In this article, adapted from the Introduction to his recent book in the NATE/Routledge series, Andy Atherton explores issues around students’ encounters and engagement with literary texts. He examines aspects of reader experience and response and explores how effective learning and progress requires meaningful interaction between the reader, the writer and the text. He looks to identify what really matters when teaching literature in the English classroom.
What does it mean to experience a work of literature? What role does response play in the creation of literary meaning? And what matters – really matters – in the teaching of English Literature?
These are bold questions, maybe even unanswerable. But then the most important questions – the ones truly worth asking – often are. In the summer of 2021, I set myself the challenge of trying to answer these questions. The result was my first book: Experiencing English Literature: Shaping Authentic Student Response in Thinking and Writing. In every way this was a labour of love: a love of literature, a love of our discipline, a love of teaching, and, yes, a begrudging affection for caffeine-fuelled early mornings and headphone-cocooned late nights.
Experiencing English is a book about literature, teaching, and teaching literature. It is a book about the experience of all three and all three as experience. It is also a book about the vital role that student response plays in the English classroom, both in thinking and writing, and how (and how not) to shape this response as well as when (and when not) to do so. Epistemologically-driven but defiantly practical, it includes chapters on teaching the novel, poetry, and plays – as well as how to write about them, from the sentence to the essay.
In this article – based on the Introduction to the book – I want to chart some of the wider debates within which Experiencing English Literature’s practical strategies might be situated. In doing this, I’ll seek to answer a more fundamental question, one that underpins everything that happens in the classroom: what is important, really important, in the teaching of English Literature?
Response Matters
Let’s start with the work of Louise Rosenblatt, a huge influence not only on the book, but my own day to day teaching. At the core of Rosenblatt’s work is the notion that any act of reading exists as a transaction between reader and text.
In her pioneering 1938 book Literature as Exploration, one of the founding texts of reader-response theory, Rosenblatt memorably characterises a literary work as existing ‘in the live circuit set up between reader and text’ so that ‘the reader infuses intellectual and emotional meaning into the pattern of verbal symbols, and those symbols channel [the reader’s] thoughts and feelings’ (25). As this metaphor implies, reading literature is a recursive experience in which the reader acts on the text and the text acts on the reader. The cost of literature is to pay a little of ourselves. We give as well as receive.
In Rosenblatt’s words, both text and reader form ‘an environment for the other during the reading event’ (Reader, 18). We read certain marks on a page at a particular time and place and in so doing we bring to them a little of who we are, our experiences, emotions and thoughts, and in this moment, for the first time, those marks on a page mean something. The exact configuration of meaning is unique to this moment, never to be repeated in precisely the same way again. However, for this to happen there must be marks on the page in the first place. I am responding to a particular textual object, which conditions, but can never dictate, the probable horizon of reaction. And so it goes on: a circuit in which one element depends on the other for its continuing energy. Once we stop reading, and the book closes, the lights go out.
One significant implication for this line of thinking is that literature does not hold meaning, not inherently so, rather it has the potential or possibility to ‘mean’. A text lying dusty on a shelf untouched does not, aura-like, have meaning emanating from it. It means something to someone, a very specific someone, when it is picked up and read. As Don Paterson explains, ‘things do not possess meaning, they have meaning conferred upon them’ (The Poem, 115). Response is not incidental to the work of literature and the work of the literature classroom. It’s in the moment of response that a text begins to mean something.
Neither is the person who actually responds incidental. ‘There is no such thing as a generic reader or generic literary work’, Rosenblatt writes, ‘there are only the potential millions of individual readers of potential millions of individual literary works’ (Exploration, 25). That literary knowledge is contingent and mutable in this way, that it depends on who is reading it, when, where and with whom, is crucially important for what we do in the classroom. It reminds us to give students space to respond to what they read, for us to seek out these responses, to take them seriously, to build on them, share them, talk about them. To do otherwise is to short-circuit what it means to ‘mean’ in an English classroom.
Response also demands an object. But this textual object does not find its way into the classroom neutrally. It is placed there. And this act of placing exists within a vast web of social, political, cultural, historical, literary and institutional influences. A book arrives in the hands of our students still and forever entangled. The texts we decide to teach and how we decide to teach them, both the mode of response and to what we respond, are never impartial.
John Burnside observes that ‘the act of paying due attention is itself a political act (Music, 25) and whilst my book is mostly about how we help students to direct their attention, we should not underestimate the crucial significance of what the focus is and how a certain text gained this special status. As Marianne Moore declares in an epigraph to her self-curated Complete Poems, ‘omissions are not accidents’. Asking ourselves what has been omitted and why is crucial work.
Response matters, not just as an expression of disciplinary or epistemological intention, but in what we read, how we read it, and why we read it.
Experience Matters
In titling my book Experiencing English Literature, I had in mind three related thoughts:
1. Reading literature is an experience and an event. It takes place at a particular moment of time, in a particular place, and with a particular person. The words on the page remain the same, but the circumstance in which they are read do not. Our encounter with a text exists within a constellation of influences that align in just a certain way to produce this specific experience of it, not easily replicated in precisely that same way again. ‘The literary work discloses itself in the reader’s experience of it’ (Limits, 191), Rita Felski argues.
2. We read by bringing to bear on the text all of our past experiences. If reading literature is an effort of co-authorship then the ink we use is drawn from the well of our memory, whether personal, literary, cultural or otherwise. We confront what we read with all of who we are. As Rosenblatt says, ‘in order to shape the work, we draw on our reservoir of past experiences with people and the world, our past inner linkage of words and things, our past encounters with spoken and written texts’ (Transaction, 270).
3. If reading means bringing to the text our own experiences then it also means encountering the experiences of others. We shape what we read, slipping ourselves into the text, but it shapes and changes us, too. As Joyce Carol Oates put it, ‘reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul’ (qtd. in Prior, 2013).
I think of a student’s experience of literature as an accumulated texture, accrued through the kinds of encounters we privilege and promote within the classroom. A student’s experience of English Literature (the subject and its texts), depends to a large extent on what they, and we, do. As Terry Eagleton writes, ‘literature is a question of what we do, a set of enabling strategies, a certain way of conducting or orientating ourselves in the presence of a piece of writing’ (Event, 48).
We can turn once more to Rosenblatt to unpick this observation, especially through what she calls a ‘reading stance’. A ‘stance’ describes the disposition we adopt in relation to something we’re about to read, a kind of intellectual and cognitive readiness. Our adopted stance depends upon what we expect to read and our intention in reading it, both of which are often cued by the text itself. We are likely to adopt a different stance to a journal article than we do to a poem or novel, which in turn conditions the ensuing reading experience.
Rosenblatt distinguishes between two primary stances: the efferent and the aesthetic. An efferent stance, she explains, is one where the reader’s ‘attention is directed outward […] towards concepts to be retained, ideas to be tested, actions to be performed after the reading’ (Reader, 24). She labels this ‘efferent’, coming from the Latin ‘to carry away’, since the focus in reading is what can be taken from the text. Adopting an aesthetic stance, which we do when expecting to read a work of literature, involves a turning inwards as the reader focuses on the ‘feelings, ideas and attitudes’ that the text stirs up (Reader, 25). As Rosenblatt summarises, ‘in aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centred directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text’ (Reader, 25).
The experience our students have of English Literature is the aggregation of the kinds of stance we ask them to adopt towards what we read. Rosenblatt’s characterisation of the ‘aesthetic stance’ pulls us back to the disciplinary heart of our subject, reminding us always of what makes English ‘English-y’. It reminds us that the power of literature lies in what it does to and with us; that it can make us feel something or nudge a new thought into existence. It reminds us to pay attention to these subtle inner shifts and moments of resonance, observing the cognitive and intellectual impact of what we read as we read it. None of this is peripheral to the work we do in the classroom, to the work of literature itself, rather it is central.
In practical terms, we need do nothing more complex than start our discussion by sharing and probing first reactions to a text; exploring these reactions during and after our reading. These initial responses give way, in time, to more detailed discussion of ideas and language, but the route to these is through the aesthetic, not through the efferent.
Authenticity Matters
Jessica Mason and Marcello Giovanelli describe what they call ‘authentic reading’. As they explain, this is a ‘reading that is born out of an individual’s own process of unmediated interpretation’, arguing that ‘if interpretation is imposed on a student, the resultant reading is likely not to be authentic, but manufactured’ (Well I Don’t, 42).
One aim of the English classroom is to facilitate and encourage this kind of ‘authentic reading’, in the same way that Rosenblatt argues that ‘our primary responsibility is to encourage, not get in the way of, the aesthetic stance’. Yet, this notion of ‘getting in the way’ is a curious one, as is Mason and Giovanelli’s claim that an authentic reading is one ‘unmediated’ and free from any ‘imposition’.
Clearly, we do mediate, impose ourselves, and get between text and student, in all manner of ways. This happens in the questions we ask and that students ask of each other, what and how we scaffold, the language we use to introduce a text, the curriculum within which it is situated, how we frame student attention and to what it is directed and in the ways we explore, share and activate ‘the reservoir of past experiences’ we all bring with us. As John Yandell says, ‘teaching and learning are embodied, irreducibly social activities’ (Learning, 412).
But none of this is incompatible with an ‘authentic’ or ‘aesthetic’ reading. Quite the opposite. Our goal is not to remove ourselves from the process, but to prime, shape and cue student response in such a way that heightens rather than obscures the literary experience. The question is not whether we should mediate, since we cannot help but do so, but instead how we do it in such a way that remains conducive to the disciplinary legacies of English Literature. It should enrich, not detract.
There is a whole spectrum of pedagogic possibility that exists between giving students something to read and saying nothing and giving students something to read and telling them what they ought to think, feel and say. As George Saunders comments, ‘all coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction’ (Swim, 5). But what we do to help to facilitate this reaction and what comes after it is the stuff that defines the teaching of literature. In the classroom-driven chapters that occupy my book, I try to suggest the countless ways in which we might tread this line, shaping authentic responses authentically.
This is brought into especially sharp relief when considering written responses to literature, a topic that occupies the entire second half of the book. Writing is the future reification of a present idea or feeling: it is the response to a text that takes place now, resurrected later when put down on paper. All writing is the product of a gap, even if a very small one, between having a reaction and then writing about or through it.
What we decide to do in and with this gap matters. We might try to minimise it as much as possible, removing ourselves in the process, so that the writing is thinking. We might extend this gap, treating writing as a process not a single event, where students redraft and refine, even completely change, their initial response. Further still, we can help students to get into the right relationship between the thought they wish to express and the words they might use to do so through deliberate practice of sentence stems, essay shapes, flexible but not formulaic scaffolding, and guided modelling.
Authentic writing follows authentic reading, but neither should imply resistance to the ways we might shape and cue student response.
Disciplines Matter
Let’s pause a moment to consider certain key ideas I’ve attempted to sketch out:
1. Reading literature is inherently participatory and collaborative, enacted by the joint enterprises of reader, author and text. Literature’s capacity for resonance and effect, its ability to unsettle, provoke, release, transfigure, exist in this encounter. Literature works on us because we work on it.
2. Literature exists as an experience: each reading a singular event, not replicable in the same aesthetic or affective configuration ever again, taking place at a specific time, in a specific location, and with a specific individual.
3. What we bring with us to the text matters just as much as what we find there. The beauty of its language, its formal inventiveness, the rich complexity of its ideas, all of this is brought to life by the experiences we bring to the text as well as those we encounter within it.
4. Meaning within a work of literature is always provisional. The work of interpretation always unfinished. This is partly a consequence of the singularity of a text’s experience, that we each bring something new to it just by virtue of our reading it. Each text we read belongs to us in a way it doesn’t belong to anyone else. But it is also a consequence of the inherent slipperiness of language, the inability to pin it to the page.
5. Literature is what we do to it: it is a particular way of tuning ourselves into its words and the shape they take. Some texts repay these attentions more than others.
These are epistemological claims, each one concerned with how knowledge is generated within English Literature and all of them deeply embedded into what Robert Eaglestone calls the subject’s ‘disciplinary consciousness’ (Powerful, 32). The question is how far, if at all, we should allow such claims to influence and shape the pedagogic decisions we make.
Drawing a line that connects epistemology and pedagogy is not without contention. Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark offer a robust answer to this question, claiming that ‘the epistemology of a discipline should not be confused with a pedagogy for teaching or learning it’ (Minimal Guidance, 83). Such comments are made in the wider context of rejecting constructivist models of pedagogy, favouring instead variations of direct instruction. Speaking about the importance of worked examples, for instance, they explain ‘for novices, studying worked examples seems invariably superior to discovering or constructing a solution to a problem’ (Minimal Guidance, 80).
Yet, I find it difficult to reconcile what such comments mean for the English Literature classroom. A poem is not a problem to be solved. And no one arrives at a text with nothing. A student cannot be a novice in how a text makes them feel or what it makes them think. This is not to denigrate or overlook the ways that we are expert, accrued over many years of thinking about and reading literature, but instead to argue our expertise can’t extend itself into the thoughts and feelings a text stirs up in our students. It would be a mistake, perhaps a grave one, to unmoor ourselves completely from the epistemological traditions of the discipline that we teach.
As a student leaves one classroom behind and enters another, they adopt a different stance, to use Rosenblatt’s term. They enter into a different relationship with the material being taught and readjust how they put their cognitive faculties to use. A classroom is not a neutral space, an instructional blank slate devoid of disciplinary and pedagogic influences. Rather as students enter it, we hope to turn their faculties to something, a way of thinking, a particular kind of relationship to the knowledge being imparted and contested. Ignoring this does a disservice to our students.
As Brenton Doecke observes, the aim of any teacher is to ‘induct students into the modes of thinking and inquiry that characterise his or her discipline’ so that we allow them ‘to enter into this particular way of imagining the world’ (‘What I know’, Literary Studies, 295). An epistemology may not imply a pedagogy, as Kirschner says, but equally a pedagogy should not be devoid of an epistemology.
Teaching within specific disciplinary and epistemological traditions need not be misaligned with effective pedagogy. In fact, they can be entirely aligned. The ambition of Experiencing English Literature is to demonstrate precisely this. Prioritising resonance and effect need not be viewed in opposition to the importance of scaffolding or modelling. Asking students what a text makes them feel or what they notice is not equivalent to leaving them to figure things out on their own. Making space for student response and fostering sustained classroom talk does not mean abdicating teacher guidance. Recognising that texts do not come with ready-made interpretations but, as Doecke states, ‘the classroom itself is capable of generating knowledge’ (‘Knowledge Question’, 251) does not require us to stop teaching our students. The educational landscape is littered with false dichotomies. We should not add to their number.
Further reading
Burnside, John. The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century. Main edition, Profile Books, 2019.
Doecke, Brenton. ‘What I “Know”: Literary Studies and the Teaching of English’. Changing English, vol. 23, no. 3, July 2016.
Doecke, Brenton, and Philip Mead. ‘English and the Knowledge Question’. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, vol. 26, no. 2, Apr. 2018.
Eaglestone, Robert. ‘”Powerful Knowledge”, “Cultural Literacy” and the Study of Literature in Schools’. Impact, vol. 2020, no. 26.
Eagleton, Terry. The Event of Literature. Yale University Press, 2012.
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. First Edition, University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Giovanelli, Marcello, and Jessica Mason. ‘”Well I Don’t Feel That”: Schemas, Worlds and Authentic Reading in the Classroom’. English in Education, vol. 49, no. 1, Mar. 2015.
Kirschner, Paul A., et al. ‘Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem- Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching’. Educational Psychologist, vol. 41, no. 2, June 2006.
Moore, Marianne Craig. Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Faber and Faber, 2003.
Newbolt Report (1921).
Paterson, Don. The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. Main edition, Faber & Faber, 2021.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. 5th ed. edition, Modern Language Association, 1995.
—. ‘The Literary Transaction: Evocation and Response’. Theory Into Practice, vol. 21, no. 4, Sept. 1982.
—. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Reprint edition, Southern Illinois University Pr, 1994.
Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. 1st edition, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
Yandell, John. ‘Learning under Lockdown: English Teaching in the Time of Covid-19’. Changing English, vol. 27, no. 3, July 2020.