finding a solution.

Finding a Solution
What is the point of critical writing anyway? It is all just a bunch of different people’s opinions about a subject that will never be resolved! I am sorry to say that these are the things that keep running through my mind as I sit here and read through all these papers we have been reading in class. Half of them I have had a rather rough time understanding what these authors are even talking about the majority of the time. I fail time and time again to grasp what the point is in those papers.
I love, love to read. It is one of my passions. When we read literature it opens up our imagination and allows you to escape through the pages. Reading critical papers, not so much, if you could not tell already. Maybe, and I stress maybe, if when I was in high school we had wrote or even just read more critical papers I would enjoy them more. So I would suggest that when in high school students should be exposed to more critical writing and literary criticism papers. If students were exposed to these subjects earlier on then when and if they go to college they would be better prepared and also be more well rounded individual human beings in the quality of their lives.
When I was in high school every one of my fellow students would have a little temper tantrum whenever our English teacher would tell us to pull out our literature books. I on the other hand loved hearing that phrase. This love of literature started when my father first brought me home a hooked on phonics kit before I started kindergarten. It did not take long after that day before I was hooked, no pun intended. Once I learned to read I was reading anything I could get my hands on. It was this love for literature that I wish could have been shared by my classmates in high school. I could never understand why they would rather being doing the tedious tasks of picking out verbs and adverbs over listening to someone read in class or reading themselves and letting their imagination get put to work. Whenever a movie would come out that was originally a book and I had read it I would tell my friends that if they liked the movie they would love the book. They never listened and I could never understand why they did not want to use their imagination for once. I don’t know, maybe some people are born without the ability to use that part of the brain. A miraculous thing did happen a couple of months ago though when the movie Twilight came out. My cousin went and seen it, so I told that she should read the book then and she did and loved the whole series and she does not like to read! Amazing, I wonder how many other people would discover the same thing if they took the time to read and expand their minds once in a while. I might be being a hypocrite though because when it comes to critical writing, I am not sure you could learn to like critical papers if you never liked them to begin with.
Gerald Graff states in his paper What We Say When We Don’t Talk about Creative Writing: “I’m not questioning the need for a specialized division of functions in departments—such specialization is essential in any complex organization. I’m questioning the failure to connect the specialized functions, something that would require that we not only talk to each other about the connections but actually work together in our teaching, as apparently we can’t imagine. Leaving it up to the students to figure things out on their own is apparently a lot easier than working together or having sustained conversations with our colleagues about what our goals are and how well we are achieving them”(272). I fail miserably in seeing the up said to what Graff is trying to argue for here and I hate to say it, but I don’t think I will lose any sleep over it. Maybe this is all due to my newness and lack of experience in the English department that I am unaware of this conflict between creative writing and criticism. From my understanding of Graff’s paper my opinion is that it would not matter even if you could accomplish getting English department teachers to work together in their teaching not only because teachers have different ways of teaching, they also may not cover the material required in this imaginary situation for the next class and then where are students left? Either in a worse spot or in the same. So, why mess with the system? I just do not see it as a benefit to anyone. It would just cause disruption, confusion, and headaches not only for students but for teachers as well.
Graff goes on to say later in his paper after giving a quick over view of literary criticism: “As this quick sketch suggests, the creative writing and conventional critical tracks of the English major reflect an opposition between creativity and criticism that lies deep in the roots of modern culture. Yet, except for the occasional honors or capstone course, perhaps, literature departments do little to activate and take educational advantage of this rich history. Because it fails to become part of the object of study, the tension between creative writing and criticism (or theory) is expresses symptomatically, in the turf wars between academic factions, on the one hand, and, on the other, in some students’ election of creative writing in order to avoid or limit their encounters with scholarship and criticism, which they’ve experienced as dry, arid, and lifeless” (274). How is knowing the history between the opposition between creative writing and critical going to make students find critical writing more enjoyable and less “dry, arid, and lifeless”. Graff does not make a very strong case for it advantages. Graff goes on to say: “In short, as long as we avoid addressing this long-standing conflict between creativity and criticism, we seem doomed to repeat it in less heroic forms. The longing for the wholeness of the Greek tragedians, which writers such as Schiller, Hegel, Goethe, and Mann ached to replicate but saw that they could only view from beyond the historical abyss, is replayed by the high school student who finds writing stories an poems “cooler” than analyzing or making arguments about them” (274-276). No wonder! Why doesn’t Graff present a solution to making critical writing more interesting? If you could make them more interesting and less like BLAH BLAH BLAH, then maybe students would think they would be “cool” to analyze and make arguments about them. Until then, I am afraid it is always going to be the same issue of students always enjoying and preferring reading and writing poetry and fiction over critical papers.
I remember reading Shakespeare for the first time, it was probably my sophomore year in high school, and thinking how wonderfully beautiful the wording was in his stories. To most of my classmates however it was just a bunch of gibberish and they had no idea what was going on in the story. So if most high school students do not enjoy literature, and can not understand Shakespeare, then how could they be expected to understand critical writing unless it was presented in a more understandable and enjoyable way earlier on in their academic life? Just like I learned from trying to get my friends to read the books that were made into movies, it just is not going to happen every time that they are going to say ok I will. It is just the same when it comes to critical writing. You are not going to force students to want to read critical writings unless teachers and writers of critical essays can find a way to make them more interesting and pleasurable. How would you make them more interesting is beyond me, but you could only improve them in my opinion. However, it is clear that a solution should and needs to be found since it is such a big and controversial subject in the English field. I am not and will and never would claim to be an expert in any form in the critical writing field of literature, I will just stick to the creative side, and the side I enjoy and am most comfortable in.