Teaching Literature in the Real World

A Practical Guide

Patrick Collier

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350195073
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Theorie der Literaturkritik

Offering guidance and inspiration to English literature instructors, this book faces the challenges of real-life teaching and the contemporary higher education classroom head on. Whether you're teaching in a community college, a state school, a liberal arts college, or an Ivy League institution, this book offers valuable advice and insights which will help you to motivate, incentivize and inspire your students. Addressing questions such as: 'how do you articulate the value of literary education to students (and administrators, and parents)?', 'how can a class session with a fatigued and underprepared group of students be made productive?', and 'how do you incentivize overscheduled students to read energetically in preparation for class?', this book answers these universal quandaries and more, providing a usable philosophy of the value of literary education, articulating a set of learning goals for students of literature, and offering plenty of practical advice on pedagogical strategies, day-to-day coping, and more. In its sum, Teaching Literature in the Real World constitutes an experience-based philosophy of teaching literature that is practical and realistic, oriented towards helping students develop intellectual skills, and committed to pedagogy built on explicit, detailed, and observable learning objectives.

1 Why Teach Literature?

Or, What Exactly Are We Doing?

In Praise of Small Failures

With this credo on the record, then, permit me to offer a personal story of teaching failure.

The text is an old warhorse, William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” and the lines

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

I’m in my second week on tenure-track, teaching British Literature 2. “Tintern Abbey” had been a formative poem in my education. I read it as a nontraditional, returning junior at the age of twenty-nine, from a photocopied handout in a class called “Intellectual Heritage.” I remember vividly my astonishment that poetry could do this kind of thing. (I liked poetry in theory, which meant that I wanted to be someone who likes poetry. And I had had a similar “I didn’t know poetry could do that” moment at age seventeen, reading Blake’s “A Poison Tree.”) But here was something new to me; poetry that seemed to be addressed confidentially to the reader, in language that seemed to me straightforward (despite its complex syntax), poetry that traced thought in detail and thus revealed the mind at work. Later in courses on Romanticism, I came to recognize “Tintern Abbey” as definitive of a scrum between competing visions of the world: a defense of the inspired and imaginative contra the rationalist, mechanistic, and scientific, yes, but more than that: a poem committed both to concrete details of the real world and to the mind’s response to them—an attempt at a reconciled vision of humanity that both validated this life and its particularity and hoped to see through it to something eternal. These issues seemed then (and, “though changed, no doubt,” still seem to me now) absolutely vital questions about what it means to be human. What is more, one of my greatest teaching moments of my young career had come a year earlier, when I subbed for my dissertation director in British Literature 2 and led a successful class on the poem. Afterward, two students approached me and asked, “What other classes do you teach?”

So here I was, walking students through a poem I loved, beginning with what I thought of as a fairly basic schematization of its time frame. The students had on their docket this week a take-home quiz that asked the question, “In ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey . . .’ ll. 23-50, Wordsworth mentions three ways in which the scenes at Tintern Abbey (these forms of beauty of l. 24) have affected him while he has been away. What are the three ways?” My thinking was that poetry reading is a skill that can be learned, and one important element of learning it is to pay close heed to details and stay with the speaker’s voice line by line, building up a straightforward, denotative sense of what is being said. I envisioned the students having these quiz questions at their side as they read, which would prepare them to talk about the key passages (or, rather, what I took to be the key passages). So, at the start of class, I posed the quiz question to the students: What effect had the memory of Tintern Abbey had on the speaker while he was away?

You know what’s coming next. Students could not come up with an answer that did justice to the complexity of the lines. They could not identify three ways. Some students could come up merely with “he really loves nature” but did not articulate any of its influences. Most could come up with one: it made him feel better when he was feeling down. A few glimpsed a second: it played an unconscious role in his behavior, sparking his “nameless, unremembered acts of kindness.” (Over long experience teaching this poem, it is clear that this phrase hits home with students, where phrases like “tranquil restoration” do not.) To my astonishment, no one in the room even seemed to have looked at the last half of the passage, where the speaker describes the most important influence on his life—the exalted state of consciousness in which he can “see into the life of things.”

In those days I was nothing if not committed, so I took pains to lead the class line by line through this section of the poem, picking out syntactic units: “[F]elt in the blood, and felt along the heart; and passing even into my purer mind” I read, gesturing toward my heart and my head. Looking around the room (twenty-five desks, approximately twenty occupied), I saw that most of the students were listening, attentive. But in my mind that edge of frustration that all teachers will know had wormed its way into my consciousness, that edge that threatens to show in your affect and to drive a wedge between you and the students. I could feel it in my chest, and in the slight flush in my face. A few minutes later and a few lines down, I glanced at the clock, to find that there were three minutes left in class. “You know what?” I said. “Read this poem again for next time, and we’ll pick up from there.”

Things did not go better, or much differently, in the next class. We trudged our way through more sets of lines, snagging this time on Wordsworth’s next set of temporal markers: his “coarser” love of nature as a boy; youthful adulation of nature as a young man, when running free in the woods was a physical and spiritual joy free of thought, with “no need of a remoter charm / By thought supplied, nor any interest / Unborrowed from the eye”; mature love of nature, informed by knowledge of human suffering and producing a vision of divinity, a “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused.” Things played out similarly, with me pulling out phrases and asking students what they meant, often to increasingly embarrassed silence. Again, the clock ran short. Again, I said, “Ok, we’ll finish up on this next time.”

At the start of the next class, a young woman named Jane raised her hand before we started. She asked, “Why are we spending so much time on this poem?” Already flustered and struggling, I came up with something like, “Because this is an important poem for laying out the fundamental issues in Romanticism.” (Let’s be honest here: in the defensive crouch this unfolding failure was producing, what I was thinking was: “Because I say so.”) Jane did not ask the crucial next question, and it took me a few years to ask it to myself: “Why are ‘the fundamental issues in Romanticism’ important?” Only now am I ready to ask, more scandalously, “How important are they?”

In retrospect, the dynamics at work in this classroom, muddy at the time, are clear to me. I walked into that classroom carrying some baggage I needed to lose and lacking the one thing I needed. What I had, and needed to jettison, were a fully articulated reading of the poem that I wanted students to share, and an unexamined belief that an understanding of Romanticism’s agon with modernity and the Enlightenment was indispensable equipment for living. What I lacked was a philosophy of teaching, grounded in the realities of teaching literature in the real world, that could articulate the purposes of a class like British Literature 2, serve as the grounding for reasonable objectives and methods for such a class, and thereby allow me to put in perspective and work with the relative (un)importance of a poem like “Tintern Abbey” to a college junior in Indiana in September 2000.

Twenty years later, I still teach “Tintern Abbey” when I get a crack at British Literature 2, which I share with two other professors. But much has changed: I no longer expect students to emerge from one evening’s engagement with “Tintern Abbey” armed to build up an interpretation that closely parallels mine, keen to parse out the poem’s engagement in epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge or political questions about the validity of individual vision. I have ceded substantial power and initiative to students, letting them identify what (if anything) speaks to them in an individual day’s or week’s reading and to write about it on a public discussion board. Based substantially on the week’s student writing, I decide which poems to focus on in class. My preparation involves grading and giving feedback on this writing and—in an internal compromise among their ideas and interests and my own priorities—deciding which issues and questions to pursue when we meet as a group. The class being a survey, I cannot give “Tintern Abbey” the space for thorough interpretation and contextualization—not remotely so. It now shares a two-day unit called “The Conversation Poem,” alongside Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp,” and short excerpts from Shelley and Wordsworth’s defenses of poetry. I know that we are not going to do what feels to me like justice to these two poems in 100 minutes. But I know what I can do: first, give students incentives to read with attention. There are many ways to do this, and I discuss them at greater length later. Most often I do so through the discussion board posts, which I insist should represent the best possible writing students can manage given deadline constraints, and which I grade promptly and with high standards and substantive, if concise, feedback. Then, I can set up a fruitful group discussion or set of activities each day that draws on the students’ interests, questions, and perplexities but also works toward a clarification and foregrounding of issues I think are important.

And this shift in objectives, from having students “understand Romanticism’s ripostes to the enlightenment” to having them take part in a multiple-stage process of interpretation, beginning alone in their rooms but continuing into the classroom and then into more formal and ambitious writing, embodies a change in my approach that is also part of a larger transformation in the teaching of literature in the United States in the last decade or so. To use broad, layman’s terms, I (and many other literature professors) have come to think that what students can do is more important than what they know.¹ I and much of the profession have moved from an emphasis on content knowledge to an emphasis on method, on what has variously been called “strategic knowledge,” “procedural knowledge,” “textual power,” and “textual literacy.”² As Sherry Lee Linkon has pointed out, our curriculum designs have not caught up with this change: undergraduate literature majors are typically designed not around these skills but around literary history: movements, periods, and so on.³ This creates a situation in which individual teachers find ways of foregrounding methods within courses, like historical surveys, that were designed, many decades ago, to convey the old canon of masterworks. But most of us would agree that the methods we teach are the most valuable things we offer students.⁴ And, as I show in Chapter 3, these are methods not only of reading, interpretation, and critical writing but also of learning—means for discerning what you need to learn and figuring out how to learn it. If we succeed, what we do in college, regardless of major or field of expertise, is develop in students the capacities, strategies, and dispositions needed to learn.

Every college literature teacher needs to come to his/her/their own accommodation of the relative importance of knowledge and method. Some of us teach Shakespeare to young people who are studying to be schoolteachers, and our society, via its accrediting agencies, has decided that those students need to have content knowledge about Shakespeare. The hearty Renaissance experts and generalists in our ranks must balance the competing values of a student’s ability to parse lines of Renaissance English, or to read Hamlet with comprehension and pleasure, against the student’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s biography and his world. Myself, I still want students to finish my class knowing roughly what the Enlightenment was and how not only Romanticism but also Victorian sentimentalism, modernist anxiety, postmodern radical skepticism, and postcolonial critique grappled differently with its legacies. I do some of this work through brief lectures, but most of it by placing students in positions where careful reading, which is clearly valued and rewarded, will put them in position to seize upon such questions when they arise. And I recognize that not everyone will finish my class knowing these things, and that only those who reactivate that knowledge later—through continued reading, or careers (like teaching or law or politics) that entail ongoing questions about history, knowledge, authority, and liberty—will remember it ten or twenty years hence. Thus, though I still personally value content knowledge and what one might call cultural literacy, I ultimately value intellectual methods above all. I design my teaching to encourage and reward the development, practice, and improvement of intellectual methods.

Here then is the central premise of my teaching philosophy, and the central premise of this book: that “teaching literature” means, above all, teaching methods: teaching students to do things, putting them in the position to develop and improve at a repertoire of perspectives, moves, and activities that will allow them to read literature (and other complex texts) for the rest of their lives. Other things we value will happen, for some, perhaps many, students as we do this: some, perhaps many, will become more compassionate human beings, or come to appreciate and respect diverse kinds of people; some will come to love some of the same things we love; some will become knowledgeable about literary history or history proper. But long-term success in these latter outcomes—the only success that matters—is not something we can measure in individual students, nor is it something we are likely to achieve by going at them directly.

In contrast, if we are deliberate and nuanced enough in our teaching of methods, we and our students will be able to see concrete results. Learning is, by definition, a process of change in which learners gain new knowledge or capacities, and teaching is the attempt to place the learner in position to undergo desired change and assist him/her/them as the change unfolds.⁵ And the many individuals and agencies who pay us to do our work—the students themselves, their parents, the government agencies that (sometimes) subsidize a (decreasing) amount of the expense, the accreditors who underwrite our authority—want evidence that the change is really happening. We tread on perilous ground if we feel superior to their desire for us to show results. (Among many other things, what I mean by “teaching literature in the real world” is working within the institutions that employ and regulate us and working with the interests—often different from ours—of the students we teach.) And while studies have shown convincingly that reading imaginative works increases compassion, it is difficult to show that an individual person (or a class of thirty people) has become more compassionate or less self-centered because of fifteen weeks of directed reading and writing.⁶ But with the proper set of well-designed assignments and frequent feedback, we can demonstrate improvement in methods.

The emphasis on method has another happy side effect: it puts to rest any need to grapple with the question of what has been for decades vacuously called the “student-centered classroom.” For if your objective is to teach your students methods, the only legitimate way to do so is to demonstrate the methods to them and then have them practice them, over and over again, to give them copious feedback, and to assess them by requiring performances of those methods. There is little place for being the “sage on the stage” in this understanding of teaching literature. Even if some lecturing is called for (and that’s a legitimate method, though more difficult than it looks), everything needs to be deliberately subordinated to the goal of empowering students with method. A sort of politics of pedagogy is thus implied in the emphasis on method. But what are the broader politics of teaching in this way?

The Politics of Teaching Literature in the Real World

I do not mean to minimize the possibility (or the importance) of teaching literature for the purposes of social justice: this is not a “Save the world on your own time” argument, as one well-known dismissal of the liberatory politics of teaching would have it.⁷ Indeed, an emphasis on method is not politically neutral or agnostic. It is, first, a more egalitarian engagement in the politics of education itself, one that honors the student’s right to pursue her or his own...