Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Liz MacLean’s Blog Post:  The “Chicken-or-Egg” Question of which does or should come first: Understanding what a text says or understanding what a text does?

 

I hope we’ll spend a lot of time in class talking about the Pope chapter, because I have a lot of questions about it.  In addition to not being entirely sure I followed his meaning throughout (which is to say, metacognatively, I recognize I have a lot more work to do with this chapter), I’m also not clear who his intended audience is, in terms of to what level of students Pope prescribes  this mode of teaching.

I wonder about what kind of student Pope would apply these strategies to for several reasons.  Or another way to put that, at what point in the semester this type of teaching would occur.  Day one?  Midway?  Toward the end, after students have already grown and achieved a lot?  To put it a third way – what sort of “scaffolding,” if any, would Pope build into a curriculum that includes these teaching methods?

In Bean, we saw the idea of students being asked to differentiate between what a piece of writing says (“summarize this paragraph…”) and what a piece of writing does (“why does the author include this paragraph at this point in the essay?  What is this paragraph doing here?  What function is this paragraph serving?”).  Like Alicia, I, too, employ this strategy for my Eng 101 students, and we also spend a lot of time on an activity I call “Anatomy of an Essay,” which is sort of like reverse outlining and sorting says/does ideas at the same time.

When I teach students to separate what a text says from what it does, I always start with “says.”  I do this in part because, if I start with “does,” students reply with a “says” answer.  Other reasons include that it gives me an opportunity to positively reinforce class participation (“That’s a great summary, Bob”), and I think it helps students frame the next step, assessing the “does,” that I’m teaching them to take.  Through process of elimination, if content summary isn’t the “does” response, they are forced to examine the question more closely in order to answer it:  What is this text doing?  Some crickets in the room don’t always mean the lights are out upstairs – in this case, I’ve found it means many of them are having little “aha” moments in their chairs as they start to grasp that there’s more than one kind of thing to look for in a text.

Back to Pope, who says:  “The best way to understand how a text works, I argue, is to change it….”  As I read through Pope’s essay, I found it a bit startling that he spent very little time challenging students to think about what, say, the poem “My Last Duchess” actually says and seems to skip right to his strategies and approaches for “re-centering” and “changing” the text.  Maybe I’m misunderstanding his meaning, but as I take it, this seems to be a more complex form of the “does” question.  And so I wonder – is Pope offering these strategies to students who have already spent time figuring out at least a general gist of the poem, and this is how he pushes them to achieve deeper understanding of the poem’s content and the technical maneuverings of its creator?  Or does Pope encourage teachers to think of “change” as a starting point for engaging with a text?

I’m really hoping this exercise is meant as a “step two” rather than a “step one” – I need more convincing before I can embrace this as a “step one” teaching strategy.  The value I see in the exercises he suggests, to me, come after at least a general discussion with students about what they thought the poem was all about, whether they liked it, etcetera; this would be a method for helping them fill in those gaps, for re-examining, for digging deeper.  I also would worry that students would get so lost in the task of changing the text that they might make the mistake of conflating the poem with their “interventions” of the poem and walk away from the text with strange ideas about what it is actually about.  And finally, as a fan of New Criticism and as a creative writer, I can’t help cringing a bit at the thought of what this exercise does to works of art – what we are here calling “texts.”   I recall a high school course in literary theory where I had to write a paper about the Oedipus complex in Huckleberry Finn.  Oh, you missed that one, too?  I’m sure Mark Twain did as well.  In any case, were I to employ Pope’s strategies in my own classroom, it would be important to me to make sure the students were “re-re-centered” at the end, and brought back around to a conversation that deepens their appreciation of what the text is – its aesthetic, its ethics, its artfulness — with or without the context of what it is not.