On Literature and Teaching

  Interpreting fiction: Five basic principles to start generating ideas (1)  (Today the first two principles, next time the following three) So there you are: there’s a text in front of you, right there on the table or on your lap, it’s a poem perhaps, a short-story or a novel, and the question you have is: What on earth is this about? And slowly but surely the famous cry will soon erupt from your lips: I don’t get it! You read the words and you understand them, but you have that nagging feeling that you’re not seeing ‘what you’re supposed to see’. You stare and you re-read, but no, it’s not happening. You don’t ‘get it’, you don’t know ‘what the message/meaning is’. There’s no magic formula to solve this problem, no smoking gun you can always find, no short-cut to the themes. Terminology is not going to help much, and reverting to jargon will only obscure what is already opaque. Looking it up online will only restrict your own input, and will fix in your mind interpretatio

Samuel Johnson (in J. Boswell, 1791): ‘It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse’.   You have a class tomorrow, and on the schedule it says that it’s a literature class – it’s part of the curriculum, and those lessons were decided upon within the English department (or whichever language you teach, of course). The thing is, you’re not quite sure what your role is going to be: guide? Explorer? Facilitator? Explainer? All-knowing, tentative, free-wheeling, directive? Impulse-giver, as Johnson says? And should you have additional activities, say, written expression, or speaking, perhaps a bit of grammar thrown into the mix? Some history, too, and a bit of culture? Or is it just about the act of reading, whatever the outcome? Well, and what about the set-up of the learners? In groups (of 3, of 4), individually, in pa