Close-reading conundrum

Rather than attempt to condense an entire semester-long disaster teaching comp as cultural studies into one blog post — a memory I'd rather keep repressed anyway — I think I'll follow in Koel's footsteps and reflect a little on my recent TA experience. This would put me on the authority side of the desk, but not the lectern: a position that provided some comfort given all the one-on-one work I've done over the years, but which has its own medial problems. There were a number of issues interpreting the close-reading assignments for students, many of whom were used to writing plot summaries or to pulling out quotes to prove fairly generic arguments about a text rather than identifying how it "worked" as literature.

I think one of the issues I found most complicated was thinking about the students' relationship to the works they were studying in terms of morality, ethics, and politics. For a CSCL course, there wasn't a whole lot of emphasis on politics and power relations in class; nonetheless, students often found themselves compelled to make judgments about the morality of characters. The instructor had specifically mentioned, among other things, not to do this, or to psychoanalyze literary characters. Most of the time this seemed essentially right to me, as these approaches tend to make things a little easy for the writer (and a little tedious for the reader-grader).

One repeat offender, or so I thought, was an argument about Gilgamesh's "immaturity" in one form or another, prepared to ward off a five thousand year-old narrative with unquestioned assumptions about adulthood as some ahistorical category. But I had a "wait a minute" moment while speaking to a student who had made this kind of argument when I found myself getting into the peculiar position of "defending" Gilgamesh once or twice. I thought back at some point to the pleasure I took as an undergraduate in Judith Fetterley's account of "Rip Van Winkle" in The Resisting Reader — with its denunciations of a patriarchy that, in broad sweeps, does seem like a fairly universal problem across the history of civilization.

I ended up telling the student that the critique needed to be made more overtly through the text, that it needed to be about how the text itself showed Gilgamesh failing to grow (and how it constructed maturity). The essay was, after all, supposed to be textual analysis. Still, the incident raised important questions about how to help turn students' gut reactions — which often have some legitimacy, after all — into more or less "smart" prose and arguments. Don't we struggle with this ourselves?