Teaching Literature

Though appreciation is our goal, there is (1) no direct method of teaching it and (2) no practical means of testing it. This is the great paradox of teaching literature. The one thing we strive for most earnestly cannot be achieved directly, but can be accomplished only by doing various things that point in other and seemingly opposite directions. Appreciation is a by-product, and develops in the realm of taste as friendship, love, and character develop in the moral and social realms. All we can do is comparable to what the gardener does: clear the ground, enrich it, sow the seed, fight weeds and grass - and hope for the best.

The same test has been repeated with other books of equal difficulty and with other teachers, and invariably the result has been the same: the pupils have received the greater enjoyment from the books studied. This test is very interesting and very significant in view of the statement one hears so often that we are teaching literature so that our children learn to dislike it rather than to like it."

Ron Luce reacts to a basic challenge in teaching literature -students who have been turned off, who have lost confidence in themselves as readers. His technical college students groan in dismay at the assignment of a poetry reading. Aiming to reverse their negative attitudes, their concern for "never get[ting] the right meaning," he effects a line-by-line response experience with Robert Frost "Mending Wall." The students' initial tentative reactions and their developing interpretations are illustrated through their journal entries, which move from initial transaction with the text through a summary response to a connected personal experience.

Mary Jo Schaars, teaching Thoreau Walden, builds student experiences that connect their lives with Thoreau concepts to provoke thoughts and feelings. The discussions that emerge are not predictable; as excerpts of two classes' interactions indicate, each class follows its own lead to establish its understandings. The culminating activities turn the students inward to measure Thoreau's values and to compare themselves with him. Samples of students' writing illustrate the personal and intellectual connections that have developed, bearing out the potential for carryover into subsequent readings and students' lives.

Revising the basis for teaching literature and encouraging the experience of literature are the foci of this anthology. The chapters, after two on theoretical and historical background, provide classroom, readerresponse practices. Four of these are concerned with writing, others with types of mental activity and methods of developing responses. Teaching literature through the transactional model of reader-response criticism is the center of this text. Its concepts inform discussions of, for example, classroom strategies, text selection, the literature curriculum, and evaluation. Reins says that teaching literature is "very, very hard work, harder even than teaching writing."