Curriculum and the Craft of Teaching Literature Revisited

Abstract

Literature curricula traditionally have been designed around two rather general concerns. The first is what could be called imaginative experiment. Louise Rosenblatt has pointed out that literature provides students with opportunity for ideal experimentation, the trying-out of alternative modes of behavior in imagined situations.' By imaginatively experiencing different human situations, reader comes to challenge his presuppositions and system of values; that is, students are led into selfawareness from their lived-through experiences with literature. Historically, this has been one of values of literary education. Educators are also aware of need to provide students with a fundamental critical acumen and vocabulary to carry on discourse about their experiences with literature. Naturally, literary educators have depended upon literary theory to provide a framework to define literary questions, skills, and context to criticize and evaluate literary works. Ideally, literature curricula balance fundamental structures of field with a need to see growth in students' understanding and appreciation of literature. The fundamental curricular goal is to enhance and intensify students' literary experience and to provide them with tools to reflect on it. This position is subscribed to by John Ramage in his article Curriculum and Craft of Teaching Literature.2 Ramage's concern evolves from his sense that too many literature students graduate having neither mastered ability to read intelligently and sensitively nor principles of criticism which inform that process.3 Ramage believes that requisite literary skills cannot be defined without addressing literary questions and without a theoretical framework with which to define and place value upon literary skills in relation to one