Literary Competence and the Experience of Literature

Author(s): Sheridan Blau

Source: Style, Vol. 48, No. 1, Euclid at the Core: Recentering Literacy Education (Spring
2014), pp. 42-47
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.48.1.42
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 Sheridan Blau
Teachers College, Columbia University

Literary Competence and the

Experience of Literature

In responding to the pedagogically important and informative effort by Peter

Rabinowitz and Corrine Bancroft to re-center literary education, I will not focus
as much on their admirable accomplishments as I will on problem spaces that they
have chosen not to occupy or fully develop, and probably could not have had the
room to develop within the scope of a single journal article. My response, then,
will try to extend the reach of their essay more than it will suggest any argument
with them. And I will begin by elaborating on the importance of their brief but
salutary observation that what literature offers to readers initially and primarily
is not a meaning but an experience and that “the experience of reading a text, the
total effect, is what’s central to interpretation.” I take this to mean that insofar as
meaning is derived from a literary text, it is derived by a reader either viscerally and
intuitively or more discursively through reflection on his or her experience of the
text, much as most people find meaning in other experiences in their lives, in their
daily experiences, and particularly in the memorable or traumatic or transformative
experiences that constitute the vicissitudes of every human life.
Literature and Experiential Learning
Let me now add to their observation some related postulates about literature as
experience that may hardly require elaboration, yet seem to be widely ignored or
forgotten in many literature classrooms. I begin with the fact that it is the distinctive
capacity of literature, among the varieties of discourse, to enable us imaginatively
to have lively, emotionally moving, and intellectually transformative experiences.
And it is this particular capacity that accounts for the value attributed to literature
by literary critics and theorists across the ages and representing a wide range of
philosophical orientations. Furthermore, this is the same power of literature that
explains the teaching in the classic formulations that literature teaches and delights
and teaches through delight, and, accounts for why, as Phillip Sidney asserts, “the
speaking picture of poesy”(977) is a better teacher than either history or philosophy
and has the power to “hold children from play, and old men from the chimney-

42 Style: Volume 48, No. 1, Spring 2014

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Literary Competence and the Experience of Literature 43

corner.” (982). And, again, it is this same power of literature that explains, as Cristina
Bruns has recently shown us, how literature can serve much like a “transitional
object” in the development of young persons and in the continuing psychological
and characterological development of adults, giving readers a safe opportunity to
test for themselves values, ways of being, and desires that through such trials assist
in the development of one’s aspirations, personality, and identity (26-36).
One would think, therefore, that this distinctive capacity of literature to serve
as an instrument of experiential learning would both justify the place of literature
in education and shape instruction in literature in classrooms at every level of
schooling. Yet historical evidence and modern observational research in classrooms
suggest, on the contrary, that literary pedagogy in secondary schools and colleges,
while generally paying lip service to literature’s capacity to teach experientially, has,
under the conditions of formal schooling, tended to employ instructional methods,
assessment practices, and a range of assignments that discourage or prevent rather
than enable students to experience directly and for themselves the literary texts
that are the focus and ostensible objects of literary instruction (Graff; Scholes;
Marshall; Zancanella).
The reasons for this failure and its intellectual costs I have analyzed elsewhere
(2003,2010); so here I will merely note that in colleges and universities, it can
probably be attributed at least in part to the conviction articulated most influentially
in 1957 by Northrop Frye that “the difficulty often felt in teaching literature arises
from the fact that it cannot be done.” Hence, he concludes, “the criticism of literature,”
as distinct from the experience of literature, “is all that can be directly taught”
(Anatomy 11). In this claim Frye did not at all mean to minimize the importance
of the experience of a literary text for students of literature, but to bracket off that
experience from the business of literature instruction, never doubting that the
experience of the literary text itself is a necessary precondition for all valid critical
discourse about whatever text is the object of study in a literature course: “Every
genuine response to art, whether critically formulated or not,” he asserted (in
substantial agreement with generations of theorists before and after him, including
Rabinowitz and Bancroft), “must begin in the same way, in a complete surrender
of the mind and senses to the impact of the work of art as a whole.” (“Levels”
248). That act of surrender to a text, an act performed through the quality of a
reader’s attention and engagement in the act of reading, was for Frye outside the
concern of the discipline of literary study or the business of a professor of English,
occupying “the same place in criticism that observation, the direct exposure of the
mind to nature, has in the scientific method” (“Levels” 248). Yet anyone engaged

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44 Sheridan Blau

in teaching literature at almost any level of schooling knows that the experience
of the literary text itself, which Frye takes for granted as an unproblematic and
necessary precondition for instruction in literary criticism, may be, in fact, the most
troubled and problematic transaction of the entire domain that defines the learning
and teaching of literature.
Literacy & Literary Competence
I am not talking here about the problem of functional literacy or the capacity to
decode written language for the everyday transactions of citizens and workers in the
modern world, but of the less frequently acquired literary competence that I have
elsewhere named “personal” or “performative” literacy (Literature 208–214) and
that calls for the more thoughtful and sophisticated acts of mind and dispositions
that are entailed in the reading of the intellectually challenging and cognitively
difficult texts that typically defamiliarize commonplace experience and thereby
demand intense, sustained, and wide-awake attention; a tolerance for ambiguity
and paradox; and a capacity to endure feelings of confusion and failure that can
be productively addressed through multiple-re-readings and a continuing dialogue
with the text and other readers of it. (cf.Rabinowitz 100). Such texts also demand
a high degree of metacognitive awareness, an awareness of the state of one’s own
understanding, and with it a willingness to acknowledge and explore one’s questions
and to continue to entertain questions, even after achieving what might count as a
provisional (and always provisional) understanding of a text. These traits together
— admittedly in combination with sufficient knowledge of literary conventions
and some “rules of notice” such as Rabinowitz and Bancroft specify — go a long
way toward constructing a theoretical model for the kind of literary competence
that Rabinowitz and Bancroft identify as the “basic aim” of their entire program
of literary study: “to develop students who can be flexible, self-conscious readers.”
How then do we foster and cultivate in adolescents and young adults (and a
great many adults as well) such habits of mind and character as will enable them
to read challenging literary texts (which is to say almost every text that is said to
be canonical or worthy of serious attention in a literary education) in a way that
will sustain them as they encounter the obstacles that prevent so many readers
from enduring and benefitting from the potentially transformative experience that
competent readers of literature characteristically undergo? There can hardly be a
more important question or task in a national educational culture where leading
policy makers (who are also guilty of misreading the Common Core Standards for
English Language Arts) are promising to make public education more rigorous and

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Literary Competence and the Experience of Literature 45

more suitable as preparation for college by severely limiting the study of literature
and replacing it in many schools with the study of more “useful” informational texts.
The misguided prejudice among school administrators across the country
against literature and in favor of informational texts is surely evidence of the kind
of experience such educators had or didn’t have as students of literature themselves.
For unless literary education attends to cultivating in student readers the habits of
mind and dispositions that enable them to encounter the difficulties presented by
challenging literary texts of the kind that are typically taught in secondary schools
and colleges, those students will remain unable to read such texts with sufficient
confidence and sense of progress to begin to surrender their minds and senses
to the imaginative experience that is the essence of the literary work of art and
accounts for the pleasure and instruction it offers and for its value to those who have
experienced it. But for students without such an experience of their own to draw
upon, instruction offered to them under the rubric of literary criticism ­— including
interpretation, and analysis —­­ will be meaningless and alienating, because it will
offer them the fruits of somebody else’s experience and grant them no knowledge
except a fraudulent knowledge that can be expressed in regurgitated formulations
and possessed as mere information about a literary text rather than any genuinely
experienced understanding of that text. Can there be any doubt about the schooled
literary experience of educational policymakers who as mature adults discount the
value of literary study and want to see it replaced with the reading of practical,
informational texts?
The Question of Practice
And this brings us to questions of practice that Rabinowitz and Bancroft felt obliged
(mostly) to defer, but that I feel obliged to attend to at least enough to refute the
widely uncontested assumption of Northrop Frye that literature itself, which is to
say, the imaginative experience available through an attentive reading of a literary
text, can’t be taught. What kind of instruction then do students need from teachers
in order to obtain a genuine and productive experience of a text and a personally
authenticated interpretation of it, and to do so at the same time that they are getting
an opportunity to grow in their capacity to encounter future texts with the kind of
disciplined attention I have identified as personal or performative literacy?
The answer is instruction that is informed by an extension of the principle
that Rabinowitz and Bancroft propose as their third theorem: that reading is
fundamentally a social activity. Beyond recognizing how reading is inherently
social in the conversations that readers conduct with texts, with characters, and
with other readers present and distant, I would urge as a pedagogical principle

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46 Sheridan Blau

that literary study in classrooms be organized and orchestrated as intensely social

workshops (Blau Literature 6-14), not only for the sharing of finished readings,
but, even more importantly to enable students to engage collaboratively (in pairs
and in small and large groups) in the construction of their readings, especially if
they are assigned to take up the passages or problems that have most frustrated and
puzzled them in their reading. Such collaborations to help students productively
engage in the process of making sense of a text (with strategically timed teacher
assistance and interventions to articulate principles), are extraordinarily productive
for most literature classrooms, and crucial for classroom communities of readers
where students exhibit varying degrees of competence and confidence as readers
of challenging texts.
Thoughtfully orchestrated workshops can accomplish a great deal, not only
yielding a richer reading of whatever text is under interrogation, but fostering the
development of the dispositions and intellectual traits that characterize all strong
readers. Students in collaborative groups, assigned to talk about and try to resolve
the problems and difficulties they are encountering in their reading are likely to
discover the power of their questions and confusions in contributing to an emerging
understanding of a difficult text. Moreover, by focusing on their own questions and
problems they will also be acquiring the crucial habit of metacognition — of thinking
about their own thinking and monitoring the state of their emerging understanding,
at the same time that they are discovering and practicing discursive strategies for
addressing refractory and frustrating problems in constructing meanings.
The approach to literature instruction that I have briefly described here seems
to me quite consistent with the principles and goals articulated by Rabinowitz
and Bancroft, though my pedagogy may appear to focus more than theirs does on
processes and on traits of character and mind that are more widely applicable than
the specific literary knowledge they would emphasize through their instruction.
But I think we share a similar educational aim and subscribe to the same crucial
pedagogical principle to guide our teaching practice in literature and rescue
literary study from the triviality and informational orientation that characterizes a
pedagogy designed for assessment rather than for learning. That shared principle
holds that instruction must be directed as much to the development of students as
competent, flexible readers who understand literary reading both as an experience
and as a process, as it is to ensuring that students acquire a rich and well-informed
understanding of whatever texts their teachers and their classmates are assisting
them in learning.

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Literary Competence and the Experience of Literature 47

Works Cited
Blau, Sheridan. “Fostering Authentic Learning in the Literature Classroom.”
Engaging American Novels. Eds. Joseph Milner and Carol Pope. Urbana:
NCTE, 2011. 3–17. Print.

——. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers. Portsmouth
NH: Heinemann, 2003. Print.

Bruns, Cristina. “Why Literature?” The Value of Literary Reading and What it
Means for Teaching. NY: Continuum Books, 2011. Print.

Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP,

1957. Print.

——. “Levels of Meaning in Literature.” Kenyon Review, (1950): 247–62. Print.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1987. Print.

Marshall, James. Patterns of Discourse in Classroom Discussions of Literature.

(Report no. 2.9). Albany, NY: The Center for the Learning and Teaching of
Literature, 1989. Print.

Rabinowitz, Peter. “’A Thousand Times and Never Like’: Re-reading for Class.” Co-
Authors Peter Rabinowitz & Michael Smith, Authorizing Readers: Resistance
and Respect in the Teaching of Literature. New York: Teachers College Press.
1998. Print.

Scholes, Robert. “Mission Impossible.” English Journal, 88 (1999): 28–35. Print.

Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Apology for Poetry.” The Longman Anthology of British
Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1B. Eds. Constance Jordan and Clare Carroll. NY:
Longman, 2003. 967–1001. Print.

Zancanella, Don, “Teachers Reading/Readers Teaching: Five Teachers’ Personal

Approaches to Literature and their Teaching of Literature.” Research in the
Teaching of English, 25 (1991): 5–33. Print.

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