A Critical Look at Critical Reading, Critical Writing

Illustration by Shaina Rubin

As an undergraduate at a college that fetishizes requirements—batteries upon batteries for each student, major, and program of study regardless of AP score, entrance exam, or other metric of prior aptitude—the English major seemed like a breath of fresh air: a laissez-faire refuge of choice in the thicket of planned majors whose electives are few and far between, and whose curricula are dominated by core classes and their inevitable corollaries, unavoidably bad professors. How else, I reasoned, could I graduate with a mere 30 credits allocated amongst lax distribution requirements as I saw fit? Here was a discipline that I was interested in, one that was fun, one where I could generate my own knowledge and in which my opinions mattered. Where my style would not be cramped by strictly required classes, and where I could carve out a niche for myself and choose whose classes I would take, which books I would read, and what I would write about.

And then I looked a little closer. A new class, entitled “Critical Reading, Critical Writing," had been added to the bulletin. Beneath the title were the words, “required for the English major for the class of 2010 and beyond.”

What was this? In order to better understand, I met with David Damrosch, a full professor in the English department (to understate his importance), and the lecturer for CRCW. We got to chewing the fat about the class, in which I had been enrolled for the first two weeks of the semester and of which he was a staunch advocate. Things had not been going well for me, and I was thinking of dropping, so I tried to explain what was wrong.

First, the focus of the class was too diffuse and its coverage of its topics too superficial, especially since the breadth of its scope—poetry, drama, novels—was mirrored by the distribution requirements already in place. Furthermore, the introduction to close reading in a seminar setting was pointless to those who had already taken an English seminar, as I had. In general I felt as if I could get more out of a class I actually wanted to take. When I asserted that CRCW was remedial in nature, instituted to ensure that all English majors had the skills required to excel in higher-level seminar settings, Damrosch took umbrage, describing it as the next step after Lit Hum for developing literary analysis skills. He also countered that there were four of the best Ph.D. students in the department leading the seminars, but, in my experience, this was no guarantee of quality. The combination of pedagogical inexperience with student inexperience was crippling. Forcing me to take CRCW after a real seminar made about as much sense as requiring me to take Calc II after skipping from Calc I to Calc III. Surely this was madness.

If the idea of Critical Reading, Critical Writing, was critically flawed, then how was the execution? On the first day of class, my instructor drew a diagram on the board with chicken-scratch scribbles meant to represent “the artist,” “the reader,” and, as the class dragged on, students volunteered their thoughts on “the meaning” and “the interpretation.” The end result was a fanciful schematic with elements of a fifth-grader’s fantasy that meant nothing but thirty minutes ticked off the glacially progressing clock. I don’t mean to be dour or anything, but the exercise was neither educational nor fun. A conversation on the purpose of literary criticism would have been eminently more useful. Over the following two meetings, the class and discussion section improved little. Two weeks later, I dropped CRCW.

The English department is probably filled with as many bad seminars and lectures as good ones, and nobody is forcing anyone to take them. But CRCW, as a compulsory class, ought to be held to a higher standard. If it remains at all, its seminars should be taught by full, experienced professors, its sections should be split into smaller, more intimate groups of ten students max, and its syllabus should be revised in such a way as to give every student an idea of why studying English is valuable. It should entice them toward, rather than repel them from, this ideal.

A requirement is worthwhile if and only if taking it is, for the majority of students, a better experience than taking a different class of their choice. Lit Hum and CC pass this litmus test; University Writing and the language and science requirements might pass; but with the constellation of great seminars and lectures within the English department already, CRCW certainly doesn’t.

Next semester—or maybe the one after that—I will bite the bullet and take CRCW, just like all English majors of the classes of 2010 and beyond. But I shouldn’t have to, and neither should anyone else who has demonstrated reasonable aptitude in a seminar setting beforehand. The students in my American Renaissance seminar, all of whom were class of 2008 or 2009—and none of whom had taken CRCW—seemed, as a whole, very incisive, endowed with ample skill in both critical reading and critical writing. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

The author is a Columbia College sophomore.