Forty Posts: What makes "critical" different from critical?

Welcome to our blog space, where you may be spending a significant amount of time between now and December! Starting next week, we'll be posting regularly on our readings until the end of the semester.

These posts may be the most concentrated and challenging writing you do in this class. Think of them as your critical offerings to the rest of the class, where “critical” means you are applying the terms, concepts, and theories of others to something we have read in order to help us understand it more fully. In my years as a reader, writer, thinker, scholar, and teacher, I realize I still have much to learn about how to do this well, because "critical" often means I need to move beyond simply agreeing or disagreeing, being willing or being skeptical. For me--and I hope for you, too--"critical" describes a kind of empowered interpretation and use of someone else's text (whether that is print, digital, or visual) to do something new or interesting with it. This may be challenging because we can never assume that others in the class share our understanding, our perspectives, or our beliefs about what we read, what we know, and what we see.

It is up to us to undertake the very difficult (but, I would say, rewarding) work of explaining our ideas to others and providing ways “in” to understanding what motivates our explanations. That is a principal goal of ENG L111. You might do this by defining a term for us, by providing an example, by making an analogy, or some other way. No matter what you do, it is always a good idea to quote or excerpt the particular passage of the text that you are referring to, so that we can understand the source of your interpretation.

You should not be afraid of sharing a quandary, posing an unanswerable question, or asking each other for further clarification or explanation. You should not be afraid of pushing the envelope on ideas, and trying on new perspectives, even if you aren't sure how they should "fit". My main requirement is that whatever you do--whether you question, support, agitate, nudge forward, or build on one another's ideas--you do with the genuine goal of creating better understanding for all of us in the class. Our readings this semester are rich and complex--there is no way that we can understand everything about them on our own.

Welcome, and I'm very excited to get started next week!

-Dr. Graban