What’s quality?
Last week we talked about what constitutes quality literature, which conversations matter, and who gets to decide. Maybe Rosenblatt helps us think deeper about these questions. Maybe she’d say quality literature is that which provides students transactions with text that produce an educative experience. This might involve gaining a clearer perspective of the self and others, finding one’s voice through identification with characters and situations, and making sense of one’s reality so that the self is strengthened and able to cope.
In this respect, I wonder if transactions with literature are akin to Vygostky’s zone of proximal development, which focuses on the role of talk in guiding a learner to a more advanced level of problem solving. Surely literature extends one’s thinking, and can help a learner articulate the inner-self to the outer world in ways that advance one’s state of being.
Maybe what constitutes “quality” literature is best determined by its potential to transform the reader into a more evolved state—either by understanding the self more clearly or expanding one’s empathy for persons and communities foreign to one’s experience.
Educative or un-educative?
Not all transactions with text are educative. I see so much narcissism whenever I watch TV (especially reality programming). Some characters on these shows are so superficial. I often wonder what effect certain TV shows, magazines, and books have in reinforcing shallowness: exterior over the interior beauty, form over substance, competition over collaboration. And yet even as I write this, I’m reminded how much I’m entertained by pop culture, and how much I appreciated MTV growing-up, and reading Stephen King & Dean R. Koontz novels, and other things some people would call trash.
Textual Influences
I think our transactions with various media create something of who we are. Some people oppose textual influences outside their world view and moral stance. The tendency is to sanction text that replicates the culture, and censor those that fragment it. People become fearful of alien influences to the culture. However, this may just be a neurotic tendency. When people encounter a text that doesn’t conform to their belief system, I’m not sure that they’re that easily brainwashed—they’re more likely to reject it (maybe this is even a biological principle…the body rejects certain foreign substances??)
My blog entry on 4/22: A Hyjacked Performance of “Invincible Summer” regards a high school group that protests a live performance because of the profanity it contained.
Perhaps we are most influenced by the texts we seek according to our own need and purpose—we are most influenced by literature that speaks to something inside us, that gets us seeking-out encounters with similar texts around issues relevant to us at the time. To draw on Applebee’s thesis, maybe we are even more influenced when literature is integrated around conversation.
Grand narratives
It’s interesting how literature can either uphold or dismantle conceptions of people; it can either crystallize or chip away at grand narratives that shape how we think about institutions and other people. For example, Rosenblatt explains how literature has reinforced the conceptions of women as subservient. It has even perpetrated notions of romantic love over the more callous reality that people often marry for practical reasons akin to survival: economic security, status, or having someone to help with work. In fact, the conflict between romantic love and social systems (i.e., class, race, culture, etc.) is still a plot device in many stories.
Perhaps not unlike TV and other media, literature can socialize the reader into dominant constructions of people and situations that become archetypes or story lines that replicate the culture. But when ideas or people represented therein are alien to the culture, literature can be controversial since it disrupts familiar ways of knowing and being.
Students as critics?
Maybe we should cultivate in students the ability to develop discriminating minds, and decide for themselves what to think about a work without telling them how to think, and help them to become critics of their encounters with texts.
9 responses so far ↓
Ann // September 30, 2007 at 3:15 pm
So much to comment on… but I’ll second this:
I wonder if transactions with literature are akin to Vygostky’s zone of proximal development
I made the same notes in the margins a few times.
Amy // September 30, 2007 at 7:41 pm
You’re so smart, Treavor.
I liked all your points, but I wanted to respond to your first one about what is quality literature and who makes this decision. I was struck by this question this week (again) as well. I felt that Rosenblatt was definitely making a case that some literature is more valuable. She did acknowledge or concede that “lower” forms, such as comics and romance novels (from drugstores even!) could be a stepping stone toward more quality literature. But still, I’m not sure I agree. Why do we all have to read Great Works of Literature? I’m not sure I buy all of her arguments about the effects literature can have; surely it has these effects on some, perhaps many, people. But everyone? And who are we to say everyone must have these experiences? It almost comes down to even more philosophical questions like, what does it mean to be human? To participate in this world? What must be all share, if anything?
a.r. // September 30, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Loved reading your thoughts…
Not all transactions with text are educative
You’re so right. I watched really bad TV today, bad, bad, bad. I’m dumber than I was when I woke up this morning.
Maybe we should cultivate in students the ability to develop discriminating minds, and decide for themselves what to think about a work without telling them how to think, and help them to become critics of their encounters with texts.
I love this theme in Rosenblatt. Maybe the power to decide for ourselves what we think is one of those human, philosophical questions we coud all benefit from (I like your question, Amy). The text, then, as a path toward understanding our own minds, whatever we decide to make of them…
angiez10 // September 30, 2007 at 11:03 pm
You made me feel better Treavor. The beginning of the school year is such a tough transition for me. I listen to my music, watch my movies, record my favorite shows, read my gossip magazines and maybe a book or two. I don’t think Rosenblatt would be too impressed. There’s always that day in August when I find my summer self slowly fading away and my teacher self unleashing herself. Summer me sometimes makes her presence known(I love Lost and Letterman and my music), but ultimately teacher me takes over.
subtextures // October 1, 2007 at 2:27 pm
It is what we bring to the texts, and what we take from them that make reading a quality experience. I think what makes quality lit quality lit is that one can return over and over and each time with more experience more is evoked from the text, both because the reader has more experience and there is more there in the text for the reader to respond to. I am not sure if this can be done with comics or dime store romances. Does that mean that we should all read a certain set of books, no. There are so many books to read, and what is an important book for you because you read it at the right time, might not have been so important if you had read it later in life. the same goes for books that left you cold, if you had read them at a different time then they might have opened in you a space that became important.
Treavor // October 1, 2007 at 11:29 pm
re, Ann. Love reading your thoughts and hearing them in class. . . I like thinking about the transaction between an individual and the text—this to me is a contact zone–without it words are meaningless, they are just images on a page. . . the transaction does seem to have elements of Vygostky.
Treavor // October 1, 2007 at 11:46 pm
re, Amy: I like what you say here. . . It makes me think that many English teachers make value judgments on what is literary—and I am not sure we English teachers always get it right. Maybe what is literary to us is what our community values, the books that are part of our community’s conversation and education. But the fact is, not everyone wants to be a part of that community—some even resist it with all their might. Some people, for example, mainly reads to get something done; it is mostly part of work and is tied somehow to an economic return. The reasons Rosenblatt gives for the value of literature may not appeal to everyone; and yet everyone reads texts–be it other bodies, movies, films, magazines, or dime store novels—and somehow they become topics of conversation (either in or out of school)— and it may be the effect of these conversation that matter most in judging the quality of a text.
Treavor // October 1, 2007 at 11:53 pm
re, a.r. & Angie: Thanks for stopping by. I really liked what Sarah said today in class—that we need to teach students to be critical consumers of texts. This means that we might teach students to examine reality TV and fan magazines with an eye toward how people are positioned and framed, and how the camera shots can be edited to make a person appear different than they really are (i.e., beauty or personality), and all with the intent of selling an image of what’s cool/hip.
As far as TV, I watched Dexter on Showtime. It’s the second season, and I think it will be a Sunday evening ritual for me. And if you haven’t seen ACROSS THE UNIVERSE yet, you must see it. It is playing at the Arbor.
Treavor // October 1, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Subtextures, I agree….I like the idea that a book takes on different meaning for us over time, and that we are drawn to a book when we are ready for it. It speaks to us in some relevant way.
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