I'm going to give my anonymous poetry course next semester again, focused on the three genres of romance, the refrán, and the canción. Of these the canción or song is the most diffuse in it definition and will come last. The romance or "ballad" will begin the course, followed by the refrán or proverb.

I made several mistakes last time: I had students read the Celestina as an example of how the refrán was used within a literary work. The problem is I didn't allot time to properly teach the Celestina, a semi-difficult and longish late medieval work, so that was largely a waste. Secondly, I over-emphasized flamenco and too many students attempted to do exactly the same kind of paper. I didn't give enough guidance on choosing paper topics. Even though this is a senior class and everyone taking it is graduating with a major in Spanish, they can't really come up with a research project. I badly handled a few C students. I had the students give presentations, and, given the similarities among topics, these presentations were repetitive.

Students in my courses often don't know what to do with what I give them. That is a key problem in my teaching. I have a hard time telling people what to do in the first place, but undergraduate students need very firm guidelines. I need super-rigid assignments that bad students can do adequately and good students can excel at.

On Wed of last week I didn't announce the reading assignment, but it was in the syllabus, listed for 9/9/9 under the name of the author and the title of the article. The article is included in the only textbook that the students bought for the course, The Translation Studies Reader. Today, the next class after that (since we had no class on Monday for labor day), only one student had found and read the article. This is the first article we were reading from this volume, so the students did not make the connection that this was the reading assignment for today. Nobody sent me an email over the break to ask what the assignment was going to be, or where the article was to be found. Few even had the book with them in class. I had a dialogue with the one student (out of 17 present in class) to do the assignment, gave a mini-lecture, and guided the discussion toward more general points that could be discussed without having read the assignment. I got through the 75-minute class somehow and I think it actually was a fairly good one--which means it would have been great with a group of prepared students. I learned two things: I can teach a good class under less than ideal conditions, and you have to be very explicit with this group of undergraduates, to the point of painfully explicit over-obviousness. If there is an assignment due, you have to announce it. You have to tell them explicitly what to do even if it is obvious. You should say: "Read Annie Brisset's article on page 3XX in The Translation Studies Reader and come prepared to discuss it." It didn't seem productive to go RYS on them and send them home, even though I had a sore throat. It's a funny group that way--we can have a decent discussion even if they aren't prepared in the least, but they aren't particularly resourceful about figuring things out. We'll see how exercise 2 goes on Monday.

If reading is about the formation of identities, subjectivities...

Where does the sub come in to subjectivity? What are we beneath, so to speak? What are we subjected to? We think of the subject as the one under control but obviously in the French theory tradition, if I can speak of it shorthand, the subject is the one subjected, formed by other discourses.

There is a kind of compulsion here: I couldn't any more give up my Creeley than give up my Coltrane. The grooves are strong and deep, the scarring is permanent. We speak of "déformation professionelle." My graduate students use the concept of "agency" as a counteracting force to this compulsion: the subject is autonomous and can speak for itself.

For graduate students, the process is double: there is a subjection to the norms of the "profession." And a subjection to the literature itself. To say there is a tension between these two things is the understatement of the century. At best there is a tension, at worst the second subjection simply fails to take place.

But how to conceive of this tension? One view is that the subjection to poetry is purer and less conditioned, but poetry is also an institution, or rather, it is inseparable from its various institutions, its concrete instantiations on this earth. (Any particular way that it exists materially.) So then it becomes a question of which institutions matter and who is in control of them, not of finding a space outside of institutions. The way Silliman, for example, insists that other institutions outside of academia should be the true legitimators. But he is no less invested in there being a legitimating mechanism.

All arguments about poetry are about this.

Questions on "Interview with Steve Evans".

1. Why is it important that we are analyzing this as an audio file rather than a written text? Was it more or less difficult to process the material in this way? What was the main difficulty?

2. What does Steve (the second speaker) mean when he faults his own use of sound files of poetry as being "illustrative." What would be a use that would not be merely illustrative look like? Discuss "dejection" and "euphoria."

3. What information does the voice give that the written text does not? What are the typical reactions of students to hearing sound files? What are the "traps" that are anticipated or experienced most often in the use of these files?

4. What is meant by "left liberal pedagogy" [toward the end of the interview]? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this pedagogy, according to the two men speaking?

5. How much of an obstacle was it for you that the context given was poetry as taught in departments of English (as opposed to Spanish)? In other words, how "translatable" are the concerns given here? How distracting was the discussion of poets you probably have never heard of (Rod Smith)? [middle section of discussion] Discuss the discussion of audience, "room," "tone," etc...

6. What are the suggestions for using the expertise of the students in the classroom? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the undergraduate students discussed. What does Proust have to do with it?

7. What questions would you ask Steve Evans?

8. You are graduate students, which means you occupy at least four positions: students, teachers (mostly, for now, of Spanish language), scholars-in-training, and future teachers of literature. How does this interview help you to reflect on your own development in any of these four areas? Why is graduate course-work oriented mostly toward the "scholars-in-training" function?

9. Write down five sentences or phrases from anywhere in the interview that you think are particuarly discussion provoking.

A graduate student in my own department writes to ask how the levels of writing I described in a recent post (treating, explaining, contextualizing/narrating, and problematizing) translate to the graduate classroom, where the performance is oral rather than written. Treating the subject matter is what happens by default, so a comment in class might be a description, and explanation, a contextualization, or a problematizing, among other things. All these things are possible in a class discussion, but none of them will be fully developed as it might in writing.

What makes for a good comment in class?

*Preparation. The student comes to class with an idea already formulated. Not always possible, because the discussion might not be going in that direction.

*Relevance. The comment relates directly to other things said; it is part of the conversation. The student doesn't always make the same comment about everything. Relevant, improvised comments are even better than prepared statements. You can also prepare to improvise.

*Thoughtfulness. The student might not say everything that occurs to him/her, but will self-censor to a certain extent. Too much, and he/she will never say anything. Not enough, and you have the glibness syndrome. We encourage glibness when we ask for participation but don't necessarily have a structure that produces good student response.

The classroom discussion is a collaborative enterprise. The best discussion is not one to which you could go back, listen to the tape, and judge everything to have been perfect. Rather, it is one in which students responded to one another, developed ideas suggested by others and by the profe. There will be digresssions and even irrelevancies. You would have to go back and edit it to make even the best discussion a well developed essay, but that's not really the point, is it? It should be more jam session than recording session.