Academic Exchange Quarterly Winter 2002: Volume 6, Issue 4
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Gundula M. Sharman,
The study of literature has always played an important role
in the acquisition of a foreign language, but increasingly students are
reluctant to choose literature modules, particularly those dealing with
pre-twentieth century texts. In order to make the literature of foreign places
and from past ages more immediately relevant to the interests and the
experiences of the students, new courses, aimed at reawakening the students’
interest in literature, have been designed according to thematic rather than
chronological criteria.
When browsing through the course
catalogue of any Modern Languages Department in the
In the following I will argue that
a switch from the traditional, chronological structure of modules in literature
to a thematic approach will increase motivation on the part of the student, who
can more easily perceive the relevance of the given literary text, and allow
for interdisciplinary teaching methods by the introduction of theories from
different subject areas. New approaches to teaching might also lead to a more
general appreciation of literature on the part of the students and to an
enrichment of the understanding of human affairs. This, after all, is the aim of
all education.
Since the early seventies there has been a long-standing and well-loved debate as to whether the inclusion of literature in the foreign-language classroom is desirable and useful or not. This question is brought to a point when even native-language teachers argue that literature ought to be taught separately from language, because the particulars encountered in the appreciation of literature are more complex than mere language comprehension. Burke and Brumfit differentiate three distinct areas of potential obstacles: "to the learner of how to read literature, difficulties may appear, which result from ignorance of the language being used, of the ideas being used, or of the form being used." (1) This argument presupposes that the connections among language, ideas and form is something peculiarly literary and absent from the focus on the mastery of "pure" language, whether that be the mother-tongue or a foreign language. Be that as it may, the assumption of this argument, which defines literature as a special case in language, has trickled into the classroom in schools and is now also noticeable at university level. More and more students take a purely utilitarian approach to the study of foreign languages, and they show a growing reluctance to engage with learning activities which are not immediately perceived as useful in the "real world". The stated aim is to achieve efficient communication skills in the target language, rather than to seek knowledge and understanding of the language, the culture and mores, which shaped the people of other nations.
Naturally, the case for including
literature in the foreign-language syllabus has been stated vociferously from
the moment its value began to fall into doubt. The function of teaching
literature in the Modern Languages can be divided into three categories, the
importance of which is not necessarily in that order. (a) Reading extended
texts in the foreign language will improve the language skills of the students,
both on the level of vocabulary and of grammar; (b) the foreign texts will
provide an introduction to the socio-cultural background and the political and
historical developments of the country in which the text is set. This
perspective will highlight the differences between the familiar and the
foreign; (c) and thirdly, familiarity with period and genre in which a text is
set will build a foundation upon which students can recognize and compare
distinctive features common to all Western culture of any particular period.
All of these can be seen as serving directly to the above stated aim of
effective communication in the global workplace. The question is not whether
the study of literature is useful in acquiring good communication skills in
one's contacts with people of other nationalities, of which an understanding of
cultural differences is after all an important part, but rather how to persuade
the student that it is.
A traditional approach to teaching
literature at tertiary level has been to select texts according to period and
genre, such as the "Tragedies of Shakespeare", the key works of the
"French Enlightenment", or the "Classical plays by Goethe and
Schiller". For those students who are genuinely interested in a specific
period, or an individual writer, this type of course will always be attractive,
but to the majority of students this system seems to provide a hindrance rather
than an aid to the appreciation of literature. The method presupposes that the
modern language student wants to be
acquainted with the thoughts of writers who more often than not lived in the
dim and distant past and whose work shows little immediate relevance to the
personal interests of the student, or indeed to the stated aim of linguistic
competence in the modern world. Not only is it increasingly difficult to awaken
an interest in foreign writers of past ages in the student, but, as young
people tend to read less, many students need to be introduced to the pleasure
of reading in the first place. Our real life experiences are complemented and
enriched by the "borrowed" experience gained through reading. This
has been recognized by Brumfit and Carter who state:
The first task must be to get people reading books for meaning and making connections between them, and outwards non-literary experiences, as a matter of personal need. Once this need is established, for any learners who wish to take this up, issues of the nature of the experience can follow. But we cannot analyse an experience we have never had, and the literary experience arises from thinking about books as meaningful, important patterning of experience, integrated with our own experience, both, direct and vicarious (234).
It must be our aim to encourage the student to see
literature in terms of a proxy for real experience. In this way reading can
indeed become a "personal need". Aesthetic concerns with genre and
period of a chosen text, which of often turn out to be an obstacle to the
students, fade into the background and the archetypal human issues, present in
all literature, move into the fore. If literature is
seen in terms of actively gaining experience, rather than the passive process
of an unwilling encounter with a self-contained fictional world, the literature
of all ages and places can potentially become relevant to the reader once more.
With this in mind I will outline briefly two models of literary courses in German Studies, offered at Honours level, which have been developed along thematic lines rather than according to criteria of period or genre. The idea is that the literary work, stripped of its cultural context, can offer a more immediate access to the human story (2), and only later the tutorial work in the group can be used to lead the students to an aesthetic appreciation of the text. The immediate advantage is that course tutors are free to choose any topic, which they perceive as being relevant to the interests of a particular cohort of students. Secondly, this approach allows that any theoretical framework that is so vital for the analytical work we expect the students to pursue in the study of literature is no longer restricted to literary theory, which is often regarded as too abstract and difficult at undergraduate level. On the contrary, depending on the topic, almost any theory from other disciplines can be used to appropriate the chosen literary text. In addition, a thematic design of a course lends itself to the incorporation of other art forms such as painting and photography, cinema or even music. (The transgression into a neighboring subject area, such as music or the visual arts, each with its own set of analytical tools, can of course only be in reference to a particular aspect of the chosen exposition.) But most important of all is that the course will be stimulating to the students, that they learn to appreciate the potential of literature to comment on and enlighten their own life experiences, and that, in the intensive study of a foreign text, their linguistic skills and their understanding of cultural difference will be enhanced in the time-honored fashion of teaching literature in the Modern Languages degree program.
The first course is entitled
"Love, Marriage and Adultery in German Literature and Film", and the
course description reads as follows: The
course will examine the discourse of love, marriage and adultery in German and
Austrian literature and film of the 19th and 20th century. Emphasis will be
placed on the social, cultural and economic context of love relationships and
the ways in which the dominant value systems of society are reflected,
criticized or subverted over the period. Particular issues to be addressed will
include the significance of reputation and honor, the generation conflict,
strategies in self-preservation and surrender and questions of gender and
identity. The course aims to enable students to think critically about issues
of relationships and marriage in the context of society, to assess how the
concept of marriage as a social institution has evolved over time, and to
analyze how these questions have been portrayed in the novel in German and
Austrian Literature since the beginning of the 19th century.
On the reading list are Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809), and Fontane's Effi Briest (1895), probably the most prominent novels in German
literature dealing with issues of marriage and adultery, as well as a number of
texts and films from the twentieth century, including Sigrid Damm's Ich bin nicht Ottilie (I am not Ottilie, 1992), which draws a
nice connection to Ottilie, one of the central characters in Goethe's novel. As
is immediately apparent, the theoretical framework, which can be uniformly
applied to this subject, could be taken from all sorts of historical and
sociological aspects, as well as psychology or psychoanalysis. The choice fell
on Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving,
which sets out criteria for the analysis of theoretical and practical aspects
of loving and being loved. Not much explanation is needed as to why this topic
is of interest to the students, but I would like to make two points. Firstly,
because the focus of the course is on archetypal human relationships, rather
than on the literary and social conventions of the Biedermeier, the
fin-de-siècle or the post-war period, the characters of the older texts,
stand side by side with those of the contemporary novels. As it was, Goethe's
Ottilie gained as much of a response from the students as did Damm's. Secondly,
Fromm's theoretical text itself was of great inspiration to the students, and
the particular focus it provided on the literary texts (and the protagonists on
film), allowed for each character to be judged using the same universal
criteria.
The second course is called
"Travel and Tourism in
Rapid tours through literary
history such as these need, of course, careful preparation and introduction. To
this effect it is important that students are given a sufficient overview of
historical and literary developments in
In the introduction of his essay
on Goethe's Elective Affinities,
Walter Benjamin makes a distinction between the material content and the truth
content of a novel. The material content, which is immediately accessible, will
give rise to commentary, whereas the truth content appears over time, and only
it can be subject to real critique.
Not the existence but for the most part the meaning of the concrete realities in the work will no doubt be hidden from the poet and the public of his time. But because what is eternal in the work stands out only against the ground of those realities, every contemporary critique, however eminent, comprehends in the work more the moving than the resting truth, more the temporal effect than the eternal being (4).
Thus, according to Benjamin, there will necessarily always
be a difference in our aesthetic appreciation between a work written in a
previous age and a contemporary work. If our aim is to (re)introduce the
students to reading literature, which, as we know, will improve their
linguistic competence, aid their understanding of foreign cultures, and which
also offers a great source of inexhaustible and inexpensive pleasure, any loss
in the full appreciation of the cultural context of a given novel is surely a
price worth paying.
References
(1) C.J. Brumfit and R.A.
Carter, Literature and Language Teaching
(Oxford: OUP, 1986), 174.
(2) Incidentally, a famous
precedent in German literature can be found in Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.
Unbeknown to himself, as he stripped the title pages off the book, the teenage
protagonists Edgar has just such an unmediated encounter with Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1973).
After an initial disgust with the old fashioned language, he gradually learns
to identify with Goethe's Werther, and his reading experience helps to clarify
the problems he encounters in his life in
(3) In
(4) Walter Benjamin, "Goethe's Elective Affinities", in Walter Benjamin, Selective Writings. Vol. 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harward UP, 1996) 297-360, 298.