Motives For Metaphor: Literacy, Curriculum Reform, and the Teaching of English

Epilogue

E PI LO G U E Toward a Metaphoric Curriculum T   have proposed that a reconception of the English studies curriculum might begin with a reconception of metaphor , both because of its overlapping position among the disciplinary domains within that curriculum (literature, composition, creative writing , and so on) and because of its unique way of negotiating “difference” —a matter of considerable significance in recent attempts to reimagine the teaching of English. While literalism responds to difference by putting things in their “proper” places, metaphor responds to difference by putting things together, not by merely juxtaposing them but by equating them despite, or even because of, their disparities. Literalism separates, arranges, and classifies, so that things that are less different are situated in relative proximity and things that are more different are situated at a relative distance. Through the lens of the literal, we are presumed to see things as they “are” and where they “belong.” Metaphor , by contrast, dispenses with the proprieties of literalism and takes the risk of merging elements and discourses that are supposedly incompatible : the metaphorical impulse might thus be described as dialogic , novelistic, carnivalesque.¹ Furthermore, metaphor not only flouts the “rules” by which literalism operates; it sneaks its way into literalism itself, which is unable to sustain the production of discourse without recourse to that which it ostensibly shuns. But as I have indicated throughout this book, the audacity (and, simultaneously , the commonality) of metaphor call not simply for celebration but also for reflective hesitation. After all, by fusing one thing with another, metaphor overlooks their differences and passes on to writers and readers the responsibility for bearing those differences in  mind—a responsibility that entails not, as is frequently thought, an insistence that the metaphor is “only” a metaphor, but rather an entry into the fictive space generated by the metaphor, where dialogue about equivalence and difference can begin. Metaphor, in other words, does more than identify one thing with another; it asks that we ourselves identify with the “world” of its fiction, that we provisionally take that fiction as literally true. Thus it is that literalism works its way back into metaphor and demonstrates that the literal is as inescapable as the metaphorical. The challenge that confronts writers and readers of metaphor is therefore the same paradoxical challenge of literacy itself, which requires that we continually relearn how both to accept and resist, to enter and withdraw from, the persuasive force of texts. My claim has been that this conception of metaphor, literalism, and their crucial role in literate activity holds certain implications for the English studies curriculum. I have suggested, for instance, that students might be asked to write and not just read fragmentary texts, so that they can experiment with the rhetorical tensions that characterize both the centrifugal and the centripetal movements of language, each of which approaches equivalence and difference in its own ways. And I have also suggested that students might be asked to write, in composition and literature courses as well as in creative writing courses, overtly fictive or metaphorical discourses rather than or in addition to those considered nonfictive or literal. Yet even were a number of individual teachers to bring such practices to their classrooms (as many may already have), the resulting changes would still leave untouched the general structure of the departmental curriculum as a whole, which arguably communicates the contents and contours of English studies more forcibly (or at least more intractably) than any particular course by itself. As Gerald Graff indicates, English has evolved as a discipline over the past hundred years through a system of “growth and accumulation” (“Other” ), so that new approaches to texts tend to enter the curriculum alongside the old, and students are left to intuit the larger picture as best they can as they move from course to course. While teachers often imagine the possibilities for altering the curriculum through changes in their own pedagogy or the contents of their own courses, Graff argues that the “reduction of education to teaching, which goes hand in hand with  •  the glorification of the autonomous, self-contained course as the natural locus of education, fails to see that educational problems are systemic ones that involve not just individual teaching but the way that teaching is organized” (). Graff contends that “individual teaching is arguably the least promising...