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What does my English 200 course look like now that it is the first course in a two-course introductory sequence to the major? After a few semesters of not using Text Book I have returned to requiring this book. This decision is part a result of organizing my sections of English 200 around a case study–a way of teaching this course that appears to fit perfectly with the two-course sequence. Last year I used the Norton Edition of Robinson Crusoe. Students were not only exposed to the text but were required to consider and build into their writing about Defoe’s text materials about Selkirk as well as spiritual biography; eighteenth and nineteenth-century opinions (Pope, Johnson, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Dickens, Marx, and so on); and a range of twentieth century responses-from Virginia Woolf to Michael McKeon.  This semester, the case study was Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and his most recent collection of essays on the novel, The Curtain. Next semester, the case study will be Emerson. We will be reading in the Norton Critical Edition that includes poetry, prose, contemporary responses, criticism and theory.

Text Book compliments the case study with other genres of writing as well as an apparatus that I build around the case study. Scholes and Comley and Ulmer introduce metaphor and metaphorical concepts and their anthology includes a range of texts. This fall students read Culler’s brief introduction to literary theory, too. Culler’s little book helped students understand that there are organizing assumptions and interests that drive literary analysis. And his chapters were enormously useful in getting students motivate their writing by identifying what question was at stake in their analysis of a text as well as consider more deliberately the discipline of literary studies.

Finally, while most students have a reliable handbook (Hacker) my tireless efforts to drill them in MLA manners (and the reasons why such attention to protocol and detail matters in a scholarly community) proved difficult. Their essays in the course suggest to me that we need to continue teaching them the nuts and bolts, and theory, of in-text citation. This will be part of the work in English 300. And while I did not include the Harmon and Holman handbook on the list of required reading I did make it available. When I passed the book around and polled them about it they all said that they would find the book very useful and that we should require it for majors. The students continuing on with me to English 300 have already ordered the book.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about this semester is what I always end of thinking bout when I teach this course: reading. It fell into focus this time when I read John Guillory’s recent  response to NCTE outcomes for reading. In “On the Presumption of Knowing How to Read” Guillory makes a distinction between comprehension and understanding and then goes on to discuss how comprehension often makes it more difficult for students to understand more complex texts. Then I realized (once again) that my students (majors and non-majors) have no idea how symbolic mediation actually works. But the problem is more difficult precisely because they have rigid misconceptions about authorship, intent, representation, judgment, and so on, that makes a lot of the interpretive work we do in class mostly irrelevant. For everything they do and say is predicated on what they have learned about how interpretation works and why it might matter. Few students have asked the kinds of questions (or enacted an address to those questions in a discussion) that can, when taken seriously, undermine what they think they know. How is meaning created? What methods and assumptions and theoretical frameworks determine ways of making (or unmaking) meaning? How do linguistic structures and literary form constitute social and political categories? How do we think about texts not only mimetically but at the same time constitutively? These kinds of questions (or problems or preoccupations) might be more explicitly stated in terms of what we want students to know. But then I wonder whether thinking through such questions might result in more interest and engagement in the texts one encounters. That would depend, I guess, on how one thinks about the relationship between reading and writing and what kinds of writing assignments are then generated to push students to really think about such things. I’d like to think that our job, in part, is to find effective ways to get our students to participate in the kind of work we do in literary studies-reading and writing and thinking about these kinds of things. I think it would be really helpful, then, to generate outcomes for reading and writing that do not simplify the interpretive process by reducing interpretation to skill sets.

Teaching English 200 this semester while putting together my thoughts for the second course in the sequence, English 300, has reinforced my conviction that we need two courses to help students grow into their identities as English majors. Class discussions about practice and theory, and my emphasis on writing exercises that ask students to learn how to read closely and then how to organize such moments of close reading in purposeful and well-organized essays, are leading into what I hope to then help students do in English 300: more sustained analysis motivated by a genuine interest in a textual “problem.” (We spent a good deal of time talking about problems in literary studies, such as intention, authorship and narration, literary value, using Culler and Graff and others.) Kundera’s elaboration of what he calls a “consciousness of continuity,” and Culler’s concise description of theory, helped me suggest where student thinking would be going in English 300 and the kinds of writing they would be doing about literary form and history in the second course in the sequence.

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