Final Project Ideas: Revisiting "Special Topoi"

My research questions about literature pedagogy are focused on best practices related to writing about and evaluating literature. I want to understand how the subjectivity of a student would help or hinder a student from learning how to write about and evaluate literature. As a rhetorician, I believe that the literary text can function as a form of rhetorical intervention thus causing the reader to re-conceptualize the world in which they live. 

Over the course of the semester, I have encountered two articles that have helped me develop my initial pedagogical questions. Joanna Wolfe’s "A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class" along with Wolfe and Laura Wilder’s "Sharing Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge of the Literary Scholar" take a rhetorical approach to teaching literature in the college classroom. These articles focus on the act of inventing the literary argument while making the case that teaching special topoi within the literature discipline (and any other discipline) will help students understand how to write within that discipline.

For instance, in "Sharing the Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge of the Literary Scholar," Wilder and Wolfe state,

We hoped that by making special topoi conventions explicit, it would become possible to address how such conventions change over time, how one can work (and how others have worked) within some conventions to bend or break conventions, and on the whole to discuss the writing students engage in such an introductory course as participating in a larger rhetorical context. (198)

By making what is seemingly implicit explicit, the writers of this article hope to use the conventions of research writing within the discipline as a way to teach students how to formulate and support thesis statements about literature.

I would like to probe into issues raised in these articles to understand if teaching special topoi would help students become more successful at writing and analyzing literature. I also want to know if teaching special topoi could help students evaluate literature, helping them to become more conversant on what is literature, how good literature is defined and what "literature" makes up a literature class. Furthermore, I wonder if knowing rhetorical conventions of literature could empower students to understand the subjective nature of the so-called objective selection process of canonizing literature.

Over the course of this semester, I have been working on an assignment that utilizes Wolfe’s use of special topoi.  I plan to assess the utilization of special topoi by surveying students about its usefulness during the composition of the final paper. I will gather information from students enrolled in Literature 219, which is an introduction to Literary Analysis and Literature 278, which is Modern African American Literature. Both of these courses are writing intensive courses. I plan to use the feedback from students at Delta College to design a course for a Wayne State Literature course.

I have taught Literature 219 at Delta College for 4 years and this is my second semester teaching Literature 278. In both courses, students have expressed the challenges involved with formulating concrete statements about abstract ideas. Additionally, students have a hard time suspending their subjectivity to locate a “meaning” in the text. As a result, some students rely on mere plot summary when writing about literature or feel that they cannot locate meaning unless they are in some way directly connected to the text or the author.

How I plan to execute this:

Over the course of the semester, students are assigned three papers. The first paper is a biographical essay in which I encourage students to discuss how they feel about a literary piece; at the same time, they can discuss information they researched about the author. The second paper is a New Critical essay in which students have to conduct a close reading and use only evidence in the text to support their understanding of the text. I find that students who are taught from a New Critical approach in high school usually do not have problems with this paper. On the other hand, students who were not taught from the New Critical perspective or are non-traditional students have an extremely difficult time trying to make sense of something that seems so concrete, yet so intangible. Finally, the third paper requires students to conduct a more involved and complex literary analysis. At this point of the semester, students have been introduced to and practice literary devices, schools of criticism, and conventions within a genre.

I find that contextualizing the third paper helps, but there is still a major disconnect between what students understand about the function of the literary analysis and my expectations for the literary analysis. This is where I am employing the use of special topoi. Along with the assignment sheet for the third paper, I gave my students a handout on special topoi. We had a discussion about special topoi and then I asked them a series of questions about the usefulness of this framework. Out of both Literature 219 and Literature 278 only two students responded that they did not think that special topoi would help them write their papers and that they were more confused. The majority of the students responded that they obtained a sense of clarity about their paper and that the special topoi would help them construct their thesis statements.

Since I introduced the special topoi, I have assigned a low stakes writing assignment so that I can see how students are applying special topoi to what they are reading. I plan to collect and assess these responses this week. When students turn in the third paper, they will be asked some reflective questions about the usefulness of special topoi. I plan to compare their reflective responses with their initial responses. Finally, students will develop a reading list particular to the course. In their reading list, students will have to explain their rationale for choosing particular books according to thematic and literary elements discussed over the course of the semester. Here, I want to assess their evaluative knowledge on understanding what makes literature Literature along with how this literature has influenced contemporary culture. Here, students will be encouraged to select texts from contemporary culture that work in conjunction with canonized literature selections.

With this assessment project, I plan to create a groundwork to approach my initial research questions. At the same time, I want to see if making students aware of implicit knowledge could not only enhance their critical thinking skills, but also empower them to use literature beyond mere enjoyment and interpretation, to create an understanding for along with the desire to change the world in which they live. I know that this might sound a bit naïve, but I think it is worth a try!

Trying to Make What is Implicit Explicit: A Response to Wilder and Wolfe’s, "Sharing the Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge of the Literary Scholar..."

I continue to search for innovative ways to trigger a passion for literary interpretation by making it relevant for my students. I have found that a large part of teaching students how to interpret literature is getting them to develop a sense of confidence in their ideas. This presents itself a challenge when the student in an introduction to literature course is used to supporting a thesis statement about topics like the Affordable Health Care Act, mental illness, or violence in video games. These topics are more tangible than constructing a main idea based on discursive irony in Jean Toomer’s novel, Cane for instance.

So then I wonder, is there an appropriate time to make students aware of disciplinary conventions? Should this knowledge be taught to introductory literature students, or should this knowledge remain a transaction between aspiring literary scholars? Would making what is implicit to the instructor explicit to the student help or hinder students writing about literature? Would this knowledge stifle their creativity?

Laura Wilder and Joanna Wolf’s study, “Sharing the Tacit Knowledge of the Literary Scholar,” explores these questions. They posit that teaching students the conventions of the discipline helps students write about literature more effectively. Specifically, they use Fahnestock, Secor and Wilder’s “special topoi” as an assessment tool to gauge students’ writing. They concluded the following:

-Students write about literature more effectively when taught how to use special topoi.

-Students who were made aware of disciplinary conventions use the language of the discipline more effectively than students who were not made aware of it.
-Students were better able to distinguish literary analysis from other genres.
-Literature instructors tended to place higher value on analyses in which special topoi were employed.
-Students who used special topoi were able to make personal connections to and develop an appreciation for literature. (192-3)

Wilder and Wolfe’s study is relevant for me considering my charge to make literature relevant to my students. I thought that incorporating these conventions in my classes would help demystify the process of writing about literature, a type of writing in which the rhetorical invention process combines concrete abstractions to construct and support a main point. Further, I think that teaching disciplinary conventions would help students develop interpretative approaches to literature beyond summary or personal reaction. It also would help students to move beyond the search for and the articulation of the “right” answer in the text.

In a previous post I stated how I was going to use the special topoi as a way to concretize the process of literary interpretation for my students. Right now, I am revising the final paper assignment sheet for students in my courses on Literary Analysis and African American literature. Here, I plan to incorporate Fahnestock, Secor and Wilder’s use of special topoi to teach the final paper. Along with the final paper, I plan to collect student responses on learning about special topoi and how much it helped or hindered their writing processes.

Wilder and Wolfe suggest that future research on this topic should, “explore the effects of transforming tacit procedural knowledge useful for succeeding in a field into explicit knowledge” (197). Hence, I am interested in knowing if the use of special topoi in literature classrooms would help students become more aware of text selection, with the purpose of improving their evaluative skills. Here, I want to assess students’ ability to choose texts for consumption, teaching them to think about the rationale for instructors’ text selection in their courses. While Wilder and Wolfe’s research show that students are able to choose books for the purposes of choosing topics, I am interested in making students more aware in the criteria of literature in relation to their individual and collective subjectivity.