This
page examines the historical relationships between literary
theory, literature curriculum, and classroom practice. Clearly,
theory has played a role in the development of our thinking about
curriculum and teaching. At the same time theories have come into
prominence in certain periods as part of or a response to particular
historical moments and movements. The contexts listed below suggest
times when approaches were in their heyday, though many theories were
conceived or developed considerably before the time they became broadly
influential.
The influence
on the curriculum of some of the most recent literary
theories is still being sorted out, as discussed below. For more
discussion of this topic see Literature
and Lives: A Response-based, Cultural Studies Approach
to Teaching English by Allen Carey-Webb.
Archeology
of the Literature Curriculum |TOP|
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Curriculum
/ Classroom Practice
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Text as sacred source of eternal truth, priest/teacher as
translator, present day understood through proper interpretation
of omniscient text, emphasis on allegory, symbol, parable.
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Medieval
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Linguistic and literary traditions define ethnic nationhood,
emphasis on mythology, national epics, ancient popular folklore,
legends, teacher as preserver.
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17th to 19th Century
Enlightenment
Nationalism/
racialism
of national culture
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Emphasis on personal experience of great artists, teacher
presents writers as role models.
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19th Century Individualism
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Literature as part of class struggle, emphasis on social inequality,
social justice, working class literature, teacher inspires
students to social change.
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19th to 20th Century
1930s
Russian Revolution
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Literary periods and movements, relation of authors to each
other, emphasis on "representative" works, teacher
prepares students for graduate study in field.
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1920s
Discipline
develops in the
academy
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Literariness, organic unity of literary work, figurative language,
irony, author's life and time not central, emphasis on canonical
"complex" literary forms, poetry, teacher helps
students discover artistry of writers.
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1940s-1950s
Cold War,
Anti-Communist,
university expansion
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Literature emerges from repression of individual (Freud) or
social unconscious (Jung); repression, oedipal complex, archetypes,
teacher helps students identify human drives.
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1960s
Challenge to
corporate culture
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Media studies, popular literature & whole range of cultural
artifacts, teacher helps students analyze pop culture.
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1960s
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Meaning created in negotiation between reader and text emphasis
on personal response to literature, literary works that inspire
the responses of students, teacher helps student develop own
response as readers.
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1970s
Relativism
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Literature, experience, perspective of women needed to address
history of discrimination and exclusion, later, social construction
of gender, orientation.
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1970s
Women's
movement
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Literature, experience, perspective of marginalized ethnic
groups needed to address history of discrimination, rethink
"canon," traditions, emphasis on biography.
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1980s
Civil Rights
Movement
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Postcolonial
Studies
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Literature of formerly colonized peoples in Africa, Asia,
and the Americas, examination of colonial literary traditions
of European powers, "Third World" literature.
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1980s
Global ism and
decolonization of
Africa and Asia
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Current
Approaches and Practices |TOP|
Cultural Studies
Integrates a variety
of approaches with an emphasis on addressing social inequality. Origins
in British social theory (Birmingham School), European socialism (Frankfurt
School), American popular culture, and multicultural, postcolonial,
and feminist movements.
Lends itself to
thematic curriculum with an issues base, might include juxtaposing
canonical literary works with marginalized or popular culture, as
a pedagogy values self-criticism, close reading, social awareness
and activism of students. Combined with Reader Response approaches,
Cultural Studies can emerge authentically from student interaction
with curriculum, rather than being "politically correct."
Poststructuralisms and New Historicism can suggest possibilities.
Deconstruction
Derrida, the founder
of deconstruction, challenges universal ideals, metaphysical certainties,
or claims to unchanging truths about the human condition. "Truths"
when examined closely, when "deconstructed," turn out to
be fictions created by language and particular systems of meaning
situated in time and place.
Deconstruction
invites English teachers and students to carefully examine the most
basic assumptions of the discipline. How might terms such as "literature,"
"genre," "national tradition," "writer,"
"reader" even "teacher" and "student"
be less precise, more blended into their supposed "other"
than they appear to be? (How is the "non-literary" also
like the "literary," the "poem" like the "short
story," the "American" like the "European"
or the "African," vice versa, and so on?) How might meaning
in works of literature (or visual or institutional "texts")
not really be as clear or straight forward as it might seem at first.
The English classroom, rather than being separated from the "real
world," becomes a place where meaning and change actually take
place as we examine, rethink, and play with the texts, roles, concepts
always and already set up for us.
New Historicism
New Historicism
incorporates the insights from multicultural studies, gender studies,
political criticism, media studies, popular culture, cultural studies,
etc. as it looks literature of the past. New Historicists distrust
expressions like "in the eyes of the later middle ages"
and tend to see historical periods not as consistent or coherent,
but as made up of different social groups in contest with one another.
Literature should not be thought of as transcending the time it was
written, but instead, as deeply involved in it, reflecting the period's
tensions and diversity. Stephen Greenblatt says that New Historicists
have "been less concerned to establish the organic unity of literary
works and more open to such works as fields of force, places of dissension
and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and
subversive impulses." New Historicists also try to be conscious
of how our position in the present shapes our view of the past and
of ways that the understanding of literature and history changes over
time.
A New Historicist
approach creates the possibility of making the study of traditional
literature more contentious, controversial, and considerably more
interesting and relevant to students. For example, a teacher approaching
Shakespeare from a New Historicist perspective might ask students
to compare his portrayal of women with street pamphlets from his day
vociferously arguing about women's rights. Or, she might have students
explore the Elizabethan treatment of peasant revolts and public forms
of torture of disloyal subjects against Shakespeare's presentation
of treason and regicide. Or, she might have students compare English
or Spanish writing about Native Americans to Shakespeare's portrayal
of Caliban in "The Tempest." Or, she might have students
analyze contemporary sermons about Jews along with Shakespeare's presentation
of Shylock, in "Merchant of Venice." All of the primary
historical materials I am mentioning here are readable, relatively
brief, and available. Yet, the textbooks and literature anthologies
currently available effectively isolate Shakespeare, for example,
from the tensions and controversies of his age and our own, instead
contextualizing student reading of the plays with simple bucolic descriptions
of Stratford-on-Avon or diagrams of the Globe theater. This sanitized
"safe" history actually makes it harder for students to
see what is really interesting about Shakespeare's time (or that of
any of writer's) and why it might be relevant to us.
Post-marxism
Breaking with
certain more rigid marxist ideas such as the necessary determination
of a social system by its economic structure, the inevitability of
revolution, or the justice of a one-party state, many postmarxist
scholars continue to draw insight and inspiration from socialist thought
while rejecting its oppressive aspects. A critique of capitalism and
materialism, a focus on class and social inequality, and a recognition
of the legitimate aspirations for "power to the people"
in political, economic, and cultural spheres are powerful ideas that
emerge from marxist traditions.
Drawing on these
concerns teachers and students might analyze discourses with an orientation
toward exposing those that serve the interests of dominant groups,
"the hegemonic," as they seek to develop alternative perspectives
that bring forward the voice of marginal or oppressed groups, especially
the poor and working class, as the "counter hegemonic."
Postmodernism
Postmodernism foregrounds
the concept of difference, the jarring, collage-like existence of
contemporary life The world is seen as a cartoonesque Disneyland,
an unremitting play of striking cultural difference, the overflow
of an uneven and diverse globalism where African slum dwellers watch
the Cosby show, where modern buildings are patterned like gift wrapped
Greek temples, where ancient Native American spiritual beliefs set
the pattern for cosmopolitan Latin American novels. If postmodernism
is, as one recent book is titled, a "Video Night in Katmandu"
it is also the startlingly heterogeneous student populations that
teachers have in their classrooms everyday, a member of the Crips
gang, seated next to a Cambodian refugee, seated next to an internet
computer nerd, seated next to a devoutly religious Christian fundamentalist
(or all these rolled into one person).
A postmodern approach
to teaching would examine the kaleidoscopic variety of contemporary
life. It would invite different voices, it would find the historical
in the contemporary, and the contemporary in the historical. It might
foreground works of magical realism (now written not only in Latin
America), explore the carnivalesque aspects of Chaucer, Rabalais,
or Swift, or the strangely altered states of science fiction. It would
juxtapose different genres, texts and materials that might not normally
be thought together but whose thinking together might illuminate modern
life. It would read its texts carefully to find the fragmentation
already built into the presumably whole and uniform. Postmodernism
is thus the most playful of the poststructuralisms, but, like the
others it refuses to accept any simple separation between the "individual"
and "society." In its best version, postmodernism teaching
means respect for difference, recognition of composite, mixture, blending,
and examination of the restrictions that prevent people from creative
participation in the making and hybridizing of culture.
Poststructuralism
Consciousness
resides in language and is socially made, not uniquely individual
or divinely given. English courses can address the discourses from
which identity (subjectivity, subject positions) arise. No escape
from the "stereotype" only richer and richer explorations
of roles and possibilities. Poststructuralism can take different forms,
such as postmodernism, deconstruction, post-marxism.
