Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio

Close your eyes and think back to grade 11 English. You might be picturing your English teacher holding up a short story- probably “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “The Lottery,” or something by Hemingway- and telling you to read it very closely. Words like “theme,” “symbols,” and “meaning” are being tossed around casually until they become meaningless, and the whole process will most likely be tedious and formulaic. But we were all, with only slight variations, taught this way of approaching literature in high school, to the point where we just accepted that this was the correct, and only, way to read a text. Faced with a novel, a short story, or- god forbid- a poem, we’d just whip out that trusty word “theme” and begin to look for it, even if we weren’t quite sure what the word meant.

All that to say that studying literary criticism this year has been mind-boggling for a panoply of reasons, one of the biggest being I’ve discovered that the above approach is just one approach. I’ve learned that you can analyse a text and never have to mention “theme”– a pretty exciting discovery for not only a literature student but anyone who’s ever wondered if there was another way to read.

Since we were 5, we’ve been given fiction and asked “What does it mean?”, as if a novel were a math problem that can be definitively solved. But learning about the different schools of criticism has taught me something most of us know intuitively anyway: literature is not like math. While some schools of criticism treat literature like a math problem- something that can be solved and regarded objectively- other critics have disagreed and pointed out that different people react differently to stories, and that our experiences colour the way we read, as though we were all wearing glasses of varying shades. For example, New Critics believed that a work of literature was “autonomous” and so existed within a self-contained vacuum. Despite their school being part of one of the older 20^th century movements, it nonetheless mirrors the way most of us are taught to read today. Literature is hardly ever situated in history, and we are simply asked to focus on “the words on the page” and establish the “tone” while focusing on “imagery”. All the words I’ve put in quotes are part of the lexicon of New Criticism, but as students we are simply encouraged to treat them as the words you’re “supposed” to use when discussing literature.

On the other hand, a New Historical reading of a text would instead concentrate on contextualizing the work within a broader historical timeframe, and explore the ways in which the social and political upheavals of a certain time are reflected in the author’s work. Unlike New Critics, they would use words like “ideology”, “subjectivity”, and “subversion”. Thus, a reading of say, Shakespeare, by two different critics could easily yield two completely different, yet equally valid, interpretations. Literature is not monochrome, even though it’s a lot easier to teach when you treat it like it is. Teaching people the differences between Moral Criticism and Russian Formalism takes considerably longer than telling people to find the one meaning to rule them all.

In terms of my literary studies, learning about the different critical schools has opened up whole new areas of analysis, but it’s also opened my eyes to the simplistic and essentialist ways in which we are often taught to look at the world. If studying in CEGEP has taught me anything, it’s that we- and, by extension, the vast array of knowledge that human beings have amassed- don’t exist in a vacuum. It may be easier to teach literature without talking about world views and philosophy, or economics without morality, but removing these ethical and academic collisions takes away the most challenging, and ultimately interesting, aspects of being a student and a human being.