At least no one's making me read Dune, I tell myself as I read my capstone students' drafts. The capstone class grounds students in a particular body of literary theory and then asks them to apply that theory to a work of their choice, and once years ago a student decided to analyze something or other about Dune, which I had read for a grad school pop culture class and loathed deeply. But I couldn't give the student helpful feedback on the basis of dimly remembered loathing, so I read it again in preparation for reading his draft. I loathed it just as much the second time through.
This time my students read a whole mess of articles about the ethics of comedy and several are examining works I know well and admire (The Importance of Being Earnest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pride and Prejudice). One is analyzing the comic distance created by the narrator's sarcasm in The Goldfinch, which I had not read before this semester. It's something like 600 pages long. Good thing I had all those spare hours while convalescing from surgery. Donna Tartt filled that long quiet week with a raucous voice telling a compelling story. I'm glad I read it, but if I'd known in advance, I could have taken that honking big book at a more leisurely pace.
My capstone students have worked their way through mastering the theoretical concepts, doing the research, writing annotated bibliographies, and writing up lit reviews and close readings, and now it's time to bring it all together into coherent drafts that I'll spend the rest of the week reading. A student emailed over the weekend and asked if it was okay if her draft was more than 3000 words long, and what could I say? Sure, she'll have to condense when she does the formal presentation, but I'd rather see a student condense a too-long paper into the most interesting elements than try to stretch a too-short paper to fill the time.
At this point, time is at a premium. Now that the drafts are done, my students will have to transform them into presentations and then revise into scholarly articles of publishable quality, an aspiration goal that many students don't believe they'll ever reach. But some do, and even an uneven effort to reach that goal often results in really terrific papers. Which is a good thing, because I'll be spending the rest of my week reading and responding to those drafts. Rewarding, yes, but that's a lot of words requiring my full attention.
Which is why I'm especially thankful that none of them take me back to Dune.
