Some words on poetry analysis

Like I said in the last post, I had to explain recently the purpose of citations, reading response papers, things like that.  Here is my explanation of the basic reasons for analyzing poetry:

The analysis of poetry isn't something you learn in order to replace reading, or even to become a better reader. You don't need analysis to read a poem and enjoy it. But analysis is a tool that opens up a shortcut to the insights you typically get after you've read a poem a trillion times. When you know it by heart. When you've memorized it. And in that sense, it's extremely useful to know, and is almost required as a skill if you want to make any truly scholarly remarks about a piece of writing like a poem, because it is only based on that intimate knowledge that anything of that critical complexity can be genuinely thought valid. But it also heightens your appreciation of a poem in general, just like reading something over and over and knowing it inside and out does. So it provides the foundation for everything involved in talking in a sophisticated manner about poems, at the same time as it capitalizes on the strengths you already have as someone who is literate and knows how to read. It is a device that can turn literacy into critical thinking.

Some words on thesis statements, response papers, and citations

I was recently asked to define and explain a few basic elements of paper writing, and I liked what I had to say. I thought it might be productive if I put it up here. Expect some further tips and tricks in the future:

On thesis statements:
These are like the initial punch of a one-two combo: you need the thesis statement to open up things decisively to get to what you really want to get at, and the better you are at writing one, the better the eventual thing you want to write about will be. Their nature, of course, depends on what you're writing about, but they do several things generally. There are a trillion formulas for this, and everyone says they know the real way to do it. The point is to do what works for you and what will give you the result people can understand clearly. For me, the best definition of a thesis statement is just that it is the argument seen as the answer to a question, one that is brief and provocative. The thesis asks, What is the question I'm asking in what I want to say, and what is the answer I give? If you can show how what you want to say is opening up a problem, something openended, but also definite and precise and provocative, and then give some sense that there is an answer to this question, suddenly what you are going to write becomes clearer in like fifty different ways. You give some sense of the scope of your argument, the stakes, and its possible resonance. And you get right to the center of what you're trying to say and why you're saying it.

On (literary) response papers: 
Like mindfulness for reading, response papers do two things: they organize your reactions to a text and showing how they can inform the text for other people, and they connect your own reactions to the larger issues surrounding the text itself. You gather yourself together, and you link yourself to the general discussion. You do this by bringing the work itself into connection with your thinking, taking a passage that was a particularly poignant node in the text for you and actually looking at its linguistic makeup. You employ, during this, a certain simple attentiveness to language, and an attentiveness to your own feelings, and an articulateness about both. This can be extremely fun, and is also extremely useful: your response paper can usually serve as the raw material for an essay that you can write up later in the semester.

On citations:
Citations are often a pain, but they are also important. This isn't just because they "show evidence that you didn't plagiarize." It's because it puts your work into dialogue with other work. Becoming good at citing and knowing how to cite adds a whole different dimension to your paper: suddenly you're not all out on your own, just saying what comes into your head, but you're actually joining a conversation, showing how what you have in mind actually is the product of reading a lot and trying to figure out what the consensus is on an issue, and whether that consensus is good or whether the discussion needs to be changed. So it's not just that you need to show you got information from a source. It shows you got SPECIFIC information from a SPECIFIC source, and that your conclusions build on what is being said THERE, or challenge what is being said THERE. Learning how to cite well is learning how to discuss and argue well--and if you know this, it makes the fundamentals (all that formatting) really interesting and crucial. Good citations are really appreciated by your readers--you appreciate them, don't you? when you read a book?--and change the nature of your argument depending on how you do them. So doing them right is a worthwhile task.

Theory, pedagogy, de Man

Why do we keep returning to Paul de Man for definitions of theory? "The Resistance to Theory," is, no doubt, an excellent essay, and contains many concise formulations--the resistance to theory is itself theoretical, etc. etc. But where precisely does the concise statement pass over into an imperative to revisit what is concisely said? And can such a statement, if it has the power to convert itself in this way, ever really be about what is concisely said--that is, the referent of the statement--as opposed to the fact that it is de Man who is saying it? From what I can see in the writings on de Man, people hesitate over precisely this issue: the answer is no, insofar as the statement is really about de Man himself, and his ability to pronounce upon theory; the answer is yes, insofar as the implications of how de Man puts the statement are immense and indeed, in themselves, provocative. It is evident though that each of these answers presupposes the other. Nevertheless, the distinction is handy for people, because it allows them to take up the first answer and analyze it somewhat critically under the title of pedagogy: in other words, viewing de Man's statements on theory as never quite about the subject under consideration gives theory itself a new subject to consider, theoretical pedagogy or the teaching of theory. This particular strain in de Man, then, is seen as precisely his pedagogical aspect (John Guillory, for example, despite what his mode of analysis entails, sees it as precisely this). It is de Man's teaching that we see in such formulations, and therefore (to bring it all back to our initial question) we return to such concise statements because they are products of the problems involved in the transmission of theory or theory's continuity over time--the survival of theory being precisely that which is involved in any consideration of theory's role. If I am wondering what theory is, I am also considering what it has been, and de Man's formulations are (in this view) precisely what theory has been, since they are made not only to sum up what theory is but send it as such into the future, my present. In such statements we feel we are not only looking at what theory was, but at how it was transmitted.

But the question then is, why is pedagogy here being reduced to a form of speaking--the concise formulation that demands revisiting (in other words, something like, but not necessarily the same thing as, the aporism)? In considering how de Man speaks, we have precisely made pedagogy and transmission account wholly for the form of the statement that de Man is uttering--when it could just as well be the case that such a statement has nothing to do with transmission, or at least would only be one element in everything pedagogy involves. The teaching of theory has nothing to do, perhaps, with this sort of concision, this sort of way of talking. This is still a bit unclear in my mind, and will become clearer as I read de Man in the coming weeks, but I might summarize (and not teach) my thoughts in the following way: because a statement also involves the conditions of its utterance does not mean it transfers along anything--anything more, that is, than we are willing to read into it, and which (disturbingly) in this case is the entire discourse of theory.