«Reading from nowhere: assessed literary response, Practical Criticism and situated cultural literacy»

John Gordon
«Reading from nowhere: assessed literary response, Practical Criticism and situated cultural literacy»
English in Education, vol. 52, n.º 1 (2018)
Monográfico: Reader Response and English Education

English in Education | Research Journal of the National Association for the Teaching of English | UNITED KINGDOM


Extracto de apartados resumen y conclusiones en páginas 20 y 32-34 de la publicación en PDF. Véanse las referencias en la publicación original del texto.

«School examinations of student responses to literature often present poetry blind or “unseen”, inviting decontextualised close reading consistent with the orientation-to-text associated with Practical Criticism (originating in the UK) and New Criticism (originating in the USA). The approach survives in the UK after curricular reforms and government have promulgated cultural literacy as foundational for learning. How is cultural literacy manifest in student responses to literature?

»To what extent can it be reconciled with Practical Criticism where the place of background knowledge in literary reading is negligible? This article explores their uneasy relationship in pedagogy, curricula and assessment for literary study, discussing classroom interactions in England and Northern Ireland where senior students (aged 16–17) of English Literature consider Yeats’ “culture-making” poem “Easter, 1916”.

»Using methods where teachers withhold contextual information as they elicit students’ responses, the divergent responses of each class appear to arise from differing access to background knowledge according to local though superficially congruent British cultures. The author proposes “situated cultural literacy” to advance the limited application of Practical Criticism in unseen tasks, acknowledge Richards’ original intent, and support the coherence of assessment with curricular arrangements invoking cultural literacy as a unifying principle.

»Conclusion

»Each case demonstrates that cultural literacy manifest in students’ responses to literature is not an easily quantifiable commodity: its extent and expression differs across classrooms, communities and countries. Study texts cannot be understood according to one prescribed package of decontextualized core knowledge. Means to activate students’ existing and diffuse background knowledge are finely judged. Only with skilled guidance does response approach confident interpretation. Activation of this situated understanding “has many implications for the nature of learning and teaching, as well as for the assessment of learning and teaching” (Gee 2008, 38).

»Unseen assessments that do not countenance background knowledge as a factor in response, or permit contextualizing detail in design, are ill-conceived and inconsistent with the discourse of cultural literacy that currently has influence. Balanced, valid assessments of literary reading must acknowledge cultural literacy’s nuance, better supporting students to articulate responses informed by their distinctive background knowledge. Success in this entails re-evaluating I.A. Richards’ pioneering reader-response method which does not preclude considering literature relative to its provenance but confirms its importance. Data here show that students need a scaffold, however gently provided. Like the Irish examination papers, revised assessment tools should provide prompts linked to current perspectives or set literary works alongside complementary metatexts (such as a published interview with the poet), so students can situate their position between texts rather than flounder in a void of guesswork. The confused relationship between curriculum, knowledge and assessment (Christodoulou 2015) can be reset.

»A different way to assess responses to “Easter, 1916” might attempt “what teachers can do and tests can’t” (Ian Duhig, quoted in The Telegraph 2014), setting it alongside Duhig’s own reformulation of “a terrible beauty” in the poem “Brilliant”. Written after the London bombings following 9/11, it relocates Dublin’s social scene of “polite meaningless words” to Leeds: I sorted the world out with Sid agreeing when all’s said and done, we said a lot more than we did. The deictic puzzle of Yeats’s stanza two, with its confusing list of protagonists, is transformed in content and register: This bomber’s Dad ran a chip shop which fried not with dripping but oil; on match days he stood on the Kop with Sid, now Sidique, from the school – they wrote his work up in the TES. You’d think you knew what Sid dreamed he showed such social-consciousness, so sensitive his nature seemed. But drugs had this other young man, till his parents sent him to learn at a madrassa in Pakistan. He too has changed in his turn. Duhig, an Irish-English poet himself, situates Yeats’ poem anew for a different audience with different experiences and different reference points.

»Reading now, we synthesise Duhig’s lines divergently according to “millions of semi-independent impulses” (Richards 1929) uniquely our own, though our proximity in time to the Manchester Arena suicide bombing of summer 2017 further complicates response relative to a redefined point of national reference. The timing of the comparison today sets it apart from the Rossetti/Millay pairing: with its echoes of Yeats’ poem, “Brilliant” compels a “close attention to language and metaphor” and juxtaposed – even triangulated with related news items? – both may become “thrillingly available” (Create 2017).

»Invoking this situated cultural literacy reorients literary-critical reading, making subject-specialist response both to immediate frameworks and to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s “case for 21st-century learning” (Schleicher 2010) which asserts “success is no longer about reproducing content knowledge, but about extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge to novel situations”. This ideologically (Street 2003) self-aware and subtly situated academic literacy (Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanic 2000) can legitimately maintain close reading where it provokes “ways of thinking which involve creative and critical approaches to problem-solving and decision-making” (Schleicher 2010).

»Education for “active and engaged” citizens in a “multi-faceted world” additionally demands greater recognition of contexts of literary production and reception in curricular detail and assessment. Where cultural literacy is invoked, it must note Hirsch’s anti-solipsistic distinction “between community-oriented patriotism and militant nationalism” (Create 2017). Students should interrogate English literary culture, its provenance, maintenance, boundaries and variation in time, and articulate their own experience in relation to it. Notably for the English canon, Schleicher rejects knowledge we find in “an encyclopaedia”.

»Modern literacy entails managing “non-linear information structures” and content free of disciplinary classif ication: “knowledge advances by synthesizing these disparate bits”. Situated cultural literacy can nurture his “versatilists” and value both their knowledge and “precious intellectual heritage”, generating “powerful knowledge” rather than recycling “knowledge of the powerful” (Young 2008). It sustains Practical Criticism in more flexible mode, open to background knowledge and material locating focal texts. Curricularised literary response cannot continue without compass, reading from nowhere.»