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Textandtheory View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Commons@Waikato October, 2009 Kirstine Moffat multiple readings: text andtheory Kirstine Moffat is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Waikato where her research and publications focus primarily on New Zealand settlement writing and contemporary New Zealand fiction and film. t was with great pleasure that I accepted an While the Scholarship Standard explicitly refers to Iinvitation to run a workshop at the recent literary theory, it is my belief that some knowledge NZATE Conference. The topic of my session was of theoretical concepts and models will also be of an overview of the use of literary theory in the assistance to English teachers at NCEA Levels 1-3. teaching of English and that same focus directs this It is my hope that this paper may aid teachers in written version of my presentation. I approach this ‘initiat[ing] an alternative reading’ and in applying topic not as a theory guru or expert, but as a and/or deconstructing ‘theoretical models’. practitioner who has found that an understanding and application of theory has made me a better Literary theory is a dense, complicated and teacher. In particular, I believe that judicious use of sometimes intimidating subject. It is also in a theory enables me to communicate to students the constant state of flux and change, with new diverse ways in which written and visual texts can be theoretical ideas and strategies constantly emerging. read, encouraging them to think for themselves in a As I write this, one of my doctoral students is fresh and original manner and to see points of working in the relatively new field of ecocriticism, connection between a range of texts. Combined while one of my colleagues has been doing some with the essential critical tools of close reading and research on trauma theory. Such theories do not textual analysis and support, a knowledge of theory emerge out of the ether, but are strongly connected helps students to think critically and to shape to the world that we inhabit and struggle to know. informed, coherent arguments. Ecocriticism, with its emphasis on sustainability and the relationship between humanity and the natural These principles are central to the Ministry of world, has obvious connections to the Education’s Scholarship English Performance environmental movement, while trauma theory has Standard. Note 5 of this standard explains the gained currency in the post-September 11 crucial term ‘respond critically’, which underpins all international environment.2 three sections of the Scholarship curriculum: Space and practicality necessitates some selectivity in 5. Respond critically is under-pinned by the my discussion of theory. I have decided to reflect essential metacognitive skills of on five theoretical approaches that have been interpretation, analysis and evaluation in EINZC, popular during the last three decades and which up to and including level 8. AtScholarship these continue to be debated and discussed. These are: skills are applied in contexts that require mature new historicism, postcolonialism, Marxism, appreciation of more demanding text and feminism and psychoanalytic criticism. After questions. For example, a student may show the examining each in turn, and applying each theory to ability to: initiate an alternative reading or a range of written and visual texts, I will end by application of theory; take a fresh approach to examining one text, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr accepted interpretations; challenge the reader’s Jekyll and Mr Hyde, through a succession of critical understandings; apply or deconstruct lenses, demonstrating that theory is a valuable tool in theoretical models.1 amplifying understandings of literature and assisting 56 ENGLISH IN AOTEAROA both teachers and students to read texts in nuanced ethnicity, class, ideology, personal history. The range ways. of poststructuralist theoretical premises emerging from this in the 1980s, such as new historicism, For those wishing to explore the theoretical terrain feminism and postcolonialism, continued to place an further, there is a wealth of published material on emphasis on the centrality of the subjective reader the subject. I recommend three excellent and the inseparability of texts from the world in publications, both for their clarity and for the which they are produced and read.7 practical examples they provide. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle’s Introduction to Literature, New Historicism Criticism and Theory is a lucid survey of a The critics most concerned with the contexts in comprehensive range of theories, illustrated with which texts are produced are the new historicists. examples from a wide range of literary genres.3 Simon Malpas provides a clear definition of this Charles E. Bressler’s Literary Criticism: An theory, writing that ‘historicist criticism of literature Introduction to Theory and Practice combines clear and culture explores how the meaning of a text, and concise overviews of each theory with practical idea or artefact is produced by way of its relation to applications of the theories, including sample the wider historical context in which it is created or students essays. The Routledge Companion to experienced...meaning emerges from the languages, Critical Theory, edited by Simon Malpas and Paul beliefs, practices, institutions and desires of Wake, is valuable for its comprehensive definitions particularly historically located culture.8 Influenced of names and terms. strongly by Michel Foucault’s perception of history as a ‘discontinuous process of conflict as different Since Roland Barthes famously declared in 1967 social discourses and institutions struggle for that ‘the death of the author is the birth of the power’, new historicists regard literary texts as being reader’ there has been a wide-spread critical ‘firmly embedded in the institutions and power emphasis on the multiple ways in which literary texts relations of general culture’.9 As a consequence, can be read and understood.4 In the late 1960s and critics such as Stephen Greenblatt do not separate early 1970s a group of critics, the most prominent texts into canonical and non-canonical categories, being Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and Michael but seek to explore the relation between artistic and Riffaterre, developed what they termed the ‘reader- non-artistic texts.10 response’ approach to texts, arguing that ‘the meaning of the text is created through the process Many of the foremost new historicist critics are of reading’.5 They were responding to the theories Renaissance scholars, and thus the plays of William and practices of new criticism, with its focus on Shakespeare provide perhaps the best examples of literary texts as autonomous, aesthetic objects. the application of these theories. In a first year paper Indebted to the principles of ‘practical criticism’ which revolves around the theme of encounters advocated by the British critics I.A. Richards and between old and new worlds my students and I F.R. Leavis, the American new critics, such as enjoy exploring The Tempest as a revenge narrative Cleanth Brooks and W.K. Womsatt, argued that ‘the that ends in reconciliation and forgiveness, a words on the page’, rather than the life of the romance, and a story of magic and the imagination. author, the subjective impressions of the reader, or However, we also spend time considering the play’s the ideological or historical context in which texts relationship with Early Modern exploration and 6 were produced, were the proper subject for study. discovery. Iser, Fish and Riffaterre approached texts in the opposite way to Brookes and Womsatt, believing The setting of a literary text beside other textual that texts are not static entities whose essential evidence from the period is a central strategy of meaning is revealed through objective study, but new historicist criticism. The Tempest was first rather dynamic objects that readers make sense of produced in 1611, the year after William Strachey subjectively, shaped by the individual and cultural published an account of being shipwrecked in the baggage that makes us who we are: our gender, Bermuda Islands. The storm which sunk Strachey’s ENGLISH IN AOTEAROA 57 ship certainly has a force that is comparable to the Kidman’s The Captive Wife posit similar solutions. tempest conjured up by Prospero and Ariel: ‘...our Terry Goldie, in his exploration of Canadian, clamours drowned in the winds, and the winds in Australian and New Zealand literatures, summarises thunder… nothing heard that could give comfort, this solution: ‘it is only by going native that the nothing seen that might encourage hope. The Sea European arrivant can become native’.14 Stephen swelled above the clouds, and gave battle unto Turner writes that this involves a split between the heaven.’11 Even more pertinent, are Strachey’s coloniser, who wants to subordinate the land and comments about the Bermuda Islands, which eliminate the indigenous population, and the settler, popular belief had held was ‘given over to devils who ‘in order to be at home in the place’ must and spirits’, a claim Strachey refutes, explaining that become ‘somehow native, like Maori, even be the Islands are ‘as habitable and commodious as Maori’.15 This is exactly the kind of displacement most countries of the same climate and situations’.12 that takes place in River Queen. The imperial troops, There is no definite record that Shakespeare read led by the sadistic Major Baine, are depicted Strachey, but given the popularity and circulation of predominantly as cruel invaders. However, the the account of the shipwreck it is certainly possible heroine Sarah, through her acquisition of Maori that it is one of the sources which inspired language, relationship with a Maori man, and love Shakespeare. An awareness of such textual contexts for her part-Maori and part-European son acquires helps readers to appreciate that Shakespeare’s a sense of belonging and indigenity of which her imaginative genius drew on aspects of the world he moko is the visible marker.16 inhabited, in which exploration, sea voyages and exotic islands were a significant part.
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