Revision as Practice
I had written about this earlier, and finally got a chance to (somewhat) apply it in the classroom. After reading the Harris article from a few weeks ago, I was struck by the importance of what I’ll call “light interrogation” in the classroom and, likewise, in response to student writing (it’s a method I also saw as particularly successful, perhaps in a different iteration, in the Convergences textbook I reviewed). What I mean by ‘light interrogation’ is the reformulation of statement as question such that pathways of analysis are opened up. In a sense, it likewise provides a method for approaching cliches along the lines of Skorczewski’s argument.
The paper that my students are working on now is a kind of extended metaphor that begins with an everyday object, moves to how this object is a metaphor for a significant condition of the society they participate in and then locates texts (broadly construed) that address this significant condition in different ways. The proposals that I got were great, but in that “almost there” sense. The movement from object to metaphor was strong but it leant itself to a paper in which the subsequent sections reiterated rather than toyed with or triangulated the significance of the metaphor. In almost every case, however, I found that encouraging the students to reframe the metaphor in terms of a question unlocked the ability to locate texts that didn’t simply imitate their thought process but represented different angles of reckoning with it. For example, one student began with a roadside cross and ended with the metaphor of our tendency to participate in a public form of mourning. Interesting ground, for sure, but also conducive to simply locating other examples of public mourning. Rephrased as a question–”What effect does a memorial have on a public who can’t identify with the specific loss that is being commemorated (i.e., those people who drive by the roadside cross who have no knowledge of the deceased)?”–led to an examination of the contreversy surrounding the Vietnam memorial, the visual rhetoric of the memorial itself (vs. for example, the Iwo Jima memorial), the odd phenomenon of the traveling memorial, the problem of how to memorialize ground zero, a Sontag essay on ethics and war photograph, etc. In short, the simple act of questioning his conclusion, of suspending a final decision/thesis, led to a discussion of everything that a memorial does when it’s not mourning. The question created a critical space into which a whole host of ideas could enter. And perhaps this is conventional wisdom that I’m stumbling upon as a first-timer, but it was a dramatic pointing out of the way in which interrogating the idea/the thesis is a gesture that doesn’t require the abandonment of an original thought but has the potential to greatly expand upon it.