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Text selection for class: how to choose? (1)
How do you select a text for class? Are there criteria you should follow? Should it be exciting, or topical, well-known, age-based?
These questions might at first seem less important than the goals you have with your literature lesson, or the themes you would like to touch upon with your students/pupils, but it actually is a crucial one to consider. A poor text will provide poor support; a poor text will undermine your goals; a poor text will let you down.
Now, I hear you say: ‘What do you mean by a poor text’? Do you mean ‘poorly written’, or ‘poorly put-together’, or ‘poorly plotted’- anything like that?
Well, not necessarily: I’d rather think in terms of ‘teachability’, that is, in terms of how much a text can give you, the teacher, to work with. And in that sense, what is very readable is not necessarily teachable, at least not in the sense that I give to ‘teachable’. Equally – and very importantly – what is full of good intentions and readable might not be that teachable either. Let’s add a last one: what learners like may not be very teachable either.
Now, I hear your second question: ‘What do you mean by teachable?’
I mean a text that is multi-layered enough that it gives you different entry points, as it were: different ways in, and therefore different ways out. ‘Multi-layered’ sounds difficult and off-putting but I just mean a text that offers:
- a good story with enough diversity of sub-plots, and a good narrative pace
- a language level appropriate for the target-group
- characters with motivations (and not just acting on whims, or because the writer is inconsistent)
- characters with enough moral complexity that they offer different ways of looking at the world.
- nuances enough that each
reader can invest the text and find something in it for themselves.
enough
I like this Robertson Davies line, from a loving essay he wrote on literature and reading (‘A voice in the attic’): ‘The best of novels are only scenarios, to be completed by the reader’s own experience’. It’s not very original perhaps, but it reminds us that a book, like a film or a series, is just boring if the scenario doesn’t invite us to participate in the creation of meaning.
It’s important here to say that a scenario may be like a straight-jacket too, not giving enough space for us – it’s not just empty scenarios that don’t work: over-full ones fail too That’s also a reason why some expensive Hollywood films flop sometimes, when the scenario and everything that happens is simply to coercive, too directive: we are told what to think and how to feel at every turn, and there’s no space for us to exist within the story.
Sometimes novels work that way, too: they do not give enough space to the reader to co-create. Yet co-creator we, readers, are, and as such we must not expect everything to be handed down to us. Arthur Koestler has this nice analogy: ‘The work of art does not provide the current, like an electricity company, but merely the installations; the current has to be generated by the reader. Literature begins with the telling of a tale. The events thus recreated are events in the creator’s mind, and [he has] the urge to share, to communicate. [Telling a tale] is not an easy task, for [the author] is asking his audience to react to things which are not there’.
You, reader, provide the current, the electricity, the sparks that give life to what is essentially a pretty dead object – the book. And you fill in the spaces between words and characters and events, and give those spaces meaning which is not plainly articulated by the novelist. That space is potentially large, and again, often unfortunately way too small. It is our duty as readers to find that space and occupy it, and it is the duty of writers to offer us that space.
So where does that leave our initial dichotomy between Readable and Teachable?
First, it goes without saying that an over-full novel that provides no space for us to exist in is not teachable. That is, what you can get out of it is little more than a succession of events, moral messaging and chiselled characters who do not need us. There’s hardly anything for us to think about because everything has been pre-thought, pre-packaged. It’s like an Ikea piece of furniture that comes to you in bits and pieces: however imaginative you are, there will be only one way to put the bits together so that the finished product is complete. Put this panel here, with those screws; put that door there, with these nails. You may have great imagination, great empathy, but there will be no space for you to exist in that Ikea leaflet: you will be an executor, no more required to think for yourself than a machine would be.
Plenty of novels are like that, and certainly a great many Young Adult novels are like that indeed. Not all of them by a very long shot, true, but still: many take you by the hand, and delineate everything in precise, formatted, inescapable contours that leave no space for you, the reader. You just know that Mary is a good person; that John looks gruff and grumpy but he has a heart of gold; that Jane is jealous, and Mike is mean and amoral.
And the good guys win at the end, and the villains are justly punished.
What can you do with that as a teacher? The absence of nuances means the absence of space for a reader to inhabit, which leads to a dearth of ideas to discuss. We can only all agree that yes, Mary is a good person, and Mike is mean and amoral. Beyond that: what? Which nuances are there to explore, and, as a teacher, to exploit?
The same problem will usually apply to those one-topic books, written with the best of intentions but usually offering little space off the main track – something we’ll come back to next week, among others!
(to go further in the meantime: https://www.litinclass.com/general-principles)
- Arthur Koestler: The act of creation, 1964.
- Robertson Davies: A voice from the attic, 1960/
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