Who Killed Annabel Lee? Writing about Literature in the Composition Classroom
Author(s): Mark Richardson
Reviewed work(s):
Source: College English, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Jan., 2004), pp. 278-293
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4140749 .
Accessed: 27/02/2012 09:30
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
College English.
http://www.jstor.org
278
Who Killed Annabel Lee?
Literature
in
Writing about
the Composition Classroom
Mark Richardson
riting about literature in composition classes has a long and vexed history, as
readers of CollegeEnglishespecially will know. Few issues in composition pedagogy invite more debate, because few issues speak so directly to who teaches
composition and to why it is taught. On the one hand, teachers trained in
literature continue to make up the largest source of staffing for first-year composition courses, and naturally they want to bring their particular expertise to the writing classroom. Also, as many historians of the discipline have pointed out, from as
far back as the rise of the English department in the early twentieth century, when
first-year programs began to move their students away from the study of classical
rhetoric and into an engagement with literature in the vernacular, English teachers
have longed to interest their students in the best and most exciting writing in the
postclassical tradition (see Berlin; Corbett; Gamer; Horner; Parker; Scholes;
Steinberg). On the other hand, the reemergence of rhetoric and the refocusing of
first-year writing on the growing discipline of composition in the second half of the
twentieth century have thrown down the challenge of pragmatics: core courses in
composition should be devoted to more practical writing matters like "planning,
drafting, revising, using data, evaluating sources, reading critically, interpreting evidence, solving problems in writing, understanding and applying the rhetorical and
formal conventions of texts, becoming good collaborators" (Lindemann, "Freshman Composition" 313), not that richest and most intellectually challenging of human arts, literary texts.
Lively and even passionate debate has resulted, chronicled most notably in the
pages of CollegeEnglish (March 1993, March 1995) and other scholarly venues but
Mark Richardson teaches first-year composition and workplace writing in the Department of Writing
and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University. Although his degrees were originally in British literature, he has since then developed into a teacher of writing concerned primarily with disciplinarity in
writing programs.
CollegeEnglish,Volume 66, Number 3, January 2004
Who KilledAnnabelLee?
also evident in the minutes of committee meetings, in dramaticallyrevised standard
syllabi, in heated listserv exchanges, in strident departmental meetings and shouting
matches in academic hallways. It is not an inconsequential debate, and the issues
raised are not merely "academic";careers and lives have changed, departments have
been reconfigured, positions created or marginalized, and students have been left
bewildered as to what "English" is all about.
Opponents of writing about literature stress the tendency of teachers to lecture
about the literature rather than to encourage students to work with writing issues
(Lindemann, "Freshman Composition," "Three Views"; Steinberg); to prefer literary questions to writing questions (Booth); and to fail to prepare students to write in
the many other genres they will encounter in college and in the workplace (Farrar;
Gellis). In addition, they argue that literature itself is not a model of the kind of
writing teachers want students to learn, that emphasizing literature tends to
deemphasize analysis of expository writing (Lindemann, "Freshman Composition";
Schwalm; Steinberg). Finally, they contend that writing about literature tends to
subject student voices to the authoritarianvoice of a dominant culture-that of teachers and literaryscholars-rather than encouraging students to make their own knowledge (Heikinen). Those who defend writing about literature argue that they can't
possibly prepare students for all the genres that they will encounter and that disciplinary and workplace writing is mechanical, uninspiring, even boring (Bouman;
Tate); that literature opens up what Gary Tate calls "public and private conversations" of compelling importance and interest to students and to him-issues he sums
up as "humanist"concerns (321; see also Gamer and Pryor). Also, they contend that
literature is a good vehicle for teaching critical thinking and interpretation-often
key values in departmental and school objectives (Pryor; Tate; Gamer). They could
add that since high school English curricula are still heavily invested in the study of
literature for its own sake as part of the cultural ethos of the liberal arts curriculum,
the expectations of both high school and college English teachers and students might
logically demand some continuity from secondary to postsecondary courses.
The debate is not easily resolved. It will persist as long as teachers of writing
continue to reflect, as we inevitably must, the central dichotomy of postsecondary
education of our time-perhaps of all time: is college to be an education in humane
knowledge and the values of an examined life, or is it to be training for a successful
career?As long as this tension exists-and there is evidence that it has existed throughout the Western tradition-writing teachers will remain divided on which path their
gateway courses should follow. And the argument shouldpersist, for, more than any
other conversation, it rehearses for us our highest, most conflicted goals. But I think
it is also useful to look beyond "shouldwe teach literaturein composition or shouldn't
we" to the question of ifwe teach literature, how should we do so? Is there a way of
teaching literature that keeps the focus on writing, on making meaning, and that
279
280
College English
minimizes the other objections while maximizing the benefits of working with literary texts?
One reason to move beyond the debate is that graduate English programs aren't
changing quickly enough to produce a new generation of rhetoric and composition
teachers sufficient to meet the staffing needs of first-year composition at all of our
colleges and universities. For the foreseeable future, many postsecondary institutions will continue to staff FYC with faculty trained primarily in literary studies.
Another is that focusing on the debate prevents us from examining best practices for
writing about literature in FYC (see Elbow, for example, for a thoughtful consideration of the way that reading and writing about literature may involve students in
the issue of style). For these reasons, I would like to argue that if literature is going
to be used as a subject for writing in FYC courses, then we should adopt an approach
that locates reading literature and writing about it in a context appropriate to the
literacies of first-year students, an approach that takes into account their developmental levels and privileges the knowledge they bring with them to the academy.
Of the various objections to writing about literature in FYC, two have implications for where I would like to redirect the discussion. The first objection is that in
the hands of a literature specialist, literature becomes more important than writing.
The second is that the study of literature is inherently hierarchical, depending as it
does on knowledge and ways of thinking which are baffling for first-year students
and impossible for them to emulate or embody.
The first objection really just sets the stage for the second. By itself, the notion
that in the hands of a literature specialist composition study "deteriorates" into an
introduction-to-literature course in disguise seems to me insufficient to abandon
the practice. After all, students in composition classes have to write about something,
and nearly any subject can end up taking precedence over writing concerns: cultural
studies, gender readings, technology, popular music, history, politics, literacy or
environmental issues-any of these can become the focus of a composition course to
the detriment of audience analysis; development of purpose and strategy; development of ideas with supportingdetail;paraphrasing,quoting, and documenting sources,
and so on. So writing teachers must alwaysachieve a tricky balance: they want students both to acquire/create knowledge and also to communicate that knowledge in
specific ways to specific readers. The real question, then, is how do reading and
writing aboutliteratureplay out in the acquiring and creating of knowledge? And this
is where the deeper problem sets in.
It hardly needs to be said that for people outside the academy, the interpretation of literature is an act hallowed by tradition and shrouded in mystery. The cultural reverence we show for writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens,
Dickinson, and Faulkner, which is inculcated throughout K-12 education, extends
to those who interpret their works-like priests who mediate the word of God to
their flocks, literary scholars and scholarship are seen as sacrosanct. Students feel
Who KilledAnnabelLee?
this keenly, even if they don't feel it deeply. In their writing, they step warily around
the interpretation of literary text, anxious not to offend, not to trespass. It is not just
that they don't understand how meaning is made of text; it is that they are reluctant
to step onto hallowed ground. Thus, writing about literature often becomes a guessing game: What does my teacher (that is, an expert) think? What does she want me
to say? What can I say that will be true?In effect, they are asking, who am I? What
do I know? What warrantsme to join this lofty conversation? And so the qualities we
most want to see in our students' writing-critical or creative or original thinking
(whichever name you prefer), analysis,support of a position-are forestalled, trumped
by the hierarchical relationship between student and text embedded in our cultural
assumptions about truth, beauty, and art.
I have my own personal experience of this. In the first paper of my first college
literature course (a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away), we were assigned a short
paper on Milton's Lycidas.I still remember clearly the sense of awe I had in approaching the task. It was not that I really even knew who Milton was-I just knew
that he was a Great Poet and that I needed to do justice to his greatness. So I went to
the library, found several critical articles about Lycidasand Milton's poetry in general, and, as best I could considering that I didn't understand half of what I was
reading, wrote a paper balancing and counterpointing the sources, trying to illuminate Lycidasin their powerful light. When the paper came back, there were several
grades on it, each scratched out. The final grade was a C. Later, in conference, the
teacher explained that I had done a good job of synthesizing sources and using them
to highlight critical issues in the reading of the poem but that I had not "thought for
myself." The tension between my ability to write and my careful use of sources on
the one hand, and my failure to be original on the other, was responsible for his
difficulty in grading the paper. My response was that I couldthink for myself, but
how good would that be compared to the words of critics who had spent their lives
studying Milton's poetry? A long confused discussion followed-I no longer remember whether I managed to get the grade changed (probably not)-about which,
many years later, I have come to this realization: my teacher and I had different goals
for the paper. He wanted to see evidence of interpretive, analytic, and argumentative skill-the same abilities I now want to see from my own students. He didn't
really care if I was "right" or if my paper advanced Milton scholarship in any clear
way--indeed, it would be silly to expect anything like this from a first-year college
student. In the service of education, he wanted to see me thinking, not them.I, on the
other hand, felt just as strongly that, in the service of truth, I had no right to an
opinion about Milton, that the best thing I could do would be to condense, repackage, and articulate the conversation of those who were qualified to have an opinion.
I should hasten to add here that I don't see all students approaching literary
studies with awe and reverence for the text, for its interpreters, and for the meaning
it might construct. Some of them are wholly uninterested, of course, and many are
281
282
College English
only mildly involved-but the postureof reverence for literary products still determines their attitude and approach. And the tendency of literary criticism to rely on
authoritative and hierarchical opinion to make meaning, "what [Mikhail] Bakhtin
calls the 'authoritatively persuasive' voice of dominant society" (qtd. in Heikinen)
and what I have been calling the cultural reverence for literature, often seems to
reinforce the students' feeling that literature and its truths are unreachable for the
likes of them. WVhenstudents approach a work, they are reluctant to interpret it, and
any nascent responses they may have are usually undercut, marginalized, by the
concerns and approaches of established authority in the form of the teacher and of
literary criticism. In A Pedagogyof the Oppressed,Paulo Freire writes: "[Authoritative
pedagogy] turns them [i.e., students] into [...] 'receptacles' to be 'filled' by the
teacher [...]. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the
better students they are" (58). Trained in this tradition, students have become what
Freire characterizes as the oppressed collaborating in their own oppression.
Although this critique may sound pessimistic, approaches do exist that make
full use of what Freire calls students' "native languages"-the knowledge and strategies that they bring to their interpretation of events in the world and in texts and
that empower them to write meaningfully about their encounters with literature.
Dialogic theory, for example, suggests that college classrooms should be thought of
as "contact zones" between the disparate discourse communities of the academy on
the one hand, and of students on the other, places where teachers can facilitate students' use of their "native languages" and their own knowledge and gradually bring
them across the bridge that separates their language and knowledge from the privileged discourse of the academy. I learned of one such approach by accident when a
group of four students attempted to write about Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel
Lee." In the process, they not only experienced a liberation that validated their own
voices and literacies, but they also crafted what I believe is a new interpretation of
the poem. In more ways than one, then, this is their story.
I could tell from the first day that they were going to be my problem group. In the
clear light of an early spring day, my English 1102 comp class sat chatting in small
groups, occasionally flipping through their RespondingtoLiteraturetext, jotting down
the answers to questions at the end of the work their group was discussing. The
students had chosen the works they wanted to write about from a chapter on romantic relationships: stories by Kate Chopin, Tobias Wolff, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
and Maria Luisa Bombal, and poems by Tess Gallagher, Anne Sexton, Kristine Batey,
Amy Lowell, Stevie Smith, and Poe, specifically "Annabel Lee." I had said nothing
about the works myself. At the time, I had not read Freire, Bakhtin, and Pierre
Bourdieu on liberatory pedagogies or Erika Lindemann's cautions on keeping the
Who Killed Annabel Lee?
class about writing rather than allowing it to degenerate into lectures about literature, but I had become tired of reading my own readings of literature rehashed without energy or interest in boring and aimless papers.
So the students were in discussion groups, building their own readings of the
works they were most interested in by answering questions and following the trails
those questions started up. All except for one group, who were sitting silently, staring off into space. They were the group who had chosen to write about "Annabel
Lee."
As I went over to sit with the group and see what their problem was, I was
conscious of a sinking sensation. I must confess that I have trouble with poems like
"Annabel Lee" myself. Give me a work that is abstruse and complicated and I am in
my element, looking up the meaning of words, teasing out symbols, unwinding the
intricately layered depths of metaphor and simile, constructing an explication where
clearly one is needed. Poems where truth is beauty and beauty, truth-where the
meaning seems to reside on the surface, no matter how glittering-leave me with
little to say. And of course, this was my students' complaint as well when I asked
them why they weren't discussing the poem. One of them, the group leader, complained, "We've answered all the questions and we just don't know what else to say.
They loved each other, she died, and he can't understand why. There's no way we
can get a paper out of that."
I glanced over at the papers of the student sitting next to me. I could see she had
photocopies of parts of chapters and articles about the poem, something I would ask
all of the students to find later, once they had written a draft explaining their own
readings, and I wondered if perhaps the criticism she had found might not help open
the poem to interpretation. So I asked her what she had found out. Unfortunately,
the criticismwas brief and mostly echoed what the students were complaining aboutthere didn't seem to be much to say about "Annabel Lee." General sources like
literary encyclopedias tend to point to the poem's associations with Poe's own experience of love and the death of his young wife, and most scholars seem to echo the
assertion voiced by Floyd Stovall that "the value of the poem subsists more in its
form than in its meaning" (qtd in Gomori 121), that the value, in effect, lies in the
verse's extreme romanticizing of love and loss. So Julienne Empric finds in the poem
"a child's explanation" and "rationalization"of "disproportionate feelings of loss";
and Richard Wilbur, hearing echoes in the poem of the order for the burial of the
dead from the Book of Common Prayer and from Paul's letter to the Romans, sees
an association between the narrator'slove for Annabel Lee and the love of God, and
the poem's theme as an affirmation of the eternal communion of souls (5-6). All of
the criticism accepts the "story" of the poem at face value--that Annabel Lee and
the narrator were truly lovers, that Annabel Lee died of "a chill," that the angels
("her highborn kinsmen") bore her away, that the narrator clings to her memory by
sleeping in her tomb.
283
284
CollegeEnglish
None of this was calculated to help the students. If the poem's value subsisted in
form rather than meaning, they couldn't very well write about it without knowing a
lot more than they did about the history of poetic forms. And approacheslike Wilbur's,
while resonant for literary scholars, merely confirm in students' minds that the kinds
of really meaningful things one says about literature are "over their heads," participating in a conversation they have only just begun to sample themselves and which
they are unready to join. It was easy to see they were fully aware of this: their body
language and their faces betrayed their irritated resignation. This was what "English" was all about, just as they had always suspected: trading in mysteries they
would never fully understand, searching for "hidden meanings" that, once found,
still wouldn't be "meanings" to them.
As I looked at the group's wary, defensive, hostile faces, I felt an irrational annoyance myself. After all, I had made the assignment and they had chosen the poem
in good faith (to tell the truth, I hadn't really thought that anyone would actually
choose to write about "Annabel Lee"); there shouldn't be this basic problem, this
impotency of expression. And even if I could help them toward an approach that
might allow them to say somethingabout the poem, they and I both knew that that
something wouldn't be enough to flesh out a whole paper. So I was annoyed with
them, for their lack of imagination; with the book, for including a poem that offered
so little to explicate; with myself, for making the assignment and for lacking a sense
of how to proceed. Out of this anger, really, I asked a question that changed the
course of the paper and the class for these four students and for me. I wish I could
say that there was a deliberate pedagogy behind the question, but there wasn't:I was
upset and wanted more than anything to say something that would shake them out
of their resignation and prove that the poem offered scope for exciting speculation
(even though I was not sure myself that it did).
The question I asked was, "OK, so who killed Annabel Lee?" For a moment, no
one spoke. Then one of the group members-the student who had found the criticism and who, I would graduallydiscover, read with great insight and imaginationsaid, "No one killed her. It says in the poem she died of a chill."
Another student responded: "No, it says the angels sent the chill. They killed
her."
Third student: "Angels don't kill people. It was her 'highborn kinsmen' that
took her away. I bet they killed her."
First student: "The 'highborn kinsmen' are the angels. It's just a way of describing them that makes her seem like an angel too."
Fourth student: "I don't know. When I was in high school, I had a friend who
dated this really rich kid? And his parents broke them up? She was, like, just devastated for a whole semester. She, like, stopped eating and lost, I don't know, forty
pounds."
Who KilledAnnabelLee?
Me: "So you're saying this might be a poem about two people from different
social classes involved in a relationship? And her family breaks it up?"
Third student: "Yeah-they can't stop her from marrying him so they kill her."
First student: "Or maybe they take her back to live with them when she gets
sick, and she dies there. They probably told her that he wouldn't be able to take care
of her and now they think they are right, but she dies of a broken heart on top of
being sick."
Me: "So how do you think he feels about this?"
Second student: "I think he flips out. That's why he goes to sleep with her in the
tomb."
Fourth student: "Yeah.It's like, they think they were right but he knows that
they killed her by breaking her heart."
First student: "Maybe they did kill her, sort of. Maybe they wanted her to die to
prove they were right all along about marrying him, so, like, maybe they didn't take
very good care of her. You can let a person die without actually killing them."
Me: "This is interesting! I'm just wondering about the narrator, though. Is he
completely innocent?"
First student: "Yeah.I wondered why he said, 'Yes, this is the reason, as all men
know,' [that is, the reason she died] twice in the poem."
Me: "Yeah.Why does he repeat himself?And why does he say 'as all men know?"'
Second student: "Maybehe killed her? You know how you will keep saying your
brother did something bad when you did it yourself? At least, I always did."
Third student: "But why would he kill her? He loved her."
Second student: "Maybe he's into, what's it called, when you love dead people?"
Fourth student: "Oh, gross."
First student: "Because he doesn't so much love her, he wants to have her. And
her family keep trying to take her away, so maybe he'd rather have her dead than
lose her alive."1
The tumbling out of interpretations in this conversation was unprecedented in
my experience. It seemed that all at once, the students had gone from having nothing to say about the poem to being able to articulate two or three different, fullfledged "hidden meanings" about a deeper story of which the poem was just a surface
layer-potentially deceptive and misleading, disguising a variety of gothic situations
and behaviors. Where had these readings come from? Not from a laborious explication of the poem on a line-by-line basis, clearly. When I interrogated students about
the sources of their insights, it quickly became apparent that there were three: TV,
especially shows like Buffy the VampireSlayer, The X-Files, Roswell,Dawson'sCreek,
soap operas, and dramas on the Lifetime network; movies, especially horror films
and erotic thrillers; and their own life experiences and those of their friends. These
are the literacies-the kinds of "text" that students are already familiar with and
285
286
College English
know how to read (though not in academic ways)-when they come to college. They
weren't so much "interpreting""AnnabelLee" as they were rewriting it-reimagining
it in terms of genres, styles, and themes with which they were intimately familiar.
When I asked the question "Who killed Annabel Lee?" I was in effect asking them,
"What would be going on here if this poem were a TV show, for example, of the
kind you like to watch?" Shifting the poem from its sacrosanct place in the academy
to the freewheeling world of gothic soaps had the effect of liberating the students'
ability to imagine the poetic world and its characters.
After more discussion, it was clear that the students had articulated at least two
basic theories about the death of Annabel Lee and about the meaning of the poem as
an utterance in response to that death. Theory 1: Annabel Lee was killed by the
narratorhimself (in some sense), and the poem represents his attempt to assuage his
guilt and assert his love as evidence that he is not culpable. Theory 2: Annabel Lee
was killed by-or at least died under the auspices of-her highborn kinsmen (literal
kinsmen), and the poem represents the narrator'sanguish and anger at his exclusion
from her life and death.
It's worth noting here that while traditional interpretations of the poem see the
highbornkinsmen as a metaphor for the angels who come to take Annabel Lee to
heaven, the students had evolved an interpretation that saw the angelsas a metaphor
for the highbornkinsmen,perhaps because some of the students didn't see angels as
real enough to operate in the "real"world of "who killed Annabel Lee" while other
students don't accept the premise that angels could kill someone out of jealousy. At
any rate, all of the students saw the highbornkinsmen as real people, members of
Annabel Lee's extended family, and therefore saw her and her family as wealthy and
the narrator,by implication, as poor.
Two of the students in the group pursued the notion that the narrator was
himself responsible for Annabel Lee's death. One approached the theory literally,
wanting to argue that the narratorwas deranged-possibly a "psycho killer" (he was
probably too young to remember the Talking Heads song with the same name-I
never thought to ask him at the time). The other saw the death of Annabel Lee as
resulting from her decision to disobey her family'swishes and to marry her lowborn
lover, the narrator,who wasn't as able to protect her from her own fragility and illhealth as her family, or a richer husband, might have been. As I have tried to show,
both of these interpretations grew not from reading the poem more carefully (although eventually the students would do so), but from freewheeling discussions of
the kinds of situations that seem to result from different kinds of marriage-to disturbed people or across class lines, in this case.
The next step involved looking closely at the poem for evidence of their theories. As they did so, the student who wanted to argue that the narratorhimself killed
Who KilledAnnabelLee?
Annabel Lee pointed again to the poem's strange insistence that "angels" killed the
girl. We had been explicitly looking for signs of a guilty conscience:
With a love that the wingedseraphsof heaven
Covetedher andme.
And this was the reasonthat,long ago,
In this kingdomby the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud,chilling
My beautifulAnnabelLee;
The angels,not halfso happyin heaven,
Went envyingher andmeYes!- thatwas the reason(asall men know,
In this kingdomby the sea)
That the wind cameout of the cloudby night,
Chillingandkillingmy AnnabelLee.
As I noted in the general conversation, this student had observed that the poem
seems to double back on itself, to reexplain what it has already explained. And then
the interjection, "Yes!"and the insistence that the explanation being offered is commonly accepted as true ("as all men know") sound like a guilty person inventing an
excuse as he goes, perhaps talking himself into it. I asked the student if he thought
the narrator of the poem had himself killed Annabel Lee, or if he thought that perhaps the narrator'smarrying Annabel Lee and taking her away from her "highborn"
life, where she might have been protected from the affliction that killed her, might
not be what he felt guilty about (another student in the group wanted to argue this
idea). The first student favored the idea of the narrator as a religious maniac and a
psychotic killer, arguing that anyone who sleeps with a corpse is crazy enough to
have done anything. I myself favored what I saw as the more "restrained"theory, but
I had to admit that the evidence the student cited could certainly be said to support
his ideas within the framework of popularly understood psychology. In short, the
student's interpretation was consistent with the understanding of human behavior
and motivation in the student's own discourse community.
The third student argued that Annabel Lee had, in effect, been killed by her
"highborn kinsmen," who had objected to the marriage in the first place, and who
snatched Annabel Lee back to their home or perhaps a fancy hospital as soon as they
saw the chance, where she died as much from a broken heart as from her illness.
This student built her case around the stanza that shows Annabel Lee sick but not
yet dead:
[...] this was the reasonthat,long ago,
In this kingdomby the sea,
287
288
CollegeEnglish
A wind blew out of a cloud,chilling
My beautifulAnnabelLee;
So thather highbornkinsmencame
And bore her awayfromme,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdomby the sea.
In this construction of the narrative, we discussed several variations or possibilities,
each one more gothic than the next: the kinsmen took a sick Annabel Lee and shut
her up in a hospital (the "sepulchre,"seen metaphorically, or at least conflated with
the hospital), where she died; the kinsmen took a sick Annabel Lee and shut her up
in their mansion, where, isolated from medical care or true love, she died (the "sepulchre" is again metaphorical); or the kinsmen took a sick Annabel Lee and buried
her alive (this is a popular theme in TV shows like TheX-Files and Buffy the Vampire
Slayer).In any case, the kinsmen's behavior is seen as vengeful and retributive, a kind
of ultimate "We told you so," directed at the willful young lovers. The student who
advanced this reading was very happy with it; when I asked her if the poem resonated with her own experience, she reiterated the story of her high-school friend
who had been involved in a relationship that cut across class lines, in which the
families had meddled and which they had ultimately brought to a close. The gothic
elements in the readings would be familiar to anyone conversant with soap operas,
horror movies, romances, and other forms of popular literature.
As the students wrote drafts explaining their readings of the poem, the problem
of the purpose and nature of the kind of writing that we were trying to do reemerged.
Two of the students in the group were bothered by the apparent contradiction between what they were trying to say about "Annabel Lee" and the received tradition
of interpretation of the poem, which both of them had consulted in the early stages
of their inquiry (the third student-the one who favored the "psycho killer"theorywas certain he was right). That is, the students were aware that interpreting a work
of literature usually had something to do with establishing the "truth"of that work,
rather than playing imaginative games with latent possibilities. All of them wanted
to know "whether anyone had said anything like this about the poem before, and if
not, why not?" I helped the students gather all of the articles we could find that
presented readings of the poem, and none of them came remotely close to suggesting mysterious plots or deranged narrators. In addition, the students, who had alreadylearned some things about Poe's life-his unhappy marriageto his young cousin,
her untimely death, and so on-were beginning to think that the critical readings of
the poem were "right" and that they were wrong.
My attempts to convince the students that I wanted to read "whatthey thought"
did not dispel the dissonance they felt: clearly, in their minds, compliance with an
authoritative reading of the poem was as important as playing out an imaginative
Who Killed Annabel Lee?
construction of their own. This resistance on their part to acknowledging the validity of their own thinking was not completely unexpected; as Toby Fulwiler has written, "before venturing an opinion [. .. most students need] a safety net [... .] to begin
to trust their own perceptions" (172-73). In this case, the absence of any large-scale
critical disagreement about the poem interfered with attempts to reassure students
that a forum for their opinion really existed. So I cast about for an approach that
would free them to develop their ideas.
My first suggestion was that together, we had noticed something earlier readers
had not-we were the first to see the darkerworld of the poem. This idea struck me
as exciting and potentially liberating. It didn't strike the students the same way. At
this point, they were becoming shrewd enough to realize that they had imported
their own world into the world of the poem, and that the biographical evidence
from Poe's life militated against such liberties. I argued that writers often transform
the facts of their own experience to make fictions that are imaginatively rather than
literally appealing, but I could see that the students were not convinced.
My next suggestion-that they think of the "gothic" elements of the poem as a
kind of dark undercurrent to the text-left them even more unhappy. Though they
understood the idea, it seemed to them insufficient ground on which to base a paper.
I was coming to realize that students have complex and perhaps even contradictory
expectations about what they write when they write about literature-that it be original in some sense, but that it not contradict the received wisdom about the text, and
that it also address some significant or major aspect of the work's meaning. Writing
about emotional nuance failed to meet their criterion of major significance. Finally,
we hit upon an idea that appealed to the students. One of them (the student who
favored the "psycho killer" theory) reminded us that Poe's short stories were very
much like the readings of the poem they were advancing. I suggested that Poe's
fiction legitimized their interpretations of the poem, and the idea that Poe might
have tried to do in his poem what he had done with famous success in his short
stories appealed strongly to them. With this insight, the papers were able to proceed. While space prevents me from presenting all of the papers in any detail, I
would like to quote briefly from one of them because it shows how impressively the
student has entered the conversation of literary argument:
[In the third stanza]the speakersays, "a wind blew out of the clouds chilling my
beautifulAnnabelLee."He only says that it chills her, and this meansthat she has
becomesickbut is still alive.He goes onto saythat"herhighbornkinsmencameand
boreher awayfromme."When he says"herhighbornkinsmen,"the readeris ableto
infer that Annabelis from a much higher class of people than the speaker,and the
upperclassmost likelyfrownsupon theirlove. [....] In the fourthstanza,the speaker
saysthatangelssent a wind duringthe night thatkillsAnnabelLee, andhe also says,
"Yes!That wasthe reason."He soundslike he is tryingto convincehimselfor some-
289
290
CollegeEnglish
one else[;...] he soundsextremelydefensive.When he uses the word"angels"[...] I
think he is talkingaboutthe "highbornkinsmen."[. . .] AnnabelLee'supper-class
familymaybe blamingthe speakerfor her death,andhe, in turn,blamesthem. (Fell
2-3)
Many features that we look for in student writing are in evidence here: a tonally
appropriate argument in favor of a reading based on evidence in the text, that sometimes considers as small a clue as a single word and that is nuanced and subtle.
Perhaps the most surprising result of my accidental experiment with student
literacies and the reading of Poe's poem is the possibility that students have something to contribute to the way the poem has been interpreted since its earliest reception. No criticism that I know of has ever suggested that the speaker of the poem
may be an unreliable narrator or that the poem may offer us deep psychological
complexity beneath a slippery, ironic surface. As I suggested earlier, in authoritative
readings "Annabel Lee" is accepted at face value as a poignant lyric. But I find myself persuaded by the students' arguments that the persona of the poem seems to
them either defensively covering something up, or enraged by the machinations of
snobbish relatives who have stolen his love away:
Yes!-that was the reason(as all men know,
In this kingdomby the sea)
That the wind cameout of the cloudby night,
Chillingandkillingmy AnnabelLee.
For me, these lines now ring with either savage irony or guilty knowledge-or both.
Considering that Poe made effective use of both devices in his prose (the narrator's
scathing irony in "The Cask of Amontillado" and his tortured guilt in "The TellTale Heart," for example), I now find it hard to think that he was not doing so in this
poetic tale of love and death. And how much better-suited to the bizarre but psychologically acute ending of the poem, with the lover sleeping by the side of his bride
"in her tomb by the sounding sea" are the students' "gothic" readings of the events
than the criticism that finds in the poem a plangent lyric about undying love!
The world of academic discourse is neither entirely strange nor entirely familiar to first-year students attending the midsized regional state university where I
teach, and it's clear to me that familiarity with this world is perhaps the single biggest influence on the success of students' writing in first-year composition courses
that require traditionally academic forms like writing about literature. Occasionally,
I have a student who is thoroughly familiar with the genre. Interestingly, these are
often talented high school students taking college courses, students who have clearly
been exposed to this mode of discourse for many years and are comfortable moving
through it. On a typical first draft, where most students write a 300- to 400-word
summary of a short story or poem (probably the genre of writing about literature
Who KilledAnnabelLee?
they are most familiar with), these better-trained students write a 1,000- to 1,500word analysis of a character or pattern of symbolism or other similarly "literary"
topic.
For students relatively unfamiliar with the academic varieties of writing about
literature, a course built around this kind of writing is a serious challenge-a challenge with real political and social implications. Students who typically do reasonably well in a first-semester composition course writing short essays based on the
rhetorical modes of development, for example, often struggle to pass the secondsemester course (writing about literature), raising questions about the validity of the
course sequencing and creating frustration among students and teachers alike. More
significantly, the reliance of many Georgia students on scholarships is also jeopardized by a second-semester composition course, which, when it focuses on analysis
of literature, tends to produce relatively low class grades.
My class's experiences with Poe's poem suggest that one way to make writing
about literature a more successful experience for first-year students is to open it to
the kinds of information that students already command, allowing them to bring to
their writing the confidence and conviction that flows from knowledge-if, that is,
they can be made to believe in the application of their knowledge as valid. (I am
constantly reminded that students are more complex in their understanding, in their
values and standards, than I usually assume.) Freeing students from the silencing
effects of hegemonic discourses has been the goal of a body of theory that springs
from writers like Freire, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and Bourdieu, among others. All of
these encourage writing teachers to empower students' own literacies, the knowledge and language they bring with them to the academy. Unfortunately, writing
about imaginative literature in the composition classroom is usually seen, either by
the teacher or, ironically,by the students themselves, as a deferralto canonical knowledge. For this reason, many writing teachers argue in favor of other kinds of writing
for first-year composition classes. And yet, there is the occasional experience like
the one recounted here in which the knowledge that students already have becomes
a key to the unlocking of the mystery of a text and the genuine construction of
meaning.
Is there any way to "programatize"the approach that worked so serendipitously
with "Annabel Lee?" I offer the following rough list as a starting place for reinventing writing about literature in the composition classroom:
1. As far as I can tell, it doesn'tmatterwhat workswe choose to read-old or new, the
canonor multicultural
readings,themesappropriateto youthor age,fictionor poetry.If
shownthe way,studentswill readanyworksin light of whattheyknowaboutpeopleand
life from the sourcesof knowledgethey have experienced:TV and the movies, their
own lives,churchandpopularculture.Sometimesthe leastlikelyworkswill open themselvesto this kind of interpretation-as did "AnnabelLee."One goal of teachingis to
291
292
CollegeEnglish
develop indicators about works that will help teachers recognize whether or not those
works will lend themselves to students' readings.
2. We have to "enable" students to access the knowledge they have. Comparing works of
literature to television shows, explicitly or implicitly, for example, mediates between the
world of knowledge the academy has to offer and the kinds of knowledge students bring
with them already. (I should add that I am not advocating the abandoning of academic
literacies for a kind of watered-down pop culturalism; I'm speaking to first-year composition and to the way we build bridges between the wider culture and the academic
culture.) For example, if we were reading "Young Goodman Brown," we might ask, "If
this were an episode of the X-Files, what would the issues be? What would Mulder say
about the coven in the woods? What would Scully say? What would the cigarette-smoking man's role in the proceedings likely be?" This approach is challenging because often
teachers know as little about the culture students are coming from as students know
about the culture of the academy. Here is where I think graduate students are often
particularlywell situated to bridge the gap between cultures. Often close in age to their
students, they may share common experiences and popular cultural knowledge.
3. We can't assume that what I have been calling studentliteraciescomprise a coherent body
of knowledge in the way that, for example, E. D. Hirsch talks about "culturalliteracy" as
comprising a more or less particular body of knowledge. Some students will know The
X-Files and others won't; some will know soap operas and others won't. And depending
on the region of the country, kind of university or college, and typical student population, popular culture literacies may vary in kind and in importance. So writing project
options need to be flexible and numerous.
4. Our writing assignments should make explicit that we want to see students constructing
the meanings of works of literature in light of their own knowledge. Asking students to
reimagineworks of literature in contexts appropriate to their own cultures seems to me
to be the key activity. Interestingly, students seem drawn to this on their own account. In
a different class of mine, in which we write film reviews, several students have reviewed
the updated cinematic version of Romeoand Juliet that casts the action in a modern
urban setting. They all seem delighted with the conflation of Shakespearean text and
modern popular culture.
Literature and the other arts are among the most powerful and mysterious ways of
knowing that human beings produce; as a result, attempts to explain literature have
developed into such a rich complement of approaches that, as Judith Langer has
remarked,"[N]o one approach[....] has emergedto dominatecontemporaryscholhold the key to an aparship"(74). As I have tried to suggest, studentsthemselves
proach to literary texts that might open the door to interpretation. The use of that
key seems to me most appropriate when students are asked to write about literature
in first-year composition classes.
NOTE
1. Not a verbatimtranscript.I havereconstructedthe discussionrelyingin parton memorybut
alsoconflatingtwo or moredaysof groupdiscussion,one-on-oneconferences,and/orpeerreviewcommentson draftsof papersto dramatizethe progressionof thought.
Who KilledAnnabelLee?
WORKS
293
CITED
1900-1985.Carbondale:
inAmerican
A. Rhetoric
andReality:
Southern
Berlin,James
Colleges,
Writing
Instruction
IllinoisUP, 1987.
abouta RhetoricalSoluSomeRhetoricAddressedto Cryptorhetoricians
Booth,WayneC. "'LITCOMP':
tion to a RhetoricalProblem."Homer 57-80.
Bouman,Kurt."Re:WritingandLiterature."
Postingsto WritingProgramAdministrators
listserv,Oct.
1999.http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html.
andLitandComposition:Alliesor Rivalsin the Classroom?"
Corbett,EdwardP."Literature
Composition
erature:
BridgingtheGap.Ed. WinifredBryanHorner.Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1983. 168-84.
Elbow,Peter."The Culturesof LiteratureandComposition:What CouldEachLearnfromthe Other?"
English64 (2002):533-46.
College
Empric,JulienneH. "ANote on 'AnnabelLee."'PoeStudies6 (1973):26.
Farrar,
Julie."Re:WritingandLiterature."
Postingto WritingProgramAdministrators
listserv,Oct. 1999.
http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html.
New York:Penguin,1972.
Freire,Paolo.Pedagogy
oftheOppressed.
andLearningin theDisciFulwiler,Toby."WritingandLearningAmericanLiterature."
Writing,Teaching,
plines.Ed. AnneHerringtonandCharlesMoran.New York:MLA, 1992.156-73.
the Disciplines:Literatureand the Boundariesof Knowledge."College
Gamer,Michael."Fictionalizing
English57 (1995):281-86.
Gellis, Mark."Re:Writingand Literature."
Postingsto WritingProgramAdministrators
listserv,Oct.
1999.http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html.
Gomori,George."TheMythof YouthfulLovein E. A. Poe's'AnnabelLee' andJeno Dsida's'Serenadefor
A Journalof Comparative
andGeneral
Ilonka."'NewComparison:
LiteraryStudies9 (1990):117-27.
Heikinen,Denise."FromFreireto Bakhtin:The Roleof Carnivalin the CompositionClassroom."
Journal
1.2(1998).2 Feb.2000http://www.wmc.edu/academics/library/pub/jcp/issuel-2/
Pedagogy
ofCritical
heikinen.html.
Horner141-47.
Hirsch,E. D., Jr."Reading,Writing,andCulturalLiteracy."
Horner1-13.
Homer,WinifredBryan."HistoricalIntroduction."
andLiterature:
, ed. Composition
BridgingtheGap.Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1983.
of
in AcademicDisciplines."Writing,
Judith.
"Speaking
Langer,
Knowing:Conceptionsof Understanding
in theDisciplines.
Ed. AnneHerringtonandCharlesMoran.New York:MLA,
andLearning
Teaching,
1992.69-85.
Lindemann,Erika."Freshman
Composition:No Placefor Literature."
College
English55 (1993):311-16.
. "ThreeViewsof English101."College
English57 (1995):287-302.
Parker,WilliamRiley."WhereDo EnglishDepartmentsComeFrom?"College
English28 (1967):339-51.
Postingsto WritingProgramAdministrators
Pryor,Chet."Re:WritingandLiterature."
listserv,Oct. 1999.
http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html.
New Haven:YaleUP,
Scholes,RobertE. TheRiseandFallofEnglish:Reconstructing
Englishasa Discipline.
1998.
Schwalm,David."Re:WritingandLiterature."
Postingsto WritingProgramAdministrators
listserv,Oct.
1999.http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html.
Literaturein CompositionClassrooms?"
Steinberg,ErwinR. "Imaginative
College
English57 (1995):26680.
Tate,Gary."APlaceforLiteraturein FreshmanEnglish."College
English55 (1993):317-21.
Studiesin English3 (1982):1-13.
Wilbur,Richard."Poeandthe Artof Suggestion."University
ofMississippi