On Literature and Teaching

  Short, even very short…but powerful One constant problem for teachers of literature at secondary schools is to do with preparation: that of the learners as much as that of themselves. Learners, when asked to read a text in advance, will usually turn up not having done so; or if they have, it was probably just a glance, or a quick read-through, maybe a few minutes only before the lesson started. (To be fair, I’ve know the opposite albeit only rarely, when a student would read the texts so much in advance that they’d sort of forgotten everything about them when lesson-time came round). We all know the consequences of that non-reading-in-advance problem: what to do in class if no-one’s read the text? Some solutions spring to mind of course, like handling the text then and there when class starts for example. But that often leads to more problems because those texts will usually be too long to be read in class, or will at least take up so much time of said class that there will...

  One aspect of the research published around the teaching of literature ( literatuuronderwijs , in the Netherlands) is how often it is conducted with the higher reaches of schools: vwo 5, vwo 6 for example. Or that research is conducted with an implicit line of development: it starts in Year 1 at secondary school and finishes in Year 6. And because only vwo go to Year 6, it’s clear that if you’re not in vwo, you’ll stop short of achieving whatever those in vwo can (or are supposed to) achieve: that’s exemplified in the oft-quoted ‘literary competence’ of Witte, which, let’s be honest, makes little sense. Why on earth would we want all our students to be literary competent? What for? To be experts at reading a niche market like literature? Why then leave visual literacy – surely a much more pressing problem in the world of social media – out of education? And the biggest problem is of course: does that mean those in vmbo or havo can have no hope – are given no hope – of reachin...

  One of the most famous questions asked in linguistics – and there are a few – relates to the way language might influence our perceptions, and in particular whether the language you speak restricts your perceptions, or at least forces you to perceive in this way rather than that way. That’s what is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, with more or less strong versions. And while the strong version of their hypothesis (that the language you speak influences your perceptions) has largely been abandoned, milder, so-called weaker versions have been shown to operate in the world. When Frederic Jameson, the literary critic and theorist, wrote his seminal book ‘ The Prison-house of language’ (1972), he was partially referring to that idea, something Barthes or, of course, Derrida, were keen to emphasise as well. You inherit the language you speak: from people, from history, from a culture – the language you speak every day is not transparent, it is loaded, it carries ways of thinking th...

 At the heart of every literature class, there are some questions we hardly ever hear asked, or even acknowledged. Yet, in order to determine what we do, why and what for, it is essential that we do ask those questions, however uncomfortable they may make us feel. Ignoring them means missing the very point of our classes: why do we do what we do, what do we want to achieve, and the most important of all: do we in fact achieve what we claim? Can we achieve it?   Q.1: How difficult is it to read fiction? That is something we tend to forget, especially if we like to read ourselves: reading is not easy, and it’s one of those things where the reward might be long delayed, or, in any case, will take long to reap. Reading is time-consuming: chronophage , as we say in French, it eats (devours) time. Watching a complete episode, with a beginning, middle and end, of a series on Netflix will take 45 minutes; in that time, you will have read, what, 20 pages of a normal quality n...