by Xinyang Li, Comparative Literature
As Dr. Myhre’s WIP Teaching Assistant this semester, I am responsible for grading and detailing feedback for undergraduate assignments, consulting with individuals when necessary, and solving as many of their writing problems and difficulties as possible. In this blog, I will detail strategies for setting assignments geared toward improving students’ literary analysis skills and how I have gradually refined the feedback in conjunction with my studies in WIP.
My previous tutors often emphasized that brilliant literary criticism requires the cooperation of at least four aspects, the so-called “KITE”: Knowledge, Inspiration, Taste, and Emotion.
Knowledge: There must be a necessary framework of knowledge to support it, and merely reading the work itself is not enough to criticize it.
Inspiration: Criticism is a hermeneutic cycle of the whole and the individual, which requires a reflexive intuitive grasp, followed by the power of logic to argue.
Taste: Good criticism reveals good taste, which is a reflection of the critic’s personality and vision.
Emotion: Criticism does not have to present poetry, but it must be emotional. Otherwise, it will not reflect the critic’s empathy with the literary work and, therefore, will not be able to provide critical physical evidence.
Literary criticism is a connector between literary works and concepts. To some extent, its value lies in breaking down stereotypes, taking literary works from their regular, natural reception to more challenging situations, and allowing theory and literary works to form a powerful interactive Q&A. I have used “KITE” as a guiding principle when giving feedback on my literary criticism assignments this semester.
Feedback strategies for different types of assignments
The first is reading reflection, an assignment requiring students to write a paragraph on the week’s reading of a storytelling text, incorporating their analysis. The purpose of this assignment is to train students in literary criticism and to write academic essays from a basic structure, and by keeping the word count to 350 in the requirements, students are both practicing their ability to summarize and encouraging their literary analysis of the text.
The equivalent is a branching expository paragraph in which students need to write a fully structured paper. In providing feedback on this assignment, I focus on four main areas: clarity of the core ideas and arguments, completeness of the thesis structure, logical articulation between sentences, and originality of ideas.
In individual consultations this semester, I have found that there are differences in the needs of different students regarding the style of the feedback, with some students preferring me to make detailed suggestions for improving the content of the assignment itself and others with a foundation in literary analysis preferring to see some suggestions and guidance in the feedback regarding research methods (e.g., what directions can be taken to expand the depth and breadth of the topic, how to integrate the argument with the theory, or how to place it in the context of comparative research). I would ask about their needs in an individual counseling session and later give as much feedback as I could based on the reality of each student’s situation. With Dr. Myhre’s advice, I would limit the number of entries to three to avoid confusion for the students. I would then find that their next assignment would be differently improved, and I was happy to see the change.
Next is the paper review, an assignment that develops students’ ability to summarize and critique the research of a leading scholar in the field. The main aspects covered include summarizing the article’s content, describing the methodology and main ideas of the article, as well as the value of the research, and finally, taking the perspective of a critic, stating their views and questions about the topic and content of the article. In the process of reviewing the assignments, some of the students did an excellent job of summarizing and evaluating, but they did not know what aspects they should start from to ask critical questions; I will give the directions for thinking that can be referred to in the feedback, trying to guide them to build up the ability of literary criticism gradually.
During the weekly WIP sessions, Dr. Harding would relate to actual teaching scenarios for different aspects and encourage TAs from different disciplines to share their experiences on issues that may arise in teaching. In the process, I always learn many practical skills and ways to cope with different teaching situations, which I am looking forward to applying to language teaching in the spring semester.