Virtual and Actual Forms of Literary Response

Abstract

In the film Educating Rita Michael Caine, a Pygmalion figure cast as an alcoholic English professor, creates what he thinks is a Frankenstein out of his Galatea, an unlettered hairdresser with a hunger for literary experience and literary knowledge. Caine chisels Rita's tabula rasa squeals of Wow! and Fantastic! into polished emanations of lit. crit.-and he looks upon what he has done as an abomination. Embodied in this teacher-pupil relationship is a current dilemma in the field of response to literature: the presumption that critical commentary on literary works is an unsalutary educational goal, certainly a mitigation, if not a total negation, of the actual literary experience, which is deemed of far greater pedagogical importance than literary criticsm. That engagement with the text is mutually exclusive with detachment from it is a vestige of T. S. Eliot's of in which the simultaneous participation in and awareness of experience is seen to be psychologically impossible.1 As readers, our habitual mode of responding to literature is invariably some form of imbalance between thought and emotion: we either overintellectualize-and lack feeling, or sentimentalize -and lack truth. Given the preponderance of the former vice in English classrooms over the past half century or so, it is not surprising that recent trends in both literary theory and literature education have been content to err on the side of subjectivism. To right the balance we need a curriculum model that aims at reintegrating Eliot's dissociation of sensibility, a model premised on the assumption that literary knowledge, as a legitimate component of literary experience, can enhance that experience. Although this paper cannot aim to accomplish that, it will attempt to clarify the