Misson & Morgan

The purpose behind reading and studying literary textsand

beyondhas been of great institutional concern for at least the last
century and is surely a question teachers of literature have
encountered on a regular basis for even longer. While many of us
may have ready answers and a great deal of practice with
sceptical consumers, this query may offer more than simply a
challenge to our professional and intellectual identities. ather, it
inspires a degree of self!reflection and can be a valuable
opportunity to clarify, even for ourselves, how components of
language and literature that are sometimes treated as oppositional
may be complementary. ead the following excerpt and consider
the spectrum of purpose behind the study of language and
literature. "ow important is bridging the aesthetic and the critical#
"ow important is separating the two# "ow do you teach a
communicative act $a literary text or other intentional use of
language% whose aesthetic and critical value are at odds#
from &isson, ay and Wendy &organ. The Cultural and the
Critical, the Aesthetic and the Political, 'ritical (iteracy and the
)esthetic* Transforming the +nglish 'lassroom. ,rbana, -(*
.ational 'ouncil of Teachers of +nglish, /001. 2!3.
The words valuing and evaluating share a common root. We value
what we prefer, and we discriminate between this $which we li4e%
and that $which we li4e less%. )ndwhether it5s a pair of shoes, or
the current bloc4buster, or the latest pri6e!winning volume of
poemswe try to enlist others to share our taste. 7ut across the
years, in secondary and postsecondary +nglish classrooms, the
activities of praising and appraising texts have been carried out in
very different ways, on different ob8ects, and with different ends in
view. These differences of valuation have been the cause of a
ma8or quarrel in +nglish studies over much of the last century. )nd
although the terms may have differed somewhat during that time,
and different parties have gained the upper hand in particular
times and places, the fallout from this quarrel has not yet subsided.
-n /003, for instance, the metropolitan daily newspaper of
)ustralia5s third largest city, 7risbane, featured an article whose
subhead as4ed, 'ould 7art 9impson do as much to help students
attain a good +nglish education as reading the classics# The
opponents in this debate were a local media studies lecturer and
the national education minister. The former first argued that
television programs should be at the heart of +nglish education*
Teaching that 9ha4espeare is good while reality television is bad
imposes on school students the values of one culture rather than
embracing the diversity of different cultures. 7y contrast, the
federal minister for education, :r. 7endan .elson, asserted that
traditional philosophy, literature, and poetry, from 9ocrates to the
more modern wor4s of ;ane )usten and Thomas "ardy to the
poetry of Wilfred <wen and the war poets, should be fundamental
to secondary schooling. Without such a curriculum students5 lives
will not be enriched as the could be, since the classics help
students to find their souls and give them the courage to do what
is right $(ivingstone, /003%.
-n the ,nited 9tates, the chair of the .ational +ndowment for the
)rts, :ana =ioia, has recently made a similar case for the reading
of literature. The +ndowment5s /003 research report, Reading at
Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, ma4es a clear
distinction between the active, engaged reading of literary texts
and the passive participation in electronically mediated texts with
their accelerated gratification $.ational +ndowment for the )rts,
/003%. )nd a causal lin4 is drawn between such literary reading
and not only the health of individuals $focused attention and
contemplation that ma4e complex communications and insights
possible, p. vii% but also the well!being of the nation $)s more
)mericans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed,
active, and independent!minded. These are not qualities that a
free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose, p. vii%.
These views are consistent with a conservative line about the
value of literature that dates right bac4 to the wor4 of >.. (eavis
over ?0 years earlier and beyond to the 2@th century views of
&atthew )rnold. ABC we do not concern ourselves primarily with
the debate over =reat 7oo4s versus popular texts, but with more
fundamental issues underlying it. These involve questions about
the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of the texts of both high and
popular culture, about the capacities that are to be developed in
student readers and writers, and indeed about the ultimate aims
and benefits of a literary education.
7y these early years of the /2st century a shift has occurred in
many high school and college +nglish classrooms. This can be
focused around the terms cultural and critical. >or most teachers it
is no longer possible to say the words culture and cultural
unproblematically and ta4e them to refer to the products and
activities of high cultureof cultivated people who are the
arbiters of taste in the fine arts. These days the terms culture and
cultural have a sociological flavor* they are ta4en to mean any of
the practices of everyday life by which members of a group ma4e a
shared meaning, whether text!messaging, shopping in a mall,
surfing the waves or the internet, going to a barbeque or a bar
mit6vah, watching football in the pub, or wearing a particular brand
of designer 8eans.
) similar shift has occurred in many +nglish teachers5 use of the
terms critical and criticism. 7efore about the 2@?0s, and in some
more conservative classrooms still today, you could use the word
DcriticalD comfortably, secure in 4nowing that your hearers would
understand that you were referring to the wor4 that literary critics
do and that students were to emulate. This wor4 entailed
explicating the literary text under consideration* interpreting it,
explaining what it really meant deep down $the meaning that an
expert reader li4e the critic could extricate%, and evaluating the
worth of the text based on the way its literary features enhanced or
made that meaning. These days, in a number of classrooms, the
term critical is no longer mostly 8oined to literary, in literary
criticism, but has migrated to 8oin up with literacy, in critical literacy.
'riticism, or critique, now entails a quite different activity, based on
understanding that texts are deeply implicated in the cultural
contexts in which they are produced and read. -t means
indentifying the ideology inscribed in any text, determining who
benefits from the very partial representation of the world offered in
that text, resisting any invitations to comply with worldviews that
are socially un8ust, and ta4ing verbal or other action to redress
such in8ustices.
These shifts broadly encapsulate two different views of the
purpose of +nglish teaching, which the Eingman eport of 2@FF in
the ,nited Eingdom identified by the terms cultural heritage and
cultural analysis $'ox, 2@@2%. The first model assumes that the
responsibility of an +nglish curriculum is to bring students to an
appreciation of the finest wor4s of literatureG the second, that
students need to be brought to a critical understanding of the
culture within which texts, and they, are produced. <ne model
encourages readers to yield to all that valued texts offer* insights
into human nature, guidance in ma4ing ethical discriminations
about characters5 interactions, and aesthetic satisfactions. There is
a payoff for readers who give themselves attentively, submissively,
to such aesthetically charged wor4s* they become discriminating,
subtle readers with a mature moral awareness. 7y contrast, the
other model, cultural analysis, encourages readers to resist the
seductions of texts that offer various 4inds of gratification, including
aesthetic, but that slip noxious, ideologically suspect drugs into
that pleasing coc4tail. The benefits of such disengagement for
readers lie in their ability to see through the text5s blandishments*
they too become discriminating readers, but in a very different way
from those who value high over popular cultural texts and give
themselves to such texts.
These simplified versions could be accused of caricature, but they
are ones that each side has con8ured up about the other, while
denying that their own position is so simplisticB'ultural heritage
teachers see a cultural analysis curriculum as clearly inadequate
because it does not, cannot even, satisfactorily deal with the
aesthetic dimension of texts or comprehend the worth of the
pleasures they bring. 'ultural analysis teachers meanwhile accuse
their conservative colleagues of promoting a naHve reading of texts
in failing to engage with the fundamentally political agenda of texts
and the ways in which readers are positioned to accede to the
ideologies they offer.