A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class Joanna Wolfe In the spring of 2000, following the completion of a Ph.D. specializing ...
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A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class Joanna Wolfe

In the spring of 2000, following the completion of a Ph.D. specializing in rhetoric and composition, I taught my first literature course: a writing-intensive survey of African American literature. The course, open to all students, regardless of major, used both traditional literature assignments, such as close readings, and more rhetorical assignments that asked the students to “join a conversation” on issues such as gender relations and African American education. After years of teaching argument in rhetoric and composition courses, I was excited about bringing some of the methods that had proved successful in this environment to the literature curriculum: peer review, audience analysis, guidance through the writing process, intensive revision, writing conferences. These were elements of writing instruction that I felt had been missing from my own undergraduate study in English literature, and I was eager to share them with my students. I envisioned transforming the lower-level writing course in literature by guiding students through the writing process and encouraging them to think of their writing in terms of the impact it would have on specific readers. The result was a disaster. Strategies that had elicited thoughtful revision from my rhetoric students fell flat in the literature classroom. For instance, I had had wonderful success with a peer review technique developed by Barbara Sitko (1993) in which students read a peer’s paper aloud and paused at the end of every sentence to summarize the main point of the essay and to predict what would appear next. My composition students had found this Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Volume 3, Number 3, © 2003 Duke University Press 399

method helpful for identifying places where their essays needed more elaboration or evidence. In the literature classroom, by contrast, the students were far less successful at identifying places that needed elaboration, primarily because their essays often lacked a viable argument altogether. Similarly, another peer review technique that had been popular in my composition classes, in which the students played devil’s advocate by challenging one another’s claims and encouraging one another to develop more sophisticated arguments, led to little insight in my literature classroom, because these students’ essays often lacked claims that one could disagree with. Along the same lines, an exercise in which students received opening paragraphs of mixed quality and tried to identify which had been written by high school students and which by college juniors and seniors was ineffective in my literature class: even good students in the class tended to focus on relatively minor issues of syntax while ignoring differences in the complexity and sophistication of the theses. The failure of these exercises underscored a fundamental problem in the literature course: the wide divergence between my expectations as an instructor and my students’ understanding of the criteria by which literary analyses should be judged. Despite extensive individual conferencing, I never bridged the communication gap that separated my awareness of what “counted” as literary analysis from the enthusiastic plot summaries, the personal responses, and the shallow character analyses that dominated many students’ texts. Even when I tried to show my students in detail how to progress to more complex literary analysis, this gap persisted. Several students complained on their end-of-semester course evaluations that I had co-opted their voices by telling them what to write. Other students had indicated during the semester that they saw in general how my suggestions would improve their essays but had no idea what specific steps to take to move from the elementary arguments in their drafts to the in-depth analyses I was trying to elicit. I had tried to conduct writing conferences as a joint process of discovery between me and the students, but clearly I had failed to clarify the disciplinary conventions and methodologies that distinguished successful literary analysis from other types of writing. I still believe, however, that the discipline of rhetoric and composition has something to offer the introductory literature curriculum, although what it might be is not nearly as obvious or straightforward as I originally and naively thought. Other researchers seem to share this sentiment. John Schilb (2001: 509) articulates the need for formal training to help graduate students make the transition from composition to literature pedagogy, noting that in 400 Pedagogy

the process “literature pedagogy’s relation to the teaching of writing will need to be thoroughly explored.” Schilb observes that one tension between the disciplines is the tendency of composition studies to privilege (sometimes excessively) procedural knowledge, while the average literature course “spends little class time on identifying and fostering techniques of persuasion employed in the most compelling professional literary scholarship” (513). Along similar lines, Anne J. Herrington (1988) notes that even a rhetoric scholar and experienced teacher of literature and writing who tries to apply sound rhetorical principles when using writing in a literature course can have difficulty making the goals and criteria of literary analysis explicit to students. A major difficulty in teaching literary argument seems to be defining what is a worthwhile problem in literary or cultural analysis. Because literary interpretation is often subtle, contingent, and multifaceted, it can be hard to discern common values and conventions across different literary arguments. In a study comparing academic articles in the sciences and literature, Susan Peck MacDonald (1987) finds that problem definition is far less regularized or conventionalized in literary studies than in scientific writing. Thus a newcomer to literary analysis is likely to have more difficulty in discerning the similarities between arguments, say, on the use of windows in Wuthering Heights and the presence of British imperialism in Jane Eyre than a beginning neuroscientist is in understanding the similarities between two strands of research conducted on different areas of the brain. Given the wide range of problems that literary analysis can address, it should come as no surprise that beginning literature students have great difficulty in finding appropriate starting points for their analyses. Herrington (1988: 164) argues that implicit methods for teaching beginning literature students to discover problems worth addressing are insufficient; instead, such students need explicit instruction and more guidance from the professor early in the writing process. Thus the problem of teaching literary analysis can be seen as one of teaching the methods of invention employed by the discipline. Invention, the first of the five rhetorical canons identified by the ancient Greeks (the other four are arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), is the process of finding and elaborating arguments. In this essay I describe how the stases and the special topoi, two classical rhetorical systems for teaching invention, can help students in a gateway literature class (i.e., a class intended as an introduction to the English major) understand the conventions of a valid literary analysis. Researchers in other disciplines have noted how such systems can benefit students in other contexts. Manuel Bilsky et al. (1953) claim that composition students write “richer” arguments after learning such a system. Dominic A. Wolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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Infante (1971) reports that students in a speech communication class who had been taught a topical system of invention could generate more arguments against a proposition than students in a control group. George L. Pullman (1994) suggests that rhetorical invention is central to literary interpretation. Ann Kirch (1996) describes how an inventional technique based on the classical notion of the topoi helped basic writing students generate ideas for timed writing tests. However, no research that I know of has described a literature course based on rhetorical systems of invention. The inventional strategies I discuss are meant to help students acquire the rhetorical forms and cultural equipment to communicate their ideas to other members of the discipline (see Scholes 1998: 66 – 68). Although some object to such a “pedagogy of conventions” (e.g., Spellmeyer 1989) because it emphasizes academic discourse over students’ personal experiences, I believe that teachers have a responsibility to make the argumentative conventions, assumptions, and strategies they value as explicit as possible for students (see Scholes 1998; Graff 2002). I do not believe, of course, that all writing about literature should follow these conventions or that students should not also be given opportunities to work with literature in unconventional ways. Most English teachers, however, value academic features such as a complex thesis, the elaboration of ideas through explicit textual references, and movement between textual details and a context outside the immediate text. Therefore a gateway course should help students acquire the tools with which to produce these features in their work. I turn first to the taxonomies that classical rhetoricians used to teach invention. I also rely on the work of modern rhetoricians Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor (1988, 1991), Laura Wilder (2002a, 2002b), and Pullman (1994) for rhetorical analyses of the conventions employed in professional literary analysis. These conventions may strike many as reflecting New Critical interpretive strategies. However, I hope to show that certain rhetorical and argumentative strategies underlie both New Critical and contemporary textual analysis. Although poststructuralism and postmodernism have profoundly shifted our field’s view of what constitutes an acceptable site of study, the basic rhetorical tools for discovering and supporting argumentation have not significantly changed. Moreover, most undergraduate instruction in literature continues to rely heavily on New Critical methods of explication (MacDonald 1994). Thus, even if the conventions I describe below seem to privilege New Critical interpretation, their use is appropriate in a course intended to prepare students for a curriculum that encourages such methods. Following this analysis of conventions, I describe a section of English 402 Pedagogy

310, “Writing about Literature,” a gateway course at the University of Louisville in which this rhetorical method was used. I describe the positive experiences of both students and instructor. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the advantages and potential disadvantages of this pragmatic approach to teaching students how to develop arguments about literary and cultural texts. The Stases

While there was much disagreement among the Greeks and their Roman successors on the numbers and hierarchical positions of the various types of rhetorical argument, most Roman theorists saw invention as a three-part process: the speaker first investigated the facts of the case, then determined its central issue (or stasis), then explored the available means of persuading the audience using a system similar to Aristotle’s topoi (Lanham 1991). Each stage of invention is associated with its own set of taxonomies, which provide the rhetorician with systematized ways of generating and focusing on ideas. Here I am primarily concerned with the stases and the special topoi. The stases, or points in a given issue that give rise to unique sets of questions, describe the basis on which the issue rests and provide a way to narrow its scope. Modern rhetoricians typically recognize five stases: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

questions of fact or existence (did the defendant steal the wallet?) questions of definition (what type of crime was it—theft, burglary, or something else?) questions of evaluation (how serious was the crime, and were there extenuating circumstances, such as the need to purchase medicine for a sick family member?) questions of cause (what background factors contributed to the defendant’s behavior?) questions of proposal (what should be done about the defendant or about the laws governing our treatment of this crime?)

In general publications, such as the New York Times Magazine and the Smithsonian, complete treatment of an issue demands that the writer move through all of the stases in roughly this order (Fahnestock and Secor 1988: 430). In academic disciplines, however, full development of the stases is exceptional. Because scholars usually focus on well-defined issues for limited audiences, their written arguments usually revolve around one or two stases. Thus arguments in molecular biology tend to focus on the discovery and definition of biochemical compounds (existence and definition), while experimental psychologists tend to evaluate the effects of treatments (value and Wolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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cause) and historians the origins and consequences of events (cause and value). By limiting their argument to a particular stasis or sequence of stases, writers announce to their audience their understanding of what counts as new knowledge in a given discipline. Both Fahnestock and Secor (1991) and Wilder (2002b) find that arguments of definition and existence predominate in articles whose main focus is textual analysis. Of the twenty-eight articles Wilder samples from journals as diverse as Critical Inquiry, ELH, New Literary History, PMLA, and Victorian Studies, all but one revolved around either definition or the closely related argument of existence.1 Definition claims can be found in arguments over whether Margaret Oliphant was a feminist, what it means to be a widow in Western culture, or what the term ode meant to William Wordsworth when he wrote his “Intimations Ode.” The prevalence of arguments of definition in both Fahnestock and Secor’s sample of articles published between 1978 and 1982 and Wilder’s sample of articles published between 1999 and 2001 suggests that acts of classifying, characterizing, describing, and defining are and for some time have been central to professional arguments in our field. However, definitional arguments are always oriented toward the evaluation stasis, since literary and cultural critics argue definitions not for their own sakes but to show that works are complex (Fahnestock and Secor 1988, 1991). The fundamental assumption of critical inquiry, Fahnestock and Secor (1991: 89) argue, is that “literature is complex and . . . to understand it requires patient unraveling, translating, decoding, interpretation, and analyzing. Meaning is never obvious or simple.” Wilder (2002b) similarly notes that complexity is consistently used as a term of praise in contemporary literary and cultural analysis. By defining a work as complex, a critic indirectly asserts that it is a valuable site of study (i.e., he or she makes an argument of evaluation). Even texts that seem shallow and transparent, such as most Arnold Schwarzenegger films, are shown to be valuable sites of study when careful unraveling and decoding reveal their undercurrents and tensions. Both New Critics and poststructuralists thus use complexity to justify their areas of study. Evaluation claims are made not only indirectly, by appeal to the value of complexity, but also directly when critics appraise the scholarship in a field. In more than half of the articles that Wilder (2002b) analyzes, the authors carved out a research space for themselves by evaluating previous critics’ work and finding it mistaken or simplistic. By presenting their own arguments as corrections, these authors created a sense of exigency for their claims and posited them as contributions to a communal field of knowledge. 404

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This relatively recent development in professional analysis, Wilder suggests, represents a shift away from the construction of knowledge based on the focus of isolated scholars on literary texts. The shift from isolated to communal interpretation can also be seen when critics use warrants such as social justice (Wilder 2002b) and ethics (Pullman 1994) to judge a text on behalf of a group. While contemporary literary critics largely reject value judgments based on personal taste, they do allow evaluations that speak as a collective judgment (Scholes 1985: 35). Thus it is possible, for instance, for a feminist critic to judge the themes or codes developed in an individual text by speaking on behalf of women as a group. Wilder (2002b) recognizes this special use of the evaluative stasis when she identifies social justice as a major value in contemporary literary and cultural analysis. By helping students see where literary and cultural criticism falls on the continuum of rhetorical stases, instructors can convey to them an understanding of how literary analysis differs from other forms of writing by defining the range of questions one asks about literature. So the recognition that literary analysis rarely makes explicit evaluative claims can help students distinguish literary argument from a book review, which does make such claims. Similarly, because literary and cultural analysis is concerned primarily with arguments of definition, we do not expect to see statements such as “Shakespeare is a great writer” in a literary analysis, nor do we expect to see evaluations that rely on personal criteria (although such arguments may be useful beginning points for more sophisticated interpretations). Likewise, while causal claims may appear as supporting evidence for an argument, causal studies themselves are out of vogue today because of our field’s emphasis on discontinuity and difference (Pullman 1994). Thus a claim like “Charlotte Perkins Gillman wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ because she experienced mental disorders in her own life” is unlikely to be the thesis of a contemporary literary analysis. By guiding us as we define the scope of claims typically used in textual analysis, the stases can help us articulate the types of arguments we expect our students to make. For many students, the simple statement that complexity is a primary value in literary and cultural analysis can come as a major revelation. Wilder (2002a), finding that many literature students adhere instead to the value of simplicity, describes a student who reacted to Jane Smiley’s essay “Say It Ain’t So, Huck” by writing: “Did Mark Twain write Huckleberry Finn to analyze racism? I think he just wrote a novel. I think Smiley’s going too far” (193). The awareness that illuminating complexity is often the goal of textual analysis — Wolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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and, moreover, that complexity is established primarily through arguments of definition—can occasion a major shift in perspective for such students. Although some may see a contradiction between teaching students to locate complexities in a text and allowing them to engage and identify with literature on their own, discovering complexities can itself be a form of affective engagement with a text. While professional critics rarely regard pleasure as the sole purpose of literature, textual analysis generally enhances the reader’s ability to appreciate and thus enjoy a text (Fahnestock and Secor 1991). In fact, a common rhetorical move in professional discourse is to associate one’s failure to enjoy a work with an inability to give it more than a superficial reading (Wilder 2002b). By teaching students how to discover complexity in texts, we can help them discover multiple ways of enjoying and engaging with them. Certainly, the fun of discovering hidden patterns and features beneath opaque surfaces is what attracted me to English studies and what I try to convey to my students. The Special Topoi

While the stases define and limit the scope of an argument, the special topoi delineate strategies of argument that are useful in particular disciplinary contexts. (There are also general topoi, applicable to all arguments.) The topoi, as described by Aristotle (1991), are mental “places” where the rhetorician goes to find the means of persuasion; they are logical patterns of thought. Edward P. J. Corbett (1990: 96) further describes them as strategies of development that help a speaker initiate a given line of thought. Thus, once the speaker has used the stases to isolate the type of question to address and has identified the general objective of the discourse, the topoi provide a “springboard” for launching the argument in the right direction (133). The following are my interpretations of the taxonomies of special topoi compiled by Fahnestock and Secor (1991), Pullman (1994), and Wilder (2002b). The first three special topoi, appearance/reality, paradox, and paradigm, are essential for making definition arguments that reveal complexities in the texts under scrutiny. The next two, ubiquity and context/intention, are most frequently used to support arguments relying on one of the first three topoi; however, in some circumstances they become primary lines of argument themselves. Finally, the social justice and mistaken-critic topoi are generally used to move from definition arguments to explicit evaluation arguments. Appearance/Reality

Fahnestock and Secor (1991) describe appearance/reality as the central topos of textual analysis. It invokes the spatial metaphor of looking below the sur406 Pedagogy

face. The critic using appearance/reality thus defines two interpretations, an obvious one lying on the surface (the appearance) and a latent one lying below it (the reality). Pullman (1994: 381) refers to this topos as defamiliarization, or the act of making “immediate and apparently effortless interpretations unpersuasive and alien, while rendering obscure interpretations plausible.” Verbs such as symbolize, decode, seem, mask, and underlie are frequent indicators of this topos (Wilder 2002b). Invoking the appearance/reality topos, a critic might argue that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” seems to be about a young man losing his innocent faith in humanity; below the surface, however, the recurrence of his wife’s pink ribbons can be taken to symbolize Brown’s fear of confronting female sexuality. The appearance/reality topos thus allows the critic to place his or her interpretation in dialogue with other interpretations of a work while invoking the literary community’s shared value of complexity by looking for deeper interpretations. It is rare to find a successful textual analysis that does not use this topos. Even poststructuralist criticism, which Wilder (2002b) claims is suspicious of the easy binaries of appearance/reality, relies on this topos. For instance, it underlies Jacques Derrida’s (1976) claim that, while writing appears to serve simply as a supplement to speech, in reality speech itself can be seen as a form of writing. The poststructuralist application of the appearance/reality topos, unlike the New Critical application of it, does not pretend that the reality or meaning hidden beneath the surface is fixed. Wilder claims that, as a perception of two entities, one on the surface and one deep beneath it, this topos continues to be the most prevalent one in literary and cultural studies. Paradox

The paradox is a version of the appearance/reality topos in which two aspects of a literary work that initially seem irreconcilable are brought together into a unified whole. Fahnestock and Secor (1991: 87), characterizing the paradox as the literary critic’s “prize,” claim that “critics seize upon paradoxical joinings with special delight.” For example, in their influential opening chapter of The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (2000) argue that male authors have tended to portray female characters as either angels or monsters and that these stereotypes, although they may seem diametrically opposed, are really two manifestations of a single pervasive male fear of and need to control female sexuality. Although many contemporary critics are suspicious of the paradox, Wolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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which they regard as a New Critical topos, paradoxes pervade poststructuralist criticism. The difference may be that, while New Critics demanded that paradoxes be resolved in the work itself, poststructuralists describe tensions and opposites that cannot be resolved in the text. Again, Derrida’s (1976) deconstruction of the relationship between speech and writing is instructive: speech and writing, which appear to be opposites in that the one embodies the metaphysical self and the other signifies absence, turn out to be predicated on the same logic of absence and understanding. Two opposites are therefore reconciled, although the reconciliation is itself another paradox. Paradigm

A paradigm is a conceptual template used to elucidate the details of another text. This template may be a conglomerate of critical and social texts representing a particular theoretical approach, such as Marxism or feminism, or it may be a specific text or argument used to explicate the text under analysis. For example, the phenomenon of double consciousness, first described by W. E. B. DuBois (1982) in the essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” is often used to elucidate themes and motifs in works by African Americans and other minority authors. Gender bias is another important paradigm today. Pullman (1994: 383) describes how it is employed: “One begins with an intense set of expectations about how individuals . . . behave as a consequence of their gender and then critiques a text based on its fit with or remodification of these expectations.” Thus gender bias becomes a conceptual template on which to map the details of the text under study. Ubiquity

In this topos the critic defines a form (pattern, device, image, linguistic feature) that is repeated, either identically or with variations, throughout a work or a corpus of works. Gilbert and Gubar (2000) again provide apt examples, first of the angel and monster stereotypes in a wide range of nineteenthcentury works and then of various transmutations of these stereotypes in individual works by female authors. While the ubiquity topos is most frequently used to support another topos with a catalog of compelling examples, it can also be used as a primary topos. For instance, Sean C. Grass (1996) uses the recurrence of lists in Christina Rossetti’s poem “The Goblin Market” to justify his examination of what the lists have in common. Thus ubiquity provides a starting point for an analysis that is then supported by other special topoi.

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Context/Intention

Both Robert Scholes (1985) and Wayne C. Booth (1998) emphasize the importance of listening to a text by joining the author’s intended audience. The critical reader, they believe, must be prepared therefore to take into account the author’s intention in writing the text. Although authorial intention has been suspect since the New Critics, Scholes and Booth insist that students must first ally themselves with the author and take the text at face value before learning to resist both. Booth (1998: 49, 51) even criticizes professional critics who fail to consider authorial intention. Pullman (1994) describes the context/intention topos as particularly useful for supporting appearance/reality arguments in which a surface interpretation of a text is rejected by explicating textual clues to the author’s (conscious or subconscious) intentions. To understand the author’s intentions, a critic must be familiar with the cultural context in which the work was written. In the articles she examines, Wilder (2002b) finds the recurrent assumption that historically contextual details should be brought to bear on textual interpretation. Such contextualization ensures that the author’s intentions are not completely violated or ignored. One critic in Wilder’s sample explicitly draws this relationship between context and intention: “It is only by historicizing [Sarah] Grand’s novels that we can guard against interpretations which would have baffled and alarmed their maker” (Richardson 2000: 248). Other critics similarly claim that only by understanding the context of a text can one join the author’s intended audience and understand the text from the inside out. Context is frequently used to justify the application of a particular paradigm (e.g., the author of a particular text is said to have been familiar with a certain body of work) or is used in combination with the appearance/reality topos to clarify details that may be opaque to contemporary readers but were accessible to the author’s intended audience (Wilder 2002b). Although context/intention is generally used to approach the details of a text, it can also be brought to bear on the cultural milieu surrounding a work. For instance, an analysis might move from a textual focus on the female characters in “Young Goodman Brown” to a general statement about Hawthorne’s intentions in presenting his female characters in a given light or, alternatively, to a statement about the sociohistorical context in which Hawthorne was writing. Herrington (1988) identifies such a move from textual details to a broader context as a major factor distinguishing successful from less successful student papers.

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Social Justice

Arguments employing the social justice topos express a desire for social change and tend to share the assumption that life and literature are connected and that literature, whenever it was written, can speak to our current condition (Wilder 2002b). Pullman (1994: 381) describes this topos as a political form of the appearance/reality topos in which the writer locates a social injustice beneath a surface appearance of fairness or equality. Often the social justice and paradigm topoi are combined as authors use paradigms based in feminist, queer, postcolonial, or ethnic studies to uncover injustice in other texts. Social justice appears largely to have replaced contemptus mundi—the view that the world is in a fallen state and that despair is part of the modern condition — as one of the special topoi prevalent, according to Fahnestock and Secor (1991), in criticism from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Wilder (2002b) notes that the emphasis on despair appears to have been replaced by a sense that the world has always been problematic but change is possible. The social justice topos assumes that the first step toward change is to bring hidden injustice to light. The shift in assumptions and values that has accompanied the supersession of contemptus mundi by social justice suggests that the latter may itself be subject to shifts in the future. Mistaken-Critic

This topos is an application of the appearance/reality topos that is geared to the stasis of evaluation rather than that of definition (Wilder 2002b). It is frequently used in the opening paragraphs of an article in which a critic characterizes others’ work as surface interpretations that in reality are incomplete. Thus the mistaken-critic topos provides an exigency for the new critic’s own analysis. Often this topos is combined with the context/intention topos, as when a writer describes the work of past critics as mistaken because it does not sufficiently account for the context in which or the audience for which the text under consideration was written. Graff (2002) notes that students often find it difficult to summarize others’ views before responding to them or to anticipate objections to their own arguments. Many rhetoric textbooks on argument respond to this problem by instructing students to adopt strategies for addressing “conditions of rebuttal” or for “refuting opposing views” (e.g., Ramage and Bean 1995; Rottenberg 2000). For students in literary and cultural studies classes, the mistaken-critic topos can serve the same function, encouraging these students to use the appearance/reality topos to position their interpretations against

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those of other critics. This strategy will be useful to students whether they are responding to published writers or to interpretations put forth by their classmates or instructor. The Special Topoi in Professional Discourse

An analysis of two recent articles shows how the stases and the special topoi work together in professional textual analysis. I have chosen these two articles because they appeared in PMLA, a flagship journal in literary and cultural studies, and because they focus on single texts and represent very different areas in the field of textual analysis. The title of the first article, Bruce Boehrer’s (2002) “ ‘Lycidas’: The Pastoral Elegy As Same-Sex Epithalamium,” clearly announces a definitional argument: the author intends to show that John Milton’s poem “Lycidas” can be classed as an epithalamium, or nuptial song, written for one of the same gender as the composer. The essay begins, however, with a brief evaluation argument as Boehrer uses the mistaken-critic topos to summarize and critique previous scholarship on Milton in general and “Lycidas” in particular. Boehrer then turns explicitly to the paradox topos to make the complex definitional argument that “Lycidas” not only “develops certain epithalamic features in a same-sex context” but figuratively performs “the act of wedlock that epithalamic verse is designed to memorialize” by celebrating “the union of a wide variety of apparently incompatible terms” (223). Boehrer supports this paradox by carefully examining both the Christian and the pagan antecedents of “Lycidas” and demonstrating how these two apparently opposed traditions can (in reality) be unified through their shared rejection of sexual contact with a female. In developing his argument, Boehrer also enlists the ubiquity and context/intention topoi to establish that “Lycidas” rejects heterosexual union and draws on a tradition that often explores themes of sexual deviation. At one point, citing the classical allusions throughout the poem, he describes “Lycidas” as “one long catalog of failed classical love affairs” (Boehrer 2002: 227). Such an argument, establishing that a pattern or theme can be found throughout the text, is a typical use of ubiquity. Boehrer combines context/intention and ubiquity when he cites other pastoral poems that are similarly concerned with sexual deviation (223) and then traces the use of the adjective unexpressive throughout Milton’s other work to support his argument that the wedding song in “Lycidas” suggests “the voice of a love that dare not speak its name” (233–34). By drawing on his extensive knowledge of

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other works by Milton and on antecedents for this poem, Boehrer thus garners support for his definition of “Lycidas” as a same-sex epithalamium. Of the seven special topoi, the only ones he does not employ at length are paradigm and social justice; even so, he at least alludes to the paradigm topos in his brief acknowledgment of indebtedness to recent work in early modern queer studies and in his claim that the conflicted sense of marriage in “Lycidas” foreshadows the conjunction of homoeroticism and misogyny identified by recent scholars in gay men’s writing (233). While Boehrer’s article provides a new look at a poem firmly established in the English literary canon, Maya Socolovsky’s (2002) “The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien” examines a contemporary text on which no major critical work exists. This lack explains why Socolovsky does not use the mistaken-critic topos. Her argument relies primarily on the paradigm topos by drawing on the “tools and terminology from writing on photography” (252) to show how photographs, like ghosts, displace time and place and can serve as metaphors for American immigrant experiences. In particular, Roland Barthes’s poststructuralist theories in Camera Lucida serve as a conceptual template that Socolovsky applies to The Fourteen Sisters. The appearance/reality topos figures heavily in her argument: early on she claims that, even though photographs in the novel “apparently bridge past and present, they also show the displacement from one time and place into another and retain the past as a trace in the present moment” (253). Thus Socolovsky rejects a superficial reading of photographs in the novel in favor of a more complex interpretation suggested by a poststructuralist paradigm. This second reading, not surprisingly, suggests a paradox, in that two apparently opposed terms (past and present) are shown to be unified by the photographic narrative in The Fourteen Sisters. Socolovsky uses ubiquity to support her application of the paradigm topos by bringing together diverse sections of the novel that combine references to photographs with reflections on time. Her argument also uses context/intention to tie temporal displacement in the novel’s photographs to the American immigrant experience. Finally, the sympathy that Socolovsky’s discussion of the immigrant experience generates suggests a movement toward the social justice topos, although she does not go so far as to advocate social change. Like Boehrer, Socolovsky clearly draws on at least five of the seven special topoi to showcase the complexity of the text she analyzes. Although they represent different points on the spectrum of literary analysis, Boehrer’s and Socolovsky’s articles are rhetorically similar in that they focus on argu412 Pedagogy

ments of definition, figure complexity as the end point of their analysis, and employ the special topoi in their arguments. The Special Topoi in Undergraduate Literature Studies

The special topoi appear to undergird not only professional discourse but also discussions of literature on the undergraduate level. In the undergraduate literature course Wilder (2002a) analyzes, the professor persistently praised complexity in texts and used the special topoi to model analytic arguments for students. Not surprisingly, Wilder finds a correlation between the students’ grades and their ability to recognize arguments using the special topoi as valid examples of literary analysis. In a follow-up study Wilder (2002b) also finds a correlation between the students’ use of the special topoi in their written arguments and the evaluations given these arguments by independent raters. These findings suggest that students at the undergraduate level are rewarded for their ability to recognize and create arguments using the special topoi. However, Wilder (2002a) finds disparities between student and instructor perceptions of the value of complexity in literary analysis. Even though the professor invoked the value of complexity in more than 60 percent of his lectures, the students rarely mentioned this term in their comments in lectures or discussion sections, and when they did, it was often to complain or to declare that a work the instructor had shown to be complex was actually simple. Wilder attributes the disjunction between student and instructor perceptions partly to the fact that complexity, although frequently mentioned in lectures, was seldom named as a value or goal in student writing. Rather than provide students with methods for inventing valid and complex arguments, the discussions of student writing tended to focus on coherence and mechanics. As a result, the instructors missed an opportunity to communicate their criteria for a successful literary analysis to the students. Wilder notes several instances of miscommunication and inconsistent feedback in which the teaching assistants initially pushed the students to make more complex arguments but then did not hold them to this standard when they failed to incorporate the feedback successfully. Invention in English 310, “Writing about Literature”

In the spring 2002 semester, to counter the miscommunication that I and other teachers had experienced when introducing students to literary argument, I designed a version of Louisville’s gateway literature class to introduce students systematically to the values, conventions, and inventional strategies Wolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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used in literary criticism. English 310, “Writing about Literature,” a requirement for English majors, is a writing-intensive course that provides “extensive practice in literary analysis and in the forms and conventions of writing about various literary genres” (University of Louisville 2000). My first objective in the course was to introduce the students to the stases and the special topoi, admittedly difficult concepts for beginning literature students. To this end, I assigned Fahnestock and Secor’s (1991) “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” for our first formal class meeting. This essay, again, describes how literary arguments function by defining terms and patterns that illustrate a text’s complexity; it also provides an introduction to the first four special topoi, which we then elaborated in class.2 My second goal was to stress that the stases and the special topoi are not just writing but also reading strategies. I wanted my students to understand how these methods of invention can and should shape even initial approaches to a literary text. Thus I had them listen to a think-aloud audiotape of an experienced reader—in this case, me—reading and trying to interpret Sylvia Plath’s poem “Morning Song.” In a think-aloud, the reader or writer speaks aloud every thought, however trivial, that goes through his or her head. This protocol is frequently employed in composition studies to gain insight into an individual’s mental processes as he or she reads or writes. As I played segments of the tape, I asked the students to identify which special topoi they heard me using; I also showed them a copy of the notes I had made while reading. The students easily identified the use of both the ubiquity and the appearance/reality topoi. Two typical segments from early in the protocol went as follows: So the baby brings up all of these wispy images: echoes, drafty, clouds being effaced. [reading] “All night your moth breath flickers.” So that’s also kind of wispy. . . . Bald cry. So bald is like empty. I’m going to make a list of empty imagery. So images to describe baby, and I think they’re empty. So we have this bald cry. [writing] “Bald cry.” OK. I’m going to divide my list into baby and empty imagery, and her and others—empty imagery. . . . [writing] “Blankly as walls. I’m no more your mother.”

These segments show me using the ubiquity topos to pull together images scattered throughout the poem. In each case I name a term that the text suggests to me and then search for images and words to support the use of this term—in essence, an argument of existence. Thus the ubiquity topos becomes central to my initial attempts to understand the poem. 414 Pedagogy

Later in the protocol, as I try to unify my thoughts into a central argument, the appearance/reality topos takes precedence: I’m thinking, though, like in terms of a thesis—terms of a thesis, uh. Motherhood is supposed to be something joyous, something celebrated, but this is reflecting a negative side of motherhood. Um. [reading] “Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles. . . .” So at first you think that that is love, as in her [the mother’s] love, but what started it was the midwife slapping the footsoles. So it sounds like what got the baby started is slapping the footsoles. That’s, that’s not love. Is love ironic here?

Here I start to identify a contrast between the expectations set up by the theme and initial words of the poem and the more negative “wispy” and “empty” images that I have identified earlier. Still later I start to refine this interpretation, bordering on a paradox as I suggest that Plath equates motherhood with both a precious new beginning and a mournful loss of self. This think-aloud protocol, therefore, shows students how experienced critics define initial interpretations of a text and then work toward increasing complexity by incorporating additional special topoi and terms into these definitions. Since students in introductory literature classes typically have little, if any, experience with professional criticism or literary theory, the paradigm topos was the most difficult for my students to understand. After introducing them to the idea that the special topoi inform even initial acts of reading and interpreting, I assigned them Rossetti’s poem “The Goblin Market,” followed by two lengthy excerpts and six short abstracts from professional analyses of the poem. The students were to bring in a handwritten chart summarizing the critics’ arguments and identifying the stases and special topoi they used. The abstracts and excerpts reflected a wide range of theoretical approaches and paradigms: some critics employed a queer studies paradigm, others a Christian paradigm, and still others a Marxist paradigm to focus on economic transactions in the poem. One abstract even showed the critic using psychological theory about anorexia to understand food imagery in the poem. This exposure to a range of paradigms helped the students understand how to identify the paradigm topos in others’ writing. The next step in the class was for the students to apply the special topoi to their own literary analyses. Problems with their understanding of the special topoi (particularly appearance/reality and paradox) began to surface. The students read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1989) “The Yellow Wallpaper” and wrote two short interpretations using the special topoi. The story’s narrator, who has been prescribed a “mental rest” cure for her nervous trouWolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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bles, develops an obsession with the wallpaper in the room to which she has been confined and slowly goes insane. Although anyone who grasps the plot will understand that the narrator is insane, many students wrote facile appearance/reality arguments to the effect that she seems normal on the surface but in reality is insane. Other variants of this argument were that mental rest appears to be a cure but in reality makes the narrator’s condition worse and that her husband-doctor appears concerned with her health but in reality helps her go insane. Such arguments, despite their use of the appearance/reality topos, remain at the surface level of plot summary. Wilder (2002a: 188) similarly notes that many students seemed familiar with the structure and general operation of the appearance/reality topos but were “unaware of its ‘proper’ use in service of the overarching value of complexity.” To stress that their arguments needed to be complex, I told my students to ask themselves, “Would anybody who has read the text disagree with this argument?” We then looked at several sample arguments and discussed the likelihood that a competent reader would disagree with them. I emphasized that this question was the first hurdle the students’ arguments needed to meet: without the possibility of disagreement, they did not have a viable argument. Another topos that caused confusion was the paradox. Many students simply described two opposing concepts or images in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and labeled them a paradox without attempting to reconcile them. For instance, a student might note that the inside of the house in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is described in unhealthy terms — the wallpaper is a “smouldering, unclean yellow” (4), a “fungus” (12) with a pattern containing “slanting waves of optic horror” (9) and “lame uncertain curves” that “suddenly commit suicide” (4)—while outside is a “beautiful shaded lane” (6), “riotous oldfashioned flowers” (5), and a “lovely country too, full of great elms and velvet meadows” (7). Certainly, noting the differences between the descriptions of the house and the world outside is an important step, and students can make good use of the ubiquity topos by pulling together evidence from throughout the story to describe these opposing patterns. However, the paradox topos requires that the writer also resolve or unify these opposites — and not every set of opposites in a story does resolve into a paradox. Arriving at such a resolution, moreover, requires advanced analytic skill; indeed, the paradox is perhaps the most difficult and the most complex of the special topoi. Not surprisingly, Wilder (2002a) finds it the one least used in student writing. Over the next four weeks I introduced the students to three critical essays that supplied paradigms through which to interpret fictional and poetic 416 Pedagogy

works. Wilder’s (2002b) study, in which raters evaluated student essays that made effective use of the paradigm topos more favorably than other essays, suggests that applying a paradigm to a text is a valuable skill to teach English majors. Since beginning students lack the background to apply a general theoretical approach, such as Marxism or queer studies, to a text, the paradigms we used came from single texts, which we then used as lenses through which to analyze other texts. We began with Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000) feminist analysis illustrating how the stereotypes of the domestic angel and the sexually deviant monster controlled and limited both female sexuality and women’s literary production. Then we discussed this paradigm with reference to three short stories: Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour,” Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” and his “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Next, the students read DuBois’s (1982) famous essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” which describes how a double consciousness of both white and African American cultures keeps African Americans from knowing or expressing themselves fully. The students applied this paradigm to poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Audre Lorde and to excerpts from The Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Finally, they read George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, followed by Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen’s (1992) analysis of how Shaw reverses the literacy myth that uncritically equates education with increased opportunities and improved quality of life. We then applied the concept of the literacy myth to Langston Hughes’s “Theme for an English B.” Of the three critical paradigms we focused on, Eldred and Mortensen’s is the least well known. I chose it because it encourages students to pay close attention to acts of reading and writing in works of literature: acts frequently fraught with meaning for both authors and literary critics. While we worked with these paradigms, each student wrote a short essay analyzing one of the fictional or poetic works, and two or three students contributed an analysis each class period. The students were encouraged but not required to use the paradigm topos to interpret the works. These analyses were shared with the entire class by e-mail, and all members of the class were required to print them out and bring them to class, where we discussed their merits and drawbacks at length. (The students, of course, had the opportunity to revise them afterward.) Although we did go over issues of coherence and organization, we focused primarily on the quality and complexity of the arguments. I emphasized that without a complex argument, even the best organized and most stylistically sophisticated essay would get no better than a C. I trained the students to summarize their own and others’ arguments in a single sentence and then to ask themselves how likely it was that another perWolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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son who had read the text would find this argument debatable. Occasionally, I also asked the students to rank the arguments on a complexity scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being “very complex.” These discussions both helped them learn to distinguish arguments that relied primarily on plot summary from those that engaged more substantive analytic issues and emphasized that illuminating complexities in a work was the goal of literary analysis in this class. If we decided that a given argument was complex, we worked on identifying which special topoi the student had used and on addressing any misuses of them. Then we determined whether the argument would be more complex if the student employed additional topoi (we had already discovered that arguments deemed “very complex” almost always used at least four of the special topoi). We frequently found that an argument would be more complex if the context/intention topos were used to connect the text to a broader issue or to explain why the author had developed certain patterns and themes. Sometimes we found that a more clearly stated appearance/reality argument or the application of a critical paradigm would be beneficial. With more advanced arguments, we might note a paradox hinted at but not developed or analyze how the student could combine two of the paradigms we had discussed to make a more sophisticated argument. To forestall strained interpretations, we also asked ourselves the question “Could this argument easily be contradicted by other evidence in the text?” Such arguments were generally treated as misapplications of the ubiquity or context/intention topos. The students’ first major assignment was to apply one or more of the three paradigms discussed in class to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in a four- to six-page paper. This novel was chosen because it represents a moderate level of difficulty, allowing students to concentrate on the paradigm, and because it is open to a range of interpretations. The novel contains ample material on differences between African American and white notions of beauty and virtue that can be analyzed equally well using either Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist framework or DuBois’s racial paradigm. References to schooling and education also occur throughout the novel, making it fertile ground for an analysis rooted in the literacy paradigm developed by Eldred and Mortensen. After the students and I had met in small groups to discuss their papers, many students were able to make sophisticated arguments by combining topoi. For instance, one student argued that The Bluest Eye shows how in black women the cultural ideal of the angelic woman causes a split personality, whose effects are so pervasive that even the women in the novel who seem to reject this ideal cannot escape it. This argument not only makes good use of paradigm and ubiquity by showing the effects of the angelic stereotype 418 Pedagogy

throughout the novel but also effectively uses appearance/reality to show how even characters who at first seem unscathed are, on closer inspection, also damaged by these white cultural ideals. Moreover, by explicitly linking this argument to black culture and black women in general, the student gestures toward the context/intention and social justice topoi. Such an argument represents considerable development in the student’s ability to produce a complex and multifaceted analysis about the text. For the last assignment in the course, I taught the students how to use the library’s resources to find published professional literary criticism. At this point, they were indirectly introduced to the mistaken-critic special topos, which we had not discussed until this point.3 The assignment required them to write an essay on Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and draw on a published critical work that we had not discussed in class. These essays showed how far the students had come in understanding and applying the special topoi, in particular the paradigm topos. Many students returned to the paradigms we had focused on earlier, showing how the African American experience of double consciousness might be modified to apply to Chinese Americans or exploring tensions between Chinese and American stereotypes of femininity and female sexuality. Some students researched paradigms not discussed in class and applied them to the novel. For instance, one student used critical discussions of Taoism as a paradigm for analyzing The Woman Warrior. Another found criticism on military themes and applied them to the central trope of the woman warrior. Although most students found this novel much more difficult to read and interpret than The Bluest Eye, they were able to arrive at some interesting and complex interpretations of it by using the special topoi. Students Evaluate the Special Topoi

Most students initially found the special topoi bewildering, and many reported in their midterm portfolios that they had rapidly lost confidence in their analytic and writing abilities in the first few weeks of the class. However, most of them had regained it by the time they finished their assignment on The Bluest Eye. Several students indicated that they had already been using the special topoi in their writing and felt validated when they found out that these rhetorical strategies had names. In an anonymous survey conducted on the last class day, the students expressed enthusiasm for the special topoi as a method of instruction. They strongly agreed that “the special topoi helped [them] understand what ‘counts’ as an argument about literature,” averaging a score of 3.6 on a scale from Wolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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1 (“strongly disagree”) to 4 (“strongly agree”). Only one student disagreed, and he also indicated, as did another student, that he did not understand the special topoi. The majority of students also agreed that “the special topoi [had] influenced how [they] read literature,” although the agreement was not as strong (3.1) as I had hoped, given the time we had dedicated to reading strategies. Only two students disagreed with this statement, and again, they were the students who did not understand the special topoi. Overall, my students appeared satisfied with their progress in the course, agreeing strongly (3.7) that their writing strategies had improved and, somewhat less strongly (3.4), that their reading strategies had improved. Students’ written comments on the survey reflected their enthusiasm for the special topoi. One student wrote: “Learning about the special topoi made a huge difference in my writing strategies. I did not know how to make an argument or write a thesis before this course.” Another commented: “Special topoi are very confusing, but when explained well they really help in understanding and developing literary arguments.” Yet another indicated that the special topoi had influenced his note-taking strategies as he read. I also used the special topoi in “Women in Literature: Monsters and Madwomen,” a course cross-listed as English and women’s studies, with very positive results. I asked the students in this class to include comments on their course evaluations about the special topoi as a method of teaching literary argument. Of the twenty-one students who responded to my request, eighteen indicated that they had found the special topoi helpful, including several students who were in their junior or senior year of the English major. A few also indicated that the special topoi were particularly helpful in understanding the writing of professional critics. Only three students complained about the special topoi, claiming that they were overly academic distinctions that confused rather than helped or that they unnecessarily limited the scope of one’s writing. Final Reflections

In many ways the stases and the special topoi provided the language I had sought for communicating to students the criteria by which a literary analysis should be judged. The assignments in the African American literature class and the gateway “Writing about Literature” class were similarly structured: in both, I expected the students to apply paradigms such as double consciousness, literacy, and gender relations to other texts, and I expected them to pay close attention to the details of the texts they read and to make arguments with complex theses. However, in “Writing about Literature” I could present my 420 Pedagogy

expectations with much greater specificity. By pointing out that I saw illuminating complexity as one of the major purposes of literary analysis, I circumvented many conflicts between my expectations of in-depth analyses and students’ tendencies to view literature as just a story. More important, the special topoi gave me a way to make specific recommendations about how the students could further develop their arguments. When their essays missed the mark, the special topoi and stases helped me point out not only where they had gone wrong but also where they might find workable arguments. My feedback on the students’ essays generally began with summaries of their arguments and compliments if they had used certain topoi well. I then suggested additional topoi that they might use to make their arguments more complex. Frequently, this meant encouraging them to use the context/intention topos to connect their analyses of specific details in a text to a broader issue. I also pointed out how the students could make better use of the topoi already in their arguments by foregrounding them in the thesis. I probably used this strategy most often with the paradox topos, indicating contradictions that the students had suggested but not developed. Students’ reluctance to foreground paradoxes in their arguments seems related to David S. Kaufer and Cheryl Geisler’s (1989) claim that undergraduates frequently gloss over contradictions in texts that more experienced writers pounce on as keys to an original argument. Learning that paradoxes are particularly valuable in textual analyses, however, seemed to help some students overcome this reluctance. Thus students’ familiarity with standard lines of argument in textual analysis enabled me to point out options that they might pursue in developing more sophisticated analyses. The main problem with basing instruction in textual analysis on the special topoi is that, as Wilder (2002a) suggests, students can invoke the formula of the special topoi without the substance.This is particularly likely if the topoi are turned into a series of questions that the students can follow systematically to discover an argument (see, in another context, Corbett 1990). While such lists of questions may be useful, they can also lead to rigid, fill-inthe-blank equations applied one after the other with little insight. To steer students away from such uses of the topoi, I continually stressed the need to have a debatable and complex argument. Two questions employed throughout the class to test the validity of arguments were “Would anybody who has read the text disagree with this argument?” and “Could this argument easily be contradicted by other evidence in the text?” If the students could not answer yes to the first question and no to the second, then their arguments were facile rather than complex. Wolfe Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

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I am not arguing, however, that an emphasis on these conventions of argument in literary analysis is appropriate for every undergraduate literature course. Nor do I feel that detailed textual analysis is the only form of writing that our students need to learn. Certainly, they should be given opportunities to relate the literature studied in class to their personal experiences and values. In fact, in the gateway course I have described, class discussions of the paradigms we studied often focused on the students’ personal experiences as these students reflected on instances of gender bias they had witnessed or tried to recall their own experience of double consciousness. The literacy paradigm in particular provoked personal reflection as the students compared their schooling experiences to those of Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle and those of Hughes. I can imagine revising the course structure to capitalize on these personal connections by asking students, for instance, to write personal narratives about how their own literacy experiences compared with those described in the course texts. Such personal reflection could well facilitate the introduction of some of the more difficult and abstract concepts associated with these paradigms. I believe, though, that we have a responsibility in introductory courses to make explicit the conventions, values, and methods of invention common to the discipline in question. The failure to be explicit often means that our courses work for students who have already assimilated these conventions (usually subconsciously) but leave those with less academic preparation on the outside. Moreover, explicitness about disciplinary conventions exposes the conventions themselves to scrutiny and examination. As Graff (2002) suggests, frank conversation about the features and conventions of academic discourse allows students to become anthropologists, or intellectual analysts, of their own academic lives. Teachers can foster such self-awareness by showing students how the arguments and values in a field change over time and as the field comes into contact with other discourse systems. Thus disciplinary conventions need not be monolithic structures to which students must submit. Instead, students can be encouraged to see themselves as negotiators of conventions that shift and are often contested.4 For me, the stases and the special topoi have proved useful in teaching students unfamiliar with the conventions of textual analysis methods of discovering arguments about texts. Moreover, they provide students and instructors with a common language for discussing the criteria used to evaluate student writing. Since the conventions and values governing textual analysis are not static, new analyses of the special topoi and the stases prevalent in our

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field need to be conducted periodically. Not only will such analyses help our students understand and negotiate the discipline’s ways of reading and writing, but they will help us critique and openly discuss our own values, assumptions, and conventions.

Notes I would like to thank the students in my “Writing about Literature” class for their frank and helpful feedback on the course. I also wish to thank Laura Wilder for her inspiration and her helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. 1. In the analysis that follows I collapse arguments of existence and definition together because they are closely related and appear to rely on the same topoi. 2. Fahnestock and Secor’s analysis was problematic for use in the class both because of its difficult, often ironic tone and because its description of the special topoi was dated. For instance, rather than the social justice topos, Fahnestock and Secor describe the contemptus mundi topos, which my students found confusing, and we eventually dropped it from our discussions. Fahnestock and Secor also fail to identify context/intention and mistaken-critic as special topoi. In the future I plan to use either Wilder’s (2002b) analysis or the present essay as an introduction to the special topoi. 3. Since the class was working from Fahnestock and Secor’s (1991) analysis, the mistaken-critic topos was not explicitly named. However, I did discuss it without naming it, explaining to the students how critics join a critical conversation by summarizing previous scholarship and locating a “gap” to address. 4. In fact, in the “Writing about Literature” course I introduced students to literary theory by having them read from I. A. Richards’s (1929) Practical Criticism and discussing the differences between the stases and the topoi that Richards and his students valued and those that contemporary textual analysis privileges. This approach had a mixed reception, but it does suggest one way that students can contemplate the constructed and shifting nature of discourse conventions.

Works Cited Aristotle. 1991. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press. Bilsky, Manuel, McCrea Hazlett, Robert E. Streeter, and Richard M. Weaver. 1953. “Looking for an Argument.” College English 14: 210–16. Boehrer, Bruce. 2002. “ ‘Lycidas’: The Pastoral Elegy As Same-Sex Epithalamium.” PMLA 117: 222–36. Booth, Wayne C. 1998. “The Ethics of Teaching Literature.” College English 61: 41–55. Corbett, Edward P. J. 1990. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. DuBois, W. E. B. 1982. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” In The Souls of Black Folk, 43–53. New York: Penguin. Eldred, Janet Carey, and Peter Mortensen. 1992. “Reading Literacy Narratives.” College English 54: 512–39. Fahnestock, Jeanne, and Marie Secor. 1988. “The Stases in Scientific and Literary Argument.” Written Communication 5: 427–43. ———. 1991. “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism.” In Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities, ed. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis, 76–96. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1989. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings. New York: Bantam. Graff, Gerald. 2002. “The Problem Problem and Other Oddities of Academic Discourse.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 1: 27–42. Grass, Sean C. 1996. “Nature’s Perilous Variety in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’ ” NineteenthCentury Literature 51: 356–76. Herrington, Anne J. 1988. “Teaching, Writing, and Learning: A Naturalistic Study of Writing in an Undergraduate Literature Course.” In Writing in Academic Disciplines, ed. David A. Jolliffe, 133–66. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Infante, Dominic A. 1971. “The Influence of a Topical System on the Discovery of Argument.” Speech Monographs 38: 125–28. Kaufer, David S., and Cheryl Geisler. 1989. “Novelty in Academic Writing.” Written Communication 6: 286–311. Kirch, Ann. 1996. “A Basic Writer’s Topoi for Timed Essay Tests.” Journal of Basic Writing 15: 112–24. Lanham, Richard A. 1991. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2d ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacDonald, Susan Peck. 1987. “Problem Definition in Academic Writing.” College English 49: 315–31. ———. 1994. Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Pullman, George L. 1994. “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Composition, Invention, and Literature.” JAC 14: 367–87. Ramage, John D., and John C. Bean. 1995. Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings. 3d ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Richards, I. A. 1929. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Richardson, Angelique. 2000. “The Eugenization of Love: Sarah Grand and the Morality of Genealogy.” Victorian Studies 42: 227–54. Rottenberg, Annette T. 2000. Elements of Argument: A Text and Reader. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 424 Pedagogy

Schilb, John. 2001. “Preparing Graduate Students to Teach Literature: Composition Studies As a Possible Foundation.” Pedagogy 1: 507–25. Scholes, Robert. 1985. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ———. 1998. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English As a Discipline. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Sitko, Barbara. 1993. “Exploring Feedback: Writers Meet Readers.” In Hearing Ourselves Think: Cognitive Research in the College Writing Classroom, ed. Ann M. Penrose and Barbara M. Sitko, 170–87. New York: Oxford University Press. Socolovsky, Maya. 2002. “The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien.” PMLA 117: 252–64. Spellmeyer, Kurt. 1989. “A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy.” College English 51: 262–76. University of Louisville. 2000. On-line course catalog. Accessed at www.louisville.edu/ provost/undergrad/catalog. Wilder, Laura. 2002a. “ ‘Get Comfortable with Uncertainty’: A Study of the Conventional Values of Literary Analysis in an Undergraduate Literature Course.” Written Communication 19: 175–221. ———. 2002b. “Critics, Classrooms, and Commonplaces: Literary Studies As a Disciplinary Discourse Community.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin.

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