Explicating the Obvious: Five Propositions on the Problem of Value in Literary Studies

I have observed through course of my classroom teaching that more I make my critical methodology explicit, more my students eventually say they are satisfied with classroom experience. I take this observation to be a powerful argument for explicating those assumptions and procedures regarding practice of literary criticism that many teachers subconsciously dismiss as being too obvious or too problematic to merit discussion. But there are two dangers to such explications: boredom and contradiction. We risk boring ourselves with repetition of a particular critical credo which seems to us implicit in any act of critical discourse: we know why we say what we say about literature, and saying it ought to be enough. And we also risk boring our students. The premises of criticism can often seem academic in extreme, scholastic in negative sense of word, unrelated except by precept to concrete experience of reading a given text. Thus students tend to be uninterested in such things as suspended disbelief, the intentional fallacy, the phenomenology of reading, however central such concepts may be to those who profess discipline of literary studies. This particular risk, however, is one I advocate taking. If such explanations are done well they eventually pay off in student response, however delayed response may be. But before going on to explicate obvious, I should mention second danger implicit in explication of critical principles: they may prove contradictory or controversial. This is acutely case in