Student ratings season again.

Today was the first day student ratings were available online. Usually, student ratings tend to swing me into high spirits. I feel validated, tickled, delighted, and even a bit starry-eyed over students I will likely only recognize by face when I pass them on campus. (Was it Carolyn or Carlyn? or Caroline? Curse all parents who name their children with Cs and Ks: a thousand Kristis, Kristinas, Kristens, Kirstens, and Kristas pass into the river Lethe just hours after grades are submitted).

This semester I got a few kicks and giggles, but was jolted by a comment left by a student upon completion of my Writing About Literature class:

I did not enjoy this class. I wish that we could have focused on a different (more current) time period. The class would have been better labeled Writing About Literature: Anne Elliot's favorite authors. My recommendation is to teach whatever you feel is necessary, but allow the students to research something that they are interested in. If I want to research Hunter S. Thompson or Chuck Palahniuk or anyone who is interesting to me why am I limited to Jane Austen or William Wordsworth simply because my professor finds their writings fascinating? We are adults and we have different tastes. If this class is attempting to prepare us to write about literature it missed the mark. I feel confident that I can write about romantic literature, unfortunately I will never read romantic literature unless it is required of me by another professor as I finish out my degree here.

I have come to terms with the fact that not everyone enjoys weekly response papers, that many think I assign too much reading, and that feedback could be more prompt (it always could be, but never is - it's like the American dream in that way), but this really swung me.

The student "did not enjoy this class" because we (woe is me) had to read Jane Austen? The British author beloved second only to Shakespeare by literary scholars (which I think is actually just an honorary first place in the canon on account of his large body of works - everyone would really much rather read a bonnet-wearers' romance than a swashbuckling study in transvestism; but really, Shakespeare, I love thee).

But beyond my initial shock that anyone could come out of an Austen/Romanticism-centered class and not be enraptured to the point of multiple swoonings, it strikes me that this student is not thinking critically about how I could structure a Writing About Literature class.

Here are some scaffolding elements that need to be in place before I can teach a student how to write about literature:

1. A text. If we're going to have discussions in class about how professional scholars write about literature, we need to have a text in common. We need to be able to understand a specific era of literature and be able to have conversations about how scholarly perceptions concerning this era have changed, how they've developed, and where they are now. It should be a text that is not too heavy for beginning readers, but substantive enough that advanced readers can still engage with the text in a meaningful way. It also needs to be a text I, as the teacher, am familiar with so that I can guide my students toward meaningful and realistic interpretations that would be legitimate to other writers about literature.

2. A literary era. If you're going to start teaching students how to write about literature, you need a common frame of cultural reference. How can you argue interpretations of a text if you know nothing about the time in which it was penned? Without history, I could easily argue that Austen's novels were influenced by Freudian angst as much as they were by 18th-century sensibility. While many debate the efficacy and precision of pigeon-holing authors into eras, this is still the most functional way to teach literary trends. Because I happen to have more experience in Romantic/Austen Studies, I knew I would be able to teach this cultural moment better than any other. And yes, I admit, I happen to be familiar with this time period because I find it is fascinating. But it would be a gross disservice to my students to try to teach them about a literary era that I have only a beginner's knowledge of.

3. Meta-texts. Unfortunately, Professional writing about literature is not any in any of the following formats: reader-response, poetry, personal essay, free verse, TV sitcom, or picture books (though "Heidegger's Day Out" is one I'd like to see: "And then little Heidegger noticed that the tree had Being and he decided it was time to join the Nazi party"). And so, in order to teach writing about literature in ways that it is actually done, we need to study actual published works of literary criticism, or, meta-texts. Texts about texts - texts that talk about what's going on in the novel, poem, or play. Texts that engage in professional, multi-national, multi-generational conversations about what these works truly mean, how they've been misread in the past, and how they ought to be studied in the future. The key here is that you can't simply assign a piece of literary criticism to a class if they have no common reference. There are many excellent examples of literary criticism that I would love to discuss in my class, but because the students aren't familiar with the novels, poems, and plays being written about, they can't critique or analyze these meta-texts very well.

If you want to teach an entire class how professionals actually write about literature, you just need to pick a text.

With these explanations still at my heels, I'm willing now to think critically about my teaching here. What if I had students pick their own texts? Their own criticism? Their own era?

I could see this working for a small number of students - students who are already familiar with a given time period, a given body of criticism, a given text. Students who are able to pick out important literary scholarship on their own, who are already familiar with critical trends within their discourse, who already know how to engage with other scholars - students who (really) have no reason to take my class.

I'm not interested in tailoring my coursework to students who already know my subject well. I'm interested in teaching those who need my guidance.

Hopefully I didn't "miss the mark" completely here; I just tried to teach what I know, along with some principles of professional writing about literature that can be used in later (more personalized) research projects.

And, just to validate the socks off of myself, here are some comments that tickled me:

Anne Elliot "is a great teacher, and I have really enjoyed learning more from her, and growing from her feedback this semester."

"She cares for writing and literature and shares her passion with students."

"She demands more of students than they think they are capable of, and that's great - it helps us realize that we're capable of more than we thought we were. Her teaching style is fun. Terrific instructor."