Active Reading

Transformative Writing in Literary Studies

Ben Knights, Chris Thurgar-Dawson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781847062635
• eBook ISBN: 9781441161284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: Literature

The subject of this book is the crossover between critical study and creative writing. 'Active reading' is a structured process of writing activities using imitation, variation and experimentation. Through practical composition techniques such as 'transformational writing', 're-writing' or 'translation', students can use writing activities to develop their critical imagination.
This book bridges the gap between theories of learning and Literary studies in Higher Education. Setting the argument in an historical and theoretical context, it outlines the importance of writing as a medium of learning and argues for its usefulness in aiding English students' understanding of theoretical as well as literary and cultural texts. The authors provide a reflective account of teaching and assessment methods using writing activities and critical thinking techniques and the forms of learning they promote. In the last section, they explore the connections with other forms of writing practice in related disciplines and argue for the role of transformational writing in promoting independent learning.
Appendices provide examples of the range of activities that can be used and an indicative list of literary examples.

Part I

Pedagogic Context

1 Contexts

It is perhaps already evident that this book seeks to be more than a handbook or a manual on a particular teaching practice.³ Naturally, we hope that readers will take from it stimulating ideas for teaching. But if those ideas are to have any valency (or indeed if they are to succeed as a stimulus), that process must take place within a larger argument about English Stu-dies in Higher Education. This chapter will supply a context for the rest of the book by providing an analysis of the situation of the English-related disciplines at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century - principally, though we hope not exclusively, in the United Kingdom - and will offer one kind of route map for the future. This is not to connive at a notion of a ‘crisis’ in English Studies. Shouts of ‘crisis’ can prove self-fulfilling, or provide cover for attempted capture of the subject from within. We would rather work with all the various energies of the subject than conjure into being another sect. We shall, however, argue that distortions brought about in large part by the continuing professionalization and specialization of research (reinforced by the Research Assessment Exercise) are distracting subject practitioners from thinking about teaching at the very moment when - for reasons we go on to outline - it is crucial that they engage in that thinking. The alternative could well be - at least for the literature domain - the fate of Classics in the mid-twentieth century: becoming a high cultural value subject for a very small elite of the privately-educated. It will also be necessary to use the chapter to do some ground clearing about the beliefs and practices surrounding ‘active reading’. We make a case for reconfiguring English Studies, and we propose the value of drawing literature, language and creative writing into a mutually productive web through raising the profile of ‘production’ for both students and their teachers. To that extent, our suggestions converge with the argument developed over many years by Robert Scholes:

In an age like ours, pastiche and parody are the natural way into our cultural heritage. We should make better use of this route in making this heritage available to students. (Scholes 1998: 161)

As I hope I have made plain, by giving production a larger role in the discipline of English, I do not mean just allowing credit for traditional courses in composition or creative writing ... I am asking for rethinking of what writing and other modes of linguistic production have to offer students and a reconstruction of the courses themselves. Those who teach students how to write poetry, fiction and drama have never expected all their students ... to become professional writers ... They have always believed, however ... that their students would become better readers of literature because of their attempts to write it. And they are right, I have no doubt. What is necessary, now, is for the discipline as a whole to accept this position and to rethink the role of writing in English studies with few preconceptions beyond the goal of producing the most literate students possible. (Scholes 1998: 162)⁴

Any debate about the curriculum and the subject matter is also a debate about the process in which that subject matter is enacted or realized. There is, we suggest, a close connection between promoting an exchange between critical and creative practice and raising the visibility of pedagogy.⁵ Both have to do with the materiality of words and practices. Visibility is essential if as a profession we are to make our tacit knowledge about what we do into active knowledge capable of being shared, critiqued and developed. Throughout, we argue that the conventional critical/creative binary divide (while pragmatically functional) is profoundly unstable: that reading, critique, re-imagining, even doing literary criticism, are themselves already forms of re-making, which in the end take place in dialogues within what Stanley Fish calls ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish 1980). ‘Textual production* potentially draws upon and feeds back into all branches of the subject.

Like any other discipline, English Studies represents an ongoing negotiation between a federation of teaching and research tribes.⁶ Because of the widely available nature of its subject matters, it (more than many other disciplines) simultaneously represents a negotiation between the tribes of those who practise in universities, those who have responsibility for school education and a diverse lay public. In many ways the history of the subject over the past one hundred years can be read in terms of the successive phases of that ongoing negotiation. In a’soft’ subject (Becher and Trowler 2001), the knowledge transacted between lecturers and students is also to some degree open to negotiation between professionals (endowed with research standing) and those who pass through or who enter the discipline. English Studies exhibits low paradigm consensus’. In other words, the curriculum of an English Studies degree is only partially dictated by a communal standard about what knowledge, understanding and skills students should achieve.⁷ To a greater or lesser degree (and naturally subject also to other factors like resource and staff availability) the curriculum is open to market forces and intellectual fashion, expressed through both undergraduate and postgraduate students. As we shall see later, the steady rise of Creative Writing, or modules in Gothic, Sci-Fi and Contemporary Fiction are examples of the subject changing in tune with changing demand. (Changes which, once cemented in the curriculum, in turn breed the next generation of research students.) Those who design English curricula have increasingly to enter into a persuasive dialogue with their market to promote strands or modules in, say, Medieval, Tudor or Eighteenth-Century literature. Because the subject evolves from expectations and mental models entertained by students and reading publics as well as by writers and academic professionals the identity of the student learner is a fairly fluid construct (Knights 2005). Practically, as anyone who has run induction programmes for new undergraduates knows, this leads to considerable uncertainty on all sides about what new students are actually being inducted into. Students attempt to guess what is in their teachers’ minds, or invent their own information-based construct. Even back in the days 'before theory’ such tensions were generally lived out in a more or less overt tussle between the substantialist desires of students and the formalist propensities of their lecturers. Even Creative Writing — in the early days at all events — struggled to put over the apparently counter-intuitive imagist and avant-garde propositions on which its practice was based. Students tended to be more emotionally drawn to the aura of 'everyone has a novel in them’ than to Ezra Pound’s imagist injunction to simplify.⁸ It is perhaps an irony that ‘English Studies’ has spent much of its institutional existence explaining to students that the interest they thought they had in their subject was the wrong one.

As teachers we could gain a lot from doing our own ethnography upon that meeting of tribes that takes place in the first year (see Green 2005). Behind that proposition lurks another: that could we but realize it, the English subject disciplines between them possess considerable if largely latent tools for pedagogic analysis and understanding.⁹ There is a metacognitive possibility here: that the skills and conceptual equipment elaborated for reading texts might transfer (not in bulk, but at all events analogically) to generate heightened awareness of pedagogic process. The vocabularies of genre, style, narrative and metaphor are not only capable of pedagogic application, but, transferred to that field, are highly generative. In fact, profound pedagogic implications reside within all the debates English has been having with itself — whether concerning addressivity, dialogism, the reader, gender, the uncanny, power, ‘the queer’, the post-colonial, the construction of the subject, Utopia or the use of linguistic corpora. The paradox is that, despite these debates, the dayto-day practice of the subject has (though with many exceptions) been largely carried on within traditional templates, protocols for interaction that long antedate the massive changes which have overtaken Higher Education since the early 1990s. In his Who Killed Shakespeare} Patrick Brantlinger appeals to the humanities to take part in a collective rescue effort In the face of the catastrophes brought about by the alleged triumph of political liberalism and the free market’ (2001: 200-1). It is a core part of our argument that if some variant of English Studies is to survive and take part in that necessary cultural resurgence then it cannot be at the level of ideas alone, however important those ideas might be. Change has to take place at the level of practice: the grammars that govern the interaction between teachers and students and students and each other; the protocols of notation and assessment, the collaborative nature of the productive processes in which both teachers and students engage. While, as even a half-baked learning and teaching strategy* can tell you, the goal is the autonomous learner, we cannot - if we ever could - go on working on the assumption that outside the classroom (or away from the virtual/learning environment (VLE)) students naturally and intuitively know what to do. While we should not patronize students, we have to collaborate with each other and with students in shaping structures for learning.

The rest of the chapter sketches this context. While it centres on English Studies, it attempts to take into account dynamics that originate from far outside that particular parish. The larger environment bears upon disciplines in different ways, and we can only understand the local dynamics of English within that larger environment. ‘English’, as we have pointed out, is very far from being a subject produced by or owned by scholars in universities. Nevertheless, the meaning of the subject to those who practise it professionally plays a major role in shaping the subject as it comes to be known by learners. Our hypothesis is that a major factor in bringing about change in the subject in universities has been the speeded up professionalization and specialization of the subject as researched and written. This specialization, we contend, has tended to squeeze out attention to pedagogy. The demands on lecturers are such that it is often simpler to fall back on conventional methods without noticing that they do not suit many of our students. On this hypothesis, we shall start with the supply side and then move on to demand. This will map the context for the chapters that follow.¹⁰

SPECIALIZATION, CURRICULUM AND PROFESSION

No variety of ‘English’ can evade the close study of language. Yet that remark, innocuous to the point of banality, has a very different weighting in different communities of the subject. While this book concentrates mostly on the symbiosis between the teaching of literature and the teaching of writing, we do not want to collude in an exclusion of English Language teaching. It is a pedagogic tragedy that the theory revolution of the 1970s and 1980s was in general so temperamentally averse to empirical language study.¹¹ As one of Evans’ respondents, a linguistician, remarked:

There’s no common cause with theory. They would say I ought to get my literary theory right, and I would say they ought to get their linguistics right. There’s a conceptual boundary between me and my colleagues. I have to adopt their way of talking about texts. (Evans 1993: 171)

Of course, English departments in British universities from the early twentieth century were no strangers to the teaching of English language. But until the 1960s the process concerned was historical and philological, and its practitioners were (as to a lesser extent they still are) the departmental specialists in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Middle English - simultaneously teachers of those languages and scholars of their respective literatures. Their position was stronger in some departments than others: weakest or even non-existent in those departments with least of an Oxford or London lineage. But practitioners of literature and culture as they were, and often living in a state of armed co-existence with their literary critical colleagues, language people in this sense were accepted as having a place in English departments. Joke as they might among themselves about the tediousness of medieval scholarship, modernists were usually willing to accept the guardian of ‘The Seafarer’, of Chaucer, or of the Gawain Poet as ‘one of us’. With the rise in the 1960s and 1970s of the new structural linguistics this situation changed considerably. By the late 1970s a new breed of synchronic linguists had emerged. Often they had more in common with their colleagues in Modern Languages or indeed in Education or Psychology than they did with the teachers of Old Norse, and they were increasingly to be found within the newly formed departments of Linguistics. While some Stylisticians and Critical Linguists in the mould of Roger Fowler, Mick Short, Ron Carter or Robert Hodge engaged in a heroic attempt to hold together the study of literature, culture and language, the ensuing history was one where during the 1980s, and outside certain enclaves, the teaching of literature and of language grew apart. This situation was exacerbated by the deep distrust for linguistics entertained by most of the new schools of ‘Theory’. With their roots in Parisian derivatives of Saussure, most theorists perceived language studies to be hopelessly empirical and agents of political amnesia. It was the students of English and the discipline itself that missed out as a result of this covert civil war.¹² Another of Evans’ respondents, this time a student, remarked:

When you are doing language in a department where there is English literature you do get marginalized. A lot of the English literature lecturers look at us as if we're inferior ... (1993: 171)

One of our arguments for the textual production we advocate is that — where students do not have access to the pedagogies of linguistics - it can go some of the way towards an engagement with language as self-aware practice. The decline in uptake of languages other than English in schools and universities has exacerbated the problem. The loss among a majority of students of even a modicum of external perspective on their language and culture makes all the more necessary a project which opens a few windows in the prison house of monolingualism.

The situation in Literature is not clear either. But for our purposes, and at the cost of a good deal of simplification, certain trends may be identified. The dominant theme is professional specialization. To simplify, across the middle decades of the twentieth century a university teacher of English (unless he or she were a Medievalist) was expected to be able to range widely across a broadly accepted canon. You might lecture in your specialist area - the eighteenth century, say, or the Victorian novel (though the expectation was that anyone should be able to lecture on Shakespeare and probably Wordsworth as well). But for tutorial purposes, the understanding was that lecturers knew enough about Milton, Hopkins, Conrad, James, Lawrence or Eliot to teach undergraduate or even postgraduate students. While it has always been an ill-informed slur that the Leavises and their followers were formalists, careless of history, it was nevertheless the case that in pedagogic terms the grounding of the subject in practical criticism could create this appearance. The core of the discipline was seen to reside in a limited number of texts and authors, to which the trained critical intelligence could be as successfully applied in the classroom as in the professional conference. The task was criticism; and in seeking to defend a particular version of continuity against the dissipating energies of the contemporary, criticism demanded a close personal encounter between articulate reader and text. This is a schematic case, and certainly advertisements for lectureships still frequently specify mixed expertise. Nevertheless, it remains broadly true that the generalist set of expectations, and the rituals of debate and argumentation that went with it, was on its way to becoming residual.¹³

If we stand back from local detail, the picture, as indicated above, is one of an accelerated process of specialization. (See Gawthrope and Martin 2004 throughout, but especially 2.8 on ‘coverage and aims’.) A number of factors are involved. The professionalization of the research doctorate coupled with intense competition for university posts results in a competitive edge for those postgraduates who can demonstrate marginal advantage in terms of Value added’. Above all, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has richly ambiguous outcomes. In national terms, English has in many ways benefited from its own extraordinary success. But the net effect has been analogous to dumping nitrate fertilizer on a complex eco-system. Some life forms have adapted and flourished, while denying light and moisture to others. And a massive distortion of the narrative of the teaching career has taken place as departments and universities struggle for competitive advantage. While most of us are prepared to make the best of an argument for ‘research-led teaching’, there is little point in denying that the effect for those departments that benefit from or expect to benefit from the RAE is an orientation of priorities where teaching and the administration of the degree assumes a relatively lowly position. The many lecturers who care deeply about their students and their teaching increasingly have to struggle (often at considerable personal cost) to reconcile their own and institutional priorities.

Specialization within the Ph.D. and the publishing of monographs and articles has other effects, too. There is, so to say, a convergence of the intellectual and the material. Thus one of the effects of the spread of forms of historicism has been to make English in some ways more like History. While many of us would applaud this trend, there are pedagogic side-effects, for example the sheer volume of immersed knowledge felt to be required before one can make significant statements about texts. While researchers revel in the popular cultures and publishing histories surrounding their chosen subject, becoming along the way authorities in aspects of medicine, anthropology or law, the effect of publicly flaunting this knowledge can be to reinforce in students the belief that the subject is actually information-based. The implication is that since you could never emulate your tutor’s erudition, it is better to take assiduous notes and make a show of quasi-professional knowledge from two or three recommended extracts. Even the increased specialization of the Level 3 special topic — while valuably exposing students to knowledge in the process - can militate against wider reading and knowledge; the research predilections of a specific departmental community creating an oddly distorted idea of the subject. Given the ever-increasing gap between teacher knowledge and student knowledge, research trends (the Gothic; postcolonial studies; embodiment) can be experienced by students as forms of coercive orthodoxy. At the same time the teaching culture of departments has shifted towards a kind of imitative professionalism, a normative assumption that a BA programme exists to turn out researchers. Thus undergraduates (while they do of course find ways of resisting or subverting the process) are now regularly trained i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Appendix III
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index