A Conclusion of Sorts
This is an openly licensed publication that I intend to revise again; I suspect my ideas will change as I engage with my students and colleagues who use these methods in the classroom. I offer this conclusion (of sorts) to share where I am now in my thinking (thanks to the anonymous reviewer who suggested adding this!).
These strategies are helping me grow as a teacher. The second I let my students choose what they would read, I started realizing what I could put in place to encourage engagement with the texts I used to require. I also was able to honestly assess why I had been requiring them. I understand more fully now that I want students to encounter our shared literary history. I want them to experience wonder and confusion and skepticism and curiosity. And I want to help them do something with the energy that emerges from those experiences. I have been encouraged to find that students are eager to engage with challenging and unfamiliar texts when their own interests and concerns guide their exploration.
The peer-review process for this book pushed me to engage with larger debates in our discipline. Revising this book has prompted me to return to my research on the rise of the professional, work I began with a dissertation on amateur performance in the nineteenth century. The amateur productions I reconstructed reveal fascinating conflicts between amateurs, eager to perform with little to no training, and theater professionals who were often insulted by amateurs’ lack of respect for training and expertise. I have realized that I am now focusing on this same tension as it relates to literary study, with an important difference: instead of describing conflicts from the past, I am advocating for a different approach to the amateur professional divide today. The assignments in this book are my effort to connect with the many millions of readers outside the academy, starting with the students who won’t read what I assign. In the scholarly dismissal of BookTok, fanfiction, and other amateur engagements with literature, we can find evidence of professionals threatened by amateur readers. This is beautifully illustrated in the tenth episode of Matt Seybold’s popular series “Criticism LTD” from the American Vandal podcast: “BookTube, BookTok, Wattpad, & The Audible Creation Exchange.” The defensive postures evident and addressed in this episode are understandable but, I think, unnecessary. Amateur enthusiasm for literature outside our most prized authors and genres does not diminish the value of our expertise. It makes it more relevant. Instead of telling students that there’s better literature out there, we can help them discover what their favorite games, songs, and films have in common with stories from the past. I think we can also start claiming professional contributions that extend beyond literary criticism. Because I teach undergraduates, I focus on the research I can do in collaboration with students in my courses (even those not majoring in English). This research can help us better understand how literature works in the world.
One reviewer suggested I read John Guillory’s On Close Reading (2025) and I did. I noticed that, in recounting the history of the technique of close reading and arguing for its enduring importance to our discipline, Guillory did not linger on issues of pedagogy (Scott Newstok’s bibliography at the end of the book points to many who have). Guillory’s book helped me articulate my primary complaint with interpretive arguments in required literature courses: these assignments very rarely encourage real engagement with the task of reading. More often, they prompt a performance of knowingness. I am certainly not the first to point to this as the reason so many students cheat on these assignments. I have a greater respect for close reading and its position in the history of our discipline after reading Guillory’s book, but his book has also reinforced my decision not to ask students to perform them in my courses. That said, I think the task of narrating one’s experience with a work of literature and then classifying the experiences and the narration technologies prompting those experiences is a logical first step in preparing for such a performance. That is, if a student genuinely wants to share their reading with me or others.
I agree wholeheartedly with Guillory’s assertion that “we might see close reading today as the disciplinary analogue of the countercultural movement embracing ‘slow tech’ and other slow forms of cultural consumption” (83). I want students to slow down and really read. By setting aside the performance of knowingness, I think the assignments in this book more effectively encourage this slowing down. These assignments also turn the attention back to how the text works, a task that I think is best accomplished when one sets aside the goal of demonstrating cleverness and originality.
For insight into the ideas informing this ongoing project, please check out the public Zotero library for this book.
