"Why We Teach Literature"
Charles Temple, Ph.D.
Professor of Education
Hobart & William Smith Colleges
and
Co-Director,
Reading & Writing for Critical Thinking Project
In a university lecture hall in one of the Commonwealth of Independent States of Central Asia a teacher was beginning her first address to a class of a hundred teachers-to-be on the subject of "Why We Teach Literature." My interest was deep, and so was my gratitude to this teacher for setting out the founding assumptions of her discipline. I appealed to the Russian translator not to spare a syllable.
The lecturer described what was clearly a long and exalted tradition of teaching (Russian) literature, a tradition that had gradually grown into two large camps (This was only the first lecture--surely after a few more sessions each of those camps would look more various).
One of the two camps was labeled the academic tradition, in which the treatment of literature in the curriculum was shaped by the science of philology, and the reading of every literary work had to be justified on the grounds of its contribution to the students' understanding of the logic and stylistics of literature. The teacher must be careful, according to this tradition, not to let students entertain thoughts about a work--such as the content or theme--that would lead them away from these scientific concerns. The other tradition was called by the Russian term vospitanya, or upbringing. Teachers who work in this tradition view literature as a means of moral and ethical instruction. Here, time should be devoted to discussion of the moral content of the stories, as well as their aesthetic appeal. "The teacher in this tradition" (say my notes) "should cultivate moral and aesthetic values as well as scientific concerns."
There you have a very rudimentary presentation of the two camps (again, without benefit of the further qualifications the lecturer surely brought to both camps in later lectures). The lecture made me think of a similar talk I would have been giving that very week, had I been home teaching in my university and not traveling on behalf of the Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking Project. Since this project demonstrates to teachers a set of pedagogical approaches that include critical thinking and active engagement of students, I wondered to what extent either or both of these traditions would support critical and interactive approaches to teaching literature. That is, if these young teachers-to-be found themselves in an RWCT workshop, would the methods they encountered there make sense to them, given what they had learned about the nature of literature instruction?
Paradigms similar to both views of the literature teacher's profession have been important in the West, too. Western teachers will recognize the philological tradition in the scores of analytical terms about literature that our students have had to learn about and apply. But they will also feel the uneasy paradox of the teacher who is put in the position of banishing human concerns from the humanities. They will recognize the tradition of vospitanya in the best-selling Book of Virtues edited by William Bennett (1993). But by making that comparison, they may worry about the didacticism that lurks near whenever a teacher sets out to 'cultivate moral values' (In the West, even before the multi cultural debates about whose values we should cultivate, there was research [e.g., Hartshorn and May, 1928-30] that cast doubt on the efficacy of any direct teaching of values, and led psychologists and educators to pursue instead the cognitive developmental strategies, such as the moral reasoning approaches of Kohlberg [1963] and Damon [1977]).
Since the Dartmouth Conference of 1966 brought together teachers of literature from the British Isles and North America, many Anglophone teachers have changed their teaching to encourage more active exploration of literature by their students. As they took on more interactive methods of instruction, they have sought new paradigms for understanding what literature is, and what the teaching of literature should do. Over the last two decades, other literary traditions have been asserted in an attempt to unleash the greater power of literature as a means of expanding students' awareness of their own lives and of the world around them, and as a means of honing their critical faculties. Below we describe three related views.
The Reader Response Tradition
Just as constructivist psychologists (such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, and Gardner) emphasize a knower's acts of interpretation in deriving meaning from experience, reader response critics emphasize the reader's activity in constructing meaning from an encounter with a text. The reader response critic who is currently the favorite among North American teachers, Louise Rosenblatt (1937, 1978), holds that in any act of meaning creation from literature there are three parties. One, of course, is the text--a web of marks on the page shaped by an author. The text by itself has no meaning, however, without a reader who makes meaning in a transaction with that text, during which the reader interprets, in terms of his or her background of associations, the marks on the pages. Included in the reader's background of associations are understandings of word meanings, mental concepts and schemes for situations and events of human life, latent emotions and images, and past literary experiences (including awareness of genre, knowledge of works from various periods and nations, as well as other works by an author). As a result of the transaction between the reader and the text a third entity is created, which Rosenblatt calls the poem (in the Greek sense of poesis, "the result of an act of creation"). The poem, the text-as-interpreted, is created by the reader during a real time transaction with the text. The poem is what the reader brings to mind later when he or she reflects upon a text.
Reader response theory has five immediate implications for teaching. One underscores the importance of the reader's activity in making meaning with texts. If texts come to have meaning as a result of the reader's activity of interpretation, it follows that teachers should encourage readers to question, associate, and reflect as they read, in order to create the richest experiences of meanings, the richest poems.
Because any reader's complex of associations is unique to that reader, the poem is unique to every reader. That leads to the second implication of reader response theory. Since readers bring their own experiences to the co-construction of the poem, different poems, different interpretations of the same text, are the result of every individual act of reading. But differences also occur in individuals' interpretation of any complex phenomena--such as determining what responsible citizenship or justice or fairness means; or deciding where to draw the boundaries between those who are "like me" and "other." Individual variations of interpretation are the source of much social conflict; and here is where the study of literature can contribute to social well-being. At its best, a classroom of readers can afford the opportunity for students to explore the problems of variety in responses, understand different people's interpretations of the same text (or event), and learn to solve problems together in spite of differences of point of view (Bleich, 1975).
Here is the third implication: It follows from the reader response view that some of the literature students read and discuss should be closely relevant to the problems presented by their own lives. Literature will contribute to their ability to understand others and to transcend differences if students read about people with problems like their own: people making life choices in circumstances of uncertainty, people searching for ideals in an increasingly materialistic world, people seeking to relate to others across cultural boundaries.
Finally, reader response theory challenges traditional assumptions of authority in interpretation. If the reader brings the text to life with her or his own associations, it follows that the teacher, the jury of literary critics, and even the author must share with the reader the right to say what a text means. Once teachers realize this point, their approach to evaluation of learning must change, since it is no longer plausible to measure the extent to which students apprehended some predetermined meaning from a text. Also, problems of relativism emerge: Reasonable means must be found to decide what constitutes a justifiable response to a text, and which responses are solipsistic.
Flashlights: Literature as Illumination of Experience
There is a fifth implication of reader response criticism that deserves a separate discussion. We have so far highlighted the effects of the reader's past associations in the transaction with a text during which meaning is made. But these effects go both ways. That is, what the reader takes from the text also adds to or shapes that reader's store of associations. This, of course, is just what a constructivist learning theory would predict: We use our prior associations or cognitive schemes to interpret the world, and in the process, those schemes become more elaborate, so that our future acts of interpretation are more nuanced, capable of perceiving finer shades of meaning in our experiences.
The American psychologist Roger Brown demonstrated many years ago that we most readily recognize those things we have names for (Brown, 1958). When it not simple concepts that must be understood but phenomena as complex and subtle as the meanings of human actions, we need not just vocabulary, but larger constructs, such as those provided in literature. Frank Kermode (1975) gives a helpful lesson here. Starting from the Greek epigram, "Consider no man happy until he is dead," Kermode makes the observation that human understanding is always hampered by a lack of finality. We never know what our actions add up to in the end, and therefore what they really mean. Consider this example:
A group of scientists achieved what no one had achieved before: they released unimaginable amounts of energy by splitting atoms. Their colleagues were very proud of them. How should we feel about those inventors?
Their invention was used to destroy two cities and kill many thousands of civilians. Now many people thought those inventors were demons for unleashing a plague on the world. How should we feel about those inventors?
Later, their invention made possible a half-century long stalemate in the world's conflicts. Many people credited their invention with keeping the peace and saving lives. How should we feel about those inventors?
Eventually, perhaps inevitably, their invention got into the hands of unstable states with unstable leaders who use them to threaten whole populations. Many people are back to wishing those inventors' parents had never met. How should we feel about those inventors?
Kermode argues that our lives are like this example: just when we think we know what our actions mean, a new day dawns and brings with it conflicting implications. We crave, therefore, a sense of an ending, and we can only find such a thing in literature. The plots of the stories we read give us the constructs of actions + consequences that lend us at least a provisional sense of the meanings of the choices we make in our lives. To return to our main point then, just as words give us templates for sensing and understanding concepts, the images and plots of literature give us more elaborate templates for understanding more elaborate constructs such as motives, personalities, consequences.
Language has a receptive and a productive aspect: it allows us to understand, and also to express ourselves. The contributions of literature to the imagination also has a receptive and a productive aspect. Literature not only furnish our intellects with complex schemata that enable us to interpret the events of our lives, it also give us models with which to imagine new creations.
An old Navajo storyteller named Yellow Man described quite well this second aspect of literature, the productive aspect. An anthropologist had listened to Yellow Man recount many stories of a trickster named Glooscap, and he was perplexed: why, he wondered, does the trickster have so many different aspects to his character-- Sometimes kind, sometimes harsh, sometimes heroic, sometimes cowardly, sometimes clever, sometimes easily tricked? The storyteller had an intriguing answer ready: "If he did not do all those things, then those things would not be possible in the world." (Doty, 1986, P. 16).
The Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye (1968), made the same point about the productive aspect of literature in a less magical way. Everything, he said, must be done in the imagination before it can be done in actual life. Reading books educates the imagination: it expands our sense of the possible.
This view of literature, as schemata for understanding our lives and as food for the imagination, also has consequences for teaching. This view would suggest we encourage students to read widely, in a wide range of genres. And, among other things, our discussions of the works should draw parallels between what is described in the books and the nuances of students' lives.
"Against the Grain" of Literature
There is a darker side of literature, however, that must be considered as well. Literature has the power to pass on cultural attitudes in a largely unconscious way. As William Doty has it, any work of literature implicitly takes some stance toward the social order: that is, toward the kinds of behavior that is expected of members of different groups; or the rights and privileges that accrue or are denied to this or that category of person. A work of literature may explicitly affirm the social order, or may overtly challenge it. More commonly, however, the work may take the social order for granted, may treat the pattern of social relationships as "understood."
The anthropologist Roy Rapaport uses the concepts of mythos and logos to describe the way literature relates to the society. He argues that the stories we hear and read are
...loosely joined into a more or less coherent mythos, which, in its entirety, expresses or represents that society's logos, (its conception of the world's moral and natural order) and how it came to be (Rapaport, 1986, p. 319).
The folk tales, religious stories, canonical works of literature, historical legends, and even popular fiction we share as a people form our mythos, which conveys (without having to explain) the logos of our society, our beliefs about what is good and evil, about how our society came to be and what qualities and conditions are necessary to keep it alive, about different categories of people should relate to each other in order to maintain social harmony.
The mythos is not a single story, but a sort of fabric made up of several stories. As Rapaport points out, "any mythos is redundant." (p. 326). We hear its themes repeated again and again.
In Tales for a New America, Robert Reich gives us a vignette that does a splendid job of catching some of the repeated stereotypes that form part of the mythos that will be immediately understood by most Americans over forty years old. The following passage is given as an experiment: It is predicted that the people who are familiar with American culture will be able to fill in the gaps that have been deliberately left in this original, but highly stereotypical story. (The answers are given at the end of the passage).
George was a good man, the son of immigrants who had made their way to Marysville. They came with no money, with nothing but grim determination and hard-won freedom. Dad worked all his life in the mill; he was union; hard and proud. George was quick by nature, dogged by necessity. He studied hard at school, and after school worked long and well at anything that would bring in a few dollars. George was good at sports, but had little time for games. He had few close friends, yet was fair and decent with everyone, and quietly kind to anyone in real trouble. He never picked a fight in his life, but in the eighth grade when the town bully Albert Wade was slapping around the smallest kid in the class, George stepped between them without saying a word. He let Wade throw the first punch, then a)______________________________________________.
George finished high school in 1943, and (b)______________________________ the day he graduated. Four months later he was in Europe. On the sixth day of the Normandy invasion his squad was on patrol, passing through a French orchard when a German machine gun nest opened up from behind a stone wall, picking off the squad one by one. George broke from cover and, dodging from tree to tree, raced towards the Nazis as bullets chewed the bark and ground around him. He (c) ________________________________________________________________
and he saved his buddies, but he never wore the medals they gave him and he never talked about it much. After the war he came back to Marysville and (d)____________
___________________________________________________.
He raised (e)_____________________, and started a little construction business, which his hard work and integrity gradually made into a big construction business...(Reich, 1987, pp. 3-4).
Answers:
A) floored him with a right hand punch to the jaw
B) joined the Army
C) took out the machine gun nest with a hand grenade
D) married his high school sweetheart
E) three sons
Works that conform to such a mythos may seem so natural that they may push aside the questions we might have asked, such as: Why are men are central to the story and women made into furnishings? Is it true that a potential for violence rather than intellectual prowess is the key to success? Does success normally come to an isolated individual, rather than to one who cooperates with others?
Much of the traditional literature we have included in the school curriculum can be seen to convey unexamined the "mythos" that Rapaport talks about. So does much popular fiction for the young, by working uncritically in conformity to it.
But if stories are templates for understanding their own and other people's lives, students should learn many stories of different kinds, about all cultures and all parts of human experience. If stories also have the power to influence them without their knowing it, students should learn to examine what the stories are saying, sometimes reading against the grain. For example, they may ask what would have happened if characters had been reversed in a story (old and young, male with female, this ethnicity with that ethnicity, and so on).
Literature From Women and Other "Minorities"
Of course, not all of the literature that is read in America conforms to the mythos. Books like The Catcher in the Rye (an anti-authoritarian work about adolescence in the late 1950's) or Catch 22 (an absurdist protest to World War II) or The Color Purple (a book about the lives of African American women) work against the mythos, and have challenged the underlying conception of social order to which it points.
Also and at long last, whole categories of people who were all but invisible in the traditional "mythos" of American culture are being represented in literature. Women’s writers have become a dominant force in American literature, and are now better represented on school reading lists. Black, Asian-American, and Hispanic writers are also more commonplace--although their representation in the school curriculum is still less than their share of the population of North America. Still, educators have now recognized the imperative of multi-cultural literature. As Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) has put it, books about young people from minority groups provide "mirrors and windows:" mirrors of themselves, to children who have heretofore been invisible in the school curriculum, and windows into the lives of such children, for the majority children who still know very little about children from social groups other than their own.
Conclusion
This paper began with an account of a lecture that set out two main purposes for teaching literature: the academic or philological tradition, and the tradition of vospitanya, or "upbringing." Here, three other purposes for teaching literature have been put forward. First, it was argued that since meaning comes about in a transaction between a reader and a text, literature instruction should encourage students to read actively and comment freely--and also use class discussions as a way of trying to understand and even transcend the differences in interpretation that come with differences in experience. Secondly, it was suggested that a major value of literature is to give readers constructs--words, metaphors, images, and plots--with which to understand what would otherwise seem to be the random phenomena of human experience; and that a complementary value was the power of literature to nourish and educate the imagination. Thirdly, the power of literature to indoctrinate was pointed to, and approaches of "reading against the grain" were advocated in those cases where hidden assumptions of works of literature, especially about the social order, might be brought to light.
In North America, these rationales for studying literature have complemented rather than replaced the traditional approaches. Teachers still honor the philological tradition by equipping students with literary terminology with which to analyze literature. However, the emphasis on analysis is not an end in itself, but rather an effort to understand the ways literature achieves its effects: that is, the activity of meaning making by human readers is still prominent, even when analytical approaches are taken. Also, teachers still teach "great books," for their moral and philosophical content and for their historical contributions to world culture. Nonetheless, those works are now approached, as Mortimer Adler put it, not because they have great answers, but because they raise great questions. Readers are increasingly invited to think along with those "great" authors, and sometimes to reach different conclusions. One major change is in the literature itself. Increasingly, along side the "great" works our students read contemporary literature: works that address contemporary life, and also works that presented the perspectives of members of both sexes, many social classes, and many ethnic groups.
Together, these rationales for teaching literature tend to favor certain pedagogical methods over others. They encourage wide reading, of a range of works--some of them contemporary, and relevant to young people's lives at the turn of the millennium, and all of them increasingly representative of both sexes and many races. They encourage active discussion, with an accent on using literature to promote understanding of one’s own life, often with attention to differences of interpretation and with the goal of promoting mutual understanding among people. They sometimes include the practice of "reading against the grain," challenging the hidden premises of works of literature.
References
Bennett, William (Ed.). The Book of Virtues. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Brown, Roger. Words and Things. Garden City, NY: Basic Books, 1958.
Damon, William. The Social World of the Child. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1977.
Doty, William G. Mythography: The Study of Myths and Ritual. University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1986.
Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Books, 1968.
Hartshorne, Hugh, and Mark May. Studies in the Nature of Character, Vols. 1-3. New York: Macmillan, 1928-1930.
Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Kohlberg. Lawrence. "The Development of Children’s Operations Toward a Moral Order: I. Sequence in the Development of Moral Thought." Vita Humana, 6, 11-33, 1963.
Rapaport, Roy. "Desecrating the Holy Woman: Derek Freeman's Attack on Margaret Mead." American Scholar, 55, 3, summer, 1986, pp. 313-347.
Reich, Robert. Tales for a New America. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. New York: Modern Language Association, 1937.
The Reader, the Text, and the Poem. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978.
Sims Bishop, Rudine. "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." Perspectives, 6, ix-xi, 1990.