Andrew Atherton's 'Experiencing English Literature'
The title and sub-title of Andrew Atherton’s new book Experiencing English Literature: shaping authentic student response in thinking and writing pick out the central principles of his approach: literature is to be experienced, and it is completed by the response of the reader/student. There is no ‘meaning’ to be handed down from on high. The other two significant words are ‘thinking’ and ‘writing’, with the former coming first, shaping as it does the quality and depth of writing. Part I is about responding to novels, plays and poetry, and Part II shows how this might be encouraged in the writing process.
If there is one idea which summarises Atherton’s approach, it is this from page 4:
Response is not incidental to the work and literature and the work of the literature classroom. It’s in the moment of response that a text begins to mean something.
I think here of Claire Keegan’s comment on her novella Foster:
I feel that every single story is completed by its reader, not by its writer. That’s the way I like to read. And everything I had to say about the circumstances of these people I said in the number of pages I had. I also think that every story is incomplete. Most of the work in a piece of fiction is done by the reader, not the writer. It’s what the writer stokes up in the reader. Each reader’s private life, secret life, comes out. Imagination is stoked by the text. No two people will ever read the same book.
This approach is brought out in very practical ways throughout the book, and it is also underpinned by Atherton’s deep thinking about his subject: everything here is done for a central purpose.
There are lots of suggestions - so many that teachers will naturally pick and choose, and work out in their classrooms which suit them best. Just a few examples:
‘Cold reading’ of fiction, which produces a first reading of a book and produces ‘narrative security’, being ‘quick, plot-focussed, and designed to help students enjoy the story as a story.’
Such quick reading should be accompanied by ‘attentional cues’, markings which can be returned to later. Atherton also suggests students creating an Index which they make so that they can track significant ideas and moments, something I will certainly try next year.
He proposes several strategies to tackle the paradox at the heart of teaching plays - that they were written for performance but we are studying them in the classroom. This presents us with ‘an almost unique set of textual and pedagogical opportunities.’ For instance, stage directions give us a rich source of discussion, and students could ‘say the line’, trying out a single statement with different emphases.
A poem could be ‘crushed’ and so patterns can be revealed - pronouns or animal imagery, for example.
Blocked out poems can show the shape of a poem well (such as Marianne Moore’s ‘The Fish’).
Creating your own poetry anthology takes time but has rich rewards: Michael Browne recently wrote on this demanding but stimulating process.
That will have to do in this space as a sample. English teachers would do well to get a copy of this thought-provoking and helpful book for their own Departments.