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Teaching the Literary EssayIn my experience, literary essays tend to be one of the most disliked aspects of any creative writing course, both on the part of the instructors and the students. One reason for this distaste is the general impression that essays are more quantitative and hence "stricter" than stories or poems. Students have the impression that essays should be perfect, that they can be graded more strictly. And to a certain degree, this is true - as teachers, we can escape the charge of subjectivity which might be given to harsh criticism of creative works. It's easier, on a certain level, to say "this evaluation of the plot needs to go deeper" than to say "this plot (that you've written) isn't tight enough." I believe that I'm particularly guilty of this. I tend to have a soft spot for creative writers - it's hard for me to give negative feedback, and harder still to give a poor grade. Unlike essays, works of fiction and poetry tend to be very personal for the author. As Pat Schneider once told us in her Amherst Method workshop, giving a C+ grade to a student's "What I Did for Summer Vacation" story is like giving her entire summer a C+ (and that kind of grade for your summer hurts like a D...) Students are right to fear lower grades on their essays than on their creative stories (at least from instructors like me - every teacher is different). On the flip side, though, many of my classmates in the graduate program program dislike including essays in the curriculum altogether. Part of the argument is that the essays take up time that could be better spent teaching creative works - this argument is bolstered by the feeling that the students don't learn enough from the essays. |
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Although I may be in the minority, I believe that literary essays are a critical component to learning writing. The caveat is that essay writing must be effectively taught, and this can be very difficult in a creative writing course. Diverting time away from the "fun" topics of prose and poetry is usually not popular among the students. However, the undergraduate course I teach - Introduction to Fiction and Poetry (IFP) - is often taken as an alternative to composition. College students take our course in the hopes of finding a writing class that's more interesting than fifteen weeks of essays. I like the idea, but I worry that some of my students complete the course without knowing how to write an effective argument. Don't get me wrong - I love creative writing. I dropped my chemical engineering major in exchange for the promise of enjoyable work and a life of poverty. But for all the students out there who enjoy creative writing as a hobby but then have to earn a living by writing real-world proposals for real-world jobs, I think that the literary essay fills a dual-purpose role. First, it grounds their writing, teaching them to become aware of styles and techniques that they may not have mastered themselves. Second, it teaches students how to write a critical argument, one that pulls together facts and details to give a coherent explanation. (When was the last time you saw that in a novel? Besides Tom Clancy, I mean?) To do this effectively, though, we have to explain the components of an effective essay. I still remember the first time a professor sat down with me to explain the thesis statement - I was a junior year English major, and those AP classes I took in high school had not quite prepared me for literary theory. Unfortunately, many students who creative writing and literature classes face this same dilema. A friend of mine in History of Science talks about how many of her students simply don't know how to write an effective essay - oftentimes, it falls to professors in fields like History and Anthropology to teach (or reteach) simple things like how to write an argument. |
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| It isn't that literary courses completely skip these things - students who write literary essays are graded on the same critical components expected of any research essay. Where we often fall short, though, is in telling students about the techniques they'll use to write their essays. It's one thing to tell a student to talk about the setting in Madame Bovary, quite another to ask them to explain why the opening scene is so effective in conveying the general sense of poverty. Similarly, telling a student "your argument about the setting needs to be strengthened" is less effective than saying "your argument needs to state what this setting does. Then select quotes that support your argument, and then explain why these quotes support what you're saying." These may seem like very simple techniques - and they are, if you've been writing extensively for several years - but students who are new to advanced academic writing need to be taught the basics. Sometimes it's just a matter of reminder, retelling techniques they learned in high school. Other times, they need to be guided forward - you need to sit down and explain to them the concept of the thesis statement.
In a future post, I'll provide the template I use for teaching and grading literary essays, and from their we'll break it down into how to teach each of the five critical components to any literary essay. Just to get you started on this, here they are in order of level, most basic to most advanced: Summary of the story/poem Identification of the literary techniques at work Analysis of how these techniques are used Evaluation of how well these techniques work for the story/poem as whole Discussion of how this story/poem expands our understanding of literature Happy Writing, --Ryan |
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