Reader Response in Secondary and College Classrooms

Nicholas J. Karolides

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136608001
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text, based on Louise M. Rosenblatt's transactional model of literature, focuses on the application of transactional reader-response theory in the classroom. It grows from frequent requests from secondary school and college teachers for teaching suggestions on how to put theory into practice. This is not a "What should I do on Monday?" cookbook, but an expression of the practice of theory in college and secondary school classrooms. The chapters portray a spectrum of strategies--including biopoems, expressive and imaginative writing, journal writing, readers' theater, role playing, and unsent letters--using as examples individual works from several genres. Recognizing that teachers who may have been trained in other theories and methodologies may be hesitant about their quite different role and expectations in the reader-centered classroom, the authors provide stepping stones to develop readiness and confidence, suggestions, and insights to ease the transition to the transactional model of teaching and learning. Pedagogical features:
* An explanatory introduction to each section defines its orientation and describes the content and direction of the chapters it contains.
* Invitations elicit engagement of readers with concepts, attitudes, or strategies presented in the chapters; they invite readers, as individuals or members of a small group, to consider ideas or to practice a strategy, among other activities, in order to enhance understandings.
* A glossary defines key concepts and strategies discussed in the text.
* A bibliography provides an extensive list of resources--books and journal articles--both theoretical and applied. New in the second edition:
* Six new chapters --three deal with the roles of film-as-literature in the English classroom, and three with enhancing multicultural understandings.
* Updates and revisions to several chapters that appeared in the first edition.
* Invitations, new in this edition, have been added to focus and expand readers' thinking.

Part IV

Exploring Differences Gender, Race, and Culture

The dynamics of personal and cultural experiences as they affect readers’ transactions are the focus of the chapters in this section. The authors examine the distancing effect by gender, race, and culture and exemplify strategies that open students to texts. These strategies include an exploration of the evoked responses, a reflection on the factors and processes that influenced the reading.

The process of exploring the evoked response is itself a learning experience. It cultivates a habit of mind that is provocatively thoughtful and democratic. Classroom dynamics stimulate the expression and recognition of multiple viewpoints and cause readers to further reconsider their own knowledge, ideas, and belief structures. In this context, bridges of understanding to characters and cultures are built.

Reader-response approaches are particularly well suited to teaching feminist and multicultural literature. Teachers, who themselves may be “out-siders,” need not place themselves in a position of authority, expressing the “correct” Interpretation. Instead of being outsiders peering in, students may undertake to assume the persona of the character in the text. This allows those outside the gender or ethnic group depicted in the text to become momentary insiders and those inside the gender or ethnic group to validate their own experiences.

In chapter 15, Laura Quinn expresses the nature of “gendered reading” and develops comprehension of the orientation of such female and male readings in response to Susan Glaspell’s “feminist” drama Trifles. Through class interactions and journal writing she provides opportunities for the “evolution and elaboration” of these preliminary responses. Quinn identifies two intervention strategies she uses to help students understand the gendered nature of their responses and reflect on their implications. The description of the preliminary and the evolving responses demonstrates the progressive transaction with the text engendered by such class collaboration: The responses become “more complex and less closed in their understanding.”

At the center of chapter 16 is the concept of the reader as outsider. To help his students gain access to two Native American novels, David Furniss asks them to identify problems and questions they face as readers in responding to experiences far removed from their own. His focus is on opening their reactions to the text and exploring these as a means of getting closer to the events and characters. He describes a reading journal strategy accomplished in class (and two other failed attempts) that generates personal reactions revealing the students’ outsider perspective. He projects the discussion of these journal entries, highlighting the focus of the students’ concerns and their wide divergence of opinions. He notes that the subsequent response to the novels was closer to characters and their world—“close enough to be able to talk to other outsiders and insiders about them in a way they might not have been able to before.”

By focusing on the responses of one reader, Arlette Ingram Willis, in chapter 17, examines the impact of the reading of a multicultural autobiography, Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places on a second reading of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. All three of this reader’s responses are included, illustrating meaningfully the development of an enhanced interpretation of the original text. Willis argues for the empowerment of “individuals to be socially and culturally conscious readers, writers, thinkers, listeners, and consumers of literacy.” Multicultural literature serves a significant role in this regard, providing a significant historical and cultural perspective, an “alternative point of view.”

Chapter 18 constitutes an analysis of a research study of a group of teachers participating in a class, Culture, Literacy and Autobiography, and a book club, the Literary Circle. Of the three case studies, one focuses on two Maya Angelou autobiographies, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name, centering on reactions to race issues; the second focuses in Jill Ker Conway’s The Road From Courain, drawing from the use of personal narratives by the readers; and the third reveals insights from teacher interviews about their learning. The authors analyze these teachers’ responses both to the texts and the dialogic nature of their learning experiences and provide insights for classroom instruction.

Asserting that “Literary voices from the African Diaspora … bring a different lens through which African Americans and European Americans may have an opportunity to embrace a broader understanding of human nature and race issues in the Americas,” in chapter 19, Linda Spears-Bunton illustrates her thesis with a class discussion of Krik? Krak! Her class, representing a broad spectrum of cultures, responds with surprise and dismay to this collection of nine stories of Haiti. The chapter includes bridge-making teaching tips, a bibliography, and a discussion of the social and cultural context for response.

In chapter 20, Jean E. Brown and Louise Garcia Harrison illustrate the range of responses to Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and discuss the influence of personal and social context on the transactions of readers. Two methods of involving students are explained—an oral brainstorming approach and a written journal activity. The discussion that follows expresses the students’ recognition of multiple perspectives as well as how and why there have been varied responses.

15

Trifles as Treason

Coming to Consciousness as a Gendered Reader

Laura Quinn

In Literature as Exploration, Louise M. Rosenblatt describes one of the aims of her reader-response approach to literature in the following manner:

One can have no quarrel with the fact that the attitudes and ideas the reader brings to literature are the results of his past experience. Our concern is rather that if the student’s superstructure of ideas is built on too narrow a base, he should be helped to gain broader and deeper insight through literature itself. That is why our emphasis has been on the interaction between the reader and the literary work. When the reader becomes aware of the dynamic nature of that interaction, he may gain some critical consciousness of the strength or weaknesses of the emotional and intellectual equipment with which he approaches literature (and life). Since we interpret the book or poem in terms of our fund of past experiences, it is equally possible and necessary that we come to reinterpret our old sense of things in the light of the new ways of thinking and feeling offered by the work of art. Only when this happens has there been a full interplay between book and reader, and hence a complete and rewarding literary experience. (126)

I find this statement of purpose to be of use to me, consistently and paradigmatically as I employ a reader-response approach in my literature classes. It is particularly applicable to the project of encouraging gendered reading—reading that acknowledges all of the cultural bases and biases of gender on the part of the reader—among students who have never consciously regarded themselves as gendered readers and may well resist doing so. One way to bring students to such consciousness is to begin a literature course with a discussion of the first statement in the Rosenblatt passage just quoted. Generally students “have no quarrel” with the statement and are often interested in naming, listing, and writing about (in a journal assignment or an in-class impromptu) the elements of their past experience that they believe they bring to the reading of a literary text. The products of such an exercise, written or oral, will, of course, contain gendered components (intersected with race, ethnicity, and class) that the students themselves can readily identify as categories under which their past experience can be organized. The process of situating themselves as readers sets the stage for the kind of self-conscious and reflective reading that a reader-response approach demands.

As Rosenblatt indicates in the passage quoted, however, the situating of oneself as a reader must be a dynamic process if learning is to take place. Indeed, the very purpose of identifying oneself as, for example, a White, male, middle-class reader with a strong work ethic and a Christian belief system is to be enabled to “gain some critical consciousness of the strength and weaknesses of the emotional and intellectual equipment with which he approaches literature (and life).” What I wish to achieve in the classroom when using a reader-response approach to a text is student understanding of both the conditional nature of their response(s) to a text and the potential for evolution and elaboration of those responses as a result of interaction with the response of others, intervention by the instructor, time, reflection, and rereading.

A large part of bringing students to consciousness as gendered readers is sharing with them the theory of what we are doing and letting them in on the approach. Being open about the underlying principles of the reader-response project and presenting the project as exploratory and provisional (a kind of working hypothesis) rather than as the definitive way in which students do and should read are ways of averting the students’ suspicion of being manipulated by a teacher with an agenda—always a risk when teaching “gender.” This is why I begin my classes with the writing exercise that responds to the first line of the Louise Rosenblatt statement at the head of this chapter—why I ask students frontally to situate themselves as readers of any text. What I like to do next is share with them the theory about gender and reading developed by Elizabeth Flynn in 1986, a theory that expands Rosenblatt’s transactional principle to include gender relations as they are inflected by historical power differentials. Briefly, Flynn describes readers as falling along a continuum from the dominant to the submissive (in terms of the reader’s relation to the text) with the (clearly desirable) interactive reader falling in the middle. A dominant reader is characterized by a detachment from the text that resists or refuses involvement. Such a reader will silence a text by resisting both its full potential for meaning and his or her own possibilities of being transformed by the text. A submissive reader is marked by an involvement that disables detachment and analysis, is overwhelmed by the marks on the page, and will often be able to produce little more than plot summary in response. An interactive reader exhibits a capacity for enough detachment coexisting with enough involvement to produce a meaningful transaction with the text (267–71). What is important about the continuum model here is that dominant and submissive reading responses to a text are not disqualified in relation to the interaction—they can, alternatively, be seen as excesses along a line that brings detachment and involvement together, in the middle, in a dialectical relation. In other words, all responses to a text (even the most hostile rejections or the most slavish entrapments) have the potential to move or be moved toward interaction.

Invitation 15.1

Consider Elizabeth Flynn’s description of readers; that is, the three categories of readers that she defines. Conduct a self-analysis, identifying the types of books—or specific books—toward which you are a dominant reader, a submissive reader, or an interactive reader.

Flynn’s categories of readers are not inherently gendered, a point I make to my students when introducing these categories as elements in one theory about reading. Her empirical research, however, with actual students and actual texts (Joyce’s “Araby” and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” for instance) yielded some gendered results in which “men students were often closer to the extremes of domination or submission, and the women were often closer to the interactive center” (276). Our classroom use of these categories, I emphasize, is to test and, perhaps, complicate them with our own experience as a group of readers analyzing collectively our individual transactions with common texts. What I hope to produce in the classroom—and what students often find engaging in simultaneously self-reflexive and analytical ways—is a kind of anthropological investigation of ourselves as a classroom culture of readers. The same standards of interactiveness (containing both involvement and detachment) that we might ideally bring to a transaction with a text can also be brought to bear on the study of ourselves as a community of readers of a particular text.

A text that I have found particularly valuable in achieving these ends is Susan Glaspell’s 1916 play, Trifles (or its short story version “A Jury of Her Peers”). Trifles raises close-to-the-bone gender issues to which any student can respond, but it also raises those issues in a problematic way that discourages (eventually if not initially) reductive readings, simplistic analyses, and premature responsive closure. It is a short and accessible text, one that can be taught so as to produce the “full interplay between book and reader” celebrated by Louise Rosenblatt.

Judith Fetterley calls Trifles a story about reading in which “the theory of reading proposed in it is explicitly linked to the issue of gender” (147). It is because this text is “about” gendered reading that it can be used to get students to look at and engage in gendered reading. Such reading (or the consciousness of such reading) will not take place without careful strategies on the part of the teacher. Perhaps more than any other theoretical approach to texts, the reader-response strategy works best, in my experience, when it becomes, in the classroom, both a highly permissive and a highly self-conscious approach, one that (initially) turns students loose on a text and admits almost any response as potentially interesting, at the same time, pulling back regularly and rigorously to examine variant responses, to feel for their roots, and to evaluate not their correctness or usefulness, but rather relation to text, classroom, responder, and a larger social context.

More concretely, when students claim at the start, for example (as some, mostly male students do when I teach Trifles) that the play is a bore, it is important and productive to credit that response with some authenticity and plausibility by posing the question (which may not be answerable until much later in the discussion but can be posed at the time of the response) of why and to whom this particular text might seem initially boring. The text may bore more men than women, the text may bore dominant readers (such readers are often bored by the texts they dominate), and, less obviously, the text may bore not only those who have been culturally programmed to resist it but also and especially those against whom the text’s treason (to be discussed later) is committed. In short, boredom may be a logical defensive response that can illuminated rather than trashed in class discussion and one that can, thus, enrich the class’s experience of the text.

I have taught Trifles repeatedly in two quite different courses; one is an introductory college literature course, and the other is an introductory interdisciplinary women’s studies course. In each case I have learned that student response will be marked by gender and that my position as an unabashedly feminist woman teacher colors student discussion responses in a variety of ways, sometimes eliciting resistance or, alternatively, obedient party-line responses, sometimes creating inhibition, occasionally authorizing the exploration of new ideas. Of course, the fact that the women’s studies students are generally around 80% female whereas the introductory literature class tends to be evenly divided has an important impact on the group interaction to Trifles and on the way in which each group interaction brings about revision or revamping of a student’s initial response to the text. It is important to note here that this approach to teaching this or other texts need not, indeed should not, be limited to the college classroom. At any level...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• I. The Transactional Theory of Literature
• II. Initiating Readers' Responses: Classroom Processes Classroom Processes
• III. Developing Readers' Responses Classroom Processes
• IV. Exploring Differences Gender, Race, and Culture
• Glossary: Key Concepts and Strategies
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index