DO WE
REALLY TEACH LITERATURE?
Dear
readers, I am going to cheat you. I am giving you here what I had written in my
very first comment in my blog 15 years ago. I have not changed a word.
A question has been jangling in my head recently
and keeping me awake at night.
Is the appreciation of literature really being
taught?
I know at first glance the question seems
self-evidently absurd. Of course the appreciation of literature can be taught.
Otherwise why do we have all those English and other language departments and
programmes in universities and colleges? And why do high-school teachers force Lord
of the Flies, The God Boy, The Colour Purple, To
Kill a Mockingbird, The Old Man and the Sea, Man Alone,
The Scarlet Letter into young and unwilling heads?
But think carefully about the question and you’ll
see there is a real problem. If the appreciation of literature means responding
perceptively to what authors have actually written, then is it really being
taught?
Let me illuminate the problem by telling you what I
know about a specific writer.
I’m quite knowledgeable about Elizabeth Gaskell and
her novels. I know that she was not quite up there with classics like Dickens,
George Eliot and Thackeray, but that she was an esteemed Victorian writer who
has retained a considerable readership. I know that she is now much lauded by
feminist academics because she gave a distinctly female account of early
industrialised England. I know she wrote Mary Barton, Cranford, North
and South, Wives and Daughters and other novels and short stories of
small town, industrial town and domestic life; and I know that some of her work
first appeared as serials in periodicals like Household Words and All
the Year Round.
If you sat me down in front of a school exam
question on Elizabeth Gaskell, or confronted me with an undergraduate essay
topic on her, I’d be able to concoct a creditable answer. I could sagely
discuss her themes – the circumscribed lives of women; the power of gossip;
the clash of older village ways with industrialisation in England’s
“railway age”; the beginnings of wage slavery; class divisions between the
squirearchy and the middle classes; the ties that bind small communities
together and so forth. I could name her main characters, write accounts of
them, and neatly précis her plots. I could even make some apt comments on her
style and her tendency to focus on the minutiae of life. All this would be off
the top of my head from what I already know. Give me spend and hour or two to
look some reference material, and I’d do even better.
But here’s the rub. Although it pains me to admit
it, and although I should be performing ritualised penance, I have never read a
single word of Elizabeth Gaskell’s works, even though three of her books sit on
my shelves as I write this.
Having never got around to her, I have simply
accumulated knowledge of her from other sources. These include passing
references in general histories of literature; what I have heard other people
say about her; enthusiastic recommendations from an Elizabeth Gaskell fan whom
I knew some years back; and my having seen two BBC TV serial adaptations of her
work – North and South and Cranford.
Everything I know about Elizabeth Gaskell is
second-hand. My eyes have never travelled across the words she actually wrote
and I’ve never experienced or assessed how she wrote.
Which brings me back to my original question – is
the appreciation of literature really being taught?
After all, if the study of literature is supposed
to be training our responses to the process of reading itself, to a particular
writer’s style, and to the impact of the words on the page, then plot
summaries, character studies, background sociological or biographical detail,
what eminent critics have thought and the neat corralling of themes all have
very little to do with it. Those things can be acquired without ever bothering
to read whatever is supposedly being studied. They are a form of knowledge, but
they are not an appreciation of literature.
I’m not exposing any obscure trade secret in noting
this. The world is filled with high school students and perhaps a majority of
BA students who have negotiated literature courses not by reading the set
texts, but only by reading “study guides” on the model of the old Cole’s Notes
or Monarch Notes, or by accessing whatever Wikipedia and the ‘net have to
say. Conning lecturer’s notes always helps, too. (Our Humanities departments
are so constituted that it is always wise to flatter your lecturer’s opinions
when you formulate your answers.)
Regrettably, these methods will often be the very
ones that earn an A+. Real literature for adults is allusive, can be read on
many levels, and does not often lend itself to simple interpretations of the
sort that one dashes off against the clock in exam or term-paper conditions.
The student who has dutifully ploughed through, puzzled over and personally
responded to something compendious like Bleak House may well be at a
disadvantage in comparison with the student who has memorised by heart
ready-made phrases about style, plot, character, themes, historical
significance and so forth. I have often enough been on the other side of the
fence as a (secondary- and tertiary-level) marker, and I know that a
forthright, organised, clearly-expressed, information-packed answer will
usually trump a sincere but more tortuous answer. Clarity and a genuine
personal response to a text are not mutually-exclusive. Yet the organised,
clearly-expressed answer is more likely to be the parroted answer.
I am reminded of a true story Solzhenitsyn once
reported. An official Soviet-era manual advised students not to bother reading
Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, but just to read the summaries of their novels given in
the manual. The books themselves would be too “confusing”. Soviet officials may
well have had ideological objections to undiluted Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with
all their religious and non-materialist concerns. But the manual’s advice was a
frank admission of the same process that is encouraged by our own pedagogy. I’m
further reminded of how often, over the years, I have heard blowhards boasting
that they won high grades in school and university courses just by memorising
bits of a “study guide”. Usually this has been said to me as if it were a sign
of the speaker’s extreme cleverness. In fact it merely references a game whose
rules all teachers and academics fully understand.
There are some fairly obvious responses to what I
am saying.
One would be to ask whether any of it matters.
After all, if high school or tertiary students of literature are gaining
credits in NCEA courses, or passing their examinations, then what does it
matter how they acquired the relevant knowledge? This approach appeals to
principals whose chief concern is making their schools look good in a
competitive market (between schools, NCEA is just as competitive as older
national examination systems were). It appeals equally to supervisors of
tertiary academic programmes, whose funding relies on a successful through-put
of as many students as possible. But it implicitly negates the whole reason for
studying literature in the first place. It says that a real encounter with an
author’s written words is less important than knowledge about those written
words. Literature is reduced to useless data, encouraging many students to
regard the whole concept with contempt and to avoid ever reading anything
challenging again, once they have their degree or certificate.
Another response would be to point out that I am
really talking about means of assessment rather the study of literature itself.
What about those teachers who ask students to compile reading journals, or to
compose personal and subjective responses to what they are set to read? What
about those who devise tests and exercises that require recall of a text’s
actual wording? What about seminars which challenge students’ understanding and
discuss specific given passages of a text?
I concede that assessment of students is one of the
main things that concerns me. I acknowledge, too, that the more advanced the
level of study, the less easy it becomes to hide behind ready-made packages of
other peoples’ summaries. Generally, high-school students and undergraduates
can get away with it, but at the postgraduate level it is much harder. (Not
that it is impossible, mind. And a little creative re-wording can usually
circumvent the electronic guards that most universities now use to prevent outright
plagiarism in students’ work.).
But I am still on firm ground when I note the
prevalence of pretending to teach literature itself, while actually encouraging
students to value facts and opinions about literature. Some years ago, as a
conscientious high-school teacher, I used to read the “model” essays that were
sent out to us as examples of the best students’ work in the old Bursary and
Scholarship English exams. I became rapidly disillusioned as I noted how many
of them could have been written without even opening the works that were supposedly
being analysed. One such “model” essay, earning top marks, was a collection of
well-ordered, clearly-expressed current clichés about the role of women in
literature. It had only a peripheral relationship with the Virginia Woolf novel
that it was ostensibly discussing. Doubtless the student who wrote it was a
very intelligent 17-year-old (or Year 13) student. Doubtless, too, she had
carefully memorised everything her teacher had told her. But she was not
responding to literature. She was repeating something that had been squeezed
out of literature before she got to it.
I could pile up the depressing anecdotes along
these lines. I once met a high-school teacher at a training day who proudly
circulated materials he gave his senior classes, telling them that “there are
two ways to study a novel”. One was to read the novel. The other, which he
recommended to his students as less laborious, was to watch a good film or
television adaptation of the novel and then read a study guide. So much for
encountering the words on the page. Then there was the lecturer who claimed
that it was unimportant for him to read the works on which he lectured. All
that mattered was that he knew the work’s cultural significance, its place in
literary history and the chief critical arguments and controversies it had
aroused. In effect, the lecturer gave second-hand opinions to his students who
(unless they took the unusual expedient of doing their own reading) would
eventually give him back third-hand answers.
And so on and so on.
In our senior national high-school Bursary and
Scholarship English exams, there used to be a compulsory “unseen” question, in
which students had to interpret a poem or piece of prose they were seeing for
the first time. It was the one part of the paper that challenged them to
demonstrate their own reading skills and perception, as opposed to
regurgitating what they had been told. Of course it was eventually judged to be
too hard for too many students, and ceased to be compulsory. So it was back to
a paper which encouraged students to write what they had been told about
literature, rather than what they had personally experienced of it. I am,
however, encouraged that a similar “unseen” interpretation question is now part
of NCEA exams.
As a teacher, one of my preferred forms of torture
was to photocopy extracts from the novel my class was studying, and then make
the students, under test conditions, identify where it came from, what it meant
and what the passage displayed that was typical of the author’s style. Perhaps
one day I will get around to reading Elizabeth Gaskell. I might then be able to
answer such contextual quizzing about her. In the meantime, having not
read single word of hers, I am fully equipped to pass whatever standard test
a standard literature course on her could throw at me.
I know at least as much as an A+ student would.
PS By
the way, since I wrote this 15 years ago, I have read some of Elizabeth Gaskell’s works.
PPS Part of my reason in writing about all this came after I had seen on
television on the night that we were all seeing who would become prime-minister.
A smug member of parliament said that
when he was in school he just saw a movie of the book he was supposed to have
read at school - and he passed with
honours…. Which is why too many school-teachers really don’t teach literature
at all.
