Invasion of the annoying aunts

Yesterday a student e-mailed to ask whether she needs to know the titles and authors of the works covered on the exam my American Lit Survey students are taking right now. Well, um, yeah. I wonder now, though, how I managed to make it through three weeks of classes without ever indicating that it's helpful to know the title and author of the work under discussion.

The exam includes only a few quotation identification questions, pairing quotes from different works and asking students to identify the titles and authors and then briefly compare the ideas expressed in the quotes, but the titles and authors are worth only one point each while the comparison is worth six. It would certainly be possible to pass this exam and even make a pretty good grade without knowing titles and authors, but we're talking about a dozen works here. How difficult would it be to learn their names?

My favorite section on the exam deals with gender roles reflected in late-nineteenth-century literature. Two questions, ten points each: 1. Imagine that Winterbourne (from "Daisy Miller") and the husband from "The Yellow Wallpaper" could get together to talk about women. What would they talk about? On what points would they agree or disagree? 2. Imagine that Daisy Miller could get together with the woman narrating "The Yellow Wallpaper" to talk about men. What would they talk about? On what points would they agree or disagree?

I've never used these particular questions before but I love questions that require students to put two works into conversation with each other. Knowing the authors and titles might help, but I'm really more interested in whether they can synthesize information from two works and draw conclusions based on a deep understanding of the texts.

But that doesn't mean I don't care whether they know authors and titles. By the time we've lived with these authors for three weeks, I hope my students know them as well as they know their roommates, but I fear they view these authors more as a host of annoying great-aunts who totter out of the nursing home periodically for a rare family visit before disappearing again into anonymity. When all the people who loved these aunts enough to know their names are dead, they'll fade into obscurity as if they had never even existed.