Introduction

The politics of the classroom

From David S. Miall, Reading Your Self (book in progress)

As a student of literature, whether at school, college, or university, how often has your interest in reading literature been discouraged or dissipated by inappropriate teaching methods? You have, perhaps, sometimes read a literary text that seemed to speak directly to your own experience or feelings. Yet the sense of excitement you began to feel, your interest in exploring your response to the text, was diminished when you found extracts from the text turning up in worksheets or examinations, or when you were asked to write an essay on the text from a perspective that meant little or nothing to you.

If you are a university student, you may have experienced such disappointments for another reason as well. In college or university you may sometimes find that an emphasis on various theories of literary meaning can distract you from focusing on your own responses to the texts you study. While your teachers may often have the best intentions in offering you new perspectives on how literary texts come to be produced and read, such concerns can sometimes substitute for engaging with the text itself in ways that would have more meaning for you. Teachers who are willing to question the authority of authors, texts, and the culture which underlies literature, are sometimes unwilling to question their own authority as agents of an educational institution. Such teachers are likely to be perpetuating a classroom situation that inhibits productive learning on your part.

The position taken in this book is that the first requirement of a literary education is to empower you as a reader to respond directly to the texts you read. By so doing, you are more likely to gain new perspectives on yourself and your world. The authority and visionary role of literature has been central to almost every society in human history. To enable you to participate fully in your own culture as a reader means showing you in the first place how to set aside the misuses of literature in our educational institutions, and in the second place how to restore control over your own reading to you, the reader. This will involve adopting a set of methods for facilitating the act of reading (the topic of the first part of this book), and evaluating and monitoring your learning either independently or in collaboration with a teacher (the topic of the second part of the book).

To read and respond to a literary text in the classroom is to participate in a type of dialogue, in which your experience as a reader and the voices of your fellow students should play the most significant role. The position of the teacher in such a classroom will be reconstructed. She or he will be there to serve your interests, your agenda as a reader; she is not there primarily to implement the agenda of a school or university board of studies (although the alternative classroom I describe need not be incompatible with the requirements of such a board). A teacher's role is to facilitate your dialogue by providing the resources needed: expertise in learning methods, professional knowledge of literature, and the skill to reflect back to you the implications of your discussions. A teacher who is unable or unwilling to take this role not only serves the students poorly, but overlooks some important and fruitful changes in the discipline of English itself over the last two or three decades.

If you are studying English literature at a university the content of your course has probably changed a great deal from the type of course that you would have taken only twenty years ago. You will have become aware that English is not such an orderly and unified subject as it might have seemed in the past. The impact of new views of the subject, from deconstruction to feminism, has opened up a variety of alternative approaches, and also made legitimate the study of texts that were not formerly within the scope of an English degree. So far, so good. At the same time, however, these new theories, which often exist within an English Department alongside the old, either ignore the presence of each other, or one theory confronts another across a formidable gap of theoretical and methodological differences. As a student you cannot resolve these differences, but neither (as yet) can your teachers. So it has become more urgent than it used to be for each of us involved in English to chart our own course through the different views of English that are on offer.

While English as a subject has changed, however, the methods for teaching it have largely remained what they always were: lectures and discussions where the teacher is wholly or mainly in control of the classroom, and where formal essays and examinations assess your progress and produce your degree at the end of three or four years. Indeed, because of the very variety of the new approaches, their complexity, and the amount of background knowledge they assume, the temptation for your teachers to lecture is now much stronger than it was. Explaining the linguistic basis of deconstruction or the psychoanalytic contribution to feminist theory may take up a good deal of class time. It may leave little or no time over for exploring these theories, their implications, and the practices they authorize, in open discussion. There is a troubling paradox here.

The standard paradigm in which English used to be taught (roughly, from the second World War until the late 1960s) was that of New Criticism. This approach tended to assume that a literary text had a meaning which could be established and agreed upon and which was independent of the differing backgrounds and responses of its readers. In this perspective it made some sense for teachers to transmit to their students a reading of a text. It would be supported by references to an established body of critical writing on the text, and could be delivered either directly in a lecture, or less directly in a seminar during which students could be pointed towards an acceptable interpretation. But this method of teaching, although it is still practised, is really no longer tenable.

If the new, conflicting views of English have one thing in common, it is the notion that there can be no single, authorized view of a literary text. But too often the methods employed to teach students in English have not taken on board the implications of the new theories. A teaching method inherited from New Criticism is being used to convey post-New Critical views of literature. To put it another way, while the new theories to which we are (variously) committed point to the free play of meanings in the text and to the openness of the reader's response, we continue to offer lectures and to direct discussions which are neither free nor open. This book is an attempt to overcome that paradox, and to explore methods of learning which more closely reflect our new understanding of the way texts exist and the different ways they are read.

But the following book, except for the last chapter, is not written for critics or teachers, but for you, the student. It will suggest various methods through which you, as a student, can obtain more control over your learning. It might at times seem a subversive book, since it asks you to acquire more control within the times and places at which you meet your teachers, and to find ways of enabling them to give up, where necessary, some of the control they exercise over what happens. I will try to persuade you that this is feasible, by describing some methods by which you can achieve this aim; but also, and more importantly, I will hope to convince you that the outcomes will be far more productive for you as a student.

The book will also appear polemical at times. The primary aim of the book is to explore different methods of practice in the English classroom which involve the cooperation of other students and your teachers. Thus the book is oriented towards practical matters: ways to approach texts, to hold discussions, to organize a project. I believe the methods described can be put to work without detailed reference to the assumptions behind them. But the methods are based on a theory of reader response, which I derive partly from better known authors, partly from my own experimental work with readers, and partly from research on methods in higher education. I have devoted a later chapter of the book to a more systematic account of the theory for those who would like to look at it. That section is also included for another reason. No book about English studies nowadays can avoid touching on issues which are controversial, so I include the theory not only to explain the approach in the rest of the book but to show what issues lie behind the approach.

The final chapter is directed at teachers (but you are welcome to read it too). Here I discuss some of the ways in which the methods described in the book can be implemented in a literature course. I show, from a teacher's perspective, what conditions to create, what resources will be needed, and how to design a course that will allow for students' input and their active participation. Most important, I trace the pathway that a teacher can use to introduce the methods systematically, so that students' gain confidence in using them and in working with one another.

The main part of the book, then, introduces a range of different methods for learning. These are based mainly on my own work with the students I have taught. I have also developed various ways of asking students to tell me about their experience of the methods we have used, and you will find some of their comments in later chapters of the book. I also include a few example diagrams and other reports that I or the students have produced in the course of our work together. But not every method or approach is illustrated in these ways, so I will ask you to accept some of the methods on trust without the evidence from students to show how they worked in practice.

If you have read this far and you are still not sure whether to commit yourself to buying or reading this book, you may be wondering where it stands in relation to two other standard types of book. The first type is the student's introduction to literature, or to one of the genres of literature. Reading Your Self is not a book of this kind. It does provide some basic information about the features of texts and their background, in order to suggest different places to focus when discussing a text. And at times I offer an analysis of a particular text, such as a short poem or an extract from a novel, but I do this in order to demonstrate the findings that a particular method might produce. My purpose is not to offer an introduction as such to the language or structures of literature. The second type of book is the introduction to study skills for students entering higher education. Such a book offers advice about how to organize your time, take notes from a lecture, prepare for essays, and the like. Such books can often be very valuable, except that the advice they offer is not specific to the subject you are studying -- English literature. Thus Reading Your Self is not this kind of book either. I try to do something rather different from both these types of book by suggesting tools for study, discussion, and writing which derive from the freeplay of the literary text itself and the variables of reader response.

Among other advantages that follow from this approach (as I will show later), one is that it overcomes the artificial and unnecessary isolation of the student, whom traditional teaching methods condemn to work largely alone, whether during reading, study, or while writing essays. In this book the balance is shifted towards the generation of a congenial social context, where responses are shared much more frequently, and where students usually learn more from one another than they do from any other single source. In this way the literary text is, at least to some degree, removed from the reverential isolation in which it is contemplated as a thing apart, and given new life within the discussions of a community. This is where the Augustan writers of the early 18th Century wished to see it, and where in other cultures -- perhaps that of Shakespeare's time, or some Eastern European countries now -- it has actually been. There seems little doubt that works of literature have long been marginalized in North America or Britain as an instrument for understanding and reflecting on our own culture.

While this book can have no influence beyond the academic community, there at least it can serve to suggest some of the forms of conversation about literary texts that could or should be taking place within such a community. It can serve to moderate the forms of dominance and control that tend to subvert the practices of an education in English studies; and it can, by contrast, point to ways in which a different set of practices in English can work to empower readers, to authorize their ownership of the discussions that take place about literature. Ownership implies responsibility, so the following pages also attend to such issues as evaluation, assessment, and the scope and meaning of "scholarship" in the new English studies -- these being other strands of the conversation that should be taking place.

In literary studies authority in the earliest days seemed to belong first to the author (hence the derivation of the word), who appeared to speak with a type of divine authority or privileged insight. From there authority passed to the literary text, which came to be regarded as a container of some immutable truth, however hard of access such truth might be. More recently authority passed to the scholar, critic, and teacher, who embodied our culture's accumulated knowledge about the author, the author's historical period, and the canon of texts that define "English literature," so that, in a political sense, literature seemed to "belong" to the critic and teacher. Most recently of all, the critic, by virtue of the superior theoretical understanding she possesses and as the originator of a body of speculative and creative work, has claimed to stand on equal footing with the authors she discusses. Thus we remain within a model of education that is largely taken for granted, and which in no way breaks into that magic circle where authority centres in either the author, the text, or the teacher, or circulates between them (according to your theoretical perspective). Thus it is that over the several years of a school and university education in literature, it is still the teacher who confers authority on students, some of whom will in turn become authorized members of the Academy.

Like many institutions which have lasted for some time, this model of education both captures some essential truths while seriously distorting the nature of the activity it is supposed to facilitate. Debates about the direction of English studies or about the future of critical theory will no doubt continue, and it is important that they should; but they will remain relatively ineffectual in furthering understanding of the cultural role of literature while they overlook the primary forum in which English studies is carried on -- the class of students. It is you, the student, who is at the cutting edge of the practice of reading. You are the object of a set of educational methods which misdirect and nullify themselves to the extent that they locate authority in the wrong place. Now that modern critical theory has itself undermined the assumptions about the location of authority that supported such a model of English studies, it is ironic that this type of education continues so often to hold the stage.

The alternative practices described in this book function to test and question the standard sources of authority. But their primary purpose is to enable you, as a student reading English, to identify the sources of authority both within your own response to texts and through the debates about texts that you have with other students and your teachers. It is in this sense that the book is about reading: your reading for yourself, and of yourself.


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