Title: The Unteaching of Literature: We Murder To Dissect.
Abstract: Abstract The current approach to the teaching of imaginative literature is designed to maintain what seems to be a professional necessity: the distinction between the capacities of teacher and student to respond to literature. However, the fact must eventually be faced that a work of imaginative literature is not made accessible to anyone by means of an explanation presented after the work is read. Imaginative writings are composed primarily, not to be thought about or discussed, but to be experienced imaginatively, to be lived vicariously, at the moment of reading. No teacher may assume that an intellectually enriching interpretation, however brilliantly conceived, is an adequate substitute for that immediate experience. This article addresses that issue and offers a new perspective on the teaching of literature. ********** Most great works of imaginative literature continue to be taught to hosts of students, not as great works of imaginative literature, but as critical afterthoughts. This unfortunate approach to the reading of literature, which undercuts its inherent capacities to awaken and enliven the imaginations of our students, is persistently, and ironically, being perpetuated by the very profession devoted to making literature more accessible to larger audiences. For many years I listened to the same student complaints about the readings assigned in literature classes. do we have to pick the work to pieces? do we have to dissect it? And, as usual, I joined my colleagues in banishing these complaints to the darker corners of our classrooms by asserting, with an undeviating persistence, those traditional answers that we, in turn, had received as students from our teachers. It's a necessary process to develop your capacities to read more Don't you see? You'll learn from dissecting a work how to get into the meat of And so throughout four years of high school and four years of college, and increasingly within the latter years of grammar school, course readings carefully selected to include an extensive coverage of the Western world's most distinguished works of imaginative literature are methodically anatomized--for the purpose of developing each student's capacity to read more critically. Underlying the traditional approach taken within English classes is the implicit belief that the understanding and enjoyment of imaginative literature is taught to students primarily through a critical analysis of the text. Thus, the first conventional step taken by teachers is that of assigning a work to be read by a particular date. Certainly, they assume, a work has to be read before it can be discussed. The inadequacy of this seemingly harmless procedure became obvious to me one day as I stood before a classroom of students taking American Romanticism and assigned Moby-Dick, a rich and complex novel written by a man of undisputed genius at the height of his literary powers. The book had long been a favorite of mine. I had been working on it, attempting to write a critical article, for a period of over three years. I had struggled and sweated with that novel as I had with no other, and it wasn't until the latter part of the third year, after many readings of the entire book, and of sections within the book, after I had roamed within the world of that work much longer than Ishmael had spent on the decks of the Pequod, that I finally broke through to what struck me as the overall experience being conveyed by Melville. And I had just assigned it cold to a group of teenage students who were going to spend two weeks on it. The results were not surprising. The students somehow already knew that the novel was about a huge white whale, and so they started into the work with varying degrees of curiosity. Within a text of over seven hundred pages, their interest lasted, on the average, I would say for about a hundred to two hundred pages. By then they began voicing their perplexities-- Why does Melville ramble so much? …
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-06-22
Language: en
Type: article
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