Literature Prerequisites

Dave at Word Munger raises an interesting question.

Most physics cannot be understood without mathematics. Yet physicists are often asked to teach “physics for poets” courses where math is not required.

What would be the equivalent for literature teachers?

Dave's answer is "literature without theory" but he realizes that this approach is complicated by the fact that all readers are informed by various experiences and historical knowlege of some sort. In other words, none of us can be "tabula rasa" when reading a book. That means that anyone teaching literature will have to deal with a group of conflicting assumptions. If you don't steamroll/mitigate these assumptions with theory then what do you do? Dave reaches this conclusion:

The most important thing is probably knowing how to approach a text.

This strikes me as a ringing note of sanity, a point that often seems utterly forgotten in the theoretical oneupsmanship that is popular these days. However, it does beg the question--which approach? Are we approaching this text as an aesthetic experience, watching how the words link and interact as one would the brushstrokes of a painting? Or are we approaching this more interpretatively, trying to teach tools to get at a meaning? I suppose we can always just answer "both" and say both approaches are worth teaching, but I'd doubt if that would mitigate argumentation.

Still, I think Dave's response is wise in that it values personal interpretation. Teaching theory is basically tantamont to telling students that these are the only valid frameworks for approaching a text. Now, obviously, certain theorists are respected for a reason and their interpretations may be better than what most people could come up with, but that doesn't mean that people should not be encouraged to evaluate a text on their own terms. Unless you're presenting a paper at the MLA conference, why is it so necessary to know how to say, deconstruct Gravity's Rainbow?

I'll grant that theory can be useful in the same way any other worthwhile information can be useful--as a way to spur imaginative approaches to a text--but I don't see why we, as non-professor students of literature, need to put theory over our own personal responses. I'll offer up as Exhibit A, a book I just finished reading, Cigarettes Are Sublime. This is an intensely personal, well-respected work that offers interpretations of a few books (Being and Nothingness and Confessions of Zeno are two), an opera, and a movie while invoking very little theory. I don't doubt the author is well-versed in theory and that theory helped him to some of his conclusions, but is that so different from other informational perspectives we can bring to books? I think not, because although the author invokes theory, he far more oten invokes disciplines not generally associated with literature--research on smoking, most obviously--to support his readings.

Comments

[SisterRye]

This discussion makes me think of "Blink" and wonder if one might intuitively, with one's "gut reaction," respond to literature, or story-telling, or the stringing together of words like beads, without overanalyzing -- which could block the pure joy of simply soaking up the experience of plowing through a book and concentrating on the mulifarious ways it soaks us to the nerves. If we allow ourselves to not separate the mind from the body, and to physically drink a book, have we really missed anything? I'd like to think not. Although science and chemistry and many thoughtful inklings are poured into the making of a fine wine and a gourmet meal, when we are eating, it's simply the nourishment and the pleasure that are taken in that give life.