Reading Fiction/Teaching Fiction/Reading Teaching: A Response

"'Reading Fiction/Teaching Fiction': A Pedagogical Experiment," by Jerome McGann (2001), is striking in a number of ways, not least for its apparent obviousness. The course in reading for undergraduates that McGann describes is elemental, substantive, and broadly challenging, and the course in teaching for graduate student teachers of undergraduates is equally so. Both courses are simply and flexibly designed, at once open-ended and sharply focused, and both courses provide an immediately (and continuously) clear way of addressing the abiding concerns of literary pedagogy and the links between graduate education and undergraduate education. It all seems such plain good sense that one wonders why such an approach is not standard. But of course, such things are not standard--the matter is not obvious, apparently, at all, and this emerges as a kind of surprise.

Another obviously sensible thing about the experiment is that it is plainly designed not so much to solve problems as to articulate them--to begin to solve them, to be sure, to provide a method (for student readers and student teachers) and a set of principles (for reading and for teaching); and to show the results affordable by these means; but not primarily to solve them. Rather, the paired courses McGann describes problematize in clear terms the difficulties involved in literary education. The distinction may seem, again, obvious: no teacher of beginning undergraduate courses would claim to do more than begin to clarify the process of reading literature, just as no teacher of pedagogy would claim that any single graduate course or program counted as full preparation for the responsibilities and unpredictabilities of classroom teaching. In both cases only time and further work and play will tell.

Reading and teaching--not to mention the teaching of reading and the teaching of teaching--are famously complex activities. Although they are full of instrumentalities (here's a problem, here's a solution; you must learn this before you learn that; if you do this, that follows), teaching and reading are not fully open to an instrumental description; how to do them is a question we can never finally answer. All this, too, is old hat.

What distinguishes McGann's experiment is that it is devoted to this open conception of reading-teaching; that is, it is a systematic effort to clarify what the problems are (for both readers and teachers) rather than to render them solved. McGann's approach acknowledges--and compels students and student teachers to acknowledge--that reading and teaching are ways of problematizing sites of inquiry and that by engaging in them, one engages above all in a kind of uncertainty.

This methodological embrace of uncertainty, of course, rhymes fundamentally with literature's own habitation in realms of the uncertain: writers, like readers and teachers, seek clarification of problems that cannot be solved. Scott's Bride of Lammermoor, no less than Lautréamont's Maldoror (to use McGann's examples, though virtually any would do), is engaged in the discovery, charting, exploration, manifestation, and embodiment of certain human or cultural problems, of which any solution, if solutions can even be spoken of in such cases, is only a contingent part. Every act of literature (as McGann has argued elsewhere) is incommensurate with itself: verily, to be "literature" is to assume problematic form, to exist in a condition marked by radical resistance to closure, radical self-contradiction--to enter a kind of mystery.

More old hat. But how well in general do our teaching methods--not what we say, but the unfolding structure of what we do, writing syllabi, lecturing, leading discussions, assigning essays, devising exams--how well by these means do we normally elicit a precise and ongoing appreciation of this fact of the literary condition: of uncertainty, ever-beginning, suspension in the unresolved? My sense is, not very well. We have other pressing commitments as well: a vocabulary to teach, genre conventions, dates, traditions, history, an enormous catalog of various classifications of material to cover (as we say). All...