The Character(s) of Pedagogical Training

Assigning Writing Studio Consultants readings about frustrated writers—by the authors Nam Le, Lucy Ives, Geoff Dyer, and Bernard Malamud—to complement trainings in peer learning methods.

           “In the process of turning from [fiction], we’ve accused it of appropriation, colonization, delusion, vanity, naiveté, political and moral irresponsibility,” writes Zadie Smith in a 2019 essay. Where the “conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the willfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect, the evil” were once the figures that drew us to fiction, Smith wagers, contemporary readers now meet such characters with a beleaguered “I’ve had enough of, I just can’t with—fill in the blank.” As many of my past students have argued, bad protagonists ought to be treated the same way as bad people: dismissed.

             Is it such a mistake to treat a character like a real person? As my Bacca colleague Toril Moi establishes in her essay “Rethinking Character” (2019), the view that characters should never be treated as real people is hardly a product of objective standards that helpfully deflect readers away from interpretive missteps. Instead, she argues, it is a “modernist-formalist assumption that such criticism always presupposes a naïve realism, a giving in to the ‘referential illusion’” (62). “The question,” then, writes Moi, “is not whether character criticism should exist but how to create intellectually sophisticated character criticism” (63).

             Perhaps the most well-established example of “intellectually sophisticated character criticism” in the last four decades comes from the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). Comparing the abstract examples philosophers use to examine moral principles to the psychologically detailed characters of literary fiction, Nussbaum submits that novels “characterize life more richly and truly—indeed, more precisely—than [a philosophical] example lacking those features ever could; and they engender in the reader a type of ethical work more appropriate for life” (47). Our “emotiona[l] involve[ment] with characters” (48) for Nussbaum, forms the very basis for literature’s ethical utility. Literature is thus, for Nussbaum:

an extension of life not only horizontally, bringing the reader into contact with events or locations or persons or problems he or she has not otherwise met, but also, so to speak, vertically, giving the reader experience that is deeper, sharper, and more precise than much of what takes place in life. (48)

            That is, by virtue of our emotional bonds with characters—our tendency to treat them like (although not exactly as) people—we gain opportunities to consider with nuance and complexity experiences well beyond the scope of our own lives.

            For the 2022–2023 Bacca Fellowship, my intention was to consider whether a tendency to treat characters as people, and the depths and sharpness that character criticism may offer, could serve a pedagogical purpose. The course I had proposed to rethink through the fellowship was Writing 255, “Literacy, Writing, and Tutoring.” In this seminar, students read into the theories and methods of peer learning, considering how notions of authority structure educational institutions and what it means to collaborate with rather than instruct other students. In doing so, students prepare themselves for future employment at Duke’s TWP Writing Studio as undergraduate writing consultants, a role in which they would meet frequently with other students whose writing goals, assignments, and impediments vary wildly.

            While students in Writing 255 typically meet with first-year undergraduates in a paired Writing 101 seminar for two practice consultations over the semester, I have always felt that two sessions were never enough preparation for the unpredictable work of collaborating with real writers. Thus, my experiment this semester has been to tap into the potential of fictional examples by asking students to read literature about blocked or otherwise frustrated writers as deep illustrations of the writing issues that they may soon negotiate alongside peer writers. That is, by asking students to consider literary examples of writing frustrations as illustrative of major compositional problems—by asking them to treat writer-characters as representative of actual people—I had hoped to give students a series of opportunities to think through how they might assist Duke writers whose compositional problems are quite real. And in treating fictional writers as test cases, students would have unlimited chances to try out multiple approaches for working with these writers in a way that might prove impossible with a live writer who might become frustrated if a consultant suddenly changes directions mid-session. I had also hoped with the access to interiority of the writer-characters represented in literary examples, students would find themselves able to consider particular writing impediments with greater nuance than they might in sessions with real writers who, for perfectly valid reasons, might not disclose the entirety of their impediments.

            So, through the Bacca Fellowship, and with much collaboration with the 2022–2023 cohort, I developed a series of scaffolded assignments and discussions predicated on the instructive potential of literary representations of impeded writing. At four points in the semester, I assigned students literary fiction or non-fiction readings about frustrated writers—by the authors Nam Le, Lucy Ives, Geoff Dyer, and Bernard Malamud—to complement their readings in peer learning theory and methods. I asked students to compose in response to these readings brief “pedagogy memos” in which they would describe in detail the selected writer-character’s troubles and propose how the character in question might restore their composing practice. These memos and the discussions they inspired also served as preparation for a final assignment that asked students to pick one of the four examples and write a mock consultation report imagining what might have happened had they met with this writer in real life for a consultation at the TWP Writing Studio.

            At this point in the term, students had completed the four readings and pedagogy memos, and their writing and discussions had proved remarkably generative. For one, students had seen much of their own experiences reflected in the literature they had read and analyzed, on both institutional and personal levels. From readings by Nam Le and Geoff Dyer, for example, students had discussed how, as with these writer’ illustrations, they too have managed situations in which they have found themselves stereotyped as particular kinds of writer based on their identities and how they too have experienced, succeeded in, and failed to ameliorate their own procrastinatory tendencies. Of particular consequence was the students’ discussion of selections from Lucy Ives’ novel Loudermilk; or, The Real Poet; or, The Origin of the World (2019), which follows two imagined creative writers whose processes are impeded or benefit from a departmental imperative to “write what you know” or “find your voice.” Having recently emerged from a high school writing curricula and standardized testing regimen predicated on inflexible writing structures—and having only recently learned the standards of college-level argument—the students enacted a rich discussion of the formal and informal writing norms specific to Duke’s academic community, and how those norms are experienced unevenly among the undergraduate student body. In each of these instances, I’ve been delighted to see how students have broadened their awareness of the kinds of impediments writers might face under various forms of institutional pressure, and to witness them experiment with how they might encourage writers to better navigate—or determine their own relationships with—the structures and authorities that shape writing at Duke.

            In this way, my students were already bolstering arguments in favor of relating or responding to literary figures as if they were real people. And far from the kind of reactionary moralism that preoccupies Smith, their engagement with texts has been characterized by sustained and nuanced analyses of the institutional, sociopolitical, and psychological forces that influence the experience of writing. So, in the search for an intellectually sophisticated character criticism, my students have demonstrated how one of the most crucial dimensions of that search may well be pedagogical in nature.

Works Cited

Moi, Toril. “Rethinking Character” in Anderson et al., Character: Three Inquiries in Literatury Studies. Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 2019, pp. 27-75.

Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Smith, Zadie. “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” New York Review of Books, October 24, 2019. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/zadie-smith-in-defense-of-f…

IMAGE CREDIT: Kuroda Seiki, “Woman Reading,” Public domain via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woman_Reading_(Kuroda_Seiki).jpg

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Aaron Colton