Sheridan Blau clearly seeks to build the confidence and competence of his students and their critical appreciation of literature.  To that end, he is willing to invent, participate with them in discovery processes, and revisit the dinosaurs that buttress professors at the expense of their students.  I was delighted to note Blau’s warning about the dangers of confusing students by trying to superimpose literary theories. 

Kill them, I say!  (The theories, that is, not the students.)  In college, I was briefly exposed to a survey of frameworks that included called new criticism, deconstructionism, formalism, feminism, Marxism, Freudianism and a plethora of other pet abstractions.  These notions struck me as philosophical abstractions that might be provocative, particularly to an English literature major.  However, in my case they left me out of my depth.  I was a political science major.  There was so much else about reading and writing English that I needed in order to move forward.  Instead, I was expected to devour a range of theoretical conundrums in one big, bewildering leap. 

In my sophomore English class, a Professor asked us to read several academic articles on Walt Whitman’s poems and explicate our most compelling retrospective hypothesis of the meaning of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry within the parameters of one or more of the interpretive theories mentioned above, or something like that.  Gingerly, I raised my hand to confess that I had no familiarity with literary theory.  “Well learn it,” barked the Professor.  “You’re in college now.”

 At the university bookstore, I bought a Guide to Literary Theory.  The feminism, political and psychoanalytical constructs elicited some resonance, but many of the other hair-splitting notions that I tried to skim still seemed elusive and something of an artificial stretch when applied to a poem.  I became anxious. 

Consequently, one spends hours faking the assignment.  One cloaks analysis in the guise of faintly understood and stilted, borrowed academic language, just as Blau describes.  And worse, I began to despise the poetry that we were reading by the exuberant Walt Whitman.  The painstaking imposition of theory onto his celebratory, democratic stanzas made the reading experience seem elitist and punishing.

 Thank you, Sheridan Blau.  Your observations about the dangers of the inappropriate imposition of hypothetical dogma onto literary gems rang out, giving me permission to find more accessible, enjoyable and hands-on paths to the interpretation of texts.  Let us help our students, particularly in their most formative stages, embrace the difficulties with the most effective tools possible, which are not necessarily the fanciest ones.  If theory cannot be introduced judiciously and pragmatically, then kill the intellectual intimidation, I say, and save the students!