From Reading to Reading Literature: A Language Teaching Perspective

Fro m R ead ing to R ead ing Literature: A Language T eaching Perspective Katherine A rens Dept.of Germ anic Studies U.of Texas at A ustin M LA 2002 This discussion w illfocus on curricular developm ent: on crafting a rapprochem ent betw een the elem ents of today’s literary study in students’native language (L1) and the linguistics skills represented in typical low er-division foreign language (FL) curricula.1 O ur need to rethink this juncture -- or, in fact, to address it coherently at all-- has its ow n historicalroots. The teaching of literature from about the 1950s into the 1970s w as constructed as a largely exclusive enterprise, stressing its ow n structure of know ledge: the period, genre, and form alfeatures of w ritten texts judged to be fine art or fine w riting. Fam iliarly, the "canon w ars" of the 1980s and 1990s challenged those norm s of education, as questions about culturalauthority, reader em pow erm ent, and the ethics of hegem onic culture w ere raised. In consequence, students’ experience in studying literature at high schools and colleges shifted radically. Earlier generations w ere trained in various form s of textual exegesis,in the kinds of system atic pedagogy associated w ith N ew Criticism ("close readings," explication des textes), often form alist in inspiration. N ow , how ever, literature classroom s have shifted aw ay from such system -based “training” im peratives to classroom m anagem ent strategies stressing student-centered approaches, criticalw riting, and criticalthinking. W here poetics and linguistics once ruled as the tools to be taught to students,then,today’s classroom s focus around culturalstudies and various reader-centered approaches (the m ost 1 The core of this presentation w as delivered in a 2002 M LA w orkshop on “Integrating Language Learning and Literature Learning,” organized by the Forum for Language and Com position in Literature Teaching, Literature in Language and Com position Teaching (29 D ecem ber 2002). fam iliar of w hich appeared under the rubric of the "Pedagogy of the O ppressed," by Paolo Freire, but w hich can, arguably, encom pass even m uch current w ork in com position theory). Ileave it to others to describe the m ore detailed im pact of this scholarly shift on the classroom dedicated to “teaching literature” in students’ first or native language.2 The result seem s perhaps m uch m ore clear-cut for those of us trying to teach literatures in various languages foreign to the students (in students’first foreign language,or L2 3 ). Given that the clear rationale for including “great literature” in a secondary- or post-secondary-level curriculum has faded, or at least rem ains seriously under challenge by those seeking a redefinition of w hat m akes any piece of literature “great,” teaching FL literature seem s daunting at best, undesirable or im possible at w orst, to m any FL teaching professionals.4 The consequences are dire: FL curricula no longer have any clear m andates about the teaching of literature (w hy, how , w hen, to w hom ?), nor any clear points of connection betw een their ow n classroom practices and those represented in the teaching of L1 literatures and cultures.5 2 A forum on “W hy M ajor in Literature -- W hat D o W e TellO ur Students?” from the PM LA is am ple docum entation of that question. Les Essif says the clock is ticking on the literature m ajor, in “The Literature of Foreign Language Program s: The Road to CulturalStudies Is N ot Paved w ith Literary History .... Tick Tock ... Tick Tock . . . ,” pointing out that the teaching of literary periods m ight be passé,but that the radicalfocus on the present that seem s to be shifting departm ents’ em ploym ent patterns w illnot sufficient, either. 3 D avid Bartholom ae, in “Literacy and D epartm ents of Language and Literature,” argues from the point of view of an English departm ent that FL and English departm ents have m any of the sam e problem s, w hich em erge in both places because of cross-listing. He also notes that low er divisions have m uch in com m on. Byrnes and Kord, in “D eveloping Literacy and Literary Com petence,” talk about the literacies involve in great detail. Jean M . Fallon describes “O n Foreign Ground: O ne A ttem pt at A ttracting N on-French M ajors to a French Studies Course,” w hich fostered “m ulticulturalcollaboration” (411) and changed the clim ate, but w ithin som ething like a traditionalFrench m ajor. 4 Susan Kirkpatrick, “E Pluribus Unum ?,” points out how a departm ent unifying several foreign languages w illeven cause a loss of status for teachers,and that English m ajors that require FLs can be threatened w ith losses of num bers. M ary Louise Pratt, “W hat’s Foreign and W hat’s Fam iliar?,” also calls boundaries betw een departm ents questionable. W erner Sollors, in “Cooperation betw een English and Foreign Languages in the A rea of M ultilinguial Literature,” argues in another w ay that departm ent boundaries m ake little sense to use our students’ existing FL abilities, or to heighten aw areness of their im portance. 5 Perhaps the best source for an overview of specific teaching techniques that have been introduced to fillthis gap in the curriculum is an anthology edited by V irginia M . Scott and H olly Tucker, SLA and the Literature Classroom : Fostering D ialogues. For practical expositions, see particularly: W illiam Berg and Laurey K. M artin-Berg, “A Stylistic A pproach to Foreign Language A cquisition and Literary A nalysis”; D iana Frantzen, “Rethinking Foreign Language Literature: Tow ards an Integration of Literature and Language at A llLevels”;and Teaching Literature, 2 To suggest both how a new rapprochem ent betw een the L1 and FL curricula m ight be conceived and how a return to literature in the FL curriculum m ight be effected, the bulk of this paper is devoted to outlining how "learning to read" and "learning to read literature" can be put on a continuum , as part of the kind of constructivist and m ulti-layered approach to language and literature learning in culturalcontext that is privileged today.6 M ore specifically, Iw ant to argue here how the study of genre is a particular loss to the curriculum , since the very notion of “genre” itself can offer a fram ew ork w hich can anchor our scholarship into our pedagogies in new w ays, principally in the FL classroom , but also (at least) for the “w orld literature” w ing of the L1 curriculum . Genre can be redefined to accom m odate both older and new er form s of culturalknow ledge, foster culturaland m ulti-culturalliteracies for our students, and close the gap betw een our roles and teachers and scholars. “Pedag og y” in Literature T eaching : T he N eed to Redefine G enre The reasons for arguing the place of literature in the undergraduate curriculum are straightforw ard: literary scholarship has over the last tw o decades called traditional assum ptions about canonicity into question, but the result for the classroom has yielded few , if any,new approaches to teaching literature as anything but ideology. This is a bald statem ent, but one that needs to be m ade and considered as at least an outsider’s view of the collective enterprises of literature departm ents. M uch has been done in com position theory particularly to tie criticalreading to criticalw riting and to em pow er our students as authorized consum ers and producers of culturalknow ledge. But at the sam e tim e, in assertions like those responding to Stanley Fish’s long-hackneyed question “Is there a Text in This Class?” (the answ er Stacey Katz, “Teaching Literary Texts at the Interm ediate Level: A Structured Input A pproach.” Jean M arie Schultz, “The Gordian Knot: Language, Literature, and Critical Thinking,” underscores the need to teach the com plexity of literature as furthering com plex student learning outcom es. 6 HeidiByrnes and Susanne Kord. “D eveloping Literacy and Literary Com petence: Challenges for Foreign Language D epartm ents,” report on one departm ent’s curricular revision to include literature at alllevels. Janet Sw affar, “Reading the Patterns of Literary W orks,” offers detailed practicalapproaches to teaching literature in the FL across levels. Joanne Burnett and Teaching Literature, 3 originally given w as, “N o, only readings”), literature departm ents, L1 and FL alike have lost a m ore generous access to the specific content of literary studies. Scholars of earlier days in literary studies traditionally defined their areas of specialization in term s of period, genre, and problem s, them es, or approaches, taking the traditionalhigh canon as their m aterials of choice. Each of these im plies a specific content literacy that can be studied and taught; each suggests specific elem ents that can be incorporated into curricula designed to teach this literacy. Periodization is a fact of literary history, often defined through stylistic preferences of an epoch or group; the study of them es ties literary texts into aesthetics or other historicaldebates and can lead students m ost directly to today's ideology-driven approach to literary studies (“the other in literature”); genres w ere arguably the m ost com plicated fram ew orks for traditionalliterary studies, dealing w ith form al features of texts and artist-on-artist dialogues carried on using them . Those fram ew orks for traditionalliterary studies, and hence of traditionalL1 and FL curricula for teaching literature, have been dow ngraded as the sole hallm arks for or specializations in the “proper” study of literature.7 W hile scholars have defined for them selves new w ays of w hat it m eans to “understand literature” (and other texts), alm ost nothing has replaced those older approaches to "teaching literature,” except reader(custom er-)driven readings of “texts.” Students are encouraged to read such texts as representatives of voices deserving of being heard, but their products of their labors are often otherw ise undistinguishable from each other. Earlier generations favored poetics and aesthetics,preferences that seem ed to be allied fairly straight-forw ardly w ith the linguistics-based classroom pedagogies of the Sputnik era: each stressed patterns of form alfeatures em bedded in texts, m aking the literary w ork of art a w ell-w rought urn that exem plified artistic handling of the linguistics and sym bolic system s of Leah Fonder-Solano, “Crossing the Boundaries Betw een Literature and Pedagogy,” report on another approach to teaching FL literatures, in research on parallelFL and L1 reading courses. 7 This charge has been m ade for other reasons by the N ationalA ssociation of Scholars,w hich seceded from the M LA because of the loss of interest in the literary qualities of texts from high culture. Teaching Literature, 4 language.8 A student could therefore m ove from syntax charts to charts of other text features, w orking, for exam ple, in the N orthrop Frye m ode of m ythopoetic spaces,9 the poetic patterns of alliteration, rhym e, m eter, and sym bols, or the narrator’s point of view in prose.10 Thus w e have titles like “how to read a poem ”11 and great collections of individualinterpretations of great w orks of art that could teach individuals and scholars alike how w ell-w rought these individualw orks of art w ere.12 But now , in the post-secondary L1 literature curricula, those kinds of form alanalysis are either not taught at all, or taught only sporadically; som e secondary levelcurricula, particularly A P English, stillm ay, but there is no guarantee that the entering college student w illhave done m ore than w rite about literature they have read, not close readings. That leaves us in teaching foreign language literatures w ithout the assurance that our students have reservoirs of fam iliar activities to fallback on w hen reading unfam iliar literature. Earlier, instructors across the curriculum could assum e that students could "close read" texts. Perhaps m ore im portantly, w hen w e lost the fram ew orks for close reading, w e have also lost the security and anchor points around w hich the typicalofferings of an undergraduate literature curriculum up into the 1980s w ere often organized: com m on m odern w estern definitions of literary periods or m ovem ents and of genres. In typicalliterature curricula (both L1 and FL), m ulti-culturalim petuses have been absorbed under concepts like “Francophone w orld literature,” attem pting to “teach literature” as part of criticalliteracies of culture, especially in relation to the students’ understandings of their ow n positions w ithin US culture. How ever, in im plem enting such goals into the FL curriculum , obvious gaps em erge betw een an L1 students’ ability to assess an L1 author’s 8 The “w ell-w rought urn” refers to Cleanth Brooks and his W ell W rought U rn, w hich w as sem inalfor N ew Criticism ; the “literary w ork of art” refers to tw o titles by Rom an Ingarden about the phenom enology of reading,The Literary W ork of A rt and The Cognition of the Literary W ork of A rt, a favorite of com parative literature scholars in the late 1970s. 9 See N orthrop Frye, A natom y of Criticism . 10 See, for exam ple, the interpretations offered by Käte Ham burger in The Logic of Literature/ 11 M ost notable am ong severalbooks w ith that title is Burton Raffel, How to Read a Poem , w ritten by this Beow ulf translator. Teaching Literature, 5 position and the situation of FL students or students reading about culturalpositions very different from their ow n (including positions from other historicaltim es). These students lack m uch practicalinform ation about everyday life in the countries or eras they study, quite aside from connections from the high culture represented in the literature w e m ight stillprefer to teach. In this w ay, even m ulti-culturalim petuses from the L1 curriculum seem to be unreachable goals for the literature curriculum , because w e do not have clear pedagogical fram ew orks for their im plem entation into sequences of learning tasks. Teachers can lecture about m issing culturalinform ation, but providing such facts does not necessarily augm ent students’independent abilities to read such texts on their ow n. In fact,such lectures m ay only increase the distance betw een students and such readings,because they w illbe tem pted to attribute an expert know ledge to the teacher that w ould,in essence,be unreachable to them . The situation is particularly dire for the teaching of literature in today’s curricular contexts. W hile scholarship has identified a plethora of new them es to teach using literature and other kinds of texts (including various film genres), w e have not rethought traditional categories for teaching literature w ith culturalstudies im petuses in m ind (periods defined through style, them es relating to structures of literature). N or has there been an attem pt by culturalstudies scholars in literature to reclaim specific established and extended patterns of com m unication w ithin culturalcontexts -- as genres. Thus w e do not have new pedagogies for teaching periods or genres, let alone fuller versions of culturalliteracies, in structured approaches to student learning and classroom practice. The stakes are high in this om ission. Rem edying it is a crucialgesture for the future of literary studies in either L1 or FL contexts, since w ithout identifying specific form s of understanding to the levelof system ic im portance in the study of literature, there are few (if any) distinguishing features betw een w hat is done in literary studies than w hat is done in culturalhistory or the kind of culturalstudies allied to ethnic studies or even m ass com m unication studies. W hile the average “literature” curriculum has expanded the variety of 12 The literature of N ew Criticism is vast, but sem inalw ere W illiam K. W im satt, THe V erbal Teaching Literature, 6 texts used in classroom s, scholars of literature have not even considered a redefinition of w hat textuality itself m ight m ean for the classroom or for other purposes that set it apart from the other hum anities. Thus in m any senses, today’s literary scholarship has betrayed its m ost cherished objects rather than bringing the idea of teaching literature into a new phase. The new undergraduate literature curriculum has, m ore sim ply said, not bridged betw een new kinds of textualstudies and culturalstudies in any system atic w ay, certainly not in w ays that could ground the system atic pedagogy of a curriculum . Teachers of literature have not figured out how linguistic/rhetoricalm arkers can be taught as bridges betw een text structures and their culturalm eaning -- w hat w ould supplem ent, if not supplant, traditionalskills of close reading. In particular, literary scholarship has not reconfigured its ow n m odels of textuality system atically, to redefine for its students the structures of texts (w ell-w rought urns or not) as discourse genres, as a specific culture’s patterned uses of language in use in specific com m unication environm ents.13 A com pendium of such discourse genres,as form s fam iliar to particular culturalsites, w ould include not only w ritten, but also oral/auraland electronic m edia “text” form s; the definitions of these genres w ould provide specific guidance about their purpose, sociology, form , and content (allsituated w ithin specific culturalcontexts -- the “rom ance novel” is not the sam e in the United States as it is in Germ any) to novices w ho w anted to approach the studies of texts in culturalcontexts (arguably, our new fiat for “teaching literature”). A t the sam e tim e, such definitions could provide a clear, central teaching aid w hich w ould give specific technicalunity to the study of texts of allkinds, com m unication strategies, and their sociology. “Studying genres” w ould, in this redefinition, m ean that students w ould learn to identify the psycho-sem iotic concerns through w hich individuals gain agency through com m unication, learn the identity positions in a culture, or are legislated into specific socialroles w ithin a culture. These concerns w ould, in turn, be correlated w ith system atic elem ents of textuality, not just as free-floating ideologies. Icon, Em il Staiger, D ie Kunst der Interpretation, W olfgang Kayser, D as sprachliche Kunstw erk. 13 The term com es from Tzvetan Todorov,w ho uses it in the title of his Genres in D iscourse. Teaching Literature, 7 How can, then, traditionalliterary studies be articulated w ith these proposed studies of discourse genres? R ed efining G enre The answ er to this question requires, first and forem ost, a return to the roots of “genre theory” in the W est. Since A ristotle, a huge superstructure for aesthetics w as put into place that defined art texts as functioning in various m ode, epic, lyric, and dram atic --, w hose core identities are conceived roughly as follow s, no m atter how the details of individualaesthetics program s’ definitions of specific genres m ay vary: E P IC L Y R IC D R A M A T IC H istorical (-ist) Story-telling m usical (I sing) expressive (praise, pain, scorn) dialogue/m onologue situations in progress 3 rd p erso n panoram ic telling Illiad/O dyssey 1 st p erso n situated utterances odes, lyric poetry, etc. 2 nd p erso n scenes show ing tragedy = Euripides Com edy = A ristophenes It is not the place here to debate this basic fram ew ork, or the history of aesthetics. This chart is only intended to point to core distinctions that are preserved across m any variations of genre theory -- distinctions at the root of m ost genre theories. From the Renaissance on, as literature w as cultivated in progressively m ore rarified high culture form s, these m odes of expression, these classicalgenre distinctions, w ere cultivated as specific form s of literature privileged in a particular cultures, from Petrarchan sonnets, H om erian epic, to Shakespearean tragedies. “A ristotles’ poetics” w as the reference point for m any discussions about the m erits of these form s, the authority against w hich specific realizations of genre w ere discussed. W hile the historically attested socialuses of genre patterns are clear for Europe’s and European-derived high culture, how m any form s of texts recognized in today’s curricula function socially and cognitively as com m unication is less so,since they cannot be referenced to Teaching Literature, 8 A ristotle. This is not, how ever, a new situation, given that one of the longest-running aesthetic problem s surrounding genre w as the justification of “prose” w ithin a tripartite genre schem e that did not,at first glance,accom m odate it:prose had difficulty in being accepted in early m odern Europe, since it w as epic in disposition, but not in its poetic form . In m any cases, prose genres becam e step-children,considered as a m ixed genre w ithout the sam e provenance enjoyed by its m ore canonicalsiblings. W hen m iddle-class readers rose starting in the eighteenth century,the novel’s popularity freed it from utter dependence on this m odeland started considerations of the novelas a valid form of culturalcom m unication in and of itself. Such aesthetic debates about literary form seem dated,but genres w ere used to organize parts of the literary studies curriculum w ellinto the 1960s and 70s: courses in “the novel,” “lyric poetry,” and “tragedy” rem ained m ainstays of the English and FL m ajors alike. These debates’em beddedness in the W est and its canonicaltraditions have helped to cast the study of genre under suspicion, since espousing this tradition of defining genres tends to define “fine literature” norm atively in W estern form s. In consequence, “non-canonical” genres like Russian folk songs or story cycles like the A rabian nights can too easily be m arginalized, as can other form s of texts m ore associated w ith popular culture (despite their levelof artistry), such as Japanese anim ated film s. That realization about m arginalization of non-W estern literary heritages is by no m eans new : early tw entieth-century scholars of Russian literature, for exam ple, already sought other m arkers of “literariness” -- a m ajor part of the poetic projects of Russian Form alists since Boris M . Eikhbaum and subsequent generations of PragueSchool-derived poetics,through Rom an Ingarden and Tzvetan Todorov.14 They w ere specifically interested in valorizing genres that had no w estern European precedents,the poetics of nonW estern genres, especially those at hom e in Slavic Languages. Today’s post-colonialtheorists m ake that charge in other w ays. N o m atter their cultivation,poetics and the study of genre appear as extensions of upper-class taste and the im posed pow er of that taste. 14 See again Ingarden; Todorov,The Fantastic; the standard collection is PaulL. Garvin, ed. THe Prague SchoolReader. Teaching Literature, 9 The heritors of this form alist legacy, especially Tzvetan Todorov, can stilltoday serve to show us the w ay out of such dilem m as. “Genre” in the m ore m odern sense of a discourse genre is a “functionalentity” w ithin society w ithout any necessary structuralcorrelate (Todorov, 2). This m eans that genres can m ore profitably be studied as conventionalform s of expression w ithin discrete culturalcom m unities. Each of these form s w illvary according to the tim e and spaces in w hich they are used; each serves w ithin a specific fram ew ork of defined social purposes. That is, genres are m ore than the form alstructures that the traditionalW estern discussion of epic, lyric, and dram atic m odes have led us to believe. Even w hen traditional aesthetic discussions w ere at their height in the early nineteenth century, the relations betw een genres as specific form s and these epic-lyric-dram atic m odes w as up for heated debate, particularly since, as the nineteenth century proceeded, that undefined entity “prose” becam e for m ost audiences the dom inant literary form , if not that alw ays preferred in high culture. W hile prose narratives exist in the W est at least since Rom an tim es, the m odern sense of “prose” arose in no sm allcorrelation w ith new form s of w ritten text production and dissem ination15 rather than from the oralperform ance grounding the genres m ore fam iliar to A ristotle’s tim e.16 W ithout a culture of scriptoria or print, poetry, especially m etered and rhym ed poetry,em erges to the forefront of group interest as part of oralperform ance. A s A lbert Lord’s Singer of Tales long ago argued,m etered,form ulaic verse contributes to m aking the verse m em orable. That longer verse w as connected w ith oralperform ance gives us a new vision of w hat this kind of verse m eant as a discourse genre --as a text form that is m ore than just s form alism , but rather a patterns of com m unication that functions as a horizon of expectation betw een perform er and listeners,a know n socialcontract of the era. A llspecific historicalappearances of genres in the epic, lyric, and dram atic m odes function in the sam e w ay. W hile each era’s form of dram a differs, for exam ple, the specific 15 For the classic statem ent,see Ian W att, The Rise of the Novel. Teaching Literature, 10 contract betw een perform ers and audience that is a horizon of expectation in the dram atic m ode w illalw ays involve certain patterns that differ from the epic story-telling that characterizes epic poem s like the Illiad and that, later, is taken up again as a possible description for new ly em erging prose form s. The m ode is dram atic w hen perform ance of dialogues is involved; w hether the individualperform ance is a three-act play, a five-act tragedy, or a farce, and the specific form each assum es, depends on a historicalperiod an on its particular horizon of expectations, including the stylistic values it particularly values. Each “genre” is, therefore, part of a culture’s norm s of com m unication,17 a site of culturalproduction based on patterns of com m unication and conventions that constitute acknow ledged form s of literacy w ithin that horizon. W hen the traditionalm odes of epic, lyric, and dram atic becom e reified as genres in specific tim es and places,then,each is a specific pattern of com m unication. That pattern is part of its culture’s horizon of expectation about its form s of com m unication, a horizon w hich includes issues like: -the status of w riter/speaker and reader/listener -a genre’s m echanism s of being public (publication, perform ance) -com m unity expectations (w here, w hen, and how the com m unication is “appropriate”) -socialrole of each genre (high culture, like tragedy, or everyday, like ordinary conversations or “bread-and-butter notes”) -narrative strategies (is it told in the first or third person; perform ed in the present or told about in the past; represented as being “real” or as originating from an individual voice) -m ateriality of the w ritten w ord and its distribution (is it m em orized and recited; printed in expensive books or inexpensive broadsheets; included in lending libraries). The W estern tradition of genre has created the illusion that the study of genre m ust be a study of high art -- of the genres favored by the literature elite of a culture. Yet it is equally at least as 16 Parallelsituations exist for Don Q uixote, at the crux of this developm ent -- the novelw as printed, but w as m ore fam iliar to the generalpublic from various popular perform ance genres, including broadsheets. 17 Todorov exem plified this in another w ay in Genres in D iscourse, Teaching Literature, 11 correct, in the sense of m odern discourse analysis, to consider allsuch form alized norm s of com m unication as discourse genres. If there is to be a new “genre theory,” it m ust include all kind of form alized com m unication patterns that exist w ithin a culture, from the m eeting and greeting rituals of everyday life allthe w ay up through the form s of “literature” proper cultivated by an elite. Each such form ,how ever,m ust be described as an act of com m unication in m aterialspace, not just as a pattern of w ords.18 O ver the last century, literature proper has indeed been cultivated in the form of a lim ited num ber of genres, as part of elite or “high” culture; this elite literacy has had the socialfunction of identifying elite socialcom m unities through a set of usages that had to be m astered as part of high-status and high-register culturalcom m unication norm s, part of the dom inant culture. In turn, a specific literary scholarship em erged to describe the intricate form s of that literacy. From their perspective -- the perspective of literary studies before the canon w ars --, the status of other spoken, w ritten, or m edialized genres w as considerably less hegem onic. Film s, folk ballads, rapping, or other popular form s of com m unication em erged after the canon w ars as equivalent parts of a culture’s horizon of expectation -- albeit m ore m arginalized ones that scholars are now trying to recover in different w ays. This is the insight that a new genre studies m ay rest on: even less hegem onic form s of culturalcom m unication, if they play recognized com m unicative roles w ithin a culture’s horizon of expectation,allneed to be considered genres. Each genre,new or old,rem ains part of the m aterialities of com m unication in the era, are attached to specific com m unication groups w ithin the larger com m unity, and have specific “obligatory m oves” that are part of their form al descriptions,as patterns that m em bers of the com m unity recognize as their ow n,and use as part of their ow n perform ance of identity. From the point of view of traditionalliteracy studies, the redefinitions of genre that are required to accom m odate these less traditionalculturalform s are straightforw ard. From this 18 In another heuristic that w ould allow one to rethink genre m ore explicitly as a cultural literacy, the Standards for Foreign Language Teaching identify under rubrics like “culture, Teaching Literature, 12 perspective,“genre” can be redefined as a set of com m unication conventions,encom passing (as in the list above) a specific know ledge about w ho can speak,w rite,or com m unicate using that form ,w ith w hat status,how and w here,and about w hat topics. To com plete the redefinition of literary studies, the culture’s “horizon of expectation” about such acts of com m unication can constructively be defined as the horizon of expectation of a historicalera or “period” of culture -- the set of issues highlighted for a specific group, and the language-based conventions preferred to dealw ith them . Finally, the aesthetic "m ovem ents" so cherished by traditional literary scholarship can be defined as linguistic-stylistic or cultural-philosophicalprogram s used to justify very specific speech acts w ithin a given culturalcontext, privileging certain language or topic m arkers -- they are aesthetic ideologies applied to the generalculture’s horizon of expectation to define certain elite com m unication gestures. In these redefinitions of traditionalcategories of literary know ledge, w e can find a new bridge betw een the teaching of language in its new er form s and the teaching of literature. “Teaching literature,” as the canon w ars have told us need not be associated w ith the dom inant culture’s norm s. Taking literature as one subset of the discourse genres of a horizon of expectation in a culture,one can then extend the definition of genre to include various m ateralities and literacies of com m unication, in allits form s. “Teaching language,” “teaching culture,” and “teaching genres” becom e three faces of w hat m ust be seen as essentially one activity -- teaching patterns of com m unication in their m aterialand culturalcontexts, as m arks of m em bership in a culture. “Teaching genre,” therefore, involves teaching students how to learn language w ith specific reference to elem ents of the com m unication situation in w hich each genre is involved, as those elem ents becom e form alized into patterns -- literary or otherw ise. The kind of culturalliteracy that has now been identified as crucialfor both language learning and the study of literature thus im plicates students’ ability to com prehend, create,m aintain,or negotiate the specialized discourses that are being defined here as genres. A nd thus literature, alongside other com plex genre form alizations of a culture, need to form com m unication, com m unities . . .” the various kinds of know ledge w ithin a culture’s “horizon of Teaching Literature, 13 part of a language-learning curriculum , as exam ples of those patterns of socialcom m unication w hich are consciously set apart from "ordinary" ones, but w hich actually represent extensions of the m ore fam iliar genres of everyday com m unication. Prep aring to T each N ew G enres: Fro m D efinitio ns to C urricula Teaching literature by teaching genres in this w ay w illrequire a redefinition of w hat it m eans to learn any genres. Rem em ber that, in this redefinition, genres are not only form alism s that are based on specific linguistic form s (tw elve stresses per line, iam bic pentam eter, three acts, or the like). The Birm ingham School19 can help us in expanding that notion of cultural literacy (here, the literacy of a culture’s discourse genres) by stressing that genre is not just a function of high culture, since allgroups and subgroups, cultures and subcultures operate w ith such form s of com m unication. To be sure, in the W est, reading literature constitutes a particular kind of high culture literacy. Yet other patterns of literacy can be cultivated by particular groups, oppositionalor otherw ise. For exam ple: graphic novels appealto one subgroup of readers, in a variant of m ass m arket printing; film s, in turn, often take on the m ass m arket to sim ilar ends. Rap m usic, epic poetry, sports reports, or com edy-variety show s on TV -- each is a genre that is historically attested in a culturalera, part of that era’s horizon of expectation for com m unication. Each reader/hearer/consum er proves him - or herself a m em ber of that com m unity by understanding how such narrative or language acts are structured, w hat status they have,w hat m echanism s and m edia they occupy and w hich dissem inates them ,and w hat the expectation” that could be used to define each genre. 19 For an exam ple of the Birm ingham School’s approach, see Stuart Halland Tony Jefferson, eds.,Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-W ar Britain. The im portance of such culturalliteracy in fluency has also been established in FL reading. See, for exam ple, the classic study by Steffensen et al., “A Cross-CulturalPerspective on Reading Com prehension,” w hich show s the influence of culturalknow ledge on the correct interpretation of texts (in this case, a report on a w edding. V irginia M . Scott and Julie A . Huntington. “Reading Culture: Using Literature to Develop C2 Com petence,” found that students w ho learned about the Ivory Coast from a poem show ed richer,less stereotyped understanding than those w ho learned it from fact sheet (622). D avid A . W right, “Culture as Inform ation and Culture as A ffective Process,” m akes a sim ilar chase for understanding culture m ore com prehensively. Teaching Literature, 14 details are of various valuative debates about the role and value of each in the com m unity. Certain genres becom e identified w ith distinct user groups; certain genres becom e associated w ith certain them es and socialfunctions w ithin their ow n historicalcontexts (such as w hen, in the late 1960s, folk m usic becam e alm ost identicalw ith protest m usic, or w hen the “m ovie of the w eek” on TV in the 1980s becam e,as m any of the audience knew ,the “disease of the w eek” m ovie). To take a m ore form alexam ple: the novelhas had very parallelform s for over a hundred years. Yet the eighteenth-century novelthroughout Europe often advocates for social structures acknow ledging hum an rights and new definitions of hum an values, in an era w here new class form ations w ere developing; the nineteenth-century novelspecializes in hum an interest and justice stories, interested in the self-actualization of hum ans, especially of w om en and the m arginalized classes. Finally, m ost tw entieth-century novels in the W estern canon stress psychology and perception, not epics. Yet allare novels, w ith roughly parallel econom ics,author status,and sociologicalvalues. A nd once one becom es a reader of novels,each century’s details of focus are accessible -- one literary form takes on different them atics in different culturallocuses, and hence play som ew hat different ideologicalfunctions in the European cultures. This shift betw een a genre’s form , its specific culturaluses, and the them es w hich its com m unication com m unity uses becom e the key question for teaching the culturalliteracy of genres. Described as sophisticated patterns of culturalliteracy, the task seem s daunting, not possible w ithin the average literature curriculum , let alone in a FL curriculum . Yet the assum ption that this is too difficult for the adult readers m et by teachers in college classroom s is sim ply erroneous: they are already readers of novels, w atchers of soap operas, fluent com m unicators in conversations of various sorts. Thus the actualproblem for teaching is to identify w hat the elem ents of such genre literacy -- the building blocks of learning form alized patterns of genres. The goalin so doing is to help learners get used to recognizing and dealing w ith genre form alizations, beyond the sim ple literacy of the “correct sentence” or “correct Teaching Literature, 15 paragraph” that has been the norm of alltoo m uch reading and w riting in the FLs up to this point. Students m ust learn to m ove from the “w ho, w hat, w here, w hen” of ordinary texts, to the specific discipline of genres -- their form s, contents, socialpositions and purposes. The toolto m ake that bridge is a single equation: each genre -- high or popular --is a stylized or extended pattern of com m unication in a particular m edium , and thus straightforw ardly connected w ith basic linguistic and/or sem iotic com ponents (albeit often w ith very com plex collocations of such basic linguistic facts). The dom inant linguistic/sem iotic m arkers for each genre are different,not in the least because of the different com m unication m edia and social conventions involved, and each of these "linguistic elem ents" has a technicaldescription (in linguistics, studies of film sem iotics, poetics, or m ass com m unication studies). Thus to teach literature m eans to teach advanced form s of literacy -- to teach the form alized structures of com m unication recognizable as genres w ithin a culture’s horizon of expectation. For readers to turn into com petent readers of a genre, that reader m ust learn, in stages,to approach both its language,its culturalcontext and purposes,and its reference of contexts. Said m ore abstractly,that reader m ust enter into the horizon of expectation of a culture, into the cognitive and expressive w orlds of the culture’s "usual" novel, conversation, play, or poem . W hat needs to be learned, autom atized, are the linguistic, cultural, and pattern dom inants of each genre. A llgenres dealw ith narration on one levelor another -- as perform ed in the here and now (as a conversation or play), as a retrospective narrative (various prose form s), as a series of events and their hearer/readers’ concom itant reactions (lyric poetry, song lyrics). In this sense, any genre has,as its cognitive foundation,som e configuration of “w ho,w hat, w here, and w hen.” Yet each specific genre also has its ow n distinctive form alization: a pattern that distinguishes it from the other genres at play in its culturalcontext. To offer an exam ple: the basic patterns of culturaland linguistic know ledge defining the genres of high culture can be sum m arized straight-forw ardly, as basic patterns of cultural Teaching Literature, 16 know ledge, logic, and linguistic m arkers that define the genres w ithin a group’s horizon of expectation: . G enre Fo rm alizatio ns w ithin the H o rizo n o f Exp ectatio n fo r H ig h -P ro file C u ltu ra l F o rm s FOR A NOVEL: Setting: narrated details, purported reality behind Character: gender, status, com m unication norm s Plots: problem s, m arkers of language, tim eline N arrative point of view : narrative as logic pattern (before, after, because, etc) . FO R D RA M A : Setting: tim e held constant, or at least linear/clearly m arked Character: conversation, perform atives, dialogues, behavioralnorm s Conflict/resolution structures (logicalrelationships betw een scenes) Conversationalnorm s for various sociologicalgroups Conventionalact structures (3- and 5-act form s, etc.) A cceptable plots (tragedy and fate, dow nfalls, m oralcensure, for exam ple) FO R PO ETRY: Epic: form alstory-telling connections, represented stereotypes and scene figures Lyric: gram m ar/m ind links to PO V of a speaking subject General: norm /deviance/patterns of usage (sem antics, syntax, figures, dictionaries) FO R FILM : Setting: w ho w hat w here w hen -- visualand verbal Character: gender, status, com m unication norm s Plots: problem s, m arkers transition (cuts, dissolves), tim eline V isuallogic and point of view : cam era focus, depth of field, fram ing, lighting, soundtrack Sound and spatiallogics: foregrounding,backgrounding,cutting strategies and effects FO R A D V ERTISIN G: V isualsem antics as correlate to verbalsem antics This chart sum m arizes elem ents defining of genres, the key to their individualacts of com m unication. Each has characteristic language m arkers and patterns, its specific stylistic and form alpatterns, and its specific patterns of culturalreference and appeal. N ovels traditionally exploit their setting and narrative points of view ; they exploit degrees of realism , be they psychologicalor referential. D ram as, in contrast, are structured principally around characters and their interactions, w ith setting less im portant in and of itself (in a dram a w ritten for the proscenium stage, w ith its distinct lim itations on scenery, setting acts sim ply Teaching Literature, 17 as a logicalconnection). Poetry has m any form s: epic tells story in m eter, w hile lyric expresses individuality. A llpoetry, how ever, deform s standard language into poetic language,20 and thus m anipulate standard expectations about usage. Film shares the narrative realism of m any kinds of novels, but w ith the additionalability to tella story on severalthreads at once: not only through the verbalplaybook, but also through visuals and the soundtrack, allof w hich can be m anipulated fairly independently of each other. W hat characters say to each other can be contradicted by the visualsettings in w hich utterances are m ade;the soundtrack m ay contradict both of them . A dvertising, in contrast, m ust generally have visuals and verbals that support each other, or confusion m ay easily result. Taking these definitions of genre as form alized patterns of com m unication or discourse opens up profoundly im portant teaching strategies. Learning these “genres” becom es not a m atter of high culture preference, but of a deeper kind of culturalliteracy, stressing how the learner m ust use these patterns to tap into various literacies inherent in the culture’s horizons of expectation. M ore im portantly, defining genres as system atic discourse genres w ithin a com m unicative fram ew ork opens up a strategy to solve one of the m ost vexing problem s of the undergraduate curriculum : the w ell-acknow ledged disconnects betw een low er and upper division FL courses, and betw een w riting and content courses in English. D ivisions or program s in rhetoric and com position have the m ission of “teaching w riting” to the in-com ing college freshm en and m ay even “teach w riting about literature” to sophom ores. But such courses’ focus in such activities is alltoo often the w riter’s ow n literacy, the m echanics and ethics of self-expression, rather than a m ove out of one’s ow n horizon of expectation into that of a particular culturallocus. That is, the w riting that results focuses on itself, not as part of a m ore generalculturalliteracy, or as addressed to the specific literacies of the genres (as outlined above). That divide betw een “w riting” and “w riting for specific purposes” like literature only gets w orse w hen, for adm inistrative reasons, rhetoric and com position teaching is rem oved from the purview of the English departm ent proper. That 20 The term refers to an essay by Jan M ukarovsky,“Standard Language and Poetic Language.” Teaching Literature, 18 rem ovaldoes indeed solve certain curricular problem s, since in these cases the low er division w riting curriculum no longer has to even pretend that it can be synchronized w ith the dem ands of the literature m ajor. How ever, such an adm inistrative solution also puts the rhetoric and com position program into a position equivalent to that of low er-division L2 program s: as essentially rem oved from the high-status content of the m ajor. In both cases,there has been no practice of reconciling the content of the curriculum across this divide: the student considered to be a potentialm ajor is presum ed to have to “w rite w ellenough” or “have enough ability in the FL” before reaching the content areas of the m ajor. Continued acceptance of this disjunction w ill,how ever,cost departm ents of m odern literatures and cultures dearly, since such divisions isolate students’ w riting or basic language com petence from culturalliteracy, especially from the kinds of criticalliteracy, critical thinking, and criticalw riting that are now valued as counterm easures to traditionalcanonicity. W ithout learning such system atic approaches to literacy rather than to w riting or criticism divorced from the m ore generalquestion of culturalliteracy, students w illnot be able to em pow er them selves as w riters and speakers w ithin a culturalcontext, because that em pow erm ent requires the ability to read and com prehend that context critically. A llacts of com m unication w ithin such a context that are fam iliar to the com m unity are parts of that literacy, parts of the culture’s horizon of expectation. Each such act of com m unication has a specific pattern of w here and w hen it is appropriately enacted, by w hom , w hat is in it, and how it is to be m arked. M ore crucially, this definition of genre offers a w ay around the "divide and conquer" m entality of today’s curriculum -- the assum ption that one levelof the curriculum can be isolated from another. The study of basic patterns leads up to a m ore detailed know ledge of socio-culturalpractices -- the study of genre, therefore, like that of allother linguistic practices, m ust be developm ental. Teaching and learning the elem ents of these acts of com m unication,therefore,m ust be staged across levels w ithin the classroom . included in Garvin, ed., A Prague SchoolReader. Teaching Literature, 19 S tag es in Learning G enres “Staging” learning, in this sense, requires the establishm ent of an accountability hierarchy,a set of stages through w hich a student’s learning is to progress,stages to w hich both the student and the program can be held accountable. Those stages are straightforw ardly defined through attention to how the specific form alism s of genres are built up from the individual elem ents of com m unication. In gross term s, there are three levels that students w illhave to negotiate as they learn to “read genres” in the culturally literate sense: an initialstage, in w hich the principle organizing elem ents w ithin a genre are introduced as significant data points for students to attend to and build into system s; a genre stage w hose focus is establishing the patterns on w hich individualgenres rest and w hich are defined as the obligatory m oves in their com m unication patterns; and finally, w hat Piaget m ight calla “form aloperation” phase, beyond a learner’s ability to read or enact single exam ples of genre fluently, w here the abstract, form alrules and issues around genre can be discussed in m ore professionalterm s. These levels m ay be sum m arized as follow s: ST A G ES O F T EA C H IN G LIT ERA T U RE (e.g. after the first 1000 w ords in a FL course, after generalreading for gist in basic English courses) S T A G E 1 : Learning Patterns in C o ntext (lo w e r-d ivisio n o r in tro d u cto ry co u rse s) TEXTS TO ESTA BLISH CO N TEXT: longer prose, film , dram a, poetry; film O RGA NIZERS TO LEA RN: longer-arc structures (form ); issues anchoring an era’s concerns (content) -GEN ERA L STO RY/N A RRA TIV E M A RKERS: gram m ar/syntax m arking w ho, w hat, w here, w hen -CULTURA L M A RKERS: facts, them es/concerns, institutions -FIRST G EN RE M A RK ERS: Gram m ar M arkers: norm aluses versus “literary” uses as patterns of norm /deviance PO V -- conversations, verbal, visual, sem antic and syntax m arkers Story gram m ars: action/rhythm s, behavior clues PRIM A RY LEA RN IN G GO A L: learners’ m astery of organizers around w hich single texts are built PRO TO TYPE TA SKS: -follow one or m ore patterns running through a discourse genre, to trace its system and see w hat the long arc does to the culturaland language m aterialof individualparts. Teaching Literature, 20 -enact one kind of com m unication in its correct register, w ith correct language and cultural m arkers ST A G E 2 : Reading D iscourse G enres (u p p e r d ivisio n , sp e cialty o r m ajo r co u rse s) TEXTS: pairs or longer series of texts in particular genres, read against m aterials on the historicalsetting of each O RGA N IZERS TO M A STER: -Typologies of or standard strategies for storytelling -Specific form alpatterns defining genres (e.g. three-act or five-act plays, 14-line sonnets, “realist” narrators). -Institutionaland m aterialconditions through w hich these norm s becom e fam iliar, and their effects (e.g. chapter length for serialnovels) LEA RN IN G GO A LS: Building com m unities of genre readers, fam iliar w ith the aesthetic and culturalm arkers that m ark genres as part of culturalproduction, in various locuses (high or popular culture, form alor inform alconversations, business letters versus “bread-and-butter” notes) PRO TO TYPE TA SKS: -com pare tw o versions of one genre, in light of the "prototype" for the genre (e.g. D on Q uixote as a picaresque novel; The Bell Jar as prototype fem inist novel; playing m aster of cerem onies at a prize gathering, or at a roast) -perform an act of com m unication in m ore than one w ay (e.g.one popular,and one form al) S T A G E 3 : T heo ries o f/Fo rm al D escrip tio ns o f G enre (cap sto ne sem inar fo r m ajo rs; g rad uate stud ies) TEXTS: prim ary literature as above; secondary literature and reference m aterials O RGA N IZERS TO M A STER: -technicalvocabulary describing system s, as key to organization of know ledge in the field (e.g. bibliographies and reference books). LEA RNING GO A LS: -learning to negotiate problem s and ethics of cultural/literary/genre studies, social stratification -study of the socialuses of literature and patterns of exclusion using artificial distinctions as value structures -access to technicaldiscussions am ong experts,and expert know ledge. PRO TO TYPE TA SK: -Critique the poles in a professionaldebate -Bring a prim ary and a secondary text to bear on each other This chart defines in very loose term s w hat m ust be the goals for these three m ajor stages in the conventionalundergraduate curriculum . The first elem ent in the entry for each state states w hat kinds of “texts” need to be integrated into a curriculum , if the curriculum ’s goalis to produce students w ho are culturally literate readers of text genres, com prehenders of film s, audio, or the interactions com m on to socialform s. Criticalfor such culturalliteracy in the first stage of learning to read literature Teaching Literature, 21 is that the learner is forced to account for discourse patterns that extend over longer sequences: scenes,not individualdialogues; books,not short stories; speeches,not responses. In the second stage,texts m ust be considered in sets -- as tokens of know n cultural discourse types that “native speakers” or com prehenders know to associate w ith each other. Readers w ithin their ow n cultures alm ost autom atically reference soap operas against each other, as they do conversations, film s, and speeches. Finally, in a capstone literacy -- a literacy of high culture, or of professionalgroups --, the m eta-discourses about discourse genres com e into play: the culturalstereotypes about how culturalform s are used,w hat they revealabout the status of their users, w hat culturalpurposes they serve. Thus “secondary literature” such as popular or scholarly review s, scholarly discourses, and the like, m ust be considered in relation to the discourse genres they evaluate, qualify, or m anage. This is the criticalculturalliteracy desired by those w ho have over the last decades challenged canonicity and its culturalpurposes. In each stage,the second listing is a set of “organizers to m aster”: system s or patterns w hich lead individualreaders, w riters, or speakers to the kind of understanding necessary at that level. In the first stage,learners m ust see w hat elem ents of texts can be com bined into patterns of m eaning -- individualpoints of gram m ar, narrative point of view , behaviors, them es, clothing or space descriptions, and the like. That is, the m ass of largely unarticulated data m ust be sorted into categories,and understood as patterns by the reader/hearer w ho m ay achieve a degree of socialliteracy. A t the second stage,that generalsense of pattern at w ork in individualtexts (novels, film s, conversations, letters) m ust be given m ore contour, especially by decisions about hw at point of view that the texts m ay be considered from (as aesthetic objects,as exam ples of culturalnorm s and values, as exam ples of successfulor unsuccessfulsocialacts). Texts m ust therefore be com pared w ith each other,and w ith the perform ance norm s that the culture uses to decide them . The “O rganizers to M aster” in the third stage are correspondingly m ore com plex: Teaching Literature, 22 not only the norm s against w hich discourse genres are evaluated need to be considered,but also the socialuses (professional, class-bound, regional) to w hich these norm s are applied. Thus each stage has its ow n learning goals,as w ellas a typicalset of tasks that could be used to assess that com petence. For the first stage,a learner m ust be able to generate a “reading” of a text or film , a successfulperform ance of a conversation, speech, or act of letter w riting. For the second, that learner m ust have m astered, alm ost to the point of routine or autom aticity, how to build patterns of m eaning from various patterns of textualliteracy, so that s/he can m ove to m ake generalizations about discourse genres. W hat distinguishes a successful speech from an unsuccessfulone; an artistic novelfrom a popular one; a m ass-m arket film from an art film ? O r m ore sim ply: w hich text w ould please a m ale audience m ore than a fem ale one; a youthfulaudience from an older one; an upper class reader from a w orking class one? In the third stage, the learners m ove from such sim ple com parisons to m ore com plex argum ents about culturalnorm s -- about how specific text types, discourse genres, and com m unicative acts are m anaged, evaluated, and circulated as reflections of culturalvalues. This chart, then, sum m arizes a set of curricular benchm arks for a learning sequence specifically tailored tow ard teaching literature. In m ost curricula today, literature is approached as culturalstudies -- as related to social, political, and culturalconcerns, not to aesthetic or form a ones,as is suggested here. M oreover,the chart is not a tem plate for any particular curriculum , since w hat genres w illbe studied differs for various student bodies, w ithin the confines of varying institution types, and w ith respect to resources and background literacy of the learners them selves. This chart sim ply sum m arizes the generaldegrees of com petency for learners w ho w illbe m oved to a culturalliteracy of genre by the end of four or m ore years of study. In allcases, the individuallearner m ust m ove from being a com petent reader of a single text,to taking each text type or discourse genre as a token in term s of the type they represent (com parison of tokens against each other), and then, finally, to analyzing both the tokens and their types as artifacts of their cultures, in proper technicalvocabularies. These learners m ove from building blocks, to patterns, to evaluations of literacy patterns. Teaching Literature, 23 C o nclusio ns: A Literacy C urriculum fo r G enre S tud y This discussion has argued that it is not only possible,but necessary to put the question of reading literature on a continuum w ith other kinds of genre know ledge, w ith genres defined as discourse genres -- form alizations that function w ithin a culture’s horizon of expectation, guiding com prehension and production alike. These kinds of form allearning need to be accom m odated at every stage of a curriculum , as part of the fundam entalculturalliteracies inherent in a culture. Since the study of literary genres has m ore or less disappeared from the secondary schoolcurriculum , such a reconceptualization of genres is a key to integrating the teaching and learning of fundam entalliteracy skills into a continuum that can lead to the study of literature and other high-status culturalform s. The discussion has to this point elided differences betw een the generalliterature curriculum and the specifics of teaching FL literature. That choice is conscious, because the sam e fram ew ork of understanding the literacy of discourse genres w illapply equally to FL fram ew orks, albeit w ith a stronger reliance on the cognitive staging of these stages of learning, in order to anchor students’ w eaker language abilities. In both fram ew orks, learners need to see explicity how to approach longer texts (prose, film ), and stylized ones (dram a, poetry), through the system s of m eaning that operate in them . For longer prose stories,students have to learn tactics to orient them selves in unfam iliar situations, historicaleras, and narrative logics. They can thus learn to use advance organizers, preview ing the “w ho, w hat, w here, w hen” that set the stage for a story,and then w orking to build up patterns in the text. How are episodes m arked? Shifts of tense, of place? Explicit tim e m arkers (“tw o w eeks later,” “subsequently”)? H ow are narrative elem ents like clothes, places, characters’ actions, or events strung together in larger chains of m eaning? A t the sam e tim e,how ever,one cannot stop w ith prose,if one is teaching the literacy of literature, in addition to that of other high-culture form s. Poetry -- including rap and song lyrics --, for exam ple, is fam iliar to expert readers as m anipulating syntactic m arkers to Teaching Literature, 24 establish points of view and to evoke states of m ind and spirit. Thus as learning continues, textuality in and of itself becom es im portant. Texts need to be inserted into their contexts: historical, aesthetic, social, and others -- the contexts that are shared know ledge from a com m unity of readers, w ithin the text’s and their ow n horizons of expectation. Thus “to know genre” begins to m ean paying attention to different historicalform s of each genre: how lyric poetry in the Rom antic era m ay differ from today’s, how novelists from tw o eras told stories about w om en,using different narrative strategies,and show ing different ideologies about w hat w om en are,and w hat their place in society w as and ought to be. The act of com paring tw o texts is thus the core activity that has to be built into an upper-division curriculum . The specific literary aspects of these com parisons,how ever,also need to be addressed. W ithin a W estern culture’s horizon of expectation about literature, for exam ple, specific texts are given privileged or canonicalstatus as prototypes w ithin literary history and in the com m unity of w riters for their speech genres (Don Q uixote as the prototype for the picaresque novel; Tolstoy for the realist novelof history). Such texts set norm s for the horizon of expectation of readers in their eras and create the obligatory m oves that later authors react to or react against. They also set stylistic, philosophical, and form alm arkers into place that others m ust follow . A gain, these descriptions apply to every genre, w ritten as w ellas those in other m edia. Film s like FatalA ttraction redefined the expectations of the m ass audience in other w ays: since its release, allhorror m ovies have tw o endings, the villain or m onster has to be killed tw ice before the film is really over. Speeches like Lincoln’s Gettysburg A ddress or Churchill’s w ar addresses set new standards for speechifying. From another perspective, the m ateriality of these speech genres com es into play,as w ell. The Realist novel’s form is influenced by the facts of its serialization or its publication in m ultiple volum es; it m akes a difference w hether poetry w as w ritten as part of a society’s notion of generalcultivation (often in the form of individual poem s, as in the eighteenth century), or to w in poetry prizes (often as collections, in the tw entieth century). Finally, the valuative discourses of elite culture set genres into plays of Teaching Literature, 25 pow er -- as part of a particular historicalm om ent’s attention to specific groups, standards, or utterances. N ot allliterature students w illm ove to the third stage of specifically aesthetic literacy about genres. The standard “English m ajor” w ho w illbecom e a high schoolteacher w illbe a com petent reader w ho can introduce the facts of literary history,taste,and reception system atically (stage 2 literacy outcom es), but not necessarily criticalinterpretations and discussions of the genres they take. FL students,how ever,are rarely challenged to reach these levels at all: m any, if not m ost, undergraduate FL program s lack any system atic training in literature -- and hence in the high-culture or high-status group literacies that w ould enhance their ow n criticalthinking about cultures. Yet the tasks of com parison being suggested here w ould be perfect set-ups for production activities that require m ore sophisticated uses of language than the conversations and opinions that exhaust student production in m ost FL classes.21 But the third stage of literacy about genres is com pletely appropriate to undergraduate literature curricula that have capstone courses for the undergraduate sequence,and necessary for allgraduate curricula. The m aterials to be treated in this levelof instruction m ust now include m ore than prim ary literature, m ore than the texts them selves and the m aterialfacts of their contexts and circulation. Secondary literature and reference m aterials that contribute to professionalunderstanding of the prim ary texts need to be draw n in; a technicalvocabulary needs to be attached to the students’system s of understanding texts. The student has to learn not only how to track the point of view of the narrator,and to com pare that point of view in tw o different novels,but also how and w hy scholars have differentiated betw een om niscient narrators and participant narrators, betw een jum p cuts and dissolves. The student has to learn not only to track detailed patterns of sound and rhythm in poem s,but w hy Petrarchan sonnets 21 Students could easily m ove tow ard debates about w hich is the better novel,book review s of poetry collections, character sketches of people in dram a, poem s and song lyrics draw n from exem plars, analyses of the relation of a text and its audience (a kind of m arket-research analysis, draw n from reception theory). This has been argued in m ore detail, and especially Teaching Literature, 26 are not Shakespearean sonnets. That is,the students need to be introduced to perhaps the m ost technicalcontext of genres: scholars,w ho generate their ow n practices,beyond those inherent in texts’ generalsocialcontexts. Said another w ay, in post-structuralist term s, the learner has to be initiated into the discipline of language scholarship: the technicaldiscussions, the organization of know ledge of the field (the form s in w hich it is produced, archived, and distributed, and w hat each is valued as), and the practices of the field, from bibliographic and research norm s, through conference and professionalorganizations and the like. In the case of literature, this also includes a criticalreappropriation of literary history and scholarship, the kind of know ledge that allow s a scholar to establish or question canonicity,to advance discussions,or to question ethics and uses of professionalpractice and expert know ledge. This is the task of the graduate program . Note, too, that the study of these professionalnorm s require a historicaldim ension, since so m any of the practices of a profession reach back to older historicalsetting and im peratives. This outline of curriculum -building is based on the conviction that the study of genres in this sense is a necessary key to culturalliteracy. In defining genre as dom inant form s of literacy w ithin culturalgroups, one creates a bridge betw een the form allanguage learning of the low er division (in rhetoric and com position, or in FLs) and m ore extended form s of com prehension and production in culturalcontexts. Such a bridge is, how ever, anything but a rear-guard action to “save literary studies.” Instead, it is an affirm ation of the study of texts, textuality, and genre as part of cultural com m unication -- as docum ents involved in various system s of culturalproduction and consum ption, and in the identity politics w ithin cultures. Taking genre in the w ay Ihave outlined here, m oreover, points to a productive w ay through (not around) today’s stillfashionable questions of canonicity and culturalproduction, because any form of com m unication that is practiced w ithin a group can be defined as a genre,a pattern of com m unication that constitutes part of a culture’s literacy. A fter all, the native speaker’s horizon of expectation (but not exclusively, by Janet Sw affar, Katherine A rens, and H eidiByrnes in Reading for Teaching Literature, 27 includes know ledge about the com pulsory m oves in a genre,the sociology of use as part of that horizon, and the various intertextualproblem s that tie into the m ateriality of culture. W ithout taking such issues seriously as culturalliteracy (a literacy of linguistic/sem iotic form as w ellas of culturalcontent), the beginning and novice student learner, as com prehender or producer, w illnot (be m otivated to) gain the kinds of cultural insight necessary to m ove tow ards advanced levels of language use and of cross-cultural understanding.22 Just as seriously, the advanced student, particularly the graduate student, w illbe cut off from 200 years of professionaldiscourse if they are not forced into dialogue w ith existing and prior scholarly com m unities -- either to espouse them , or to refute them successfully, as a possible com m unity epistem ology instead of an opinion. In the form of such a reconceived “genre” study, the study of "literature" w illbe the study of culturalform s, w hat Julia Kristeva called a sém analyse, a sem analysis, a criticalstudy of com plex verbalform s of a culture, their pow er relations, and their ability to create, m ediate, and recreate form s of subjectivity for individuals w ithin the culture. A nd, just as im portantly, teaching literature w illbring undergraduate study closer to our ow n m ainstream s of scholarship, as a vitalintellectualenterprise.23 M eaning. 22 Kim berly N ance, “‘A uthentic and Surprising N ew s of Them selves’: Engaging Students’ Preexisting Com petencies in the Introductory Literature Course,” m akes the case that “very few students enter the literature classroom w ith the expectation of fullparticipation” (31) and that w e do not,in general,take pains to accom m odate them ; she suggests one w ay to doing so,by changing classroom m anagem ent schem es. 23 This also has im plications for the teaching of graduate students,an issue Ihave not pursued here. For this discussion, see Elizabeth Bernhardt, “Research Into the Teaching of Literature in a Second Language: W hat It Says and How to Com m unicate it to Graduate Students,” and Peter C. 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