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Reading for Engagement: To Live or to Tell
by Reg Harris
Adapted from The Hero’s Journey: The Path of Transformation (2019), by Reg Harris
Experience before Analysis
To make literature part of our students’ lived experience, we must allow students to engage a text before they analyze it. For a story to have any lasting impact, students must “live in it” to make it real. This means that instead of adopting a posture of “receiving meaning” from a text, students must open a “dialogue” with the text. Through this dialogue, they can create a personally significant experience and explore new meanings. They can’t do this if we ask them to read for analysis.
Existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre understood the impossibility of trying to engage in life and reflect on life simultaneously. In Nausea, he writes,
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story….But you have to choose: live or tell (1964, p. 39).
In essence, when we ask students to “read analytically,” we are asking them to “tell” rather than “live.” We block the direct interaction that makes literature real and allows it to influence the reader’s personal narrative.
A 2007 study at the University of Toronto could explain why students can’t experience and analyze simultaneously. Researchers identified two distinct forms of self-reference that influence our interactions with the world: “an extended self-reference linking experiences across time, and momentary self-reference centered on the present” (Farb, et al.). They called these the “narrative” or “extended focus” and the “experiential” or “present-centered” focus.
Narrative (extended) focus requires reader elaboration to form connections between new information and prior knowledge. Experiential (present-centered) focus demands that we open our attention to the experience and explore a broad range of mental and physical sensations. The experiential focus suppresses reflection and self-referencing so that we can fully engage in the experience in the moment. Both modes of processing are important and have their place. However, for teachers, the significant finding in the study is that each mode activates a different part of the brain, and using one mode necessarily decreases our ability to use the other.
Avoid the “Alternative Text”
Many educators confirm this view. Robert Scholes, a leading 20th century scholar in literary studies, argued that by asking students to read for such things as irony, theme, symbolism and meaning, we add a layer of difficulty by creating an “alternate text” that “stands between the literature students read and their own humanity” (1999, p. 35). To avoid this, Scholes encouraged teachers to allow students to find personal resonance and meaning in the text rather than to distance them from it by putting them immediately into the role of analysts.
Thus, a “reader-oriented” (rather than “analyst-oriented”) approach to literature allows students to engage the text and create personally significant meanings. As a result, while students interpret the text, the text “interprets” them by bringing to awareness their hidden beliefs, understandings and potentials. Texts can make the unconscious conscious and influence students’ perspectives and expectations. In Joseph Campbell’s terms, literature can help our students expand their horizons so that they can take journeys of “ever-expanding realization.”
Teaching for Engagement
Reading becomes a meeting of the reader’s prior knowledge and textual meanings that work together to create a greater sense of things
Jeffrey Wilhelm, You Gotta BE the Book
While the interactive model of reading does allow readers to engage literature authentically and to construct their own meanings, it necessarily changes our approach to teaching. According to Jeffrey Wilhelm, in You Gotta BE the Book (1995), it “stresses the prior knowledge structures or schema of the individual reader.” As a result, “Reading becomes a meeting of the reader’s prior knowledge and textual meanings that work together to create a greater sense of things” (pp. 17-18). This reliance on the reader’s prior knowledge puts an additional burden on the teacher, who must ensure that students have the schema (i.e., background understanding) needed to read and write in a personal, purposeful way.
The most important of these schema is the narrative structure. In With Rigor for All, Carol Jago explains that an ignorance of narrative structure is one of the greatest blocks to eliciting genuine student engagement and response to literature. If students don’t understand of how stories work, she explains, they may not be able to respond to literature at all. Jago goes on to observe that while some story structures “may be so familiar to an English teacher that they hardly bear commenting on, this is not the case for many high school readers,” and that “it is unrealistic to assume that … they will figure out the structure themselves” (2000, pp. 39-40).
Teaching Structure with the Hero’s Journey
The most popular tool for teaching narrative structure has been Freytag’s Pyramid. Also called the “dramatic arc,” Freytag’s Pyramid was developed by German novelist and playwright Gustov Freytag. Freytag created the arc to chart the structure of tragedy, and explained it in his 1863 book Die Technik des Dramas (The Technique of Drama), which explored the composition and structure of the five-act drama.
I would like to suggest, however, that the Hero’s Journey (or “narrative” journey) is a better tool for instruction. If we illustrate the Hero’s Journey as a “narrative arc,” we see the resemblance between it and Freytag’s dramatic arc. Both describe the same existential process of humans engaging in and growing from the challenges in their world. However, as a teaching model, the hero’s journey has several advantages:
1. It addresses both the psychology of the narrative process and its structure, so it includes characterization, motivation and plot directly, not as just elements or parts of the story.
2. Its stage names better describe the processes involved. Journey stages resonate better with lived experience, so students identify with them more easily. For example, consider how students would react more easily to “Road of Trials” than to “Rising Action.”
3. Students are already familiar with the journey pattern from the films they watch and games they play, so teaching it is basically a matter of formalizing and expanding knowledge that they already have.
4. Where the dramatic arc does not work with some modern drama, the journey works with all literature.
5. With more stages (eight instead of five), the Hero’s Journey provides a better schema for analysis.
In short, the Hero’s Journey makes a better connection between literature and a student’s lived experience than the dramatic arc. The journey helps students experience literature first, forming a firm foundation for later analysis. Then it connects the stories students read with the stories they live so that they not only explore literature, but grow from it.
References
Farb, N. et. al. (2007). Attending to the Present: Mindfulness Meditation Reveals Distinct Neural Modes of Self-Reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Oxford University Press, Vol. 2, Num. 4, pp. 313-322.
Jago, C. (2000). With Rigor for All: Teaching the classics to contemporary students. Portland, ME: Calendar Islands.
Sartre, J-P. (1964). Nausea. (trans: L. Alexander). New York: New Directions.
Scholes, R. (1999) Mission Possible. English Journal 88 (July): 28-35.
Wilhelm, J. (1995). You Gotta BE the Book. New York: Teachers College Press and NCTE.