Two Problematic Issues Relating to Literature Didactics

Author(s):

Greger Andersson(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 09 A, Teaching and Learning Ethics, Literature and Rhymes

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-10

11:00-12:30

Room:

201.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Ilmi Willbergh

Contribution

This paper addresses two problematic issues relating to Swedish literature didactics. The first issue concerns the stipulated aims of the education in literature like novels, short stories, plays and poems. The second issue concerns standpoints regarding what it means to understand literary fiction.

Why shall we teach about belles lettres in school? Asuperficial reading of the steering documents for elementary and upper secondary school in Sweden shows that the education in Swedish and literature has several goals. The primary aim is that students shall improve their ability to understand and use language, because humans are supposed to develop their identity, express feelings and understand the thoughts and feelings of others through language. Students shall also become familiar with different genres and work outan ability to adjust to the form and content of a text to be able to comprehend and interpret it.The formal and technical aspects become more specific in the curricula for each year and in their final year students shall be capable of understanding, interpreting and analyzing texts from different media and to apprehend the message, theme, motif, purpose, sender and context of texts. The steering documents forelementary school are rather vague regarding which literature students should read in school. The most important criteria appear to be that the chosen texts shall represent different genres and be from different times and parts of the world.

If we turn to didactic studies we can note that different theories of education have informed scholars’ reasoning about the aim of the study of literature. It has even been argued that one theory, so-called “experienced based” teaching, has been a point of reference when didactic scholars have observed and evaluated teaching (Mossberg Schüllerqvist2008). According to this approach, teaching should take its point of departure in students’ experiences. However, this should not be taken to mean individual experiences only. The approach assumes a more general focus on human’s experiences and holds that the ideology of texts should be related to different discourses in society. The purpose is eventually emancipatory. This relates closely to the opinion that the prime aim of the study of Swedish is to promote democracy.

These goals can be summarized as three kinds of aims that don’t seem fully compatible (a) that students are expected to learn both to recognize genres and to understand how texts are composed. They shall, equipped with this knowledge, be able to read, analyze and interpret texts; (b) they shall also gain knowledge about different cultures, peoples’ various experiences and ways to cope with life-issues; (c) the reading of literature shall moreover work as a “stimulus” for conversations in which students train democracy, discuss their experiences and life-issues, or try to come to grips with conflicts in society, different discourses and power-relations.

It could be countered that that these aims in fact are compatible since the understanding of literature entails a merge between the text world and the readers’ life world and hence that the goals hence are compatible. A common assumption in Swedish literary didactics appears to be that to understand literary fiction is to be able to “envision” it (Langer 1995, cf. Mossberg Schüllerqvist and Olin-Scheller 2011). This could be taken to be in line with common theories about the reading of narrative fiction like reader-response criticism (Iser 1991) possible world theory (Dolezel 1998, Ryan 1991) story-world theory (Herman 2002, 2005, 2011) and cognitive theories about “transportation”, “immersion” (Emmott 2005, Gerrig 1998). However, it’s not clear how we are to comprehend these theoretical concepts. Are they for example to be taken as metaphors for semantic or psychological processes?

Method

My paper is theoretical. Yet I refer to the steering documents for the Swedish school, to studies in didactics, to narratology and to a short story by the Swedish author Stig Dagerman: “To Kill a Child” (2013). When discussing the aims of the education in literature I examine the suggestion that there is a putative conflict between an emancipatory approach, which takes its starting point in student’s experiences and focus on “meanings through literature” and an education in literature in which teachers are “experts” who introduces students to new and perhaps strange texts and meanings and the focus is on the analysis of “meanings in literature”. I will not advocate any of these extreme alternatives but will suggest a distinction between the reading of literature and the use of literature as a stimulus. When turning to the issue of how we understand literature, I start with the notion that readers take part of all narratives as information about past events, which are true in some world. Moreover, readers are supposed to create an image of the narrated world in their minds and react to and interpret this world into which they have been immersed. I will put this notion in question referring to that not even advocates of this theory hold that every gap-filling or inference is relevant. Walton even speaks of “silly questions” (Walton 1990). This label could be applied to discussions about Hamlets childhood (Skalin 1991), what snake it was that made the killing in Conan Doyles The Adventure of the Speckled Band (Wistrand 2012), etcetera. This reasoning implies as Walsh has pointed out (2007) that readers’ gap filling and drawing of implications must be relevant in relation to something, which must be a sense of genre or purpose and the very composition of a narrative. Scholars who refer to cognitive and neurological studies, like Kuzmicova (2013), could be taken to question common psychological understandings of concepts like “envisioning”. She holds that readers have momentary experiences of presence when reading fiction. This can be related to mirror neurons and humans’ ability to “experience with” someone in fiction. She also argues that readers don’t make pictures in their minds when reading descriptions. Yet readers can voluntarily produce an image of a description if encouraged to do so. This, I hold, is confirmed by the fact that readers seem to be content to understand the sense and function of descriptions.

Expected Outcomes

I will thus suggest a distinction between the reading of literature and the use of literature as a stimulus in a discussion about life-issues. This implies a certain order of procedures. First, one takes part of a text in accordance with ones apprehension of its “sense-governing intent”; secondly, one reflects over one’s own practice and then, thirdly, one can turn to a discussion based on the text’s transmission of knowledge, the text’s function as a stimulus to the imagination or to group discussions, or a critical analysis of the relationship between text and reality. Such an order is, I hold, not only necessary for the understanding of texts but also for the hermeneutical dialogue in which the text must be allowed to be “the other” and even for the development of critical literacy. I will also put common understandings of the meaning of theoretical concepts as “envisioning”, “possible-world”, “transportation”, “immersion” etcetera in question. I hold, that readers are not transported to a world which they “envision” and interpret when reading fiction. If this is correct then my suggested distinction between the “talking about life issues based on literature as a stimulus” and the “reading of literature” should be sustained. The former task is important task and requires a skilled teacher. Yet, it would be a mistake to confound it with the reading of literature.

References

Dagerman, Stig. ”To Kill a Child” [Att döda ett barn]. 2013. In Sleet: Selected Stories. Translated by Steven Hartman, 17–20. Jaffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Gordiner. Doležel, Lubomír. 1998. Heterocosmica: fiction and possible worlds. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press Emmott, Catherine. 2005. “Narrative comprehension.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 351–52. London: Routledge. Gerrig, Richard J. 1998. Experiencing narrative worlds: on the psychological activities of reading. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska Press. ------. 2005. “Storyworld.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 569–70. London: Routledge. ------, ed. 2011. The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1991. The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press Kuzmičová, Anežka. 2013. “Mental Imagery in the Experience of Literary Narrative: Views from Embodied Cognition.” PhD diss., Stockholms universitet. Langer, Judith A. 1995. Envisioning literature: literary understanding and literature instruction, Teachers College Press, New York. Mossberg Schüllerqvist, Ingrid. 2008. Läsa texten eller "verkligheten": tolkningsgemenskaper på en litteraturdidaktisk bro [To read the text or ”the reality”: communities of interpretation on the bridge of literature didactics]. Diss. Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2008 Mossberg Schüllerqvist, Ingrid & Olin-Scheller, Christina. 2011. Fiktionsförståelse i skolan: svensklärare omvandlar teori till praktik.[The understandingo f fiction in school. Teachers in Swedish transform theory into practice] Lund: Studentlitteratur Ryan, Marie-Laure 1991. Possible worlds, artificial intelligence and narrative theory. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press Skalin, Lars-Åke. 1991. Karaktär och perspektiv: att tolka litterära gestalter i det mimetiska språkspelet. Uppsala: Univ. Uppsala. Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: on the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wistrand, Sten. 2012. “Time for Departure.” In Disputable Core: Concepts of Narrative Theory, edited by Göran Rossholm and Christer Johansson, 15–44. Bern: Peter Lang.

Author Information

Greger Andersson (presenting / submitting)

Örebro Universitet

HumUs

Örebro

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