Ben Knights is the Director
of the English Subject
Centre. His most recent
book is Masculinities
in Text and Teaching
(Palgrave, 2007).
The English Subject Centre has recently initiated or collaborated in a number of attempts to develop a more systematic understanding of how students learn in our subject. This enquiry includes commissioning focus groups, the support of departmental projects such as the Keele ‘Production of University English’ project (and see Bruce, Jones, and McLean 2007), and welcoming student bloggers onto our website. In the context of an endeavour which seeks insight from a variety of projects, this article represents an attempt to come at the question of student engagement from a different angle. It seeks to get hold of an intuition about the aesthetics of teaching and learning. English (especially in its Literary Studies manifestation) is a discipline where subject matter is embedded in a dialectical relationship with the process of articulating insight, and where teachers (even from apparently incompatible theoretical backgrounds) tend to share a set of tacit rules about the appropriate idiom in which to do so. The discipline expects its students to make a counter-intuitive leap: to be willing and able – to have the patience and the self-confidence – to treat even apparently discursive texts as non-discursive. In going beyond the seductions of manifest content, students are implicitly expected to make their own incursions on the unsayable, complicating, as they do so, the protocols of everyday speech. The medium of teaching is in fact no more transparent than the modernist text. So the argument of this short paper is that residually English not only studies the aesthetic (admittedly in a more or less troubled way) but also performs it in its day-to-day practice. There is an assumed continuum between the play of the text and the play of the articulate reading.
While it is true that the subject has steadily complicated its own sense of ‘beauty’ (and in many ways over the past 30 years shifted its sense of the aesthetically satisfying away from the literary text towards the apparatus of analysis), it still in one way or another proposes a cognitive and expressive hierarchy of esteem whose rules are aesthetic and rhetorical. That this integration of medium and message moulds our pedagogy is only obliquely apparent, for example underlying the reservations entertained by many colleagues about making allowance for dyslexia (on the lines that ballet schools don’t put up with people who habitually fall over their own feet). University ‘English’ is a form of behaviour or performance which is ‘about’ its own practice as much as it is ‘about’ its subject matter and texts. To put that another way: this essay seeks to suggest the pedagogic consequences of the propensity to divert attention from proposition to medium, a propensity which throws weight onto the student ability to reproduce the medium in all its verbal abundance. This is one of the reasons why many students find it difficult to grasp what is going on and what they are supposed to do. They are effectively required to take the authority to speak by becoming the author of the writerly text of the discipline, but do not always realise that this is what they are meant to do. Meyer and Land’s (2003) ‘threshold concept’ is perhaps helpful in focusing this. For the literature student, one conceptual threshold is constituted by the focus of attention on representation (granting primary significance to the how rather than the what). Another is the idea that you (as student, as scholar) act out and make available to others a unique experience; that to have the experience (say of being moved, surprised, confirmed, or shocked in some way by a reading) is dialectically integral with the ability to articulate that movement of mind and emotion in ways which generate intellectual and affective pleasure for the reader or listener. So students are expected to engage in a linguistic and meta-linguistic activity whose forms are not (and some would argue cannot be) made explicit to them.
The lack of formal requirements – assessment objectives to be fulfilled – had made several of the students feel confused and uncertain in their first months of the course. Caitlin* said that she had spent much of her first year trying to work out what she was expected to do, a feeling which Siân (currently taking her first year) recognised. The students felt that the course offered a space where brilliant, innovative thinking was encouraged and valued, but that they also had to try to work out what their tutors wanted. The values of the course were not explicit; they had to be discovered through an apprenticeship that might last well into the second year and beyond.
(*all names have been changed)
(Hodgson 2010:17)
Why should we take an interest in this apparently recondite topic at this historical moment? Precisely because teachers expect students to internalise these tacit rules, but, generally speaking, without explaining the necessity of doing so, or even suggesting that the rules exist. The existence of this body of largely unspoken rules has critical implications for the forms of hospitality (or exclusion) we extend towards students and potential students. I’ll cite the field notes of an astute observer of first years in an English department:
There is a constant sense of these students walking into a world that they are not part of, where there is something going on that they are not party to, but which they’re trying to understand without anyone ever really explaining it to them.
(Snapper 2008: 172).
'Good’ students are those who are able to align with the implied student the discipline asks them to become. But many students (at least at first) misunderstand the subject as one where they are expected simply to acquire knowledge and display it. So the unacknowledged aesthetic of English professionals may turn out to be an important, even central, aspect of the barrier we put up to students from outside the charmed circle. To take on a sanctioned identity as an English student is to be able to perform that identity within the drama of the subject, a performance which involves subscribing to a purportedly shared subjectivity of response. Probably those students who remain compliant, ‘plodding’ learners (‘typical 2.2’ as some colleagues used to say) experience themselves and are largely experienced as outsiders to this project. They haven’t, so to say, grasped that they were meant to play their own part in performing the verbal ebullience of the discipline.
This article makes an initial case for exploring the persistence and meaning of such an implicit aesthetic. In doing so, it makes a contribution to a discussion of disciplinary styles, working on a hypothesis that even within an increasingly heterogeneous subject there exists an effectively consensual learning idiom. We should of course beware of making a claim of English exceptionality. Other subjects undoubtedly have their own aesthetic and understandings of disciplinary ‘elegance’. Such values are likely to shape in more or less covert ways the relations between students and their teachers. Nevertheless, the relationship between the practice and the subject matter is particularly problematic for disciplines like Literature and Creative Writing whose subject and practice is representation. Both, so to speak, address aesthetic values at the cognitive level, but usually without acknowledging they are doing so at an existential level as well. Equally, again, the fear of looking naive or ignorant in front of peers or teachers is certainly not confined to English students. But I suggest that such a fear takes a quite specific form in a subject whose medium is suffused with its own aesthetic values. The anti-humanist revolt may have talked a different language, but it did not in fact exorcise from the profession the implicit belief that it bore the high responsibility of coaching students out of the ideologically compromised discourses of which they would find themselves shown up as the discomfited avatars.
The world of an academic tribe is both signalled and constituted by its communicative idioms and values: how the phenomenon for study is selected, how once selected it is deployed within a felicitous grammar of argument and exemplification. But only in a limited, if expanding, group of cases do new meanings in English emerge from new information. A lot of the time (and if we make the important exceptions of stylistic or historicist research) new meanings emerge from making what are felt to be more satisfying arrangements of existing information, drawing on analogy, creating parallels or interpretative frameworks that hadn’t been thought of before. To take a classic example: Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) didn’t on the whole tell us anything new – in the sense in which, say, recent histories of Russia or Germany draw on newly opened archives. Instead it re-arranged thinking about how narrative moulds social and individual experience. Students are not expected to turn into Frank Kermode or Judith Butler overnight, but they are expected to be able to act out in their essays or their seminar contributions the novelty of insight. The ‘scene of reading’ into which we seek to induct students consists of a small-scale dramatisation of the steps of discovery with its own narrative of simulated ignorance, triumphant disclosure, and provocation to the credulous or literal-minded. As a subject where in principle a student is as capable of startling new insight as an experienced scholar, ‘English’ establishes criteria for what is interesting in the absence of any immediate semantic pay-off. Footing in the subject still rests to a large degree on being able persuasively to turn mere sensation into significant sensation, preserving as you do so some echo of the vigour and many-layered complexity of the text. A powerful consensus within the subject values struggle in writing, and student writing which bears the traces of that struggle.
More research is needed. The ideas sketched here might provide a thread for future research on seminars or through focus groups. They could also provide pointers for teachers’ own reflection, an examination of the pre-suppositions underlying feedback to students, or those governing our own performance in lectures. In the space available, I can only suggest where – in our own experience as teachers – we might turn for examples. What does a well-formed critical proposition look like? What, we might ask ourselves, makes an essay in our eyes ‘plodding’ or ‘pedestrian’? What are the signifiers of brilliance in discussion? What is it that strikes us about a student for whom we would be happy to write an AHRC reference? Hard work and extensive reading are clearly not the only pre-conditions. What irks us about a dull, repetitive, or inarticulate essay? Being good at appreciation, making intelligent connections, developing persuasive analogies is inseparable from the craft of articulating your insights economically, persuasively, and with wit and verbal panache. Productive verbal facility is a core element in being good at dealing with a subject matter which vexes commonsense with indirection.
The professional community favours argumentative suppleness, metaphorical play, the ability to engage in representations which – if not verbally exotic – are at least distantly commensurate with the complexity of the representations under study. Implicit is an existential position: tolerance for ambiguity and cognitive delay – a refusal to give way quickly to the simplistic desire for interpretative closure. (The profession resists simple one to one equivalence between verbal phenomena and meaning, may indeed pull the rug from under students by playfully deconstructing the deep/surface, or original/copy metaphors themselves.) The model student is capable of seizing on a superficially tangential item, then elegantly demonstrating its paradoxically central significance. She has a feeling for verbal penumbra, a degree of self-reflexiveness, and, too, (though increasingly rarely) a gift for unforced quotation. If, as Louise Rosenblatt (1978) argues, the text is an event, a transactional medium of communication between readers, then the occasions on which it is formally discussed exemplify its event-ness, but they do so not on the principle of pure free association but within normative connotations supervised by a caste of professional arbiters. In thus exposing their subjectivity, students may well feel themselves under a judgment potentially more undermining than simply being confused or ill-informed, and are likely to feel the need to edit their subjectivity in a way that makes it acceptable.
It is commonly argued that Creative Writing is a practice-based subject. It would probably be misleading to make a similar claim for Literary Studies. Nevertheless, the thrust of this article is that there is a practice element even to the study of the already written. Analytical cohesion, the crafting of argument, the willingness to engage in an ambitious, risk-taking interchange between synoptic range and the selection of precise examples comprise between them core elements of being good at the subject. Further, given the disciplinary commitment to the dialectic of form and content, stylistic panache is not the only element. Thus, it seems to me that how you manage embarrassment is another ingredient of subject identity. English has always been to some degree a subject that dealt with the libidinal. In the last generation, it has become a subject that makes a positive point of talking in public about the erotic and about intimate bodily matters. A lot of its subject matter can be experienced as shocking, and prides itself on being shocking. Can the student join in? How does s/he handle the embarrassment of doing so? How do you gain footing in a discussion that many of your peers feel inhibited about joining? However apparently formal the discussion, you risk the exposure not alone of your fumbling verbal prowess, but of your unformed intuitions, your longings, fantasies, inhibitions, and nightmares before an audience of judges whom you have few grounds to trust with them.
Clearly we have to acknowledge internal differences. I am not trying to suggest that the discipline or the expectations placed upon its implied student are homogeneous. Rather, the argument is that as a discipline community we do need to bring to the surface and reflect upon our unacknowledged pedagogic aesthetic and its influence on the identity of both learner and teacher. If we are to avoid our own form of pedagogical naiveté we need to examine how studying representations itself entails the making of other representations, representations whose success is judged according to the largely unspecified rules of a discourse of shared subjectivity. If there is anything at all in the argument of this paper, it will surely have implications for the continuing professional development of those to whom falls the task of choreographing that dance along the borders of the public and private that run through the discipline.
References
- Becher, Tony, and Trowler Paul R. Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines (2nd edition). Buckingham: Open University Press/SRHE. 2001.
- Bruce, Susan, Jones, Ken, and McLean, Monica. ‘Some Notes on a Project: Democracy and Authority in the Production of a Discipline’. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. 7.3 (2007) 481-500.
- Graff, Gerald. ‘The Problem Problem, and Other Oddities of Academic Discourse’. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 1.1 (2002) 27-42.
- Hodgson, John. The Experience of Studying English in UK Higher Education. (English Subject Centre, 2010)
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/studexp/index.php - Knights, Ben. ‘Intelligence and Interrogation: the Identity of the English Student’. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. 4.1. (2005) 33-52.
- Knights, Ben and Thurgar-Dawson, Chris. Active Reading: Transformative Writing in Literary Studies. London: Continuum. 2006.
- Meyer J H F and Land R. ‘Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge 1 – Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising’ in Improving Student Learning – Ten Years On. C. Rust (Ed), OCSLD, Oxford. 2003.
- Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1978.
- Snapper, Gary. Beyond the Words on the Page: A study of the relationship between A Level English Literature and university English. Unpublished PhD thesis. (2008). Quotation reproduced by kind permission of the author.
