On Jun 11, 2005, at 2:09 AM, Dorothy Stephens wrote:
> Nor--to refer to an earlier moment in this thread--do I
> believe the answer lies in emphasizing exams over writing at the
> undergraduate level. If not now, when? There's no magical time
> in a student's life when she or he is ready to learn quickly how to
> write original essays. Older students have more complex personal
> experience, certainly, but waiting until graduate school to begin
> the slow, uneven process of finding an original voice doesn't
> markedly speed up that process and can waste valuable graduate
> degree time. It can also leave graduate students feeling betrayed
> and embarrassed at having been sent thus far before being given a
> good idea of whether this profession is truly for them. If we de-
> emphasize original writing at the undergraduate level and then send
> those undergraduates off to other institutions to learn how to
> write, we're simply passing the buck.
Why would undergraduate nonEnglish majors, who outnumber the future
graduate students by several factors in survey and lower level
courses, need to write "original" lit crit essays? Most of these
students are not going to become professionals in a field already
overloaded with professionals. And who really believes that an
"original voice" is what future professionals need to create by
writing undergraduate essays? What the professionals produce is
overwhelmingly the typical academese that fills the journals no one
reads but a few others from the same theoretical stratum. The thing
least valued by the journals is a fresh, literate, well-written,
accessible and original paper. The dreary, unreadable prose on their
pages was stillborn at birth and has no future except in the brief
life of a footnote.
Let's be frank here: most literary research is written to gain
tenure, promotions and reputation. Given the practical seriousness
of those motives, "original" is merely a synonym for the currently
acceptable. It might be worth considering to what extent literary
criticism is research at all.
Students should already know how to write when they leave high
school. That was certainly the case in the 40s, 50s and 60s when
American high schools still did a reasonably good job of education.
There is where we should focus our reform. No English literature
teacher is going to teach the current crop of students, addicted to
passive computer games and visual media, to write effectively by
forcing essays in literary criticism on them. Students with weak
writing skills will of course need to take remedial or basic writing
courses, both growth industries, but I see no reason to burden them
further with the need to please a teacher by plumbing English poetics
for clever aperçus. By all means put future graduate students
through the mint so they'll know what they must become for survival.
I see nothing, however, that would invalidate the Russian approach,
both at the undergraduate and graduate level.
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