On Literature and Teaching

  Edwin Muir, a poet and essayist from the last century, wrote beautiful memoirs (‘ The story and the fable ’) evoking the remote Scottish island he was born on, and his subsequent move to England, and he has that line which is here appropriate: ‘The great sin is to let everything slip past in a sort of dream or stupor, aware neither of yourself nor of the world: the normal state of human life. The task is merely to wake up’.   In part 1 we started with the idea of ‘Thinking while reading’. A very common misconception here is to do with thinking as a conscious, active, almost physical effort, as in: I need to think about this , or I need to put my mind to it in a very conscious, self-conscious way . It’s a misconception because reading is cumulative: each paragraph adds to the previous ones, builds on the previous ones, and takes on meaning in relation to the whole. Your mind needs to be active but only in the sense of ‘ open to everything ’, and perhaps better: ‘ ...

'I don't want to think when I read!' The historically dominant view of literature over more than a hundred years has been academic , intellectual and moral . Academic , because universities have dominated the landscape for a while, creating Literature Departments, Literature Degrees, Literature Professors and Literature Lists. That, in turn, has canonized some texts and relegated others to a Below-Par, Academically-Unworthy purgatory. And that , in turn, has ostracised plenty of writers and readers. Intellectual , because academic studies immediately imply intellectualizing, developing the tools of the trade, creating a specific jargon, categorizing, labelling, sub-grouping. And that , unsurprisingly, has ostracised many, many readers and authors. Moral , because the written word, for millennia, has been associated with the ability to read it, write it, use it, and that little by little, the idea that Literary texts are superior has morphed into the idea that R...

  Transposed to the classroom, the discussion above (in Part 1) has two very clear consequences: First , assuming that most pupils (or students, or even people at large) read little fiction – something national studies consistently show – it will mean that the texts you give them are likely to be the first token of that type. In other words, the first example of a genre, style, narrative approach and all the rest of it. All those elements you take from granted when you know the genre will become distractions, obstacles for the others. What seems evident to you is for them a nuance they cannot yet perceive; what stands out as possibly symbolic to you remains prosaically what it is for them. A stone is for you mineral so it could symbolise death, or it symbolises the past, or solidity, or an opposition to the lichen on top; for them it’s just, well, a stone. With some lichen on top, which they’re likely to have ignored (details, Watson, details!). And let’s not forget: those el...