When I was studying literature as an undergrad, I can recall one student inquiring, “What is the purpose of literary criticism?” While the discussion that followed made us consider the various lines of critical theory published by scholars, with the class’ closure we discussed how literary criticism is a means to provide new ideas.
At the high school where I used to teach, getting students to use literary criticism as a means to reflect on their own ideas was a challenge. Students are introduced to the Media Center databases as freshmen, but by the time they came to me as juniors I often encountered two extremities in their responses to literature: Either they responded strictly on how they felt with limited support OR they relied so heavily on the literary criticism that their own papers showed little development of original thought. There were others, of course, who could take one idea and blow it so far out of context that its original meaning was unrecognizable…My goal became to show my students how to build upon ideas to create a meaning of their own, but I also suspected this would not be possible unless they recognized the sources of their own responses.
In the summer of 2006 I delivered a demo for my class at Rowan (National Writing Project Summer Institute) which I called “Assigning Value to Multiple Perspectives: A Question of ‘Meaning’ Displayed Through Ideology.” In short, the purpose of the demo was to help teachers/students recognize that there’s a reason they respond to literature the way they do (with consideration to the personal and the social) and to help the learners recognize their varied perspectives in the context of past and present societies. The demonstration developed around three videos: Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” from Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, Madonna’s “Material Girl”, and Nicole Kidman’s role of the ”sparkling diamond” in Moulin Rouge. (If you’ve seen the Giorgio Armani commercial, you know variations of the original song continue.) The demo called for learners to apply Feminist, Marxist, and Standpoint theories.
I began using varied versions of the demo to begin my classes and help students recognize the transitions in thought they would encounter in my American literature course. This also encouraged my students to respond with their ideas without losing sight of context.
In Richard Miller’s book Writing at the End of the World he speculates, “The danger of the written word, is thus, its promise; the fact that it can’t be finally and completely controlled means it forever retains the power to evoke new possibilities” (194).
In my Writing for Electronic Communities class, I am attempting to revisit and re-evaluate my understanding of reading and responding to writing. With advances in technology and the ability to publish on-line, literary theory may no longer be reserved for select scholars. Through blogs and other forums, students have the ability to participate in the discussions from which they may otherwise have felt removed. Part of me is clinging to the published documents of critical theory and part of me is looking to the theories of my own demo to better embrace the possibilities of knowledge and understanding on the World Wide Web.
