Beyond the Model of a Teacher

The post-structuralist theory of literature brings a new concept of reading. A reader is not only a receiver who should decipher a linguistic code, but s/he becomes the subject of plural operations of reading: understanding, associations, evaluation, feelings and emotions. And the most important thing: reading can transform a reader’s mind and his/her sensibilities. This broad concept of reading gives the teacher of literature fantastic possibilities. The territory of literature is the esthetic and moral space, where a pupil can compare his/her experience with other better or worse subject. In the first chapter I try to show that the compulsion of reading books at school is arbitrary and makes the system of the policy of education invisible. I claim that a teacher (not the reading list) is the model of value of literature. S/He has no choice - texts in the classroom have my face and my voice and I have to personally confirm their advantage to life. In the next chapters (“Situations of Readings”, “Awakenings”, “Jealousy and Reading”, “Inducing to Infidelity”) I show how the teacher can produce “the event of reading”, using emotions of intimate reading. Every strategy that I describe - strategy of situational teaching - has the same question: whether a given narrative will work for good or ill in the life of other readers, after the last page has been turned. Will this fiction help form a character who is hypersensitive, properly sensitive, or insensitive; intellectually pretentious, thoughtful, or shallow; rash, bold, or timid; bigoted or tolerant? The answering to the questions means to win the battle of myself.

REFERENCES:

• Booth W.C., (1988): Vocation of a Teacher. Rhetorical Occasions 1967–1988. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London.
• Edmundson M., (2003): Teacher. The One Who Made the Difference. Vintage Books, New York.
• Nussbaum M.C., (1995): Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Beacon Press, Boston.
• Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida, (1994): Villanova University, October 3.