The times, time and

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The times, time and the timeless

• Current dilemmas in teaching literature

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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

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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
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The times, time and the timeless

• Without meaning there is no time
• Without time there is no meaning

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Without time there is no meaning

• Every text comes with a context
• Text is implicated with society and social
  meaning
• Basis of critical literacy

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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

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Critical Literacy

• Who or what is being excluded from the text?
• Irrelevant considerations
• Framed view
• value-added
• Whose interests are being served?
• Ours
• Power

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The aesthetic
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The aesthetic
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The aesthetic

• Concern with feeling as well as thinking
• Concern with artistic shaping
• Fusion of form and feeling

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Lullaby - W.H. Auden
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my
faithless arm Time and fevers burn
away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children,
and the grave Proves the child ephemeral But in
my arms till break of day Let the living creature
lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely
beautiful.
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Lullaby - W.H. Auden
Beauty, midnight, vision dies Let the winds of
dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming
head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking
heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough
Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary
powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by
every human love.
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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

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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?

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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

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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
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.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
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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

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Reading

• Reading is an imaginative act
• A text is a scaffold on which we build our
  understanding
• Texts mean things

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W.H. Auden The more loving one
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That,
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 burn With a passion for us we could not
return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the
more loving one be me.
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Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give
a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed
one terribly all day. Were all stars to
disappear or die. I should learn to look at an
empty sky And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
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The times, time and the timeless

• Current dilemmas in teaching literature

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