Department of German

When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Disappears:
On the Absence of Teaching in the Literature Classroom

Susanne Kord
Georgetown University

The Great Divide between language and literature is, of course, not merely a matter of pedagogy or even curriculum. It is institutionally mirrored in the division many, if not most, Foreign Language Departments have set up between "language teachers," those folks responsible for the first 3 years of college-level instruction, and "literature professors," the folks taking over from there, and in the reward structure that privileges scholarship over curriculum and pedagogy. As a literature professional myself, I began my career as someone who had fun teaching language but whose entire professional self-esteem lay in literature courses, preferably courses related to my research, taught at either the undergraduate or graduate level and taught either in English or German. The course of my career has done nothing to dissuade me from my initial assumption that while language teaching and language pedagogy may provide me, if I'm entirely honest, with my clientele, my professional performance and standing will be exclusively determined by the work I do in and on literature. As an assistant professor, I was even once discouraged by my chair from wasting too much of my time on a language pedagogy article I had intended to write. Along with my distinguished colleagues in literature, I "inherited" my students from the "language teachers"; right along with my literature colleagues, I kvetched constantly that these students who had gone through the "language" sequence, usually three years of college-level instruction, were not adequately prepared to sit in my literature courses, where my attempts to get them to soar the heights of literary theory or cultural studies was invariably curbed by their usage of primitive sentences, their rudimentary menu of verbs and their flawed syntax. Unlike many of my literature colleagues, however, it did occur to me that I could do something about this, and thus began a long and fruitless quest for help from the professionals: I started reading literature pedagogy. In the course of my reading, three major points very quickly emerged: one, scholarship on the teaching of literature very often engages in pursuits that would be considered methodologically questionable or outdated in literary scholarship, concentrating, in many cases, on plot questions, author biography and personal responses to the text. Number two, much of the literature pedagogy I read took no cues whatsoever either from literary scholarship on the epoch or author or from SLA literature on advanced reading or writing. And number three, language acquisition in literature courses, as described in this scholarship, is not targeted but implicit. In courses whose content focus is literature, as opposed to, for example, courses that target a specific L2 acquisition goal such as writing and merely use literature to attain that goal, L2 acquisition is either ignored entirely or indirectly targeted by comprehensible input and unstructured "discussion."

Both approaches essentially perceive student difficulties in approaching the text as cognitive, not linguistic, and both are at grave odds with the conclusions drawn in part of the SLA literature on how L2 students read. The assumption in the literature classroom, taken over from the "mastery" model of L2 acquisition, is that students must already have a high level of L2 competence before they can even begin to read. To me, this amounts to an admission that further explicit L2 learning and teaching will not take place in the literature classroom. What little does take place is limited to passive skills like comprehension/recognition or vocabulary acquisition. Quantity is privileged over quality: what matters is how much the student talks, not how."Knowledge" is defined initially as comprehension, later as recall of facts; interpretive, analytical or discourse strategies are not taught at all. Invariably, in my conversations with other literature professors, textual analysis in the target language is seen as necessarily resulting in a lower level of ideation: this is not interpreted as result of our refusal to teach the skills of formulating ideas about literature in the L2 but as an inevitable fact of life in the FL literature classroom. Thus literature professors in a foreign language face a choice of two, to me, unappetizing alternatives: either cultural, historical, and theoretical context are abandoned in favor of personal responses to the text, in the FL. Or the target language is abandoned as soon as the discussion moves into the abstract or analytical domain.

What all this means is that literature professors in a foreign language are caught in two entirely contradictory assumptions that nonetheless result in the same consequence. Assumption number one: students coming out of the language sequence simply are not linguistically prepared to talk and write about literature intelligently. Assumption number 2: a students' problem in approaching a literary text is cognitive, not linguistic. Both assumptions contradict each other directly, but both, I think, are so ubiquitous because they absolve literature professors of all responsibility to deal with the problems they perceive: in scenario one, it's the language teacher's fault, in scenario two, it's the student's. With the little time I have left, I would like to do two things: contest the assumption that students' problems in dealing with literature are cognitive rather than linguistic, and read this as the trail of breadcrumbs that might enable the language teacher to find her way back into the literature classroom.

First, I would like to offer two brief examples of student writing, which I would like you to take as symptomatic of my long experience with student writing as a literature professor and, perhaps more importantly, as a language teacher. Both examples treat the same theme; they are taken from the 2nd writing assignment of my German Comedies course, a fourth-year course taught in German, which is a review of Emil Janning's 1929 filmic adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 drama The Broken Jug. The assignment charges students with incorporating both textual and contextual knowledge of the original drama (that is, historical and literary/epochal contexts for both texts) and language and style adequate to literary analysis and professional review writing, in German. The translation is mine, all mistakes are approximated:

Does this have consequences for our classroom practice? Two realizations must occur in the minds of literature professors before that practice can change. One is the realization that the language classroom, especially in a traditional FL curriculum that is fatally divided into "language" and "literature" courses, cannot give us the finished product we desire: the student who, perfectly trained in the language, now hungers for the intellectual content that only we can provide. We need to realize that there can be no easy transition from textbooks to real books, that language training is intended to create a speaker-reader-writer capable of many different things, and that literary analysis is not necessarily one of them. The second realization would be that if we want students to be linguistically competent analyzers of literature, it's our job to teach them, and we cannot ask anyone else, including the folks who taught the language sequence, to do that job for us. Conversely, if we offer students our expertise as literature professionals without re-materializing, simultaneously, as language teachers in the literature classroom, we have condemned them to an existence either as passive recipients of this knowledge or as linguistic buffoons, people whose intellect cannot be expressed and therefore recognized in the foreign language, even by us. The difference between my student A and my student B that matters to me is this: Student B's opinion would be taken seriously by a German academic or intelligent speaker/reader of Kleist, Student A's would not. Once I have identified Student A as someone who has something intelligent to say about Kleist, but who is quite literally tongue-tied by his linguistic abilities, it is my duty as a literature professor to teach him, explicitly, the language that will adequately and convincingly express his ideas. On the ground in the classroom, that means a series of deliberate linguistic and stylistic interventions. The linguistic tools for analyzing literature have to be deliberately and repeatedly offered to students, in the form of extensive modelling by the instructor, directed discussion on the part of the students, and follow-up assignments that target both the students' knowledge and interpretive acumen and their successful acquisition of the linguistic tools for literary analysis (I've brought some examples, see handout). What is usually hardest for literature professors, namely careful linguistic modelling and deliberate direction of student discussions based on linguistic as well as content criteria, are probably the most important characteristics of the language teacher who needs to reappear in the literature classroom. Obviously, this is much easier to do in departments that have a clearly formulated curriculum that spans both language and content-courses--and they do exist--, and in Departments where the divide between language teachers and literature professors is not an issue--and believe it or not, such departments, where everyone teaches everything, also exist. Nonetheless, I believe all of us, no matter what contexts we work in, have identified common complaints when we teach literature in the foreign language, and I believe we should answer them with some ambition both as literature professors and as language teachers, even at the highest levels of instruction--and I'm thinking here of PhD-level seminars. My ambition is to turn student A into a capable reader, debater and critical thinker about literature, in my language, to enable him to have a real interpretive argument with me, the literature professional, in my language, and to enable him to win that argument. My loss would be my gain: it would tell me to what extent I have done my job, both as a literature professor and as a language teacher.