Literature, Pedagogy, and Curriculum in Secondary Education: Examples from France by M. Martin Guiney (review)

In Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), M. Martin Guiney argued that for all its rhetoric of secularism and reform the French educational establishment had continued, when it came to literature, to advance ‘a crypto-theological ideology modeled on the mysteries of the Roman Catholic Church’ (p. xiv). Some of the same scepticism lies behind this new book, which is similarly stimulating and historically rich. Guiney’s analysis winds through episodes including the arguments around Lanson and historicism at the turn of the twentieth century, the post-1968 radicalism of the Charbonnières manifesto, and the reforms of 1999 shaped by Alain Viala’s commission. He offers deft interpretations of films about French schools, including L’Esquive (dir. by Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004) and Entre les murs (dir. by Laurent Cantet, 2008). All of this sheds light on the questions with which he starts: ‘Should literature be a subject taught in school to a general population? If so, how should it be taught?’ (p. 1). Scepticism about the first question can come from many directions, of course, and Guiney’s project is in part a response to the hostile climate swirling around the humanities in US universities. One chapter is called ‘Harnessing the Neo-liberal Beast’, but every now and then, keen to keep readers on their toes, Guiney seems inclined to let it loose: ‘It is not an oversimplification to say that all of the arguments on behalf of general literary pedagogy in France over the last 150 years are attempts to establish a justification for its protection from the harsh laws of supply and demand’ (p. 262). Elsewhere he writes: ‘It feels as wrong to say that reading literature is a marketable skill, like writing code or bookkeeping, as it is to defend Holy Communion based on the nutritional value of bread and wine’ (p. 194). Other provocations—and what I saw as some inconsistencies—appear less deliberate: for example, Guiney comments parenthetically that the study of languages ‘needs slightly less protection’ than the discipline of literature, ‘since all living languages have the potential to help advance global commerce’ (p. 195), but in that instance the economistic language does not even capture accurately the behaviour of the educational ‘market’. (For that matter, the fact that some students will pay to study literature does not offer any real legitimacy: there are always people willing to buy snake oil.) Still, the book is genuinely thought-provoking, and at moments quite funny, for example in its discussion of the long-established educational ‘principle’ that teaching should concentrate on ‘texts that almost nobody wants to read’ (p. 201). Guiney’s own answers to the question of what and how to teach revolve around the idea that ‘literariness’, defined after Jakobson as ‘ubiquitous’, is ‘the indispensable foundation of literary pedagogy’ (p. 19), and that ‘[e]ducation can and maybe should be a process by which “remote” culture grafts itself onto “proximate” culture’ (p. 166). He sees great promise in the field of didactique de la littérature; less, perhaps, in the emergent literary genre of poems written purely for OECD tests (‘Yes! There it was—the motorcycle. | It was just as wrecked as last night. | And my leg was starting to hurt’, p. 265).