|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
READING through the Fall 1986 MLA Newsletter I was struck again by the relative lack of concern for the status of literary study in undergraduate foreign language departments. Much of the reform activity in foreign language programs since the first meeting of the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies in 1978 has been aimed at improving language pedagogy in order to enable students to combine a program in a foreign language with study in another discipline. We needed and still need to improve our teaching of foreign languages to undergraduates, and it goes without saying that proficiency in another language opens a student to the possibility of studying virtually anything that has been systematically contemplated in that language. I would like to argue, however, that the undergraduate foreign language major should retain literature in its traditional position at the center of foreign language study.
I do not mean to suggest that the combined study of a foreign language and business or social work is a bad idea. On the contrary, I applaud any attempts to demonstrate the applicability of language study to students who would not otherwise take language courses, for I am more firmly convinced than ever that the study of foreign language is absolutely central to the purposes of higher education. What I am saying is that, contrary to what many of us have assumed, the study of literature is not necessarily in good health in the undergraduate major simply because most major programs at least nominally emphasize it.
With increasing regularity major programs centered on the study of literature have been forced to retrench because of the crisis of “dropping enrollments, declining levels of achievement by those who do enroll, plummeting teacher morale, and sharply eroding belief in the humanities as an educational ideal” (Sachs 41). This crisis, many believe, was precipitated by the new “vocationalism” in undergraduate education, which made literary study seem useless.
As a result of this attitude and the implied criticism that we as teachers of literature were unconcerned about our students' career needs and expressed preferences, new courses such as French for Business Majors and Spanish for Social Workers began to sprout like weeds in undergraduate departments. Most observers, however, realized that the primary motivation for such curricular reform was not intellectual conviction but survival.
Now, during the years when the pressure to build enrollments led many departments to abandon tradition, some tried to make their literature courses more attractive to students who were less and less prepared to deal with the subject matter. Unfortunately this attempt often meant presenting a watered-down version of the real thing. Thus students found that the intellectual content of courses in foreign literature lacked the complexity and focus they usually associated with serious academic work. Often this perception led to a damaging decline in the relative status of undergraduate foreign language and literature departments in the eyes of both students and faculty.
From what I have observed, I would say that this decline in status has exacerbated the crisis in departments of foreign language and literature almost as much as the “new vocationalism.” To stem this decline and take advantage of a climate of educational reform that is largely in favor of our efforts, we must work toward regaining lost ground by strengthening the study of literature in the undergraduate major.
We must keep a major in foreign languages firmly centered on literature without neglecting the essential services we provide to our colleagues in other departments. The reasons are simple, but they are fundamental to the liberal arts. If we don't teach business in French, business will survive in its own department; and if we don't teach Spanish for social workers, the field of social work will not be seriously threatened. But what will happen if we stop teaching classical theater in French or poetry of the Golden Age in Spanish or Romanticism in German? These subjects will disappear from the undergraduate curriculum, for we are the only ones with the training and background to deal with the great texts of our civilization in their original forms. And this activity, whether popular or not, is absolutely essential to the liberal arts. Teaching works in translation must be considered for what it is: a convenience necessitated by the limits of our undertaking and tainted by its association with a kind of linguistic imperialism that must be vigilantly denounced.
In any attempt to strengthen our pedagogical strategies, we must first consider exactly what it means to teach literature. It seems to me that we have two major areas of knowledge to cover in the literature curriculum. The first includes the history of literature and the forms it takes in a particular linguistic tradition, what Paul de Man calls “historical and philological facts” (4). We usually introduce students to this material in traditional survey courses, followed by period or genre courses that build on and refine the material of the survey. This practice is what most critics have in mind when they berate foreign language teachers for being “out of touch.” The second area, however, is directly concerned with the language of literature, with the discourse itself rather than with the conditions of its emergence, in other words, with “methods of reading or interpretation” (de Man 4). It is this area, the teaching of literature itself, that is the more difficult of the two confronting a rational plan to improve the undergraduate major.
It is a truism that while French literature is French and German literature German, both are also literature; but we often lose sight of its implications. As a profession we have failed to define the second object of our activity at the level of the undergraduate major, where it is most threatened and most problematic. We must now begin systematically to construct for ourselves, as well as for our students, a coherent idea of what constitutes knowledge in the field of literature. If it is clear to students that they are studying business in French when they take French for business, we must be sure that students are equally lucid about what they are studying when they take literature in French. Of course they are becoming familiar with a body of literary texts written in French, but how many of them, indeed how many of us, also realize that at the same time they are pursuing a branch of knowledge with a history, discourse, and methodology of its own—and doing so in French?. We as a group must now take steps to deal with our failure in this second area.
The remedy I propose is a problem-centered model for teaching literature in the undergraduate foreign language classroom. Based on clearly defined concepts drawn from recent work in literary theory, this model could be used in concert with a historical or philological approach. In this way we would be elaborating a methodology for imparting literary knowledge at the same time that we are introducing students to the major texts of the canon. By “problem-centered” I mean to suggest that a course covering a certain chronological sequence of texts chosen for their exemplarity might be organized around a series of increasingly complex critical problems. In reading each text, students would learn to solve these carefully delimited problems by using theoretical tools that structure much of the contemporary meditation on literature.
In teaching a text such as Voltaire's Candide , for example, I would introduce the concepts of story and discourse as tools that are essential to the systematic description of narrative texts. It is relatively simple to demonstrate the difference between the story, taken as the chronologically ordered sequence of events, and the discourse in which the events are presented according to carefully mapped strategies in order to produce certain meanings. In Candide I would lead students to appreciate the difference between the events of the story themselves and the meanings that Candide and Pangloss want the events to illustrate. Then I would introduce the concept of motivation as the a posteriori determination of fictional causes by their effects (Genette 94). I would ask students to consider the “motivated” relation between the story and the discourse of Voltaire's tale. The critical problem would then be to work out the exact relation between the narrative structure and Voltaire's denunciation of philosophical optimism. To solve this problem effectively students would have to write a short essay interpreting Candide in the terms of our analysis—that is, story, discourse, and motivation, theoretical concepts essential to contemporary narratological practice.
The range of possibilities is enormous. In dealing with poetry, for example, we should introduce precise definitions of metaphor and metonymy and refer to Jakobson's work in this area. Questions of influence and literary relations should make use of the technical vocabulary introduced by critics who have explored intertextuality. These terms are not difficult to use in descriptive strategies, and they have the outstanding advantage of contributing systematically to the students' growing mastery of the discourse we call literature.
Of course this method has other advantages as well. It might also help us rescue the study of foreign literature in the undergraduate curriculum from its reputation as unsystematic, impressionistic, or, worse, frivolous. At the same time it would explicitly “link” the practice of literature pedagogy to the social sciences, for theory itself has emerged in a milieu that disregards the traditional boundaries between disciplines. Gerald Prince goes so far as to suggest that this fact alone justifies making theory part of a core curriculum for the liberal arts (40). Perhaps we should consider such a move, but the model I am suggesting is one that uses theory exclusively in the context of systematizing our strategies for reading literature.
Now, I must make two things clear. First, we do not need new courses to do what I am suggesting. In fact, an approach to the teaching of literature that passes through theory is possible in a completely traditional, chronologically ordered, masterpiece-based literature major. It is a question of reconstructing the content of these courses so that a rational progression of topics leads to a coherent notion of what constitutes knowledge in literature. Second, we do not need to exhaust the field each time we introduce a new concept. Many have suggested to me that undergraduates are too ignorant, too uncultivated, too untrained to study theory. But this attitude, as Prince points out, “forgets that one can profit from Derrida or Foucault without commanding the entire philosophical tradition … [and] appreciate the distinction between signifier and signified, langue and parole , competence and performance, without knowing linguistics” (40). In fact, the difference between story and discourse that I mentioned above could easily become the focus for an entire course on the nineteenth-century French novel. We must remember that each time we talk or write about literature, we are implicitly theorizing. But we must begin to control and to exploit what has been implicit by making it the second focus of our enterprise.
How can we go about focusing on theory in our undergraduate classes when we are so often faced with students whose functional knowledge of the language falls far below the level we normally associate with literary study? A foundation has been established for us in what has come to be called the proficiency movement in foreign language education. A theory-based pedagogical model for literature can be seen as growing logically out of this movement. Inherent in the model I have been sketching for the reform of the undergraduate major is the need for proficiency-based language instruction supporting the literature major. When we look at the functional ability required, it becomes clear that students are capable of description and narration at a relatively early stage in their linguistic development in a foreign language. Acquiring the ability to sustain oral discourse accurately at this “advanced” level may take them several semesters, but we may safely assume, I think, that they can understand texts as stories and even write simple descriptive plot summaries after three or four semesters of proficiency-based work. Furthermore, Hoffmann and James have demonstrated convincingly that “the linguistic and literary levels of difficulty are not dependent on each other.” They observe that “a student's limited foreign language skill need not interfere with the intellectual level of the literary questions asked” (31).
In a sense, then, I am suggesting that we add a third proficiency area to language and literature, a sort of theory proficiency. Using the generic descriptions developed by ACTFL as guidelines, we could establish goals for teaching literature through theory. For example, to draw on the illustration above, which suggests a narratological approach to teaching Candide , we could say that an intermediate level would be characterized by the ability to identify and isolate story and discourse in a narrative text. At the next level students would be able to sustain a written comparison of the two that, in addition to paraphrase, would accurately describe the relation between them. At the superior level appropriate for undergraduates and graduates, we could expect students to accomplish critical tasks by mobilizing a conceptualization of the story-discourse relation. In other words, at this stage they could use that relation to solve problems posed by the activities of reading and interpretation.
When I suggest that we use the proficiency descriptions as guidelines for developing pedagogical strategies for teaching literature, I only intend a rough approximation, for I don't think that an exact correspondence could be found for each theoretical issue. As an inspiration, however, it seems very useful. If we keep in mind as we plan courses and syllabi that students ought to master description and narration before we introduce abstraction and hypothesis, we can work rationally toward a restructured literature curriculum that stresses both “historical and philological facts” and “methods of reading and interpretation” in a whole in which their necessary interdependence becomes clear.
Something else may begin to become clear in such an approach. Through theory we implicitly cross departmental boundaries, not only those that separate us from our colleagues who teach other languages and literatures but also those that divide the different discursive contexts in which the same theoretical issues are raised. Derrida and Foucault, for instance—two of Prince's examples—are not confined to French departments but are actively studied in many of the humanities and social sciences. Lacan's writings are equally alive in literary and psychoanalytical circles, and many of the categories invoked to organize our critical discourses emerged in structural or functional linguistics. Perhaps the most significant effect of a literature major redesigned through theory is that it creates important intellectual links to our neighbors in other fields. Culler makes the same point about the place of theory in the graduate program (210–26), but I think his argument is also valid at the undergraduate level.
Precisely at a moment when we often seem called on to reduce the importance of literature in our curriculum in favor of a more broadly defined orientation toward “culture,” we can reassert what we know to be the irreducible fact of literature: that its relation to language is different from that of any other discourse, since it takes language as both its point of departure and its point of arrival. “La littérature est et ne peut être autre chose,” wrote Valéry, “qu'une sorte d'extension et d'application de certaines propriétés du langage” (1: 1440). There is no more eloquent justification for placing literature at the center of the foreign language major.
The author is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at the State University College of New York, Potsdam.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Genette, Gerard. Figures II . Paris: Seuil, 1969.
Hoffmann, Ernst Fedor, and Dorothy James. “Toward the Integration of Foreign Language and Literature Teaching at All Levels of College Curriculum.” ADFL Bulletin 18.1 (1986): 29–33. [Show Article]
“Major Developments in Foreign Language Studies since 1978.” MLA Newsletter 18.3 (1986): 3.
Prince, Gerald. “Literary Theory and the Undergraduate Curriculum.” Profession 84 . New York: MLA, 1984. 37–40.
Sachs, Murray. “Collaboration's End: ‘Live in Fragments No Longer.’” Profession 84 . New York: MLA, 1984. 41–43.
Valéry, Paul. Œuvres complètes . 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
