THE CEA FORUM - Summer/Fall 2013 - Teaching Laura Kipnis’s “Love’s Labors” in Ways of Reading

Oct 15, 2026

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An academic essay for the CEA Forum (Summer/Fall 2013) explains how to teach Laura Kipnis’s “Love’s Labors” through critical reading strategies. It frames critical thinking using Nosich’s system of elements and standards, emphasizing how point of view and context function as heuristics for interpreting complex texts. Using Bartholomae and Petrosky’s anthology as practice material, it argues that Kipnis’s adultery subject reveals repression-driven misbehavior and offers discussion questions and activities for in-depth exploration.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time28 min

AccessFree to download

Teaching Laura Kipnis’s “Love’s Labors” in Ways of Reading

Critical thinking as elements and standards

Point of view and context as heuristics

Using difficult anthology texts for practice

“Love’s Labors” and psychological illumination

Defining polemic and adultery

Kipnis’s conflicted polemic and “against”

THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2013 Teaching Laura Kipnis’s “Love’s Labors” in Ways of Reading Matthew A. Fike Winthrop University Winthrop University’s sophomore “Critical Reading, Thinking, Writing” course is dedicated to teaching students the vocabulary and techniques of critical thinking.1 My colleagues and I use the fourth edition of Gerald M. Nosich’s Learning To Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum, which lays out in separate chapters the elements of critical thinking, the standards of critical thinking, and various critical thinking traits. The elements and the standards are tools whose use enhances the traits, which are intellectual qualities.2 Although critical thinking is sometimes simplistically defined as “looking at something from more than one perspective,” point of view is only one of 8+ elements in Nosich’s system. It appears on acircle, along with seven other “elements”: purpose, question at issue, assumptions, implications and consequences, conclusions and interpretations, information, and concepts. Alternatives lie in the center to indicate that multiple possibilities exist within those eight. The diagram’s shortcoming is that context, the background that frames the circle, seems not to be subject to alternatives, though it certainly is. One may consider alternative contexts along with alternatives within the eight main elements. Like point of view, context is a lens that brings things into focus; if the lenses are changed, new alternatives appear within the other elements. Pursuing analysis from one point of view or within one context is thus not about “controlling” critical thinking. THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2013 Rather, point of view and context are heuristics that provide a framework for approaching the other elements. My students practice the elements by analyzing some of the texts in David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky’s Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, whose selections, being long, non-modal, difficult, and sometimes mysterious, set it apart from other texts used in writing and critical thinking courses. A familiar example is Michel Foucault’s “Panopticism,”which is the stuff of graduate reading lists and professional scholarship; yet in Resources for Teaching, the editors report hearing from community college instructors “who talked with great pleasure about the work of students in a technical curriculum who love to quote Foucault to each other in the shop or the hallway”(77) . Such difficult texts provide excellent laboratories for reading, thinking, and writing, especially when the elements of critical thinking are part of the mix. A more engaging but still very challenging anthology piece,“Love’s Labors,” the first chapter of Laura Kipnis’s 2003 Against Love: A Polemic, is the topic of the present essay. Bartholomae and Petrosky observe that her subject, adultery, illuminates order, hierarchy, and power within the social context (Resources 90-91). In the following comment, Kipnis invites readers to think critically about such dynamics: Might we entertain the possibility that posing philosophical questions isn’t restricted to university campuses and learned tomes, that maybe it’s something everyone does in the course of everyday life—if not always in an entirely knowing fashion? If adultery is more of a critical practice than a critical theory, well, acting out is what happens when knowledge or consciousness about something is foreclosed. (399) THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2013 The passage is the key statement in “Love’s Labors”: critical thinking is for all of life, and it must shine a light into the psyche’s dark places because misbehavior arises from repression. Such illumination is especially important because adultery is something we do, more than something we think through consciously and critically. The editors, however, pay no direct attention to the psychological context, though it underpins the social. To invoke two

FAQs

What framework does the essay use to teach critical thinking?

It uses Gerald M. Nosich’s system, which organizes critical thinking into elements and standards that support critical traits.

Why does the author emphasize point of view and context?

They function as heuristics that shape how students approach and interpret the other elements, revealing different alternatives when lenses change.

How does the essay connect Kipnis’s discussion of adultery to critical thinking?

It argues that the passage treats critical thinking as life-wide work, illuminating the psyche where repression drives misbehavior, and it positions adultery as an enacted practice rather than only a consciously reasoned idea.

Oct 15, 2026

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