Blogging the Peer Review

Critical Thinking: making readers care

The place to "reach" when you answer the question, "who cares?," or "why does this matter," doesn't mean you have to scale up to the level of big culture, big history, or make connections to the present moment if you're working from a text in the past. Sometimes the most interesting thing to say about the old world isn't the contrast with the new world - your world, our world. It's just making the old world complicated, and showing all the moments where we run up against those complications.

Stereotypes about the past are boring - this is at least half the reason to stay away from them. In the past all white people this, in the past all black people were that, in the past women couldn't...we can go on and on. There were rules in the past, but there were also exceptions. And more importantly, when we read novels and talk about characters, their identities, and their struggles, we get to see the complicated the world of their stories. It's really quite effective to simply make connections between one scene of a novel and another, and to say how they're connected -- by what ideas? By what themes? By what actions? And then we discuss those connections with suggestive language -- we can imagine that...this scene is suggestive because...on the one hand this, on the other hand that...complicating things is the name of the day.

It's also sometimes more powerful to hint at things than say them outright. Perhaps Rufus felt both blah and blink at the same time...and we can see in his character a conflict between chune and lune, a contradiction between his desire for boom and his knowledge of bam.

This language of perhaps, this language of contradiction, this suggestiveness, this feeling out for the risk of truth rather than simply naming a truth...this is sort of the "voice" of an English paper. You're there to link the character to what you know about history, but what do you know? It's easier to ground your idea of that world by studying the world as its depicted in the novel. We've seen with If He Hollers Let Him Go and Kindred, for example, that the world of racial relations is one beset by intimate violence, volatile emotions, and limits to what it's possible to know, but also by recognizable faces, candid moments, fleeting moments of love, tenderness, anger, and casual prejudice. It's complex - it's a world. Staying with the conflicts, the contradictions, makes for more interesting writing. This is the realm of interpretation - making something about something else. Everything both is what it is, and what it isn't. How you write around and through and beside the ways that things "are" and "are not" is the game of the discipline - as if everything, in its evolutions and revolutions, was always becoming different, while retaining some part of its original core. Your job is to make the messiness of the stories simpler to understand while retaining their complexity...and your job is to take simple stories and make them complex by finding how the "ideas" coming from and through them can challenge us, by showing how they challenged the characters.

At the least, all these characters are experiencing things that should be familiar: family, feelings, friendships, and crises of self-knowledge. To think critically is to talk about these things; to think critically about them means that you can reveal the complexity of the characters and events in the novel. To just stay within the story is as creative and vital as your ability to link the world of the novel to the rich textures of history that stand outside the novel.

To connect things, never rely on a 1=1 model. Rely on a 2+2=5 model - that is, the symbol also exceeds any "one" meaning. A character's motivation and behavior cannot be reduced down to "one" thing. When you explain something, or connect an event, action, or scene to another event, action, or scene, you should always say what's consistent and what's inconsistent about it -- how they work together and how they don't...and what we learn from the semblance, and from the incongruity.