Okay, so I posted on entry early. To make up for it, I am posting this one late. Not to confuse you, this is my post about the Scholes text. I will post again for this week’s readings.

Inside/Outside

There are three things that struck me in the Scholes’ text that I feel the urge to comment on. The first two are relatively simple; the third is more personal. I recognize that none of these are the “deep” content of the text, but I believe they are worthy of discussion and note.

To begin, on page 46 Scholes advocates withholding information that would help students to understand Hemmingway’s references to Mantegna until “after they have worried the meaning … a bit without this evidence.” This withholding empowers the teacher and diminishes the student reader. If Scholes really believes that this information is vital to understanding the passage in question, keeping that information from his students will only frustrate them, and in the process make him look like the revered holder of all knowledge. I also think Scholes’ word choice of “worry the meaning is telling.” Does he want his students to actually worry, as in have anxiety because they are unable to perform the required task? If so, he is then able to rescue them with his profound knowledge as the all-seeing, all-knowing teacher. (Actually, this strikes me as his attitude throughout the text with his constant references to his other writings. But I digress.) Perhaps I am reading too much into his word choice and intentions in this passage. Perhaps I am interpreting wrongly.

Secondly, on page 43, Scholes writes that literary study “opens the way to a critique of culture.” I find this an interesting comment in the light of other arguments that the study of literature is solely for the purpose of enjoying literature, that it serves no real purpose. Perhaps Scholes is attempting to create a “real” reason for studying literature that will validate it outside the ivory tower of academia. (More on this later.) Even if not, this leads to the dangerous territory of teachers leading and dominating the discussion and critique of society. I know this is true because I usually (I would love to say always but was taught to never (ha!) use absolute words in writing.) try to link readings to life with the “so what” question. This does typically lead to a discussion of society. Students are very quick to condemn the cultures of our society that preceded our own. They desperately want to condemn the husbands in “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wall Paper.” They automatically read these stories from a feminist perspective without even realizing it while I, on the other hand, have a certain amount of sympathy for the husbands. I find it difficult to maintain a completely hands off attitude in these discussions. Yet I don’t want to lead the students into the “only acceptable reading” idea that the teacher knows best.

This leads me to my third area of interest in Scholes’ text. Scholes points out a dichotomy between reality and the academic life. He claims that this is “the most problematic, and, therefore, perhaps the most important” distinction in his basic structure (5). He explains that we “despise our own activities as trivial unless we can link then to a “reality outside academic life” (5). He advocates that this distinction is false and that there does not need to be a link to reality to validate the study of literature. Yet he later states that the study of literature “opens the way to a critique of culture” (43). In this statement he contradicts his earlier statement that we do not need to have a link to the world outside of academia for the study of literature. At one point Scholes echoes Fish’s argument that literature needs no reason to exist as an area of study; it is its own validation. Yet Scholes later counters his own argument.

It is this very contradiction that I find intriguing because it is echoed through history and my own teaching experience. From the early stages of education in this country there has been a battle between composition and literature. Literature was the elite study that needed no reason to exist. It simply was. Composition, on the other hand, was very egalitarian in its efforts to raise the less culturally refined to the ranks of the elite. Not only has this struggle been seen through the history of English departments, but it can also be traced through my own teaching career. I teach both composition and literature. For a long time, though I thoroughly enjoyed teaching literature, I saw no use for it outside the ivory towers of academia. Therefore I turned to composition to deem my job as worthy. Everyone needs to be able to communicate and to write well. This was an area that translated well to the real world outside of academia. It was easy to explain to students why they needed to take composition, no matter what the major. It was less easy to justify literature as a required study. Yet I continued to struggle to justify it to both my students and to myself. Finally I allowed myself to say to my students (and to myself) that they needed to take it because it was fun. Of course they looked at me as if I was crazy. However, once I admitted this to myself and gave up on the idea of justifying literature as being “useful,” my students did actually begin to enjoy the study, at least some of them. Yes, our conversations frequently turn to the “so what,” which I think is a good thing, but sometimes we just read something and admit, “wow, that was pretty neat.”

So I may have focused on a minor part of Scholes’ work, but it is a part that speaks to me personally as it elucidates my own struggle with “why.”

Edith