The last word – not?
You could have knocked me down with a feather when I was invited, last summer, to join the Advisory Board of the English Subject Centre. ‘Flattered’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. I said yes immediately, before they changed their minds!
As a stylistician, someone who researches and teaches the detail of how we interact with, understand and are affected by the language of literary texts, I have always felt that I belong equally to the worlds of English language and English literature, even though I teach in a department of Linguistics and English Language and don’t have much contact with my literary colleagues these days.
Part of my exhilaration came from the fact that English Studies must have noticed I was there. Many English departments, including the one at Lancaster, do not have colleagues working in stylistics. Moreover, I live in a strange world where I interact mainly with other stylisticians, a breed who feel occasionally attacked, but mainly ignored, by the two worlds, Linguistics and English, which, like Ted Hughes’s water lily, they fearfully inhabit.
We don’t think, as is sometimes claimed, that texts must have one and only one interpretation (indeed, I don’t know any stylistician who holds that belief).
What most excited me, however, was that I now had the chance to talk to people teaching English literature again, as I have lots of questions to ask and things I want to debate. So I also blithely accepted the consequent ‘punishment’ of writing something for this Newsletter, as it meant that I could begin to renew an old acquaintance, hopefully through new friends. When I first came to Lancaster I was in the English department, taught some literature courses as well as English language and stylistics, and regularly collaborated with a small group of literature colleagues interested in language as well as literature. I enjoyed this immensely but when, in the 1980s, the English department was deemed to be too large (an unfashionable idea these days, of course) and was split up, I was assigned to Linguistics and the co-operation and collaboration with my Literature colleagues gradually drained away. So, is there anyone out there who is up for co-operation and debate? What I will try to do below is to raise some theoretical issues which concern me and which I think have considerable pedagogical knock-on effects.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the stylisticians and most of the literary critics I have read concerns the nature of textual understanding. From the perspective of most critics, stylisticians cling to the quaint idea that the range of reasonable textual understandings (and also textual effects – which are to a large degree dependent on understanding, as far as I can see) is rather small. We don’t think, as is sometimes claimed, that texts must have one and only one interpretation (indeed, I don’t know any stylistician who holds that belief). In the 1970s my literary colleagues used to say that there could be as many understandings of a poem, say, as there were readers of it, and many contemporary literary theorists have taken the idea of plurality of understanding even further. Derrida’s ‘différence’, Stanley Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’, the general ‘push’ in deconstructive and postmodernist approaches to criticism, and the fondness for ‘resistant’ readings in gender-, post-colonial- and cultural-studies-based approaches to literature come to mind.
How can such a wide difference of view be understood? First of all, the stylisticians are more interested in understanding how we arrive at readings that, as Rob Pope has put it, go ‘with the grain’ rather than ‘against the grain’ of texts. Indeed, I find it difficult to see how one could have a ‘resistant’ reading if one had not first arrived at a ‘receptive’ reading to resist. I’m not against challenging current socio-political orthodoxy. Far from it. But I do wonder whether literature, rather than non-fictional reality, should be the site for that kind of struggle. The reason I worry about this matter is that I value the things which seem to get pushed aside in the process of struggle, namely the aesthetic and affective properties of texts that make us want to read them in the first place (and keep them on our bookshelves and recommend them to others) and the pedagogical importance of helping students to engage sensitively with good literary texts and appreciate their special properties (something which involves close reading, at the very least, and arguably close textual analysis too). My students are pretty good at emoting and disagreeing at the drop of a hat, but they seem to have more of a problem with describing accurately the texts I ask them to interact with.
Let us now turn to more ‘receptive’, non-resistant readings. Clearly, we are all different, and so can have different personal understandings of, and responses to, texts. But I am continually struck by how my stylistics colleagues (and my students) and I seem to agree rather a lot about how we understand and are affected by particular texts, even though we don’t agree about absolutely everything. This is the thing which, in my view, most needs explanation. The position that there are as many understandings/readings as there are readers (something which has never been adequately tested in my view), does not, I think, distinguish properly between (a) two different interpretations of a text, (b) two minor variants of the same interpretation and (c) different levels of abstraction in apparently competing interpretations. And I think that the failure to make these important distinctions has unfortunate pedagogical, as well as theoretical, consequences.
When I was still in Lancaster’s English department, I was struck by the fact that, in spite of their stated views, my literary colleagues often seemed to push their students towards a rather restricted range of meanings and (partly consequential) effects in seminars. It seemed to me that they acted more like I A Richards, William Empson and similar critics whose views had already become rather unfashionable (but I still like!).
I value the things which seem to get pushed aside in the process of struggle, namely the aesthetic and affective properties of texts that make us want to read them in the first place
I would like to know what happens in classroom discussions of literary texts now. The stronger versions of plurality of understanding I have read about in more recent critical and cultural theory (though I certainly wouldn’t claim to have read it all!) would seem to lead logically to a style of teaching which would be maximally ‘inclusive’, ‘accepting’ and uncritical of what students say about texts in class. Is that true, or is there now an even bigger mismatch between theory and practice? If there is, this is something Stanley Fish would approve of, I guess, as he has argued that ‘theory’ has no practical consequences. But, like academics in other subjects, I think that theory and practice should be intricately connected, that practice should test and inform, and so change, theory – and that we should teach how we preach.
I think that students should be helped to understand that it important to be accurate about texts, even if they want to resist them. If they do not develop adequately the ‘transferable skill’ of analytical interpretative precision, how will they come to appreciate, with any accuracy, what makes great pieces of writing so valuable, or hold down those jobs in the media, the civil service or publishing, which they all seem to hanker after? I hope, in other words, that there is still a helpful inconsistency between what students are taught ‘abstractly’, in the critical theory lectures I hear about, and what happens in textual discussion in class.
Is the inconsistency I saw still there? Have you all moved on so much that your literary criticism and mine are so at odds as to be completely different beast? (I recently heard a public lecture on criticism by Terry Eagleton, applauded to the rafters, in which he never referred to, let alone examined, a single literary text, as he developed his view of criticism as a branch of political struggle or what the linguists call critical discourse analysis.) Would you be interested in working with stylisticians like me to understand, through co-operative, reader-based empirical work, what exactly counts as a different interpretation or reading of the same text, what counts as a reasonable interpretation and what pedagogical consequences all this might have?
