4lisa-h.

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A New Kind of Research Paper:

Bridging the Gap between Reader
Response and Formal Critical Analysis
Using their peers work as secondary source
material helps students overcome the cognitive
difficulties of writing about literature.

n his teaching . . . Wing Biddlebaum [of Sherwood Andersons Hands] is described as one of
those men in whom the force that creates life is
diffused, not centralized. . . . Wing is a man hiding in an age of misunderstanding. A poet who
yearns for a pastoral golden age. . . . Wing Biddlebaum wants his students to be leaders in a
broad expansive kind of thought. . . . As his story
closes, we find in [a] dense blotch of light . . .[a]
kneeling figure . . . like a priest engaged in some
service. Perhaps the poet Wing prays for you
and me.

Mark Desmond
Introduction
It startled me, I remember telling a colleague about my student Mark Desmonds analysis of Sherwood Andersons
Hands.
There ensued a discussion about what
in interpretive writing, by students or
professionals, has the power to astonish.
I recall listing the things that surprised
me in Marks study of Andersons troubled schoolmaster: a tone of quiet revelation, a striking move away from the usual
critical preoccupation with Biddlebaum
grotesqueness to a more discerning exploration of Biddlebaum transcendence,
the question of the prayer Mark leaves us
to ponder. None of which was as remarkable to me as the eventual practical result
14

by Lisa Hamilton-Johnson
of Marks insightful essay. For in his study
of Wings intriguing eccentricity, I found
the idea for a new kind of research paperone in which the voices of community college students: aspiring architects,
business executives, computer programmers, engineers, health care specialists,
law enforcement officers, philosophers,
scientists, teachers might develop the
resonance too seldom found in students
interpretive writing about literature.
To read Mark Desmonds description
of Wing Biddlebaum is to understand
the singular opportunity we have in twoyear college-transfer English courses1 to
promote a transforming dialogue
Whitman-like in its celebration of the
differences that make an extraordinary
wholeness. Why then, we must wonder,
do these courses so often produce writing
that is at best tedious in its predictability,
at worst grotesque in its fragmentation?
Why must writing of the quality of Mark
Desmonds be an anomaly in the community college English classroom?
When I ask what would be involved
in realizing Wing Biddlebaums pedagogical vision as Mark Desmond defines it:
students . . . becom[ing] leaders in a
broad expansive kind of thought (9),
the most urgent part of my response
seems to be that we must somehow honor our own talented students writing
TETYC, February 1997

Copyright 1997 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

4lisa-h.doc Page 15 Monday, January 13, 1997 11:48 AM

more than we have done in our most innovative models of collaborative learning
and reader response. Why not, for example, books of students critical essays
selected each term and bound and catalogued in the colleges library? Why not
students most insightful interpretations
as sources for other students critical
analyses? Why not, in other words, a
model for writing about literature to
show two-year college students how
their responses to stories and poems can
be more than just school exercises?
To learn any trade or art, one must
have the opportunity to practice it as
masters and professionals do. Experiencing the atmosphere of the trade or guild,
I think, must have profound effects in
writing as it surely does in other fields.
That we have provided for the novices
we ask to do scholarly writing about literature nothing approaching the guildspirit of clinicals and apprenticeships for
learning other skills, should, therefore,
suggest a new direction for classroom
practice.
From Reader Response
to Formal Critical Analysis
without Much Direction
By advocating membership in the community of writers for two-year college
students, I do not wish to minimize the
legitimate concern of the critic who believes that students have in recent years
been given a large measure of self-esteem
at the expense of rational thinking. I applaud, for example, Kenneth Seibs observation about reader-response theory at
its worst: tell[ing] students, as many
have suspected, that words have no consequences and that literature has no genuine value (27475). In fact, by briefly
describing a specific reader-response model here, as an introduction to my own
A New Kind of Research Paper

approach, I hope to show that students

require more guidance than they typically receive in the kind of project I am proposing in this paper. They certainly need
to understand that there is a range of
supportable meanings and that there are
what Seib calls non-negotiable (276)
items in many texts.
Acknowledging potential problems
with students interpretations, however,
should not preclude encouraging a variety of responses to literature. Nor should
the insupportable interpretations that
inevitably come up when students are
encouraged to think for themselves lead
us to conclude that there is no interpretive community among students who
comprise a typical college literature class
in a two-year institution (Seib 274). Indeed, the differences in age, cultural orientation, and aspirations are the very
materials of which a strong interpretive
community should be made.
Bruce Peterson inspires us to have
confidence in students capacity to create
learning partnerships out of which an interpretive community can grow. According to Peterson, in the process of sharing
their affective first responses to literature, students refine their conceptions
through a discovery process leading to
more focused written analysis of texts.
The specs for how the refinement is to
take place are missing from Petersons discussion, but still there is an idea to build
on. For Peterson, personal associations
. . . shape both reading experiences and
written responses, a phenomenon which
suggests to him that reading and writing
derive from similar . . . mental structures
(460). The significance of this link between reading, interpretation, and composition for pedagogical practice cannot
be overemphasized, in Petersons view. In
mine either, I might add. The foundation
here is strong.
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Certainly Petersons assessment of

what motivates reader-response theory is
also well laid out: the principle that the
most fruitful study of literature arises
from the desire to make or compose meanings and not from the desire to discover
meanings in the words of the text (463).
But his efforts to bring this theory to students in some tangible form leave us
with the feeling of being at great height
without a railing.
Stressing in various ways the close relationship between reading, listening,
writing, and speaking, Peterson briefly
describes his pedagogical model, which
initially eschews critical approaches in
favor of encouraging students to bring
their own experiences to bear on literature (464). Students experiences take
first form in the model as raw responses which are shared in peer groups
students helping students select points to
develop into focused papers. Finished
papers are then discussed in class,
where students see views different from
their own on the works being analyzed
and thus discover the limitations of egocentered or self-consuming thought
(464). Petersons course model culminates in a formal critical research paper
informed by the students new perspectives on reading literature. Here, as in
other places in Petersons design, the
construction seems both alluring and
illusoryat times even dangerous.
Petersons model is illustrative of the
useful dialogic mode of responding to literature and, like all constructs inspired
by reader-response theory, may be recommended for its emphasis on enriching
individual perspective through an exchange of ideas. Convinced as I am of the
soundness of reader-response theory at
its best, however, my recent efforts to enlarge upon Linda Flowers features of

16

writer-based prose (features that Peterson charts in his article) suggest that
the full-blown research paper Peterson
sees as the culmination of earlier readerresponse work presents cognitive obstacles which he does not address. Moreover, his model does not provide the
means to help students see what is poorly conceived or, in some cases, missing
from their raw responses that research
might repair or supply.
Furnishing what the model is missing
would, at the outset, mean giving students early specific guidance in the form
of literature-oriented critical thinking exercises. The possibilities include those I
will introduce in the following section as
support for a research heuristic (See appendix). What the heuristic itself offers, I
hope, is exposure to a number of different critical perspectives in open-ended
but well-directed questions which, I believe, challenge students . . .[to] express
real thoughts (Seib 275). The related
reception paper I am proposing here is
one in which students use their peers
focused responses to the heuristic
questions as critical sources (gap fillers
in reception terms) for supporting a preliminary formal research commitment.
Viewing their classmates as published critics and valuing their works as
legitimate support (rather than simply as
other student reader responses) should
help ease anxiety about meeting the critics in library volumes and journals that
first-year community college students often find inaccessible. By comparing the
critical work of their peers with excerpts
from library sources in carefully designed
in-class activities, students can begin to
see themselves as contributors to the critical community, a crucial passage in
being able to manage the multidimensional task of critical analysis. With some

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thoughtful direction, they can probably

also learn what is negotiable in an interpretation and what is not.
Describing the Gap:
Features of Writer-Based Prose
The particular dimensions of the gap between reader-response writing and formal
critical analysis that might be bridged by
the research heuristic and the reception
paper I have in mind are defined in part
by Linda Flower in her article WriterBased Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing. Flower characterizes
writer-based prose (expository in the
case of her analysis) by its tendency to:
1. obscure (in narrative) logical and
hierarchical relations between ideas;
2. present data in survey without analysis;
3. use code words without articulating
connections;
4. focus sentences grammatically on
the writers discovery process to the
exclusion of audiences needs; and
5. use ambiguous referents. (2234)
The neglect of what Flower calls hierarchical relations in students writing manifests itself specifically in their writing
about literature, I believe, in such features
as the use of plot summary in place of interpretation of story, novel, play, poem; in
the stringing together of primary and secondary source material in list fashion
without explication; and in the failure to
suggest any purpose for writing other
than a proof that they have read an assignment according to the instructors
edict. The feature Flower describes as
use of code words (32), without articulation of the particular meaning ascribed
to them, is most evident in students writing about literature in paragraphs composed of deductive strings or repetitive

A New Kind of Research Paper

generalization. Here the code words

literary terms, sometimes only vaguely
understood, and universal principles
drawn from unarticulated observations
about, for example, a characters speech or
behaviorcontribute to the language Ken
Macrorie once aptly labeled Engfish.
I can find, in students writing about
literature, ample illustrations of the third
and fourth features Flower draws from
her analysis of expository writer-based
prose. Yet more confounding to the reader in students writing about literature,
perhaps, is the tendency to brush haphazardly over the existing elements of a
story in order to tinker at length with notions of what might happen to a character in the future or what a character
should have done. And none of Flowers
writer-based prose features describe the
vague, emotional language expressing
student writers admiration for or boredom with texts they are writing about, or
the convolution of secondary source material in paraphrasing, or the avoidance of
original ideas about the work under analysis, or the lack of any grammatical connection between quoted matter and the
material of sentences in which quotes are
embedded. There are other features we
might also consider, but these I have
mentioned serve to describe the gap with
which I am presently concerned.
Past Efforts at a Blueprint
for Getting from Reader
Response to Formal Analysis
The cognitive problems that produce
the features of writer-based prose cannot, in my estimation, be overcome by
reader-response strategies alone. Nor
should we expect students magically to
surmount these difficulties merely by
assigning more focused pieces of writ-

17

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ing drawn from ideas in their readerresponse papers, a tactic suggested by

Petersons model. For a number of years,
composition theorists and practitioners
have acknowledged that students require
specific strategies to deal with the special
cognitive obstacles they will encounter in
writing about literature. And more than a
few have contributed to the beginnings of
a blueprint to help teachers help students
on unfamiliar ground working with unfamiliar materials.
Virginia Perdue, for instance, offers
valuable instruction in the inhibiting effect of narrow definitions of theses that
undermine students cognitive processes during prewriting (13436), reminding us that students may not have an
opportunity to see the landscape of a
work from more than one angle if we ask
them to limit the scope of their observations too soon.
Others, engaged in expansive Wing
thinking (Desmond 9) similar to Perdues,
offer a variety of useful techniques for
looking at literature in less conventional
ways. With a multimedia heuristic, for
example, Ted Hipple demonstrates the
value of playful activities to enhance students power of analysis by allowing them
to respond to literature through collages,
character diaries, and cartoons (5053).
In a similar mind-stretching vein, Karen
Scrivens innovative approach to plot
summaries helps us see how students can
discover for themselves the inherent ambiguous richness of literature (28083)
by exploring what a plot summary cannot
tell us. A wonderful complement to the
Hipple and Scriven tools, Diane Thompsons instruction in telling lies assists us
in altering students sometimes narrow
perceptions about truthperceptions
that hamper productive reading and analysis of literature (3739).

18

Exploring the idea of limitations in

students writing about literature in a different way, Daniel Kurland shows how
we can change the way students read and
write about texts through a diagnostic instrument for detecting non-analytic
and pre-analytic modes of presentation
in students attempts at focused writing
(34146). His charts provide a starting
place for developing our own strategies
to move students into an analytic mode
of thinking, the level at which they must
work to be able to show relationships
among ideas and ultimately to introduce
and explicate secondary source material
effectively in the context of their own
interpretations.
In addition to creating from Kurlands
charts our own strategies to help students develop critical thinking skills necessary for writing about literature, we can
choose from a number of useful heuristics already available. Elizabeth McGonigals game-like prewriting exercise in
analogy, for example, shows us how, with
the right approach, students can move
quickly beyond the obvious observations
about their reading assignments to the
delightful discoveries that depend on
seeing relationships:
Huck : ________ ::
Dorothy : yellow brick road (66)
Developing the skill of correlative thinking so crucial to writing about literature
does not need to be tedious, as any example from McGonigals collection of
analogies immediately demonstrates.
When its time to move from the
primary sources on which McGonigals
activities are focused to secondary sources, Richard Stracke and Sara Snows detective ideas will introduce students to
the tools of research in a way that will

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make them want to return to the library

(11519).
Problems with Literary Criticism
The importance of Stracke and Snows
detective approach to the library cannot
be overemphasized, nor can the value of
any of the heuristics and strategies outlined in the previous section be denied.
But the map is still sketchy, as a look at
just a few fragments of the kind of textual
material students might encounter in
their first trip to the library should reveal.
Excerpts from critical essays about
Sherwood Andersons Hands, gathered
by my students in a Stracke-and-Snow
detective session in the library, provide
powerful evidence that while student
writers are still struggling with their own
interpretations of the primary text, they
must, in effect, acquire knowledge of a
new languagethe language of professional criticism. They must, for example,
deal with unfamiliar literary terms, like
the ones David Stouck uses when he
writes,
Andersons vision of life in Winesburg,
Ohio is tied directly to the expressionist
form of his stories. The narrator in the introductory sketch tells us simply that
there is no such thing as truth, but there
are a great many. . . ways of viewing life,
all of which are valid. But human beings,
he says, have insisted on experiencing life
from just one vantage point, which becomes the position of truth.This distorted
view of the world in turn distorts the
viewer, who becomes a grotesque. . . .(41)

The dilemma presented in this passage

by such terms as expressionist and grotesque is complicated by the fact that
Stouck is discussing a body of work,
rather than a single story, so students
must also wonder if parts of a critical essay that do not contain specific reference

A New Kind of Research Paper

to the story they are analyzing can be

useful to them and, if so, how.
English instructors may forget sometimes that students writing about literature for the first time can be immobilized
by a single question that professional
writers would quickly file as a possible
lead-in idea or dismiss immediately as irrelevant to their current project. Examples are plentiful. How important, for
instance, is an argument between critic
and story author? During first library sessions, students working in groups on
Andersons Hands often bring me conflicting passages from William Phillips
and Sherwood Anderson on the method
of Andersons crafting Hands. Arranging
their writers-at-odds on the library table
in front of me, the more timid researchers
point and wait, standing mute with their
frustration. The bolder ones exhale little
bursts of impatience. The Phillips passage
they have brought me proclaims, It
seems clear that the story, although drafted in a sudden passion, was reworked
several times . . . (16). Andersons puzzling reply: The story was written that
night in one sitting. No word of it ever
changed (qtd. in White 4). If I wait to respond, the least solicitous in the group
will usually lean over his peers, cutting
right to the question I should probably
have asked more often in English methods classes: What are we supposed to
do when this happens?
What I have learned, among other
things and mostly on my own, about obstacles students encounter when they
write about literature is that if contradictions among library sources do not discourage them immediately, they will still
need substantial supervised practice and
conference time before they can begin to
put together a readable research paper
based on current literary scholarship.

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Then should we tell our students simply to avoid any professional analyses
containing terms from a list to be provided: parole, countertransference, phallocentric,
hegemony, otherness? And when our students suddenly discover that part of the
literary construction site is located in the
minefield of deconstructionism, do we
advise them to back quickly out of any
critique they have gotten into which
seems to be on the verge of exploding
into everything and nothing at once? If
we answer no to these last two questions,
as we probably should, then we need a
more detailed plan than most of us probably have to cope with eventualities.
Support for Spanning the Gap:
A New Heuristic
The heuristic shown in the appendix is
designed with the dual purpose of exposing students to a variety of critical approaches to a piece of literature and of
helping them construct a research commitment of manageable scope, based initially, perhaps, on a single difficult
moment in a story (an idea suggested to
me by Thomas Newkirk). Sherwood
Andersons Hands provides a number of
opportunities for applying Newkirks
strategies. When my students understand
the concept of the difficult moment,
they often choose, as a place to start their
discussion of Wings dilemma, one of the
following enigmatic passages:
1. Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum
made a picture for George Willard. In
the picture men lived again in a kind
of pastoral golden age. Across a green
open country came clean-limbed
young men, some afoot, some
mounted upon horses. In crowds the
young men came to gather about the
feet of an old man who sat beneath a
20

tree in a tiny garden and who talked

to them. (Anderson 23)
2. He [Wing] was one of those men in
whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands, doubt and disbelief
went out of the minds of the boys and
they began also to dream. (Anderson
2425)
3. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well
have been mistaken for the fingers of
the devotee going swiftly through the
decades of his rosary. (Anderson 26)
Initial reader responses to the difficult
moments in Andersons storyor in any
other piece of literaturemight be handled in whatever way a teacher has used
successfully to engage students in freewriting exercises assigned in the past.
(Petersons model is one possibility, as are
journal entries and collaborative writings.) Again, however, I would emphasize
that many students do not automatically
move to these negotiable parts of the
story when they writesomething I
learned through informal classroom experimentation. A class period is well spent
discussing the kind of tension that invites
more than a retelling of story events.
To produce the greatest variety of responses for sharing and to encourage different approaches to research, I urge
asking students to negotiate among
themselves toward a collective responsibility for covering a number of the heuristic questions.2 The length of the
focused response to any of the questions
is likewise up to the instructor, and the
inquiry can certainly be modified in any
way the instructor finds productive.
Focused responses from the heuristic
may first be shared in a dialogic mode in
which students comment in the margins
of peers work and then discuss what
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they found particularly engaging, especially what suggested to them possibilities for further exploration of the
difficult moments.
The New Reception Research Paper
The heuristic activity described above
should ultimately provide adequate support for the new reception research paper I offer here as a follow-up and a
bridge to formal critical analysis. This research paper should be an especially productive assignment in the community
college classroom, where the ages in a
typical class might range from 17 to 70
and where a variety of cultures will usually be represented.
In the model I am proposing, the instructor might choose to publish the students focused responses to the research
heuristic in a kind of case book that will
then provide the secondary sources for
the new research paper. Or she might
informally circulate students responses
in a read-around in which the students
could choose the peer texts from which
they wish to draw. In either case, growth
will almost certainly be the result of exposure to peers different ways of framing
responses to literature.
The rationale in the new research paper, then, remains the powerful one suggested by Mark Hurlberts studentsthat
an effective interpretation is one that
somehow incorporates all ideas into a
collective interpretation and one that
does not devalue creative or divergent
reading of a text (136). In other words,
students will begin to feel how their voices are essential to the interpretive dialogue. And this feeling, it seems to me, is
a first crucial step in helping them meet,
on more equal footing, the professional
critics, who often have a debilitating
power over them.
A New Kind of Research Paper

I would encourage teachers to design

exercises to help students work with
their peers critical texts to overcome a
range of problems from dealing with divergent interpretations to introducing
and explicating quotations. These difficulties will be more easily surmounted, I
believe, when texts are at first closer to
students own modes of expression, as
peer texts almost certainly will be in
most cases.
In the following passages, excerpts
from student and professional comment
on the reception of Andersons Hands,
the difference in level of vocabulary and
syntax, as well as in the treatment of the
primary source, helps to illustrate the potential power of the bridging research paper in which peers interpretive work is
used as secondary source material. Responding to item 2 of the heuristic, which
asks, in part, if the readers moment
in history might affect his reaction to
the difficult moment, the student writer
observes:
On the one hand, there may be more tolerance today than in the time Sherwood
Anderson was writing about Wing Biddlebaum touching his students. Remember
that the Nineteenth Amendment to the
Constitution giving women suffrage was
adopted several years after the Winesburg
collection was finished. Also, the Stonewall Inn riot that led to the gay rights
movement was half a century away. The
whole discussion about the expanding
canon we have talked about in class
shows that schools are actually giving
some guidance on the subject of differences now. On the other hand, the newspapers and television today give so much
attention to child abuse, homosexuality,
AIDS etc., and readers in the 1990s may
be just as likely as readers in the 1920s to
jump to conclusions about Wings behavior. In fact, earlier readers may have an
easier time than modern ones believing
the part about Wing never really understanding why he got in trouble for the
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caress that was in his fingers when he

was teaching . . .

None of the ideas expressed in the

preceding passage will likely puzzle the
student writers peers. The register we
see here is one with which students are
familiar. Since they readily understand
the language, they can concentrate their
efforts almost completely on the difficult
business of learning to paraphrase, summarize, quote, and explicate. If students
must jump directly from their own reader response to the professional critics
work, on the other hand, they must deal
first, in all probability, with a highervoltage prose, illustrated by the following passage:
To present-day sophisticates in matters of
sexual desire and frustration, Wings complete ignorance of the horrors of which
he was accused those long years ago may
seem implausible. But the reader must
simply accept this character as a completely Platonic personality, unable to
conceive of the crimes of which he was
accusedwhich were, of course, homosexuality and pedophilia. Self-ignorance
and public stupidity have destroyed the
good that Wing Biddlebaum could have
given to a world already starved for intellect and inspiration. His life, intended by
nature for growing clover, has produced
instead only dense and useless mustard
weeds. (White 58)

Student writers looking at the preceding

discussion encounter words most do not
use in conversation (sophisticates, implausible, conceive, pedophilia were
among those my students underlined
during one troubleshooting session); an
allusion with which many will be unfamiliar; a metaphorical passage emphasizing images inexperienced readers seldom
notice even after several readings of
Andersons Hands; and a sophisticated
sentence structure with embedded modifiers and cumulative patterns.
22

When I examine my own students

treatment of library sources, comparing
their writings before and after they work
with the heuristic and the new research
paper, I am urged daily to further exploration with my models. I offer one example of student progress to encourage
others to join me in experimenting. In
the following passage, a student attempts
(in an in-class activity on quote incorporation, prior to engaging in any of the
other exercises recommended in this paper) to explicate a passage from Lynda
Browns Andersons Wing Biddlebaum
and Freemans Louisa Ellis. In response
to Browns observations about the refined
Freemans paradoxical influence on the
freethinking Anderson (414), the student
critic writes,
It says he was in rebellion against Victorian standards of taste and form that Freeman exemplifies in which Wing was
chosen to make a point about what can
happen to people if they do certain things.
Anderson and Wing are probably supposed to be the same, according to this.

Immediately apparent in this excerpt are

features that appear in many first-year
students early efforts to use library
sources: the neutering of the critic, the
awkward modification, the ambiguous
passive voice phrasing, the vague certain things, the problems with pronoun
reference, and the failure to include a citation for the quoted material. More
troubling than these surface flaws, however, are the parallel the student draws
between Anderson and Wing (no part of
Browns interpretation) and the absence
of any relevant comment on Browns
central comparison: the obscure provincial[s] Wing Biddlebaum and Louisa
Ellis (414).
In the new research paper (a reception paper of the kind I am proposing
here as a bridge in the first-year comTETYC, February 1997

4lisa-h.doc Page 23 Monday, January 13, 1997 11:48 AM

position and literature courses between

reader response journals and formal researched analysis), the same student
responds to peer Mark Desmonds published essay Sherwood Andersons Wing
Biddlebaum,3 introducing and explicating a passage from Marks observations
about Andersons sensitive school teacher:
Mark Desmond sees that Wing has imagination. Desmond introduces Wing as a
poet . . . a rare person, whose elegant and
exquisite art extends above . . . intellect . . .
whose ideas bring out the fears in men . . .
held back from the wonders of pure uncontrolled thought by programmatic and
literal thinking (9). Wing is rare. Desmonds description shows how sad it is
when the poets gift for teaching is wasted because of other peoples fears and
narrowmindedness.

Here the student has obviously gained

confidence in her own interpretive powers. Through class activities (see Hipple,
Scriven, Thompson, and McGonigal),
explication exercises, and helping-circle
discussion of her peers interpretation,
she has eliminated the writer-based features that marked her earlier efforts. In
the above passage, taken from the first
typed draft of her paper, the student incorporates the quotation smoothly and
comments on it thoughtfully, giving
credit to her peer in an appropriate attribution and parenthetical citation. In the
final draft of her paper, the student even
braves another part of the passage from
Browns comparative analysis, moving beyond the requirements of the assignment:
Lynda Brown thinks that Sherwood
Anderson created Wing after reading a
story by Mary Wilkins Freeman. Brown
makes a comparison between Freemans
Louisa Ellis and Andersons Wing. She explains that Anderson must have responded positively to Freemans . . . obscure,
provincial people and that he may have
gained inspiration for the character of
A New Kind of Research Paper

Wing in Freemans artistic treatment of

social aberrance (414). Brown thinks it
isnt just a coincidence how Freeman describes Louisa as a nun and Anderson
describes Wing as a priest.

This time the students discussion of the

professional critics observations is valid
and coherent, and the passage she
chooses from the secondary source material is more appropriate to her chosen
focus: the sadness of eccentricity.
Spending Time on the Bridge
Eventually, students may be asked to deal
with secondary sources in more substantial ways: incorporating a number of
sources in a formal research paper, comparing several works, refuting or amplifying professional interpretation. But
before first-year students conduct individual research for the formal critical
analysis, I would suggest that the instructor spend time in class working through
some excerpts from professional essays.
Trouble-shooting exercises might engage
students in a discussion of ways to handle new terminology, of methods for
choosing what to paraphrase and what to
quote, and of syntactical problems encountered in embedding quoted material. I would add that I can think of no
reason why students should not include
their peers interpretive work as valid
secondary source material even in a formal research paper or why formal research papers should not, in some
instances, be of the collaborative kind
described by Hurlbert (13148).
If we are genuinely interested, as
Bruce Peterson is, in students composing meaning rather than merely discovering it (45967), then we must
engage ourselves in a revision of our current models of reader response, focused
interpretive writing, and formal critical
analysis. We must design a model that
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honors students critical contributions,

one that says they are quite as meaningful as those in the library sources we require students to value now as more
significant than their own.
And while we are working on this revision, I propose providing places for
students to publish their finished critical
essays (college literary magazines, for
example) where these pieces, as I have
found from experience, provide a fine
balance for poetry, stories, and plays.
Here students work can appear with the
work of their instructors. Need I suggest
that students may ultimately ask to write
A

critical analyses not only of canonical

literature but of marginalized literature,
including their peers poems, stories,
plays, and essays?
When Mark Desmond, my student
and my teacher, writes in his essay about
Wing Biddebaum, A poet is a rare person whose elegant and exquisite art extends beyond the extramundane limits of
intellect (9), I am reminded of how like
a poet teachers must become as they
search for ways to help students discover
themselves and their peers as poets, critics, and teachers.

P P E N D I X

Exploring the Difficult Moment: A Heuristic for Moving from

Initial Reader Response Toward the Reception Research Paper
1. Does the composition of the difficult moment seem to hinge on one word or
phrase? If so, what is the crucial word or phrase and what various definitions/connotations seem possible in the context of the moment? Will a dictionary or thesaurus
likely provide all the information you need about the words? If not, why? What other
sources might help? Does syntax (the order of the words) at any point in the difficult
moment seem a help or hindrance in adding to an interpretation of the moment?
2. What clues to the time of the storys events are you given in the difficult moment? What social/ psychological/ historical questions does the difficult moment seem to raise? Would these questions or the responses to them likely be
different depending on the moment in history to which the reader belongs? How
might the character in the difficult moment answer the question?
3. How close do you feel to the character in the difficult moment? What do you
think is most responsible for your ability or inability to identify with the character?
How might the gender/culture/social class/political affiliation of the reader make a
difference in the construction of the meaning of the difficult moment? If you are
not sure but feel that such knowledge would be valuable, how might you proceed?
4. If you were asked to write a plot summary of the story, would it include a paraphrasing of this difficult moment? Explain.
5. Does the difficult moment seem to be part of a pattern that repeats itself in other
parts of the story? If so, where are two or three other places in the story that
somehow remind you of the difficult moment? Do these other places seem to
reveal something important about the moment or do they raise questions that increase your puzzlement? That is, do the places you have detected seem to harmo24

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nize with the moment or to contradict it? If they harmonize, what is the nature of
the harmony? If they contradict, can the contradiction be expressed as an antithesis (examples: sharp lines vs. curves; trumpet vs. oboe; ripe vs. green; harsh vs.
gentle; freedom vs. bondage, etc.)? Which part of the antithesis, if either, does the
author seem in the whole of the story to favor? Explain.
6. If you could somehow transform the difficult moment into a billboard that
would capture its message (as you understand it), what would the billboard look
like (what images, colors, marks, words would it contain)?
7. Does the authors voice seem to intrude in the difficult moment? If so, how does
this intrusion affect your reading of the moment? Would it help to know something about the author (his attitudes, preoccupations, relationship to his world,
etc.)? How would the difficult moment change if the words that signal the author/narrators presence were removed?
8. If the difficult moment includes dialogue, how does the characters speech seem
to reveal his/her perception of himself/herself, his/her world, the people in that
world? Does his/her self-perception/perception of others and the world seem
clearer or less clear to you after he speaks? Does he/she seem to lack self-knowledge? If so, what seems to be the consequence of his/her ignorance? Do the characters physical movements seem to speak with or against his/her words? If the
difficult moment does not contain the characters thoughts (different from
speech), what would be added to or subtracted from the moment if his/her
thoughts were included?
Are you able to retrace the process by which you arrived at your original interpretation of the difficult moment (i.e. Did something in it remind you of a conversation?
a song? a sign? a movie? a news clip? another story? etc.)? Has your original response
been significantly altered by discoveries made in responding to the heuristic? If not,
what evidence would you need to alter your initial construction of the difficult moment? Might such evidence be found in a response to another part of the heuristic
or in conversation with others?
Notes
1. The courses for which I designed the heuristic and the research paper described in this essay are introductory literature and composition courses in which
first-year students read, discuss, research, and write about novels, short stories, poetry, and plays from both the traditional and expanding canons.
2. I have tried to design the heuristic in such a way that it could be used with almost any short story. It might also be modified for use with novels, plays, and poems.
3. Mark Desmonds paper appeared in Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community Colleges literary journal Flight in 1993. Students who choose to write their initial
reception research paper about Hands often select passages from Marks paper as
support for their own observations about Andersons story. My students seem to enjoy learning to cite the works of their peers and, in my observation, make fewer errors on the whole with works cited entries and parenthetical citation in formal
A New Kind of Research Paper

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analysis when they have spent some time learning to document peers critical observations in the new research paper.
Works Cited
Anderson, Sherwood. Hands. The Sherwood Anderson Reader. Ed. Paul Rosenfeld.
Boston: Houghton, 1947. 2126.
Brown, Lynda. Andersons Wing Biddlebaum and Freemans Louisa Ellis. Studies in
Short Fiction 27 (1990): 41314.
Desmond, Mark. Sherwood Andersons Wing Biddlebaum. Flight 1 (1993): 910.
Flower, Linda. Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing. College English 41 (1979): 1937.
Hipple, Ted. Writing and Literature. English Journal 73 (1984): 5053.
Hurlbert, C. Mark. The Walls Dont See: Toward Collectivist Pedagogies as Political
Struggle. Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature Courses. Ed. James M.
Cahalan and David B. Downing. Urbana: NCTE, 1991. 13148.
Kurland, Daniel. The Students View of the Text: Implications for Reading and Writing. College Composition and Communication 26 (1975): 34146.
McGonigal, Elizabeth. Correlative Thinking: Writing Analogies about Literature.
Explicator 48.1 (1989): 6667.
Newkirk, Thomas. Looking for Trouble: A Way to Unmask Our Readings. College
English 46 (1984): 75665.
Perdue, Virginia. Authority and the Freshman Writer: The Ideology of the Thesis
Statement. The Writing Instructor 11 (1992): 13436.
Peterson, Bruce T. Writing about Responses: A Unified Model of Reading, Interpretation, and Composition. College English 44 (1982): 45967.
Phillips, William L. How Sherwood Anderson Wrote Winesburg, Ohio. The Merrill
Studies in Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. Ray Lewis White. Columbus: Merrill, 1971. 1519.
Scriven, Karen. Writing about Literature: Interpretation through Exposition. Teaching English in the Two-Year College 16 (1989): 28083.
Seib, Kenneth. What Is That Lapping the Miles? Responding to Reader Response.
Teaching English in the Two-Year College 22 (1995): 27377.
Stouck, David. Andersons Expressionist Art. New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio. Ed.
John W. Crowley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 4146.
Stracke, Richard, and Sara Snow. The Literary Research Paper: Some Operating
Principles. Teaching English in the Two-Year College 15 (1988): 11519.
Thompson, Diane. Introducing Adult Students to Writing about Literature. Teaching English in the Two-Year College 16 (1989): 3739.
White, Ray Lewis. Winesburg, Ohio.Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Lisa Hamilton-Johnson is an instructor of English at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, Asheville, North Carolina, where she teaches courses in composition, literature,
research methods, and creative writing.

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