Literature Study Post-16 I

Strategies and Issues in the Classroom

Texts in Contexts and the Making of Meaning

As previous pages have indicated, the picture of English Literature in post-16 education has evolved rapidly and continues to do so. But the core argument about the special space of the post-16 literature classroom remains: that it affords the potential space where there is a uniquely balanced, interdependent and fruitful relationship between the component parts in these three models:

student, text and teacher
teaching the student and teaching the text
the literary encounter, personal development and growth in critical literacy

The goal is 'now do it without me' in which 'it' is the individually empowered reading of texts of all kinds because of the shared work of the classroom experience with the particular literary text.

A crucial question for student teachers is: what distinguishes the experience of thinking about texts at post-16 from what happens before? An initial point for discussion is that it's not the texts that are different but what students are doing with them that is. Teachers of post-16 literature have always deployed, even if unaware of it, aspects of 'theory' in the kinds of questions that distinguish post-16 study from GCSE study.

If the GCSE question might be 'what is this character like?' the A-level question might be 'how is this character characterized / constructed?'

Melville's astonishing Bartleby is an excellent A-level resource for the study of character (and of endings – see next bullet). It presents three modes of characterization that in effect interrogate and undermine each other

The minor characters Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut, are, as in early Dickens, restricted to the ownership each of a couple of traits that they simply keep 'performing'
The lawyer develops and is very obviously a different man at the end – but in a knowably and movingly realized way
Bartleby is radically, obstinately unknowable, an affront both to the very notion of literary characterization itself in mainstream fiction and also to our readerly urge to explain and interpret

If GCSE asks 'what happens at the end of this text and why?' A-level asks 'why do texts of this kind / in this genre end in certain kinds of ways?'

Students, not least because of the role of literature in their own education, bring particular expectations about endings and closure to different genres. How, for instance, does their early exposure to Shakespeare ('comedy', 'tragedy') in the curriculum play into this?

If GCSE asks 'what is the difference between a simile and a metaphor?' and 'where is the metaphor in this verse?' A-level asks 'what is the function of figurative language in poetry?' and 'where do we get the competence to recognize when language is figurative rather than literal?'

That figurative language in poetry is functional rather than decorative is an issue that student teachers should consider how to address in class. An example from George Herbert's 'Affliction' (the way the image in lines 1-3 amazingly generates the image in line 4) has proved very telling with students.

My thoughts are all a case of knives

In terms of competence, how do we know we need to read the final two lines of Frost's celebrated 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' in different ways, the penultimate line literally and the ultimate line figuratively?

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

A useful demonstration of the same difference can be seen in Blake's two versions of 'Nurse's Song' in the two parts of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Why do we intuitively read 'the dews of night' in the 'Innocence' poem as literal and in the 'Experience' poem as figurative? Is that the point – that an experienced reading is a figurative reading? These lines are identical in both poems

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,

A model that has as its goal the dispensing of the teacher's role ('do it without me') might be understood to be one in which teaching and reading are also uniquely balanced or even synonymous. Good teaching and good reading both ask questions that generate not so much as answers (unlike at GCSE where students expect readings to be answers provided by the teacher) but more and better questions. The teaching of a text is a reading of the text in an active and transactional process with the student gaining the power to read by questioning in the same way. The reader (student and teacher) acts on the text rather than being passively positioned by it, or by the teacher.

In post-16 study of literature particular attention might be said to be paid to three aspects of texts, the second and third of which are highlighted in the Assessment Objectives:

The constructedness of texts, their textuality or textures
Their contexts, their place in the world as interventions in social process
Their susceptibility to pluralities of interpretation

Good A-level teaching has always struck the appropriate balance between the shared close reading or explication of the text (its constructedness) and contextualizing practices and multiple readings. Before Curriculum 2000 and its Assessment Objectives, the exam boards used to talk about the importance of the student's 'informed personal response'. Attention to textual constructedness leads to the personal response (the reading); the response and reading are theoretically informed when grounded in contexts and in relation to other readings.

To underline an earlier recommendation: the best place for student teachers to focus their thinking on the teaching of texts in contexts is Adrian Barlow's excellent book World and Time (Barlow, 2009)

It's important for student teachers to hold a dynamic model of the relation between texts and contexts in contrast to the older foreground / background model which can too easily obtain at GCSE. I've explored this elsewhere (Jacobs, 2001, p.4). The summary that follows should lend itself to debate among student teachers:

Texts and contexts are always in dynamic and volatile relations with each other

The contexts of a text are multiple, changing over time and from reader to reader

The 'common sense', older view (inherited from New Criticism) that texts are self-sufficient and that context is the static supplementary material, a stable set of facts and truths, against which the text is merely to be measured encourages a misleadingly simple and one-directional view of reading

It assumes that textual meanings are unchanging, universal and uncontradictory
It assumes that all the reader has to do is to get out the meaning like getting the nut from the shell (or, rather, having the teacher get it out and handing it to the passive student)
It assumes that the writer is the sole controller of the meaning-process, conveying meaning in full consciousness and unaffected by anything outside the writing-process

Instead the making of meaning needs to be understood as a process that happens between the text and the reader, that meaning is socially and culturally produced, changing and various and multiple

The writer needs to be understood as a product as well as a producer
Texts need to be understood as interventions in social processes

Contexts are a network of pressures and debates in which readers as well as writers are entangled because readers too are products, subject to contexts

Contexts are the changing conditions of possibility for the production and consumption of the text
Contexts are the process whereby the text finds and makes a place in the world, the ways in which it is enabled to speak and the ways in which it makes a difference

Marilyn Butler put it very well (Butler 1981, pp.9-10):

'Literature, like all art, like language, is a collective activity, powerfully conditioned by social forces, what needs to be and what may be said in a particular community at a given time... Authors are not the solitaries of the Romantic myth, but citizens. Within any community tastes, opinions, values, the shaping stuff of art, are socially generated.'

Here's an example of working with contexts to lead us to the final web-page.

At the end of King Lear (Quarto and Folio texts are textually identical here), when Edmund reveals that he has ordered Cordelia's death, Albany, hoping with the audience that the counter-order to save her arrives in time, says 'the gods defend her'. At exactly that moment, as if in cruel reply, both Quarto and Folio texts have the stage direction enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms - and Lear is howling in anguish. How might this terrible moment be taught contextually, in a way that is both 'close' and 'theoretically informed'?

The first context is formal-generic. The audience's expectation is that Cordelia will survive, both because Edmund has twice intimidated doing 'some good' at last and because of our generic knowledge of last minute rescues that go right up to the wire before good triumphs. We are cruelly jolted against these expectations, founded as they are in sound cultural competencies on our parts.
The next context is intertextual. All previous versions of the Lear story have the Cordelia figure surviving. Shakespeare's audience is kicked in the teeth of that knowledge. Readers and audiences today need to be taught that knowledge to experience that contextual shock.
Related is the next context, which is cross-cultural as well as intertextual. The emblem of father with daughter dead in his arms is an inverted pieta (just as the 'Nunnery Scene' in Hamlet is an inverted Annunciation). The notion of Cordelia as a Christ figure has been anticipated in Act 4 when she said 'O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about.' Again, Shakespeare's audience would have the expertise to hear this echo of Christ more readily than we can; but the effect of that knowledge is the opposite of that in the last context: audiences semi-consciously 'expect' Cordelia's sacrificial death.
The last context is cultural-historical: the fact that Nahum Tate's version of 1681, with Cordelia surviving in a happy ending, was the only version available to theatre-goers throughout the 18th century – and was famously endorsed by Dr Johnson. It's easy to mock Tate but not so easy to mock Johnson. (And in Tate's defence we could argue that his fairy-tale ending was at least appropriate to the play's fairy-tale beginning.) Johnson's evident horror at the sheer gratuitous outrage of Cordelia's death provides students with the means with which to explore and elaborate their own emotional responses to the scene. Those responses are shaped and refined by, as well as embedded in, the contexts as sampled above.

The impact of 'theory' on the teaching of post-16 literature has been exaggerated by both its defenders and its opponents. As mentioned above, it has been there, in good practice, all the time. Theorised reading and teaching is simply more reflectively self-conscious reading and teaching. In that light, and in addition to the notions about contexts and multiple readings explored above, student teachers might consider the role in the post-16 classroom of three further notions of what it is that 'informed' reading is informed of:

Post-16 reading and teaching should be conscious of the relations between acts of writing and reading and issues of power and authority
It should be conscious of the critical influence of gender, sexuality, race, colour, belief-systems on acts of writing and reading and as critical forces shaping meaning
It should be conscious of the importance of what, in texts, is not said, not written as well as what is – of voices suppressed, stories not told, books written but not published, published but not studied or valued

What follows, in a final webpage, are some suggestions to help student teachers develop strategies for teaching literature in the current post-16 classroom.

Contents

Placing the experience of post-16 literature

Problems and pressure-points

Resources and reading