As I finish up with The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, I, like some of my fellow classmates, have some initial “difficulties” regarding the use of this textbook in the classroom. What age are the students to whom this textbook is geared? I ask this because at times, the book takes on some rather abstract concepts—i.e. a “moment of difficulty” for me was the discussion in Chapter Two about the difference between standard and poetic language. On the other hand, this textbook also introduces vocabulary like “narrative,” “personification” and “simile,” concepts that are generally taught in early high school and maybe even as early as elementary school. As I will further, Elements clearly promotes the use of writing as a gateway to understanding literature. This leads me to another initial question—in what kind of classroom is this textbook geared towards? I can see it in both composition and literature classrooms.

Moving past these initial questions, I’d like to focus the bulk of this post on what I found most fascinating with this textbook: Salvatori and Donahue clearly promote the act of writing as a critical thinking tool in the study of literature. For the authors of Elements, readers have a responsibility to the text; it is the reader’s duty to do “the work, be creative, and not settle for the quick and easy response” (33). In other words, rather than being given the answers to textual difficulties by their teachers, students should be given the tools to critically analyze these moments of difficulty themselves. The authors of Elements clearly advocate the act of writing as one of, if not the best, tool to give literature students; both the “Difficulty Paper” and Triple-Entry Notebook assignments are designed to help students make sense of both their own repertoire and more importantly, how their repertoire affects their understanding of any given text. 

I was surprised to encounter, then, this “writing as a means of discovery” mentality in what I thought was going to be a textbook on the concepts of literary analysis. Salvatori and Donahue show that writing can (and should) be used in every aspect of literary analysis. The student case studies that are excerpted throughout the textbook clearly show how writing can help a student recognize his own previous misconceptions that are inhibiting his understanding of the text. In the discussion of hybrid genres in Chapter Three, for example, students are asked to writing Difficulty Papers on The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. Most of the student writing focuses on the difficulties of reading a long poem that strays away from standard chronological storytelling. Here, the act of writing illuminated the repertoire of the students who believed that longer texts should function as straightforward narrative. Writing about this particular difficulty in Rime helps the students come to an understanding of the poem as a hybrid text. Following this discussion of hybridity, Salvatori and Donahue ask their readers to analyze their own writing as a hybrid text. Here, the authors equate student writing with literature; it is so refreshing to see how literary analysis and “writing to learn” should work hand in hand in the literature classroom.