This is a response to Prof. Sample’s comment on Aliens, but it’s long and the format doesn’t work very well in the comment section, so I’ll put it here too:

I wasn’t really responding to Scholes so much as I was responding to “Story of an Hour;” offering, in a way, an interpretation for how to teach it. Chopin’s tale isn’t just a feminist parable, nor a lesson about the economy of storytelling in general; it also follows the conventions of an elaborate joke. The reader response can be similar to an interpretation found in Blau of “Any Minute Mom Should Come Blasting Through the Door.” This interpretation found the piece to be an extended verbal joke based on exaggerated forms of hyperbole. In “Story of an Hour,” there is a dissonance between what’s at stake–Mrs. Mallard’s freedom, her autonomy, her happiness, her very life–and the fairness, or lack thereof, of the abrupt finish. Chopin waxes poetic about grief, about misery, about the idiosyncrasies of life that make it worth living or worth exiting. Then, she finishes with a quick “Oops. Her husband is still alive…aaaaaand now she’s dead.” The only thing missing is the soundtrack going Wah-wah-wah-waaaaaaaaaah.

Of course, this reading overlooks the subtext of that final sentence–“When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease–of the joy that kills.”–undermining the duality of the juxtaposed superficial and deeper meanings: she was being rewarded/she was being punished; she died of happiness/she died of misery; her heart broke with joy/she was heartbroken. But those meanings also serve as commentary on the feminist reading. No matter the eloquence of feminine liberation, it’s attainment is still as ephemeral as a dream that evaporates upon waking. Snap of a finger. The passage of a few sentences. The beat before the punch line.

I believe more fiction utilizes this technique than we recognize. As for “Aliens!,” it’s not that good a story, but I do make use of a punch line rooted in human narcissism. When the little purple hermaphrodite informs Dan that he has effectively annihilated an entire species, Dan’s essential reaction is to mourn the loss of what would’ve been a cushy life: “What happens to me?”

It’s also a simple mockery of the human desire for exploration and understanding of our own universe. Here exists an entire culture that Dan can barely fathom–sometimes noble, sometimes petty, bizarre in appearance and action, prone to exploding–and it’s gone before he can even recognize that its destruction was his fault. I suppose it’s a bit too self-consciously irreverent, only showing a small inclination towards that melancholy near the end; but, in my own way, I tried to set it up with a punch line that mirrored what I understood about Chopin’s story, and about storytelling in general.

In a class last semester, we spoke of a technique for understanding a text that involved transcription. Copying the text to see how the author went about writing it. Well, if writing is merely thinking on a page, writing a story that duplicates what the student understood to be the intent of the original is arguably the best way to think about it, regardless of how successful the duplication. After all, inspiration does not mean imitation.

My comment about Scholes was not really connected; I was merely tired and didn’t want to produce a post that would be completely interchangeable with what everyone else was already saying (and therefore get lost in the shuffle). The argument over this kind of theory always seems to devolve into an argument over semantics, the primary contention being how to say “New Criticism bad, Reader-Response good.” Check your ego at the door and teach the student how to learn to learn, not to learn what your telling them.

A fine enough contention. But everybody puts up this specter of the egocentric teaching of yesteryear like one of those blow-up dolls with sand in the bottom that children are encouraged to pummel even though they always pop right back up. Easy targets, but pointless targets as well. A caricature of the real problem. Why else does Laura contend that lectures are not the problem, bad lectures are? Why else does J.J. contend that the five-part-paragraph, while useless in its pure form as anything other than a literary artifact, can still have use as a building block? Everyone in class is looking for happy mediums, but no one’s necessarily happy about the mediums being presented in the readings. The texts just keep preaching to the choir under the guise of saying something new.

I suppose this comment would’ve made a better post. But hey, that just means that the comment is in the post and the post is in the comment; it’s backwards! Hilarity!

Ba-dum-bum.

Sorry, my brain is paste right now. I think of Scholes, I think of footwear. His discussion of literary theory feels like it’s going in circles. Tired. I shall post a story I wrote inspired by “Story of an Hour.” Always seemed like an anecdotal story for strictly introductory purposes; all fiction is an elaborate joke to get to a drawn-out punchline:

One day, Dan Freeman was abducted by aliens. These aliens were gentle but firm. They promised to cook, clean, and provide entertainment for him until such time as their study of human behavioral patterns came to an end. All he needed to do was be himself.

Though angry, Dan was also rather excited. It seemed like a nice gig, especially in light of his recent employment opportunities—or lack thereof.

“Finally,” he thought, as the little purple man who was his host finished gesticulating with his three arms (which might have been feet). “I’m finally getting what I deserve. All my needs will be taken care of, and all my days will be a breeze.”

“Zorsplatt!” the little purple man exclaimed. Dan nodded and favored him with a blank smile. His Splurbian translator operated on a ten-second delay. In a moment, the stentorian tones of television actor and history channel narrator Edward Herrmann flowed into his ears: “And, in conclusion, we shall select a mate for you, engaging in a worldwide search of your home planet.”

“Wow!” Dan said. “You said all that in just one word?”

“Snarf blug, chesekstan. Snedley sploo. Elta fremon che so la la garfnoddle. Deweda dweda ne ne.”

In ten seconds time, Edward Herrmann’s mellifluous tones translated this statement as “Indeed.”

“Huh. My own space girlfriend. Do I get to choose?”

The little purple man did a back flip, or perhaps he stood up—Dan wasn’t exactly sure what part of his captor was the head—and unleashed a torrent of rapid-fire gibberish. In a few moments, Edward Herrmann assured Dan they were counting on his input.

“Man, you guys thought of everything.”

“Flurble!” said the little purple man.

“I am not a guy,” Edward Herrmann translated. “I am a hermaphrodite.”

“Oh.”

A door slid open and a little purple chef with an ample belly—or perhaps an enormous cranium—waddled in. He was carrying two gourmet dishes on his tentacle-arms and he skittered across the room on his hundreds of little legs (which might have been hair). “Splattle!” he said. Ten seconds later the powerful voice of veteran character actor and history channel narrator Keith David said “I have brought forth your sustenance!” He slapped the dish down and removed the top; inside, hundreds of little bugs wriggled.

“Um,” Dan said.

The little purple chef slapped his fat belly—which, as it turns out, probably was his head—and gibbered for a bit. “Oops,” Keith David translated. “My Bad. This meal is not for you.” He handed it over to the little purple hermaphrodite, who quickly dug in. He placed an alternate plate before Dan, lifting the top to reveal a well-cooked steak, mashed potatoes and asparagus.

“Ah,” Dan said. “Much better. Although, for future reference, I’m not really a fan of asparagus.”

The little purple hermaphrodite choked on a mouthful of grub; hacking it up, he/she let out a piercing scream. Edward Herrmann soon joined in. The little purple chef looked stricken (I think), at least until the little purple hermaphrodite pulled out an object that looked like a pencil and fired an incandescent beam of tightly focused energy through the little purple chef’s belly/head, coating the wall behind him in a gooey splatter of purple guts. The little purple chef screamed and fell down dead. I stared at the corpse for a full ten seconds before Keith David said “Aaargh!”

“Splittle splottle fooby booby splay nog,” screamed the little purple hermaphrodite, his/her arms fluttering above him/her like a deformed, waving balloon at a car dealership.

“We do not take kindly to failure amongst our staff!” Edward Herrmann translated huffily.

“Evidently,” Dan said, looking down at the little purple chef—now the little dead chef. He gulped and turned back to his dinner. How would he be able to eat now? He winced and began picking at the mashed potatoes.

Dan and the little purple hermaphrodite dined in silence for a few minutes, Dan careful not to touch any of the offending vegetables. He wondered idly if his voice was being translated into a mildly famous Splurbian celebrity. Probably so. He wasn’t sure why, but the thought actually pleased him. As he began debating which celebrity would be best suited for his voice—perhaps the Splurbian equivalent of Edward Norton—he cut at his steak with greater enthusiasm. He spared a glance behind him and saw that the little dead chef, as well as the mess made by his passing, had disappeared.

“Wow,” he thought. “What service!”

As the little purple hermaphrodite and Dan went over the criteria for his stay—indefinite, but pleasant—they finished their respective meals. By the end of dinner Dan was almost certain that he’d imagined the little purple chef entirely. After all, he was in an alien spaceship talking to a creature whose anatomy he couldn’t even fathom.

Anything was possible.

An hour later, after a delicious dessert of caramel apple pie for Dan, and roaches for the little purple hermaphrodite, the two were looking through the Victoria’s secret catalogue for a mate. Suddenly, a little purple man in a little purple HAZMAT suit rushed into the room.

“Flibble flobble,” he wailed. Ten seconds later, the dulcet tones of Meryl Streep translated this sentence as “Code Seventeen-B!” and then the little purple man—probably a little purple woman—exploded, splattering the inside of her little purple suit with little purple guts.

The little purple hermaphrodite seemed to sigh—or perhaps fart—and put the catalogue away.

“What happened?” Dan asked.

When he/she answered, the little purple hermaphrodite’s voice had a fatalistic quality to it. Edward Herrmann almost seemed to take longer, as if he were reluctant to translate. But translate he did.

“We made an unforgivable error,” Edward Herrmann said, voice cracking. “It seems your species carries a certain bacterium which ours cannot tolerate for a sustained period of time. We are all exposed. Though it takes a variable amount of time for death to occur; sometimes earlier, as in the case of my dear wife Garfsblaggle,”—he gestured to the little purple pile of goo in the little purple HAZMAT suit—“and sometimes a little longer, death is nevertheless inevitable. Honestly, I could detonate at any moment.”

“Oh my,” Dan said. “Is there anything I can do?”

The little purple hermaphrodite sighed, looking not at Dan but into the eyes of the Fourth Horseman, and gabbled a bit more.

“No,” Edward Herrmann translated. “Our race is telepathically linked via brainwave. Your bacterium will destroy us all, even those on our home planet…Splurbia.”

“No!”

“Yes,” said Edward Herrmann.

“But, what will happen to me?”

“You shall be returned to your home planet immediately. I am sorry we did not get to continue our association much longer, Dan. But, in the short time I’ve known you, I feel safe calling you…friend.” He held out a tentacle-arm, the last act of a doomed hermaphrodite feeling the ephemeral breath of some slouching beast upon his neck (or perhaps upon his ankle). Dan reached out his hand, a single tear rolling down his cheek…and then the little purple hermaphrodite exploded. Dan was coated with purple substance that felt like a mixture of jelly, honey, and Jell-o.

Ten seconds later, Edward Herrmann said “aaaah…”

In a moment, lights appeared before Dan’s eyes, a deep thrum hummed in his ears, and he found himself in the food court where he’d been abducted. He looked at the people milling by, so blissfully unaware of the truth behind the curtain of their own consciousness. So sad. So short-sighted. So small they all were, so oblivious to the presence of life beyond the stars.

And then Dan laughed.

After all, there was nothing to be oblivious about anymore.

-Matt (maybe)

  Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of theories, especially of those that are past their prime.  Would knowing about New Criticism and the rest have been beneficial years ago in my early attempts in understanding a whole text? Perhaps, but now, in trying to learn and understand teaching of literature ideas/concepts, these resurfacing theories are like a thin layer of dust that I’d like to wipe away once and for all, but know will always be present, even if not visible.

  I have mixed feelings about Scholes’ book.  Possibly, because of his writing style, I think.  At times, the language is quite academic-sounding to me, such as on pg. 24″……in perceiving the potent aura of codification…….,”and yet other times, his talk is straight forward, “teaching literature should be retitled studying texts.”    It doesn’t sound as intellectual but it does provide a clearer purpose.  (On a side note, my B.A. is in Family Studies, but the following year, Univ. of Maryland changed it to Family Science.  Which sounds better to you)?

In many of our readings and discussions, we’ve mentioned (if not outright) that the current system of teaching English seems “broken.” Gerald Graff discussed the problems within curriculum and Peter Elbow would like greater emphasis on the writing process.  Scholes too speaks of rebuilding and discusses his middle of the road ideas. He dismisses the revolution or abrupt change approach as well as the tinkering or reform method. This got me thinking about the D.C. school system and how past superintendants attempted to reform the broken system, but never got too far in instituting change.  Now  there’s Chancellor Rhee using a revolutionary-like style to overhaul the system. Although, it’s still early in the remaking, she doesn’t appear to be backing down from the opposition, which gives the impression that maybe this time reform will actually occur.  My guess is that a university setting would be much more resistant to the overhaul process.  So then how textual power is taught still lies with the individual teacher.  

  Both Blau and Scholes list the three skills: reading, interpretation and criticism.  Blau defines reading as what does the text say while Scholes views reading as processing text without confusion or delay.  Reading for both refers to text within text, which I understand, but I’m uncomfortable with Scholes use of ‘without confusion or delay.’ So if I  reread text to strenghten or cement my understanding at a particular point in text during the first read- through then I’ve delayed my reading process, and what? (Or am I putting too much stress on his choice of words)?

 Also, on pg. 11 he discusses his diagram regarding the English apparatus.  How does moving composition from the bottom to the othermost margin place a greater value on the subject of composition?  Which brings us back to Elbow’s argument and why reading and writing can’t get along. And yet, Scholes’ other comments, specifically that cultural knowledge should either present itself or be told, overlap previous scholars’ ideas.

As for Hemingway, perhaps he’s not a favorite among women because in the few stories that I’ve read, the women are often referred to as girls or hold an inferior position to the male character.  Also, the bull fighting theme has masculine overtones and although bull fighting is so entrenched in that culture, I personally wouldn’t mind seeing that act, of inciting a bull and then shoving swords into it till death,  banned.  I don’t understand man’s need to dominate animals. Anyway, as for the painting, I’m glad it was posted because aside from Impressionist paintings, I’m at a loss. But how does four holes and the gash in the side be deemed  “lots of holes” since that was the method Romans used.  In reading an excerpt from “Portrait of Hemingway” by Lillian Ross,  Hemingway says, ” I learned to write by looking at paintings at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris.” In this scene, he is looking at pictures by Italian painters Titian, Giorgione, Francia, plus Rubens’ “The Triumph of Christ Over Sin and Death.” I’m wondering if Hemingway’s attraction to these stems from his own fears of death and of his writing being misinterpreted. He refers to Mantega’s portrait of Christ as bitter. Is that because Hemingway feels that any attempts at goodness and righteousness will be condemned in a tortuous way like that of Jesus?  Or was Hemingway feeling embittered already? Does this even have anything to do with the criticism question? But I did use textual power….right?

Susan  

The second chapter really spoke to me because I do think that the English curriculum that is forced in most schools really serves as an injustice to individual student learning. Scholes has brought about a new way for teachers to teach literature in the classroom. I do believe that textual power is important. Having kids create the ownership and understanding of the works we teach is invaluable. When I watch my students I realize that reading is in fact a skill and when they do not understand the fundamental narrative coding it is difficult for them to understand.

When we were reading In the Time of the Butterflies, I was surprised that they really had a hard time adjusting to the narrative change. One chapter would be written in a narrative they were used to and the next would be set up in a diary-style. It took dissecting the reasons for the diary entries for them to become more comfortable with the novel’s style. As a teacher, it is a challenge for me to help them read and understand the overall concept of the text. It seems with the novels I choose to teach, there are always political and social undertones that make the reading much richer when they are understood. The term textual power is so powerful because to me understanding the connections and links to other works, art, history and politics does make the reading that much more interesting and meaningful.

When Scholes looks at Hemingway’s work, In Our Time, I was really impressed and overwhelmed by the detail in which he looked at the text. As a teacher I don’t think I ever asked such detailed questions about the writer’s style. This might sound odd, but asking those questions was what I loved so much about my college professors. I guess I never felt that way with any of my high school teachers. I think secretly I felt that my high school students wouldn’t be able to interpret to the extent Scholes discusses. I am more encouraged after reading this book, but I also got a little hung-up on the cultural codes that my ESOL students struggle with. At times they cannot “orient” themselves because they are thrown off by the new language and culture. When Scholes suggests looking at words and asking kids to construct a scene and slowly add or imagine text without words really seems like it might work. I suppose it does if he wrote a book about it. In my class we are about to embark on The Odyssey. I feel I can use these methods because Homer does use specific language and often more than once. Asking students to pay special attention to the words and phrases will hopefully enable them to understand the text better. Having students write from the point of view of Odysseus or one of the men on his ship may also help them relate to the text.

When Scholes suggest the group study approach to reading and interpretation it makes me feel good because I run my ESOL classes seminar style. Luckily I only have less than ten students in each class so I can ask deeper questions and we can discuss the hang ups and issues that individuals have with the text. I feel a lot more confident about teaching my students because I do think we need to find new ways to be great teachers because the traditional curriculum and style is dry and I always a proponent for fresh changes in the classroom.

Thanks Renee for letting me know that I was not the only person who found Textual Power really difficult to understand. In fact for me I thought none of the matters was sinking in until I read Professor Sample’s question, which was a great help for giving me a direction to begin my post. On page 24 Scholes mentions “our job is not to produce “readings” for our students but to give them the tools for producing their own”. My guess is the Andrea Mantegna’s painting would be considered a tool for understanding and criticizing Hemingway’s fiction. For students who don’t understand art very well, like myself, I would argue that in fact that painting does not help me push from interpretation to criticism. I am a big fan of Hemingway’s works. His simple, yet intriguing sentences can already spark different criticism and interpretation. Mantegna’s painting does not necessarily add or subtract from my understanding of the work, unless it is fully discussed in a classroom setting, and I am able to hear the views of others in class.

Although I do not deny that for many other works a painting or “marginal cultural allusion” can actually help students begin criticizing a work. For some students maybe a painting is not enough to spark criticism. For example when a teacher asks students to compare a work of Shakespeare, like the text of Romeo and Juliet with the most recent Hollywood version of the story, students can easily begin the criticizing and interpretation process because they can relate to the recent version that uses guns and other familiar cultural props. They can then compare the differences and understandings of the original text. This activity helps students explore the different interpretations, and how to criticize.

“essays say what they mean and stories do not” (p.22).

I likedhow Scholes spells out the different tasks of essays and stories. I realized one of the reasons stories are so highly appreciated among all ages and cultures is that it allows the audience to come up with their own interpretations based on their own cultural experiences. I always wondered why my creative writing instructors were not very concerned about format and grammar, and why being good at punctuation does not necessarily make you a good writer.

I especially enjoyed chapter five as Scholes walked the reader step by step through the bull fighting story explaining exactly how Hemingway walked with the reader to experience bull fighting.

But then from chapter 5 and 6 I really began to lose track of the text. Scholes’ comparison of the different formulas and commentators like Jameson, de Man, and the hermetic theoreticians threw me off. Even the quotes on page 83 which seemed very simple to read seemed like a different language. I’m looking forward to understanding them in class tomorrow.

I’m with you, Sara. I was OK with some of the chapters in Textual Power (mostly the ones in the beginning) and even with pieces of some of the later chapters, but parts of the book seemed convoluted and were very difficult for me to read. As someone else mentioned I, too, was annotating and employing some of the difficulty paper tools, but eventually the text seemed to degenerate into semantics. The lengthy discussion on whether history is anything besides text (really?) and then the pages on how to define the words that were made up by other literary theorists made my eyes spin.

I was looking forward to reading Scholes because he was referenced in some of the other texts and I liked the ideas presented on his behalf. And, I do like the idea in Textual Power of breaking down literature into the three stages of reading, interpretation, and criticism. I also appreciate Scholes’s focus on not criticizing and interpreting during the reading stage but instead on trying to read the text from a more detached point of view so as not to misinterpret or to just miss information. I also appreciate his discussion “between practice and earnest.” This reminded me of Blau’s suggestion to create a literary community within the classroom but with a suggestion to take it one step further so that practice does not merely become theory without a place for application.

But after that, Scholes began to lose me and as I meditated (i.e. began losing interest in and focus) on the text during the discussion of whether a word means a word or means an object and if the object really exists (or something like that) I kept asking myself, so what? Isn’t it Scholes’s theory that encourages the reader to ask, so what? One of the questions that I keep asking myself in this course is “what is the objective of teaching literature?” If a student doesn’t care about the end result, is he going to care about the exercises he is doing to get there? Some of the possible answers I have come across so far are to learn critical thinking skills, to explore thoughts we might not have on our own, to be entertained, to connect with humanity, for self exploration, to become a better writer, and to develop consultation and collaboration skills doing group work. Are students going to care about literature more if we are able to define “differance”? How is that going to make a difference in the world?

During the discussion of objects and signifiers I couldn’t help but think that Magritte seems to have communicated the same thing much more succinctly, creatively and poignantly in his painting, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” where he presented a picture of a pipe and wrote on it, this is not a pipe
(http://artscenecal.com/ArtistsFiles/MagritteR/MagritteRFile/MagritteRPics/RMagritte1.html).

Is literary theory about semantics, and if it is, can’t we at least make the discussion a bit more interesting? Perhaps, sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

 Like Ginny, I noticed that Scholes recommends that smart English teachers suppress their natural inclination to show off for their students.  Too bad he couldn’t resist.  He sounded like he agreed in principle with Blau, that an English teacher’s role was to enable students to read and interpret a text themselves, but in practice, he gave me the feeling that interpreting texts is a mysterious power held by genius English teachers.  Of interpreting texts, he says “there is an element of intuition . . . that cannot be reduced to formulas”31).  That said, he presents the formula for interpreting a text:  Step 1.  Look for repetitions and oppositions in the text.  Sounds simple enough, but the cultural and geographic information he supplies, as well as some not-so-obvious oppositions he points out, put him in the position of telling the students the correct interpretation of the text.  He says, “In leading a class from reading to interpretation, I would try to uncover the implications of the opposition by exploring all the relationships and differences that link the story’s two main places and episodes” (33).  He asks questions and answers them himself.  His text gives no indication that his students were coming up with the conclusions he makes. Step 2. Determine what these oppositions represent.  About this step he says students must be able to make connection between text and culture based on knowledge, and then teaches the class the cultural knowledge they will need to correctly interpret the text.  Sounds like a show off to me.  I do not question his brilliance.  I just don’t think being in one of his classes would make me feel empowered.

As I started my journey through the pages of Scholes, I was interested. True, it was a much more theoretical text, but it has been awhile since I’ve been able to contort my brain into his way of thinking. I was fine with all the binary oppositions that he set up in the beginning pages, and I was on board with the need to rebuild the ‘English apparatus’. Then, I found myself questioning him and disagreeing with more than I agreed with, and then I agreed with him, scratched my head, screamed and threw the book across the room, had a drink, went to bed, got up and tried it again with only marginally better results.

I enjoyed his humor at times, like when he said, “Milton’s Mammon not too long ago materialized as our Secretary of the Interior” (14). I can only imagine given the publication date that he is refering to Donald P. Hodel…I giggled.

I applauded him when he stated that, “We must…ask[ing] what we mean when we proclaim ourselves teachers of literature” (11), and that “we must stop ‘teaching literature’ and start ‘studying texts'”(16). However, I realize that he has the priviledge of having an office in that Ivory Tower, and can live in the theoretical world postulating about what ‘we’ (don’t you love the use of the Royal ‘We’) must do. Then I almost lost it when he so nonchalantly states, “In our hypothetical introductory course, we cannot expect our students to read widely in any single author, but the process can at least be enacted by a teacher who had read widely and makes the fruits of this reading availabel to the class for thier use, rather than hoarding them up to enrich some superior, teacherly display” (51). Only four pages after saying, “We, as teachers, may or may not wish to trouble our students about this theoretical dispute, but we will have to make up our minds about our own positions in it, simply in order to decide whether to make this material available or conceal it”(47). Persumably, if we are going to make it available, it will be in some ‘superior, teacherly display’.

Oh, I could continue on for hours, but I shan’t bore you any longer expect to say the following.

I did like what Scholes had to say about ‘studying texts’ instead of ‘teaching literature’; however, the ‘English Apparatus’ is a huge machine that has only been strengthend within the walls of testing army (I’m speaking primarily of K-12 education), and it takes a lot of courage to stand up against those forces, especially within the design of the current system. For example, even though I have 7 years of teaching experience since I have not been teaching in my present county for 3 years, I have to turn in weekly lesson plans for review. Mostly, I’m trusted and they only get a cursery look; however, when they do get looked at more thoroughly, I get questions like, ‘when are you teaching…’, or ‘why haven’t you covered…’. Persumably, knowledge that will be covered on the oh so important test. Now, there are teachers who have less experience than I do, but since they have been in the county for three years they don’t have to turn in lesson plans. However, they’ve been following the ‘teaching for the test paradigm’ since they first walked into the classroom, so that’s what they do because there isn’t a lot of emphasis put on reflective practice once you step into the classroom. This in turn leads to the students’ ‘school behavior’ where they want the answers and they don’t want to ‘study the text’. I face this with my students constantly, many of them are starting to come around, but still some of them wonder why we haven’t blazed through as many texts as the other classes and why I ‘never tell them the answer and make them figure it out for themselves’ or ‘why did Ms. so and so say it meant…’.

 Alright, seriously, I’m done now.

I had promised after reviewing my past blogs not to glow about our future readings, but in Textual Power I found a few things to put into my Future Lesson Plans file.  I also found myself reviewing every other paragraph and, like somebody else had mentioned, wanting to bang the text and my head against the wall.  The language Scholes uses left me wondering.  Gee, do I know enough to be an English teacher.  I mean, there were years of voracious reading for pleasure and then the transcribing volumes of text as a reporter, the vocabularies of scientists and business people, physicians and those who specialize in the production of time release capsules, the pouring of grout into cinder block walls, any variety of very specific language, and Scholes left me grasping for my dictionary.  Belletristic: writer of letters.  Peripatetic: itinerant.  reification: the process of regarding something abstract as material or concrete.  These are a few of the stumpers I encountered.  They would comprise the first paragraph of my difficulty paper, were I to write one connect with this book.

The lessons that I would include in my notebook for use later were mentioned in class, so I guess that they are not particularly innovative, or perhaps Scholes came up with them and they have become commonplace.  I thought the rewriting of the story from a different character’s point of view would be interesting.  It would require a close reading and an indepth understanding of that character’s motivations. 

The most interesting idea, and it appeared early on in the text, was the breaking down of the text.  How many of the sentences were required to create the story?  Again, this would require a close reading, it would focus the reader, help determine exactly what the story is. 

Scholes, I thought made what could have been an entirely pleasant read, annoyingly dense, and his insistance that Hemingway must be read along side a feminist work was insulting to me.  Hemingway is a masculine genre, but to assume that women cannot handle it without a counterpiece to “soften the blow” is politically correct and likewise, chauvanistic.

I know that as an English major and now a grad student, I was and am supposed to take literary criticism very seriously. Or so they say. Parts of it interested me in college, but most of it, no matter what I did, just wouldn’t stick. I would read it, retain none of it, re-read what I could, and give up. When my professor or a classmate would talk about it in a “Lit-Crit For Dummies” sort of way, I’d be okay. For a long time, and even a little so as I write this, I feel like this makes me some kind of academic fraud – like to fit in with the “cool” English majors, I have to be able to carry on a philosophical conversation about literary theory. The truth is, I will fall short of that expectation every single time. Part of me is afraid to write this because I don’t want everyone to think I’m an idiot. I’m really not. I just don’t “get” literary criticism all that well. This is me being a realist.

I started reading Textual Power. And I was trying to understand it. I really was. I was making notes in the margin and asking myself questions. Some parts weren’t that difficult, but it just got so dense that I found myself re-reading pages and pages trying to figure out what was going on. I tried these techniques we’ve been talking about in working through the difficulty, but there aren’t enough hours for me to re-read that much (I’d never get my other homework or my grading done. Or sleep.)

And then Hemingway showed up.

I don’t at all care for Hemingway. I’m not familiar with his body of work, so there are large parts of this text that I just couldn’t even relate to, no matter how he tried to explain it. I have read criticism that is still academic sounding, but that I can actually understand. I felt like in a lot of this book, the Scholes was unnecessarily wordy and made things too complicated. At some points, he was down-right snobby. I wrote this in the margin of my book and continued reading. About 30 pages later, I came to a page that had been marked up by a former owner of the book. Next to a comment much like the one I marked as snobby, this reader had marked the same thing, only in slightly more vulgar terms.

So at least I know that I’m at least getting something someone else is :-)

I don’t usually care much for Kate Chopin either, but I really liked this story. It’s short and to the point and contains so much in such a short period of time (as the title would imply). I’d really like to use this with my 9th graders for examples of irony next year.

When I was a high school student, my English teacher used Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” to illustrate the concept of irony. Now that I am also an English teacher, I can appreciate the complexity of teaching irony and my students’ subsequent misunderstanding of the literary element. As I reread “Story of an Hour,” I questioned whether a New Critical approach would have better helped me, as a high school student, understand irony and Chopin’s use of the element in Mrs. Mallard’s approach to the news of her husband’s death.

I remember feeling shocked that a wife, upon hearing of her husband’s brutal death, could have felt anything akin to freedom or relief. Would it have benefited my eventual understanding of irony if my teacher had front-loaded the class with information regarding the treatment of women in 19^th century America? Perhaps he assumed that teenagers would have intuitively understood a 19^th century woman’s desire for independence from a male-dominated society. But the central problem in understanding the irony at work in Chopin’s story, is that our 21^st century students do not have a cultural basis for understanding Mrs. Mallard’s situation. Our students, contrary to our graduate-schooled selves, do not understand Mrs. Mallard’s feminist desires. As a teacher, I now know that many of my students would view the “widow” as cruel and deserving of her untimely death. The element of irony that “Story of an Hour” clearly illustrates would seem overshadowed by my students’ negative contemporary judgments regarding Mrs. Mallard’s behavior.

I believe many students would benefit from a well-structured preamble to the teaching of canonized texts. Though I feel New Critical theory has its place in secondary education, a teacher should initially introduce the concept without his or her students’ conscious knowledge. As a student myself, I favor creative and innovative lesson planning over a front-loaded lecture any day. If I were teaching irony via “Story of an Hour,” I would prime my students’ contemporary sensibilities with 19^thcentury role playing. My female students could play the role of Mrs. Mallard-esque women and the males could adopt the privilege bestowed upon Mr. Mallard-esque men. After role-playing, we could discuss their character’s behavior in juxtaposition to how women and men behave in modern society.  Without explaining my New Critical approach, my students would become better able to analyze the 19^th century characters in Chopin’s ironic story.

Would my high school class have developed more empathy for Mrs. Mallard’s cloistered existence if my teacher had helped us develop a cultural basis for our understanding? Cultural compassion, at the very least, would result from a creative New Critical approach to the study of classic texts. Students would develop an appreciation for the literary skill Chopin exercises in her writing, whether or not they understand the complexity of irony. Perhaps teachers should help their students create cultural connections with century-old text before we ask them to analyze difficult literary concepts.

Scholes spends a good deal of time discussing how Mantegna’s disturbing depiction of the dead Christ (“Very bitter…lots of nail holes”) figures in Hemingway’s fiction. Since I imagine this specific image is not part of our daily cultural vocabulary–and Scholes suggests it ought to be in order to push through from interpretation to criticism–I submit for you here the painting (click on the thumbnail for a larger version).

Finished sometime around 1490, on the cusp of the Renaissance, “The Lamentation over the Dead Christ” now hangs at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

So seeing Andrea Mantegna’s painting, does Scholes’ argument make more sense? Or do you, like myself, have some doubt about what Scholes’ particular critical move is in this chapter? How does familiarity with the image, or with the history of its genre (the dead Christ figure) help us adopt a critical stance toward Hemingway? If it does, how might this strategy (i.e. focusing upon a seemingly marginal cultural allusion, or a pattern of such allusions in a text) work with other texts, helping us help our students become more textually empowered?

In Textual Power, Robert Scholes spends a considerable amount of time discussing the power and relevance of the text. In particular, he decides to attack the idea that a text is nothing more than a result of the interpreter. He attributes this point of view and approach to Stanley Fish. In his argument, Scholes contends that the text’s contextual clues and its actual language serve to constrain meaning. Therefore, the free-for-all interpretations that have no basis in the text’s background and context can be judged as incorrect or invalid.

Scholes is advocating what most readers have done all along. My students and I use different contextual clues from within the text to derive meaning. It’s a constant struggle between our own experiences and the boundaries that the text presents. If we rely too heavily on one aspect, our view of the writing and its meaning becomes skewed. Like Scholes, most readers use more than a single approach to a given piece of writing. One of the major misconceptions in classes about literary theory is the tendency to isolate each school of thought. Naturally, a student leaves the classroom thinking that people read a text using a distinct literary theory such as New Criticism or New Historicism. This is rarely the case. While some readers advocate a particular theory, I have never met a fellow student or reader that completely adhered to a particular tract. The interaction between the text and the reader demands a number of different approaches. In some cases, a considerable amount of cultural knowledge is necessary. In other texts, a specific knowledge of a case or moment in time is helpful.

Shakespeare is a perfect example of a text that requires a little knowledge from a wide range of fields. The language requires the ability to appreciate rhyme schemes. Some of the references are based on historical events, so a cursory knowledge of “basic” history is equally helpful. Finally, a firm grounding in basic psychology or human nature can help illuminate some of the various motivations that each character brings to the action. Are all of these elements necessary? No. Are they extremely helpful to deciphering the text? Yes.

At some level, the text is communicating some essential message or truth. That explains the similar reactions that people have to an unknown text. While readers differ in their precise interpretations, the fact that most agree on a few basic concepts about a given text is an indicator of something within the text. To argue that interpretation is purely based on cultural influences is to deny the power and tools present in the text. Texts have meaning and value. Our view of the text may change, but some aspects and themes (good and evil) remain ever-present. I am reminded of that old saying about the journey being more important than the destination. In the case of literature, the process of discovery leads to critical thinking and deep learning. Losing site of that goal is a constant danger.

–Francois Guidry

On several occasions throughout Textual Power, Scholes makes remarks about the challenges of designing an English curriculum. His claim that most resonates with me is that “school is the one place where our major concern is to study what we don’t know, to confront Otherness rather than to ignore it or convert it into a simulacrum of ourselves” (59).

I would like to highlight this passage from Scholes’ book and mail it to my Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Hatrick. It seems that recently Hatrick’s goal has been to pretend that Otherness doesn’t exist, to hide Otherness, to keep it under lock and key. I am speaking of his recent decision to ban And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book based on the story of two male penguins from the NYC zoo who “adopt” an unhatched egg. Though the theme of the story is the importance of family, unarguably it contains a family with two daddies, which, translated into the human world, would be a family with homosexual parents. Because one parent thought the “themes” of the book “too mature” for elementary students, ultimately it was taken off the shelves of all county schools. However, the resulting backlash toward our Superintendent forced him to reverse his decision in all schools except for the one with the complaining parent.

Though I whole-heartedly disagree with Dr. Hatrick’s banning of the book, I can recognize that he, as someone with power over texts, is often faced with difficult, delicate decisions. Those classroom teachers fortunate enough not to have their reading lists dictated to them must similarly decide: What texts should I teach? Should I stick with the classics or move beyond the traditional canon? What texts can simultaneously engage my students and teach them to think critically? For my first two years teaching, a primary consideration was often “For which books do I already have teaching materials?” I was so overwhelmed just keeping up with the day-to-day lessons, I never paused to consider the “otherness” of a text. Other teachers shared their plans with me, so for the most part, I taught what they taught.

Now, as I am considering a position for a lead English teacher, a position that would allow me to develop an entirely new curriculum, ultimately for grades 6-12, the passage about including and examining Otherness speaks forcefully to me. I would be shifting from an overcrowded, predominately wealthy, Anglo rural suburbia HS anchored in tradition to a small, fledgling, inner-city, public charter middle school with rich socio-economic and ethnic diversity. The job change itself would be an experiment in Otherness. But it raises some interesting questions for me. At my current school, many of the students are sheltered, naïve, unexposed to elements of Otherness. Their friends, their classmates, even their teachers, are very similar to them. This year in particular, I’ve noticed that this homogeneity lends itself to judgmental, self-righteous, and often ignorant attitudes toward Others. In my classroom, we’ve had discussions about people, beliefs, texts that are somehow different from my students, and I’ve struggled with trying to expand some of their narrow views. I wonder how the prior knowledge piece of Otherness will have affected the belief systems and attitudes of the students at the DC school. I’m wondering if, as important as prior knowledge is to understanding difficult texts, it is just as important in navigating “difficult” belief systems (difficult in that they are different from our own). My hypothesis is that an immersion in Otherness opens the mind to even more Otherness.

Now I just have to figure out What to Teach…

–Karen

At the end of last week’s class when Professor Sample referred to Textual Power as more of a theoretical work than a “practical” work, a particularly disturbing and potentially embarrassing image danced across the stage of my unconscious. I saw myself sprawled across the dining room table, snoring – the pages of Scholes’ text and my own notes crumpled and wet under a heavy, drooling head; an errant sticky note rising and falling in concert with my rhythmic breathing while my daughter demonstrated her burgeoning artistic talent with mommy’s unused pen. I suppose you could say I was expecting the worst. Mr. Scholes, however, proved me wrong. Textual Power is absorbing and engaging in its approach to teaching literature and applicable to both the collegiate and high school classrooms.

I first realized the practicality of Scholes’ theory during one of my tutoring sessions this week. I work with an ESOL student who is about to enroll in NOVA’s English 112 for the second time. She came to our Friday session having read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” convinced the story was about using the lottery as a way of deciding what games to play in an historic community. She balked when I asked her to reread it and complete a double entry journal for our meeting this coming Monday, convinced she had completely understood the story without any difficulty at all. We were at an impasse until I remembered Scholes’ discussion of the levels of reading. I explained that she was at the first level, working to understand the basics of the story such as plot and character. Her study of the text that day, as well as a return to it for the double entry journal, would help her to interpret the text (make judgments about plot, character and theme) and ultimately criticize the text (make judgments about the text’s connection to or statement about the outside world). She thought for a moment, then exclaimed that this process was exactly what her professor wanted her to do the first time she took 112. I smiled quietly and we moved on, but on the inside I was really pleased with myself.

That is until I remembered something else Scholes included in his discussion of teaching literature.

Scholes wisely asserts that there is a “bright little student” inside each English teacher, and that we are all desperately trying to show off our knowledge of our subject to our students. This proclivity for show and tell gets in our students’ way, he argues, such that they are hampered in the ability to develop the skills necessary for critical interpretation. Scholes places this claim within the university setting, but I think it is an issue that runs far deeper into the educational apparatus (if I might borrow Scholes’ phrasing).

Though Scholes does not directly state it, his subtle negativity toward high school English classes leads me to believe that he sees the larger picture as well. There are several instances where Scholes notes a lack of critical ability in college freshman, and it is up to the college literature professor, then, to help students develop this skill. To this end he argues for a complete overhaul of the standard university English curriculum, one which ultimately helps students no longer “fear the other” but embrace it, integrating difference into their own world view so that they can criticize a text, speaking not only for themselves but for a larger community as well.

I think the issue in high school English curriculums is that most teachers (or overly gifted, eager students in positions of authority) tend to look at their students as kangaroos and Numb-eels. Though aware on some level that students can build a schema for critical interpretation, they somehow find themselves devoid of their own frame of reference for this perception. Rather than assisting students in the development of their own sense of cultural literacy, they revere the text as almighty and its meaning as a matter to be handed down from on high, not discovered through textual study and an awareness of one’s place within the world. High school students are much more perceptive and world wise than given credit for, and I believe they can successfully be challenged in the manner in which Scholes espouses.

How to do this, however, is another matter – one which I will have to think about for my teaching presentation in April. Until then I will work on shedding the “bright little student” persona…

I’ll keep you posted on that.

– Ginny