I completed my Literature degree with the end of Fall quarter in December, and I've moved away from Santa Barbara! Since I'm not at CCS anymore, Lit Collab no longer exists as a weekly club, but it may be picked up and led by another student if people feel a need for it again. We founded the group in Spring 2007 in response to perceived problems, so in one way, it's good when that interest fades. Somehow I made a bunch of good friends along the way. ♥
Over my years at CCS, I discussed the Literature program in depth with my advisors (Robyn Bell and James Donelan), Lit Collab members, and other friends, usually trying to come up with ways to improve the major. Here are some of these ideas in writing in the hope that they will continue being discussed.
Note that these are just recommendations, limited by my single viewpoint as a student. I've sometimes been frustrated by aspects of this college, but as a whole it's been even more than what I imagined as a bored high school student thinking about the perfect university. I love CCS, and I'm happy I got to contribute to it in a few ways.
Advising
Advisors should regularly ask their advisees what they think of the Lit program and how it should be improved, starting during their freshman year. (Some advisors do this already, but not all of them.) Encouraging students to think critically about their educations and involving them in discussions of teaching styles, curriculum, etc. supports the mission of CCS: helping students think for themselves and produce their own educations instead of simply accepting knowledge.
Advisors should encourage their advisees to take core classes from a broad range of instructors in both CCS and L&S (English, Comp Lit, etc). Every instructor has something different to teach.
Advisors should follow up with all of their former advisees 1 year and 5 years after they graduate, probably through simple personal emails, and compile the results into a document discussed by the Lit program and used to help fine-tune future advising and program choices. Do they have jobs, and if so, where are they working? Are they in graduate school? Are their careers in progress? Are they satisfied with the preparation that CCS Lit gave them? Do they want to start donating money to CCS?
Advisors should encourage all students to consider taking a CCS Book Art class in their freshman or sophomore years as a way to think more deeply about writing and reading. Setting a poem by hand with metal type makes a person consider every single comma; learning to sew and glue eight different ways to structure a book encourages a person to think about innovative ways to structure narratives.
Advising is central to CCS, but I’ve heard many students complain about their advisors for all kinds of reasons. I’d like students to have to write an anonymous advisor evaluation at the end of every year, much like class evaluations: formally collected, typed up, compiled, and distributed back to those advisors (and the Lit program as a whole).
Requirements
The Lit program should produce and distribute a one-page document that explains to students why they have to take Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. Students complain about the arbitrariness and old-white-men bias of this requirement, but there are reasons for it: they are a symbolic remnant of traditional liberal arts curriculums, they changed the English language, etc. I picture this document with one paragraph from each instructor explaining his/her thoughts about this requirement, putting it into a broader academic context.
Lit Symposium should present Marvin Mudrick once a year (or couple of years), with a video or a reading of his writing and/or transcribed classes. A lot of students graduate from CCS Lit having barely heard of the interesting person who established much of what CCS is today, and I think they missed out. I’ve benefited from reading about his ideas and thinking critically about them both on their own and as embodied in the current Lit program. This remembering shouldn’t be worshipful or antagonistic, just educational.
Lit Symposium should also have a student reading once a year or so, probably in Winter quarter. There are usually some student-organized readings in Spring quarter for Spectrum and Teeth, and sometimes people create other reading events in the evenings, but it’d be great for students have more chances to share their work with their peers in a large-ish and somewhat formal setting. It could work like this: the Lit Symp organizer would email a call for submissions to all Lit students a couple weeks before the reading, and then the organizer would review the submissions and approve 10-12 diverse short pieces or excerpts.
The Senior Portfolio project is important and should be more rigorously defined. I imagine it like this: each student would produce at least two copies of a portfolio book of some kind, to be determined in conjunction with his or her advisor. This may be: a collection of poetry xeroxed and stapled; a set of academic essays and short stories, interspersed with drawings by a friend, bound by the Alternative Copy Shop; a themed gathering of photography and memoir writing hand-bound with a technique learned in a Book Arts class; or anything like that. They would usually include an introduction and a list of important classes the student has taken while at CCS. One copy stays at CCS in a small library of portfolio books created by graduates, available for all interested current Lit students to browse and take inspiration (maybe on a shelf in the CCS office or something like that).
More small group projects outside of class might be able to help Literature students get to know each other better. A sense of community in the Literature program is very important. Each student’s Literature friends contribute to his or her individual success through informal discussions, writing exchanges, class recommendations, etc.
The program itself
Literature is too large, diverse, and personal of a field to approach with a rigorously defined system. Throwing students into the deep end with serious classes starting as freshmen and teaching them via modeling by instructors and other students in discussion-based classes, with lots of reading and lots of writing, is the most effective way I’ve seen to teach literature. We should continue improving this system with good visiting instructors and enthusiastic new students.
Some aspects of the CCS Lit program aren’t well explained, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work. I’m in favor of incremental changes, not drastic ones.
CCS Lit should offer core classes that engage with a broad range of approaches, subjects, and time periods, so that each student can piece together a solid and specialized overview of the field by the time he or she graduates. This may include classes involving feminist theory, postcolonial scholarship, postmodernism, and psychoanalytic theory as well as the literatures of many nations and cultures and eras.
What’s the difference between the L&S English program and the CCS Literature program? I’d really like to be able to provide a solid answer for this when people ask me, respectful of the perspectives and goals of both of these programs.
