In the previous chapter, I examined the nuances and methodologies for mentor-teaching in the Composition class. In this chapter, I will turn to the other facet of the English classroom as we know it: literature. After setting in place the background and theory of why the literature classroom offers equally strong mentoring opportunities as the composition classroom, I will offer some ideas for how we might put into practice the ideas of two scholars who have already paved the road for mentor-teaching through literature: Louise Rosenblatt and Sheridan Blau. That will lead me into a discussion of “canonical” texts and their applicability to a mentor- teaching context. Throughout these discussions, I will utilize actual student writing from my own teaching experiences that demonstrate students’ willingness to learn life-lessons from literature.
During a 2005 “Introduction to Literature” class, a young woman very honestly told me she felt that one is just as likely to learn life lessons from actual life experiences or even TV as one is from a difficult-to-understand piece of literature. Many of my students have said they feel this way, though this particular student was the most boisterous so far in my career. She seemed almost angry that English teachers thought “this literature stuff” was so valuable. She simply could not see the point of studying literature and felt exasperated that she was expected to study it year after year. Many students, I suspect, feel the same way, though they are not as bold in sharing their frustration. Teaching literature from a mentor-teaching stance, though, can help to bridge the perceived gaps between literature and students’ lives.
Teaching literature (as opposed to composition) comes with an equally meaningful opportunity to impact students’ real lives. After all, no great novelist wrote her masterpieces thinking how great the story would be as a classroom textbook for teaching Colonialist style or
108 Post-modern rhetorical methods. When an author writes a great text, he pours his beliefs and values into it – his social, political, spiritual…beliefs because he wants readers to examine, consider, and perhaps even adopt those beliefs. Yet the system we have been “raised” in as English teachers has subtly encouraged us to teach what can be tested, and that often means defaulting to facts about the text rather than its implications for our lives. Modernist technique, symbolism, and stream-of-consciousness style are fine aspects of literature to study, but only if they are closely linked to the potential impact on the students’ lives.
The hill we must climb in the literature classroom is steeper than that of the composition classroom when it comes to convincing certain bored students of the content’s relevance for their lives. Unlike learning writing skills, learning to decipher or decode literature is not obviously practical beyond the academic walls in its clear ability to gain one jobs and promotions. Years of trying to gain students’ interest in the literature we love can wear us down, and many spend the majority of their years as literature teachers focusing on the students who are naturally interested in the subject. Who can blame them? Most of us gravitate to people with similar interests. But if one adopts a mentor-teaching approach to the literature classroom, she might begin to see the uninterested students differently. Perhaps she will see the rolled eyes as a challenge to help that very eye-rolling student to have an “aha!” moment. If one has chosen to teach literature as a career, I need not convince him of the connection between literature and life, but I do hope to convince all would-be mentor-teachers not to abandon hope in the ability for literature to change lives, as it has changed mine, and, if you’re reading this, likely, yours.
Returning to the aforementioned student’s complaints about the uselessness of literature, I decided on a whim to allow this “off the subject” (or was it?!) discussion to lead us down an unplanned path. Standing in front of the classroom which had suddenly been overtaken by
complaints about the frivolity of studying literature, I decided to ask students to write about their “worst English classroom experiences.” Rather than trying to defend all of my English
colleagues who had frustrated this student (and other students who chimed in), I wanted to turn this conversation into a productive, reflective writing opportunity. The assignment gave our classroom conversation a chance for extension beyond the bell; it also gave the students a chance to vent and to process their frustrations constructively; and it gave me a deeper glimpse of why they found the study of literature so exasperating. Here is what one young woman wrote:
A negative experience I’ve had in an English class was last year in American Lit when we read Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I must admit, I got summaries online for almost every single chapter of the book. That’s not to say that the book didn’t have potential: it was simply taught in such a way that made it an unpleasant experience. First of all, my teacher loaded us up with so much unnecessary historical knowledge surrounding the Great Depression that most of the class had trouble absorbing the literature. Also, we moved so quickly through the chapters that we were unable to discuss what the book meant to the average person; instead, we discussed the symbols Steinbeck was using, and how they kept recurring. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but our teacher never really explained how the symbols enhanced the literature, or how they helped Steinbeck get his message across. My feeling was that most of the students couldn’t relate to the book because of how it was taught. There was too much focus on the literature and not enough focus on how to get a message from it. My suggestion is to always focus on getting meaning from the story first, and then analyze the literary devices afterwards. If you do it the other way around, students don’t see
110 the meaning of the story, so they’re not motivated to investigate it further, and they end up not getting anything from lessons on literary techniques. (Nelson) What profound advice right out of the mouth of a 17-year-old girl! Her annoyance with previous literature classes came from the teacher’s emphasis on facts over meaning, not, interestingly, on having to do the reading in the first place as we might suspect. Dierdre points out that tracing an author’s use of symbolism can be a great teaching tool, but if it is the only aim of one’s teaching, students will quickly dismiss the literature as irrelevant. She advises teachers to, “Focus on getting meaning from the story first, and then analyze the literary devices afterwards.” If teachers of literature would see the importance of putting meaning first and literary technique second, we would spare ourselves endless heartache, and we would accomplish the goal that so many of us have set for ourselves: to change lives.
This student is not the first one to see the potential of literature in this way. In fact, she’s in esteemed company. Henry Giroux, noted pedagogical and cultural critic, echoes these
sentiments. In his 1999 article “Public Intellectuals and the Challenge of Children’s Culture,” Giroux states,
[M]ainstream educational discourse not only ignores the ideological nature of teaching and learning, it erases culture (i.e. literature and art) from the realm of the political by enshrining it either as purely aesthetic discourse or as a quasi- religious call to celebrate the “Great Books” and “Great Traditions” of what is termed Western Civilization. In both cases, any attempt to transform the nation’s classrooms into transformative spaces where future citizens learn to critically engage other political and pedagogical sites outside the classroom are dismissed as irrelevant or unprofessional. (qtd. in Lorentzen 290, parentheses mine)
It is the “critical engagement” of the world beyond the classroom that interests me, and literature is the perfect and possibly even the primary door to such engagement. Literature, after all, is the recorded history of humankind’s struggles: politics, freedom, the meaning of life, the downfall of humankind, and anything and everything that has ever been rationally processed by a human mind for the purpose of its own betterment. But our educational obsession with standardized tests scores and measurable progress has forced many of us to abandon the meaningful personal quest that literature provides in favor of teaching in ways that diminish the un-measurable value of personal growth. As Claire Katz, professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Texas A&M University, puts it in a 2001 journal article called “Teaching Our Children Well,”
“’Knowing oneself’ appears to be a luxury not that we cannot afford, but that we are unwilling to purchase. Academic philosophy has separated the reading of the text from reading ourselves” (535). When we view literary education as an opportunity to teach students to “read
themselves,” as Katz profoundly puts it, we open up the world of literature for our students in a new way. We give them the chance for self-reflection and personal growth that so many of them need and that so many of us set out to give them when our careers began. How differently might our students feel about literature studies if they saw each new novel as a chance to know more about themselves rather than as another mandatory list of facts that really only interest the teacher? As Katz suggests, we need to actively work toward reconnecting the reading of texts with the reading of ourselves.
Here’s the great news: Our job as mentor-teaching English educators is actually easier than our peers who teach other courses. Literature does the work of asking probing questions about life for us. All we need to do is approach each text with the aim of making these profound questions apparent, and the students will often do the rest. However, just as it is tempting to
112 teach and to learn history as a series of dates, names, and events rather than to teach it as a means of questioning critically our own heritage, the current of today’s educational system makes it tempting to teach literature as a list of facts rather than as the starting point of an inner journey. Mentor-teaching wants to reverse this trend. Mentor-teaching encourages teachers to start by asking the questions raised by all great literature and to help students wrestle with their answers critically. Just as a history class ought to address questions like “Would I have participated in the Crusades?” “Could I have treated blacks so abominably as slave owners did?” or “What would have stopped me from using my power to uproot the Native Americans?” an English class must not merely demand that students know that Raymond Carver was a minimalist who died in 1988 or that the main characters’ eat and apple and drink Scotch. The teacher must push the students deeper, down into the roots of the human struggle that Carver is portraying in his story, down to the bones of the story where questions arise like, “Where do I get my boundaries of right and wrong?” “Are humans merely civilized because we are usually supervised?” and “What causes us to always think other people must have it better than we do?” These questions, after all, are more likely to mirror why Carver wrote the story in the first place – so that such questions would be probed by readers. And while Carver’s style is undoubtedly central to his message, I believe that he and other great writers would want the questions addressed first and the technique addressed in it secondary place, as a means of creating the all-important meaning and application.
With little guidance in how to apply the lessons of the literature classroom, too many students are left merely checking required courses off their lists while they drift from social event to social event looking for guidance in their personal quests for purpose and meaning. There is little question that most college students need a rudder of some sort. Consider some of
these statistics: The rate of depression has tripled in the ten-year period from 1987 to 1997, and young people are often the most susceptible to serious depression (Twenge 106); 17% of teens said they “seriously considered suicide in 2003” (Twenge 213) – that’s nearly one of every five people sitting in our classes; 85% of directors of university counseling centers have reported a recent “rise in the number of students with severe psychological problems” despite the fact that 63% of those same directors also report that their schools have failed to add further resources to help these students (Robbins 394). With statistics like these and the well-known fact that a majority of college students experiment with unhealthy levels of drinking and drugs, the question is where will they find the compass they so clearly need? Since many have not found it at home and few will ever find it in the college social atmosphere, teachers of literature should jump at the opportunity to open the doors of literature to the wandering souls in their classroom. This method requires going against the flow, without question. Creating paper topics and test questions to evaluate students’ performances becomes grayer rather than the black and white evaluative methods of multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank. But by taking the easy route in how we teach and test, we are furthering the unfortunate perception so many students already have: that literature has no relevance beyond the classroom. If that is truly the case, I tell my students, then we might well be wasting our time reading and evaluating literature, as my students seemed to suspect during our impromptu conversation. But! But this irrelevance is not the case, and those of us whose lives have been shaped by the profound impact of great literature need to be sounding a trumpet cry to our students to help them see what we see in these life-changing stories!
114
A Return to Louise Rosenblatt and Reader-Response Criticism
If we can agree that literature has the power to change lives, we need to help one another conceptualize the place of most effective theories and practices for enacting this change in students’ lives. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I want to turn our attention back to the past in the hopes of helping us see the value of what has been in front of our eyes for over a half a century. As such, I want to suggest a reclamation of the basic constructs of reader-response theory and, in particular, the theories of Louise Rosenblatt.
Reader-response criticism puts the primary focus of attention on the reader and her response/reaction to the work at hand. The value of reader-response criticism for mentor- teaching is in its complete student-centeredness. When the teacher interprets a text for the students from his own critical point of view, the majority of the students’ interpretations are immediately thrown out the window. Only those students who come from a similar critical angle as the professor are in luck in seeing how the text has meaning for their own lives. But when the readers’ (a.k.a. students’) responses are the starting point for class discussions and questions, not only do all students suddenly have an active role, but all critical angles are also brought into play. If the teacher is a feminist who sees all literature through that lens, she need not fear that her “pet” perspective will no longer be brought to bear on the class discussions. In most modern classrooms, a student will bring up the feminist angle to which the teacher can add his
knowledge. But not only will the feminist interpretation have a voice in a reader-response classroom; so will the Asian voice, the trans-gendered voice, the black voice, the masculine/jock voice, and so on. In this way, reader-response criticism offers teachers an inclusive meta-
voices heard, but the teaching of all texts will be far more thorough than any one, inevitably biased, teacher could possibly attain.
Reader-response theory came to prominence in the second half of the 20th century. Before scholars like Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, and David Bleich began promoting this student- centered approach to reading, the text-centered ideas of New Criticism reigned as the primary method for interpreting literature. In an effort to get to the purest analysis of a text possible, the New Critics warned against the “affective” and “intentional” fallacies, claiming, respectively, that the effect a book had on a reader and/or the attempt to know an author’s intention in writing a poem or novel both led readers down erroneous roads. The New Critics worked with the text itself, focusing on “close reading” of the words on the page, ignoring as much as possible any outside intervention in the interpretation of a piece of literature. Reader-response criticism came to prominence in the 1960’s and 70’s largely as a reaction against the overly text-centered
approach of the New Critics. These theorists wanted to bring the reader’s reaction back into play as the primary component for interpreting literature. The reader-response theories of Louise Rosenblatt, whose foundational work Literature as Exploration, was published in 1938, are so closely connected to the concepts of mentor-teaching that I have to work actively to prevent merely summarizing what she has already said. Nevertheless, I want to delve into her ideas and offer some suggestions for moving from theory into practice.
In my own experience, we have reverted from the student-centeredness of reader
response back to the text-centeredness of New Criticism, or perhaps we never progressed beyond text-centeredness. Either way, text-centered approaches to teaching literature still reign. In the two institutions where I’ve taught, one a high school and one a college, on many occasions, I have heard teachers talk about having students do “close readings,” literally using this term, yet I