Word: brower
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...Defense of Reading, edited by Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier. Dutton...
...Defense of Reading presents the unhappy paradox of a badly written book about the delights of good writing. A collection of essays by present and one-time section-men in Reuben Brower's Hum 6, it has in parts all the dedication to reading as (in Brower's phrase) "active amusement, a game demanding the highest alertness and the finest degree of sensibility" one remembers from Hum 6, but --alas-- all the section-man dullness which is also a part of one's recollection of the course...
Unfortunately, this defect is far more crucial in the book than it is in the course. For the guts of Hum 6 (as of "Literature X" the imaginary Hum 6-ish course Brower outlines in his introduction to this volume) are not to be found here: the carefully prepared and skillfully guided discussions of a work of literature by which the students are brought to discover for themselves the subtleties of the work. Brower's idea of first year literature course doesn't rely very heavily on lectures, except as a means to introduce new students to the practice...
...what the book shows beyond any question is that Brower is sage indeed in not emphasizing lectures in "Literature X"-Hum 6. For in all but a few of these essays, the low-lying grey haze of section-man prose completely obscures the rich English literary landscape that lies somewhere below. Whatever effect Brower may predict "Literature X" will have on students, the essays in this volume--explicitly intended to demonstrate his ideas on teaching literature--ought to send him scurrying back to the old drawing board to plan a little re-tooling. The dullness of so many of these...
...literary badness of these essays and the fact that they were written by graduate students. But when one thinks of it, there is no reason why recently demonstrated interest and competence in solving some "literary problem" should be considered anything like adequate preparation for the difficult educational enterprise Brower describes in his essay...