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Using Literary Theory


Using Literary Theory

Literary criticism should be utilized “in order to make what is implicit in a book finely explicit” (Bloom, 2000, p. 19). Readers, students and teachers, should use the tools of critical literary theory and not be used by them. Literary criticism is a method of understanding, but the theory relies on developing self-understanding as well, and it is that desire to understand ourselves and the world that pushes me and my students to read.

I created this model of using critical literary theory lens applied to a fairy tale as a way to aid my students in understanding how to apply critical theory. I use this example to demonstrate to students how to look at a text pre-critically and through the lens of formalist, mythological/ archetypal, feminist, psychological, historical, and reader response approaches. By using the familiar format of a fairy tale, these difficult concepts become more manageable with simple text and the support of images found in a picturebook. Students then, working in groups, take a picturebook of a different fairy tale and attempt to analyze it in a similar way, trying out the skills they are attempting to master through a less threatening text.

We build through application and discussion to the utilization of literary theory in more complex and meaningful ways. In the spring semester, each student selects a novel, researches criticism on the novel, takes their own interpretive stance, and utilizes the criticism and other supporting materials (biographical, historical, etc) to persuasively argue their perspective.

“The reader of a text who evokes a literary work of art is, above all, a performer, in the same sense that a pianist performs a sonata, reading it from the text” (Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 28). Students need to become performers of literature, and the way that teachers can prepare them for that performance is through practice. This practice is promoted through discussion, through visual representation, through performance, and through writing. Rosenblatt’s definition of efferent and aesthetic reading are guiding principles in the instruction of reading and making meaning from reading. The supremacy of the text has been a classic reason for teaching the canon and having students submit to the “intentions of another” in which the reader “begins with the recognition of textual power and ends in the attempt to exercise it” (Scholes, 1985, p. 40-1). Students should recognize the power of the text, but they need to recognize their own power as well. Teachers need to prepare students to not just experience text, but to expand their aesthetic experience and synthesize what they read with what they know. Teachers need to promote not only the joy of the text, but expand students’ breadth of knowledge, so that the reading becomes a deeper more rich experience. This is where literary theory can become a useful tool instead of simply an esoteric experience or a way to “tie [a text] to a chair with rope and torture a confession” as poet Billy Collins would admonish us for doing.

Discussion, interpretation, and critical thinking benefit from putting on different “critical lens” of literary theory to see what we encounter (Appleman, 2009, p. xi-xii). My instructional goal has been to have students access text through not only their own personal experiences but through its authorial context as well. In negotiating between text and self, students are encouraged through modeling and discussion to utilize critical lens; such as the Marxist and feminist lens to understand how they might be positioned not only by the text but by their own culture in the reading of the text (Olson, 2007, p. 141). They are encouraged to realize that context matters and that examining a text through historical and cultural, as well as psychological critical approaches, allows them to look at the layers of text instead of resting superficially on the surface. The variability of reasonable interpretations illustrates to students that their view matters and that the text matters as well. While interpretation must first rest on the text and then build from what the text says to the reader, the reader and writer are intertwined and cannot exist without the other. Interpretation, thoughtful interpretation, illustrates to students that they matter in the process of reading and interpretation. There is no one “right way” to interpret a text.

 

Appleman, D. (2009) Critical encounters in high school English: Teaching literary theory to adolescents, 2nd edition. Teachers College Press: New York.

Bloom, H. (2000). How to read and why. Simon & Schuster: New York.

Collins, B. (1996). “Introduction to poetry” The apple that astonished Paris. University of Arkansas Press: Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Olson, C. B. (2007). The reading/writing connection: Strategies for teaching and learning in the secondary classroom. Pearson Education: Boston.

Rosenblatt, L.M. (1995). Literature as exploration, fifth edition. Modern Language Association: New York.

Rosenblatt, L.M. (1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, Illinois.

Scholes, R. (1985). Textual Power: Literary theory and the teaching of English. Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut.

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