The times, time and “the timeless”

Current dilemmas in teaching literature

The times, time and “the timeless”

• Teaching Literature in an Age of Accountability, Multimodality and Critical Literacy• Literature = “the timeless”• The age = the times• Time = pressing demands on teachers

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time,

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,

A moment in time, but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.

- T.S. Eliot

The times, time and “the timeless”

• Without meaning there is no time

• Without time there is no meaning

Without time there is no meaning

• Every text comes with a context

• Text is implicated with society and social meaning

• Basis of critical literacy

Critical Literacy

• The inscription of ideology in all texts/representations• The power of texts to shape beliefs, and indeed

identities• Social justice and the marginalisation of non-

privileged groups• The importance of critical analysis of the ideological

imposition texts are making on our subjectivities• The need for ethical judgment on the ideology

exposed in texts

Critical Literacy

• Who or what is being excluded from the text?• Irrelevant considerations• Framed view• “value-added”

• Whose interests are being served?• Ours

• Power

The aesthetic

The aesthetic

The aesthetic

• Concern with feeling as well as thinking

• Concern with artistic shaping

• Fusion of form and feeling

Lullaby - W.H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm:Time and fevers burn awayIndividual beauty fromThoughtful children, and the graveProves the child ephemeral:But in my arms till break of dayLet the living creature lie,Mortal, guilty, but to meThe entirely beautiful.

Lullaby - W.H. Auden

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:Let the winds of dawn that blowSoftly round your dreaming headSuch a day of welcome showEye and knocking heart may bless,Find our mortal world enough; Noons of dryness find you fedBy the involuntary powers,Nights of insult let you passWatched by every human love.

Literature and Critical Literacy

• What is the experience that the text is giving me?

• How is that experience created textually?

• What does this show me about the nature of textuality?

• What generic expectations are being activated or played with

Literature and Critical Literacy

• What are the discourses out of which the text is constructed?

• What is its relation to its time, and howdoes a modern reader read it

• What s the text valuing and wanting me to believe?

• What do I think of this?

Literature and Critical Literacy

• Relativity of discourses - no discourse is absolute and true

• Analysis brings you closer to the experience of the text

• Empathy and ethics are not in conflict

…the wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot, I venture to say, be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness. Indeed, the various definitions of beauty come at least as close to a plausible characterization of virtue, and of a fuller humanity, as the attempts to define goodness as such.

-Susan Sontag

….their passion for literature was bound up with an engagement with entire civilisations. What else is language but the bridge which links the two? Language is the medium in which both Culture and culture – literary art and human society – come to consciousness; and literary criticism is thus a sensitivity to the thickness and intricacy of the medium which makes us what we are.

-Terry Eagleton

Without meaning there is no time

• Language as constitutive of the culture

and individual identity

• The project of critical literacy

• Help us understand our social world better

• Help us understand ourselves better

Reading

• Reading is an imaginative act

• A text is a scaffold on which we build our understanding

• Texts mean things

W.H. Auden: The more loving one

Looking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I amOf stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, sayI missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die.I should learn to look at an empty skyAnd feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

The times, time and “the timeless”

Current dilemmas in teaching literature