On Literature and Teaching

 A few months ago, I was talking to secondary school teachers about the literature line at their school. By ‘literature line’, I mean the way literature teaching is organized over one year and also over the years, how it is (or not) seen as a line of continuous development, and how texts are selected and on which criteria. One of them told us – and this happened so many times in the past that this example will have to stand for many – that she intended to put a book on the reading list of her upper-form kids (havo 5 in the Netherlands, which prepares for Professional universities but not full-blown academic universities). Which book? Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song . Even the other teachers around us were…shall we say surprised? Now, don’t get me wrong: everyone who has read that novel praised it, thought it superb and profound and all those things. But everyone who has read that novel knows about its idiosyncrasies as well: run-on sentences, absence of clear dialogue marks, missin...

  What’s your reason for 'doing' literature in your class? What’s your reason for handing out this or that text? For doing this or that project around literature? For example, you have this great project in the bovenbouw, centred around the First World War – a staple of English classes in this country. WW1 saw a school of poetry emerge (the Great War poets, unsurprisingly) that other countries didn’t, or certainly not on the same scale. So out come Wilfried Owens, and Sassoon, and the Poppy Fields, and the sadness of it all. Out come the chronologies, and facts about that war, and tales of battles lost and won, and tales of death. But what, exactly, precisely, are your reasons for this project? Are these reasons to do with Literature-reading, literature-interpreting, literature-as-instrument? Or are the reasons to do with ideas about what learners should know historically and culturally? Is it to say 'War is bad, death is terrible', or do you want to explore the...