Although today I stand proud and affirmed of all the mind-wrenching, finger-twisting progress I made as a reader, writer, problem-solver, and literary critic during this class, that was not always the case. I came in with an exceptional case of mixed feelings and an uneasy jitter in my stomach. On one hand, it was a breezy, comfortable stride I took through that classroom door: I had been doing academic writing at a brisk pace for years, and I could churn thoughts into essays in a couple of days, no problem. But on the other hand, I knew this class would require a stark break from my passion (creative writing and novel construction) and I was afraid my heart simply would not be in my work–which scared me, considering how heavy this semester’s workload would be. In order for this class to be a success for me personally, I knew I would have to figure out how to warp my half-hearted academic writing process into something more filled with flavor, originality, and meaning. That way, my academic skills might grow to enrich my creative ones, and vice versa. Let’s say, as an artist and not a builder at heart, I wanted to learn how using a wrench might help me better wield a paintbrush.
Initially, I was my traditional stubborn self, and didn’t plan to move away from the rigid order in which I had always completed my papers. I had always felt successful and received good grades, so why should I learn how to use a toolbox just to fix something that wasn’t broken? I liked my method—I could stay in my comfort zone, get the paper done on time, and return to the idyllic, cloud-lined bliss of my novel-writing. However, I was always aware that my process metamorphosed me into an android cranking words out without thinking too deeply about what I was doing, or what it meant outside of the grade I would get for it. I had always thought creative writing was about your own meaningful work, and academic writing was about other people’s–and so I turned myself off for it, and wrote about the topic straightforwardly, and what others had to say about it.
I knew this had to change. I had to find what would make my work stop feeling like a factory and start feeling like I was building something that was mine, with tools and real-world applications I understood and texts that were my friends instead of my distant peers. It was time to be flexible, and learn, and evolve my process to make me a more skillful and effective writer instead of just someone who dumps words on the page and gets an A.
And so, throughout this semester, I promised myself I’d gain willingness–to try new things instead of playing it safe, to learn new writing methods with an open mind, and to show my creativity and original ideas about the world we live in wherever I could. In the journey I am about to surmise, I tiptoed out of my comfort zone, and before long, found that I was enjoying the journey. I wasn’t just learning how to “use a bunch of methods and make a bunch of drafts,” even if that was the bulk of the hard work; I was learning how to feel like my academic writing could be organic and mean something real. Each new class unit provided me with more skills that could make that happen.
Before coming into this class, I didn’t find much of a point in the writing of my past English classes, the reason being that most of those assignments didn’t require anything more than finding a random source on JSTOR and using it to back up a fairly obvious, meaningless argument about a text, effectively saying nothing new or original whatsoever. And in the first unit of this class, the close reading unit, where we examined individual passages of The Tempest to search for an answer to a thematic question, I still felt like I was back in high school. I had learned this skill years ago, and re-examining it was simply a nice way to get back into the swing of things this semester without stretching myself too far. I only had to tweak my method ever-so-slightly in order to meet the requirements–the smallest possible baby step. Without having external sources to think about, I’ve always been able to plunge in and try to prove something through examination of text, since it has always felt like the most creative of academic writing. I may not have learned much from this first unit, though it was helpful in the way that it set up the foundation for the papers we would be writing down the line, and broke the ice for my anxiety by allowing for originality.
But learning how to incorporate primary and secondary sources was a place of disconnect for me, as I had always been taught to use the opinions found in sources to as an argument of my own. That was a problem for me, and was a reason I had always gone straight into robot-mode during research papers–if I was just supposed to stake the same claim as another writer, then what purpose did any of my own work actually serve? Thankfully, this class drove me straight off that factory line and handed me some real, purposeful methods.
In the historical contextualization unit, where we uncovered the ways historical sources could support a reading of a text, I was taught to back away from using sources as evidence, and instead, to lay them down as background foundation for my own, research-based but original ideas. Too often in my earliest draft of this assignment, I tried to sneak my historical source in as a piece of evidence alongside The Tempest, which led me once more into the land where everything I said was based off someone else’s work. But once it hit me that finally, my own close readings could make creative claims in an assignment without being smothered by interspersed background noise as backup, I was thrilled, and the paper took off. I was starting to see how contextualization laid a path for close reading without the sources walking all over it–and I was starting to feel as though my unique perspective on a work could shine through.
This skill ended up becoming the most important part of my personal journey–and the single most vital tool to keep in mind for the third unit, critical conversation. This essay required us to face my worst enemy: scholarly sources. But it wasn’t about finding sources that mimicked the claims we wanted to make; it was a chance to take a look at arguments that already existed about a text, and to make original additions or rebuttals to those arguments. No longer did I have any reason to hide behind the words of others, for it would go against the assignment to do anything but put my own creative opinion about The Tempest out there. I applied the argument-and-response method instead of tangling scholarly opinions amongst my close readings, and noticed a huge growth in the clarity of my paragraph organization, and a new focus on my own distinct voice within the paper. It was an enormous step in my journey to be able to look back at the finished product and know that even though there were still instructions and methods to follow, I had been able to craft my ideas in my own colors and say something worth reading.
This new organizational and conceptual mindset lent itself nicely to the second half of the semester, the methodological unit, where we learned to use various “methodologies,” or theoretical perspectives, in order to solve problems within our second text, Hamlet. The first section of this was psychoanalysis, in which I took on the theories of Freud as an explanation for events within the play. With this essay, I hit my peak for the semester, finally understanding how to integrate historical and scholarly context as background material as well as introducing a text from a certain school of thought, the methodology–and juggling these tools without my paper being a jumbled, torn-apart mess lacking cohesiveness or originality. In psychoanalysis specifically, I learned that theories of psychology might account for characters’ (or real people’s!) underlying motivations, and that such a reading could be easily placed in conjunction with the other skills I had added to my box this semester. Finally, everything was starting to come together, and this unit produced perhaps the best and most sophistically argued and organized paper in my portfolio. I was able to wield the different tools provided to me by methodologists, scholars, and historical sources, but most importantly, I was able to prove I could produce a professional, researched, uniquely-my-own critique–more like an individual work of art than a creation from a blueprint.
And that is why, as I continued the development of my methodological knowledge, I kept in touch with the critical conversation skill, contrasting my ideas with those of others so that I could continue to feel as though the work I was doing might matter in a real way to literary criticism. After all, the work literary criticism does, and the methodology it employs, offers its readers new ways to see the world and analyze the motivations of real people instead of just fictional characters. This is the same goal I want to achieve with my creative work–say something about the real world using only characters and words on a page–and so, my creative and academic worlds collided along this logic. More than anything this semester, that thought was what gave my work purpose.
The end of my journey took me through my Marxist critique and gender critique papers. The Marxist critique taught me how to hunt for someone’s motivations in the social circumstances and ideologies around them, while the gender critique allowed me to better see the gender politics at work within not only plays, but the real performances of gender we all engage in, and illuminate how people like Hamlet have a rather difficult time accepting the deconstruction of the gender binary in their conditioned social spheres. While my motivation was starting to falter with the end of the semester looming near, I still felt myself grow more and more comfortable with what methods, tips, and skills had been placed in my toolbox–critical conversation, methodology, organization, you name it. Even though I wasn’t always successful with every idea or paragraph—and remained ever-wordy—I know I stepped further into a world where I could take the materials given to me and use them to my own original ends, make something creative with a message about our cultural tendencies. That, to me, is the most important skill I learned this semester.
And so, here I stand, nearly four months later, half a mile out of my comfort zone with a belt full of new technical skills and theoretical knowledge, and a better understanding of not only the literary world, but the real world around me because of it. I finally feel as though my work means more than just an assignment–my essays forayed into the historical, political, and economical discussions undulating all around us, and allowed me to have something to say to each of them in a sophisticated, intellectual, very real way. Perhaps the essays seemed to be about The Tempest and Hamlet, but in reality, they were about the ways in which our real world acts upon characters and literature, and vice versa. No longer inside of me was there a dichotomy between being a creative writer exploring real issues and being an academic writer doing mindless research on a piece of centuries-old literature. I had discovered how to bring true originality and real-world application into literary theory, and use my reading and writing to make claims that could affect not only the world of literary scholars and their chosen characters, but the perception of motivations and goals of living, breathing people. Literary criticism does not have to just be about literature; it can shape our understanding of why the world works the way it does and how we might change or better those workings. And as a creative writer who wants to write about realistic issues found in our world, being able to see society and its people from multiple angles will help me continue to write works and characters that mean something. My future work can still offer perspective based on my learned context and methodology in this class, even if my writing is no longer for academic purposes.
I’m an educated writer and an original author now, not one or the other. I don’t just spit out facts and theories mindlessly, and I don’t pout when I’m not allowed to go off on prosaic tangents or scene-setting in a piece of writing. I’m so much more than the contradictory robotic straight-A-student and eccentric novel-writer who entered the classroom on day one with two separate processes for creativity and academics. I’ve found creativity and color between the black-and-white pages of literary theory. I have a toolbox and a paintbrush now, and I can wield them both at the world simultaneously–so watch out!