Literature in Language Education

Geoff Hall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137331847
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

A state of the art critical review of research into literature in language education, of interest to teachers of English and modern foreign languages. Includes prompts and principles for those who wish to improve their own practice or to engage in projects or research in this area.

Part 1
Language, Literature and Education

1

Literary Language and Ordinary Language

One objection to using literary texts in language education often voiced is that literary language is difficult, specialised, out of date or just in some way ‘different’. The view is not totally misguided but the distinctness of literary language has been exaggerated sometimes, and in any case the language of a text is only one element in successful or productive reading. Discussion of this issue in this chapter will lead us back to the ‘discourse’ of literature in both the sense that literary text comes to mean in an environment of other texts, and in the sense that any literary text has a reader, and contexts or reading.

Question addressed in this chapter:

• Does literature have a language of its own, perhaps rather unrepresentative of, or rather different from ordinary language (e.g. old-fashioned, obscure, pretentious, generally ‘difficult’)?

Does literature have a language of its own, perhaps rather unrepresentative of, or rather different from ordinary language (e.g. old-fashioned, obscure, pretentious or generally ‘difficult’? The simple answer to this old question is, ‘No, there is nothing uniquely different about the language of literature.’ But a fuller answer will reveal why the language to be found in literary texts is often particularly interesting for language learners. Of the three broad areas surveyed in Section 1, Culture and curriculum (Chapter 3), Reading of literature (Chapter 2) and the language of literature, in this chapter, research to date has told us most about the language of literature. This is a well researched area, and some issues and conclusions are already relatively well defined, though ongoing research, particularly in corpus linguistics (discussed below), is also opening up fascinating new dimensions of the topic.

• there is no clear and obvious literary/non-literary divide to be defined on strictly linguistic principles
• literary language cuts across dichotomies like spoken/written (oral/ literate) and formal/informal
• creativity may be a larger category than the literary, and with more explanatory power across both literary and more everyday discourses
• it is now recognised that discourse types such as metaphor or narrative are central to all language use, whether literary, professional or more everyday spoken interactions
• literature, especially modern literature, is kind of writing unusually, perhaps distinctively, tolerant of linguistic variety, including incorporation of many features of spoken language.

Overview of Chapter 1

This chapter reports six influential areas of research into literary language:

• ‘literariness’ in Russian, Czech and other ‘Formalist’ writings.
• oracy and literacy and variety including corpus linguistic findings
• linguistic creativity: metaphor, idiom and formulaicity.
• style and variation, and register
• the study of narrative
• dialogics: literature as discourse (language in use).

Paradoxically, the linguistic study of literary language has indirectly provoked a better understanding of language and language use as a whole, just as diverse areas of descriptive linguistics, cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis have unexpectedly shown us the pervasively poetic and creative nature of everyday language use, and in doing so confirmed what once sounded like wild speculation in Derrida and other literary theorists. Far from a peripheral concern, in sum, language used in literature is in many ways central to understanding language and language use in more general terms. Literature is made of, from, and with ordinary language, which is itself already surprisingly literary. In so far as literature exists as an identifiable linguistic phenomenon, independent of readers and contexts of reading (Chapters 2 and 3), ‘literariness’ is a matter of degree rather than kind:

Quote 1.1

Features of language use more normally associated with literary contexts are found in what are conventionally thought of as non-literary contexts. It is for this reason that the term literariness is preferred to any term which suggests an absolute division between literary and non-literary. It is, in our view, more accurate to speak of degrees of literariness in language use.

(Carter and Nash 1990: 18; also quoted and discussed in
Verdonk 2002. A quick basic overview of this perspective
is Carter 2006, condensed from Carter 1997)

Commonsense nevertheless traditionally opposes a stereotype of ‘literary’ language to ordinary language. Literary language, in this view, is flowery (or more positively ‘elevated’), unusually figurative, often old-fashioned and difficult to understand and indirect (for example, ‘symbolic’), all in all totally unlike the language we all use and encounter in everyday life. Our prototype of literary language is perhaps obscure modernist poetry, though a moment’s reflection helps us realise that such texts are hardly representative of a wider field of ‘literature’. Where everyday language is used to exchange information, we tend to think, literary language has designs on our souls and deals with metaphysical ideas or ethical dilemmas. Readers and teachers of literature will recognise a limited validity to these kinds of charges. Those who resist the introduction of literary texts into language learning classrooms have often relied on such characterisations of literary language, as have those who wish to preserve their own literary turf. Those who advocate literature in language classrooms need to be able to offer an informed response to these charges of linguistic irrelevance and inappropriate difficulty.

In practice, as we shall see, research has found it difficult to identify any clear boundaries between literary and non-literary uses of language, or to catalogue any definitive list of distinguishing features. Although some tendencies undoubtedly emerge from linguistic investigations into the language of literary texts, even these do not quite conform to the stereotype with which we began. Indeed a provocative formulation of the research reviewed in this chapter could be the surprising degree of literariness of the ordinary, and the equally pervasive ordinariness of the literary, particularly in the modern period. (Compare conclusions of Mukařovský 1964; Carter 1999). Most crucially for the language teacher, it could be that the language of literature is noticeably different in that it is typically more interesting and varied and ultimately indeed more representative than the language of dreamed-up dialogues in chemists’ shops or reprinted AIDS leaflets, as found in many of the best intentioned classrooms today. But these are matters for empirical investigation.

Quotes 1.2

…by raising these questions about the notion of literature, I have been taking for granted the existence of another coherent notion, that of ‘nonliterature’. Perhaps we need to begin by questioning this notion.

(Todorov 1990: 9)

[E]ach type of discourse usually referred to as literary has nonliterary relatives which resemble it more than do other types of literary discourse. For example, a certain type of lyric poetry has more rules in common with prayer than with a historical novel of the War and Peace variety ... [T]here is no common denominator for all ‘literary’ productions, unless it be the use of language.

(Todorov 2007 [1993]: 11; 10)

1.1 The language of literature: formalist approaches

Traditional views of the language of literature in the Anglo-American context derive from Romanticism via New Criticism, and typically characterise literature as ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’, in Arnold’s well-known formula, and therefore an appropriate model for students to revere, if not aspire to. Such a rationale lies behind the traditional modern foreign languages curriculum which culminates in the study of literature, with the implication that the literary classics represent in some sense ‘the best’ uses of the language to date.

Key figure 1

Matthew Arnold: 1822–1888. Poet, from the 1870s on a man of letters, perhaps the first important ‘literary critic’, much concerned to establish standards and values for literary reading, as opposed to ‘Philistinism’. Arnold was also Senior Inspector of Schools (1870), later Chief Inspector of Schools (1884), and what he saw in his professional visits convinced him of the importance of literature, ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’, particularly in an age when conventional Christianity was losing its hold on the urban masses of the Victorian cities. Poetry, for Arnold, would represent alternative and better values than those that surround most of us most of the time, ‘a criticism of life’. His key work is Culture and Anarchy (1869). Some of these ideas are pursued in Chapter 3. A brief incisive introduction to Arnold is in Collini (1994; or even briefer see Collini 2004, ‘Matthew Arnold’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.)

Concept 1

New Criticism: a generic label given (after Ransom’s 1941 book of that name) to the dominant critical and pedagogical approaches to literature for most of the twentieth century and beyond. Reacting against the reduction of the meaning of literary texts to the biography and intentions of the author, or to historical contexts, or to the responses of readers, New Critics like Eliot (1965), Richards (1929), Brooks (1947) or Wimsatt (1954) insisted on ‘close reading’ of the words of the poem itself. Value was assigned to the literary text to the degree that ambiguities, paradoxes and ironies were structurally posed and resolved in the language of the poem itself. The language of poetry was intrinsically complex, and opposed to the referential language of science or of logic. A poem, in this view, represents a unique experience, and is not translatable or generalisable into other terms (Brooks, ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’). ‘A poem should not mean but be’, in MacLeish’s famously self-contradictory poetic pronouncement. (See Abrams (1998), Drabble, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Robey 1986 is one of the best discussions.)

In established models, literature is viewed as complex, demanding, stretching the resources of the language to its limits. It is difficult to avoid cliché in representing this kind of perspective, though such an idea also anticipates the discussion of more rigorous Formalist ideas in what follows. ‘In major literary works we have the fullest use of language’; Literature is ‘the supreme creative act of language’ (F. R. Leavis, Cambridge Professor of English and a key founder of literary studies in the United Kingdom quoted in the context of a useful discussion of formalist approaches by Birch 1989; 44; 51). Poetry, for such critics, is found in writings like those of the Victorian Hopkins. But is all literary language really this difficult? How typical is such poetry?

I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!

(Hopkins 1990: 144. Poem 120. Simplified typography)

Jakobson (not coincidentally a great admirer of Hopkins’s poetry) notoriously described poetry as ‘organised violence committed on ordinary speech’, at three distinct linguistic levels:

sound-structure (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, metre);
choice of words (metaphor, archaism, variety);
and combination of words (unusual collocations, inverted word
order, marked parallelisms, ellipsis, etc.)(See discussion in Pope 2002:
89. See also Leech 1969).

I return to Jakobson’s work later in this section, but certainly the extract from Hopkins would seem to meet this description. Other modern ‘formalists’ or ‘textualists’ – as opposed to ‘contextualists’– include Bradford (1994, 1997) or Fabb (1997). Certainly, one feature of at least some literary writing is an unusually effective deployment of language, though it may not be the defining feature such commentators would wish for, and in any case, one would need to ask, ‘effective’ for who? noting the variety of response to any given utterance in art as in life. (Compare Chapter 2 below.) The query is, however, elided in arguing for the value of writers who use ordinary language in extraordinary ways. Taken to logical extremes, the Formalist position becomes untenably mystical. A critical discourse analyst would wish to probe who is exactly is doing the ‘isolating’ in my next quotation, and why:

Quote 1.3

The poem isolates itself, so to speak, from its context in ordinary experience to take on a separate, unique and indestructible existence of its own – independent not only of our ordinary experience, but also of its own separate constituents of sense and sound.

(Reeves 1956; quoted in Birch 1989: 76)

The attention to the ‘words on the page’, which was the slogan of New Criticism, was importantly prefigured in the first important historical attempts to identify and methodically describe the ‘literariness’ of literary language by the so-called ‘Russian Formalists’ in the early 20th century. Generally these writers, too, accepted the idea of ‘poetry’, particularly modern or modernist poetry as the highest and so most typical form of literature.

Concept 2

Russian Formalism: an approximate label for publications deriving from members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle (started 1915) and Opojaz (The Society for the Study of Poetic Language). Prominent members included Roman Jakobson, Victor Shklovsky, B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction: Literature as Discourse
• Part 1 Language, Literature and Education
• Part 2 Exploring Research in Language, Literature and Education
• Part 3 Researching Literature in Language Education (LLE)
• Glossary
• Reference
• Name Index
• Subject Index