Using a Text as a Lens

Back in January 2020, I had an idea: a series of blog posts about how I teach academic writing.

Well, given what happened next, you can guess how that went. That series of blog posts accumulated no further installments. But last week, I had a lesson go really well, and thought, man maybe I finally should write that up.

The Genesis of the Idea

The idea of a text as a lens was a common one in UConn's Freshman English Program, where I learned how to teach writing. Usually the way it was pushed was that literature could be a lens: you could use literature to write about ideas in the world. This idea was probably best articulated by my colleague Mary Isbell, who edited a textbook of pieces of literature that could be used as a lens and wrote the introduction.

The idea of literature as a lens—no offense to Mary—never really gelled with me but that idea of texts as as lens is one I think I first articulated in the way I'm going to discuss below when I taught a research class for Honors students, and I was trying to explain how to best make use of the sources they found. When I next returned to the Freshman English, I carried the idea there in a new form, and thence into the "basic writing" courses I taught, refining it each time of course. I based my job talk around it when applying to my current position at UT—and it's basically the way the UT Academic Writing Program conceptualizes its second unit, so it's little wonder I got hired.

So it's not my idea, and it's not even UConn's: the idea of a text as a lens is something that circulates in composition; I found it very well articulated, for example, in Rosenwasser and Stephen's Writing Analytically. Thanks to the anonymous UT adjunct who suggested that instead of calling it "lens and object" as I used to that "lens and focus" would be a better term.

How I Teach It

So the first unit here at UT focuses around textual analysis of a single text with no other source. In the second unit, I begin by introducing a "lens text," though I don't call it that right off the bat: some kind of piece of criticism that offers ideas the students can use, which fits into the theme of the course. This semester, in my science fiction–themed AWR 101 course, it's an essay by Isaac Asimov called "Social Science Fiction"; in my previous violence-themed course, I usually used the introduction to Elana Gomel's monograph Bloodscripts. At UConn, I used John Berger's Ways of Seeing or Roland Barthes's "Rhetoric of the Image." (One hiring committee once asked me why I assigned so much difficult stuff!) We spend a couple days working through this text: "coming to terms" with it, to use the concept of Joseph Harris.

Then we have a day where we go back to a "focal text": in my violence class, this was usually the Sebastian Junger podcast "War"; this semester, I used an sf story by Fonda Lee, "I (28M) Created a Deepfake Girlfriend and Now My Parents Think We're Getting Married." We discuss it briefly just for reactions, but I quickly segue into drawing a stick figure and a book on the board. What I say is something like this: 

A metaphor I like to use for academic writing is one of sight. Analysis is all about what you see in the text. You see details in whatever your text is, be that "Mother Tongues" or "San Junipero." Sometimes I call this the "focal text" because you spend the whole paper focusing on it and telling your reader what you see.

But this isn't the only way to use a text in your paper.

Then I add a lens in between the stick figure and the book.

Believe it or not, I used this exact image in my job talk at UT and somehow got hired.

I call these other texts "lenses." A metaphor ought to illuminate something, and here's what I think this one does: you don't write about these other texts. You don't focus on them. Instead, you write through them. Just as a lens lets you see objects you might not otherwise see, a lens text lets you see things you might not otherwise see. But you are still the one doing the seeing. You notice things you might not have noticed before in your focal text. The lens gives you a new way of seeing, but it's you doing the seeing.

The key to making this actually happen, I reckon, is viewing the lens as a source of questions, not answers. So then I give out this handout: (It works better in landscape format.)

I carry them through the first row, which I've filled out for them. First, you pick an idea from the lens you think might speak to the focal text in some way. The thing I try to emphasize the most is the second column: transform that idea into how or why question specific to the focal text. Asimov tells us all social science fiction does a particular thing, so we can ask how our specific sf text does this thing. Then you turn to the focal text for an example of where this happens, and then you analyze that example—using all the same analysis skills practiced in the first unit.

Then, for the second row, I give them a lens text quotation, but make them work as a class to turn it into a question, come up with a relevant passage from the focus, and analyze it. Then for the third row, they work as a class to pick a lens text quotation and turn it into a question, but I make them all pick their own focal text quotations for the third column and analyze them themselves. If we have time, they do the whole fourth row themselves, but I find we rarely have that much time.

If you think of the lens text as a source of answers, it limits you. You can't say anything Asimov doesn't say, and all you really can say about "Deepfake Girlfriend" again and again is that it is a work of social science fiction. But if you think about it as a source of new questions, it opens the focal text up. You have new questions to ask that never would have occurred to you... but the answers are purely your own, based on your careful analysis of the focal text. You have learned to see it in a new way.

Some Final Thoughts

I've given this exercise at lot in my almost seven years here at UT. Like all teaching techniques, sometimes it works better than others: they have to be game that they can work with texts in this way they haven't before. But at it's best, it's amazing: I always remember this as the day in one of classes that a student named Jack, who had been doing fine but was somewhat quiet. Something just clicked as he seized onto Elana Gomel's idea of the "ellipsis" in violent narratives and realized it explained something in Sebastian Junger's "War" but also gave him new questions to ask about it; he wrote a strong paper I still use as an example.

Last Friday, it went fine in my first class. (That class is struggling with attendance; there were only six of eleven students present. I would say that accounting for that, it went well.) I felt it went really well in the second: they were doing the thing, working hard and thinking about these texts. I think it's one of my best lessons in theory, so it's always gratifying when it actually feels like the best in practice.

Hopefully the actual papers live up to it!