Teaching Literature as Experience

Abstract

As most everyone teaching literature must know by now, the various kinds of study and analysis grouped under the rubrics of new criticism and formalism are very much in retreat. What most of us learned in college and graduate school by way of analytical method, and indeed what has been the dominant mode of teaching and discussing literature in the United States during the last fifty years, we have been urged to renounce. While unquestionably it is good that teachers develop a fresh perspective on what they are doing, for many such renunciation is an unsettling, and even painful and threatening, prospect. For me it involves denying the neo-Aristotelianism to which I was introduced over twenty years ago by my most thoughtful and persuasive English professor-an attitude, a rigor, and an analytical method that were the cornerstones of his teaching and critical writing, and that I still respect as probably the most flexible and fruitful way of asking certain key questions about what we read. Broadly speaking, this method insists on examining the unifying principle of a literary text-that principle of inclusion and ordering that best explains what elements make up the text, how they are arranged, and to what ends. A good deal of my early interest in the neo-Aristotelian enterprise centered on what I perceived to be its tolerant, non-authoritarian manner-which is ironic in light of how it and related methodologies have come to be attacked for their narrowness and rigidity. At any rate, it has hardly surprised me, at least, that many of the chief proponents of critical pluralism, notably Wayne Booth, have come out of this approach. Nor, I think, is it surprising that the proportion of attention I myself have come to give matters of form and shaping principles in the fiction, poetry, and drama I teach has fallen off sharply during my teaching career. Of course, even at the beginning, though I talked of little besides form and shaping principles, I did so largely without the jargon of Aristotelianism, and was never so much concerned with my students' my analysis of a particular poem or novel as with their learning how to read more formally, how to ask the questions of texts. But even my notion of what were the right questions soon began to broaden. For example, many years before I knew of reader-response criticism, I began