Overall Reactions About Wilhelm's Text

Before coming into English 4800, as I have mentioned before, I probably would have taught literature solely from a New Critical perspective because that is how I was taught to read literature. My has this class changed that. Instead of delving immediately into the various critical theories that I one day hope to employ, Wilhelm is a nice introduction into one of these theories known as Reader Response. It is a worthwhile text for any class that is aimed at the the teaching of literature, and I really think that reading this one first enabled me to be more receptive to the two texts that followed. Reader response seems like the most natural way to get reluctant readers "hooked" into reading literature by connecting their personal lives to the events and characters described in a text, so this was a good first read for me to get me thinking about alternatives to New Critical Theory. Activities referenced in Wilhelm that I would definitely implement throughout the course of a year include role-playing, dramatization, relating to characters by writing about a situation as if they were that character, guided imagery and filling in inter- and extra-textual gaps to name a few.
Although I feel the text was a very reader-friendly text, it seemed to become very repetitive during the last few chapters. Several of the sub-headings in the latter chapters were continually used, and I feel like the book could have been condensed. Not to say that there wasn't a lot of really good information contained within the text, rather it would have been simply enough to combine a few chapters.