Teaching What We Do in Literary Studies

More than a decade of Laura Wilder's and Joanna Wolfe's research on teaching students to read and write about literature culminates in two ground-breaking books: Wilder's monograph Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions and Wolfe and Wilder's textbook Digging into Literature. Building on a series of earlier articles and providing the theory and research behind the textbook, the monograph won the CCCC's Research Impact Award, attesting, by extension, to the significance of Wilder's and Wolfe's larger contributions to writing studies (see Wilder 2002, 2005, 2006; Wolfe 2003; Wilder and Wolfe 2009). Strikingly, however, Wilder's book has gone almost altogether unnoticed precisely where it stands to make the most difference. As of this writing, in pedagogical scholarship within literary studies, only Sarah Banting (2014) cites the book, in a short essay in the journal English Studies in Canada. While the yawning gap between writing studies and literary studies easily explains this neglect, that gap bears bridging, especially with these books. Teachers of literature and scholars of teaching literature should widely read, cite, debate, push back against, and build upon the work of Wilder and Wolfe.

In scholarship on teaching literature, the most pedagogically promising recent developments move the conversation from teaching literary texts (or terms or contexts or theories) to teaching literary skills. As Michael Carter (2007: 385) argues, disciplines are not simply bodies of knowledge but shared "ways of doing." Accordingly, teaching literary studies means teaching the ways of reading and writing that constitute our discipline, particularly critical reading and persuasive writing about texts. In The Crafty Reader, Robert Scholes (2001: 213–15) urges literature teachers to "start taking reading seriously." Teaching literature should mean teaching "reading . . . as a craft, or set of methods, for producing meaning from texts." This work begins with "simplifying and clarifying the ways of reading we have already learned to use in our studies of . . . literature and culture." For years, both Scholes and Gerald Graff have made similar calls (see Scholes 1985, 1989, 1999, 2001, 2011; Graff 1992, 2004, 2007). Recent scholarship has taken up this task of simplifying and clarifying, as well as the related task of creating and assessing ways of teaching our ways of reading (e.g., Showalter 2003; Blau 2003; Linkon 2005; Chick et al. 2009; Weissman 2010, 2016). Addressed mostly to writing studies as an audience, Wilder's and Wolfe's work offers much to this unfolding pedagogical conversation in literary studies. Specifically, the monograph and textbook make significant contributions with respect to naming, teaching, and evidence, while gaps in these books regarding process, form, and purpose point toward further work to be done.

Naming

Whereas Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle (2015) take up the task of Naming What We Know in writing studies, Wilder and Wolfe take up the task of naming what we do in literary studies. Replicating Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor's (1991) earlier study, Wilder analyzes recent literary scholarship to uncover the habitual moves or, more formally, the rhetorical topoi of literary analysis, identifying the practices of digging beyond the obvious interpretation, supporting an interpretation with multiple, varying details from throughout a text, applying a theory to a text, resolving apparent contradictions to arrive at a deeper meaning, indicating how a text has implications for life or society, positioning a proposed interpretation as better than previous ones, and illuminating a text through reference to its historical context—all underscoring, according to Wilder, the shared value of complexity in literary studies (34, 46). In the textbook, Wolfe and Wilder translate the monograph's formal language into more accessible terms for students. The topoi of appearance/reality, ubiquity, paradigm, paradox, social justice, and mistaken critic become the strategies of surface/ depth, patterns, theoretical lens, opposites, social relevance, and joining the conversation, while context remains...