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