English 200
Reading Literature

Introduction

Scope of the Course

Here is the description of English 200 as it appears in the University of Washington General Catalog:

Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature. Examines some of the best works in English and American literature and considers such features of literary meaning as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense. Emphasis on literature as a source of pleasure and knowledge about human experience.

Let me begin this online course guide by offering you a "reading" of this description.

The first thing I notice about it is the absence of an agent. I find no clue as to who is reading, examining, and considering, and so I conclude that whoever wrote the description thought of students as non-beings, the act of studying literature as impersonal. Next, I am struck by the conflation in the first sentence of "techniques" and "practice." While I can understand that if there are techniques for reading literature, we need practice in applying them, I am mystified by the notion that we need to practice how to enjoy it. Practice may make perfect, but I am not sure it makes for pleasure. Finally, the description emphasizes such features of literature as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning. What this suggests to me is that reading literature is a matter of technical analysis. Although this must be partially so for experts in the field, it isn't clear whether such technical analysis necessarily underlies "literature as a source of pleasure and knowledge about human experience." Perhaps the person who wrote the description thought that only experts are able to obtain such pleasure and knowledge.

Now you may disagree with some or all of what I say in the previous paragraph, and indeed I welcome disagreement with every part of this online course guide; but I think you will agree that you know where I stand. I interpret and evaluate the catalog description straight-forwardly, and stand behind what I write by using the first-person pronoun. My intent has been to model for you a notion of reading quite at odds with the one in the catalog's description. For me reading is an act that entails someone thinking, forming conclusions, and expressing them as lucidly as possible; and it is that sense of reading which will inform this course from beginning to end. Humans read, they contemplate what they read, they express themselves.

English 200 is not an introduction to the English major, but a course people take either to satisfy part of the University of Washington's General Education requirement in Humanities or because they want to extend their general knowledge and appreciation of literature. Hence, I have constructed a course which is meant to speak to such people. This does not mean that you won't learn some technical things from this course, nor does it mean that English 200 won't be of benefit should you choose to become an English major. But in writing this online course guide, I have always in mind the generally-educated citizen and the sorts of questions she will ask throughout a lifetime about what reading she does. English 200 will provide opportunities to think about some of those questions.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the discussion forum. I will reply on the same forum.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Required Texts

• Lesson One: The required texts for this lesson (James Wright's "An Offering for Mr. Bluehart" and Linda Bierds's "Lawrence and Edison in New Jersey: 1923") appear within the online course guide.
• Lesson Two: Two of the required texts in this lesson (a Wordsworth poem and Elizabeth Tallent's story "No One's a Mystery") appear in the online course guide. The required purchase is David Mamet's play Oleanna(that is, you will need to purchase the script of this play; you may choose to view the video as well).
• Lesson Three: The required purchases in this lesson are Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions.
• Lesson Four: The required purchases in this lesson are James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Franz Kafka's The Sons.

As I write this, all of the required books are in print and available at the University of Washington Bookstore. You may buy them there, but I will be just as happy if you find them in used bookstores or check them out of libraries. (I don't say this because I have anything against the University Bookstore, but rather because I am thinking of your bank account.) At any rate, the point is to read the books, not to fuss over the edition used.

Course Goals

Before I go further, I want to list for you the aims of this course. By the time you finish English 200, I would like you to have a richer sense of five issues involved in reading literature.

• You will understand what it means to read a text closely for detail and how details work together to make meaning.
• You will know more about interpretation (making meaning) and why when we read, we so often interpret texts differently from others.
• You will understand the place of authorial intention in interpretation and the pitfalls that accompany any appeal to that intention.
• You will explore the role of a reader in making any text come alive and speak, and you will come to appreciate just what kind of reader you are.
• You will be able to discuss criteria for telling good books from bad, to critique those criteria as neither God-given nor immutable, and to apply both the discussion and the critique to your reading.

Each of the five lessons that follows this introduction focuses on one of these aims. Because they differ one from the other, my procedure in each lesson will be different, and I should also alert you to the fact that there are many important issues involved in reading which I will pass by quickly or never even mention. There is only so much time in a course, and I have chosen to focus on these five issues because I have found from my thirty-three years of teaching at the University of Washington that they are the ones students most commonly raise in English 200.

Organization of the Course

There are six lessons in this course. The first five involve reading and the submission of a paper for each; the sixth is the final exam. I want to describe each lesson here briefly so that you know what is coming before you get into the course proper.

Lesson One: Reading Closely

I can explain what it means to read closely by describing an experiment from cognitive psychology. It involves this question: if numbers are flashed simultaneously on a screen for a second, how many numbers can a person see (keep track of) in that second? The untrained person can see something like four at once, but when five or more are flashed onto the screen simultaneously, that person's capacity to see breaks down and he remembers fewer than four. However, with training such a person can learn within a few weeks to see sometimes as many as thirty numbers at once. Reading literature closely is learning to see more and more of the "numbers." Close reading entails the capacity to hold in suspension the maximum number of details within a text and then to fuse or integrate them into what I will call an account of the text.

Lesson One will help you develop this capacity. I will read as closely as possible for you (that is, provide an account of) James Wright's poem, "An Offering for Mr. Bluehart," and then the writing assignment will ask you to do the same for Linda Bierds's poem "Lawrence and Edison in New Jersey: 1923." My reading will be a model for you to follow, and once you have read a short text really closely, you will never again be so "blind" as to what is there on the page before you.

Lesson Two: Interpreting What You Read

The question of how to interpret what we read is a complex philosophical one, and in fact I teach a whole course every fall to beginning graduate students in English on what might be called "Theories of Interpretation." But we do not need to be experts in order to interpret literature. No one ever reads without interpreting, else she would be seeing nothing in a book and have nothing to say about it. Furthermore, once you reach Lesson Two, you will have proven to yourself that you can interpret, because in Lesson One you will have produced a close reading of a demanding poem. So rather than go into theories of interpretation in this lesson, I want to focus your thinking on a problem that usually energizes readers. When two people read the same book, they often (always?) disagree to some extent about it. This lesson will explore that disagreement. I will begin by giving you a poem by Wordsworth and then quote two world-class critics whose interpretations of the poem are mutually exclusive. This will be a useful introduction to interpretive disagreement, and it will alert you to the fact that expertise does not preclude such disagreement. I will then reproduce for you in the lesson a story by Elizabeth Tallent called "No One's a Mystery." It involves a very short conversation between a married man (who is perhaps in his thirties) and his teenage lover about what their future is. They disagree, and the story turns on which story of their future we believe. It's a version of "The Lady and the Tiger" which many of you read in high school; I will read it for you as a fictional dramatization of interpretive disagreement for which there is no ultimate authority because the story does not tell what the future holds.

All this will prepare you to read and write about David Mamet's play Oleanna. This work has two acts. The first is a conversation between a woman student and a male professor; the second is an argument between them over whether, as she insists and he denies, their conversation in the first act involves sexual harassment. The writing assignment will ask you to explore the argument and to explain how its mutually exclusive positions can possibly arise out of the conversation in Act One. It will also ask you to choose sides and to explain what it is in your history, values, and commitments which leads to that choice. When you finish with Lesson Two, you will know more about why interpretations vary and about what kind of reader you are.

Lesson Three: The Place of Intention in Interpretation

I have found from years of teaching that most people are made quite uncomfortable by interpretive disagreement. They want a text to have a single, unified, stable meaning, and they want to know what that meaning is and how to find it. The first move they usually make is to ask what the author intended, and then to insist that the intention (presuming it is available) is a way to control interpretation, to be able to say definitively what the real meaning of a text is.

In this lesson we will explore that move. I will lay out for you some of the issues involved in discovering and applying authorial intention, and then I will turn to the first of the two assigned books, Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception. I will focus on what Wolff says his intention is in writing the book, and I will then test out whether the book that follows actually embodies that intention. In other words, I will ask if Wolff's stated intention is a definitive guide to reading the book, or one of several (many?) ways to begin making sense of it. My discussion of The Duke of Deception will serve as a model for your paper about Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. Her narrator tells us in her opening pages what her intention is in telling her story, and your writing will test her claim against the book which follows. When you finish with Lesson Three, you will understand just how complicated is the issue of authorial intention as a guide for literary interpretation.

Lesson Four: The Reader in Reading

At the beginning of this online course guide I quoted the catalog description of English 200, and in my "reading" of it I suggested that whoever wrote that description appeared to think of reading as an impersonal activity. I disagree with that notion, but I think I understand where it comes from. Given the honored place that scientific research occupies, and given the presumed impersonality of all such research, other areas of intellectual inquiry aspire to impersonality in the hope that they can bask in the same limelight as science. Unfortunately, studies of science increasingly reveal that there is much more of the scientist in science than the usual accounts would have it; hence, for students of literature to want to become impersonal readers is to follow a model of science now known to be of questionable validity.

In this lesson I want you to discover more about what kind of reader you are. You will have already done the paper for Lesson Two, and in it you will have had to explain why you think you chose either the professor's or the student's interpretation of their conversation. At the end of this lesson you will explore your style of reading in a different way.

The reading assignment for this lesson consists of the first of the two letters that make up James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and "Letter to His Father", which appears in Franz Kafka's The Sons. I will read the Baldwin letter for you as follows: I will analyze the terms of the letter and the ways in which it tries to position its reader to be the person Baldwin wants him to be; and then I will write a possible response to the letter from its recipient. Your assignment will be to write about Kafka's "Letter to His Father", following the model of my treatment of Baldwin's letter. When you finish Lesson Four, you will be much clearer about how a piece of literature contains within it an assumed reader; and you will know still more about what kind of reader you are as you impersonate another reader.

Lesson Five: Evaluating Literature

When we read, we not only want to make sense of what we read (interpret it), but we also inevitably form opinions about the value of it. Sometimes we do this from the point of view of our closest friends, and that is why I-despite loving detective fiction-tend to dismiss it as lightweight. Within English departments, detective fiction is still frowned upon. Other times, we acknowledge the force of public opinion (as, for example, when I praise Hamlet for being a great play) but we find ourselves not sharing that opinion (as, to continue the example, when I say that I find Hamlet boring). Within English departments Hamlet is pre-eminent, and when I find it boring, I know there is something wrong with me rather than with the play. Evaluation goes on in many directions.

In this lesson, I will discuss for you the whole difficult problem of finding, and agreeing upon, criteria for judging literature. I will then use my discussion as a way to explore two poems, Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" and Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Both are well-known, but the first is usually ridiculed and the second praised. My discussion will complicate the common opinion of the two poems. Your writing assignment will be to evaluate one of the texts that you have already read for the course. Indeed, you will indicate and thus evaluate your favorite text. This process will require you to compare your favorite with a text that you favored less. The gap between favored and less-favored texts may not be as great as the downright ridicule and praise that divide Joyce Kilmer from Robert Frost in the estimation of most critics, but it should help you to understand just how problematic orthodox literary judgment can be and how difficult evaluating texts can be.

Lesson Six: Preparing for the Final Examination

This lesson will describe the nature of the final examination and how you can prepare for taking it. The reading assignment for the examination is Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" which appears in his The Sons, a copy of which you have already purchased for Lesson Four.

Tips for Completing the Course On Time

There is a course calendar included on your syllabus page. Please complete and submit this calendar when you start the course. This is—to break the project down to its barest essentials—a course in reading and writing. You will notice that while the writing projects are sprinkled evenly throughout the quarter, the reading assignments are uneven. That is, Lesson One requires the writing of one essay based on the reading of a few short poems; Lesson Two requires another essay based on a two-act play and possibly a movie whose viewing time indicates how long it takes to read a play. Then Lesson Three includes two substantial autobiographical novels, the longer of which is the subject of your essay. So, if you want to do the writing on time, you’ll begin this reading early in the course. Save all that for week 5-6, and the essay won’t get done on time or it will be rushed. After that you have Franz Kafka’s Letter to his Father—not long but dense. It is not clear if we are to read this as fiction or non-fiction; it may not matter. But it is clearly related to your reading for the Final Exam—Kafka’s fictional response to the pleasures of family life: “Metamorphosis.” The relation between the two texts—and your response to both of them—will be improved if you read them at about the same time. You’ll also be ready for your final when you hit the single week given to that task at the end of the calendar. Assignment 5 is a short essay based on previous reading. You’re there. Stick to the schedule.

Assignment Submission Guidelines

Please see the "About Your Instructor" page for information about submitting assignments.

Negotiating the Course

This section contains the nuts and bolts of this online course guide. While each lesson contains more substance about individual texts and assignments, it is here that I cover my assumptions, expectations, and advice for the course. This is also the place where you will learn about me, however indirectly, and about the pedagogical views I hold. If you make use of what I say in this section, I think you will find the course more accessible and interesting, and your final grade more to your liking.

Using the Course Guide

Whenever I assign a reading that is not quoted within this online course guide, I strongly encourage you to read it before you read what I have to say about the lesson. This does not mean that I think what I have to say is worth skipping, but only that I believe it is important for you, as much as possible, to form your own opinions and register your own responses to the reading before you encounter mine. The aim of this course is to make you a better reader in the senses of that activity I have discussed in my outline of the lessons; if you lean too heavily on what I have to say about the reading before you have had a chance to digest it, it will be harder for you to fulfill that aim. We are always better for beginning from our own center rather than borrowing one from someone else.

Consistent with the advice in the previous paragraph, I strongly discourage you from going to the library or onto the Web to find commentaries on any of the assigned readings. Having been a student once for a very long time, I know very well the motive for seeking out such commentaries. We all want to stand on solid ground and to approach any assignment for which we will receive a grade with as little apprehension as possible. But the trouble is that almost all commentaries you will come upon are written by professional students of literature (people like me) for other profession students of literature (other people like me). When less experienced and educated readers of literature try to use those commentaries, the results are almost never positive. You will do better in English 200 if you stick to this online course guide and if you learn to trust yourself, your intelligence, and your own ideas.

When you do read what I have written in a lesson, try to remember the following:

• First, I have been teaching and writing about literature at the University of Washington since l966, and before that I spent six years in graduate school pursuing a Ph.D. I write with a confidence, insight, clarity, and perhaps arrogance which I did not have when I was in your shoes. So, do not compare what you write with what I have written.
• Second, despite the fact that I am a "professional" student of literature, I am still one person among many, limited by my perspective, prejudices, and commitments. Thus, what I have to say in this online course guide is my effort to tell the truth as I know it, but it is not The Truth. I am not infallible. If you don't agree with something I say, it is important for you to understand why not, but not to buy into my claims. I know I have succeeded as a teacher when my students disagree with me in cogent ways, and lest you think such disagreement puts you in jeopardy, I should also say that I do not grade on agreement. I value independent thinkers.

What Is "Literature"?

Because this course is called "Reading Literature," I want next to discuss that title. If you had anything like the education I did, then you grew up knowing what literature is: poems, plays, novels, and the occasional (old and boring) essay. But then, people in English departments began to assign autobiographies and histories in literature courses, and the category called "Literature" was on the way to including anything that can reasonably be called a text. Diaries, letters, and biographies are texts; but so, too, are philosophical monographs, Supreme Court opinions, and scientific papers; and all of them crop up occasionally in literature courses.

This fact bothers many people my age and older, for they believe that there must be some necessary features of what we call literature that distinguish it from other forms of writing. But take, as an example, the well-known speech that Johnny Cochran gave when the defense summed up its case in the O.J. Simpson trial. Surely, you might be saying at this point that speech isn't literature; and yet consider some of its features: Cochran employed narrative, turned witnesses and Simpson into characters within that narrative, and delivered his narrative with rhetorical flourishes and a sense of climax. In other words, Cochran's summation had many of the features of a story. Now of course that doesn't necessarily make it literature; but my example does point to the difficulty in discovering or specifying the necessary and sufficient features that define literature and, at the same time, separate it off from other human discourses, activities, and products.

In the face of that difficulty, many people have begun to think of literature as including all writing; while that conclusion might smack of academic imperialism, at least it avoids the definitional dilemma I outlined in the previous paragraph. If that conclusion doesn't work for you, perhaps you might prefer this one: literature is what literature teachers teach and write about for a living, what gets reviewed and discussed in the literary sections of newspapers, what people read in school and out. Or, if that doesn't work for you, you might do well to remember Justice Potter Stewart's remarks about pornography when writing a Supreme Court opinion. He concluded that he couldn't define pornography, but he certainly knew it when he saw it. I think you know what literature is.

Reading

Because this is a course on reading and because each lesson focuses on a different aspect of that activity, I will not go into the subject here. But I do want you to understand that there is a difference between reading for this course and just plain reading, and that difference entails the role of pleasure in each. While I hope, of course, that you enjoy the reading in English 200, my hope is beside the point, for this is a course dedicated to increasing your ability to read in the five ways described earlier in this introduction. I happen to believe that with increased ability comes increased pleasure, but that is the subject for another course. This is one about learning to read better.

Writing Well

There are five papers and a final examination in this course. Topics and directions appear at the end of each lesson in this online course guide; here I want to say some general things about writing. The best advice I can give to help you write well is something I know from experience you are likely to resist. It is this: you should reread and then reread again the assigned material for a lesson before you write, because if you don't know what you are talking about, you can't write about it well. Most students are well-meaning, but they can't mean well in their writing if they haven't taken the time to master what they are writing about.

Then when you write, you will have to rewrite and rewrite some more before you turn in your assignment. I know this advice sounds tiresome, daunting, and too teacherly, but I speak from my experience that almost all students are capable of much better writing than they produce and that they fail to live up to their capacity because their first draft is their final one. A first draft is the place for finding out what you want to say; subsequent revisions allow you to clarify and shape what you have found out. My job in this course is to help you realize your potential; I offer my prescription for rereading and rewriting, not out of some sadistic pleasure, but because I know you will perform better if you follow my advice.

If the previous paragraph is about a condition for writing well, the aim of this and the two succeeding paragraphs is to give you my sense of what good writing is. First of all, good spelling, grammar, and syntax are not the sole ingredients of good writing. They are, instead, conventions we follow if we wish to be members in good standing of the writing public. If we violate these conventions, we invite others to think of us as they do when we defy other conventions. Follow conventions in order to avoid being thought rude, but do not assume that in doing so you will automatically turn out good writing.

To produce good writing, you have to write in a human voice. This is one that is neither generic (generic voices are those often employed by people who sell used cars or solicit us by phone), nor formulaic (a formulaic voice is one which automatically announces at the beginning of a paper that "in this essay I will . . ."), nor borrowed from someone who already has a writing voice (don't try to sound like me, for example). It is the voice that includes the pronoun "I" when it is appropriate, that is sad when the writer is sad, angry when angry, excited when excited. If you write in your own voice, you have a much greater chance of turning out good writing.

Good writing also requires that you care about what you write. If you are taking this course for purely cynical reasons, you will approach the writing in it cynically and without any motive other than finishing the course in order to receive a grade in it. I can't prevent you from doing this, but I can assure you that if the previous sentence applies to you, your writing in this course is very likely to be dead. If you don't care, the writing will be careless, dead, boring. End of sermon.

Evaluation

Before moving on to the lessons themselves, let me take up the dreaded issue of grades. The five papers and the final exam in this course each count as one-sixth of your final grade, but because it takes a while for us to get to know each other, I will make allowances for improvement in the course. If you steadily produce better work, your final grade will reflect that fact.

At the same time, I know that you will worry about being evaluated; I worry about it also. I feel very strongly that I should not lower grades for those who disagree with me, and I believe that I honor my feeling; but this point requires elaboration. I know my political, religious, and ethical biases, and I can keep them out of my grading. But if a paper truly upsets me because it violates those biases, I always show it to a colleague to be sure I am evaluating it fairly. I bend over backwards to be fair. Also, I try to explain my evaluations when I return papers to you. If my explanations make sense, I hope you will try to write your next paper with them in mind. But if they don't, let me know; I am always happy to reconsider an evaluation, especially if the request that I do so is accompanied by a cogently written objection.

Finally, I hope I can relieve your anxiety some by explaining what I take evaluation to be in writing papers about literature. It is not at all like marking a paper in mathematics but much more like deciding who gets into a symphony orchestra or onto a basketball team. Only those with considerable experience and training can make truly informed and defensible decisions about whom to select for a symphony or a team. That doesn't mean that they can't be wrong, nor that they are free from biases; it only means that in some areas evaluation is something which comes more easily for those who have been on the inside. I have been here for over thirty years, and I think I evaluate writing as well as a conductor of a symphony assesses new talent. So, my problem is not whether I can grade well, but whether I can explain well to you my grading. I will do my best.

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