Resources - Discussion Papers

“After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?”
Literature in the Post-Critical-Literacy Classroom

Plenary Address given at the TATE/ALEA Conference
"Literature and Literacy: Weaving the Fabric"
Hobart - 9 May, 1998

Ray Misson

My title, as many of you will recognise comes from T.S. Eliot's poem "Gerontion". It's not one of my favourite poems, but I've always liked that line, and it has come to me a number of times over the years when I've been thinking about some of the implications of poststructuralism and so of the kind of thinking that underpins a lot of work in the humanities and education these days. I don't want to give a lecture on poststructuralism here, but let me remind you of just a couple of the basic tenets:

• there are no absolute truths: all truths are provisional and dependent on context;
• there are no stable meanings: meaning is indeterminate and ungraspable;
• there are no innocent texts: all texts have ideological designs on us.

I think you can see what I mean. Poststructuralism entails a fairly radical loss of innocence, a coming into a fallen knowledge of the relativity and interestedness of all things. Well we might ask, "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'

In particular, for our purposes here, with Literature. Teachers working in the field of English studies know that over the last fifteen to twenty years, the main thrust of the study of Literature in academic circles has been to do with Theory, and I want to say immediately that it has been immensely beneficial: we now know far more than we ever knew before about how texts work, how they position readers, how readers make meaning out of them. We can no longer be the innocent readers we once were. We have become especially aware of how Literature does not necessarily carry the humanising life-enhancing messages that were once thought a necessary corollary of literary greatness. Rather we see that literary texts, like all texts, are bound up with the ideology of their age and their authors, and indeed can be a screen on which the ideological beliefs of their readers can be projected.

This has had a couple of effects, mostly good:

1. it has developed ideologically-aware critical practice in which this ideological aspect of the text is of central concern. Initially feminist criticism was the major kind, but it has been followed by various versions of Marxist and New Historicist criticism that look at the construction of society in more general terms, post-colonial criticism largely concerned with questions of ethnicity, and Gay and Lesbian criticism, concerned with issues of sexuality.
2. It has opened up the range of texts being looked at, and has broken down considerably the high culture/popular culture distinction.

There has however been a negative side to this:

1. The emphasis has been rather taken off Literature as a particularly important kind of text to examine, and a lot of work is done on cultural representations, media texts, etc, that provide in many ways an easier target for the favoured kind of analytical work.
2. More than that, it has developed a deep suspicion of Literature, an attitude that suggests it may be a health hazard (or at least an ideological hazard) to give oneself up to the text, and that the main kind of work that needs to be done is the work of ensuring that the ideological messages are clearly perceived and resisted. One of the offshoots (or sideshows) of this is the favourite newspaper story about some academic saying that particular texts are bad for kids and ought to be banned. It's all part of the media's love affair with what it sees as ridiculous examples of Political Correctness. This of course doesn't just happen with older texts that might be labeled literary, but with texts for young children too. You may have seen the article about Babar the Elephant being ideologically unsound that hit the papers recently.

In primary schools, too, I think that the main thrust of literacy education over the last few years has taken the emphasis off Literature as well. I know Tasmania is not a rabidly genre-oriented state, but the emphasis on developing a range of text types has undoubtedly hit here too, and this is often set up against what is characterised as the previous dominance of narrative. Kids in the past are seen to have been busy writing stories, when they should have been preparing themselves for the writing requirements of the big world out there, or at least the writing requirements of secondary schools.

Actually, I think the account I've just given is one that might be imagined from reading the books and articles produced about literacy and English teaching, but it isn't perhaps matched by reality. My account reflects the fact that, while there was a flurry of activity in the late eighties and into the very early nineties of publishing about literature teaching, a lot of it using interestingly the kind of insights that were coming out of theory, there is very little happening at the moment. Of course, there's some, but the main thrust of publishing is in books and articles that promote a socio-cultural view of literacy, which we might loosely define as Critical Literacy. Imaginative literature is felt to be at best peripheral in this construction of English: the urgent thing is to develop political awareness of the world in which we live. And while there is always a Children's Literature element in publishing about primary teaching, I think it has come to seem increasingly marginalised as the nineties have gone on, and a more functional outcomes-based notion of literacy has dominated.

However, I suspect (and there is plenty of evidence for this) that literary texts are still being looked at (perhaps as much as ever) and still being looked at in very similar ways to those that have been customary for a number of years now. There in fact seems to me to have grown up a rather worrying discontinuity between theorising about what should happen around texts in the Literacy/English classroom, and what is actually happening. What I want to argue is that it's time for the teaching of Literature to be put back on the agenda for discussion, not forgetting all the things we have learned over the last few years, but with a full awareness of it.

What I want to do is talk about some of the ways in which texts are implicated with ideology by using a particular example, and then to look at what might be valuable in engaging with the text for all its ideological interestedness. Just because of the complexity of what I want to do, and the limited time available, I've chosen a very short text, a poem, and because it's easier to make points about implicit belief systems on texts from other eras, I've gone for a "classic". I want to insist, however, that I could have done this work on any text, including texts that might be found in Primary classrooms, such as, for example, one of the Babar books (and indeed I will be using a favourite primary school text as an example later on). I am also, it's worth noting, largely talking about reading, but I could have just as well developed what I want to say about writing too.

The poem is one of Wordsworth's group of poems known as "The Lucy Poems". They all circle round the death of a country girl, Lucy:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
     Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there was none to praise
     And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
     Half hidden from the eye!
- Fair as a star, when only one
     Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
     When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
     The difference to me!

(1985 (1798), p.23)

One of the reasons why I chose this poem is that I actually remember quite vividly my first encounter with it and the other Lucy poems. It was when I was at school studying Year 12 Literature. The whole class broke up because we thought they were such obvious crap. They were just these simple little sentimental ditties, and we couldn't believe that anybody could really be wanting us to take them seriously. It actually wasn't until I came to teach them that I really "saw" them. Certainly I didn't bother with them any more in Year 12 after that one class.

I guess my reaction is understandable enough: most Year 12 boys don't have much time for qualities of simplicity, reticence, understatement, lyrical control. They probably don't sympathise with such quiet love and loss either: it takes Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett going down on the Titanic to get them moved. However, let us leave that aside for the moment. Let's also leave aside the kind of poetry-reading skills necessary to get the meaning from the poem: things like having to be able to relate the metaphors in the second stanza to the girl ("We're talking about this girl, and then it suddenly starts on about violets; what's going on here?"), or getting the impact of the simple quatrain structure, which is in itself carrying a lot of meaning as a sign of rustic simplicity in a fairly sophisticated high art poem. What I want to talk about are some of the more obvious things that the reader has to acquiesce in if she/he is going to get a lot of pleasure out of the poem.

I suppose the first thing is that a certain value is being given to the country setting. There is an implicit city/country dichotomy being built up. The "untrodden ways" stresses the isolation, but also the unspoilt nature of the place, untouched by travellers from the wider world. It's drawing on a whole range of beliefs about rural simplicity, and the way simplicity equates with innocence, and innocence equates with purity and beauty. The remoteness is extreme: there is no public world in which Lucy can be praised (the interesting implication being that the praise that matters is public praise which almost by definition must happen in cities). Building on the city/country dichotomy, one can go further and say it is centrally a poem about class, and its thrust is democratic. It is asserting the value of humble human beings living obscure lives, and suggesting that they matter as much as well-known people in the social mainstream.

However, one could imagine a complaint being made that it manages to create this message only by playing on particular images of femininity, and aligning the sense of social value with images of the passive and vulnerable feminine. The woman is just there, depending on the admiration and love of others. Her value is brought home not by anything she does but through the effect of her loss on the speaker of the poem. The images are of a fragile and passing natural beauty rather than of a living humanity. She is a violet unexposed to the full light of day, a pure and untouchable solitary star to be admired.

One could also perhaps make the complaint that the assertion of value is done in natural terms through the metaphors in the second stanza, and in personal and emotional terms through the articulation of loss, and not in social terms. There is no sense that she is an active part of her community, or that her social isolation is something that might be a limitation on her that could with benefit be changed. In fact, if she were moved into another social setting, she would lose her value because the poem only sees her value as being bound up with an innocent natural beauty, by her being untouched by a larger world.

I am sure that when, as a seventeen-year-old I reacted to the poem as sentimental crap, it was at least partly a resistance to acquiescing in the romantic valuing of the poor little peasant girl, not because I had strong socialist principles in those days or had been well-trained as a resistant reader, but because there is something so old-fashioned and fairy-tale-ish about it. And I have to say, that one wouldn't want to support the ideology of this poem. The very notion that isolated country girls are somehow purer and more spiritually beautiful seems rather ludicrous nowadays. In the current images, they're more likely to be seen as deprived and even desperate. (I'm not saying they are: I'm just saying that the whole mythology of the rural has changed, and perhaps not for the worse.)

There is obviously a problem here. The power of the poem is not independent of this view, but totally bound up with it. If I am moved by the poem, and I now am, it's because at some level I can at least momentarily acquiesce in this view of the vulnerably feminine in a rural setting. One might talk about suspension of disbelief, but it seems to me to go deeper than that. Rather than simply saying, I am not going to disbelieve for a while, there is a positive opening up to the imaginative possibility that life could be like this, feeling and thinking this way is a position that one could occupy. Indeed there is, to some degree, an actual occupation of that position, at least for a time.

Now, of course, this is precisely what some of the poststructuralist critique is on about. I am inhabiting or being confirmed in particular attitudes in order to get the emotional charge from the poem, and these attitudes are in this way established as part of my repertoire. I am at some level agreeing that it would be nice to live in a world where you could find (and lose) a girl like this, and indeed, that it would be rather fine to be so quietly emotionally distraught as the speaker of this poem.

As I say, you can't dissociate these views from what you might find moving in the poem. Which seems to create a considerable dilemma for a teacher. Do you try to establish some level of imaginative sympathy with (if not inculcate) the values on which the impact of the poem depends - values which scarcely seem relevant or worthwhile for students living at the end of the twentieth century - or do you simply acknowledge that they are not particularly worthy values and so basically give up on thinking it would be a good thing if the students responded positively to the poem?

You can certainly then still use the poem as the basis for critical literacy style work, which is what I was doing before. Indeed, that kind of work becomes more urgent precisely because the poem is promoting less than worthy values: the values demand to be countered. You can see the kinds of questions you would ask, and you would get interesting answers. Whose views are being represented and whose interests are being served? What are the cultural assumptions about rural life out of which the poem is built? What is the view of women in this poem? How is this view textually constructed? A lot of valuable work might be done in teaching students about the constructedness of the text and its ideology. And you could keep so busy that you might not even notice that you're kind of missing the point, or you might not even feel that something of real value has been dismissed and lost.

So, is there another way? The answer could lie in a consideration of what might be the value of the poem apart from the overt content, the message that it gives. In fact, what I want to do is argue that, in some very important senses, the critical literacy critique is not so much mistaken as inadequate. It's inadequate both as critique and as an account of what is worthwhile or not about the poem. And I want to argue this by going into a digression on the aesthetic, drawing on work that I've been doing with Wendy Morgan on this notion of the aesthetic and how it fits in with critical literacy practice.

A digression on the aesthetic

What do I mean by the aesthetic?

What I want to argue is that the aesthetic is a particular way of knowing. We have many ways of knowing (ways, indeed, in which "knowing" means many different things). There are the basic means of knowing through sensory input, and there are the simple categorisations of the sensory material into useful organising concepts - food, day, weapon, shelter, etc. Then there are the more abstract ways of knowing where the categorisation moves into theorisations, where basic principles are intellectually abstracted from phenomena - philosophy, theology, science, etc. The aesthetic is another of these more sophisticated ways of knowing, but as opposed to the "philosophical/scientific" ways, there are two major differences with the aesthetic:

1. The intellectual is not (necessarily) privileged over the emotional/ sensory/affective; and
2. The movement is not to abstraction, but to particularisation, knowledge coming from a more intense focus on the particular rather than by abstracting from particulars to general rules.

This is not to say that the intellectual is excluded, nor that the general is not aimed at. Indeed, it is one of the constant claims about the aesthetic that it is its capacity to encompass the intellectual and the bodily emotional, the particular and the general at the same time that makes it so powerful. Equally, however, such claims indicate that there are major tensions within the concept, and it helps in mapping out the aesthetic to look at some of these. There are a whole range of these tensions but I am just going to concentrate on a couple here that are particularly relevant to the points I want to argue later.

Just to give us variety, so you don't get sick of the Wordsworth poem, I thought I'd work in this section on another text, and I decided to make things a bit more difficult for myself by choosing a text that it's less easy to make the points on than a poem like "She dwelt among the untrodden ways". I also thought I'd use one that teachers would be more familiar with, particularly primary teachers, so I decided to work with Mem Fox's Possum Magic (1983).

Just to remind you of the story. Grandma Poss uses her magic to make her grand-daughter Hush invisible. Hush has great fun for a time, but then decides she wants to become visible again. The only problem is that Grandma Poss has forgotten the magic to counter the spell. She remembers it has something to do with food, so they set off around Australia and try various bits of food, with no results until they get to Darwin, where Hush eats a vegemite sandwich and starts to appear again. Some pavlova in Perth makes more of her visible, and finally, at the casino in Hobart, she eats a lamington and is totally visible. There is great celebration, and an annual feast of the required food instituted.

So, what are these tensions within the aesthetic that I'm interested in:

Particular/Universal

Leaving aside purely formal abstract works, characteristically with the aesthetic we are presented with a representation of some particular experience. We are involved in the particularity, but at the same time assume that this experience is representative, that it is telling us something about the world, human beings or life in general.

With a book like Possum Magic, once you think about it, this is particularly clear, because while on the surface the story is about these two possums, in another very obvious sense, it's not about possums at all. The very fact that they are so anthropomorphic suggests that we are hearing something that has relevance beyond the particular story. We get a lot of particular details about Grandma Poss and Hush, their problem and their travels, but we certainly don't think about it as a David Attenborough documentary on possums, or indeed, just as a story about these particular possums. The story can be (has to be) related to human beings, and, to tell the truth, it has more relevance to human beings than to most possums I've met. That immediately establishes the drive to generalise, to read the story as telling us about something beyond the particular events shown. This universal/particular duality is caught up in the question, "What is the text about?" One range of answers is to do with content: "It's about this possum who's invisible, and they have to find out what food will make her visible again." The other range of answers (and these are the kind that tend to be valued in schooling, particularly as you get higher up) has to do with more general concerns: "It's about someone wanting to gain normality," or "It's a celebration of Australian culture," or "It's about the relationship between generations, and how the desire to protect the young has to be moved beyond." The detail of the story defines the way the bigger concerns are seen.

Material/Spiritual

This is basically the same tension projected in different terms. The particularity of the aesthetic suggests that it has to do with things that are embodied. The kind of knowledge that the aesthetic brings is not a matter of airy thought but of (the representation of) physical, material things. Against the philosophical, which tends to privilege abstract intellect, the aesthetic makes a strong claim for the importance of material reality, and of knowledge gained through engagement with material reality. However, there is also a persistent strain in the aesthetic that relates it to the spiritual, that sees it as revealing elements of experience beyond the material.

I don't think the materiality of the story of Possum Magic needs to be established, what with possums, and vegemite sandwiches, and lamingtons, etc. but it might seem a bit much to say that it has a spiritual quality. It is undoubtedly a word with the wrong connotations in this case, but what I would point to is that growing sense of excitement and even revelation as Hush progressively finds the food that makes her appear again. There is a sense of experiencing something significant, some deeper comic pattern of existence, a sense that there is something right with the world that is being discovered and affirmed as the quest goes on. The fact that it's all comically related to a kind of mundane, stereotyped Australianness of course gives it a particular slant, but I don't think that undercuts the sense of discovery and moving to completeness and celebration which makes it such a satisfying (and much-loved) story.

Emotional/Intellectual

While often working towards intellectual engagement with major concepts (such as the value of finding normality, or the value of Australianness), the aesthetic will normally move us to these perceptions not by rational argumentative means but by emotional ones, either by encouraging us to experience events along with the characters, the experience leading us to particular conclusions, or by creating a work that involves us emotionally through its ability to structure experience (e.g. by counterpointing different elements, or simply by producing a formal narrative or patterned structure that is powerful in itself.) It is, of course, the power of the aesthetic to carry one away emotionally that has led to the deep suspicion that has been felt towards it through the centuries. Reason and logic are always felt to be safer guides than the emotions, and the powerful work of art can lead to acquiescence in ideas that one might find logically suspect. (It is one of the reasons why so much art in so many cultures is bound up so closely with religion.)

It's easy to see the ways in which Possum Magic works to involve the reader emotionally. On the level of story structure, it sets up a simple quest structure, and once we as readers set out on that quest, we desire powerfully its completion. It actually very cleverly keeps the conditions of the quest obscure for a time. We hear that the solution to the problem is probably food, and it's not until we are into the quest that we realise that the key is the culturally stereotypical Australian nature of the food. The intellect is engaged, as we've seen, in working on the story and pushing it to abstractions, but, in this case, it's secondary to the emotional acquiescence in the story. The other emotional element, on the level of the detail of the text is the warm relationship between Grandma Poss and Hush. One is pleased by and drawn into Grandma Poss's desire to do everything good for Hush. It is, of course, again drawing on a particular cultural type, the loving grandmother, indeed almost the fairy godmother. Grandma Poss couldn't be Hush's mother, the whole feeling of the book would change, and probably become more serious. Mothers make more demands, they're not as open or as wise.

Inspiration/Control

A parallel tension comes in conceptualising the creation of the work. One line of rhetoric sees the artist as inspired, as carried away by deep forces within or outside her/himself, becoming little more than the channel through which these impulses can be externalised. The artist is a sleepwalker, instinctively producing greatness. Another line of rhetoric stresses the craft of art, the hard work in finding the right word, in achieving the exact curve within the painting, or the unexpected but exactly right keyshift in music. This opposition often comes close to the emotional/intellectual one, the artist being seen as either carried away by emotions and pouring out the art from an overflowing soul, or seen as exercising higher intellectual qualities, mastering emotion by subjecting it to formal control.

In Possum Magic, I think this can be seen in the wonderful energetic inventiveness of a lot of it, which makes it seem fresh and newly thought however often you read it, whereas there is clearly a lot of crafting going on, with the rhythms of the language and the move into rhyme at times, and the structuring of the stages in the quest.

Form/Content

Implicit in a number of the points of tension already mentioned is the form/content dyad. In the ideal work of art, it is often felt, there is a perfect match of content and form. The form has become expressively unified with the content, the content has found its natural (however strenuously-worked-for) form. I don't particularly want to look at the visual element of the book, but even putting that aside, the patterning of the language expresses the exuberance of the imagination. Even more, the language creates that particular tone of affectionate irony about the Australian food and places which is so significant to the meaning of the book.

There are lots more of these tensions that I could look at, but these are some of the main ones. Note that I'm not saying they are binary oppositions, or that they necessarily contradict each other. Rather, what I'm claiming is that the aesthetic way of knowing is valuable because these things can coexist within the aesthetic. This gives it a peculiar power, a power that allows us to know things in particular ways.

There are two other aspects of the aesthetic that I want to talk about briefly. Two words that keep coming up in writing on the aesthetic are "pleasure" and "beauty", and before returning to our main question, I think it's worth saying something about them.

Beauty

The aesthetic has a long history of relationship with the beautiful. Indeed, there is a temptation to make beauty a necessary condition of the aesthetic. Things that are aesthetic are not necessarily beautiful in the common understanding of the term. One has only to mention the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear to make the point. However, there is always a temptation to find the work as a whole beautiful, to assert that in the end it produces a meaningful pattern that transcends any momentary ugliness. Whether one always wants to or should make this move is obviously a matter of debate. On the whole, it seems to me to weaken a lot of what's most powerful in texts to try to accommodate it to a notion of beauty. And yet, there is something there in aesthetic texts for which this word is being used as a convenient label. It is a kind of intensity, a sense that what we are seeing has a reality heightened beyond what one expects in day-to-day existence. This intensity moves us of itself and inclines us to involve ourselves with the things that are displaying the quality. I think I've already shown this kind of intensity in Possum Magic, in the way that the imaginative projection of this parallel animal world suggests a heightened reality, and in the way the quest structure carries us through the story

Pleasure

Pleasure is an equally problematical term, although obviously again gesturing towards something that is basic to the aesthetic. Mentioning the blinding of Gloucester as a limit case once more raises the problem: what can possibly be found pleasurable in witnessing this violent act? The word is obviously inadequate in its common meanings, although the complex understanding of pleasure that one finds in psychological writings could perhaps cover the phenomenon, since it allows for a core of potential pleasure in revulsion and negativity. If "beauty" as a feature of the aesthetic work needs to be glossed by "intensity", then pleasure needs to be glossed by some term such as "involvement" or "engagement" which can suggest the degree of response without necessarily implying that its nature is benign. Again, I've already talked about some of the ways Possum Magic engages us very strongly, and I think it's time to get back to the Wordsworth.

This material I've just given on the aesthetic is very sketchy and obviously fairly preliminary thinking. I particularly want to stress that there are many, many aspects of the aesthetic that I haven't covered. Even in terms of those tensions there are lots of obvious ones that I've passed over "innovative/traditional", "individual/cultural", "useless/valuable", lots of them - we could be here all day. And that's not even to begin on other aspects. For example, I've been talking about the aesthetic largely as a concept, but in many ways it's more important to talk about it as a process involving a text, a reader/viewer/listener and a series of very complex negotiations that go on between them, negotiations that have both cultural and individual dimensions.

What's the use of the Aesthetic?

But let's not get into all of that, let's instead return to the Wordsworth poem, and to our question: what might be the value of working on a poem like this one. I want to test out three possible answers - answers couched in terms of Truth, Personal Development, and Pleasure - and in each case I want first to give the traditional answer that really won't do any more given the poststructuralist critique, and then look at what comparable new answer we might give that could affirm the value of working with such a text "after such knowledge", within a framework that acknowledges the theory.

Truth

The first answer is a classic one, that the poem is revelatory of some kind of truth. The classic statement of this in English is, of course, the words of Keats's Grecian urn:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
          Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(1985 (1820), p. 177)

The argument is that the intensity of the aesthetic experience is a kind of guarantee of truth. Anything that can be so profoundly engaging must be tapping into some pretty fundamental perceptions about the world.

You can see how this relates to that notion of a tension within the aesthetic between the particular and the general. If, as I suggested, a defining characteristic of the aesthetic is the perception of general significance within particular cases, then it's not surprising that it should be seen as a revelation of Truth with a capital T.

However, any good poststructuralist is rightly allergic to notions of absolute truth, - "all we know on earth and all we need to know" - and earlier on I suggested some of the ways in which the truths that the poem is purporting to present are bound up with socially-limited and distorting perceptions. This isn't just if you consider the content, but it is very much involved with the feeling of the poem, its aesthetic way of operating. Indeed, it seems to me that the kind of standard Critical Literacy critique that might be done - "whose interests are being served by this poem", "what is being excluded from this poem" - as I suggested before, rather misses the point of how powerfully ideological the poem is, because the ideology is projected through the aesthetic experience i.e. the affective elements, including the form.

And yet, of course, if the poem doesn't give us "the truth", it is nevertheless not a lie. It gives us some truth. It allows us, through its aesthetic way of knowing, to know some things that we would not, could not know otherwise. By shaping the emotional trajectory of placing the girl within that environment in the first stanza, projecting her value through those metaphors in the second, and then registering the loss in the third stanza, and by doing it in these particular terms, the poem has put us through an experience that we might quite powerfully feel is revealing to us a possibility of what the world might be. It might only be a limited truth, and it might be provisional in all sorts of ways, but it is not something to be despised. It can join all the other provisional truths we live by, that we have discovered through the various ways of knowing.

So, the first of the reasons for looking at such texts is because they allow us to know the world in ways that we could not know it otherwise. This knowledge is provisional and contingent, but then so is all knowledge. The provisional nature of truths makes us evaluate the ones we are presented with more carefully, but it also perhaps makes us value those that seem meaningful even more.

Development

The second kind of answer to the question of what might be the possible use of the aesthetic is couched in developmental terms, and is implicit in what I've just been saying. The aesthetic allows us to have a different range of intense experience and know the world better, thus turning us into different, and hopefully more comprehensive human beings. Again there are two models of this, an older one and a newer one. The older, discredited version is of course the "personal growth" model. This is predicated on the notion of an essential self, with literature as a kind of fertilizer that, if applied in sufficient quantities, makes us into wonderful, sensitive people. After the knowledge of poststructuralism, it's difficult to accept such a naâve version of how a person is constituted, of the sensitivity-producing properties of literary texts, and of how change happens in the personality .

The poststructuralist version of human beings is that we are much less unified and stable than the personal growth model suggests, that we are constituted multiply through the different subject positions we can occupy, our subjectivity thus being constituted by the discourses we command (or that command us), and the texts we read. This has, of course, been a crucial insight in critical literacy, that when we read a text, it calls us into a particular way of being, and through that, makes us subject to its ideology unless we have strategies of resistance. I was using this kind of notion before when I suggested that the Wordsworth poem required us to believe certain things, go into a particular subject position that it might not be particularly valuable to go into. And indeed, in this aspect too, I'd say, that a lot of work on texts is naâve because it ignores the aesthetic mode of operation, and so doesn't see fully how the text is creating our subjectivity.

However, again I want to put a positive spin on this, and assert the value of aesthetic engagement. Engaging with a text can allow us to extend our existential repertoires, it adds to our range of possible subjectivities, it allows us to rehearse other ways of being. If I read the Wordsworth poem sympathetically, I understand - I have felt - a particular way of feeling loss. I have added to my emotional possibilities, as well as to my possibilities of understanding other people. I have another model, a new kind or inflection of discourse and so a new way of being through which I can respond to the world when appropriate. Now, of course, giving oneself up to a text can be damaging if one incorporates negative or distasteful selves - and that's what critical literacy is constantly warning us to guard against - but an attitude of suspicion that avoids any engagement is a ridiculous cutting-off of the possibilities of extending the self. To put it in the terms that the late Foucault might have done, to ignore the aesthetic is not taking proper care of the self, it is not taking on the ethical responsibility of shaping your life richly.

Pleasure

The third answer is a simple assertion that the aesthetic experience is good in itself because it gives pleasure. The naive old-fashioned version of this is that we just want the kids to enjoy reading. Of course we want them to enjoy reading, so I guess there's nothing wrong with this, except that it's so weak. It tends to trivialise the aesthetic, seeing it as a pleasant way to fill in time, rather than as a powerful way of knowing. Literature is never going to be taken seriously if it's being seen merely as entertainment.

The version of this answer that I would give is to do with strong notions of pleasure, of engagement with the aesthetic to produce intensity of experience. There is pleasure in the formal shaping of Wordsworth's poem, that wonderful quiet build-up to the revelation of loss, the material structuring of the movement of the language, its momentary surges, that extraordinarily daring use of "oh" as the rhyme word at the end of the second last line. There is, of course, pleasure in feeling the intensity of emotion and momentarily empathising with it. The text gives you powerful experience, makes you feel more alive, involves you, including physically. The most interesting work on pleasure and desire at the moment sees it not as coming from our lacking something and getting the needs fulfilled, but sees it as productive, generative. It is powerfully creative, a basic drive, and such texts can activate it.

I want to insist through all of this, that I am not for a moment denying the critical element. It is still vitally necessary. Involving yourself with a text doesn't necessarily entail abandoning choice and judgment. You don't decide, "Well, I'm going to turn off my critical faculties and my ethical values and just give myself up to enjoying this." You don't need to turn off your critical faculties because you're enaging with the aesthetic, or vice versa. Indeed, as I've said, you can't be properly critical unless you are acknowledging the aesthetic dimension of the work. What I want is for us to move on to an enriched sense of literacy in which the critical is not locked into an attitude of suspicion, into defensive objectification and analysis, but can link with the generative pleasures of the aesthetic in a way that is more responsive to how we actually live in the world.

Back in the Classroom

You are undoubtedly wanting me to say something about classroom practice, but, in the end, I don't think one can give strategies that will make this happen. In fact, I think there is a rich repertoire of things that happen in classrooms now that can do the kind of work that needs to be done in developing the ability to read texts in a way that is responsive to their aesthetic dimensions: drama techniques, imitative creative responses, straightforward critical analysis, etc. I think if there is a problem, it's that many of us are generally not seeing a development of aesthetic understanding as one of the things we have to work for, or rather, we're not enough aware of what such a development might entail, and so we're not shaping the work on reading and writing imaginative texts for that purpose. This, at worst, can make the classroom practices become empty routines because they're not informed by any vision of what they should be achieving. So, I don't necessarily think we need new strategies, what we need is an informing awareness of how the strategies can be used for developing aesthetic understanding.

What I want to finish up by arguing for is the need to develop a new sense of purpose in literature teaching, and a new confidence that it's worthwhile. As I said, the sociocultural versions of literacy that are dominant at the moment, and that, in most ways I support wholeheartedly, tend to make literature peripheral, either because they see the only interest in working with such texts as being to expose how they're perpetrating some kind of ideological imposition on the reader, or because they don't see this kind of text as functionally particularly significant in the society. ( I think, actually, in many ways this comes down to the fact that aesthetic texts tends to be apprehended individually, but much of recent thinking is unable to cope with the individual, being locked into a sense of human beings as essentially social.)

In the past, up to the eighties, the claims made for the teaching of literature were obviously too grandiose. Literature tried to claim that it was absolutely central, that you practically didn't need anything else, but if you were able to handle literature well, then everything else would follow - business letters, scientific reports, a happy life, the lot. This is patently ridiculous. Literature is just one part of the field of literacy, but it is an important part because, as I've argued, the aeshetic is a distinct way of knowing and, within the field of literacy, it's in literature that this can best be developed. We do ourselves, our subject and our students no favour - we sell ourselves short - if we consider it either as just material for language or issues work or just as entertainment, leisure time stuff. We need to make the claim that it is an important part of the fabric of literacy - to pick up the metaphor from the title of your conference - and that reading for the knowledge that the aesthetic reveals is an important skill that has to be developed.

So where are we, "after such knowledge"? We can't "unknow" what poststructuralism has shown us. We can't simply put our head in the sand and ignore the critique of older ways of thinking about literature, society, people, and how they all relate. However, as I hope I've shown, poststructuralist knowledge doesn't disable us from affirming a particular value for the aesthetic text and the aesthetic way of knowing. Indeed we can assimilate the poststructuralist critique and find through it a more realistic and I think more powerful understanding of what it is to engage with texts, weaving literature into the fabric of an enriched view of literacy teaching.

References:

Fox, Mem (1983). Possum Magic. Omnibus, Adelaide.
Keats, John (1985 (1820)). Poems (selected by J.E. Morpurgo). Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Wordsworth, William (1985 (1798)). Poems (selected by W.E. Williams). Penguin, Harmondsworth.