From
Literature
and Lives:
A
Response-Based, Cultural Studies Approach
to Teaching Literature in High School and College, by Allen
Carey-Webb, Western Michigan University.
Chapter
1: A Course in Contemporary World Literature
"Contemporary World Literature" was not
a subject that I knew much about. I had never taught the class before.
I didn't have a textbook. I didn't have any prepared curriculum. Yet,
in a few days streaming in to meet me in room 12C would be a rowdy
group of twenty-nine high school kids. A mixed lower-track course
for sophomores that weren't taking a writing class and seniors avoiding
British Literature, reading levels would range from fourth grade to
college.
Three years earlier I had entered the profession with
an English degree and a teaching credential, but otherwise poorly
prepared to deal with the students and courses for which I was responsible.
My training was primarily in British literature with an emphasis on
the tradition of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Romantic poets. In
college classes we attempted to understand the unity of form and meaning
in imaginative works of art and we contemplated the supposed "eternal
truths" that literature revealed to us. How such literature or
such truths might be understood by teenagers or significant to their
lives was not a subject that, as far as I can tell, crossed the mind
of my professors. Even by the restricted standards of the 1970s, my
college courses were narrowly focused. The only literature by a woman
writer that I was asked to read during those four years were a few
short stories by Flannery O'Connor. I never encountered-in fact I
wonder now if at that time I had ever heard of-any writing by American
minority authors. I had never been asked to read a book published
within the last fifty years or written by an author outside of the
British-American tradition. In other words, I had never taken a class
or even been assigned a text that might be called "world"
or even "contemporary" literature.
I learned from the former World Literature teacher
that copies of Old Yeller were available. I am not especially proud
of the fact that to this day I haven't read Old Yeller. Maybe by the
time you read this I will have remedied my ignorance. For all I know
this presumably heart warming story about a boy and his dog is the
ideal classroom text. At the time, however, Old Yeller seemed so far
from the exciting promise of "Contemporary World Literature"
that I couldn't envision handing it out.
Instead, I headed to our school's book room to see
what else, if anything, I could find that was not yet reserved by
another teacher-all of them senior to me. Unfortunately our ready-to-retire
book room warden was convinced that the fewer books on her shelves,
the less work she would have to do, and she consigned unused titles
to the flames. Those that remained she was reluctant to let escape.
In other words, beyond Old Yeller precious little was available. The
only thing I could break away with that might possibly fit the definition
of "Contemporary World Literature" was a dusty class set
of Elie Wiesel's autobiography, Night. So with this book the semester
began.
Those who have taught Night have some idea what my
students and I were in for. Wiesel tells the story of the Jewish Holocaust
from his own experience as a fourteen year-old deported to Auzchwitz
and separated from his mother and sisters. Desperate to keep his father
alive, Elie constantly risks his own well-being in a futile struggle
that shakes his faith in God and humanity. Written in a simple and
direct testimonial prose, the book allowed students of different reading
abilities to enter into the discussion. Their responses and questions
varied-many that I could not answer. How could this have happened?
What would I have done if these things happened to me and my family?
Why didn't the Jews fight back? (Did they fight back?) Are there things
like this happening today that we don't know about? How could we find
out? What could we do? Students were responding in an intense and
personal way to a story that seemed to be far from their own experience.
Moreover, their behavior was unlike that of the other "low-track"
high school students I had been teaching. These students were reading
ahead, doing the homework, listening to each other in class They were
caring deeply about-and troubled by-what they were learning.
I tried to create a variety of ways for them to turn
this interest into a fuller response. In addition to small and large
group discussions, students also wrote letters to Mr. Wiesel, illustrated
scenes that seemed important to them, created monologues for different
characters. Several students became involved in research on various
aspects of the Holocaust, trying to find answers to questions that
arose in the discussion. Through their research and my own we began
to find other materials that would help us enrich our understanding
of Nazi racism. We read a chapter from The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich that showed how Hitler created youth movements, influenced schools,
controlled the media and "Nazified" German culture. We watched
a recreation (and translation into English) of one of Hitler's speeches
from the video of Inside the Third Reich. (see appendix for additional
materials for teaching about the holocaust). As we learned more about
cultural and historical contexts, the holocaust began to seem less
like an abstracted evil and more like a real event in history-it began
to seem, in other words, not so distant from the present day. This
sense significantly increased with the next class event.
Inspired by their interest and the impact of Night,
I contacted the Holocaust Resource Center at our local synagogue.
From their librarian I learned that some extermination camp survivors
were still alive, living in our area. With a measure of uncertainty
I phoned the number the librarian had given me and asked Diana Golden
if she would be willing to speak with my class. Mrs. Golden told me
that for forty years following World War II she had not spoken about
her experiences, not even sharing them with her own children. Yet,
because some historians had begun claiming that the holocaust had
never taken place, she was determined that the truth must be told.
She said she had been seventeen years old when she was taken to Auzchwitz,
about the same age, she supposed, as many of my students. "Yes,"
she said. "I will come to your class."
Nearing seventy Mrs. Golden was confident and resolute,
yet it was clearly difficult for her to talk to us, and, at times,
her courageous poise gave way to tears. Rounding up, train cars, Auzchwitz
in the middle of the night, selection, loss of family, desperate struggle
for survival, as my students listened to Mrs. Golden speak these were
no longer events in a book but something that had happened to a real
person we were coming to know. They listened intently and the questions
they had been asking came up again with even greater urgency. I had
talked to the class about treating Mrs. Golden respectfully, therefore
I felt a bit uncomfortable when, as time for questions was nearing
an end, Sherrie, one of the "low achieving" sophomores,
asked if she could touch the numbers that had been tattooed on Mrs.
Golden's arm in the concentration camp.
In response, Mrs. Golden pulled up the sleeve of her
dress and rolled over her hand to expose the inside of her forearm.
First Sherrie, and then the other students, stepping tentatively out
of their desks and across the room, reached out and touched the clearly
visible blue numbers marked on Diana Golden's skin.
Mrs. Golden's visit to my World Literature class was
an event that I believe none of us will forget. Looking back on it
eighteen years later, I recognize her visit and the teaching of a
holocaust unit also touched something in me that began to enlarge
my vision of English teaching. Starting off Contemporary World Literature
with Night, the holocaust, and Diana Golden's visit, my students and
I were immersed in discussion, writing, questions, and feelings that
went beyond the boundaries of English studies-at least as I, until
then, had experienced it. We weren't addressing literary genres or
terminology. We weren't climbing a list of great writers simply "because
they were there." We weren't learning writing skills merely to
satisfy the academic requirements of the competency test or the next
grade level. Instead we were vitally concerned about real people in
the real world, about what had happened to them, and about what these
events meant to us. We were reading, writing, and learning intensely,
about history, literature, culture, racism and how they intertwined.
Above all, and at Sherrie's instigation, students were being touched,
and touching others, in ways that I hadn't expected.
As that holocaust unit drew to a close I found myself,
as usual, rushing to consider what the class would be doing next.
Although I didn't understand exactly how things would be different,
I realized I had a new level of intensity, involvement, and meaning
to aim for. Trying to identify possible materials, I went from our
school, to bookstores, and to the public library. I wanted to build
on the themes and issues we had started with and hoped to extend them
into a broader consideration of "Contemporary World Literature"
relevant in some measure to my students and their questions about
what was happening today. In the 1980s Cold War tensions were still
high. Threat of nuclear war was a subtle given in our lives, something
there but rarely brought to the surface. The word "holocaust"
provided a link, I thought, and I came across several collections
of contemporary Russian short stories. Xeroxing like mad, these became
my next unit, one that allowed us to look at our "enemies"
in the "Evil Empire" and discover a human face. We watched
the film "Dr. Zhivago" and students did research projects
on Russian life and culture. My library and book store forays also
led me to read contemporary works from India and Africa in English,
and from Latin America in translation. Literary works, film, essays,
photographs, speakers, research, library trips, they all began piling
up on each other extending our curriculum and analysis in many directions.
As I feverishly sought ways to teach that could develop the kinds
of human connection that were made by Night, new worlds of literature,
experience, and supplementary materials were opening up.
My journey into more effective teaching included plenty
of bumps and potholes, as my experience with Contemporary World Literature
illustrates. In an effort to develop a more careful step-by-step scope
and sequence for our students, integrate writing and reading into
the same courses, and reduce tracking, our English department decided
to drop its remaining elective courses in favor of a sequence of grade-level
based full-year survey courses. Thus, the year after I started teaching
Contemporary World Literature, the course was no longer in existence.
Although individual teachers could vary what they were doing, the
content in the new courses was organized by the nationally standardized
textbooks with which we were provided. The new understandings and
approaches generated from the Holocaust unit did not have opportunity
to mature in a second draft of the course. Nonetheless, teaching Contemporary
World Literature showed me ways that my teaching could center on sensitizing
students to the experiences of others, help them communicate from
heart and mind together, and connect them to pressing social issues.
I allowed what I was learning from Contemporary World
Literature to spill over into my other classes. My department chair
agreed to purchase a class set of Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country,
and I introduced it into my British literature class. We watched movies
about South Africa, read history and contemporary essays. As with
Night I realized I needed to respect my student's responses and allow
their questions and interest to set directions for where our discussion
and reading would take us. The divestment debate (did US companies
need to leave South Africa in order to fight apartheid?) was going
on in congress and the class expressed an interest in the issue. Thus
we read newspaper articles and magazine essays and debated what stand
the United States should take on the issue. While I had an opinion,
in this discussion it was important for me to hold it back, to let
students explore the complexities and make up their own minds. We
didn't come to a consensus on divestment, but their reading of Cry
the Beloved Country was becoming all the more compelling and relevant.
And, as they learned about Apartheid keeping white and black people
ignorant of each other in South Africa, my suburban middle class white
students began to ask about the segregation that was still evident
in our community.
In a hallway closet I found an out-of-use class set
of John Hersey's book, Hiroshima, and started using it in the Freshman
Language Arts class along with a variety of essays, speakers and films
that addressed what we could do today about the nuclear threat. As
I expanded the kinds of texts that were read in my classes, addressed
present day issues, and developed integrated thematic units, my teaching
was moving away from a narrow emphasis on the literature I had read
in high school and college. The more I strayed from the textbooks,
the more risks I took, the more I found material in which the students
could develop a passionate interest, the greater the excitement and
relevance my courses seemed to take on-and the more my students were
willing to read, write, and work.
Still I felt a reluctance to let go of traditional
curriculum and approaches. My own high school experience, my undergraduate
education, and the weighty and authoritative organization of the textbooks
I was given made me doubt the innovations I was making. Had I strayed
from what literature classes were supposed to be? Were students learning
the "right stuff"? I still valued the classics, but how
could I integrate the new worlds of literature I had glimpsed? What
changes could I make? How far should, or could, I go? What was the
content of Language Arts classes supposed to be, anyway? Who had decided
and why?
Contemporary World Literature, and the experimentation
I was doing in other classes, made it plain that all students, and
especially those struggling in school, needed to discover that everyone,
even the most persecuted or oppressed, has a voice that can and should
be heard and respected. I saw that for the white and relatively affluent
American young people in my upper-track courses, comparing and contrasting
their experiences with people different from themselves was a revelation.
Somehow the media and the insulation of their suburban community lead
many to believe that their experience was "normal," that
everyone else in the world was either like them-or wanted to be like
them. Although it was preliminary and haphazard, Contemporary World
Literature also convinced me of the value of focusing on the content
of literature and of carefully linking materials together in historically
meaningful ways, ways that would generate student interest and make
possible a wide variety of responses. This approach helped me better
connect reading, writing, and speaking. It helped me make my teaching
simultaneously relevant to issues in the contemporary world and respectful
of my student's independent and critical thinking.
Although at the time I didn't have a name for the
kind of teaching I was beginning to do, today I would call it a form
of "response-based cultural studies," one that draws on
both the "Reader Response" work pioneered many years ago
by Louise Rosenblatt and the new and emerging "Cultural Studies"
approaches rapidly impacting literature and cultural study around
the world. If my first experiments with response-based cultural studies
were almost lucky accidents, as I have learned more about literary
theory and history, Reader Response and Cultural Studies have increasingly
come to provide for me a theoretical framework and a research base
for careful thinking about English teaching, both the way I had been
trained and the teaching I am trying to do. [For summaries of each
approach see the shaded boxes.]
Reader Response
Although they may not recognize themselves as enacting
a literary theory, teachers who encourage students to develop and
explore their personal responses to literature are putting the "Reader
Response" theory into practice. Rather than lecture, recitation,
or the discovery of some predetermined meaning, Reader Response teachers
favor small and large group discussions, literature circles, creative
writing, dramatic and artistic activities that help students actively
engage with what they read and express their individual response and
understanding. Just the kind of activities my students became involved
in with Night. First set forward as a coherent theory of reading by
Louise Rosenblatt in a now famous book Literature as Exploration (1938),
Reader Response emphasizes that the way a work of literature is understood
depends the interaction between reader and text and the presumably
unique personal meaning that readers create for themselves.
Because this approach respects student reactions and
insights and focuses on the interactive process of their learning,
Reader Response is an important theory for teachers to know about.
Rosenblatt herself emphasized teaching contemporary literature more
likely to engage student interest and passion. She also understood
that the more Reader Response teachers can draw student experiences
into the classroom-the more self-aware students become-the better
readers they are likely to be. As a movement for the reform of English
teaching, Reader Response has helped teachers move away from telling
students what to think or herd them all to the same "correct"
interpretation.
At the same time, however, an exclusively Reader Response
approach does have limitations. Rosenblatt's followers have tended
to romanticize both the effect of literature and the individual uniqueness
of student response. Because of the focus on reader rather than text,
Reader Response tends not to be very helpful when it comes to thinking
about content for English courses, about how we choose between "great"
works, about why we might prefer the literary canon to popular texts
or vice versa. Indeed, some Reader Response based classrooms, such
as the one described by Nancy Atwell in her fabulous book In the Middle,
focus entirely on students as independent readers with no common texts
for analysis and discussion. By itself a knowledge of Reader Response
theory would not have provided answers to the questions I was having
about curriculum after teaching Contemporary World Literature. Reader
Response doesn't facilitate our thinking about how we define "cultural
literacy," about how and why we should select literature for
study, nor what "literature" even is and how our definitions
have changed over time. Yet, as Reader Response takes us into the
interaction between reader and text it opens the door to a variety
of approaches that further and more compellingly elaborate the connection
between literature and lives.
Cultural Studies
The very limitations of Reader Response are precisely
the strengths of a Cultural Studies approach. Cultural Studies emphasizes
the integration of literary works, even the most canonical, with the
whole range of cultural expression. In the classroom Cultural Studies
calls for up-to-date and engaging thematic curriculums where culture,
social structures, and historical circumstances are explored side-by-side
with a particular emphasis on how those issues touch real people in
the present day. While it draws on the insights and interests of "multiculturalism,"
Cultural Studies is both broader in its inclusion of issues of social
class, women's studies, and popular culture and more critical in its
emphasis on social change. Thus the Cultural Studies movement explores
not only the high literary culture that has been the traditional domain
of English teaching, but also the lives of people whose voice, perspectives
and experience are seen as the very stuff of which culture is made.
As I have come to learn about Cultural Studies, I began to realize
that I had already started doing it in Contemporary World Literature
and my other courses.
In exploring a particular issue or theme a Cultural
Studies approach might involve a close and careful reading of one
or more literary works, along with studying a television program,
doing library research, and reading prose essays. Research papers
can be combined with literary analysis, personal reflection, and argumentation.
A Cultural Studies approach might lead us to compare traditional canonical
authors with contemporary popular materials, including the mass media.
Cultural studies invites a wide variety of new and potentially invigorating
writing into teaching, such as interviews, ethnography, testimonial,
surveys, film and media analysis. It urges us to be self-reflective
but not cavalier about the disciplines we work in. While mixing genres
and crossing disciplinary boundaries Cultural Studies spur us to also
consider how the establishment of genres and disciplines has functioned
historically.
Cultural Studies fosters critical thinking and activism
as it wrestles with how we see ourselves and others in the process
of understanding and acting in society. The perspective of "marginal"
groups such as women, ethnic minorities, working class people are
important in Cultural Studies. Valuable in themselves, they also help
us better understand dominant ways of seeing. Thus Cultural Studies
is interested in ethical, moral, and social questions. Emerging from
British social theory, studies of American popular culture (such as
television and film), and new forms of literary scholarship (multicultural,
gender studies, third world studies, etc.), Cultural Studies is increasing
shaping the university level study of literature, generating academic
conferences, publications, and new ways of thinking about the job
of English teaching. Cultural Studies serves as an umbrella category
inclusive of many of the new theories and approaches we will examine
in this book.
Yet, Cultural Studies also needs Reader Response if
it is to avoid the danger of "political correctness"-when
teachers dictate, legislate, or otherwise pressure students to hold
particular opinions without respecting their own insights, experiences,
ideas and perspectives. As we further explore the concept of Cultural
Studies in subsequent chapters, I hope to show that bringing Reader
Response and Cultural Studies approaches together offers exciting
possibilities for the Language Arts teaching of the future.
Many teachers have already begun to integrate Reader
Response and Cultural Studies approaches. I have found that an understanding
of response-base cultural studies has enhanced my sensitivity and
openness to students, increased my range of freedom and choice, and
inspired me to become a more aware and braver teacher. It has helped
me carefully and systematically build on the kind of teaching I began
in the holocaust unit only by a stroke of luck. Those of us who have
been teaching for any length of time have seen dramatic changes inspired
by the new research in composition studies and the widespread integration
of a writing process approach. The implications of a response-based
cultural studies for English teaching are, perhaps, even more significant.
A couple of years after teaching Contemporary World
Literature I had a conversation with a stranger that led me to take
the next step on my journey toward integrating these new approaches
into the world of my students.
