Richard Jacobs, is the author of A Beginner’s Guide to Critical Reading: an Anthology of Literary Texts, a regular contributor to the knowledge base on teaching literature at 16+, and of course, literature lecturer at Brighton University. Richard’s lectures are always engaging, enjoyable, and interesting, but here’s what he has to say on his approach to teaching the subject:
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How I like to teach literature
I like to teach literature in ways that place the text and the students’ responses to the text at the centre of everything I do, for there can be no successful teaching without engaged and energised students.
I like to teach in ways that leave students able to do it without me – where ‘it’ is the individually empowered reading of texts of all kinds because of the collective work of the classroom experience with the particular literary text.
So I like to teach towards making myself effectively redundant for each student.
Activating a process
My sense of how I like to teach literature, as that sense has developed over the last thirty-five years, is not one that feels like imparting a body of knowledge. It’s more about activating a process rather than delivering what the teacher or the course or the assessment system has pre-determined.
It’s not objectives-driven teaching.
Decades ago Lawrence Stenhouse noted that literature teaching, compared to the teaching of other subjects, allows us ‘to specify content, rather than objectives… the content being so structured and infused with criteria that, given good teaching, students’ learning can be treated as outcomes, rather than made the subject of pre-specifications’. But if there is one objective that I have in mind it is this sense of students being able to ‘do it’ without me, to read the world and its texts for themselves.
This is critical literacy and each generation of students needs it more and more urgently. But it’s not a goal or objective that students reach having been through and left behind the process of working on the text; instead it’s that very process of working with texts ‘so structured and infused with criteria’ that materialises the critical literacy.
Virtuous triangle: student text and teacher
Stenhouse’s ‘given good teaching’ does of course beg many questions. And there are three aspects of what I think may together constitute the good teaching that I aim for in my work. These are the virtuous triangle between student, text and teacher; the dynamics of desire; and the roles of narrative – and the three are intimately connected.
A successful literature seminar feels like one where there’s been the maximum energy flowing between student, text, and teacher and flowing in all directions. (For my own part, I have an agenda for the seminar, shared with the students, but it’s more of a flexible group of signposts rather than a fixed march.) The process is active and alive, it is never fully finalised or closed, and if any one of the three sources of energy becomes passive, the process collapses.
To make the text active and alive (as opposed to a museum piece) means it needs to be materialised in the room and this may often mean the teacher making it, or a representative part of it, real by reading or performing, ‘being’ or ‘acting’ the text. And beyond the teaching and learning experience is the future where the teacher drops out of the triangle.
Teaching and reading
A model that has as this goal the dispensing of the teacher’s role might be understood to be one in which teaching and reading are uniquely balanced or even synonymous.
Good teaching and good reading both ask questions that generate not answers (unlike perhaps at school where students expect readings to be answers provided by the teacher) but more and better questions.
The teaching of a text is a reading of the text in an active and transactional process with the student gaining the power to read by questioning in the same way. The reader (student and teacher) acts on the text rather than being passively positioned by it, or by the teacher. The seminar room is like a ‘safe place’, informed crucially by mutual respect and tolerance, where students can feel that everything they say will be valued and acted on, taken up and developed, recognised as provisional and unfinished, as all readings of texts should be. A student award-nominator once wrote that she appreciated above all feeling that nothing she and her friends said in class would ever be looked on as ‘wrong’.
The dynamics of desire
This leads to my second point about the dynamics of desire. Rene Girard argued that desire is imitative and that processes of identification precede desire. As with the virtuous triangle, an activation of desire may be vital for literature teaching to thrive.
Texts desire to be read, the teacher desires the text, the students identify with and become affected by that desire (award-nominators regularly write of the infectiousness of the teacher’s passion for the text), and that in turn re-energises the teacher’s response to the text.
Peter Brooks’ influential Reading for the Plot provides a useful model. He noted that novels begin with the activation of the protagonist’s desire (Freud’s pleasure principle) which is duplicated or mapped onto the reader’s desire to read on. This process is enacted in successful teaching.
Narrative and teaching
Brooks’ argument can be developed for the third of my points, the importance of narrative as a model for the teaching of literature, We could think of a dynamic process in three parts, beginning in the personal (the student reading the text in advance), moving to a communal experience shared in the lecture and seminar, and ultimately returning, with new insight, to the text These correspond to Brooks’ notion of how we negotiate plot as we read novels, the middle sections of which are where the pleasure principle totalises the divagations and digressions that mediate between the linear beginnings and eventually endings where the death instinct as well as the pleasure principle is gratified.
If the experience of the literature lecture and seminar can be seen, taken together, as analogous to the desire involved in reading the extended ‘middle’ of novels, then we can also chart the lecture and seminar, seen separately, as a narrative beginning, middle and end. The (largely) uni-vocal and linear lecture gives way to the populated field of the communally voiced seminar where ‘plot’ diverges and dilates, and then both student and teacher are returned to linearity – another book, better reading, better teaching.
