Earning the Right to Ask Questions: Teaching Housman's Last Poems

Earning the Right to Ask Questions: Teaching Housman's Last Poems Richard Hannaford University of Idaho In the aftermath of structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, many of us continue to struggle with what English is. Consequently, we applaud the recent English Coalition Conference's efforts to define studying literature as "democracy through language," and the focus upon "difference" as a viable response to texts (Elbow 38). Nevertheless, students often remain convinced they can discover the meaning of literary texts, that a particular meaning exists and deserves to be reified. Even students who have worked with high school teachers employing a reader-response approach confess (in my office) their suspicion that talking about their responses "really only let us randomly discuss stories and poems. I guess it was more fun than trying to psych out the teacher's ideas, but I don't think any ofus were really fooled. We wasted a lot of time. What did we know?" One freshman from my Literature ofWestern Civilization class smiled cynically about one of his classes, trying to take seriously an interpretation of a Hopkins poem "as marines landing on a Pacific island during World War I [sic!]. Tossed that one around for two days—and laughed over lunch. We knew the war came later. Teacher really praised his imagination. Stupid!" Anyone teaching humanities courses has similar anecdotes to relate, and they are significant to the degree that they illustrate the enormity as well as the challenge oftrying to initiate in the classroom what Peter Elbow reminds us we desperately need to do: "our goal must be to produce active and questioning students who inquire and make meaning rather than just receive meaning" (41). Perhaps in order to promote thinking we need to acknowledge without condescension or rancor the reality of students' limited ability to discuss literary texts from their own experience—to avoid the "stupid" waste oftime which they well understand—at the same time that we make the most of imaginative, creative impulses they do have. This does not mean reverting to an insistence upon imposed "right" or "wrong" answers to questions about a text's meaning; it means, at least in part, teaching students they have to earn the right to ask what a text means. To earn the right is more than empowering students to access and discuss their own experience and imaginative capacities, although it encompasses that kind of authoritative response. To earn the right 205 206Rocky Mountain Review requires that students engage texts not only from the "signified" contained in their personal and collective repertoires, but from an expanding perspective they can be invited to confront through a course's content. What comprises this content reveals how instructors frequently err. We believe the texts and their meaning (or meanings, if we are especially taken by multivalent voices or dialogic discourse) represent the content, whereas texts and meanings are only a means to a more critical end. The essential content ofa course, ifwe are going "to produce active and questioning students," has to be the process we inspire students to learn and apply so that texts they read today and those they go on to read can make a difference. Process defines how an informed lay reader can learn to think intelligently and creatively about a text. By emphasizing process we can reaffirm the power ofthe creative writer and promote our students' desire and capacity to respond to literature by imaginatively exploring its ideological orientation, what Bakhtin calls scrutinizing "the temporal, spatial, and assumed linguistic (ideological) purview" (Bernard-Donals 58) of textual events—the nature of the text's utterance. Bakhtin indicates that texts and reader are involved in a two-sided act for which we as readers are ultimately answerable. In such a context, we no longer desire students to react one-dimensionally to the words as others have already defined and dictated their worth. We do desire students to discover the process of being dialogic, and they can if we provide the opportunity—and the time. Time is most critical because to devote a classroom to process (however well-intentioned) can sacrifice the breadth ofreading we also want to encourage. This is true, however, only ifwe...