipus or whatever," but we try not to have our tutors sit down and merely tell a student, "Well, this what I think the play is about" or "This is what I think the book is about" or "No, I don’ t think you’re quite on the track; this is the right interpretation." Rather than approach tutoring that way, which we think is the wrong way, our approach is: we might be mentally thinking, "I think this student doesn’ t quite understand what is really important in this text, he hasn ’ t really figured out the significance of this character, or do esn ’t understand w hat’s happening in the scene, or this act of the play." You might be, as a tutor, thinking these things, but probably not saying that to the student, but rather creating questions that would get the student, by way of answering one if not a whole series of questions, that "Maybe I really didn’ t understand what that second act w as all about. Maybe my view of that character needs reconsideration. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all. Maybe I didn’ t realize that he was trying to balance these sorts of worries and concerns off against these." It is always through questions leading the student with the tutor to a new perspective, this perspective I think you were alluding to. I wouldn’ t want you to say, "Yes, I would like to have tutoring" thinking that if you are going to m eet each week the tutor is going to be saying- S Giving me the answ ers? No . . . I Yeah, yeah. But in a way w e’re leading you to answ ers by way of questions. That is our role; that is what we are trying to do. And then, sort of in the long run, encourage you to start becoming even more questioning than you already are. So that you can maybe becom e m ore autonom ous as a learner. 459 Interview with Amy Heine in Introduction to Poetry Interviewer You’re in 170, aren’ t you? Student Mm-hm. I How do you feel about being in the 170 class? S Well, obviously required for me to get my major, but I like it. I like the subject a lot. I took poetry in high school but I wanted to see what they teach it like in college. I What was your experience with reading and dealing with poetry in high school? S I had a really hard English teacher, so we got pretty nitty-gritty into it. ’C ause I went to a college prep school so it was really hard, and we got into the major author or the writers of the poem s. I So was your experience a good one, do you think? S Mm-hm. I OK. S It was just hard. I was kind of reluctant to take the class because I didn’ t want to go through what I did in high school, but out of all the choices, this one looked the best. I Good. What do you th in k wants you to do in her class? S I think she wants us to be able to identify specific authors in the poem s and be able to understand poem s, the different types there are, and to be pretty well knowledgeable, if som eone brings up an author, to be able to associate the author with the poem and what they’re trying to say. I Do you think sh e ’s reinforced these things in terms of her oral presentation, these goals? S Mm-hm. I think she has. She’s been pretty thorough with what she said in the syllabus and then taught, like, our assignment, our 460 half-hour assignm ents in the next class period. So she seem s to be following it. What do you think is the single m ost important skill for a student to have to be successful in this poetry class? I need to have an open mind in the poem s and not take it so . . . Like, there’s so many meanings in the poem s and to be open- minded to other people’s suggestions. Two people could interpret it entriely different. I think that’s . . . She stresses that a lot ’cause she always tells us every class that her opinion isn’ t the right opinion just ’cause sh e ’s the teacher. Everyone has their own opinion. OK. How do you rate yourself, then, in this area? I think since I like poetry and I’ ve read poetry, I think I’m generally a pretty open-minded person, that I feel, like, it’s good that I can handle that in the class and that I do that. I respect other people’s opinions. Do you like to read literature? Yeah, I like reading a lot. I’ ve read a lot, like, ever since I was small so it just adds to it. That’s why I like English literature. How would you describe your reading habits? Mostly they’re just fictional, not really autobiographical. More like The Red Dragon, kind of like movie books and stuff, leisure books, stuff I can read on the job. Pleasure books. Yeah. Pleasure reading. Not too, you know, challenging but occasionally, like, I’ll read Steinbeck books. Do you read other sorts of things. I mean, do you read the new spaper? 461 S Oh, yeah. I read the L.A. Times, like, front to back. I did that every day this summer. I What about m agazines? S Not usually. I usually don’ t really like m agazines that much. I pick them up and I usually skim it but I don’ t really read it read it. I A ll right. When you’re reading literature, and m aybe if we think in term s of poetry in ’s class, do you ever ask yourself questions while you’re reading? S Q uestions in the sen se of what it m eans to me and what, like, what the words are saying or just. . . I Well, just that you’re in a questioning mode, I suppose, that as you read you are formulating questions, you are asking yourself questions. S Yeah, I think I do that because it’s really hard to understand Old English and a lot of the sonnets are in Old English and you have to ask yourself questions, what it m eans, or else you’re not going to . . . If you passively read something, you’re not going to understand it and so I have to write things down and look things up because I don’ t understand what they’re saying the first time. And she always tells us, "You’ll never understand it the first time. You have to read it about ten times to understand it." I Where do you write things down? S In the columns in the book. I All right. What value, do you think, might there be to reading literature? S I think specifically it being maybe applying it to your own personal life ’cause a lot of it directly focuses on love problem s and soical problem s and stuff like that, and I think that helps us to see that other people are thinking the sam e thing. Literature, I think, I don’ t know, it can give you an idea of more knowledge, becoming more, I d on’ t know, seeing things for the first time when you read som ething you w eren't aware of, like, in the new spaper. I think 462 that broadens your horizons to be able to talk about more things and be more knowledgeable. I You mentioned you like to read Steinbeck. S Mm-hm. I W hat’s the value of reading Steinbeck to you personally? S I read a lot in high school, that’s the first time I read Steinbeck, and, I don’ t know, I just thought it w as really interesting the way he looked at things in life, like the migration of people and how it affected culture and stuff. I think that was really interesting. I don’ t know why I find it interesting. I like his characters a lot. I can relate to them, I think, their humor, and I think that’s why. So when you relate to something personally, you like it better than if you can ’ t relate to it at all. So I think that’s why I like Steinbeck. I OK. What about your writing habits? How would you describe yourself as a writer? S I went to the Learning Resource Center all the time last year ’cause I could not do grammar. I cannot, I do not know where to put a comma, and I don’ t know where I lost that information. I don’ t think I ever picked it up in high school. They just assum ed I knew it and I didn’ t know it. So I was in here a lot. I had really good ideas and I can organize the paragraphs and put them down on paper and I do n ’ t have a problem saying what I want to say, it’s just making it grammatically correct, and so I get really bad grades on my papers, like C ’s, because all the punctuation was mixed up but the idea was good. So I fixed that last year. Hopefully, I can use that this year. I Well that sounds good that you fixed it. S I know. I I’m pleased to hear that. But what about the act of writing? Do you enjoy writing? S Mm-hm. I’ ve been writing a lot, like diaries and journals ’cause I travel a lot, so my mom always m ade me write down what I was doing. So she stressed it a lot, my mom, and then it just kind of 463 becam e habit that I’d write things down. So I’ve done a lot of writing. I Not punctuating as you wrote down. S I think a lot of, like, stream -of-consciousness writing, ignoring all rules and regulations. I What about when your professors, when they read your writing, what are the typical sorts of things they might say about your writing? S Sometimes . . . Well it depends how much work I put into it. If it w as som ew hat of a last minute paper, I don’ t think I back up my points as well. . . because you can ’ t really, in a last minute paper, do that. But pretty much I have good ideas but som ethim es I don’ t think, like, not express it as well, but I could have said it in a shorter am ount of time than what I said. Like, I’d say three sentences com pared to one sentence. That w as good because that helped me, like, make things more concise instead of rambling on. I Do you think their remarks have been for the m ost part accurate or fair? S Well I haven’ t had a really good experience with my English teachers last year. This was the first year that I actually- I Who did you have? S I h a d a n d . . . . The first time she w as really good but I w as also a freshman and coming out of a really hard English class and I thought I could totally, you know, "Oh, I got a B." And I got a C, and it w as kind of a shocker and I think she w as very opinionated and I just had a hard time. I pulled off a B, but I was in there every time after an essay going, "Why did you do this? Why did you do that?" and I think that w as really hard for me because I don’ t think she was very open-minded and I cam e in here a lot. Everyone knew who she was and had to help me out on the papers giving me moral support ’cause I was, like, "Why am I getting this?" And then my second teacher. . . I wrote one paper for the entire year or entire sem ester, and that’s just stupid 464 ’cause you can ’ t get a feel for what the teacher wants ’cause you’re kind of writing for the teacher in a way. I Which course w as that? S It w as fiction, I guess. I Tell me it w asn’ t writing fiction. S No. I love writing fiction. Actually, I can’ t even rem em ber what I wrote on. That’s really awful b u t. . . He gave me a B -/C +, and I think I worked so hard on that paper and I cam e here to get it proofread but I don’ t think he and I understood the sam e things. We looked at things very differently. Oh, I remember, we were writing on a short story we had to analyze. . . . I don’ t think I quite said what I wanted to, b u t. . . I I’m not sure if that’s a commentary on your paper or on the short story. S I don’ t know why, and we didn’ t get to pick what we wanted, and I think you should be able to pick one. The paper I’m going to write now for English, we had to pick a sonnet, and I think . . . ’C ause certain stories people can relate better to and I felt. . . I These are Shakespearean sonnets or not? S Some. You can pick som e Shakespearean, som e Spenser, som e, urn, I don’ t rem em ber the other ones, but I think that helped a lot to do that ’cause som e just click. I All right. Do you think a teacher’s com m ents on your writing have ever been really helpful to you? S I’d have to g iv e som e credit. She did put som e com m ents that helped me structure, like, structure-wise in my essay. Maybe I should have put this paragraph after what I said or before, and that helped a lot. But I think what’s more devastating is som eone who puts six hours in their paper and gets their whole idea shot down, and it’s not b ecause the ideas are wrong, it’s just because they don’ t believe in them, and that’s really, that w as really hard to deal with, and I just kind of overcam e that and said, "Well, I’m gonna write what I can write, and whatever she gives me she 465 gives me because i can ’ t do anything better than that." But she, I think, from structure point of view, she gave som e pretty good comments. I OK. I’m gonna shift gears here. The next kind of set of questions are a little different. Would you say that you’re the kind of person who enjoys solving, and for lack of a better phrase, mental or intellectual puzzles? Do puzzles intrigue you? Do you find-- S Well, on a mathematical sense, no, ’cause I don’t . . . I Well, I’m not thinking necessarily mathematical. You know, like puzzles that are, maybe puzzles pertaining to situations, to people, to events. S Yeah. Very much so. I’m a psych major, so I like those puzzles a lot. Yeah, it intrigues me. I like to know why something happened and what cuased it and how can you fix it. I OK. Is there maybe a recent example, one that you feel comfortable talking about? It could be an academ ic example of getting involved and trying to figure out what caused it and why did it happen. So your example could be academ ic or maybe more personal but one, if it’s personal, you feel comfortable talking about. Have you been involved in solving a puzzle? S Yeah. During high school, I had a lot of friends that som ehow got them selves in trouble and I think I was . . . For the m ost part, I listened, but then once you start listening a lot, you kind of want to know why they’re doing that and then you want to kind o f . . . They’re your friends; you kind of want to m ake it better. And I had a lot of people that were into drug problems and . . . it taught me a lot of, like, what to say, not to say, and the best thing you can do is listen. But I think that’s probably because I want to be a psych major; it’s, like, why people do this and stuff like that. And I think also I have friends . . . That’s another thing, I wonder why they behave the way they do and why they say things they do when they know they’re saying something that’s malicious and I don’ t know if they m ean it or they don’ t mean it but I want to know why they mean it. So I’ ve had stuff like that. A lot of friends have com e to me and talked to me and they’re counting on me to say something and, a little stressful, but I like doing that a lot. 466 How about with your classes? Do you think that you have a tendency to approach your classes, the content of your classes, as puzzles to be solved or not? I mean, I’ ve always got what I have to get, but I’ve done it just ’cause I know I had to do it. . . . You could tell,the subjects I liked; I would get an A, and the subjects I didn’ t like, I’d get a C or a B just because I didn’ t put too much effort. This year, I found myself doing that in classes. Now that they’re getting harder and more towards my major, the classes that are in my major, even though they’re hard, I find myself really intrigued and want to know why that happened and that helps a lot in studying. It’s a lot easier; you’re not fighting yourself. You d on’ t really want to do it but you have to do it; I think that’s helping me. It started to happen this year; it’s kicked in. OK. Do you ever. . . You’ ve already said that you engage in conversation with others. Frequently they engage in conversation with you, using you maybe as som eone to help them solve their puzzles. What about going the other direction? Do you seek out the conversation of others when you’re trying to figure som ething out? Yeah. I think it’s hard som etim es when you have a problem ’cause you’re the one w ho’s in the problem, and you want som eone else w ho’s not as biased as you and can look at it from a totally different angle. And I think I have a tendency to do that ’cause I cam e from a really small school, so I have a lot of close friends I still keep in contact and they . . . You know, you grow up with som eone they know and they can look and see you . . . and say, "OK, this is maybe what it could be." So I know I go to people a lot. All right. Do you ever do that, though, with academ ic problem s or puzzles? Yeah. I find m yself. . . It’s better. I can study better. Like, after I’ ve reviewed it, I can study better with som eone by talking it out and explaining it ’cause that always helps your memory, and I’m really into study groups. That helps. OK. Do you ever think that--and w e’re shifting gears once again here with this question-do you ever think that, do you ever catch 467 yourself, maybe find yourself drifting off, maybe not drifting off, but you realize that you’ ve been thinking about something for the past four minutes? You hadn’ t intended to think about that thing, but you realize retrospectively, "Gosh, I’ve been thinking about that for four or five minutes." S Yeah. And especially, I mean, particularly in classes. I don’ t know which ones but they . . . I have a tendency to do that in certain classes. Like, something the teacher will say will spark something in your mind. You’ll rem em ber this then you kind of, like, continue on until something the teacher says jars you back into reality, and I found that occasionally. I do that. Depends how tired I am. I Do you think, though, that you som etim es turn this pondering, wondering, if not daydreaming behavior, do you ever turn it to things that are pretty much purely academ ic, where instead of maybe going away from the academ ic focus, you’re pondering, thinking about at odd moments, things academ ic? S Yeah, I think in all my classes they touch on som ething that I’m interested in, so when they say something, I’ll start thinking, "Well, why did that happen?" or maybe "How?" or "What w as it like to live back like that?" Da-da-da-da-da. And that. . . I’ve done that, too. I kind of take in little breaks but not about, like, social things or personal things, more thinking about what the teacher had said and that kind of sparks an interest and I’ll continue on that thought. I You m eander with the thought. S Right. Go more in depth with it than the teacher does. I All right. What about in this poetry class? Do you think you’ve been spending time kind of thinking about it at odd m om ents or musing over som e of the poem s o r . . . S In class or out of class? I Out of class. S Well, w e’ve kind of had a . . . We’ ve been required to do that. I mean, she wants us to do that to pick our topic. But I think a lot of times, ’cause the person I live with really likes poetry too, so it’s 468 kind of, kind of strikes up a conversation for som e reason. We’re, like, "Oh, yeah, we read that" or something like that. I think something will remind me of it and I’ll think of the poem because I really . . . A lot of them are really love poem s and trouble poem s and break-up poem s and everyday things that happen. It kind of sparks a thought. How would you rate yourself as a listener? I mean, you got, in a way, you have answ ered that. Sounds like you’re a good listener. You have all your, many of your friends com e and talk to you, but do they have good reason to com e to you? Are you a good listener? I think so. I think also ’cause I’ ve been through a lot of what they’ ve been through, so I can relate to them more, like, empathize than sympathize, and I think people can feel the difference when som eone says, "Oh, I know how you feel" com pared to, "Oh, I’ ve been through that, you know, and I understand that." And, so I’d say it has a lot to do with past experience, but I’m also really curious to how they’re feeling, so I think that kind of m akes you a good listener when you want to know what they’re feeling instead of just listening to yourself talk. So, I’d say yeah. Are you a good classroom listener? Most of the time, yeah. I think m ost. . . It goes back to if I’m interested in it or not, and if I have a good teacher ’cause I’ve had really good teachers this sem ester, so I’m pretty clued in to what they’re saying. But when a teacher has a . . . Like last year’s teacher. I couldn’ t focus on anything they were saying so I’d start writing, like--this is really b ad -b u t I’d start, like, writing letters to other people because I couldn’ t stand being in class but I had to be there ’cause else I’d get docked on my grade. So that was kind of a no-win situation, but I didn’ t retain anything from that class. It has a lot to do with the teacher. If they like it, you can tell they like it. That’s affected me a lot in my classes. What do you think m ake for good classroom listening skills? I m ean, what are the qualities or characteristics of a good classroom listener? Can you name som e things? 469 S Well, obviously listening. Well, noticing what the teacher’s doing on the board if they write on the board, and noticing or listening to what the teacher has to say, like, the important points they talk over a couple times. Usually they review, like, three times important points; they’ll say it over again. But also, I think, what other people have to say because if you’re in a class that talks a lot-m ost of the classes I’m in, they have a lot of participants that talk a lo t-a lot of students have more, you understand what a student is saying better than you do som etim es what the teacher’s saying ’cause they can put it on your level, like, "Oh, so they’re saying, like, this," so and so and so. And so that helps ’cause I listen to what my friends say a lot in the classes and then I’ll be like, "Oh yeah, I rem em ber you saying that in class," and that kind of helps me rem em ber it. 1 don’t think it’s just listening to the teacher; it’s also listening to other people, what they have to say, too. I All right. How about yourself as a contributor to classroom discussions? S Actually, I’ ve always been really verbal in English for som e reason. I think it’s the kind of, type of topic you have to be. But in other classes, such as geography, I’m - I Cultural Geography w ith ? S Yeah. . . . The whole class really isn’ t that verbal so I . . . I’m not really interested in the subject, so I kind of just go with the flow and get the fifty minutes over with. . . . Unless there’s something that really bothers me and I’m totally clueless, I’ll raise my hand. I’m not scared to raise my hand. I’ll just be, like, "I don’ t understand. Can you explain that to me?" So I don’ t have a problem really doing that, but I think I participate a lot. English is the one I participate the most in, actually. I How would you define your role as a participant? What kind of things do you say? Can you categorize them ? You said you will ask a question if you don’ t understand. S Right. Also, my interpretation of things or a response to som ebody else’s ’cause I like debating so . . . Like, som eone will say something and I’ll disagree with it, but I’ll be, like, " I can see their point. I can see where they’re coming from, but this is also 470 the way I see it." So not, like, to make them mad or anything at me, ’cause I had that happen in English. . . . and the teacher just sat there and listened to us. You know, I don’ t usually do that, but I think I give my opinion and I usually back it up ’cause I know my English teacher; she is big on backing up. I mean, sh e ’s totally open, but if you can ’ t support it, sh e ’ll totally shoot you down--in a good way. I mean, she always says. "Not to be mean, but. . ." That d o esn ’ t make sense. No. I like that class a lot actually. It’s a really good, good class. A ll right. So you find yourself contributing in a variety of ways: answering the teacher’s questions; asking your own questions; responding, reacting to what other students in your class have said. Yeah, but I think it all com es down to if I like it or not. Hmm. Do you think a student would find it helpful to sit down for about an hour per week with another person, a tutor, and talk about a course, talk about what the student is reading about for that course, the assignm ents, the discussions that have been going on? I think it can ’ t hurt. But I think that the student has to be completely open-minded ’cause I know a lot of people who, like, would refuse the help ’cause they think it would, m akes them look not as smart. And I think that’s totally stupid because this is here for people and it’s free. It’s with the tuition, and I m ean I’ ve learned so much more coming here than I have in my English classes last year. And so I think people that com e here can talk about it with som eone. It ju s t. . . Not only you get your ideas out but you can absorb the other person’s ideas too, so it kind of m akes you more broad in the sense of understanding. If I were the person who was meeting with the student from your 170 class, what advice would you give to me as to what I could do during those sessions to be helpful to the student? I think, well, talking about personal experience, . . . the mood of what the sentence is saying. Like, I’ll read it, and . . . then the teacher will say something and it’s not what I thought it really was or w asn’ t totally what I thought it was. So I think clarification is, would be a main thing to start with, and then maybe how to back 471 up points, like, by taking the actual quotes and how to back them up. I A ll right. S I think that would be two important points. Just things that I probably might have problems with, that I’d want help with. I I end all of these interviews with the sam e question. I ask the person if you’d like to have weekly tutoring. S Mm-hm. I Would you like to have weekly tutoring for the 170 course? S Yeah. 472 Interview with Mary Inman in Introduction to Fiction Interviewer OK. How do you feel about being in, it’s P rofessor ’s class, isn’ t it? The one you’re in? Student Right. I How do you feel about that? S In what way? You mean feel about the teacher, feel about the class, feel about what? I All those things. S I am in the class, of course, it is a core requirement. I think if it w as not a core requirement, most likely I would not have taken the class, to be really honest with you. It is a lot of work. Rumor has it that, of course, that she is one of the harder teachers of English 172. I I can confirm that rumor. S You had her? I No, but I have worked with students in her class and I have known her as a friend for about twelve years. S So, I was not aware of it. I Rumors are true. S I w as not aware of this until, like, a week ago when my friend was telling me, "Oh, who do you have?" You have students conversing with each other, gossiping about the teachers or which . . . I Sure. S Well, I told her. "Well, you will be lucky to get a C in the class." With that in mind, I am thinking, "Gosh!" That is kind of, like, . . . where I stand right now as far as classes are concerned. As far as the material, like the quizzes and stuff, I have been getting ten out of ten. There is not a problem as far as quizzes are 473 concerned. It is just the paper. Like, we have a paper due; I have it with me. It is due at five o ’clock. I am just, like, concerned now because of that rumor that I heard. So I don’ t know. Well, if you are doing well on the quizzes . . . You see, the papers are worth a considerable am ount of your grade. Each paper--there are two total— is worth twenty-five percent of your grade. So fifty percent total is your papers. Can you revise the papers? I don’ t believe so. OK. I don’ t know; I haven’ t heard. It is not on the syllabus, so I assum e that you can ’ t. Could we then describe your feeling about the class in one word as apprehensive? Somewhat. Summarize it. But then again, there are the positive aspects. Such as? Such as, I am a very slow reader, and the more I read, of course, the quicker you learn how to read. So I am required to read such a large am ount of material; because of this, I learned how to read a little bit faster, a little more precise. OK. Have you taken other classes similar to the one you are enrolled in? As far as English? Yes. I have had College Writing, poetry, and now fiction. 474 I OK. All right. Do you think the poetry c la ss- S The poetry class w as much harder than the fiction class though. I How? S B ecause poetry is either something you have, I don’ t know . . . Intuition, I guess, is the word I am looking for. Like, either you understand it or you have a hard time understanding poetry. Um, it is, like, Shakespeare and poetry . . . Like, a lot of people, "Oh, well that m eans this." I, you are just sitting there, "Um, I didn’ t get that from this. How did you get that from this?" And it is-- I Which are you? Intuitive or not in your poetry class? S I w asn’t very intuitive, but I did okay. My grade was okay. But it w as just. . . I don’ t know how to explain it. It w as a better class, even though it w as a harder class. I Who did you have? S I h a d _______. . . . I had her and was glad I took the class because now I can read poetry. Interpret it is the word I am looking for. I Did you learn som e things in English 170 when reading the poetry that is maybe helping you right now? S No. English 170 and College Writing did not do anything for me at all. It was a requirement. That class did nothing. I Now, we are talking two classes here, English 110 and English 170. S 110. I am sorry, maybe I said the wrong number; but 110 is the basic class? I Yes. S Did not help me at all, as far as English is concerned. I And who taught that class? S 475 I OK. Then you took another class, English 170, fro m ______ ? S Correct, which w as poetry. Which you see, really, you can ’ t tell the teachers because it has nothing to do with the teachers. The content of the class, you are dealing with poetry while you are dealing with College Writing. A lot of that is basically with you. Four years in high school, yeah. Everything that was said in that class w as said to me for four years straight. It was kind of a drawback because then you have students in there who are bored and who have a tendency, because they are bored, not to do as well as they could. They are stuck in there. . . . I mean, of course they have to go there because there are students that don’ t know. But, overall, the class is a drawback. But the poetry class I had not had. The material that dealt with, you know? I So back to my question then, and I think you are answering it. I just want to see that I have got the right answer in my own mind. The English 170 class then that you took from P ro fesso r , you don’ t feel that that is helping you at all in English 172 class? S The poetry versus the fiction? I No. What you did in the poetry class. I know you are not reading poetry; you’re reading fiction. But, recognizing that you are reading a different genre. S I understand. I would say, as far as becoming accustom ed to the work load that is required in the English Department yes, but otherwise no. I OK. What do you think P rofessor wants you to do in her class? S Work. I Elaborate on that. S I think that she just wants us to be able to take a book and look at it from a deeper perspective than what you just see by reading it. I think she wants to go more into the symbolism, more into being able to interpret it at a different level. Like, I think you could call it a little more intellectual--be able to com pare books, for example, 476 like what they are letting us do; comparing one narrator to another narrator; draw similarities between different things. I Do you see that as more intellectually challenging? S Correct. That’s just like a high school-level class or what have you or a College 110 class. I Is what P ro fesso r wants you to do, as you just described it, just not looking at a piece of literature at the surface but digging deeper? A more intellectual reading of a text? Do you think this is stated on P rofessor ’s syllabus? S See, I only read certain parts of the syllabus, to be honest with you. I read, like, the paper format. I didn’ t clearly read the whole thing. Actually I don’ t rem em ber the whole thing. But I just rem em ber that, yeah, she expected, she stated in there som ew here-l am not exactly certain where--she expected something more than just effort from us. So . . . I Has this information about what she wants from the class coming by way of what she is saying in class, then, as well? S She told us the first day so there shouldn’ t be any discrepancy. I What do you think is the single most important skill for a student to be successful in P ro fesso r ’s class? S Papers. Be able to write well. I To write well. S Because the quizzes are just what you read, so that’s an A right there. It’s just papers that really . . . And then she holds them a little bit too heavy; the papers are worth more than the exams. Papers are worth all the quizzes put together. I think they hold a little bit too much weight as far as percentages are concerned. I How would you rate yourself or evaluate yourself as a writer? You are saying, in her class, writing is very key to su ccess in her course work. How would you a sse ss your own skill as a writer? 477 S As a writer, depends on what I am writing because if I am writing something like, say, in journalism or something that pertains to something more controversial, then I can write really well. But, like the assignm ent that we have right now, presently speaking- comparing of two books which I learned-is very difficult for me. I find it difficult, so I would say average. I Not to digress, but why do you think you are having difficulty with this paper? Is it something to do with . . . S B ecause there is so much to say. Each book is, like, three hundred pages, and there is so much to say, too much to say. It is a three-page paper, so you have to condense everything in that three pages and there is just so many parallels to draw between the two characters. There is so much to try and condense in three pages. It’s just, when you get to a point when you are writing something and have so much to say you are trying to throw it all in there, how do you get it in there? And you spend m ost of your time trying to pull things out or put things in; it takes a lot of time. It is very time- consuming. I Do you enjoy reading literature? S It depends upon the subject. I can ’ t say yes to that question because it really depends upon the subject. I What about the things you are reading in - S So far, I have enjoyed the things that we have read. The Color Purple I have enjoyed very much so. . . . That is something that depends upon the subject. Like I say, that is what interests me primarily. I What about Jane Eyre? You are reading that, aren’ t you? S I could have passed that one by. I Why? S It was just very Victorian, kind of old-fashioned, kind of out-of-date. I like more modern . . . 478 I Certainly, The Color Purple I can see that that is pertinent to America. How would you describe your reading habits? S I would say very disciplinary. I mean, I am a slow reader. I Do you think you’re a pleasure reader? Som e people read a lot on their own. S No. Not at all. Maybe after this class, but I am not sure. I have always read just what is required. When you are in college, you don’ t have time to read what you want to read on your own because you have all these books thrown at you from different classes. So to say that I am a pleasure reader, right now, I would have to say no. I So, do you read the new spaper? S Yeah. I Ok, so you read that. M agazines? S Vogue. . . . I read them when I have an opportunity to read them. I read, like, Vogue and Sports Illustrated, those kinds of things. I Why do you think anyone should read literature? S To make them familiar with the past, like historical background, I think. It does bring you vocabulary and, you know, understanding of certain things. . . . It is a good way to describe things to you. You don’ t have the time for som eone to sit there and explain it to you verbally. So I g uess that would be the-- I Do you enjoy writing? S Depends, again, on what issues it was. When I was in high school, I took journalism and I always took the issues that were really controversial, and I like that even though it is challenging. It w as debate them. As far as what we are doing right now, no. I don’ t enjoy writing this stuff. I When teachers read your writing, do you think typically their assessm ents of your writing are accurate or fair? 479 S Sometimes I think it depends upon . . . I really do think that this one teacher. . . I have som e teachers that were more concerned with the content and w eren’ t so critical of the way you said it. "Maybe she didn’ t word it... as well as you could have," but the content is good, so therefore I will get a good grade. You know, the other teachers: "Well, it is not written properly or not written well," so forget the whole thing. They don’ t even bother to look through, deeper, you know? I really don’ t like that. I can ’ t tell you. This teacher right now, 1 can’ t p ass judgem ent on her b ecause she hasn ’t graded a paper. I Have teacher’s com m ents on your writing ever been helpful to you a s a writer? S Here at Loyola? I Anywhere, high school? S High school, yes. I had a really good English teacher one of my years there, and it was really helpful. But as far as English 110, no. Nothing really in that class. I got the sam e grade on every paper all the way through. Obviously, there was no progression there or digression. I didn’ t go down or go. I just stayed on the sam e level. Obviously, nothing happened in that class. For ’s class, yes, what she did say helped me. She really took the time. I Do you rem em ber something that she pointed out to you by way of her com m ents that was helpful? S She also noticed the style of writing, and then she also said I am trying to think. . . . She was helpful in the way that. . . Like, style, like, how to organize the essays, that was helpful. But I can ’ t rem em ber right now any particular. . . I It is kind of a different set of questions. Are you the sort of person who sort of likes to solve puzzles? S I w as an engineer. I OK, all right. Affirmative to that one. Can you m ake a recent example of something that you have been engaged in solving? It could be academic; it could be personal. 480 S I g uess I would go along the line of academic. My major is a very good thing to try and solve, to try and decide which way you want to go. Actually I am really certain about it right now, as far as which major I would like to take. I just switched out engineering. It was, like, a real problem for me to decide if I am going to stay in this degree, . . . to make a decision as far as what route I was going to take. Finally I wanted to end up in law school, somehow, som ewhere. I didn’ t know what I was going to do. So that has been a real problem for me right now. I can’ t really figure out what I am really going to do. I Do you have a process that you typically follow when you have a puzzle in front of you? Just like the one you described to me. What am I going to do? What is my major? Am I going to continue with this major? Do you have a pattern maybe that you typically follow when you are trying to answ er a question and make a decision? S No. I have a tendency to be, like, more reserved while I think about it. You know, there are certain people who are, like, blunt. I am very blunt actually; I can ’ t say that I am not blunt. I am a very blunt character. But I have to think about something before I say it. I really think and concentrate a lot on what I am going to do, as far as decisions are concerned. I take a long time and think them through. The actual process is, like, I don’ t know. It is different. I can’ t explain; each time I do something it is going to be different. For, like, this major, I stayed in engineering for a year. And then I said, " I am going to go through a whole year and see if I don’ t like it, see if my decision is still the sam e that I have right now or six months from now or what have you." Flow long is a sem ester? Four months actually. Four months from now, see if my decision is still the sam e. And then stick with it. It is not something that I m ade right away; you have to take time to make a decision. I Well, that is part of your decision-making process. You have to have som e time. You don’ t com e to snap conclusions. S But then again, there are times I may com e to a snap conclusion. It depends on how big the situation is, you know? Like, if it’s something like my major, of course, I am going to take time to consider it. 481 Then, maybe to m ake it easy for you to answer the question, when you were making this decision about your major, do you talk to yourself? I have to say I talk to my best friend, which is my boyfriend and my father. OK, so you engage in conversation with others as part of your process. Right. OK, not everyone does. Right. I see what you are saying. Yeah, I do engage in conversation. My advisors were not very . . . I mean, they were not very helpful because they were just, like, "Well, your life. You have to live it. You got to make your own decisions, so . . ." Big gem s of wisdom there, right? It just. . . Like, they are very helpful to a certain extent. They are just, like, well, what can they say? But then in these conversations with your boyfriend and your dad, they were different then? Totally different. How? Why were they different? B ecause they are the ones that are going to be there. They are the ones all the way through. Where are your advisors? They’re going to be there for four months, a year, however long you have them as your advisor. But these people that I am referring to are going to be there. And they know me as a person; they know me more personally. You know, of course, my Father knows me ever since I w as a kid. And then they know you, they know who you are, what you are like, what your w eaknesses are, what your strengths are, and, you know, what the probability of you following through with something, depends on the situation, and all that. They know that, so that they are more honest. I would have to say they are more honest. They are going to say, "You don’ t 482 have the skill" and say, "That’s really not true." But let’s say you don’ t have the skill in math. You are poor in math. They would com e out and tell me, "Well, you know, you really do a bad job at this," w hereas the advisors . . . You know, they have to be more considerate. I Do you think that you use these sam e conversations when you are trying to solve a more purely academ ic problem? Obviously, this problem or issu e-th e question am I going to continue as an engineer, which you’re not--is very personal. If the puzzle, the question, the problem is more academ ic . . . S For example? I The paper you are writing right now where you are having to com pare the two narrators. Have you talked to anyone else about the paper? S Yes. One of my best friends. I OK. S Now you see when you get down to that level, it’s, like, step-by- step. I don’ t have to say I talked to my college friend, but I still do talk to my boyfriend about everything. He still helps me write papers. I Once again, you are using conversation with others-- S I use conversation with others as well. I basically throw everything on to you. I I talk to som e people and they don’t. I have talked to som e people and they use conversation when dealing with personal questions and issues, but not academic. Do you ever spend time wondering about things or daydreaming? S Oh, everyone did, especially during a lecture that is really boring. Everyone daydream s. I When you are in your classroom, what might you be daydreaming about? 483 What am I going to do this weekend? Or should I do this this w eekend? Do you ever have academ ic daydream s? Oh, yeah. Students might think they are nightmares, not daydream s. Yes. What might you be daydreaming about? "What did I get on that test? Or how did I do on that test? Or I forgot to do that on the test? I could have done this. Oh no! I have a test this week." Or papers: "Maybe I should start like this." Or even when they’re lecturing, you will sit there and think about what they lectured about the class before because you are trying to catch up. You know what I am talking about? Sure. Or they are talking, like, what is happening, and they are still talking and you are still over here. Yeah. You are only partially listening to what is going on right now. That happens a lot. OK. I must say my attention span is very limited. Have you been spending a lot of time, or som e am ount of time, thinking about, at this sort of private level, the level of random thoughts or daydream s about the literature class? Basically, everything I have told you prior to this when you first started talking to me is what I have been thinking about. I was thinking about, "Oh no! the grade, the final result, the sem ester grade." 484 More than the process you might be involved in, like the actual process of writing the paper? You are jumping ahead to the assessm ent phase. "How is she going to react to this? What is she going to say about my paper?" Correct. How would rate yourself as a listener? Again, what do you m ean? Do you mean as far as classroom situation or personal situation? Both. Let’s talk about both. Classroom situation: above average. Why? Not excellent, but above average because I . . . always take notes on everything I did. You know, you see students constantly, where they just sit there and don’ t take notes. Just listening. But I think while I am taking notes, I am listening even more so. I can ’ t really explain this to you. But, I mean, when I take notes, then I listen more because I am actually writing, I am actually thinking about it and writing it down, and looking at it again and thinking about it again. So, that is all coming from listening. So then, on the personal level, yeah. I listen very well. I let people finish what they are going to say before I jump in. What do you think are the qualities, then, of a good classroom listener? Well, it depends upon the person because they could be this guy who sits next to me for example. I don’ t know, but he d o esn ’ t take notes. Yeah. But he still does well in the quizzes. So it could be each person has their own way. So I can really define that-- Does he appear to be attentive in class? 485 Yeah. OK. So, then there are those who don’ t take notes that aren’ t attentive in the class and there are those who do take notes that really aren’ t listening either. They are kind of spacing out the window. And there are those . . . There are all different kinds. Do you think that listening skills are important to your su ccess in P ro fesso r ’s class? You mentioned to write well is key. No. In a way, because I think if you didn’ t show up for class and you just read the stuff and showed up for the quizzes and did the papers, you could get a B. That is from the outline. This is the beginning of the class, so I might be wrong. But what she does in class is talk about what we read. So if you don’ t even read the book. . . You see, you have to read the book for the quizzes because she gives you quizzes before she talks about it. But if I didn’t read the books and just sat there and listened to her lectures, I could get everything from the book from the lecture- even more so. So you could not read the book and listen to her; but you would do all the quizzes. So, up to now you would say that these classroom discussions aren’ t really adding m uch to w hat- They’re adding, but m ore . . . Again, she is going to the deeper level in class discussion, trying to see that we pulled that out of there. I wouldn’ t miss her class; don’ t get me wrong. I don’ t; I think you could and still do decent in the class. Do you ever contribute to these classroom discussions? Yeah. Jane Eyre, which is the second book we read, which I really didn’ t like, I didn’ t really talk much about it. But The Color Purple, I contributed a lot to that because I understand that. I can relate to that more than I could relate . . . A little controversy there. I can relate. I m ean, to break it down, I can relate to the black, and one of my families is black. I can relate to that and I can 486 understand what the book is talking about. I can understand the reasons, so therefore I can contribute to that. But to listen to Jan e Eyre, I just, like, "This is way out there; I can ’ t relate to this." So, therefore, I am not going to say much about it because I can ’ t relate to it, you know? OK. That would be my feeling on those. How would you describe your role, then, as a discussion participant? When I am interested, I will discuss; when I’m not, I w on’ t. But, more precisely, are you the kind of person that ask questions, who reacts to what other people say? Yes, I do. I am very argumentative. . . . If som eone says something, "This is happening in The Color Purple," som eone says something that I totally don’ t think is right, I say something. I won’ t sit there. Some people a re - I’m not passive. Sit in class and don’ t do that. I’m not a passive person when it com es to argument. OK. So, you ask questions, you react to what other people say. Yeah. Do you think the times that you--especially with The Color Purple when you were conversing more in class because you were interested in that book more than Jane Eyre- d o you think that those conversations you engage in helped your understanding of the book? No. 487 Why not? In this particular. . . I already understood that book very well b ecause I had an experience w ith-no direct experience, but indirect experience--with what was taking place in the novel. So because of that, I already understood m ost of it. . . . I already knew. I knew all the history, I knew all that kind o f . . . So the conversation was leading to discovery? No. Do you think that a student would find it helpful if that student would m eet with som eone on a weekly basis to talk about what w as going on in class, what the person is reading, what w as being discussed in the classroom periods, the assignm ents that were part of the class? No. I just think they need help writing the paper. I meant, not necessarily with respect to this English 172 course, just with any class. Well, that is why she has the quizzes there, so you do keep up with the class. You are saying that som eone would be there like a disciplinarian, where you would just talk to this person and try to keep you up to date. But, because of the quizzes, we are up to date. Not necessarily. If I were to meet with one the students in your English 172 class each week for an hour, how do you think I might be able to be helpful to that person? Anything I could do to help the person? With their writing. I could help them with their papers? Yes. What role might I take in helping them? 488 Construction, organization, gram m ar all that stuff. Helping them maybe, I don’ t know, pull out things that you see that they don’ t see. Would you be interested--! think I already know the answ er to this one-w ould you be interested in meeting som eone over here to talk on a weekly basis about the 172 course? No, unless it was about the paper. OK. The paper. You see I have a friend who is an English major, who is my "tutor" for my paper, who has already read through my paper. So I do have a tutor in essen ce for the paper. But as far-- It is an informal tutor. It is an informal tutoring, which m eans I should go more formal. But after this paper, I might be over here more often. Well, that is what I just wanted to get, and I will let you go. 489 Interview with Mara Jovanian in Introduction to Poetry Interviewer One of the first things I wanted to ask you is, generally, how do you feel about being in the 170 class? Student I went into it feeling a lot more optimistic than I do now. So far, w e’ ve had two quizzes. I always had a very good feeling tow ards poetry, and I thought I understood it. I had a lot of liking towards it, and since I write poetry myself, I always felt like I would do well. I’m getting a little discouraged because in one of the quizzes, I got a six out of ten, and the other I got a seven-and-a-half out of ten, which to me is just a joke because I do study the poem s, I do go over them two or three times som etim es, and I think I grasp generally the m essage, and it seem s that that hasn ’ t been the case. So that’s becoming one of the classes I d on’ t look forward to now because of that reason. I OK. Have you spoken to-- S No. I P ro fesso r about it? S No. I feel it’s a very individual thing because there’s others who, sitting in the sam e class, are getting nine-and-a-halfs or nines or tens, you know? And that m akes me feel uptight. I OK. I have a series of questions here that I wanted to ask you this afternoon, and what you just said is of interest to me. I’d like for us to talk about it a little bit more, but if maybe we could come back to that after w e’ve gone through som e of these other questions and revisit then what we were just talking about. You mention that you’ve written poetry and that’s why you were anticipating in a very positive way this poetry class. Have you taken, though, other classes similar to this one? Have you taken poetry classes? S I have. I have in the past, and one of my concerns was . . . Actually, at the very first class, I rem em b er passed out a couple poem s and we went over them and . . . You know, I always raise my hand, I always participate in the class, and what I 490 liked is that she never said to anybody, "Oh, no, that’s totally wrong." She accepted everybody’s point of view. But when it com es to quizzes, sh e ’s looking for a particular answer. It’s no longer this "Throw at me what you think." So then it becom es all of a sudden . . . You know, in class participation, there is a lot more room for imagination, w hereas in the quizzes, all of a sudden I feel limited ’cause then I feel like, "Oh, sh e ’s looking for this one an sw er.". . . I Well, what w as your experience in the other class? S Well, the other class I w as really a lot more uptight because the lady would really com e right at it in class participation and say, "No, that’s not what I’m looking for." And I rem em ber telling , after her first or second class, " I really like the way you conduct class participation or just conduct your classes because it allows for a m ore shy student who is, let’s say, afraid to say, ’Oh, this is what I think the poem m eans,’ you know, to break through that barrier and com e out and just throw in any idea and, more or less, it’s acceptable." So, as opposed to the other class, I feel that this is better. But I have this incredible anxiety now about this paper that’s due next week for her class because I can tell by her outline of what the paper’s supposed to be like that sh e ’s going to be extremely, extremely critical. Like, not just our interpretation of the poem that w e’re supposed to pick out, but I almost feel like it’s not an introduction to poetry. I mean, that’s what the class is called, but I feel like it’s just more, a lot more intense. I OK. A ll right. What do you think, then, P ro fesso r wants you to do in her class? S Well, what I rem em ber from her first class and the syllabus is . . . Again, I have this thing in my mind that it’s Intro to Poetry, and this is for a lot of people who have never been exposed to poetry. So it’s supposed to be this broad sen se of taking this from Chaucer, . . . dated back to Middle English and up to the present time, to just get a sense and appreciation for the different types of poetry and the different m eans of expressing the ideas and how som etim es they’re pretty much the sam e. They’re trying to convey the sam e thing but with different tones and different m ethods. That really interests me to want to learn more. . . . That’s what I think she wants us to get--a clear understanding and an appreciation for. . . 491 I So, the historic view of poetry, where it’s com e from . . . S Right. I What do you think she wants you to do, though, in term s of maybe a skill or your involvement? Is there something that you think sh e ’s saying you have to do in this class? S Well, for instance, the paper that’s due next week, there’s going to be two such papers and that’s going to be, I’m not exactly sure, but I have a feeling it’s roughly five pages of explication of a poem. Som e of th ese poem s are very small, and I cannot imagine how it’s going to be a five-page paper. I am one to explain things in detail, but I believe that she wants us to com e to a correct understanding of what a poem m eans by taking each stanza, each -y o u know, depending on how the poem is set up--quatrain or whatever, and taking it bit by bit and analyzing it and seeing what we think it m eans. So I believe that she basically wants us to be able to do that throughout the whole course. I All right. Do you think, then, that P ro fesso r______ w ants you and the other students to have an historical sen se of poetry and then this ability to interpret a poem, com e to an understanding of what it m eans part by part, stanza by stanza, whatever? Is that stated in the syllabus? S It is. I mean, honestly, I’ ve read the syllabus, but I don’ t know if it really em phasized historical m eans. She does com e to class, and she writes on the board certain things that have to do with what type of poetry this is, what type of poem this is, as far as what, you know, what kind of nam e it’s given. And she d oes draw a lot towards the historical background of a certain poet, I mean, what w as going on at that certain time, if there were any significances. Quite frankly, I do n ’ t think it m atters much that she puts em phasis on it because it w as a poem that several people got the answ er wrong on the quiz. She knew the historical background; she knew what it m eant to say " I am C aesar’s." We thought the whole poem dealt with a deer, and all of a sudden, when she went over it when the quiz w as given back, she said, "Oh, no, it could also mean that w e’re talking about a queen and she was married to Caesar," and w e’re saying, "What are you talking about?" She knew what the poet’s relationship, let’s say, w as with this woman of the time. And so, if she were to go over that at least before the 492 quizzes, . . . I mean, as far as the historical background, not so much the meaning. And if it has an affect on the interpretation of the poem, I feel like w e’re kind of left in the dark because we really don’ t know. I All right. Do you think then, since you’re not quite sure if the emphatic parts of the class are stated in the syllabus, what about orally? Do you think sh e ’s m ade it clear by way of oral presentation what she wants, what she thinks is m ost important for you to do? S She doesn’t . . . I honestly don’ t know. She says, "Oh, I’ll com e to class, and I’ll put these things on the board," but I’m not sure if these things are important. No, sh e ’s never really said that, "Oh, this is so important that I think it’s test-worthy." . . . I don’ t know. It’s just on the board, and I write it down. A lot of times, it’s, like, no facts about the poem s, and I don’ t know whether she is going more in detail or whether this is, you know, just to give us more of an insight or background or whether this is something that is crucial. The only thing I’ve so far found of significance is to take it, you know, and look at it, what kind of poem it is, and depending on the background of where the poem com es from, how many stanzas at a time we must take to analyze. Because in som e of them, it’s like taking eight and then, you know, then whatever, and then som e of them it’s like taking four-four-four and then the last two. So that’s interesting to know because then that aids us to do that. I Sure. All right. What do you think is the single m ost important skill for som eone to have in order to do well in this class? Academic skill, or skill with relation to the content of this course, which is poetry. S Probably a good understanding of English, I would say. I’m not sure. English . . . I Maybe if I put the question to you differently. You were saying earlier that som e students were getting quizzes back with nine- and-a-half. S Yeah, I don’ t know. I don’ t know what would aid other people because I know there are som e people who are doing very poorly. 493 I Mm-hm. Som e people are doing well, apparently. S Som e people are doing very well; som e people are doing really poorly. I would love to conduct a test of my own. I’d like go to class and ask people, like, "What do you guys think about this?" because I am so curious to know. We’re all sitting in the sam e class, w e’re all getting the sam e material basically presented to us, and why is it that som e of us are just really getting it? Another thing is also the guy who had a nine-and-a-half, I noticed his book w as already written in som ebody else’s handwriting before, so som e of the books have interpretations written in them from previous students. And since this is an open-book test, som etim es you have that as an advantage. Let’s say you go over the quiz. After you go over the quiz or you go over the things in class, I write down things in the book. I Sure. S So som e of the people have the advantage of having books that are already . . . So I don’ t know if that’s a factor or whether these people are really in tune with what’s happening and also . . . I So you’re not really s u re - S I’m not sure. I Of what’s key here. S I honestly don’t know. I think maybe another factor is whether they’re English majors because . . . I Are you? S I’m not. We got into-which was g ood-w e got into groups of, like, four people yesterday for the first time, and she w asn’ t feeling well, so she said we should do that. I found that to be more helpful because it allows for a lot more participation, I think, and then it’s not just her interpretation. One of the guys w as just so intelligent. I mean, he would always know what the stanza meant or whatever. And then he w as very knowledgeable, for instance, of Shakespeare, and so I noticed that, with what he w as saying, he had a lot of references to Shakespeare’s other works. He says, "Oh, well, if you were to read his other things, there’s a 494 mention that maybe Shakespeare had a lover who he was writing these things to." And I was sitting there in awe thinking, "Well, I have no idea. I’ ve only read . . and he was talking about S hakespeare’s other works in great detail. So that’s another factor, whether they’re English majors and they’ ve had exposure to this type of writing. Especially now that w e’re talking about Middle English. What is your major? Psychology. Psychology. A ll right. Tell me this: Do you enjoy reading literature? Did you enjoy reading literature before this class? I’m sorry. I don’ t m ean to be pessimistic. No, I want you to be altogether candid, you know. That’s the point of this. I enjoy poetry quite a bit. I enjoy poetry, m odern poetry a lot more, as I expressed in the first class. She said, "Are there any particular poets that you like or any poets you don’ t like or don’ t understand?" And now, I forgot who it is, Evelita Gibson(?). S he’s very interesting, but I have a hard time understanding a lot of her poetry because I don’ t know when a certain thought stops and another starts, and it can really throw you off. And yet, I have som e m odern poets who I just love, who I could get caught up in their writing for a long time. It do esn ’ t bore me. Even though it’s not my major, I find it to be very fascinating. All right. Do you think that you have any kinds of reading habits, and if you do, what might those habits be? My bad reading habit is that I am a very slow reader. It could also contribute to good habits because I read for detail. And I reread, because I don’ t read it and say, "OK, I’ ve read it. I know it." Usually, I pick out my faults, but I feel that it kind of cripples me. But in poetry, in this particular thing, I think that it is good to read slow and reread, because then you get more of a sen se of what you’re doing, what it’s all about. 495 All right. Well, you’re not reading poetry, you tell me. You’ ve already indicated an interest in poetry. What are other things that you might read? Sort out things that are assigned to you in class. Do you ever read on your own? No, that has always been a problem of mine because, since I am a very slow reader, I always found that it was one of my greatest handicaps in life, that I don’ t read for leisure. It always takes such a long time. This, by the way, is my first sem ester coming back full-time to college, and I’ve had a three-year absence from the year-and-a-half that I w as in college, when I left school. I worked full-time, so bringing school back into my daily life has been something that has also been very challenging and quite scary I have to say it has been because I quit my job and, all of a sudden, everything was taking a different course. So, lately, I don’ t find time for leisurely things, but I did m ake myself read. . . . I w as on a trip overseas this summer, and I took a book along, and it w as the first book I actually ever finished, and it m ade me feel as though, you know, it’s something encouraging, that I could do this more often. And now, for my religion class, I have two books to finish by next week, and these are just paperback books. I find that I’m getting through bit by bit, and so far I have gotten through half of one. But with poetry, what’s good about that is that I have a book of poetry at home, and I can just pick it up, and since there are different poem s, you know, I can read a few and feel a sense of satisfaction that I have, you know, read a poem though its entirety and put it aside w hereas with books, I’ ve picked up many books, and I read it, and it’s like, "God, I never know how it’s going to end!" So, that’s a problem. Do you read the new spapers? I do. But not in its entirety. That is another thing where I feel like I’m missing things. I’m still missing a lot of important things. What about magazines. Do you read m agazines? I do. Any particular types of m agazines? How do you go about reading those m agazines? Do you read them cover to cover or pick at them o r . . . What do you do? 496 S I pick at them. I look at, most likely, first of all, the articles if they are mentioned on the actual cover or the inside on the table of contents or, as I’m flipping through, maybe a certain picture grabs me or a certain title grabs me. Mostly titles, I think, that I’m more inclined to go ahead and read it. And, like I said, it’s always been a problem for me, I’d say, up until this past year, and now I’m starting to pick it up more. I So, if you were to pick up a magazine, thumb through it, and find a title that was interesting, would it be likely that you would begin and finish an article in a m agazine? Something at that length you might finish? S Yes. Definitely. I OK. How about writing? Do you write poetry? You said you did, I think. S Yeah. I do. I Do you like writing in general? S A lot of unfinished poetry, [laughs] Yeah, I don’ t have a problem with writing. I also belong to Encore [an adult re-entry program], and w e’re supposed to keep a journal, a weekly journal, so I would say I . . . This journal keeps me in tune with how I am doing in school because I have a lot of anxieties being back at school, and I feel that I’m falling behind. It’s a whole different lifestyle for me, being back in school. I Being a student is tough. I don’ t know why everybody says that the life of a student is a jolly life. I think that if you take it seriously, it is really hard. S I know. I do take it seriously, and that’s one of the things. B ecause I am taking it seriously now that I am back, because my whole perception of college and education is different now than when I went in as a freshman right out of high school, because at that time I was just doing it for my parents. . . . So, yeah, I do write. I don’ t write as much because I don’ t find the time for as much anymore. I Do you write letters? Are you a letter writer? 497 No. I just wrote one letter that was two pages long, but that w as it because . . . I just met som ebody during the sum m er who-- You are writing the journal for Encore, but were you a diary writer at one time? No. I would start to do that, then . . . I was frustrated because I wanted to see a pattern, and when I would break the pattern, I would feel like, "Oh, there goes all that valuable information that happened in this past week or two or month or whatever, and I m issed it. So, darn it, I have to stop." Or I would pick it up from where that was, and som ehow there would always be interruptions. When teachers read your writing, what are som e of the things that they say typically about your writing? Their com m ents. Anything that com es to mind? Anything good, bad, suggestions for improvement, compliments? I usually think that I give a lot of supporting detail, and som e teachers have said that. The com m ents that they m ade on my paper were "Good supporting detail," and som e have said, "Not enough." So I don’ t know. It would depend on what class it would be and, urn, usually I don’ t have as much of a problem with gram m ar and punctuation. I’m not saying it’s perfect but these are not usually my weak points. I would say, um, probably that I should put more time and effort into giving more supporting information. Though I feel that I do with m ost things, som e teachers don’ t think that it is enough. Do you think teacher com m ents regarding your writing have been helpful to you? No. I can ’ t say that one really was. I mean-- They haven’ t helped you, you feel, to becom e a better writer, where maybe you’ve had a teacher for a sem ester or something, com m ents that a teacher put on your paper got you to see yourself as a writer more clearly and see how you can maybe becom e a better writer by way . . . I can ’ t say that I have. 498 OK. I’m going to shift topics a little bit here. Do you like to solve mental or intellectual puzzles? No. OK. What about making sen se out of situations or people? Is that something that you find yourself. . . Definitely. All right. OK, good. Can you supply a recent example of maybe something that caught your attention, that was puzzling and therefore, the puzzlement of the situation or the people or the person is what got your attention? Can you give me an example, something you feel comfortable telling me about? Well, I love observing people, and usually it’s really intriguing to me to see if my first impressions of people are correct. It’s scary, but it’s almost always true to fact that my first impression is right on the money. At a recent graduation party for my best friend, I saw a couple of old, very old, high school friends who I hadn’ t seen since high school. They were there, they were married, and my best friend knew what their life was like. . . . I told her after the party my observation of these people, what I thought, and how they had changed, and it was so sure. . . . I think people just intrigue me in general, and analyzing or just looking at how they were at that time, the m ates that they found now and how it holds true to their life, and what I think they want out of life . . . Seeing them now and in com parison to what I think, it’s very interesting for me to kind of analyze or interpret what I thought, what I thought that picture holds because, to me, it seem s like I go above the room and I’m looking at this whole picture. And it was very true that it w as almost exactly what I thought. What about with yourself? Do you think that you do the sam e sort of thing with yourself? Oh, I self-reflect all the time. I do that. I think also it’s what keeps me san e ’cause my life has always changed so much and it changes in such dramatic ways a lot of times that I always need to keep reflecting back and just going over in my mind, like, how things have progressed, where I am. Like, for instance, being back at school and the fact that it’s so scary, I have to look back 499 and say, "OK, well you did sacrifice this and this and this, but this is what you really wanted. Ultimately, this is going to make you happier." So I do that constantly. I When you were working but thinking about going back to school, in trying to decide what you wanted to do at that point, to be consistent with what you’ ve just said, you must have reflected on that. Did you also engage in conversations with other people in trying to figure out what you were going to do about it? "Am I going to go back to school? Am I not?" Did you seek out conversations with others, or w as it a private process? S I think my final decision was a private process because, as I said, it w as three years before I decided to go back, and when I finally went back, I only went back to night school, one class, and then I followed it up with three following sem esters of two classes. . . . And I honestly thought I would never go back because I w as very resentful towards a lot of things; I thought that this is just a whole process that society and my family expects me to do, there’s a path that I have to follow. I didn’ t see any point in education for myself. So the initial conversations I got were a lot of guilt-ridden conversations from parents and other elderly people or people that I looked up to, telling me that I shouldn’ t do this, this is not the right thing to do. And those talks really turned me away. But as it got closer to my decision . . . What it was getting close to w as also the fact that I was seeing my high school friends graduating from college on top of being married in most of their cases and, on top of one of them, having a child. So som e of it was observation of people around me, and it put certain pressures and certain guilt feelings in me, and I don’ t necessarily think that’s bad because it’s better that I felt that and did something about it now than if, let’s say, I would do it twenty years down the road because then the guilt and the fears would probably be a lot worse. I So, if you were to seek out the counsel of other people when something puzzled you, when you want to find an answ er or a solution, would there be cases when you think you might want to have conversation with others in order to work through that process? S Yeah. I talk to my friends. I don’ t have a problem with that. I have an open flow of conversation with my friends; as you can tell, 500 I’m a talker. . . . I really believe in the value of expression and communicating so that, for one thing, you don’ t leave the other person in the dark as to what you are thinking or feeling. . . . This is helping me because, as I am saying these things, it’s making me realize a lot of things inside me, that maybe things aren’ t so bad or certain things that I really need to work on. So I do find that when I talk, if there’s something puzzling me, like you said, yes, talking to people . . . Definitely. I Do you tend to do that when you have academ ic puzzles to deal with? S No. Actually, that’s a real sore spot for me. Outside people always say that is the one area that my friends becom e almost like enemy figures because when they try to counsel me on how to study better, I feel like, "You have no idea what I am going through; you are not in my predicament." But that’s why I’m in Encore, because I am surrounded by people who are coming back, and I feel like that’s . . . For this particular problem academically, I need to be around people who are academically having problems also or they are struggling in the sam e areas. Then at that point, my friends know nothing about the fears and anxieties because they say, "Oh, you’ll do well," and I want to say, "You have no idea." I’m, like, chewing my nails: "I’m going through the wall almost, here. I can ’ t sit still. You can ’ t tell me it’s going to be all right!" But hearing other people in Encore, it’s really soothing for me to know that there are other people having anxiety attacks just like me. I Well, you said there was a paper coming due in P ro fesso r______ ’s class. Have you thought about talking with som eone else about the specifics of that paper? That’s something that’s causing you anxiety, you just said. . . . S First of all, quite frankly, I’ ve read the instructions throughout, and I haven’ t looked at the actual poem s to see which I would be interested in. I’ll be doing that this week, and I know it’s cutting it close, but after I look at the poem, I will write down what I think, how I would go about it, and then I would m ost likely set up an appointment to see her next Monday or something to go over this. I Mm-hm. Now answ er this question really honestly. Do you think that it would be m ore or less likely that you would seek out 501 conversation with som eone else when trying to handle an academ ic puzzle? I always feel that writing a paper, an academ ic paper, is sort of like dealing with a puzzle: there’s an issue, the issue with the paper, you’re trying to wrestle with it, resolve the issue in som e way. I think that you are embarking on that process right now with P rofessor , with the paper that is due next week. Would it be more likely for you, at this point, to connect, if not with your professor, with som ebody else to talk about that process or to do it on your own? S Oh, definitely. Especially this area where I feel . . . Now that I’ ve gotten two quizzes back, and I don’ t feel as comfortable as I thought I would with how I am understanding certain things, I really feel that getting a tutor, for instance, would really put my mind at ease, and it would make me realize just how on-track I am or how off-track I am. And, you know, have my ideas written down or com e in with my ideas and just see where I stand, how I’ ve grasped the poem, more or less. I Right. Right. OK. Are you a daydream er? Do you spend any am ount of time, do you think, sort of pondering things, or is that not in your nature? S It is. I OK. Urn . . . S I don’ t do it as much as I used to . . . It’s interesting. I look at this one girl in my ethics class, and she w as just staring out the window while the m ost critical lecture material w as given, and I just, like, glanced at her, and she was dazed, and I was thinking, "God, you know, I w as like that my freshman year." And I can’ t. When I’m in class, I don’ t daydream. I OK. Do you com e back, though, to maybe the critical lecture in your ethics class and sort of-and, again, maybe it’s my poor word choices--have academ ic daydream s, is I g uess what I’m getting at? Do you revisit what you are dealing with in a class at odd m om ents and find that you’ve been thinking about something, maybe a poem or poetry class? S Yeah. I mean, from class to ciass. For instance, today in my class I was thinking, "How am I going to schedule my time to 502 study for my ethics test tomorrow? Urn, should I go hom e? Should I . . So, yeah, if there are important things, I do reflect. I do have daydream s if there is certain deadlines, for instance, or certain test results that w eren’ t so well. I Did you ever find that your daydream s are the sort where you are pondering the material of the class? You know, that you are thinking about it, like, to use the example of the poem. It is a poem that you read, a poem that w as discussed in class, and then, without intending to, after the fact, you realize that you’ ve been pondering the poem in your head. S Mm-hm. I Do you ever do that? S Yeah. I Much? Seldom? Often? Can you quantify it in any sort of way? S Urn, I would say that I do a lot more, let’s say, if I w as completely wrong in my interpretation of the poem. And it’s so much more visible to me when I think of getting a test back, and w e’ve gone over the poem, and I realize, "How could I have thought that?" or "This was totally wrong." I could go into the next class, or I could sit w hile goes on with her lecture, and I am pondering about, "Well, why d oes she say that it m eans this?" And I could really be stuck with that because I want to work through what the problem w as and why I didn’ t understand it. Or, if it’s a very good piece of poetry or if it triggers any kind of emotions in me, then, yes, I could do that as well. I All right. How would you rate yourself as a listener? S Pretty good. I All right. Do you think that you are a good classroom listener? S Yeah. I OK. What do you think are the main ingredients for a good classroom-- 503 S Sitting up front, num ber one. I learned that, ever since I have been back at school. . . . I used to think sitting in the back of the class is a lot better, but it is so distracting seeing other people move. I’m one of those people in the library who, if I don’ t have a cubicle to myself or if in som e way it is so quiet, get distracted by, you know, the shift of a pen. . . . If I could say to freshmen, "You know, students, what the single m ost important thing is to really stay focused on class? Sit up front." It is so critical. I OK. Are there other ingredients to being a good classroom listener besides taking a chair in the first row? S I would say another good thing is--l d on’ t know if this is exactly what you mean--but if it com es to something that you’re a little ambivalent on, and whether you heard it already or you know the meaning, immediately ask a question. I Do you do that som etim es? S I do that. Or if you can ’ t or if the teacher goes on, write a little question by it on the side of your notes or som ething and immediately ask it right after class from the professor. I think that’s about it. I OK. Do you think that good listening skills are important to su ccess in the ENGL 170 class? S Yeah. I guess so. I Why? S Well, I think they are in every class really, you know, but especially because we take the poem s line by line. They could mean such totally different things, and the idea shifts so rapidly som etim es that it’s not just, "What do you think this poem m eans in one sentence?" She w ants us to look at every line, every stanza, whatever, and just see the progression of how the feelings change or how the ideas change. And if that were, let’s say, to com e up in a test som ew here down the road, sh e ’s not just going to ask, "What is this poem saying? Just say it in a short sentence." She may ask, "Go through it line by line." And I think that’s where you really have to stay in tune because everything would make sense or everything is related and you really should be taking notes. 504 A ll right. OK. How about classroom discussions? I think you’ve already indicated you’re a contributor to it? I do contribute, yeah. OK. How about the conversations that have occurred in Professor 's class? How would you describe your role in those conversations? Every class session, I have contributed something, I would say. I don’ t talk a lot. How would you describe most of your contributions? What sort of contributions do you think you make? S he’ll ask, "What does that m ean? What is the poet doing here?" or "What do you think is happening here?" And I would give an interpretation, and usually sh e ’ll nod her head with affirmation that it’s, you know, right on the money or it’s one of the possibilities. Do you ever com m ent when other students m ake com m ents? In other words, react to what they’ve said? Right. Not so much in that class because, in that class, really, I feel you’re just throwing your own ideas of what you think or you don’ t argue with another person’s interpretation because theirs could be right in their mind and you just say, "Well. . ." It could be, you know, they’re taking X and you can say, "Well, I think that’s Y," and you don’t say, "Well, I think you’re wrong," w hereas in other classes, you could say, you know . . . You said that when P ro fesso r asks you a question, it’s common for you to answer it. What about your own questions? Do y o u - I do ask questions. OK. Do you think that the classroom discussions are important to the poetry class? I really do, and I wish more people would participate. OK. Do you think the classroom discussions in som e way connect with the grade you’re going to get? No. I just realize that it d o esn ’ t. That’s why I’m discouraged because, you know, in classroom discussions, I feel that there is a lot more room for you to be right. But when it com es to a test answer, sh e’s looking for this one answer, and there’s no more variety any more. There’s just one particular answer, and it’s either right or wrong, and therefore, it kind of, in a way, contradicts itself. And another thing I don’ t like is that she gives her tests to her T.A. to correct--or her quizzes, I should say--and I think if she were to do it, maybe sh e’ll have a lot more understanding for why maybe w e’re kind of on the right or track or maybe we saw it that particular way. But if the T.A. has a certain answ er in front of them, you know, if you intrepret this thing . . . Like, she had what does "death’s other self" m ean? I put nighttime or winter. Thank God one of the answ ers w as nighttime, but it could’ ve been winter because the whole poem w as dealing with seasons. So I could go either way, and I thought, "I probably got penalized for giving two answers." But I didn’ t. Do you that the average student would find it helpful to sit down with another person and talk about a particular class for about an hour every week? Oh, definitely. I mean, for instance, I was telling som eone today, " I have got to get a tutor in poetry because every week there’s going to be so many poem s that are just going to whiz right by m e .". . . With poetry, you can’ t just read it and think; you study it and you know it. There’s som e things that I truly realize now that I don’ t know, that I don’ t understand, and I do need help and another person’s insight to make me say, "Oh, OK. I see." ’C ause som e of the poem s, honestly, I read them and I just don’ t get it. I just really don’ t get what it’s saying, where it’s going, whether it’s talking about an "it" or it’s talking about a person because it’s dealing with something that all of a sudden I . . . It also has to do with the time that it w as written, and the language is so difficult for me. I don’ t know if this is a factor or not, but I mean there are certain things that I don’ t know if there could be language barriers because, you know, English is my second language, and there’s certain words that I kind of sit in class and I think, "Well, do other people know what that m eans, or am I the only person who d o esn ’ t get it?" So I always tend to wonder. 506 I Well, I would say you don’ t operate with any kind of a vocabulary deficit. Most decidedly not. S No, but still, there’s certain things that sh e’ll say and everybody gets it. They go, "Oh!" and I’m, like, "Well, what does that mean?" I Oh, no. Don’ t trust the bobbing head phenom enon in class. That can be misleading, too. S There’s certain things, honestly, that I find myself having to, you know, ask her. W hatever she says afterwards, I have to draw from that and say, "Oh, OK. The supporting things kind o f . . . It goes . . . Maybe this m eans this." So I can go and look it up or som ething later on. But to go back to your questions, I would definitely think there’s certain subjects--and poetry is definitely, I learned, one of the things. I’m not going to be stubborn about it and think, "Oh, well, since I wrote poetry" or "Since I’ve had a similar type of experience with past poetry, I should grasp this." I cannot afford to fall back and just take it easy because I really need to get this stuff now. I If som ebody were tutoring in your 170 class, what could that person do to be helpful to the student, maybe helpful to you? What would be the role of the tutor? What should they be doing to be helpful? S I sought tutors years ago for different classes, and I also have tutored in the past. . . . Both people have a responsibility that you have to com e in having read the material, having som e knowledge, and you should’ ve already drawn from the material what you think, no matter how strange or off the track you might think it is. You have to com e in with som e kind of interpretation, and I think the tutor should hear out first what you got out of the poem. First, they should read it together and then say, "OK, what do you think this m eans? Let’s go through it, and you tell me what you think." The first time around, the student should do it. I think since poetry also has to be taken line by line, basically, to go over it then the second time with the tutor, and the tutor gives insights or inputs as to what they think is right. I What about the kind of tutor who maybe would start off the sessions as you described it: you read through the poem together, line by line, and the student is orally explicating the 507 poem in front of the tutor-"Well, I think it m eans this here"--and then, instead of the tutor taking his or her turn and going through the poem and sharing insights, what if the tutor asked the student a whole series of questions? So during the session, the tutor w asn’ t saying, in direct fashion at least, "This is what I think the poem means." What would you think of that? Would you find that frustrating? Would you think it inappropriate? No, I think that’s good. . . . I do find that question/answ er approach really good because, you know, they could put it like, "Do you think that this is not so much literal and it could mean this?" Mm-hm. Sometimes, they’re called "leading questions." You know, the tutor is kind of leading you to what they’ve observed themselves. You are in a sense getting what they think about the poem but~ Exactly. It com es in the form of questions rather than statem ents. I think actually, though, that is more productive because . . . with the right kind of push, just a little push, maybe you were on the wrong track but then you could also figure out the answ er by just a little bit of help. I think, actually, that does make a lot more sense. I think I know how you’re going to answer my last question: to ask if you would like to have weekly tutoring. Oh, I would love it. Yes, I anticipated your answer. OK, good. Tutorials for Introduction to Literature C lasses 509 Kelly Bush’s Tutorial with Lara Kinevsky Undated Tutor OK, so this is your first assignm ent? Student Yeah, and I heard that sh e’s just, like, this evil grader. S he’s really a nice woman, but. . . T OK, OK. If you bring a rough draft of your paper to her, will she go over that with you? S Uh-huh. T She will? S Yeah. She will. T OK. Then that is a really good idea to try to do that, so if we could try to get your rough draft done early, you can take it to her because that usually helps. S Yeah, if we could just start something today, then I could take it to her on Thursday. T Yeah, OK. Oh, that’s good. OK. We’ll work on it. . . . OK, so did you pick which one of these you wanted to do? S Yeah, I decided to do this one because it’s pretty straightforward. T OK, so let’s see. You are supposed to do . . . S She said any of the Shakespeare that we haven’ t done. T You mean, not write about any of these? Oh, OK. So you could do Sonnet 130? . . . OK, so you are going to do 130. S Uh-huh. Usually my biggest problem in a paper is getting the thesis, like, my introductory paragraph. Once I have done that I can usually support it, but I have a lot of trouble with that and my conclusion. T OK. 510 S Maybe we can work on my introduction. T OK. So really what we should probably do first is go ahead and read this over and think about what you want to say first, and we can just to ss your ideas around, and then maybe we can get a few things to start from scratch with. S OK. . . . Well, overall, I think that h e’s saying just that sh e ’s not beautiful. S he’s not any of the things that people write poem s about, but he loves her anyway. T OK. Well you know what? Why don’ t we just start jotting down som e of your ideas that you have and then we can work from there because som etim es once you see it on paper. . . . OK, well she also wants you to include the sonnet in relation to its genre, so do you have . . . Did she lecture on any other basic genres? You might want to incorporate som e of that in there. Did she lecture a little bit, give you any background on William Shakespeare? S No, not really. We did Chaucer. That’s all. She hasn ’ t really talked about it. . . . T Do you think it would be any easier if you write down the basic part of your essay and then we do the introduction and the conclusion last? Is that easier for you usually? S Urn, not really because I usually like to have my exact thesis to work with, but we could try that. T Well why don’ t we . . . It’s best if we stick to the thing that you’re used to and just work from there. S Ok, so what does she want the thesis to say? . . . T She wants you to be very specific. You have to consider not only the meaning and the them e of your sonnet but how imaginary language, style, structure, and rhythm add to your understanding. S OK. 511 T So maybe in y o u r. . . Do you think it would be a good idea to maybe introduce the meaning and the them e in your introduction? Like, what you have, the notes you have here. S OK. Well it, it rhymes. It’s got a rhyme schem e. T OK. You are going to want to write about that. How about imagery? S It’s kind of like . . . There is a poem that is called a "blason" where they talk about a woman from her head to her toes, but usually it’s like a love poem. Well this one is, too, but usually he’s admiring her. This is kind of backwards. T You might want to write about, then, what this poem would contradict with that style. S OK. So, it is sort of a contradictory poem. Urn, imagery will . . . T Is he descriptive o r . . . S Let’s see. He w as an English poet. T Mm-hm. You might want to include a little bit of his background in your introduction. S OK. Do you know, like, what kind of, what time period he w as in or whatever? T It should give when he w as born. He w as born in Stratford-on- Avon. I think it w as in the 1500’s. Oh, yeah. 1564. S Is he like a . . . Is he . . . I mean, obviously he’s not Renaissance. Is he, like, Elizabethan o r . . . T It w as very late R enaissance probably, P o s t-. . . S Between 1590 and 1609 is when they think they were com posed. Do you know what time period that is? Here we go. "Common R enaissance Poetry." . . . So I guess he w as a R enaissance poet. T Yeah, his time period is late Renaissance. 512 S OK. So he’s English and his poetry is Renaissance. I g uess I can just look up som e of the characteristics of that and then com pare it. T Mm-hm. Make sure, though, that if you use anything outside of this book that you cite it. S Yeah. . . . OK, well, she gave us a sam ple one to look at, so . . . T A sample essay? S Yeah. T Well that is helpful. . . . Did she go over all this iambic pentam eter and couplet with all of you? S Not really. I w as sick one day. Maybe that’s when she taught everything that I need to know for this paper. I don’ t know. But I pretty much know what iambic pentam eter and all that is. T OK. Yeah, I rem em ber som e of that from high school, [laughs] S I think pretty much everything Shakespeare wrote was in iambic pentam eter. T Mm-hm. S So . . . Well, the sam e . . . I guess the poem I picked is pretty much the sam e format as this, so I guess his poem, I could just basically say, is a typical Renaissance Shakespearean sonnet. . . . T OK. Do you think it might be a good idea if we take all these things that she wants you to consider and make them, you know, into something, you know, the subheadings for your paragraphs? You might want to do something . . . Like maybe in your introduction, consider the meaning and the theme, and then work from there. S OK. Maybe we should kind of, like, get the ideas for the body first, and then go back to the introduction. Maybe that would be easier. T OK. 513 S So, . . . I g uess my introduction will probably introduce everything, so maybe we could just start with, like, the first pargraph. My first idea. T OK. S Urn, do you think I should go from general to more specific? Like, "The overall ’feel’ I get from this poem is this," and then in my other paragraphs talk about why, o r . . . T Mm-hm. You can probably be general in your introduction, but then it might be a good idea in your paragraphs . . . See, like right here, right off the bat they tell you the narrative voice of this sonnet is male, as usual. So you know that this paragraph, they are really going to stress on the narrative voice. S OK. T So you can use a lot of examples. So maybe you want to start off with, you know, "The language of this poem is this," and then, you know, give exam ples of it. S OK. T It is always good to support whatever you are saying . . . by giving a quote. That is the best way to support what you’re saying. S OK. So we have the poem. Well, it’s obviously a male talking, but, I mean, I don’ t want to follow this exactly. T Right. You might want to go by what she wants you to do. You maybe want to do one on imagery, you know, one on language, because these are all the things she is telling you to pay attention to. S OK. . . . Like how the imagery adds to what though? T Well, his use of imagery. Like is this . . . Is he painting a picture for you? Can you picture this person? S Uh-huh. 514 T That’s maybe what you should focus in on, then. And how he does that, like what kind of words he uses. S OK. T Like, "black wires grow on her head." You know, instead of just saying hair, he gets, you know, real graphic. S OK. So I can say, like, in the first paragraph, discuss how, um, his use of imagery is, um, m akes us, like, able to see her. Like, you can just pretty much picture her. So like . . . T Like, yeah. Exactly. He is painting a picture with words. S OK. T Do you think that maybe we should jot down som e exam ples of that so, you know, like, when you go back over this? S Yeah. So, um, well, "black wires grow on her head." That w as pretty good, [laughs] And, um, how many exam ples do you think that I should give for that? T Um, let me see what this gives as an example. If you’re just doing it in a paragraph, I don’ t think I would go more than, you know, a couple . . . I don’ t think you have to . . . S These are pretty short paragraphs, and obviously this is an A paper, so . . . T Yeah. . . . I don’ t think there is a set rule for how many quotes you have as long as you get your point across and you feel confident that they are going to know what you are writing about. S This essay has tons of paragraphs in it, see? T Yeah, that’s not your typical five paragraph . . . S Yeah, I guess, because she wants us to talk about everything. T There is a lot here that she w ants you to cover. . . . 515 S It’s a three-page paper, so I’ll probably just use two examples. I’ll use the hair/wires one and how about "her voice I love to hear speak / Yet well I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound." T That’s good. S OK. T All these ideas you are pointing out, since they are contradicting each o ther-or he is putting her down basically-that kind of goes back to the contradictory thing you had mentioned in your introduction, too. S Yeah. So in the introduction, should I just talk about, like, how the rhyme schem e m akes it, like . . . And the iambic pentam eter and all that m akes it an English Renaissance poem ? And he loves her even though she isn’ t beautiful. OK. So this is pretty much my intro, the basic ideas for my intro. T Mm-hm. S OK. We’ ve g o t . . . First paragraph discuss imagery. T You know, you might even . . . You think it would be a good idea if you put your meaning in a paragraph about the general meaning and them e before the first paragraph? Or do you think it would be better to include that in your introduction? S Actually I should probably make that my first paragraph because that’s kind of like . . . T It’s kind of like a foundation for it. S OK, so this could be my second paragraph. I could say how his imagery m akes me think this. T So the first is going to be the meaning and the them e of the sonnet. S OK, well the meaning is just, um . . . OK, the basic meaning of the poem is that, even though she is not all the beautiful things that m ost men want, he thinks that their love is better than 516 anything. I don’ t really understand the last line: "And yet by heaven I think my love is rare / as any women m isrepresented with false comparison." Well, that m akes sense. T Mm-hm. S So I g uess he’s saying that at least their love is true. He is telling the truth about her but he still loves her, so the meaning is . . . He can ’ t, I guess, can ’ t com pare her to beautiful things. Well, he kind of is, b u t . . . T Mm-hm. S He can ’ t . . . T Maybe that’s the point. Even though he can ’ t com pare her to all those things, that he still does love her. S Mm-hm. OK. He can ’ t com pare her to all the beautiful things . . . T You know, actually, he is comparing her to those but she just d o esn ’ t m easure up to them, [laughs] S Maybe he can ’ t describe her with those things. T Yeah. S So he can ’ t describe her with beautiful things, but he loves her and he thinks that their love is true because at least it’s honest. T Do you think that it would be a good idea to write something about, that this is the way he see s her? That he see s h e r . . . Like, it’s not all foggy to him . . . S Yeah, yeah. OK, and he thinks that their love is true because he see s her for what she really . . . He, but he loves her ayway. . . . I g uess he d o esn ’ t have any, like, false im ages about her or anything like that. T Mm-hm. . . . S So the them e would be, like . . . So that’s the meaning, though. The basic meaning of the them e is . . . 517 T Well, the them e and the meaning kind of tie together so . . . S Yeah. T I think that if you get one . . . You know, if you explain i t . . . S Yeah, I think that she just wants an overall explanation, maybe, of what the poem is about and then . . . OK, so I can talk about how his use of imagery m akes us know that she is not a beautiful woman, obviously, because he says th a t. . . T You see, that’s good because now this is going to lead right into that, because you are saying that she is not beautiful, and then right away you are going to get into the imagery. You see? So, like, one paragraph is going to lead to another. S OK. T That’s really good because then they’re going to link to each other and then you can go from there. S OK. So, after the second paragraph, after imagery, she wants to know about, um, language. Imagery and language kind of tie together sort of, huh? Maybe like . . . Hm . . . T Maybe because he is using his language to paint the image for you, you might want to comment on his choice of words. S OK. So, this should probably still be the second paragraph though, huh? Or do you think the imagery and language should go in the sam e paragraph, or should I split them up? T I don’ t know. What do you think? S Well I guess it is the language that he uses that, like, m akes the imagery, so maybe they should be in the sam e paragraph. T You want to show the link between the two of them. . . . S Well I guess it’s kind of ironic that he uses beautiful things to describe an ugly woman. 518 T OK. You might want to mention that then. Make sure you give an example of that, because, you know, that is going to be kind of vague if you don’ t . . . S Yeah, OK. . . . I guess, like, just "coral is far more red than her lips are red." He com pares her to roses. T Mm-hm. S Do you think that roses one is better? . . . T Is better than which one? S Than the first one. I mean the "coral is far more red than her lips are red." I g uess roses are probably considered more beautiful than coral, so . . . T What other English classes have you taken? Have you taken 110? S Yeah, I took that. . . . T Is this your second English class, then? S No, I took fiction, too. Introduction to Fiction. . . . Um, I just have trouble, like, turning a poem into a paper. That’s kind of hard because it’s so short. T Right, the whole point behind it is probably . . . You have to be really analytical, you know, really expand on your idea because, you know, it says right here that she wants you to be sure that you analyze closely line by line rather than generally. So it probably isn’ t a really good idea to just kind of, like, say, you know, "In general . . ." That’s why it’s probably good for us to concentrate on each line. S Yeah. The only problem with this poem is that it’s just so basic. I w as going to pick a harder poem, but then I was thinking that if I analyzed it wrong, then that counts. You know, if I do it wrong, then the whole paper is wrong. At least this poem I know what it m eans for sure. . . . But it is kind of hard to explicate it because it’s ju s t. . . It’s really basic. I m ean . . . 519 T Well it’s a good starting point. I mean, if you are uncomfortable with doing a harder one, then this is a good place to start. S OK. Well, let’s just say that is my second paragraph for now. T OK. Where do you want to go from there? S Let’s see, the third would be style. Well, the style is that it’s a sonnet. T OK. Great. S And that it’s Renaissance. I guess I should expand on what m akes it a sonnet and what m akes it Renaissance. T Mm-hm. Do you have anything like that in your notes? S No, but I’m sure I could find it in the book or something. She talked about ballads and lyrics . . . She d o esn ’ t really give us any notes on that, but I’m pretty sure I could find it in the book or something. T Do you think that it would be a good idea to talk about his writing style, too? S Mm-hm. . . . I think the rhyme schem e, the way it sounds . . . T You might want to put how it rhymes every other line or, you know, how if it has an ABAB or an ABCABC pattern. S Mm-hm. T Did she go over that with you? S Yeah. So this is w h a t. . . Yeah, that’s why, kind of why it’s a sonnet. T Mm-hm. S So the rhyme schem e is why it’s a sonnet. . . . When I go and talk to her, she can answer my questions about why it is R enaissance and stuff like that. So if in my third paragraph I talk about t h a t . . . Fourth paragraph. 520 T Structure. S That kind of would go in with it being a sonnet. T Yeah, I think structure would definitely consider your AB pattern that you pointed out. S Yeah, the fourteen lines with the couplet. OK, after structure . . . So that’s all in the third paragraph. This do esn ’ t have that many paragraphs. T You know how you have that these are the fourteen lines o f . . . You know, when you give your definition of sonnet, your fourteen lines of iambic pentam eter? Let’s see how they did it in your example. Like, this person included it in the introduction. . . . S Did they expand on it, I wonder? . . . I think that the way they divided it up was . . . T In sections. They went by sections because this person cam e right off the bat and told you that it’s, you know, a sonnet because of these reasons. S Mm-hm. T And then they went through each part. S I g u ess I kind of do n ’ t want to do that, just because I’ll have to write the first section, and then I will say the sam e thing over again. Like he says "my m istress’ eyes are nothing like the sun." All I can say about that is that his m istress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. I don’ t think that that is a good way to say that, b u t . . . T OK. S Um . . . T So you just feel more comfortable with the way w e’ve done so far. S Yeah, I think so... T OK. Well we can just keep working from there. 521 S I think the meaning is kind of general. Like, I don’ t know . . . T B ecause . . . Maybe because . . . Are you trying to say because it’s about the sam e thing throughout this whole thing instead of all these transitions that this person is talking about? S Yeah. T See, because there, they’re talking about shifts in voice, shifts in tone. S Yeah. And I don’ t think that this poem does that, so I think that it would be kind of repetitive. T OK. S Um, but I think this is, like, like, the characteristic of a certain kind of sonnet. The fact that it is all one thing, then it changes in the last, in the couplet, but I’m not sure what, so I want to ask her about that. T OK. You might want to write that in our structure notes. S Yeah, like, have the couplet change tone. That will probably have something to do with what m akes it whatever kind of sonnet that it is. T Mm-hm. S And then I just need a conclusion because that is an intro, three paragraphs, and a conclusion. T OK. Let’s m ake sure we covered everything that she mentioned here. OK, the meaning and them e of the sonnet. That’s in your first paragraph that you were going to talk about that, right? S Yeah. T OK. And imagery . . . S Uh-huh. T Then you have style, and you have structure . . . 522 S Style, structure, and . . . W as it rhythm? T And rhythm, too. Yeah, she w ants you to consider rhythm. S OK. That’s still. . . That has to do with the iambic pentam eter and the rhyme schem e and all of that. So w e’ve got meaning, language, and imagery. I think if I, in my first paragraph, just kind of talk about how all these things make up a poem, and then, I g u ess I can start giving exam ples in my . . . Like, I probably won’ t give any exam ples in my intro. Does this person give any exam ples in their introduction? T No. S Oh, no really. OK. . . . T OK. How about this part about "You should also consider your sonnet in relation to its genre?" S Yeah, I think I need to work on my thesis. I think that is going to be my biggest problem. . . . I never learned about thesis in high school. T OK, a thesis is, like, basically the point you are going to try to argue or the them e you are going to carry through your whole paper. S OK. So, is that the whole introduction or just a sentence? T Um . . . You should introduce your thesis in your introduction, and you might want to expand on it. But a thesis is basically going to let your reader know where you are headed and, you know, what you are going to consider and the general point you are trying to make. S B ecause I think I want to use for my thesis the fact that this is a blason. T Mm-hm. S B ecause he goes from her eyes all the way down to the way she walks, so that pretty much covers what this is supposed to do. 523 T OK. You’ ve got that in your introduction already. S Yeah. And then . . . So, I guess that all these things are supposed to prove that it is sort o f . . . T Right. S OK. T And if you are going to say that it is an English R enaissance poem, if you are going to include that in your thesis, then all of these should explain, like, in term s of language, why it is an English R enaissance poem, and, in term s of this style of structure, it is because of those fourteen lines of iambic pentam eter. S OK. T So, let’s see, do we have either a traditional Italian or English sonnet or does it offer som e sort of innovation? OK, you’re . . . You said that you are going to argue that it is traditional English? S I think. I don’ t really know though. T That’s what you were going to write down to ask your professor. S Yeah. Like, what kind of poem is this? T OK____ S Because i t . . . Let’s see. S he’s using that for something like Chaucer. C haucer w asn’ t the sam e time as Shakespeare. . . . So I think that I am going to say that it is a traditional blason, but it has got a twist because he’s comparing her to these things, but instead of doing it to praise her, h e’s kind of saying that she do esn ’ t com pare. T You’re going to include that for your thesis then, right? S Yeah. T OK. The way that you have this set up is good, but see, right here she says that "You must examine the poem closely, line by line, rather than in a general way." 524 S Yeah, I w as just thinking that, too. Maybe I should . . . B ecause if I am going to say it is a blason, but it has a twist, then I’m going to have to go through and say, "Well, he starts out with her eyes and he ends with the way she walks, and he is comparing her to beautiful things like they usually do, b u t . . So I g uess I do have to go stanza-by-stanza or whatever. T Mm-hm. You might want to keep to this outline that we have, though, so you know to keep all of these points in there because you know what you want to say. You know, you have a clear idea of what you want to say, and this might help you to organize it because, since he does in this order, you can just follow his pattern and just keep reading these into here. S So should I maybe, like, incorporate instead of dividing the paragraphs up into these things? Like, let’s say I do a quatrain. So I start with these four lines and then I say what those four lines mean, like, I’ll say word-by-word. Then talk about the imagery in the line and what the line m eans, and the word choice . . . T That will work too. S In every paragraph? T Mm-hm. You see, there is never, like, clean-cut rules when you are writing something like this. You have to do, like, how you feel that it is going to communicate it. S OK. So maybe I should do it that way. Maybe I should divide up the paragraphs by quatrains. But then, as soon as after I write that, then the first thing I’ll do is talk about the meaning of the quatrain, and then I’ll talk a b o u t. . . T Do you think that you still want to keep your introduction, though? S Yeah, I think so. T OK____ S I think I’m going to have to put, like, in the third paragraph, more into the introduction, maybe. T OK. 525 S Or maybe I should m ake that my first paragraph, because if I put it, that it is a sonnet, in this structure and rhyme schem e last, then what I am supporting might get kind of confusing. So I think I am supposed to be supporting that, and if I don’ t talk about it until the last paragraph, then they aren’ t going to know what I am talking about at all. T Right. S I think that before I can really even start this, I have to find out what kind of poem it is. T When is this paper due? S Next Thursday. T Oh good, so when you com e in next week, we can work on it again. S Yeah. I think I will go see her on Thursday b ecause right now I am kind of confused about. . . I can ’ t use any of this to support anything because I don’ t know what I am supposed to be supporting yet, so it’s kind of hard. T OK. Well you have a good starting point because you do understand what they are talking about, and that is half the battle right there. S Yeah. And . . . I think I figured out pretty much how I want to set it up. T Mm-hm. S I have figured out what I am going to talk about on all these things. I have to find out exactly what a blason is and exactly what iambic pentam eter and all that stuff is before I even write my introduction or else . . . T Does it help you when you write these ideas down, just jot them down first? S Yeah. 526 T OK. That’s good. S Yeah, because it’s kind of something to look at. I have to figure out what all of this stuff is first because I can ’ t really even write my introduction. I can ’ t write a paper until I write the introduction . . . T Right. So that m eans you have to do what works for you. So then we are just going to incorporate these ideas and . . . are you going to go by doubles, or are you going to go by the first four? How do you want to do that? S I kind of want to go, like, by each idea, not a whole paragraph for each line, but I think, like . . . T For each ABAB pattern? S Yeah, probably. Yeah. I think that that is the way it is supposed to be. Usually, though, there is, like, a whole idea. In each quatrain he kind of puts a whole idea in every line. . . . But I don’ t know. I think maybe that I have to look som e of these words up in the dictionary. T Which words? S Like, if I can get the e x a c t. . . First of all, I don’ t know what "dun" is. Do you know what that is? Is it a color or som ething? Let me see if this person puts, like, every line of the poem in the paper. T I’m sure we have a dictionary around here. Do you want me to see if I can dig one up? We can look som e of this up now. . . . Let’s see. What words do we need here? S "Dun." . . . "Dingy or dull gray color." OK, and also I wanted to look up exactly what a "blason" was. Maybe that can tell me the time period and stuff it cam e from. T Did she lecture about this in class? S She just mentioned it really briefly. . . . Oh, here it is. . . . "To describe in technical language . . ." ["A poetic genre devoted to the praise or blame of almost anything"] 527 T This dictionary is really old. It might not even have . . . You know, especially if it is a particular type of writing, it might not. . . S Yeah. T It might be too specific. S Oh, well. I think I have a good start, though. I mean, becuase I have something definite at least to go in and show her and say this is what I have to work with. T If you show her the outline, she will know that you have at least started to think through this. S Yeah. T Is that all you want to do for today? Is there anything else you want to go over? S Yeah, I think so. 528 Mara Jovanian’s Tutorial with Holly Lee Undated Student OK. I’m trying to do this explication of a poem. We have three main points she says she wanted us to work on . . . . and the them e of his sonnet, but how imagery, language, style, structure, and rhythm add to your understanding, and how to distinguish whether it’s an Italian or English sonnet. I have to have a thesis for my explication supported with evidence. OK, I chose this one from Spenser, and I pretty much tried to tear it apart as much as possible, but I have a couple problem s still with . . . You know, at first I thought that, in reading it, it didn’ t occur to me until the last four lines or the last quatrain and couplet that it deals with God and divinity and then, this here m akes me think of going back. I had another tutor and I w asn’ t sure, he w asn’ t sure, and so I kept going back and forth in a way, and I want to go over this. I want to get a feel for whether I’m on the right track with this because a couple things still bother me. This one where it says "trew fayre" and this whole quatrain in here . . . So, I’ll go over this [Sonnet 79 by Edmund Spenser]. "Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it." Now, first of all, for "credit it," I thought it m eant that you do deserve it but I was also told that you also believe it? Tutor You know what, let me read it over first and then w e’ll go through it line by line. . . . OK. Let’s take it line by line. S So he says, "Men call you beautiful, and you do deserve it, and you, yourself, know it." Which, like, I don’ t know. T OK, the thing with these sonnets is that we can ’ t know, unless we talk to Spenser, what he truly meant, you know? So, I think . . . what she looks for is . . . I mean, you could very easily say that it could mean this or it could m ean this. She would prefer you say that than for you saying this is what it definitely m eans. Because we have no way of truly proving it. S Oh, okay. T What you have to concentrate on is proving your thesis. 529 S Oh, okay. T I would probably say "deserve it" . . . but it could be "believe." We don’ t know. S OK. "For that your selfe ye dayly such doe see:" Here he’s saying, um, you, yourself, see that on a daily basis, and you know it because you se e it on a daily basis. Or he do esn ’ t say anything about you knowing it. I mean, you see that within yourself every day. T Right. S That sh e’s beautiful, I guess. That part. "But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit, / And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me." Um, here the way I see it is that h e’s saying that the real beauty is a gentle wit and a virtuous mind. And the way I see it is that he’s kind of almost being critical of her, and the way I envision it is that she thinks that sh e’s beautiful and men praise her for her beauty, and that’s enough. And I see him, the writer, the author, the speaker, saying that-alm ost knocking her dow n- saying that that’s not what the real beauty . . . The real beauty is this. T OK. I took it as not so much that he’s knocking her down, but just saying that men, m ost men, see her physical beauty, and he see s beyond that. S Ah, OK. Yeah. That’s the other way, but I don’ t know. For som e reason, I thought that he’s almost saved her as though she didn’ t know it. But then that’s another way of looking at it, that he’s saying that that would make the whole thing so different, that she does p o ssess gentle wit and virtuous mind and that he see s virtue beyond the beauty. T So what the first quatrain, and how I took it, is saying: Men call you fair, physically, and she sees that. She sees, like, from looking in a mirror or whatever, that sh e’s physically beautiful. But to him, the wit and the virtuous mind are more important. Actually, we can go through and look at the tone and then we can see which one is more probable. S All right. 530 For all the rest, how ever fayre it be, Shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew: But onely that is perm anent and free From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew. Um, all the rest however fair it be . . . Um, everything else, no matter how beautiful it is, will turn to nothing and. . . At first I looked up "hew," um, and it said "to strike forcibly with an axe, sword" or whatever, and it just do esn ’ t fit in here. And then, "hew," if it’s meaning of h-u-e, maybe color. T That’s how it’s meant. Yeah, it’s just in the Old English. S All right. So that’s hue. T You did the right thing, though, by looking it up. Usually you’ll get the definitions. But in this case it’s like h-u-e. S OK. So then, um, everything else. So this is what I wrote for the first one: Men call you beautiful and you do deserve it. For you, yourself, see it everyday. This is the way I put it. But the true beauty is the gentle dem eanor or character and the virtuous mind, that which encourages you to be, that which encourages you to be virtuous. Those are what I praise to be beautiful. Inner beauty is more worthy of praise than outer beauty. T Perfect. S OK. And then the second quatrain I put: Everything else, all the physical attributes of beauty, no matter how beautiful, shall turn to nothing and lose its color. T Mm-hm. S Or its . . . T The life, the beauty. S Like, the vitality. And then here, the second part, "But onely that is perm anent and free / From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew." For that I put: "But only that which is inner beauty, inner attributes, is perm anent and free. From frail corruption the body disintegrates w hereas it do esn ’ t affect the inner side." . . . When I 531 first went over it, the poem, I looked at it on a much m ore spiritual level. The way I looked at it the first time w as that, "But onely that is perm anent and free / From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew." "Ensew," it said, "To follow an order." And "flesh ensew," what follows after flesh would be the spirit. You know, like after once you die, what follows after the flesh is the spirit. I thought maybe here is where it’s leading into the spirit aspect of the poem, the religious aspect. I looked these two, but all of a sudden, it kind o f . . . I don’ t know if that’s wrong for me to do that because I would say the body breaks down, it disintegrates, but the only thing that is perm anent and free would be the soul or the spirit. But I don’ t know if I’m just pulling that out of a hat. I m ean, that’s the feeling I get, but I don’t know that’s what I should be seeing in that. T I would say both. If he’s saying that the body is subject to corruption and her spirit and inner beauty is not, and so that’s permanent. But also, what you’re saying . . . I would say you’re on the right track because if we look down a few lines, the divine and heavenly and spirit, you know the diction has a religious or spiritual sen se to it. S That’s what I thought. T I think that you’re right on the track. S OK, so . . . But only that inner beauty, inner attributes . . . I could include inner spirit? T Sure. S OK. The soul, inner beauty. . . . T And, if we looked at the "Spirit," it’s capitalized. S Right, right. T You know, so again, it’s a sense of a divine being. S Yeah, the only problem I had was whether I should stick with what is really . . . You see, for me, I felt like maybe my imagination is already taking off a few miles ahead of me or whether I should wait until it actually mentions the "divine" and the "heavenly seed" 532 and all that. But for me, automatically when I got to this quatrain, I w as already thinking of spirit. It took me a while because I didn’ t know "that doth flesh ensew." I kept sticking at it and I thought, "OK, if it m eans to follow an order as a result, then"--l th o ught- "after flesh breaks down and dies, there would only be the spirit." T And the whole poem is about body and spirit. But what she wants you to do is to go into that and pull out exactly what you’re doing. S OK. Then it says, "That is true beautie: that doth argue you." This one bothers me. I still don’ t get it. I don’ t know if it m eans it encourages you, but I’ll read the whole quatrain. T OK. S Um, That is true beautie: that doth argue you To be divine and borne of heavenly seed: Derived from that fayre Spirit, from whom al true And perfect beauty did at first proceed. Um, I said that is true beauty which argues against your belief to be divine and virtuous and to com e from the heavenly seed. That d o esn ’ t make sen se to me. Derived from a beautiful Spirit which all true and perfect beautiful things com e from. All perfect beauty com es from the Spirit, being God. . . . T The word that I think is confusing is "argue." S Yeah. T And I think it’s m eant as in "that tells or com m ands you." You know, I don’ t think i t . . . I think it symbolizes, like, the struggle between the body and the spirit. But I think he’s saying that it’s true beauty that tells you to be divine, one of the heavenly seed and not of the world, and the physical beauty. Does that make any sen se to you? . . . S Two of the things that also caught my attention w as putting a colon here and here, maybe to draw more attention . . . Maybe if it’s doing that, it’s saying a m essage. Is that what you m ean? 533 T Well, I think that the colons are leading to definitions. So h e’s saying that is true, and true beauty is that which encourages you to be divine and born of the heavenly seed, and the heavenly seed is derived from the fair spirit. S OK, what is the heavenly seed? T Good question. Part of the heavenly seed is your just saying that you’re rooted in the divine. You know what I m ean? S OK. T Like, you, everything that you are com es from something that is spiritual instead of coming from an earthly seed, that is like from the world. So that it’s . . . S So he’s looking at hum ans as being, like, a miracle of God, like a product of God. T Right. S The heavenly seed m eans that you’re a product, like a source from God. T Right, and that what you work on to grow or what you work on to root out of is the spiritual, not the physical. Like, h e’s saying, concentrate on what com es from the heavenly seed, what is spiritual in you and build that and grow from that. You see what I’m saying? S OK, let me write that down. So do esn ’ t it seem like . . . kind of giving her this m essage is almost like h e’s teaching her, as if she d o esn ’ t know? T Yes. S You know, like, maybe she d o esn ’ t think of the virtuous mind and the gentle wit and sh e ’s just very vain and very, you know, just taking care of her outside and not looking in, and h e’s almost like a teacher telling her what it should be. I mean, that’s what the colons kind of tell me, that he’s a lm o st. . . Like, this is what follows, this is what it is. 534 T Right. S Almost teaching it. T Right. S Do you see it that way or do you see it differently? T No, I see what you’re saying and I think that perhaps it’s not so much that she d o esn ’ t see it all, but that she em phasizes so much the vanity that you were speaking of. S Right, right. T And he’s saying, you know, com e away from that and em phasize this. S I see, yeah. T So I think you’re right. S OK. So, "Derived from that fayre Spirit, from whom al true." So here, basically, he said--let me see if I got it right— that the beauty, the true beauty, is that which encourages you to be divine? Do I need to take each word, like "divine," and give another meaning to it or can I stick with divine and would she want me to, you know, use that sam e word? T OK, you can stick with it. There are certain words that you should say, like this word can mean this or this. Divine is pretty clear cut. What you want to do, though, is go through and look at w ords that tie into each other. Like I was saying, "divine" and "heavenly" and "Spirit," and, you know, anything like that. And say, like, here, these words tie together and this is how . . . But you don’ t have to assign a new definition to every word in the poem. S OK, yeah, because, like, with that one . . . And also, there w as another one, like, the "vertuous mind" and "the gentle wit"? T Mm-hm. 535 S I w as trying to see if I have to keep putting different things to it, so that’s why with "the gentle wit," I put "gentle demeanor" or "gentle character." T Right. You could say, like, "intellect" for "vertuous mind." S OK. T Or things such as that. S All right. Um, so that’s the . . . T Pardon me, if you’re going to use "vertuous mind" or "gentle wit," if you’re not going to change it, just put it in quotes imbedded into your sentence. Do you see what I am saying? Like if you say that "the speaker tells her that she should concentrate on her ’gentle wit.’" Just set it in quotation marks. S And then if I want to go on to give more definition to it, do I put a com m a or do I put it into parenthesis? Which one works better? T Comma. S Comma, okay. So then, that is true beauty, that which encourages you to be divine and born of heavenly seed. I keep having a mental block as to how to phrase this. I m ean I keep trying to structure a sentence in my mind, every time I read these two lines I can see, like, "That is true beauty, that which encourages you to be divine." But this part, "and borne of heavenly seed," how do you say that in a sentence without it sounding like you’re just saying the whole thing like the way it is in the book? And to be born. I mean, who is encouraging her? How can you encourage a person to be born of heavenly seed? T Well, see the thing is that. . . In a sense, what h e’s saying is she w as already born of heavenly seed. She was already given the spirit when she w as born, so what he’s saying is to nourish that. So, you could go to the sense like it is true beauty that encourages you to be divine and nourish the spirit that was given to you. S OK. 536 T Or nourish the heavenly spirit within you. Do you see what I’m saying? S Yeah. T Something of that sense. S That is true beauty, that which encourages you to be divine. To nourish the sp irit. . . that was born within you? T To nourish the seed of the spirit she was born with, that w as born within her. S OK. T The other thing that I think th a t. . . See that’s what I’m struggling with, that word. S OK, OK, yeah. T It could m ean encourages; it also could m ean her struggle. This argues against her because she is concentrating on vanity and the spirit is another aspect of it. It’s almost like sh e ’s in conflict. Does she concentrate on what is fame or does she concentrate on spirit? S OK. T So what is divine and what is pure and what is inner beauty is also arguing for what is outer beauty. Do you see what I am saying? I think that could be read both ways, which you can either state in your paper or you can pick a direction and stick to it depending upon your thesis. I don’ t m ean to confuse you more. S No, no, because here I have this is what the . . . What I had, what I w as thinking is the true beauty is that which encourages you. Then the other aspect of it that I g o t. . . from the other two was--l don’ t know about this first part--but that which argues against your belief is to be divine. So I guess her belief, meaning that she wants, like, what you just said . . . T Her vanity probably. 537 S And then argues against her belief. T Right, because it’s arguing for the spiritual and sh e ’s arguing for the physical. S OK. T Does that make sen se? S Yeah, except I don’ t know what’s arguing. Who’s arguing, I mean. T The whole notion of beauty brings up this question between the physical and the spiritual, so what brings about the argum ent is the whole notion that she should concentrate on the spiritual. It’s, like, if she hadn’ t been told this, there wouldn’ t have been any conflict because she could just go on concentrating on w hat’s vain, but he is saying to her, "Concentrate." I’m assum ing it’s a he. Yeah, h e’s saying that "Concentrate on what’s inside of you," and to her it’s kind of like, "Oh, do I concentrate more on w hat’s inside or do I concentrate on what’s outside?" So it’s this belief that what is spiritual is what is good that is making her question; if it is, not what is physical, that she thought w as good. Does that m ake sense? S Yeah, I understand that, except when I’m reading this I’m thinking that this is happening as he is speaking it to her, at the present moment. T What is happening? S Like, as he is saying this to her, this is the true beauty, etc., and gets to hear that that is the true beauty, that which, etc. As I’m reading this, that’s the moment that the poem is at that moment; at the present moment he is speaking this to her. But what you are saying and what I am having difficulty understanding is that it m akes it almost seem like she has had time to think o f . . . It m akes it seem like he knows; he has already spoken it to her and sh e ’s becom e in conflict with it and she knows of that conflict. And I don’ t know how that’s happened. T Oh, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. When he is saying this poem to her, like you were saying to me, like sh e ’s taught to 538 concentrate on what is vain, right? And as he says this to her, it just arises, the conflict. I’m not saying that the conflict’s in her and that she has been carrying it around with her; it just brings up the question to her and the reader, like, "Oh, she m ust be concentrating on the physical and he’s arguing that she should concentrate on what’s inside and that this beauty, the true beauty, which is what’s inside, is arguing to her that she should be divine, at one with the heavenly spirit." But that do esn ’ t m ean that the conflict has been within her for a long time or that, you know . . . Does that m ake more sense? S Okay, this part all of a sudden becom es what’s inside her, and it’s no longer the poet speaking it; I mean, the speaker speaking it? T Oh, he is. He’s saying that what is true beauty is what is telling you to be divine. What is true beauty, which is inner beauty, is telling you to be divine and born of the heavenly spirit. It’s exactly what we were saying. It’s just, in one sense, we are saying that this what true beauty is encouraging, which it is, and in another sen se we are saying that true beauty is arguing for that, which it is. S Okay. T It’s basically the sam e thing we were saying before. I didn’ t m ean to confuse you. S No, no. . . . I like that fact that you shed m ore light into it because if I see it a different way, maybe I can understand it if it follows more of a flow because that bothered me forever and ever. I just could not get past that. So what does it m ean? Who’s arguing it? And I thought, "Well, does he literally m ean argue?" And then I thought, "Is it encourage? Is it telling you . . ." T I think it’s both. I think it’s arguing and encouraging because they are arguing for that point and encouraging her to follow that point. S Now, to be divine, does that mean to be holy? To be spiritual? T Yeah, I would say spiritual. So we have to be careful in playing on the religion because it’s safer to say spiritual since he directly refers to the spirit instead of saying that the spirit is definitely God, because that can get confusing. But. . . can ’ t we assum e that it is God? Or that he’s personifying the spirit that’s in her. You can make that assum ption, but the thing is that I don’ t know if the whole poem is encouraging her to be holy, religiously holy. It’s encouraging her to reflect on inward beauty. I think it’s the second one. At first I thought it w as very spiritual, I m ean very, like, religious. Then I thought that he is just saying that you’ve got to tap into that inner side. OK, so to go on: "Derived from that fayre Spirit." Oh, here again, it says, To be divine . . . of heavenly seed: Derived from that fayre Spirit, from whom al true And perfect beauty did at first proceed. So basically, this is all one sentence saying it’s one thing causing another thing which got derived from another thing. I m ean, the true beauty is what m akes one be divine . . . and one who com es from the heaven’s seed is one who is derived from the beautiful spirit, which is God. So the heavenly seed com es from God, and God is from whom all perfect beauty is first started from . . . You’re right. I mean, you are getting caught up in it but you are right. Seriously. True beauty is that which encourages a person to be divine, born of the heavenly seed, and the heavenly seed is derived from the spirit, which is God, from whom all beauty first cam e from. And then here, with the perfect beauty, I said physical beauty is not perfect because it fades. Only the spirit can be perfect beauty so here he-- Wonderful. And then h e-ex cep t I don’ t know this--probably he m eans by God because I wouldn’ t know, since it’s the beginning, I wouldn’ t know if would have been a capital anyways. Now here, I do n ’ t know if I should see it as only or "onely." It’s only. Yeah, I’m almost positive because it’s old English. It’s like the "fayre." 540 S "He only fayre, and what he fayre hath made: / All. . . lyke flowres, untymely fade." Since God is the only true, real beauty, God, which is the fair spirit, is the only one that is fair. Why do I want to say fair, like just? And he m akes beautiful things and beautiful people. Here I get the sense that he’s saying God being the only real beauty who m ade other beautiful things. In the last sentence I know that he’s saying that he-being the only b eau ty - what he made, I guess . . . This is the way that I see it, but I don’ t know if this is what it’s saying. God m ade two beautiful things: one is the spirit and one is the beauty that fades like flowers and, before its time, untimely fades. I see it; like, flowers lose their beauty much faster than you expect them to. I see here, like, there are two beauties involved almost. There are three "fayres" going on here but each one, I m ean these last two I see as being different, but I only think it’s because I want it to be. T You see this "fayre" and this "fayre" as referring to two different things, like that being the spiritual and that being the physical? S Yeah. He’s the "onely fayre, and what he"-the "onely fayre"--"hath made." T That m akes sense because this is "other fayre." It’s not that sam e "fayre." S Now I see it. OK, I don’ t know why I felt that way b u t. . . Thank you. T No, thank you. Now I understand it, to o -th e "other fayre." A ll the other beautiful things, like flowers, ultimately fade, in time fade, but the spiritual . . . S Does that "untymely" mean in time? T Yeah. S The way I see it is before its time, like almost untimely, like it w asn’ t time for it to die, so we thought, and then it dies. T Right. Either way I think it m eans that the beauty dies before we want it to or before . . . I see it also as ultimately there is no way you can preserve the physical like you can the spiritual. I think that’s the point he is trying to make: that what is physical will die 541 no matter what and what is spiritual is constant. And that’s perhaps his argum ent as to why the spiritual is the true beauty because everything is perm anent and true and steadfast, that which is spiritual. And everything that is physical is subject to time. S So here again I think that. . . Is it okay to say the only beauty or do I m ake another meaning out of only? T I wouldn’ t say the only beauty because he is creating the other beauty, but perhaps the truest beauty, because it is from God that all the beauty com es from. He is the origin of perfect beauty or the truest beauty or the origin of what is the most perfect beauty. B ecause it is referring to inner beauty as perfect beauty here, we cannot say that he is the only perfect beauty; what he has created is referred to as perfect beauty. Does that m ake sense? So that probably m eans the truest. S The truest beauty or just the truest? T Is that how you see that line as well? S I w as wondering when I looked at the historical dictionary under "fayre." The way it is spelled here, it didn’ t give a meaning but it gave two words--fair and fare. I was thinking a s I am reading this whether the meaning of fair changes from being beautiful to being ju s t. . . T Oh, I see what you are saying. S I wonder here if it d o esn ’ t change its meaning to he being like a grand just person or the grand judge. He is the one w h e th er. . . T Or what he justly has made. S So I don’ t know if I should stick with beauty all the way through or whether I should try to experiment with the notion of just, but the only way it would fit is at the end. T Right. We know that these are beauty. I would say that the only one that I would really play with is this one because this one is just saying that what he is creating is beautiful, and this one I would say is beauty too because it is referring to flowers. This is the 542 only one that you could play with and the safest thing to do and the sm artest thing to do is say this "fayre" can either m ean this or this, and that way you have just covered your bases. It can ’ t hurt to give too many definitions in an explication because there are different ways to read it and it show s her that you have taken the time to look into that word and to think about it and give it som e insight. The rest of them I probably wouldn’ t question. S Right, it is just that one because I thought God would j u s t. . . T That is a good point. S You know, to do that. T Right. S So then, OK. So, "He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made." So it basically is separating what God has m ade to what, urn . . . There is something . . . T I see what you are saying. S I am thinking that maybe there is since God is the real beauty. T Let’s just stick with that one instead of just. . . S If God is the real true beauty. T And I think that’s what it does say. OK, go ahead. S Then the . . . Then what he produces is also another true beauty, which would be this spirit, and then here it almost seem s like he is saying . . . T Like God didn’ t - S Like God didn’ t create. Yeah! T I see what you are saying completely. S God didn’ t create these "A ll other fayre," all other beautiful things "lyke flowers, untymely fade." So if God has m ade something, it’s not going to fade; it is going to last. 543 T Right, it is saying . . . Wait. What fair God has m ade, and this is "A ll other fayre." You are right, almost like He hasn ’ t created it. S "A ll other fayre, lyke flowers, untymely fade." So it m akes me think that maybe, you know, creating a baby is a physical thing and what God has done is put something spiritual within that being. So God provides spirit, but the sperm and the egg provide the actual physical being and almost seem s like it is separate in that, saying that the beauty is one thing but the spirit is another thing, that God m akes the spirit which is the real beauty. B ecause he is the real beauty; everything else he keeps separate. I almost feel like . . . Accept the spirit. He is saying that God kind of stays back and everything else is going to fade. T Right. It’s true. It sounds to me like what you were saying, that He creates not one, like, the spirit and the body aren’ t one. It’s, like, the spirit is true beauty and the body is like the house without beauty or whatever. S Right. And the only thing, now that we have read the whole thing, you wouldn’ t think that one, the third line, that "the trew fayre" would m ean God, would it? Or should I just stick with the meaning of the fact th a t- T No, I wouldn’ t say that. Do you have any idea for your thesis or anything? S Let me ask you. Let me see if I got the idea what a thesis is anyways. T OK. S Is it that you com e up with an idea that this is what the poem is about or this is what the poem is trying to prove? Then you build support around that. T Right. Something to the effect with this poem, you’re probably going to want to concentrate on the spiritual in your thesis. S Why? T B ecause you have evidence for it. You have words you can pull out that back up the spiritual and you are going to want to say 544 something to the effect of how the speaker is referring to the perfect beauty as what is spiritual, or something to that effect. Then you go through and stanza-by-stanza or, you know, couplet- by-couplet, whatever, and back that up, you know? S The thesis. Would I, when I say thesis, do I need to present it like a third person, like the speaker is trying to say this, or should I say that, urn . . . Or should I speak it from my point of view? Do you know what I m ean? T You put it in the third person. S Third person, and keep it that way throughout? T Right. And because what you are going to want to do is not say, like, your saying that this is what is happening in the poem, you know? It can be debated by people or not. But that is what your evidence is going to back up. So you are saying it just as if you are absolutely sure that’s what is happening. So instead of saying, like, " I think," you are saying, "This is what’s happening"-- you know--"This is what is going on in the poem." And you just support whatever your contention is. See, what I am saying, just stay in the third person throughout the paper. And also with sonnets, or anytime you write about literature, keep it in the present tense, like, "the speaker says" instead of "the speaker said." S OK. T Or, you know, that "physical beauty is" or whatever, or that "she is" or "he is." Just keep it in the present tense. Ju st a general rule. S What I want to, as far as the introduction . . . Now, this is an English sonnet, correct? T Mm-hm. S Right. T No, wait. Do you have the rhyme schem es written down som ew here? The ABB. 545 S Yeah, I do. T OK, that is where you are going to want to look. Because-- S OK, that’s fine. I’ll look at it later. . . . I know that it is in the introduction, but do I start out with the thesis? Is that the starting sentence? T You can start it as your opening sentence or you can conclude the paragraph. You can even stick it in-between, except it is harder to locate. It’s better to either open with it or have it be your last sentence. S Of the introduction? T Mm-hm. A lot of times, it is very easy to make it the first sentence because you could say, like, "In S penser’s Sonnet 79"-and say your thesis, you know-"it is apparent that" whatever. And put the thesis in or you could just. . . I don’ t know. Does she want any background o r .. . S I don’ t think so. T OK, if she do esn ’ t want background, it is probably good to jump into it. If the teacher wants background, it’s probably better to start with a few sentences about background and then put in the thesis. But. . . S Background about the poet? T Yeah. Or if there is . . . Like, som etim es with the Shakespearean sonnets, there is background as to who he is writing it to, or if you know if there is any basis in reality or do a few sentences address a certain woman? You might want to bring that in. S How do you know that? How would I know that? T Your teacher would probably tell you . . . if she was looking for som e background information or she would give you the background information in class. You would probably incorporate it into your paper. It d o esn ’ t look like she is looking for it. Yeah, it would be better to probably just jump into it. So however you feel more comfortable, first or last sentence, would be fine. 546 S OK. So what she wants . . . Here it says, um, "Consider how the meaning and the them e and the imagery and the language, style, structure, and rhythm add to your understanding." So, um, I g u ess I need to go over this with you and see what that m eans. The meaning and the them e? T OK. S That would m ean that probably what the speaker is trying, what the speaker’s intent is? Which is to prove to this woman that there is m ore to beauty than the just the physical. T Mm-hm. S The imagery? What would the imagery be? T The images would be the scene. S What is imagery? T Imagery is what image stands for. Stands for language, as in . . . Like with this scene here, . . . he is comparing it to a scene. It is so you could m ake a visual picture of something, do you know what I am saying? S OK. T Like, you can picture a scene and you can picture that which grows out of the scene and the beauty of it. Instead of just saying it literally, he is giving you an image to play with. That’s what imagery is. And even the "glorious hew," the color, you could say that the im ages of c o lo r. . . Like, the color is the beauty; lack of color would be lack of beauty. Do you see that scene? S The "glorious . . ." Could that also already start having connections with God? T Mm-hm, you know it there. A couple of words up here actually praise. See you can play on that: "praysd," "glorious." S "Glorious hew." T Yes. Sure. 547 S And then, isn’ t there another one? . . . T "Heavenly," "Spirit." S Is divine also. T Mm-hm. Definitely has religious connotations. S "Divine." And do I mention "Spirit" with a capital S? T Mm-hm. You should discuss how that S is capitalized. S That’s imagery? That’s, like, when you read a poem and . . . T Oh, no. I am so sorry. These words are not imagery. The ones that color and the scenes, the ones that are pictures or words, those are imagery. These would be when you are discussing. Diction, for example, that, um, language . . . Language is all the religious words. Language is also the play on the "fayre"s. Anything that. . . Like, we were talking about "argue" could have two meanings, or like that "fayre." That’s all pictures of language, part of your paper. S I don’ t need to mention those separately, I m e an - T What you are going to do is - S As I am going through the whole thing . . . T She wants you to go line-by-line, so when you get to it you can bring it up. She just said here, "You must examine the poem closely line-by-line rather than in a general way." S Right. T So as you get to it you can mention it. Probably get to a separate paragraph for language o r . . . S I see. Style, structure, and rhythm. . . . T You could bring in there the poem s. You know, how it flows would be the rhythm. The structure would be working on the poem s. 548 S This is one. T There is actually a lot of poem s in here you could work in. S Oh, another one. T Mm-hm. S It seem s like every time he is going to say a sentence, almost like a teaching thing. T Right. S Giving you a m essage. He puts the colons . . . T Right. That’s what it is basically. It is like a m essage to her, so that’s correct. S Maybe he is a prophet, like he is bring the words of God. Or who knows . . . T It is possible. Anything is possible. S Structural, about style. The poem s are style, or structure. T There’s style and structure basically. It is how he puts together the poem and how the lines follow each other; it is both style and structure. S And then rhythm? Anything about rhythm? T Let’s see. I do n ’ t see a great concentration here. . . . He does work with rhyme, but I was looking for alliteration or something and I don’ t see it. I would say . . . I am sorry, go ahead. S I would probably have to em phasize on all those things. Maybe she just put that in case it was a different kind of poem that we chose. T Right. Som e poem s, like yours, concentrate on language and style, structure. Som e would concentrate more on imagery and rhythm or whatever. So she is just covering her bases. I think that you have it pretty much covered here. 549 S Thank you so much. T You are very welcome. S I just need to put them in words. T You are doing very well. You chose a hard sonnet, too, you know? I am impressed. You are doing well. 550 Student Tutor Mara Jovanian’s Tutorial with Holly Lee November 18, 1991 Bald heads forgetful of their sins; Old, learned, respectful bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Lying down in love’s despair, At the thought of beauty’s ignorant year. A ll shuffle there, all cough in ink, All wear the carpet with their shoes, A ll think what other people think, A ll know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say if their catalysts walked that way. OK. Well, with the images o f . . . He keeps seeing bald heads, um . . . He seem s very negative toward how he feels towards these people. So these are people who, like, they take the poem s apart and they judge them and it’s almost like they do a disfavor, that there is wrongdoing to the poem s, like, they dissect the poem s so much they take the meaning out of it and it loses that meaning it’s supposed to have and you read i t . . . Like here, with "the young men tossing on their beds lying in love’s despair." They wrote these poem s because they were broken hearted . . . I don’ t know if all of these "alls" mean anything: "A ll shall shuffle there, all cough in ink, all wear the carpet with their shoes, all think what other people think, all know the man their neighbor knows." I don’ t know what this m eans that the "catalysts walk that way," if catalysts is two men going . . . OK, well you had said that you noted about the "aH"s, that anything . . . Do you see anything? Do you see any symmetry there? Or do you get anything from the fact that it keeps saying all, all, all? S No, I can ’ t except that I take it very literally. I can ’ t see beyond why. 551 T It’s referring to the scholars and it’s almost as if they are all uniform. You know, they all walk the sam e way, they all walk on the sam e carpet, they all know the sam e people. In comparison, the old to the young, and in comparison to this poet who wrote these love lyrics and was so non-uniform that it’s, like, what would they say if he had walked and talked and acted the way they did, things in uniform. He probably wouldn’ t have produced such wonderful poem s, you know, if he just sat around all day doing what. . . S What would they say? What would these scholars say about him? T Right. S If he w as so uniformed? T Right. If he had walked and talked and acted the way that they act. S Okay, so he is really criticizing these people for being how they are, and there is just. . . But I wonder if he is criticizing both the way that they are and the work that they do? Or is it just so much what they are? B ecause at the beginning, I guess, I th o u g h t. . . The first part gives me the feeling, like, he is about to say that what they do is bad, and then the second part focuses on what they are, how they are. T Right. Well, I think there is an element of both. There is an element of the poet versus the scholar, som ebody who is looking at what the poet has produced. Now Yeats being a poet, it is easy for him to criticize the scholar, but at the sam e time it’s just a m ore of a play on the contrast, like, the old and the young, the poet and the scholar. And of course he is defending the poet’s position, you know, because he is a poet. But, um, I don’ t think it’s a straight-out condemnation. There is just slight negative aspects, like, that are singled out, like the "bald" reference and, you know, the uniformity, and I don’ t think that too much more can be read into it. S What does "all think what other people think"? T Just that they are not, like, poets. Each poet’s mind is thought to be different. They have different emotions, they choose different 552 words, but with the scholar they are looking at what other people have written. They are not coming up with their own thoughts and their own ideas and their own emotions. They just think about what is produced for them, what has been told to them by other people, and they all think the sam e. It’s like their minds aren’ t really challenged because their lives are centered around what other people have done or what other people have written. S OK. I like this but I also don’ t get this either. T "The young men, tossing on their beds, lying down in love’s despair." I don’t want to offer you an interpretation . . . because I don’ t see a clear interpretation so I don’ t want to mislead you. I’m not that sure. S What does "annotate" m ean? T It’s just going through the lines and pulling them apart with the individual words. S "Second Coming": "Turning and turning in the widening" spiral . . . upward flight. . . that repeats itself or something? T Right. S Turning and turning . . . The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The cerem ony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely . . . Surely the second coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: som ewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadow s of the indignant desert birds. 553 The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour com e round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? I lose it here on the last part. So are there three points to this or two parts to it? OK, well she kind of told us that it has to do with the ending of the world, the perfect vision of the anti-Christ coming, perfect vision of the end of the world. OK, well I can see that in the first part, "Turning and turning." . . . So is the falconer the one who w ears the glove and who has the falcon go and com e back? Is that the one? T Right. S And I don’ t know, is that supposed to be, like, God and his children? T Right. That’s how I interpreted it. Like, the falcon is, like, people who cannot hear any sen se of direction anymore. S OK: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." So that’s all explanatory: . . . tide is loosed, and everywhere The cerem ony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. So, like, all the good deteriorates and the bad reigns? T Right. It’s the coming of evil and the drowning of innocence. S OK. Surely som e revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! . . . . . . vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: som ewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, . . . 554 T What’s this line here? S Sphinx-like creature, half lion, half man. A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadow s of the indignant desert birds. Okay, so here you first sense that they must be . . . What is that called, that time? I’m not Christian, so I have a hard time . . . The time where . . . T Judgem ent Day? S Like the Judgem ent Day. That’s it. Okay. So, he thinks that the Judgem ent Day is coming and people are going to be either forgiven of their sins. They can separate the good from the bad people. Is that what that is? T Well, he is concentrating more on the evil and the coming of the Anti-Christ. S In these two lines, he feels calmed down, like, "Okay, okay, at the worst, it’s going to be Judgem ent Day and then it gets bad." I mean, here I almost think, like, he takes a breath and he is almost thinking, "Surely, som e revelation is at hand." Almost like he is hoping for it. What does "revelation" m ean? T It m eans that there is a turning point. I see what you’re saying, but this is all completely negative and about chaos, and then when he says here, "The Second Coming!" with an exclamation point, it seem s to me like there is just a sense of urgency here. S Oh, okay. I guess it’s the "Surely" part of it. Almost like he is trying