19, no. 2 (January 1988): 4-6
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INTRODUCTION Constructing Critical Readers—Pedagogical Approaches to
Literature That Make Use of Literary Theory
Yolanda Stern Broad
STRAIGHT out of graduate school, when I taught my first literature course, a twentieth-century survey, I had the odd notion that one taught literature by pairing a literary text with a compatible critical method of analysis. Thus, I taught poetry using explication de texte, but I also paired Stanley Fish's affective stylistics with further poems, the principles of narratology with novels, Franz Fanon with third-world drama, Derrida with Beckett, Greimasian notions of function and role with other plays, and speech-act theory with the nouveau roman . The reading list for the course was very heavy, and my students were asked to write a series of papers analyzing what they had read and incorporating into their analyses the critical methods I had taught them. These particular students were innocent (they had never studied literature before—indeed, they came from a social milieu where “literature” was a foreign element), and because they were innocent, they had no notion that what I was asking them to do might be hard; they learned to apply theory as they learned to compose their writing into logical sequences. Guided by the critical structures that we studied, they read bulky texts, including nonstandard “difficult” works like Sarraute, Michaux, Desnos, Beckett, and Breton. They spoke in class and wrote papers, in ways that were reflective, original, and interpretative.
I was just as innocent as my students: it never occurred to me that undergraduates might not be able to handle the “sophisticated” concepts that I had worked on in graduate school and that were still burning brightly for me. The result, of course, fortuitously, is that I have no reason to believe that training students to use critical theory is in any way difficult or inappropriate. By luck, it seems that I am in step with increasing numbers in my profession: many of us, if not all, want to give our students tools so that they can understand what they are reading and gain entry to valuable texts at many levels and from many perspectives: like the sexual revolution, the textual revolution will, we hope, liberate our students, giving them full access, in this instance, to the aesthetic panoply of literature.
The pedagogy of applying literary theory is a timely topic: wiser, less foolhardy souls than my fresh-out-of-graduate-school self are aware of the value of good, organized approaches to literature independent of their application in the classroom. It is timely not only for individuals among us but for the profession as a whole. J. Hillis Miller, past president of the MLA, wrote in his final column for the MLA Newsletter that “our real obligation … is to teach good reading, critical thinking, and the good writing that is only possible for those who can read and think.” He suggested that we might achieve such a goal by learning to use literary theory:
In spite of widespread hostility to literary theory, there is also a widespread strong interest in it on the part of both teachers and students. This interest is not merely fashionable. It responds to a deep intellectual need. Literary theory is the indispensable bridge allowing movement back and forth among the various canons and curricula and allowing also for the use of many different sorts of texts to accomplish that primary responsibility of teaching good reading, critical thinking, and accurate, forceful writing. Our main business in the coming years will be to teach people to read—to read all the signs, including those of the newspaper and of the mass culture surrounding us, as well as those signs inscribed on the pages of the old canonical books. In the coming years an informed citizenry in our democracy will be one that can read and think clearly about all the signs that at every moment bombard us through eye and ear. (4)
The four articles that follow are based on papers delivered at the 1986 MLA convention, in New York. Each sets out to illustrate an aspect of a different theory of literary criticism, in the context of (1) its utility in solving a specific problem often encountered by undergraduates, (2) the efficacy of its transfer to “naive” students, (3) the possibility that those who have mastered it will apply it to other texts later on, and (4) its special value for students who are dealing with literature in a foreign language and therefore have to cope with understanding on a preliterary level. This last point goes beyond Miller's goals for literary theory: students of foreign languages have—usually—learned a foreign language as an explicit and coherent, rule-governed system; for them, literary theories can be shown to be other instances of logical systems, similar in organization to a linguistic system. Thus, there is the continuation of a familiar and already successful approach to gaining access to the foreign language and its culture.
These are not how-to papers: they do not give lesson plans for teaching a text. They do address the needs of beginning literature students and present aspects of literary theory that are currently of great usefulness to serious analysts. At one time, professors were mediators of texts; as the four papers that follow show, the professor now has taken on the additional task of mediating the theory for the student, so that the theory can serve as the student's key to the text.
To Lynn Kettler Penrod, the problem facing the student is to get “beyond the mere content-oriented teaching of literature … toward a tentative appraisal of what authors do in their texts and an appreciation of how they do it.” She gives us a basic tool, focalization, part of Genette's theory of narratology, that can be applied to texts in general, to tell us how to take them, that is, in what ways their viewpoints are subjective and how readers come to sympathize with protagonists. Using François Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux as a sample text, she illustrates how students can be trained to apply focalization.
According to Peter G. Broad, novices often cannot grasp, let alone appreciate, the refinements of their target language's rhetorical devices—devices used for such purposes as persuasion, suspense, ambiguity and humor—because they lack cultural and literary experiences. They can compensate for and even overcome these shortcomings by learning “to recognize basic speech-act types—both illocutionary acts and implied perlocutionary intention.” By doing so, “they can at least arrive at an intellectual response to the language of the text.” In particular, Broad would have students apply H. P Grice's theory of “implicatures” in order to recognize writing that is meant to influence the reader. To demonstrate the applicability of speech-act theory, he offers rule-based solutions to various rhetorical difficulties that students encounter with several authors (García Márquez, Galdós, and Unamuno).
William F. Cipolla would like students to be able to see the interplay between form and content, to conceive of them not as mere static stylistic features but as a dynamic and complementary pair that gives the text its meaning. Also using narratology as his mediating vehicle, specifically the notion of motif elaborated by the Russian formalist B. Tomachevsky, he leads students to the point where they can use the theory on their own to demonstrate how Voltaire's satire is achieved in Candide .
Fabienne André Worth combines Marxist notions of ideology with the theory of reader response to reveal the subjectivity of reading in general. She even uses another medium, cinema, to illustrate to her students the point that not only are readings plural but that (1) each lacks elements present in others and (2) readings of texts can be grouped by ideology to reveal the communities to which readers belong. She assigns to her students Rameau's Nephew in conjunction with a number of critical interpretations. Her purpose is to make students suspicious of all interpretations and, thence, to lead them to challenge “universal concepts such as ‘identity’ and ‘difference.’” In showing students the importance of “clarifying the interpreter's motivations as well as doing justice to them,” Worth juxtaposes the interpretations of Rameau's Nephew with another, feminist interpretation, which notes that gender marking renders the interpreters incapable of perceiving the androgyny of the principal character. In her final comments, she reminds us that students tend to feel threatened when they confront foreign concepts (here the strangeness not of nationality but rather of androgyny) and that we are responsible for giving them appropriate instruments (theoretical models) by which to mediate and go beyond these instances of alienation.
Finally, Lynn Kettler Penrod, in the introduction to her paper, lists a number of recent literary theories: structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction, as well as linguistics, semiology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. All these approaches should be able to yield further models for classroom use. We might add to Penrod's list at least the following: reader-response theories, such as reception aesthetics; areas of philosophical investigation such as pragmatics and phenomenology; cognitive psychology; and sociology and anthropology—all fields that have shed light on the nature of texts and their appreciation. Penrod's classification reflects current divisions of investigation. Some areas, however, have deeper roots. For instance, while not on the cutting edge of literary investigation, archetypal criticism, which belongs to the field of psychoanalysis, does provide a useful instrument to students when they are presented with, say, the symbolism of a Lorca or the systems of symbols of many medieval works. Similarly, various systems of phonetic “rules,” while demonstrably untrue and incomplete in the light of more recent work in the field, offer students concepts that are contemporary with certain works.
In a sense, these four papers serve as prototypes for communicating the pedagogy of literary theory. I hope, of course, that the currently felt need for the opening sections of these papers, which seek to justify the very use of literary theory by providing rationales for bringing it into the classroom (in answer to the “widespread hostility to literary theory” noted by J. Hillis Miller), can be abandoned soon. It does appear appropriate and useful, however, when we communicate applications of theory to others in the profession, to (1) incorporate a brief model of a literary theory, (2) mention the kinds of problems that this model can deal with, and (3) demonstrate how the model can be brought to bear on texts that exemplify the problem. I especially hope teachers of foreign literatures will recognize and respond to this last point, the usefulness of certain literary theories for specific texts, by continuing to develop a solid corpus of many approaches that, taken together, can deal with all the literatures we teach.
The author is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. This article is based on a paper presented at the MLA convention, 27–30 December 1986, in New York.
Work Cited
Miller, J. Hillis. “President's Column: The Future for the Study of Languages and Literatures.” MLA Newsletter 18 (1986): 3–4.
© 1988 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 19, no. 2 (January 1988): 4-6 |
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