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.