Bizzaro's project is to adapt Theory to the problem of evaluating student poetry. He examines four critical stances (New Criticism, reader response, deconstruction, feminism) and tests them out by attempting to read his students' poetry from each perspective and reporting on the results. To be sure, this is not much of a methodology; he limits himself to three poems in each case, and because he is attempting to analyze his own application of his own understanding of theories on his own students' poetry...well, there isn't much that can be generalized. And there isn't much distance between him and his "data." But it's not really meant to be scientific; more like the chronicle of a writing instructor testing out ideas and trying to improve on his own work.
NEW CRITICISM
Bizzaro says a major difference between New Criticism and workshop crit is that the student work is seen as unfinished and in need of correction. Even so, both share the following:
meaning arises not from ideology or logic, but from analyzing the structure of norms that direct—in fact, *are*—the reader's experience of the text. Using New Critical values in evaluating student writing thus requires students to believe that the teacher's reading of the text, as the meaning rendered by an exemplary reader, is the text as it really exists. (41)New Critical comments on student texts "respond primarily to textual matters" and "tend to encourage a view of revision as text manipulation"; the danger of this approach "naturally" is that "such comments can easily enable a teacher to appropriate a student's text, since only one text exists, the one the teacher reads and thus rewrites" (43):
In an ineffective adaptation of the New Criticism, a teacher might inadvertently require students to write in a narrow range of poetic styles..On the other hand, it seems to me that the New Criticism might be profitably adapted to the evaluation of student poems if students are involved in the process of identifying the boundaries within which the teacher evaluates their texts...[that is] if it helps students better understand what they want their poems to do and, at the same time, enables the teacher to stay involved in the student's writing processes. (54)Quotes Richard Hugo: "If I can, I talk as if I'd written the poem myself and try to find out why and where it went wrong" (55).
This Hugo quote can either be read as appropriate modeling of the revision process, or as a presumptuous appropriation of student work. I tend to side with the latter reading. To talk as if I've written someone else's poem myself is to ignore the author's aspirations for the work as if they were irrelevant. And then to impose my own aspirations upon it w/o any concern for the actual motivations for the work. This is perhaps a different kind of intentional fallacy. Your intention is fallacious; mine is true.
Bizzaro says students respond to the New Critical type of commentary by "hypercorrection," over doing their revision to meet his standards: e.g. "Penny has hypercorrected in certain places, attempting to write the poem she believed I wanted her to write, the poem she might have believed I would have written had this been my first draft" (57).
Rather than impose his own list of criteria on student work, Bizzaro wonders:
Isn't there someway to involve students in the development of such a list of criteria so that they might aid me in making a more accurate statement of what they should attempt to produce in revising their texts into acceptable poems?...Isn't there something basically wrong with telling students, in effect, that their grades will be determined by how nearly they make *their* poems conform to *my* biases?"(63)And he explores the remaining three theories in an attempt to answer these questions.
READER RESPONSE
Bizzaro introduces reader response in order to begin addressing the problems of New Criticism in the writing workshop. He does so without once ever mentioning Stanley Fish, let alone examining any of Fish's work. One passing citation of Iser, and that's it for actually looking at the theory. Makes me skeptical about his work here, as if he's getting his theory second- or third-hand somewhere. He does the same in his next chapter, by covering Deconstruction without so much as a nod in Derrida's direction.
Anyway, Bizzaro feels that reader response allows for a more cooperative relationship between teacher and student:
If properly adapted to the classroom situation, reader-response methodologies will require that students determine who they want their texts to address and that teachers relinquish some power in examining those texts. Rather than enforcing their readings of student poems as definitive, teachers must willingly submit to the text, participating in the development of the reader summoned by the text and evoked, knowingly or unknowingly, by the author...Since the writer makes choices that dictate who the reader will be, the problem a student must solve in revision is how to make certain that the text will be read as he or she intended. (67)There are already some problems reconciling this statement with actual reader response theory. How is an author to exercise control over a reader's responses when it is a community of readers that determines the meaning of a work? What is "the reader" anyway, and why "the"? Are we assuming a unified response from all readers? Or is this some kind of abstraction, and if so, what is its purpose? What aspect of reading/readers does it represent? Bizzaro doesn't ask or answer these questions. So the problems lie in wait.
The teacher-reader must thus make an effort to envision the audience that the writer's text produces. And the student-writer must revise the test to more effectively address (and thereby create) the audience. (68).Maybe he's drawing this stuff from Iser. That is possible. The "implied reader." But he doesn't use that term. Or quote Iser. So we don't really know what Bizzaro is doing here. He assumes that texts "produce" and "create" audiences, which is a really interesting theory, but how does it work? How do texts do that and how can authors control the process? If writing instructors are to help students revise to do this more effectively, by what criteria are they to offer comments and criticism?
Rather than relinquishing control of the text to the teacher [or the reader], students must work cooperatively with their teacher-readers in determining what the poem might become, a process that includes the critical consideration of who the poem addresses. For teachers, the task of response requires that they view their students as writers who seek to create not just a text, but a reader as well. (68)I think this "work cooperatively" business is the heart and soul of reader response for Bizarro. He's not too interested in the deep theory, he just wants a way of working with students and evaluating their poetry that doesn't impose the teacher's biases on student work. I like him for that. And I do like this idea of reading texts in light of the audiences they (invoke?). Even if it may require some work to establish that poems can actually invoke audiences and then more work to demonstrate the means by which they do so and even more work to offer students the tools by which to effectively utilize those means, this perhaps untheorized emphasis on "the reader" has the great benefit of not presuming that the CW professor (or the CW workshop for that matter) is the sole intended audience for a work. I think Mayers best stuff was an expansion of this instinct in Bizzaro.
Reader response, for PB, is not so much about the text as the dynamic between author and audience:
Even in my earliest adaptations of reader-response methods, I found that less attention went to the text than to the evolving relationship between the writer and the reader as they determine what the text will be. (69)There is more to explore here, too, as questions of appropriation rise in a new form. Now the professor must appropriate not the student's poem, but his/her audience. By commenting as one of the invoked readers, the professor assumes competence to do so. But what if the intended audience shares a culture and language and literary tradition and values and tastes that are completely foreign to me? Here were right back to this questions: Can I speak on behalf of the "Other?" Or, more pointedly: What right do I have to talk on behalf of someone whose experience is not my own?
Bizzaro finds that student revisions based on reader-reponse commentaries are "more extensive and far less predictable" than those based on New Critical analysis (83), which goes to show that his purpose in appropriating his own version of reader response works for his purposes. The poem belongs more completely to the poet than when the professor takes over and offers specific changes. Unless we start to think of the audience as a key component in shaping any written work; in that case, Bizzaro may unintentionally be appropriating student work more completely than ever before, since he now speaks for The Reader.
DECONSTRUCTION
This was my least favorite of Bizzaro's chapters. I have to confess I need to read up more on this stuff myself, and I'm just as put off (and/or intimidated) by Derrida's style as everyone else. Even so, from what little I do know of Derrida's work and the literary criticism that claims to derive from that work, I don't think Bizzaro's "deconstructive" readings of student poems is really what it claims to be.
He frames it this way:
A deconstructive pedagogy...will be founded chiefly on the issue of difference, on analyzing the incongruities in a text, on applying pressure to a poem's seams and thereby uncovering what has been intentionally or unintentionally excluded....What deconstruction enables a reader to acknowledge...are the complex disagreements warring within any text. (95)Which is okay as far as I know. And then there's this:
Deconstruction enables us to explore with our students the conflicting forces of signification that constitute the work itself....Any effort to adapt deconstruction to the evaluation of student poems must therefore reflect an effort to read differently, so that the conflicts submerged beneath the literal level—that is, those conflicts not readily available to us through our "usual" ways of reading—can be uncovered and brought to the surface. (96)Which also sounds pretty good. And then, I think, he gets down to what he really wants to say:
Deconstruction offers us a way to read deeper, to read more closely than even the New Critics urged, by focusing the reader's attention on what the student has failed to say. Among other things, deconstruction gives license for readers to do what many teachers have been doing all along when they have asked students to write more about this or that undeveloped portion of the text. (97)Most of his "deconstructive" comments on student poems are not so much deconstructive as more of "what many teachers have been doing all along." He points to things that the student didn't do and leaves it an open question as to whether or not the student ought to explore/develop those qualities of the poem. For example, he tells one student that "excluded are the possibilities of letting this setting function symbolically" (102), which is not so much deconstructive as a "Hey, look. You didn't do this." I get that he's leaving things open, but to point out to a student what they did not do doesn't strike me as very helpful. At best it's obvious and beside the point; at worst it's just another way of imposing the professor's biases upon the student, as in "You didn't do this and you really should have."
And I don't think it's really deconstruction. I imagine that if he read poems to demonstrate their instability and inability to "mean" what it pretends to mean... I imagine that would be a weird thing for a writing instructor to do. It dismantles the whole project of writing... I don't know. I gots to read up some more to comment fully here.
I think this is what he really wants to say, Derrida or no Derrida:
by relinquishing authority for the text, it is possible to empower students to serve as authorities over the text they want to write, if not always the one they have written. Students also learn something about how to read deconstructively. (122)Even if that last claim is dubious, his heart is in the right place, no?
FEMINISM
Bizzaro spends most of this chapter worrying about how to be a man doing feminist readings. What he says about the use of Feminism in the CW classroom is less extensive:
Feminisit theory looks not for what has been excluded, but for what has been *silenced*; that is, reading from a feminist critical perspective requires a sensitivity to elements of gender that may typify the reading habits of some, though not all, readers of a text. (124)"Silenced" rather than "excluded" is the distinction that separates Feminism from Deconstruction for Bizzaro, really more a matter of emphasis than distinction. And Feminism acts like reader-response for Bizzaro, too:
From a feminist perspective, evaluation must involve a dialogue between reader and writer about the text as it develops. Dialogue is critical to this approach to evaluation. But of more importance than the invitation to participate is how the dialogue is handled. Rather than a debate format, where the participants/combatants are able to stake out their positions in advance to make an adversarial reading, a feminist approach manages conversations...[by] cultivating differences. (137)Feminism brings something new to the CW class by introducing political inquiry at all levels:
If one of a course's goals is to call upon feminist criticism for assistance in reading student poems, then the teacher must consider the matter of ethos throughout the semester. This means, of course, opening up oneself, one's political stance, and one's teaching methods for critique. It also means being a conscious reader, one who not only recognizes the impact of various literary-critical theories on the reading of student texts, but one who plans on using those methods as well. (138)Somehow, though, Feminist poetics ends back where Romanticism left off:
teachers who hope to employ feminist criticism in reading their students' poems must use their authority in the classroom to undermine that very authority. This means that the decision of whether to revise or not revise must rest with the students themselves, that they must be encouraged to be less concerned with pleasing the reader and more concerned with expressing themselves. (144)That's a weird mix of gender politics and "self-expression" ideology. Wandor wouldn't like it too much, I think.
And then Bizzaro makes a move that seems to call on Fish's idea of "interpretive communities" when he says that he felt "obliged to consider the political ramifications of using feminist criticism to read student poems"; and this meant "offering not a requirement that they think differently, but the recommendation that it is to their benefit as writers to be able to read from the perspectives of different communities, even communities they might not choose to stay in for long" (144,145).
Finally, no matter what decision they ultimately make, I wanted my students to realize that from at least one perspective—that is, in the eyes of one community of readers—all texts, both theirs and the ones assigned from the anthology, are political documents. And for some, politics arise from the gender codes that can be found in the language itself. By helping my students understand this particular orientation to language, I hoped they would see that by using feminist criticism in reading their texts, I was not offering an authoritarian judgment, but showing them how their poems might be read by a reader who has been sensitized to gender. (145)Bizzaro closes the chapter by indicating that student responses to his comments along these lines vary, and are entirely student directed.
Not clear yet on how I'll be using Bizzaro. Seems clear I'll need to cite him anytime I want to talk about the relationship of any of these theories to CW practice. So far, he's provided a helpful nuance in my aims. He took theory and applied it to CW pedagogy in a way I don't need to or want to repeat. How to evaluate student work is an important and practical question, but not one that interests me this semester.
Not sure exactly what my niche will be yet, either.
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