Listen and Respond

[S]uit the action to the word, the word to the action… – Hamlet

I once had a whole batch of School Certificate answers on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale by boys whose form-master was apparently a breeder of poultry. Everything that Chaucer had said in describing Chauntecleer and Pertelote was treated by them simply and solely as evidence about the precise breed of these two birds. And, I must admit, the result was very interesting. They proved beyond doubt that Chauntecleer was very different from our modern specialised strains and much closer to the Old English ‘barn-door fowl’. But I couldn’t help feeling that they had missed something. – CS Lewis

Paul admonishes the Roman church to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. There’s an aptness there, a symmetry, a decorum. Hamlet wants his actors to adopt a similar method. Match what you say with what you do. Respond accordingly. Reciprocate.

Lewis takes the principle and applies it to reading. It’s not like smart people can’t say things about poultry in Chaucer, it’s just that there’s nothing about that kind of criticism which responds to the story its purportedly about. I can’t work back from an agricultural livestock reading of the Nun’s Priest Tale and get anything like the story.

When I ask students to write literary criticism, I focus on quotation development: unpacking the dense language of the evidence they’ve chosen to use. This development can start from selecting an overlooked part of the story, something the reader didn’t really remember, and showing how in even the story’s nooks and crannies, the author includes thematic and tonal work. The other can be the familiar quotation that takes on new possibilities when examined with fresh eyes.

My students read so much–are asked to ingest a great deal of material in very little time–that I can see them at times begin to lose this keen sense of taste, this response to the work.

This, then, is the benefit of engaging with single quotations. Even if the entire work’s flavor has soured, the single quotation offers a chance for the student to listen and respond accordingly.

This is also why it’s important for me as a teacher to hold individual conference sessions with students. It’s hard enough to hear everyone in a classroom setting, but when you add the number of voices and the kinds of questions that a class setting affords, you start to hear noise instead of the signal. I need to make time to hear my students, and I’m much more likely to do that when engaged with their work or them in person, one-one-one, when I can weep or rejoice with them.