I am an teacher of English Language Arts (ELA). ELA, according to the Common Core Standards, is the teaching of literature, informational texts, writing, language, listening, and speaking with the expressed purpose of "making sure that all students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school." The word "literacy" is used 97 times in the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. However, the document does not define literacy rather it uses literacy as an adjective -- literacy skills, literacy components, and literacy development. The word "literacy" is most often used as "literacy in" as in literacy in History or Science.
Assuming that teachers working in any of the forty-five states that have adopted the Common Core Standards will need to "use" the Standards to create curriculum in order to keep their jobs, the questions remain, and are apparently open to interpretation according to the standards, what is literacy and how do we teach it? While we know that a "particular standard was included...only when the best available evidence indicated that its mastery was essential for college and career readiness in a twenty-first century, globally competitive society," we do not know from what particular theoretical framework the authors were working. First, I will say that I agree that it seems appropriate for us to want students to be able to participate in a global society. And, I can get behind the idea that we want students graduating from high school ready for a career and.or college. Nevertheless, the literacy practices we teach and test have implications for the sort of thinking and acting our students will do in this globally competitive society. What will we read and how will we read it with this in mind?
We are at a historical juncture with the new standards to confront the failure of previous reform measures that sought to quantify learning and achieved, essentially, an accumulation of skills and knowledge without the sorts of understanding or thinking that students need to participate in a global society.
The National Endowment for the Art's 2004 publication makes a causal link between literary reading and not only the health of individuals ("focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible," p. vii) but the well being of the nation ("as more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent-minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose" p. vii). The Standards seem aligned to this. Part of being career and college ready for a global society means students " actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experiences, and broadens worldviews" (3).I will argue for a literary education for these reasons. Literature when read with certain literacy practices does enlarge experience and broaden worldviews, but I will also argue that was is missing here is the word "understanding," for what is knowledge without understanding and how can one act intelligently without understanding?
One way ELA has been conceived is through the framework of cultural heritage, which sees the English curriculum as bringing students to an appreciation of the finest works of literature. According to Misson and Morgan, this "model encourages readers to yield to all that valued texts offer...readers who give themselves attentively, submissively, to such aesthetically charged works ...become discriminating, subtle readers..." (4). The problem is that this can be seen as conservative and failing to engage with the political agenda of texts and "the ways in which readers are positioned to accede to the ideologies they offer" (4). Another framework is cultural analysis which seeks a critical understanding of the culture within which texts are produced, which encourages readers to "resist the seductions of texts that offer various kinds of gratification, including aesthetic,"' and these readers become discriminating as well but in a different way because the literacy practice of cultural analysis fails to "satisfactorily deal with the aesthetic dimension of texts" or the affect a literary experience brings. Both of these frameworks have implications for the selection of texts for curriculum, the readers' literacy practice, and, therefore, the sort of experiences students have in school. To read one way or another limits the experience and world views that literature offers. In other words, reading habits shape understanding and thinking. Misson and Morgan, suggest a different sort of literacy practice; they see that the "aesthetic and the socially critical are not opposed to one another but, rather, are necessary, complementary components of a rich literacy practice, one that can lay claim legitimately to benefiting both individual readers and writers and the society to which they graduate from English classrooms" (4).
Critical pedagogy is a strand of cultural studies that sees the classroom as a site for not only literacy skills but also political awareness and countering hegemony. Misson and Morgon write that "students are taught how to critique the very bases of knowledge offered to them in the 'commonsense' texts of their culture and schools. And that the 'voices' of marginalised minorities are to be heeded and validated" (13). Regarding cultural heritage, critical pedagogues see traditional literature as serving to create a bourgeois body/subject and is skeptical of interpreting a text. Giroux writes, "How we read or define a canonical work may not be as important as challenging the overall function and social uses the notion of the canon has served" (1992 96).
I think a case can be made that the sort of literacy practice the Common Core is going for is "close reading" or "New Critical reading" or "practical criticism" (Books, 1949; Ransom, 1941; Richards, 1929). In the introduction, we can find this: "Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature" and "read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text." The techniques for close reading inevitably produce certain kinds of reading and value certain kinds of meaning and thus certain kinds of readers and thinkers. Misson and Morgan suggest, by citing Terry Eagleton, that such reading practices are a "recipe for political inertia" (Literary Theory Eagleton 1983) because " they encouraged the illusion that all a reader needed to do was focus on the words on the page rather than on the contexts that produced and surrounded them.
February 18, 2013
February 17, 2013
Narrative Inquiry
Schaafsma and Vinz write, "The beauty of a good narrative -- it doesn't over tell; it doesn't preach; it doesn't lecture; it doesn't explain."
In narrative research, then, the reader is "trusted to do some of the work with the narrator/researcher as guide," and because I see teaching in a similar way -- students should be trusted to do the work with the teacher -- narrative research seems most appropriate for my dissertation. But more importantly, while I am an English teacher, I am foremost a teacher of/with students, human beings, and so when it comes considering what is worth researching and writing about, the answer has to be, as Schaafsma and Vinz say, people. So then because I am a teacher of students in the discipline of English, then it is logical and necessary that I use narrative inquiry to talk about the narrative of our lives: "...narrative shapes our experiences and portrays experiences simultaneously."
Schaafsma and Vinz (2011) tell us that narrative inquiry matters because “it compels us to care about people’s lives in all their complexity and often moves us to action (p. 1). In educational inquiry, research should inform action, so what must emerge on the page is willingness for the author and participants to “grapple with issues of responsibility, power, relations, and ethics as it evidences the importance of learning with others (p. 8). In order to learn with others, I see now that I need multiple voices. And in this, I imagine the voices of legislators, school administrators, teachers, parents and genocide survivors all grappling with issues of responsibility, power, relations and ethics. I see the grappling as a unifying thread in the stories. However, I also see the grappling as a sign of what Schaafsma and Vinz refer to as “first told stories.” When a story is told for the first time, there are gaps and fissures wherein rests “deeper stories, glimpses into people’s beliefs, assumptions, and experiences” (p. 50). To me, this means that I must return for a “re-telling” or another story that goes deeper into one of those fissures; in fact, it is in the re-telling and the re-living of stories that inquiry begins.
Three other books that helped evolve my orientation to narrative inquiry are Danling Fu’s “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995), Greg Michie’s Holler of you Hear Me : The Education of a Teacher and His Students (2009) and Arlene Elowe MacLeod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, The New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991). I realize that the subjects of these two texts are significantly different; however, I think this speaks to the evolution of my orientation to inquiry. I am beginning to read more into how texts are constructed rather than just engaging in the text's content. I see the table of contents as a strategy for telling a story and how that strategy, although deliberate, will always have gaps and fissures that warrant future work.
Danling Fu’s work in “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995) combines narrative and case study. She situates herself in the story in her introduction by telling the reader about her own experience in learning English. Her book is organized with a chapter that is a family story, and then each subsequent chapter goes deeper into the stories of three children in this family. Within each chapter, Fu takes on the role as a research and a practitioner in some instances to draw upon her story as an observer, the teacher’s story, and then the story of the participant. Vinz (2011) expresses concern with characterization in narrative inquiry wondering if the author has the right to tell a story for a “character”: “Should he be speaking for himself? At what point to researchers become guilty of sensationalism or romanticism, especially when they write about populations historically stereotyped by the media and the academy” (p. 109)? By giving her characters a strong voice in her work, Fu avoids such sensationalism. It is clear to the reader that although Fu has a personal stake in her work she recognizes that the personal and social are not binaries but “permeable membranes” that influence and become part of the other (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2005, p. 64). The story does not belong to any one participant in Fu’s book; the stories complement one another bring both light and complexity to second language acquisition.
Michie’s work, while incorporating student narrative set off in complementary yet bold-faced font, is more about his experience than that of his students. Unlike Fu’s work where she is almost re-telling her story through the voices of a younger generation of English Language Learners, Michie is retelling his story is his own words. His story is generalizable to his readers while Fu’s story is generalizable to her participants with student voices woven into the narrative rather that set apart in another section. I think what I see is that there is an intimacy of the subject in Fu’s and an intimacy with the narrator in Michie’s work.
Macleod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991) actually seems closest to the work that I hope to do. This is a bit closer to an ethnographic study only because she is an outsider going into a setting for research where she conducts multiple case studies. Macleod recognizes a phenomenon, lower-middle –class women in Cairo who had not previously veiled adopt the higab. Macleod explores the subculture in which the phenomenon occurs by not only listening to stories but by observing behaviors and investigating conflicting ideologies. Macleod knows that what her participants say is only one part of the story; thus, in collecting many different stories, Macleod is able to unveil the tensions that exposed this phenomenon as an “accommodating protest” or a way of redistricting power. While I include this text here as an example of inquiry, I also consider this concept of “accommodating protest” to be fascinating and wonder if teacher accommodate policy in some form or another.
I wish to study the human experience and to illuminate human actions through the study of experience. The experiences reveal complexity. As a teacher of (more often with) teachers, I see the struggle for answers, for comfort, for knowing the “best way” of achieving results or capturing the attention of students. Teachers seem fearful of doubt or swimming in the tension with their students. I think this is explored a great deal in social justice education, but I think this will be very valuable as I begin to explore how teacher accommodate policy mandates, particularly how teacher have accepted or rejected the responsibility to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides. And, I think stories are a place for me to not only collect these experiences and tensions but where teacher can ultimately go to enter into places of crises with their students, stories of survival, stories of grief, stories of disgust, and stories of regret. In the gaps and fissures of stories, we can ask questions together.
References
Auron, Y. (2005). The pain of knowledge: Holocaust and genocide issues in education. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.
Fu, D. (1995). My trouble is my English: Asian students and the American dream. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
Macleod, A. E. (1991). Accommodating protest: working women, the new veiling, and change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press.
Michie, G. (2009). Holler if you hear me: the education of a teacher and his students (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College.
Mikaelsen, B. (2004). Tree Girl . New York: HarperTempest.
Schaafsma, D. & Vinz, R. (2011). Narrative inquiry: approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College.
Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Book.
Ung, L. (2000). First they killed my father: a daughter of Cambodia remembers. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers.
In narrative research, then, the reader is "trusted to do some of the work with the narrator/researcher as guide," and because I see teaching in a similar way -- students should be trusted to do the work with the teacher -- narrative research seems most appropriate for my dissertation. But more importantly, while I am an English teacher, I am foremost a teacher of/with students, human beings, and so when it comes considering what is worth researching and writing about, the answer has to be, as Schaafsma and Vinz say, people. So then because I am a teacher of students in the discipline of English, then it is logical and necessary that I use narrative inquiry to talk about the narrative of our lives: "...narrative shapes our experiences and portrays experiences simultaneously."
Schaafsma and Vinz (2011) tell us that narrative inquiry matters because “it compels us to care about people’s lives in all their complexity and often moves us to action (p. 1). In educational inquiry, research should inform action, so what must emerge on the page is willingness for the author and participants to “grapple with issues of responsibility, power, relations, and ethics as it evidences the importance of learning with others (p. 8). In order to learn with others, I see now that I need multiple voices. And in this, I imagine the voices of legislators, school administrators, teachers, parents and genocide survivors all grappling with issues of responsibility, power, relations and ethics. I see the grappling as a unifying thread in the stories. However, I also see the grappling as a sign of what Schaafsma and Vinz refer to as “first told stories.” When a story is told for the first time, there are gaps and fissures wherein rests “deeper stories, glimpses into people’s beliefs, assumptions, and experiences” (p. 50). To me, this means that I must return for a “re-telling” or another story that goes deeper into one of those fissures; in fact, it is in the re-telling and the re-living of stories that inquiry begins.
Three other books that helped evolve my orientation to narrative inquiry are Danling Fu’s “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995), Greg Michie’s Holler of you Hear Me : The Education of a Teacher and His Students (2009) and Arlene Elowe MacLeod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, The New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991). I realize that the subjects of these two texts are significantly different; however, I think this speaks to the evolution of my orientation to inquiry. I am beginning to read more into how texts are constructed rather than just engaging in the text's content. I see the table of contents as a strategy for telling a story and how that strategy, although deliberate, will always have gaps and fissures that warrant future work.
Danling Fu’s work in “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995) combines narrative and case study. She situates herself in the story in her introduction by telling the reader about her own experience in learning English. Her book is organized with a chapter that is a family story, and then each subsequent chapter goes deeper into the stories of three children in this family. Within each chapter, Fu takes on the role as a research and a practitioner in some instances to draw upon her story as an observer, the teacher’s story, and then the story of the participant. Vinz (2011) expresses concern with characterization in narrative inquiry wondering if the author has the right to tell a story for a “character”: “Should he be speaking for himself? At what point to researchers become guilty of sensationalism or romanticism, especially when they write about populations historically stereotyped by the media and the academy” (p. 109)? By giving her characters a strong voice in her work, Fu avoids such sensationalism. It is clear to the reader that although Fu has a personal stake in her work she recognizes that the personal and social are not binaries but “permeable membranes” that influence and become part of the other (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2005, p. 64). The story does not belong to any one participant in Fu’s book; the stories complement one another bring both light and complexity to second language acquisition.
Michie’s work, while incorporating student narrative set off in complementary yet bold-faced font, is more about his experience than that of his students. Unlike Fu’s work where she is almost re-telling her story through the voices of a younger generation of English Language Learners, Michie is retelling his story is his own words. His story is generalizable to his readers while Fu’s story is generalizable to her participants with student voices woven into the narrative rather that set apart in another section. I think what I see is that there is an intimacy of the subject in Fu’s and an intimacy with the narrator in Michie’s work.
Macleod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991) actually seems closest to the work that I hope to do. This is a bit closer to an ethnographic study only because she is an outsider going into a setting for research where she conducts multiple case studies. Macleod recognizes a phenomenon, lower-middle –class women in Cairo who had not previously veiled adopt the higab. Macleod explores the subculture in which the phenomenon occurs by not only listening to stories but by observing behaviors and investigating conflicting ideologies. Macleod knows that what her participants say is only one part of the story; thus, in collecting many different stories, Macleod is able to unveil the tensions that exposed this phenomenon as an “accommodating protest” or a way of redistricting power. While I include this text here as an example of inquiry, I also consider this concept of “accommodating protest” to be fascinating and wonder if teacher accommodate policy in some form or another.
I wish to study the human experience and to illuminate human actions through the study of experience. The experiences reveal complexity. As a teacher of (more often with) teachers, I see the struggle for answers, for comfort, for knowing the “best way” of achieving results or capturing the attention of students. Teachers seem fearful of doubt or swimming in the tension with their students. I think this is explored a great deal in social justice education, but I think this will be very valuable as I begin to explore how teacher accommodate policy mandates, particularly how teacher have accepted or rejected the responsibility to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides. And, I think stories are a place for me to not only collect these experiences and tensions but where teacher can ultimately go to enter into places of crises with their students, stories of survival, stories of grief, stories of disgust, and stories of regret. In the gaps and fissures of stories, we can ask questions together.
References
Auron, Y. (2005). The pain of knowledge: Holocaust and genocide issues in education. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.
Fu, D. (1995). My trouble is my English: Asian students and the American dream. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
Macleod, A. E. (1991). Accommodating protest: working women, the new veiling, and change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press.
Michie, G. (2009). Holler if you hear me: the education of a teacher and his students (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College.
Mikaelsen, B. (2004). Tree Girl . New York: HarperTempest.
Schaafsma, D. & Vinz, R. (2011). Narrative inquiry: approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College.
Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Book.
Ung, L. (2000). First they killed my father: a daughter of Cambodia remembers. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers.
February 4, 2013
Nussbaum: Poetic Justice/ Novels and the Public
Notes from Nussbaum:
Literature and its limitations
Nussbaum
Wayne booth- the company we keep. An ethics of fiction--like yagelski's writing as a way of being in public life--the act of reading and assessing what one read is ethically valuable precisely because it is constructed in a manner that demands both immersion and critical conversation, comparison of what one has read with one's own unfolding experience and with the responses and arguments of other readers
9 - if we think of reading in this way, as combining one's own absorbed imagining with periods of more detached (and interactive) critical scrutiny, we can already begin to see why we might find in it am activity well suited to public reasoning in a democratic society
8 - the novel constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning that is context -specific without being relativistic, in which we get to potentially inversely e concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through imagination
Novels embrace the ordinary -- that which is common and close at hand but which is often, in its significant strangeness, the object of profound ignorance and emotional refusal 10
Empathy and compassion as highly relevant to ciizenship
10-Booth shows that many popular works entice the reader
The lives of the insignificant would not be I biography or history
32- narrative features if the novel that it shares with other genres
1. Commitment to the separateness of persons and to the irreducible quality to quantity
2. It's sense that what happens to individuals in the world has enormous importance
3. It's commitment to describe the events of life not from an external perspective of detachment but from within as invested with the complex significances with which human beings invest their own lives
Novel is more opposed than other genres to the reductive economic way if seeing the world, more committed to qualitative distinctions 32
The novel's capacity to give pleasure -35-- it binds us to the characters because it causes us to take pleasure in their company
Fancy- fiction-making imagination, the ability to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another -- things look like other things or the other things are seen in the immediate things
52- addressing the reader as a friend and fellow agent, though in a different sphere if life, the authorial voice turns readers' sympathetic wonder at the fates of the characters back on themselves, reminding them that they too are on the way to death, that they too have but this one chance to see in the fire the shapes of fancy and thee prospects they suggest for the improvement if human life... It's claim is that the literary imagination is an essential part of both the theory and the practice of citizenship
To argue fur literary education in the public realm we must make some defense if the emotions and their contributions to the public rationality
What are emotions?
What is reason and does it exclude emotive elements such as sympathy and gratitude
Are emotions if a certain sort essential elements in a good decision, rational judgement
Are emotions in a normative sense irrational and thus inappropriate as guides in public deliberation? And so what us the public role if literature?
4 objections
1. Emotions are blind forces that have nothing to do with reasoning lacking the stability and solidity of the wise person . Stoics urged their pupils to pay attention to literature only from a viewpoint of secure critical detachment without thought
-emotions are ways of perceiving -a belief might be false but rational if formed on good evidence; and it may be true but irrational but in no case will emotions be irrational in the sense if bring totally cut off from cognition and judgement
2. Emotions as closely linked to judgments and beliefs about the worth of external objects
-
3. Emotions focus on the person's actual ties or attachments, especially to concrete objects or people close youth self - binding the moral imagination to the self and not even handed not getting distant lives or unseen sufferings so novels would be encouraging a self centered and unequal firm if attention to the suffering if other humans
4. Emotions are too much concerned with particulars and not sufficiently with larger social units such as classes 59.. Making novels useful only in the private domain
-70-while the novel emphasizes the mutual interdependence of persons, showing the world as one in which we are all implicated in one another' s good and ill, it also insists on respecting the separate life of each person, and on seeing the person as a separate center of experience
- 70 mass movements in the novel fare badly because they neglect the separate agency if their members, their privacy, and their qualitative differences
There is no reason to dismiss emotions because they can go wrong
Aristotle argued that compassion or pity requires the belief that another person is suffering in a serious way through no fault if their own and to feel thus one must believe that their own possibilities are similar to those if the sufferer
Readers have both empathy with the plights if the characters experiencing what happens to them from as if from their pov and pity or compassion which goes beyond empathy; involves spectatorial judgment that the characters misfortunes are indeed serious and gave arisen through no fault if their own -- necessary for social rationality
Rousseau and Emile
Utilitarian - each human being should count as one and none as more than one
Numerical analysis comforts and distances
Intellect without emotion is value- blind; it lacks the sense if the meaning and worth of a person's death that the judgements internal to emotions would have supplied -68
69- a certain degree of detachment from the immediate - which calculations may help to district in some people - can enable us to sort out our beliefs and intuitions better and thus to get a more refined sense if what our emotion actually are, and which among them us must reliable
Aristotle insists that removing the family, rather than ensuring impartial and equal concerns for all citizens, will ensure that nobody cares strongly about anything
80- the poet is no whimsical creature , but the person best equipped to "bestow in every object or quality its fit proportion" duly weighing the claims I'd a diverse population , with its gaze fixed on norms of fairness and in history" both of which are always at risk in democracy
Adam Smith - judicious spectators
84- what we ate after is not just a view of moral education that makes sense of our own personal experience, but one that we can defend to others and support along with others with whim we wish to live in community
92- when one idea manage for whatever reason to take up to the individual the literary attitude of sympathetic imagining, the dehumanizing portrayal is unsustainable at least for a time
Literary understanding ... Promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of the stereotypes that support group hatred 92
97- the reader perceives the character in a very different way from the way of the people around him or her ; those around the character cannot permit themselves to imagine for a moment what it might be like to be him it her but the reader dies imagine and ya fully aware all along that he is neither the same nor a monster meaning the reader is a judicious spectator aware in a way the characters are not of the stigmatizing effect if societal prejudice and if the helplessness it creates ...enlisting readers as partisans of equality by making it easy to see the character as Simons they or one if their friends might be/99
As symmetry of positions must be considered in life and do literature is good practice for such deliberation but I would argue because if the representation of discourses
111-Is nussbaum saying that posner's argument is literary ?
120- intimate and impartial, loving without bias, thinking of and for the whole rather than as a partisan if some particular group or faction, comprehending in fancy the richness and complexity of each citizen's inner world, the literary judge ... sees in the blades if grass the equal dignity if all citizens -- and more mysterious images, too, of erotic longing and personal liberty
Sent from my iPhone
Reading literature, as I discuss it in my dissertation, is an intervention of sorts; however, I do not necessarily see it as a revolutionary intervention. Reading literature is a low-risk act where each person counts as another -- something democratic and antihierarchical. How one person, out of a mass of others, may become suddenly vivid through an accident of aquaintance or perception (George Herbert Mead, pragmatist) is an essential understanding for reading literature and for being a citizen. If rational argument is essential to democratic, social participation and if we are to say that literature supports such rational argument and ultimately participation in public discourse, how is story-telling and literary imagining essential in rational arguments? How does literature work to achieve a social intervention?
Nussbaum wants to compare aspects of law and literature. She claims that legal discourse and literary discourse rely upon an "imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities." Specifically, Nussbaum wants to consider economistic issues that attempt to make human being and their actions measurable (Cintron). Nussbaum resists such thinking, thinking in terms of a quantifiable imaginary, to emphasize autonomy and the "irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person's experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home -- hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism" (Gorman). It seems that Nussbaum's intent is not to "mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing...human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview." This position supports my own thesis,which is that literature can help students to get inside this worldview, a view of the darker side of modernity and thus the potential of literature in public life -- a public life where we make decisions that affect all our citizens. This might be the Atticus Finch argument to "walk in someone else's shoes."
Nussbaum claims that the argument works on us by appealing to our sympathy, the ability to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others. No doubt many readers encountering Tree Girl for the first time have heard a talking wound. Nussbaum suggests that such insight is morally valuable with the potential to modify our moral understanding. Empathetic imagining cultivated in the literary experience is another way of attending to life's problems. "Economic utilitarianism" is an aspect in need of empathetic imagining...Nussbaum wants a political economy that does not reduce people to numbers, but can literature accomplish this? She suggest that leaders or "Guardians" must read literature in order to develop the necessary sympathy . Such an argument treads along the lines of cultural imperialism, such that there would be a common fund of knowledge to create a unified citizenry. By focusing, then, on literature for the purpose of generating sympathy for the marginalized, but what might be the political uses, and then once we ask for political use, we invite rhetoricality. Hesford argues that no genre is immune to spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.
Narratives produce a sort of enlightenment as they draw us into sympathetic involvement with the characters as individuals, perhaps imagining what it might be like to be or be with these imaginary individuals. This is not to say that informational texts, non-literary texts do not produce a narrative In fact the press can elicit our sympathy. Such stories can inspire and lead readers into the public discourse and right action; nevertheless, the sympathy- eliciting function of narrative can lead readers into the "wrong" direction. If we consider Hesford's Spectacular Rhetorics, we might see how such narratives enact a spectacle, an exploitation of victims, for example, to provoke sympathy. And then, how productive is sympathy that mirrors the Western values, the values of the target audience. Therefore, while Nussbaum encourages sympathy-based considerations, such a claim overlooks non-sympathy-based considerations.
Nussbaum writes: "For the Greeks of the fifth and early fourth centuries b.c., there were not two separate sets of questions in the area of human choice and action, aesthetic questions and moral-philosophical questions, to be studied and written about by mutually detached colleagues in different departments. Instead, dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical inquiry in ethics were both typically...seen as ways of pursuing a single and general question: namely, how human beings should live." Nussbaum wants literature to be useful -- to ask What does all this mean for human life? Of course, these questions are not terribly welcome in our discipline. Tension between argument and narrative -- philosophy and literary. -- as though one sort of understanding blocks out another while, perhaps, achieving the same end (eudaimonia). Nussbaum suggests that both philosophy and literature need each other. Emotions are not opposed to reason. "Moreover, Nussbaum argues, there are some kinds of knowledge that are accessible to us only when we experience certain eotions such as love. There is a reciprocal relationship between love and knowledge: we love people because of what we know about them, to be sure, but we also come to know them more fully because we love them" (Jacobs). Just as I mention above, Jacobs notes that Nussbaum does not consider what would happen if "one's personal telos as 'holiness' or 'righteousness" rather than goodness." Jacobs further argues that , according to Shelley, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and that "of the poets' legistlative role were to be publicly recognized and accepted, then poets would be in the position of having to acknowledge their responsibility and accountability to those whose behalf they are legislating. But such an acknowledgement would be utterly at odds with the Romantic belief in the autonomy (which is to say the unaccountability to anything but itself) but the poetic imagination."
Literature and its limitations
Nussbaum
Wayne booth- the company we keep. An ethics of fiction--like yagelski's writing as a way of being in public life--the act of reading and assessing what one read is ethically valuable precisely because it is constructed in a manner that demands both immersion and critical conversation, comparison of what one has read with one's own unfolding experience and with the responses and arguments of other readers
9 - if we think of reading in this way, as combining one's own absorbed imagining with periods of more detached (and interactive) critical scrutiny, we can already begin to see why we might find in it am activity well suited to public reasoning in a democratic society
8 - the novel constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning that is context -specific without being relativistic, in which we get to potentially inversely e concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through imagination
Novels embrace the ordinary -- that which is common and close at hand but which is often, in its significant strangeness, the object of profound ignorance and emotional refusal 10
Empathy and compassion as highly relevant to ciizenship
10-Booth shows that many popular works entice the reader
The lives of the insignificant would not be I biography or history
32- narrative features if the novel that it shares with other genres
1. Commitment to the separateness of persons and to the irreducible quality to quantity
2. It's sense that what happens to individuals in the world has enormous importance
3. It's commitment to describe the events of life not from an external perspective of detachment but from within as invested with the complex significances with which human beings invest their own lives
Novel is more opposed than other genres to the reductive economic way if seeing the world, more committed to qualitative distinctions 32
The novel's capacity to give pleasure -35-- it binds us to the characters because it causes us to take pleasure in their company
Fancy- fiction-making imagination, the ability to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another -- things look like other things or the other things are seen in the immediate things
52- addressing the reader as a friend and fellow agent, though in a different sphere if life, the authorial voice turns readers' sympathetic wonder at the fates of the characters back on themselves, reminding them that they too are on the way to death, that they too have but this one chance to see in the fire the shapes of fancy and thee prospects they suggest for the improvement if human life... It's claim is that the literary imagination is an essential part of both the theory and the practice of citizenship
To argue fur literary education in the public realm we must make some defense if the emotions and their contributions to the public rationality
What are emotions?
What is reason and does it exclude emotive elements such as sympathy and gratitude
Are emotions if a certain sort essential elements in a good decision, rational judgement
Are emotions in a normative sense irrational and thus inappropriate as guides in public deliberation? And so what us the public role if literature?
4 objections
1. Emotions are blind forces that have nothing to do with reasoning lacking the stability and solidity of the wise person . Stoics urged their pupils to pay attention to literature only from a viewpoint of secure critical detachment without thought
-emotions are ways of perceiving -a belief might be false but rational if formed on good evidence; and it may be true but irrational but in no case will emotions be irrational in the sense if bring totally cut off from cognition and judgement
2. Emotions as closely linked to judgments and beliefs about the worth of external objects
-
3. Emotions focus on the person's actual ties or attachments, especially to concrete objects or people close youth self - binding the moral imagination to the self and not even handed not getting distant lives or unseen sufferings so novels would be encouraging a self centered and unequal firm if attention to the suffering if other humans
4. Emotions are too much concerned with particulars and not sufficiently with larger social units such as classes 59.. Making novels useful only in the private domain
-70-while the novel emphasizes the mutual interdependence of persons, showing the world as one in which we are all implicated in one another' s good and ill, it also insists on respecting the separate life of each person, and on seeing the person as a separate center of experience
- 70 mass movements in the novel fare badly because they neglect the separate agency if their members, their privacy, and their qualitative differences
There is no reason to dismiss emotions because they can go wrong
Aristotle argued that compassion or pity requires the belief that another person is suffering in a serious way through no fault if their own and to feel thus one must believe that their own possibilities are similar to those if the sufferer
Readers have both empathy with the plights if the characters experiencing what happens to them from as if from their pov and pity or compassion which goes beyond empathy; involves spectatorial judgment that the characters misfortunes are indeed serious and gave arisen through no fault if their own -- necessary for social rationality
Rousseau and Emile
Utilitarian - each human being should count as one and none as more than one
Numerical analysis comforts and distances
Intellect without emotion is value- blind; it lacks the sense if the meaning and worth of a person's death that the judgements internal to emotions would have supplied -68
69- a certain degree of detachment from the immediate - which calculations may help to district in some people - can enable us to sort out our beliefs and intuitions better and thus to get a more refined sense if what our emotion actually are, and which among them us must reliable
Aristotle insists that removing the family, rather than ensuring impartial and equal concerns for all citizens, will ensure that nobody cares strongly about anything
80- the poet is no whimsical creature , but the person best equipped to "bestow in every object or quality its fit proportion" duly weighing the claims I'd a diverse population , with its gaze fixed on norms of fairness and in history" both of which are always at risk in democracy
Adam Smith - judicious spectators
84- what we ate after is not just a view of moral education that makes sense of our own personal experience, but one that we can defend to others and support along with others with whim we wish to live in community
92- when one idea manage for whatever reason to take up to the individual the literary attitude of sympathetic imagining, the dehumanizing portrayal is unsustainable at least for a time
Literary understanding ... Promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of the stereotypes that support group hatred 92
97- the reader perceives the character in a very different way from the way of the people around him or her ; those around the character cannot permit themselves to imagine for a moment what it might be like to be him it her but the reader dies imagine and ya fully aware all along that he is neither the same nor a monster meaning the reader is a judicious spectator aware in a way the characters are not of the stigmatizing effect if societal prejudice and if the helplessness it creates ...enlisting readers as partisans of equality by making it easy to see the character as Simons they or one if their friends might be/99
As symmetry of positions must be considered in life and do literature is good practice for such deliberation but I would argue because if the representation of discourses
111-Is nussbaum saying that posner's argument is literary ?
120- intimate and impartial, loving without bias, thinking of and for the whole rather than as a partisan if some particular group or faction, comprehending in fancy the richness and complexity of each citizen's inner world, the literary judge ... sees in the blades if grass the equal dignity if all citizens -- and more mysterious images, too, of erotic longing and personal liberty
Sent from my iPhone
Reading literature, as I discuss it in my dissertation, is an intervention of sorts; however, I do not necessarily see it as a revolutionary intervention. Reading literature is a low-risk act where each person counts as another -- something democratic and antihierarchical. How one person, out of a mass of others, may become suddenly vivid through an accident of aquaintance or perception (George Herbert Mead, pragmatist) is an essential understanding for reading literature and for being a citizen. If rational argument is essential to democratic, social participation and if we are to say that literature supports such rational argument and ultimately participation in public discourse, how is story-telling and literary imagining essential in rational arguments? How does literature work to achieve a social intervention?
Nussbaum wants to compare aspects of law and literature. She claims that legal discourse and literary discourse rely upon an "imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities." Specifically, Nussbaum wants to consider economistic issues that attempt to make human being and their actions measurable (Cintron). Nussbaum resists such thinking, thinking in terms of a quantifiable imaginary, to emphasize autonomy and the "irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person's experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home -- hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism" (Gorman). It seems that Nussbaum's intent is not to "mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing...human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview." This position supports my own thesis,which is that literature can help students to get inside this worldview, a view of the darker side of modernity and thus the potential of literature in public life -- a public life where we make decisions that affect all our citizens. This might be the Atticus Finch argument to "walk in someone else's shoes."
Nussbaum claims that the argument works on us by appealing to our sympathy, the ability to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others. No doubt many readers encountering Tree Girl for the first time have heard a talking wound. Nussbaum suggests that such insight is morally valuable with the potential to modify our moral understanding. Empathetic imagining cultivated in the literary experience is another way of attending to life's problems. "Economic utilitarianism" is an aspect in need of empathetic imagining...Nussbaum wants a political economy that does not reduce people to numbers, but can literature accomplish this? She suggest that leaders or "Guardians" must read literature in order to develop the necessary sympathy . Such an argument treads along the lines of cultural imperialism, such that there would be a common fund of knowledge to create a unified citizenry. By focusing, then, on literature for the purpose of generating sympathy for the marginalized, but what might be the political uses, and then once we ask for political use, we invite rhetoricality. Hesford argues that no genre is immune to spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.
Narratives produce a sort of enlightenment as they draw us into sympathetic involvement with the characters as individuals, perhaps imagining what it might be like to be or be with these imaginary individuals. This is not to say that informational texts, non-literary texts do not produce a narrative In fact the press can elicit our sympathy. Such stories can inspire and lead readers into the public discourse and right action; nevertheless, the sympathy- eliciting function of narrative can lead readers into the "wrong" direction. If we consider Hesford's Spectacular Rhetorics, we might see how such narratives enact a spectacle, an exploitation of victims, for example, to provoke sympathy. And then, how productive is sympathy that mirrors the Western values, the values of the target audience. Therefore, while Nussbaum encourages sympathy-based considerations, such a claim overlooks non-sympathy-based considerations.
Nussbaum writes: "For the Greeks of the fifth and early fourth centuries b.c., there were not two separate sets of questions in the area of human choice and action, aesthetic questions and moral-philosophical questions, to be studied and written about by mutually detached colleagues in different departments. Instead, dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical inquiry in ethics were both typically...seen as ways of pursuing a single and general question: namely, how human beings should live." Nussbaum wants literature to be useful -- to ask What does all this mean for human life? Of course, these questions are not terribly welcome in our discipline. Tension between argument and narrative -- philosophy and literary. -- as though one sort of understanding blocks out another while, perhaps, achieving the same end (eudaimonia). Nussbaum suggests that both philosophy and literature need each other. Emotions are not opposed to reason. "Moreover, Nussbaum argues, there are some kinds of knowledge that are accessible to us only when we experience certain eotions such as love. There is a reciprocal relationship between love and knowledge: we love people because of what we know about them, to be sure, but we also come to know them more fully because we love them" (Jacobs). Just as I mention above, Jacobs notes that Nussbaum does not consider what would happen if "one's personal telos as 'holiness' or 'righteousness" rather than goodness." Jacobs further argues that , according to Shelley, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and that "of the poets' legistlative role were to be publicly recognized and accepted, then poets would be in the position of having to acknowledge their responsibility and accountability to those whose behalf they are legislating. But such an acknowledgement would be utterly at odds with the Romantic belief in the autonomy (which is to say the unaccountability to anything but itself) but the poetic imagination."
February 3, 2013
Gallagher: "The Rise of Fictionality" (Paradoxical Fictionality)
In this article, Gallagher argues for a recovery of discussions about fictionality in the novel.She begins with an analysis of mideighteenth century British narratives to demonstrate how the nature of fictionality changed during this century, which in turn influenced narrative fictionality in Europe and American in the nineteenth century and thus influencing our expectations of novels today.
Gallagher suggests the the novel had to differentiate itself from other genres establishing a unique and paradoxical fictionality. On one hand, the novel tried to hide behind realism making claims about truth offering a sort of ambivalence towards its fictionality. The 18th century novelists "abandoned earlier writers' serious attempts to convince readers that their invented tales were literally true or were at least about actual people"while still concealing "fictionality by locking it inside the confines of the credible" (337).However, what seems important about fictionality is that as a discursive mode readers "developed the ability to tell it apart from both fact and (this is the key) deception" (338). Indeed, fantasy genres such as allegory and fables are easy to identify as fiction, but Gallagher argues that "plausible stories are thus the real test for the progress of fictional sophistication in a culture" (339). In the 18th century, novels that did not contain the obvious fiction of talking animals but rather seemed referential were accused of fraud. Such fictionality was not accepted nor welcome. Allegorical novels with imaginary kingdoms and talking animals may refer to contemporaries; a reader can tell it apart from reality (i.e. not deceptive) yet not clearly set apart from fact as it still alluded to a referent. Is the truth, then, a disguised reflection and thus fictionality,and can we distinguish fictionality from fiction? It seems that Gallagher is wanting to explore the fictionality as features that satisfy some sort of wanting in the readers, a wanting that is specific to modernity.
In the 18th century, Gallagher argues, two things were missing in discussions of the novel: 1) a conceptual category of fiction and 2) believable stories that did not solicit belief (340). In consider how the novel developed an awareness of fictionality as such, Lennard Davis argues that it developed out of the "news-novel matrix" -- a tangled mass of journalism, scandal, and and political and religious controversy. By calling it fiction, some authors avoided libel eventually being enjoyed for itself without reference to "the person satirized" (341). In addition to the fiction alibi, Gallagher points out that fictionality expanded the idea of truth to include verisimilitude. So we see this idea of historical as truth to a sort of simulated experience as truth. Furthermore, fictionality assumes that the novel is about no one in particular with no particular referent yet a "proper name in a believable narrative an an embodied individual in the world." And in doing this -- resisting a particular referent -- readers can "contemplate their own deformity, and endeavor to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame" (342). The fiction writer is no longer a libeler because the "nonreferentiality could be seen as a greater referentiality." Nonetheless, any invention of a person to represent the universal would prove to bee too narrow to cover all the cases; thus, this feature of fictionality is problematic if not paradoxical.
"For the difference between the historian and the poet is not in their presenting accounts that are versified or not versified...' rather, the difference is this: the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history. For poetry tells us rather the universals, history the particulars. "Universals" means what kinds of thing a certain kind of person will say or do in accordance with probability or necessity, which is what poetic composition aims at, tacking on names afterward" (Poetics, ch. 9, 301-2).
Gallagher suggests here that the "novel may be said to have discovered fiction." The use of fictionality is a special way of shaping knowledge through the fabrication of particulars. Writing about something that was probably was not necessarily an indicator of fiction. The question Gallagher asks "what it was about early modernity in the first capitalist nation that propagated not just realist fiction but realist fiction. What is the modernity-fictionality connection?..to explore what it means to read a narrative as credible while thinking it affirms nothing" (346). (I feel like education reform is fictitious in a similar way if we consider what it means to read its dominant narrative as credible when it affirms nothing.)
Considering the position of the reader external to the fiction and capable of speculating on the action, the novel seeks to suspend such disbelief; fictionality is about believability or plausibility rather than reality. Such was modernity in the 18th century and modernity in the 21st century,both with interests in capitalism, development, and anticipation of progress. Consider paper money and credit. We do not live in reality but on plausibility Gallagher writes, "Indeed, almost all the developments we associate with modernity -- from greater religious toleration to specific scientific discovery -- required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit" (347).
Nevertheless, fiction asks for a willing suspension of disbelief, and so reading a novel allows the reader to suspend skepticism and detach from the mental effort of critique or doubt. Fiction absorbs the reader asking for a suspension of disbelief yet not going so far as to believe. The form brings the reader into imaginary experiences presuming interference with volition (348).
Coleridge says of this: "It is laxly said that during sleep we take our dreams for realities, but this is irreconcilable with the nature of sleep, which consists in a suspension of the voluntary and, therefore, of the comparative power. The fact is that we pass no judgment either way: we simply do not judge them to be real, in consequence of which the images act on our minds, as far as they act at all, by their own force as images. Our state while we are dreaming differs from that in which we are in the perusal of a deeply interesting novel in the degree rather than in the kind (1960: 116).
The fictionality of a novel ask for pleasure or a "deep immersion in allusion because {you} are protected from delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief" when you pick up the novel. The enjoyment or the experience is a fictional encounter without a "tangible profit or practical advantage" thus fictionally experiencing. Here is the paradox: "the novel reader opens what she knows is a fiction because it is a fiction and soon finds that enabling knowledge to be the subtlest of the experience's elements. Just as it declares itself, it becomes that which goes without saying" (349).
In considering characters, Gallagher discusses the problematic that the novel encourages naive essentialism: "the reader's involvement in the dominant modern form of fiction has generally been thought to come about through some sort of psychic investment in, or even identification with, the characters" (350). However, as fictionality became more commonly understood, writers also realized that reader identified with characters not because of their realness but because of their fictionality. In other words, "they noticed that the fictional framework established a protected affective enclosure that encouraged risk-free emotional investment. Fictional characters, moreover, were thought to be easier to sympathize or identify with than most real people" (351).
Gallagher discusses the characters' "peculiar affective force" as "generated by the mutual implication of their unreal knowability and their apparent depth, the link between their real nonexistence and the reader's experience of them as deeply and impossibly familiar" (356). Knowing their fictionality makes it easier to surrender and be intimate. The character is what Jeremy Bentham in "A Fragment on Ontology" called an "imaginary nonentity." This is fascinating: "We would not be able to enter represented subjectivity while subliminally understanding that we are, as readers, its actualizers, its conditions of being, the only minds who undergo these experiences" (357).
The fictionality is the ontological contrast. The narratorial mode elucidates this further. First person narrations differentiates the narrator and the implied author whereas third person omniscient narrators "must sustain the illusion of opacity of the characters surrounding them...vehicles for the epistemological uncertainty that modernists were anxious to produce" because of the intimacy between the narrator and the characters. Paradoxically, the representational tactics that make the character seemingly knowable are "peculiarly delimited" because the character is a textual being. The character is also and always partial or incomplete as a fictional construct.
The naming of the character, for Barthe, however, "imports the supplement of personhood, the ideological assumption that the character is everything attributed to it by the text, and everything else that is needed to make up a human being. Where it is not purposely prevented from doing so...the proper name draws together and unifies all the semantic material, and we have...the ideologically suspect pleasure of sensing a person on the other side of the text" (360).
In the end, Gallagher explains how fictionality which seemingly originated in the mid 18th century novel extended into the 19th century and now informs modern readers' anticipations and expectations of a novel's fictionality. She writes: "What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character. On the one hand, we experience an ideal version of self-continuity, graced by enunciative mastery, mobility, and powers of almost instantaneous detachment and attachment. We experience, that is, the elation of a unitary unboundedness. On the other hand, we are also allowed to love and equally idealized immanence, an ability to be, we imagine, without textuality, meaningfulness, or an other excuse for existing" (361).
Gallagher suggests the the novel had to differentiate itself from other genres establishing a unique and paradoxical fictionality. On one hand, the novel tried to hide behind realism making claims about truth offering a sort of ambivalence towards its fictionality. The 18th century novelists "abandoned earlier writers' serious attempts to convince readers that their invented tales were literally true or were at least about actual people"while still concealing "fictionality by locking it inside the confines of the credible" (337).However, what seems important about fictionality is that as a discursive mode readers "developed the ability to tell it apart from both fact and (this is the key) deception" (338). Indeed, fantasy genres such as allegory and fables are easy to identify as fiction, but Gallagher argues that "plausible stories are thus the real test for the progress of fictional sophistication in a culture" (339). In the 18th century, novels that did not contain the obvious fiction of talking animals but rather seemed referential were accused of fraud. Such fictionality was not accepted nor welcome. Allegorical novels with imaginary kingdoms and talking animals may refer to contemporaries; a reader can tell it apart from reality (i.e. not deceptive) yet not clearly set apart from fact as it still alluded to a referent. Is the truth, then, a disguised reflection and thus fictionality,and can we distinguish fictionality from fiction? It seems that Gallagher is wanting to explore the fictionality as features that satisfy some sort of wanting in the readers, a wanting that is specific to modernity.
In the 18th century, Gallagher argues, two things were missing in discussions of the novel: 1) a conceptual category of fiction and 2) believable stories that did not solicit belief (340). In consider how the novel developed an awareness of fictionality as such, Lennard Davis argues that it developed out of the "news-novel matrix" -- a tangled mass of journalism, scandal, and and political and religious controversy. By calling it fiction, some authors avoided libel eventually being enjoyed for itself without reference to "the person satirized" (341). In addition to the fiction alibi, Gallagher points out that fictionality expanded the idea of truth to include verisimilitude. So we see this idea of historical as truth to a sort of simulated experience as truth. Furthermore, fictionality assumes that the novel is about no one in particular with no particular referent yet a "proper name in a believable narrative an an embodied individual in the world." And in doing this -- resisting a particular referent -- readers can "contemplate their own deformity, and endeavor to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame" (342). The fiction writer is no longer a libeler because the "nonreferentiality could be seen as a greater referentiality." Nonetheless, any invention of a person to represent the universal would prove to bee too narrow to cover all the cases; thus, this feature of fictionality is problematic if not paradoxical.
"For the difference between the historian and the poet is not in their presenting accounts that are versified or not versified...' rather, the difference is this: the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history. For poetry tells us rather the universals, history the particulars. "Universals" means what kinds of thing a certain kind of person will say or do in accordance with probability or necessity, which is what poetic composition aims at, tacking on names afterward" (Poetics, ch. 9, 301-2).
Gallagher suggests here that the "novel may be said to have discovered fiction." The use of fictionality is a special way of shaping knowledge through the fabrication of particulars. Writing about something that was probably was not necessarily an indicator of fiction. The question Gallagher asks "what it was about early modernity in the first capitalist nation that propagated not just realist fiction but realist fiction. What is the modernity-fictionality connection?..to explore what it means to read a narrative as credible while thinking it affirms nothing" (346). (I feel like education reform is fictitious in a similar way if we consider what it means to read its dominant narrative as credible when it affirms nothing.)
Considering the position of the reader external to the fiction and capable of speculating on the action, the novel seeks to suspend such disbelief; fictionality is about believability or plausibility rather than reality. Such was modernity in the 18th century and modernity in the 21st century,both with interests in capitalism, development, and anticipation of progress. Consider paper money and credit. We do not live in reality but on plausibility Gallagher writes, "Indeed, almost all the developments we associate with modernity -- from greater religious toleration to specific scientific discovery -- required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit" (347).
Nevertheless, fiction asks for a willing suspension of disbelief, and so reading a novel allows the reader to suspend skepticism and detach from the mental effort of critique or doubt. Fiction absorbs the reader asking for a suspension of disbelief yet not going so far as to believe. The form brings the reader into imaginary experiences presuming interference with volition (348).
Coleridge says of this: "It is laxly said that during sleep we take our dreams for realities, but this is irreconcilable with the nature of sleep, which consists in a suspension of the voluntary and, therefore, of the comparative power. The fact is that we pass no judgment either way: we simply do not judge them to be real, in consequence of which the images act on our minds, as far as they act at all, by their own force as images. Our state while we are dreaming differs from that in which we are in the perusal of a deeply interesting novel in the degree rather than in the kind (1960: 116).
The fictionality of a novel ask for pleasure or a "deep immersion in allusion because {you} are protected from delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief" when you pick up the novel. The enjoyment or the experience is a fictional encounter without a "tangible profit or practical advantage" thus fictionally experiencing. Here is the paradox: "the novel reader opens what she knows is a fiction because it is a fiction and soon finds that enabling knowledge to be the subtlest of the experience's elements. Just as it declares itself, it becomes that which goes without saying" (349).
In considering characters, Gallagher discusses the problematic that the novel encourages naive essentialism: "the reader's involvement in the dominant modern form of fiction has generally been thought to come about through some sort of psychic investment in, or even identification with, the characters" (350). However, as fictionality became more commonly understood, writers also realized that reader identified with characters not because of their realness but because of their fictionality. In other words, "they noticed that the fictional framework established a protected affective enclosure that encouraged risk-free emotional investment. Fictional characters, moreover, were thought to be easier to sympathize or identify with than most real people" (351).
Gallagher discusses the characters' "peculiar affective force" as "generated by the mutual implication of their unreal knowability and their apparent depth, the link between their real nonexistence and the reader's experience of them as deeply and impossibly familiar" (356). Knowing their fictionality makes it easier to surrender and be intimate. The character is what Jeremy Bentham in "A Fragment on Ontology" called an "imaginary nonentity." This is fascinating: "We would not be able to enter represented subjectivity while subliminally understanding that we are, as readers, its actualizers, its conditions of being, the only minds who undergo these experiences" (357).
The fictionality is the ontological contrast. The narratorial mode elucidates this further. First person narrations differentiates the narrator and the implied author whereas third person omniscient narrators "must sustain the illusion of opacity of the characters surrounding them...vehicles for the epistemological uncertainty that modernists were anxious to produce" because of the intimacy between the narrator and the characters. Paradoxically, the representational tactics that make the character seemingly knowable are "peculiarly delimited" because the character is a textual being. The character is also and always partial or incomplete as a fictional construct.
The naming of the character, for Barthe, however, "imports the supplement of personhood, the ideological assumption that the character is everything attributed to it by the text, and everything else that is needed to make up a human being. Where it is not purposely prevented from doing so...the proper name draws together and unifies all the semantic material, and we have...the ideologically suspect pleasure of sensing a person on the other side of the text" (360).
In the end, Gallagher explains how fictionality which seemingly originated in the mid 18th century novel extended into the 19th century and now informs modern readers' anticipations and expectations of a novel's fictionality. She writes: "What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character. On the one hand, we experience an ideal version of self-continuity, graced by enunciative mastery, mobility, and powers of almost instantaneous detachment and attachment. We experience, that is, the elation of a unitary unboundedness. On the other hand, we are also allowed to love and equally idealized immanence, an ability to be, we imagine, without textuality, meaningfulness, or an other excuse for existing" (361).
February 2, 2013
Misson and Morgan: Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic
Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic: Transforming the English Classroom by Ray Misson and Wendy Morgan investigates literacy education based on the poststructuralist understanding that all language is socially textualized, meaning that all texts are ideological in nature and that such texts are "fundamental to the construction of our identity." The authors take up the question of how critical literacy deals with aesthetic texts (like poetry).
Understanding critical literacy to have an agenda and to be about discourse, genre, subject position, and resistant reading, the authors ask how such a framework might be compatible with desire and performativity. They imagine how critical literacy and poststructuralism work in the classroom reading practices. Essentially, the authors argue about the limitations of critical literacy and resistant reading offering a way to reconfigure it to allow for aesthetic and pleasure.
For middle and high school teachers, this book wants to be in conversation with you about how you are currently teaching English. The authors assume that you use a "conventional model of narrative, thematic, stylistic, or issues-based analysis, alongside a regime of tasks that may ask for creative responses but in the end values most the analytic essay or the book report." I think Common Core and previous learning standards also value this sort of model considering text-based questions and responses. Teachers are encouraged to take on the culture of the school, and the values of that school with regard to reading practices and meaning making. Reading the text "conventionally," which I take to mean without resisting or rather without consideration for ways of knowing, is the sort of practice this book calls into question. . The authors, however, do not intend for this book to be about teaching literature inasmuch as they are interested in teaching literacy or the reading texts that are both literary and nonoliterary because their argument is that the aesthetic is an element in all texts.
To read a text the critical literacy way is to consider the text as a product of culture that positions the readers to see the world in potentially sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist ways and then to read to resist such. I think some classrooms do this sort of work. Such a position, however, has the potential to strip the text of pleasure. Critical literacy then strips the aesthetic delight of the text, and so Mission and Morgan are interested in how to accommodate aesthetics to critical literacy or rather accommodate critical literacy to deal with aesthetics. The author's treatment of aesthetic is to define it or rather position it as located across a process rather than elements that can be found or identified in a texts.. Locating beauty in an object is problematic because not everyone will find the same object beautiful; thus, beauty is more in the experience of beholding the beauty; however, to behold, one must be able to notice certain qualities or what the authors refer to as "way of knowing." it is in this that talking about aesthetics offers a similar problematic as critical literacy. Aesthetic, as I understand it, "entails a creator, the work created, and an audience" (33). in other words, to have an aesthetic, the text must have a maker and a responder -- a relational quality. Where is the location of the aesthetic? In the responder or the stimuli? What from the text is the stimuli? Isn't the aesthetic the product of reading (39)? The aesthetic, then, seems to be equally implicated in the text as a product of culture needing to be exposed as critical literacy.
Is all knowledge culturally determined? Is aesthetic bound up with ideology?
Ch -1 Notes:
valuation -- people place value on things they like; we want others to share what we enjoy; how are "good" texts chosen in the English classroom; what is valued by the dominant society is deemed good
textual politics -- poststructuralist theory -- texts are constructed within a society; meanings can change with different times, places, and readers; meanings in text reflect the assumptions and values of that society
identity politics -- marxist theory -- examines the positional of social classes; feminist/gender theory -- women critiqued their invisibility in literature; female writers were brought to light beside the privileged male authors; the right to appreciate texts that validate their experiences and culture
Williams and Eagleton -- good literature could no longer be determined by the author's genious; the literary value was not intrinsic but given by the institution that created the category -- aesthetic as a product of the ideology of the dominant group****- lecturers schools, teachers produce a reading that values certain meaning -- develops readers who can PERFORM the reading and find satisfaction in it
Is an aesthetic experience a deception? Is pleasure an ideologically driven effect -- we are supposed to like it because we were taught to value it.
critical view -- made inquiries into who held power in society; traced ideologies of cultures; label masses as fooled by culture industries in power; saw mass culture as enemy; teachers job was to enlighten students by revealing the deception in the common sense offered in the texts
view of the popular -- more inclusive accepting and appreciative of a range of cultural forms, practices and texts; looked at how people engaged with entertainment; less concern with power
radical pedagogy -- critical pedagogy -- advocates opposition to the status quo; politicizes the concsiousness; struggles in the community and classroom become learning opportunities for political awareness; students taught how to critique the knowledge offered to them in the common sense texts of the culture and school; sought to cure students of their investment in popular texts
critical literacy -- focuses on texts and language not the schooling reform agenda of critical pedagogy; scrutinizes the selective representation of people, places, and events; examines the tendency to privilege some matters and marginalize others; interested in the politically charged silence in texts; identifies position readers are offered and encourages resistant reading positions
media studies -- puts deceitful media studies on trial; looks for bias, distortions of reality, manipulations of audience; evaluated based on assumptions of value and culture similar to Marxist critics; teacher seen as bearer of the light of pure, critical reason bringing students out of their darkness
multilteracies -- recognizes the multimodal nature of literacies in our technologically and visually soaked world of texts; all literacies positions within particular cultural and social contexts
teachers-- A - -resist introducing popular text forms as equal within literary texts; popular text forms take away from worthwhile texts; do not know how to teach popular texts productively; find it difficult to credit pop culture texts with artful design or aesthetic satisfactions that literary texts offer
B -- less comfortable with trad. literary texts; don't know how to facilitate poltiical criticism; only comfortable using pop texts if they give a voice to historically silenced interests, such as indigenous rights
gap between university English and high school English -- high school regimes encourage or require teachers to conform to the norms of their school and their profession; busy teachers are not expected to read, reflect, theorize, and translate those theories into classroom activities- 21
ch 3 -- The Social Nature of the Aesthetic
Understanding critical literacy to have an agenda and to be about discourse, genre, subject position, and resistant reading, the authors ask how such a framework might be compatible with desire and performativity. They imagine how critical literacy and poststructuralism work in the classroom reading practices. Essentially, the authors argue about the limitations of critical literacy and resistant reading offering a way to reconfigure it to allow for aesthetic and pleasure.
For middle and high school teachers, this book wants to be in conversation with you about how you are currently teaching English. The authors assume that you use a "conventional model of narrative, thematic, stylistic, or issues-based analysis, alongside a regime of tasks that may ask for creative responses but in the end values most the analytic essay or the book report." I think Common Core and previous learning standards also value this sort of model considering text-based questions and responses. Teachers are encouraged to take on the culture of the school, and the values of that school with regard to reading practices and meaning making. Reading the text "conventionally," which I take to mean without resisting or rather without consideration for ways of knowing, is the sort of practice this book calls into question. . The authors, however, do not intend for this book to be about teaching literature inasmuch as they are interested in teaching literacy or the reading texts that are both literary and nonoliterary because their argument is that the aesthetic is an element in all texts.
To read a text the critical literacy way is to consider the text as a product of culture that positions the readers to see the world in potentially sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist ways and then to read to resist such. I think some classrooms do this sort of work. Such a position, however, has the potential to strip the text of pleasure. Critical literacy then strips the aesthetic delight of the text, and so Mission and Morgan are interested in how to accommodate aesthetics to critical literacy or rather accommodate critical literacy to deal with aesthetics. The author's treatment of aesthetic is to define it or rather position it as located across a process rather than elements that can be found or identified in a texts.. Locating beauty in an object is problematic because not everyone will find the same object beautiful; thus, beauty is more in the experience of beholding the beauty; however, to behold, one must be able to notice certain qualities or what the authors refer to as "way of knowing." it is in this that talking about aesthetics offers a similar problematic as critical literacy. Aesthetic, as I understand it, "entails a creator, the work created, and an audience" (33). in other words, to have an aesthetic, the text must have a maker and a responder -- a relational quality. Where is the location of the aesthetic? In the responder or the stimuli? What from the text is the stimuli? Isn't the aesthetic the product of reading (39)? The aesthetic, then, seems to be equally implicated in the text as a product of culture needing to be exposed as critical literacy.
Is all knowledge culturally determined? Is aesthetic bound up with ideology?
Ch -1 Notes:
valuation -- people place value on things they like; we want others to share what we enjoy; how are "good" texts chosen in the English classroom; what is valued by the dominant society is deemed good
textual politics -- poststructuralist theory -- texts are constructed within a society; meanings can change with different times, places, and readers; meanings in text reflect the assumptions and values of that society
identity politics -- marxist theory -- examines the positional of social classes; feminist/gender theory -- women critiqued their invisibility in literature; female writers were brought to light beside the privileged male authors; the right to appreciate texts that validate their experiences and culture
Williams and Eagleton -- good literature could no longer be determined by the author's genious; the literary value was not intrinsic but given by the institution that created the category -- aesthetic as a product of the ideology of the dominant group****- lecturers schools, teachers produce a reading that values certain meaning -- develops readers who can PERFORM the reading and find satisfaction in it
Is an aesthetic experience a deception? Is pleasure an ideologically driven effect -- we are supposed to like it because we were taught to value it.
critical view -- made inquiries into who held power in society; traced ideologies of cultures; label masses as fooled by culture industries in power; saw mass culture as enemy; teachers job was to enlighten students by revealing the deception in the common sense offered in the texts
view of the popular -- more inclusive accepting and appreciative of a range of cultural forms, practices and texts; looked at how people engaged with entertainment; less concern with power
radical pedagogy -- critical pedagogy -- advocates opposition to the status quo; politicizes the concsiousness; struggles in the community and classroom become learning opportunities for political awareness; students taught how to critique the knowledge offered to them in the common sense texts of the culture and school; sought to cure students of their investment in popular texts
critical literacy -- focuses on texts and language not the schooling reform agenda of critical pedagogy; scrutinizes the selective representation of people, places, and events; examines the tendency to privilege some matters and marginalize others; interested in the politically charged silence in texts; identifies position readers are offered and encourages resistant reading positions
media studies -- puts deceitful media studies on trial; looks for bias, distortions of reality, manipulations of audience; evaluated based on assumptions of value and culture similar to Marxist critics; teacher seen as bearer of the light of pure, critical reason bringing students out of their darkness
multilteracies -- recognizes the multimodal nature of literacies in our technologically and visually soaked world of texts; all literacies positions within particular cultural and social contexts
teachers-- A - -resist introducing popular text forms as equal within literary texts; popular text forms take away from worthwhile texts; do not know how to teach popular texts productively; find it difficult to credit pop culture texts with artful design or aesthetic satisfactions that literary texts offer
B -- less comfortable with trad. literary texts; don't know how to facilitate poltiical criticism; only comfortable using pop texts if they give a voice to historically silenced interests, such as indigenous rights
gap between university English and high school English -- high school regimes encourage or require teachers to conform to the norms of their school and their profession; busy teachers are not expected to read, reflect, theorize, and translate those theories into classroom activities- 21
ch 3 -- The Social Nature of the Aesthetic
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