Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters

Imagination, Interpretation, Insight

Dennis J. Sumara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135634636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight explains how a reader's involvement with literary texts can create conditions for developing deep insight into human experience, and how teachers can develop these interpretive possibilities in school contexts. Developed from the author's many years of research, this book offers both a theoretical framework that draws from an interdisciplinary array of sources and many compelling and insightful examples of literary engagement of child, adolescent, and adult readers, as well as practical advice for teachers and other readers about how to create interesting and expansive sites for interpretation that are personally rewarding and productive. Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight:
*provides an overview of theories of human learning that influence beliefs about language, culture, and identity;
*shows how these theories of learning influence beliefs about and practices of reading and interpretation;
*introduces new ways to conceptualize reading that emphasize the relationship between individual and collective identities and language/literacy practices;
*explains why access to information does not guarantee that understanding and/or insight will occur--by emphasizing the importance of "re-reading" and "close reading" this text shows that development of deep insight depends on interpretation skills that must be taught; and
*presents a reconceptualized view of reading pedagogy. This is an essential text for education courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and a must read for teachers and for anyone interested in more deeply understanding how literary works of art can create conditions for learning about oneself, one's situation, and one's possibilities.

The Gradual Instant

CHAPTER ONE

Earlier this year I re-read Margaret Laurence’s (1964) novel The Stone Angel. Presented as the autobiography of elderly Hagar Shipley, this story shows how life evolves as a surprise, not a plan. Most striking in this novel is the way Laurence is able to reveal the complex topography that conditions profound insight. For 90-year-old Hagar, such insight emerges from what Anne Michaels (1996), in her novel Fugitive Pieces, describes as “the gradual instant”:

Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion—planned, timed, wired carefully—not the burst door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant. (p. 77)

Near the end of her life, when Hagar realizes Marvin has been the best son, not John, it is an epiphany that has been years in the making. As with all unexpected revelations, there is no immediate accounting for this understanding. For Hagar, insight does not spring directly from a particular episode in her life, but emerges ambiguously from the strange crevices that collect memory, current perception, and fantasy. That she now is able to express her affection for Marvin is significant not because it is a more truthful account of her feelings, but because it helps her to improve the quality of her life.

Hagar’s experience is not unique. It is only in retrospect that we are able to interpret our lives and imbue them with meaning. Making explicit these interpretations is the primary work of memoirs, ethnographies, and autobiographies. That is why I read them. I do not read them for pleasure, although I do experience pleasure. I do not read them to learn moral lessons, although I do learn moral lessons. I do not read them to expand my repertoire of cultural and historical knowledge, although this does happen. I read them because I find I must continually create new sites to interpret my lived situation. I read them because I have learned that what is considered true about myself and my contexts is not easily accessed or represented. Truth does not exist in platitudes and clichés or moral imperatives. Truth cannot be found, directly, by asking others for advice, or from reading pop-psychology books that give directions for improved living conditions. What is experienced as truthful emerges from the complex relations of history, memory, language, and geography.

Like other educators who are interested in understanding the relationship between questions of knowledge and identity (e.g., Ellsworth, 1997; Greene, 1995; Miller, 1990; Willinksy, 1998), I have abandoned the idea that universal truths exist. What is considered true about experience is not foundational to experience, nor does it exist outside experience. There are no grand narratives that can adequately represent the complexity of human perception and understanding. Even so, human beings are compelled to try to interpret experience. Following arguments made by Rorty (1989, 1999), I have come to believe that the quest for essences and foundations must cease. Instead, I have become committed to emphasizing the importance of insight. And, like others who are interested in writing about insight (e.g., Grumet, 1988; DeSalvo, 1996) I have learned that it cannot be discovered. Instead, insight is fashioned from what François Lyotard (1984) has called “les petits récits”—the “small stories.”

What I am describing is not an original idea. As ethnographers and novelists know, what is interesting to people are not the big ideas that are believed to organize human experience. More interesting are the tiny plots and descriptions that circumscribe past, present and projected worlds of experience. Created from these small stories, sometimes, is what we humans recognize as insight, as revelation, as something that prompts us to remark: “Yes! That’s so true! I love you. I hate you. I’m sorry.”

Although small insights occur daily (“If I use the right lane, I will move through this traffic more quickly.”), deep insight is not so easily gained. Deep insight emerges from the hard work of interpreting one’s relations with people, to objects people have made (including narratives that describe and explain experience), and to the more-than-human world. Although conditions for the production of insight can be created, deep insight is usually surprising, occurring unexpectedly, emerging from curious places.

One of these curious places is what we have come to call “imagination.” As Jerome Bruner (1986) has suggested, imaginative thought is supported by the use of subjunctive forms of language. In the English language, words like “might,” “could,” “would,” “should,” are used to convey a sense of future possibility or obligation. To imagine, then, is to create interpreted bridges between what is held in memory, what currently exists, and what is predicted about the future. From this perspective, imagining is not a special act limited to certain persons or certain situations. Rather, imagining is central to human cognition (Egan, 1997). As I argue throughout this book, it is possible to create conditions for the expansion of imaginative thought. In the chapters that follow, I aim to show how literary interpretation practices can transform imaginative occasions into productive insights.

My personal reading experiences have been influential in helping me develop some of the theories and practices presented in this book. For example, over the past 25 years I have read The Stone Angel three times. Each reading experience has been differently situated, conducted for different purposes, and has yielded different interpretations and effects. When I read it in 1976, I was an undergraduate student of Canadian literature. I recall little of that reading, other than my attraction to Hagar’s strong personality and my interest in the world of the elderly—which, at that point in my life, seemed exotic, not pending. When I re-read it in 1999, I did so in response to my reading of James King’s (1997) biography of Margaret Laurence and a desire to remember and interpret my young adulthood. As I became reacquainted with Hagar Shipley, a generous interpretive site was created, one that connected my recent interpretations of Margaret Laurence via King’s autobiography with my current situation as an academic researching literary engagement.

My third reading of The Stone Angel was prompted by an unexpected tourist opportunity. During a recent cross-Canada trek from Toronto to Edmonton to take new positions at the University of Alberta, my partner and I happened to pass through Neepawa, Manitoba, which, as the sign at the entrance to the town reminded us, was the long-time home of Margaret Laurence. Although we forgot to travel to the cemetery to look for the “stone angel,” we did locate her former house. Viewing it from the idling van was reassuring to me: the house is substantial, two storied, and verandahed—a place with plenty of space for thinking.

As we drove through this small town in the middle of the Canadian prairies, I was reminded of how extraordinary products can emerge from seemingly ordinary places. How could Margaret Laurence have written such brilliant prose in this place? But then I remembered that she spent years in Africa and England. If a sense of “place” includes memory, then for Laurence the town of Neepawa was a much more textured and interesting context for writing than could ever be noticed by a passing stranger like myself.

During that first week in Edmonton my energies were consumed with the intense labor associated with redistributing life into a different context. When I finally located the copy of The Stone Angel I had purchased in 1999 (unfortunately, my first copy seems to have vanished), I noticed that included at the back of the novel is an “afterword” written in 1988 by Laurence’s friend and colleague, Adele Wiseman. I had not noticed this in my previous reading. This time I read it first. Woven throughout this text are excerpts from letters Laurence wrote to Wiseman during her work on The Stone Angel. Here is my favorite passage:

This book (?) of mine, you see, has been written almost entirely without conscious thought, & although the conscious thought will enter into the re-writing, on the first time through I simply put down the story as the old lady told it to me (so to speak) & let it go where it wanted, & only when I was halfway through did I realize how it all tied together & what the theme was. I didn’t know it had a theme before, nor did I know the purpose or meaning of some of the events & objects in the story, until gradually it became clear. (p. 314)

The gradual instant. Over time, with persistence and the use of interpretive strategies and writing techniques, the pattern becomes evident, the theme emerges, and what is identified as meaning is presented. This is what happens when one becomes involved in what I call, following the work of Albert Borgmann (1992), “focal practices.” The practice of gardening, the writing of poetry or novel or memoir, the writing and singing of songs, the inventing of new forms of mathematics—all these can function as sites within which personal and cultural interpretive work can be accomplished. That Laurence should not know precisely what her novel is about until quite late in the process represents the way in which one cannot understand the particularity of one’s lived experiences easily or immediately. It seems that there is no direct correspondence, through language, between experience and interpretations of experience. One cannot say simply, fully or unambiguously what one’s life is or what one means.

This does not suggest, however, that humans should not attempt to interpret their experiences or to make those interpretations available to others. As I try to show in the chapters that follow, interpretation practices function to create experiences of self-identity. As a species that has learned to use language and its many forms as tools to connect ourselves to the human, human made, and more-than-human world, we must continue to create interesting interpretive sites that both clarify and complicate what we believe to be true.

Of course, what I am describing is not unknown. Margaret Laurence developed her abilities as a writer of prose fiction in order to create such interpretive spaces. Although I do not believe she is writing about herself when she presents the narrative of Hagar Shipley, there is no doubt, from what she says about her experience of writing (see King, 1999), that she is developing personal insight through writing novels. In writing about another character with whom she becomes relationally involved, the writer is altered. As Margaret invents Hagar, Hagar also participates in the continued invention of Margaret.

These experiences are not confined to those who craft literary fiction. Other literary workers, such as critics and biographers, have presented similar insights about their experiences. In her memoir Vertigo, Louise DeSalvo (1996) writes about her years of researching the life of Virginia Woolf:

She has been very good to me, this woman. And, in time, it is through her life that I begin to understand the lives of the women in my family—my mother’s, my sister’s. And finally, mine. (p. 241)

Insight also emerges from involvement in other aesthetic practices. In Jane Urquhart’s (2001) historical novel The Stone Carver, the main character, Walter Allward, a master stone carver commissioned to create a monument to the soldiers who died at Vimy Ridge, describes his experience working on this project:

I have been eating and sleeping stone for so long it has become an obsession with me. And, incidentally, a nightmare. (p. 270)

Here, Allward shows how involvement in any creative art form becomes an organizing structure for one’s sense of self-identity. Importantly, while these aesthetic involvements can become personally rewarding, they can also become terribly difficult. Because the making of art requires more than simple representation but also, as Gadamer (1990) has suggested, a re-presenting, the work of the artist is to continually find ways to interrupt familiar perceptions and interpretations. This, in itself, can become troubling, since interrupting familiarity in a particular aspect of one’s experience is influential to all other aspects.

Challenging familiar perceptions is difficult. As Madeleine Grumet (1991a) explains, “The problem with everyday life is that it is always the ground, rarely the figure” (p. 75). Artful living requires that elements of unnoticed life be re-surfaced, re-examined, and re-presented. This is not only work for people who make art objects. It is work for anyone who is interested in continuing to develop deep insight into human experiences.

The discussions of literary engagement presented in this book are developed around a theory of learning that conceptualizes human identity as co-evolving with the production of knowledge. Identity is not some essential quality of the individual human subject. Identity emerges from relationships, including relationships people have with books and other communicative technologies based on language.

Through the invention of languages that can be reproduced and represented in many ways, human beings have learned to create personal and cultural identities that are more complex than those of other species. Literacy practices have become tools to make associations and to preserve personal and cultural memories. The development of computer-assisted electronic communication has expanded these possibilities, offering human beings many more opportunities for identification with others and their ideas than at any other time in history.

Opportunities for identifications, however, do not guarantee that meaningful relationships to people or to their ideas will occur. As I write this, I am reminded of the difficulty a friend of mine has experienced using the Internet to develop a primary relationship. Although she has participated in many contacts and exchanges, possibilities for other-than-electronic relations seem to dissolve once photos are exchanged, or telephone conversations are initiated, or face-to-face meetings are arranged.

While it seems that relational identifications can be maintained through electronically mediated literacy practices, they cannot always continue when the boundaries of these interactions are transgressed. This, in itself, is not problematic if the interlocutors are content to develop a relationship that exists in language, mediated through literacy practices of reading and writing. Similar to how Louise DeSalvo’s ongoing relationship with Virginia Woolf continues to be supported through reading and writing interpretation practices, my friend’s Internet relations can be maintained when these are contained within the organizing structures of that genre of interaction. The difficulty, it seems, is that while they mimic the experiential structures of literary engagement, on-line relations hold the promise for other kinds of intimacy, including physical contact, while literary engagements do not. The literary relationship remains as imagination and fantasy, and can become incorporated into the reader’s daily life without the usual commitments or obligations required by many other types of relationships.

It is not only electronically mediated social relations that become difficult when the boundaries of their initial organizational structures are transgressed by face-to-face encounters. Readers’ relations with characters and with other people often undergo tension when the initial organizing conditions and structures are changed. Such has been my experience, for example, with authors of books I have read. Because I like to re-read favorite books, I sometimes develop strong identifications with whom Eco (1994) calls the “model author”—the persona the reader invents to represent the flesh and blood author. With books I come to love, these model authors attain mythical status, becoming fantastical, larger than life.

In the past, I have made an effort to meet and become acquainted with the flesh and blood person who has written these books I love. Most of the time, this creates an interpretive problem since, of course, the persona I meet is not the persona I have come to know through identifications with her or his text. The experience is usually disappointing, since I am confronted with evidence that there is often little or no relationship between what one writes and how this is communicated to readers, and how people present themselves, in person, to others. This is why I now resist trying to meet the authors I read, preferring, in most instances, to live within the interpretive structures conditioned by my identifications with what they have written.

In my previous book Private Readings in Public: Schooling the Literary Imagination (1996) I outlined a theory of reading that described how engagements with literary fiction participate in the reader’s complex ecology of human/human, human/text, human/context relations. Although I supported and developed Rosenblatt’s (1978) and Iser’s (1978) analyses of the relational experiences of reader/ text involvement, I elaborated these by attending to literatures emerging from science and ecology, which interpret relationships between human thinking and biological and ecological systems. Supporting this theoretical framework were a number of analyses of readers’ experiences with literary fictions, drawn primarily from work I had done with English teachers and secondary school students. I attempted to show the complex and nuanced ways relations with literary characters, plots, and settings function to create interpretive opportunities for readers.

In this book, I elaborate my earlier theoretical discussions by showing how literary engagements contribute significantly to the ongoing invention of the reading subject. I choose the term “reading subject” to signify that acts of literary engagement create opportunities for both the continued invention of the reader and the ongoing production of knowledge that occurs during acts of reading and interpretation. Drawing from research I have conducted over the past decade with different groups of adult, young adult, and child readers, as well as personal memories of teaching and reading experiences, I attempt to show how literary engagement can become an important site for the ongoing interpretation of the personal, the communal, and the cultural.

Although I emphasize engagements with literary fiction, I acknowledge that these are not the only forms of imaginative encounters that have the potential to produce insight. One interesting example, which resembles the experience of literary engagement, was the overwhelming public response to the sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales. As I watched the incredible outpouring of grief, and listened to testimonials by persons from all around the world, it became clear to me that many people had developed strong relational identifications with someone they had never met. Their relationship to Diana was wholly developed through the countless media representations of her. This does not mean, however, that the grief people experienced was not real. It does show, however, that what counts as an identity and identification depends more upon narrative structures than physical contact.

The experience of loss is common with readers of literary texts. The research in reader response is replete with examples of how readers mourn the loss of relational identification with characters when their reading of a novel is complete (e.g., Appleyard, 1990; Nell, 1988; Sumara, 1996). As I discuss in greater detail later, because identity emerges from our relations with others, when a relationship ends (whether in divorce, death, or other sudden partings) individuals experience a profound and lingering grief. The grieving, it is important to realize, is not only for what can be identified as the other person, but, as well, for the complex ways in which the relationship with that person has contributed to the development of the identities of the other individuals involved. When my relationship with someone ends, I do not only experience a loss for that person, I experience a loss of personal identity. In order to regain some sense of personal coherence, interpretation practices need to be employed. In the case of Diana’s sudden death, the weeklong processes and rituals of public grieving, culminating in the ritual of burial, facilitated the creation of a context for this interpretive work. With literary identifications, practices of re-reading can alleviate experiences of loss, as can opportunities for explicit interpretation of the literary relationship and its possible effects.

Although I sometimes use the word “coherence” to describe a sense of self, I do not mean to suggest that human identities are clearly bounded, predetermined, or fixed. Following post-structural theories of language that emphasize t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter One: The Gradual Instant
• Chapter Two: Learning How to Create Insight
• Chapter Three: Interpreting Identities Troubling Bodies
• Chapter Four: Learning How To Be a Subject
• Chapter Five: Interpreting Identities Every Moment is Two Moments
• Chapter Six: Learning How to Fall in Love
• Chapter Seven: Interpreting Identities Enlarging the Space of the Possible
• Chapter Eight: Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters
• References
• Acknowledgments