I am always looking for reasons to teach literature; I believe that reading and responding to literature is a valuable part of education (both formal and informal), but I am still formulating my ideas about the purposes for reading. Rosenblatt gives one excellent reason or purpose: "The boundary between inner and outer world breaks down and the literary work of art, as so often remarked, leads us into a new world" (p.21). First, literature is an art. A few weeks ago I was talking with classmates about the idea that "English" may be a misnomer for the subject we teach. Instead, we should probably call our subject "Language Arts" since we engage in much more than the English language. Rosenblatt speaks of "the arts of language" (p.xiii). I think the way we approach the teaching of English would be different, more flexible, if we thought of it as the arts of language. Second, literature is both individual and social. It seems that often we forget the social aspect of reading, the social aspect of creating meaning from the text. I like that Rosenblatt looks at literature as communication; it is an event rather than an object (p.12). That would also change the way we teach--if a text is not a fixed object, then the reader has an active role in the event and in the communication. Finally, literature leads us into a new world. That is my favorite part of reading and teaching. The way we see the world can expand and change; we can learn more about ourselves and others. As Rosenblatt says, "the human element cannot be abstracted out" (p.41).
I think, though, that sometimes we do just that in school. We make kids read efferently when they want to read aesthetically. We "push the richly infused cognitive-affective matrix into the fringes of consciousness" (p.40). How do we not separate the emotional response from the "message" of the text? I am afraid I have done just that in my teaching--there's the reader response and then the "more serious" study of the literature. How do we fuse those two together? I also like her take on studying literary devices and formal traits as elements of the text that make the literary experience more "complex, nuanced, or intense" (p.34). If we look at stylistic devices through this lens, then there is a purpose to studying formal traits of literature, one that combines the affective and cognitive.
The idea of the invisible reader struck me. When we place the text as more valuable than the reader, what does that do to students? How often do students feel invisible in their reading experiences in school? I have been concerned about students' declining interest in reading in secondary school, and perhaps feeling like they are separate from the text and often irrelevant to the study is literature are reasons for that decline.
Amber,
ReplyDeleteI like that you highlight the social nature of reading and making meaning from texts, and agree that in school we don't stress this enough. Too often "class discussion" is just a one-to-one interaction between teacher and student, rather than a community of people engaging in collective meaning-making with a text. Practices like individual silent reading and analytical essay style assignments seem to reinforce the idea that reading is something you do alone with a text. Perhaps if we look more closely at the role of assessment and discussion, we can find ways to create that social reading time and create poems in class, rather than just transacting with texts.
-Thea
You write that "I think the way we approach the teaching of English would be different, more flexible, if we thought of it as the arts of language." This is really interesting to me, and I wonder about how the way we name things shapes (and also reflects) to way we perceive those things. What would English curricula look like if we approached our discipline as "the arts of language"? I wonder what traditional content would be included or excluded, and what new content or ways of thinking might enter?
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