Literary Classroom Research Articles

Defamiliarizing Romance: The Arabic sīra in the English Literary Classroom

Defamiliarizing Romance: The Arabic <i>sīra</i> in the English Literary Classroom

Whose uncertainty? Addressing the intersectional reader through the wound of trauma

Abstract Few measures are more emblematic of the desire to curb uncertainty than trigger warnings issued in the literary classroom. But do they establish more certainty? A growing body of empirical research is showing that trigger warnings are “functionally inert.” Furthermore, in some studies they have been shown to increase PTSD symptoms. Against this background, this paper takes the rise in demand for trigger warnings as a window into Gen Z reader’s relationship to uncertainty and directs attention to the problem that trigger warnings aim to mitigate but are failing to alleviate – an “epidemic of trauma” in the classroom, as identified by the US National Council of State Education Association (NCSEA). Illuminating trauma as a neglected issue in narrative studies, this paper takes an intersectionally situated perspective to reappraise general propositions about the Reader in order to move towards a trauma-informed approach to teaching narrative in the classroom.

Using literary conversations to design stimulating learning environments for all elementary students

The paper presents results of the LemaS-GRiP project. The focus lies on literary conversations in inclusive literature lessons in primary schools. These conversations link individual aesthetic experiences and interests with a jointly responsible development of literary interpretations in exchanges between pupils and teachers. Based on a Literary Classroom Conversation in a fourth grade, we can show in a preliminary analysis how learners enter into the open-ended process of understanding and approach the ambiguity of the text. At the same time, all participants have a growing responsibility towards the text and for each other. In doing so, they are partly dependent on a competent other, who supports them in approaching the ambiguity of the text in the sense of scaffolding. Central instrument was a multimodal interaction analysis of videotaped lessons following the principles of the documentary method.

Exploring Poetry in Dialogue: Learning as Sustainable Development in the Literary Classroom

Exploring Poetry in Dialogue: Learning as Sustainable Development in the Literary Classroom

‘Doe je best op school’: Nederlandse hiphop in het literatuuronderwijs

Dutch youth have been hard to enthuse for literature and reading in recent years, both in private and educational settings. At the same time, however, they are highly attracted to (primarily Dutch-spoken) rap, an originally US-American music genre with literary features. In the US, elements of rap and its accompanying hip-hop culture are fruitfully integrated into literature classes to enthuse youth for reading. The combination of hip-hop’s popularity and its intercultural, literary, and educative potential opens up possibilities for a similar implementation of hip-hop in a Dutch context. However, although many teachers are open to trying this, they often lack the prior knowledge to get started. In this article, I present four preparatory ‘lessons to learn’ to help teachers use hip-hop in the literary classroom. These lessons concern hip-hop’s literary qualities, hip-hop-inspired teaching attitudes, and new perspectives on the challenging language and topics of the genre.

Breaking down barriers - Englische Lektüre in einfacher Sprache

Texts in simple or simplified language have the power to enrich the EFL literary classroom. Since there is a vast number of graded readers or simple originals out there, we should benefit from them and use them to enhance reading in heterogeneous secondary classrooms. This article first outlines the ongoing discussion on the value of graded readers, especially in connection with learners’ perspectives and the aims of reading. The article then explores in detail the category of simplicity and how it manifests in young adult literature. To illustrate the practical use of simple texts, the results of selected extensive reading projects are briefly presented, along with the analysis of an exemplary literature project on Robinson Crusoe. Excerpts from guided interviews with three teachers who all carried out reading projects with graded readers are woven into the article to add experience-based knowledge.

USING GIBBS� REFLECTIVE CYCLE IN MAKING REFLECTIONS OF LITERARY ANALYSIS

In English as Foreign Language (EFL) classroom context, it is compulsory for the students to make reflections of literary works. The current study is aimed at examining how the students implement Gibbs� reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis. The qualitative study employed a document analysis upon the students� reflection artefacts. The students� reflections are their responses to a short story written by Amy Tan. The findings of the study revealed that Gibbs� reflective cycle is a good framework to be used by the students in writing reflections upon literary works they are working on. The well-structured framework of writing reflection helped the students explore the literary work deeply, since the reflective cycle accommodates important aspects that can be explored from the literary work by the students. It can be concluded from this study that among the models of reflective writing developed by Kolb, Johnson, and Gibbs, the latest model is considered the most suitable to be used in literary classroom since its well-structured model enables the students to write better reflections of literary works.Keywords: reflective writing; Gibbs� reflective cycle framework; literary works; literary analysis.

An emergent sense of the literary: Doing children’s poetry translation in the literature classroom

This article brings together findings from translation theory, the poetics of children’s poetry, and the pedagogy of translation, in an attempt to theorise the practice of poetry-translation in the literary classroom. I argue that translating children’s poetry in the context of translation workshops mobilises skills, and encourages ways of thinking about poetry, that espouse particularly well one of the complex challenges of literary education: namely, triggering in learners an emergent sense of the literary. Poetry-translation, I contend, allows for profoundly experiential engagement with some of the most sophisticated, and least easily articulated, aspects of the aesthetics of literature – prominently, the resistance of the literary text to paraphrase, the lack of a clear content-form dichotomy, and the embodied aspects of the literary encounter. Because translating is never just writing, but always already writing one’s reading, the translation of poetry in the literary classroom requires pupils to capture, experience, and take ownership of their encounters with literature, in order to re-express them. I first explain the practice of literary translation in the classroom; I then talk about contemporary poetry translation theory and its deeply phenomenological approach to text. I next show why the particular poetics of children’s poetry situate that kind of text ideally for a pre-semantic, intuitive approach to poetry translation. Finally, I look at the writing process as a way of turning the pupil into what Roland Barthes calls a poéticien, a person whose poetry-writing does theoretical work.&#x0D; Key words: children’s poetry, translation, literary education, aesthetics

The Shifting Frontiers of Literary Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Traditionally seen as a discipline that was immersed in published narratives, with poetry, drama, short fiction, and novels as the sole determinant corpus, Literary Studies in the twenty-first century has progressed across the latitudes of narrativity, as the notion of text itself has pushed past established boundaries of words on a published page. The page in the contemporary context can be taken to mean the written text, the visual text, the moving text, and the hypertext, to name just a few. The articles in this Forum Kritika present a glimpse into the shifting frontiers in Literary Studies as it presents varied facets of contemporary literary scholarship by literary scholars. The discussions take us across a number of planes. They integrate both print and multimodal texts, demonstrate eclectic frameworks of reading that cross disciplinary boundaries, reveal the utilization of analytical tools from the hard sciences, and also project the inculcation of innovative and entrepreneurial skills in the literary classroom. Yet, the Forum is also mindful that however far away we trek beyond established frontiers, we must still ensure our contact with the core of our discipline, that of traditional forms of the printed text. For, if we dismiss them from our view, we run the risk of inadvertently devaluing the worth of literary fiction and its attendant academic scholarship. As such, the Forum also incorporates articles that engage with contemporary theater and novels and their inherent validity in reflecting the socio-political concerns of our world, emphasizing that these will never lose their currency however much the arena changes.

Friction in fiction. A study of the importance of open problems for literary conversations

The present paper is part of a multiple case study of literary classroom work at Norwegian lower-secondary schools (students aged 13–16) where three classes are invited to discuss texts presented to them as open problems. The first case study carried out showed that the text and the task had the power to attract as well as the ability to generate student engagement. The second case study identified varia-tion in student engagement based on a description of intensity and an analysis of students' discursive valuation mechanisms. Following those findings of engagement, there is a need to understand what it is about the three short stories involved―Raymond Carver's Little Things (Carver, 2004), Roy Jacobsen's Run for Your Life (Jacobsen, 2001) and Franz Kafka's Before the Law (Kafka, 2000b)―that may yield that engagement. The main finding made is that what attracts students' attention are different forms of friction that delays the unfolding of the motif or plot of the story. This friction can therefore also be seen as the basis for the engagement shown by students in conversations. The findings suggest that lower-secondary students take an approach characterized by substantial engagement to those aspects of the text that represent problems of high relevance even within the field of literary studies. At a general level, the findings of the study open up for a discussion about whether greater use should be made of the genuine problems of literary studies in order to create student engagement.

The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud's Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm

The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm Ellie Ragland In recent literary studies of trauma, many critics postulate trauma as itself a limit on representation. In Shoshana Felman’s words, working with trauma in the literary classroom, whether through fiction, historical fiction, or poetry, has the pedagogical effect of “break[ing] the very framework of the class” (50). Yet what makes the study of trauma particularly germane to literary critique and analysis is not, as one might assume, some extra-linguistic component which would seem to belong to the field of History. Rather, what appears in narrative accounts of trauma are the pathetic, suffering, passionate and affective dimensions that literary language and genres have always sought to embody and recount. Relating the descriptive words used by her students on the occasion of their having viewed a videotaped session of Holocaust testimony, Felman finds commonality between the students’ words and those of various poets, such as Paul Célan and Mallarmé. Célan recalls “A strange lostness/Was palpably present,” while Mallarmé speaks of “the testimony of an accident.” But the larger point to come out of trauma studies is that art cannot be seen as separate from life, or as separable from a certain normal affectivity which is the very domain of literary language. The goal of this essay is to link the relation of trauma to memory (and forgetting) in terms of its speech, displaced in symptoms, passion, and affect; to unveil the nature of traumatic catastrophe as a concrete, historical event; to argue that the limits of representation in trauma tell us something new about the affects (as opposed to cognition) which Lacan tried to explain by his category of the real. Further on, I shall relate my argument to Freud’s Dora case, his “Fragment of a Little Hysteria” (1905), his study of “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), and his comments regarding the trauma undergone by his young nephew in the Fort! Da! paradigm. I shall reconsider these in light of Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s theory of the object in reference to his Seminar IV: The Object Relation. Critics working in this new mode of literary study have isolated certain features marking a clear set of responses that arise from trauma material. Dori Laub, for example, speaks of the temporal delay that carries one beyond the shock of a first moment of trauma to what inevitably follows: a repeated suffering of the event. Traumatic memories—whether recounted by Holocaust survivors, incest victims, or survivors of rape or other abuse—have the characteristic of reappearing with a literal repetitiveness that reminds one of Freud’s arguments in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): at the point where one would expect the pleasure principle to function, one discovers, instead, a repetition whose fixities are on the side of the death drive.1 Lacan put forth the theory that what is repressed in the real—the order of trauma, of the unsayable, unspeakable, the impossible—will return in the symbolic order of language. A trauma, in other words, will not just disappear. It cannot simply be forgotten. Not only will it remain recorded in the real as a limit point to memory; it will reappear as a symptomatic enigma which opens onto a certain anxiety. In his Seminar X (1962–1963): L’angoisse, Lacan stresses that the anxiety accompanying a trauma is not doubt. Rather, its effects have remained inscribed as an unconscious system of knowledge which appears in conscious life as a concrete insistence, whose characteristic modes are repetition, passion, strong affect, or a suffering that one cannot simply and easily talk away or talk through. Trauma, in Lacan’s estimation, is not only not doubt; it is, rather, the cause of doubt. Lacan stresses an unfamiliar picture of the causality of trauma, then: it is a kind of certainty that can be known insofar as it is acted out. Put another way, behind an affect caused by trauma, one finds the movement of cause itself as a return of the real into the symbolic. Precise knowledge regarding the trauma’s cause...