Introducing literature vs Working with literature

Being shown something is not the same as thinking about it - introducing learners to a name, a period or a movement is often nothing more than a history lesson (Literary and cultural history). It may be valuable, but it is not the same as working with a text.

Some teachers like to introduce learners to Literature: show them extract of e.g. Shakespeare, or a Sassoon World War I poem, or a few Shelley stanzas, or the first page of Bleak House.

Typically, that introduction will be about who the writer was, when did they live, what movement were they part of (or affiliated with), their overall importance in the canon - in fact, they will be introduced for the very fact that they are the canon (and by being introduced, enshrine this canon further and ossify it a bit more).

But what of the engagement of the readers with those texts? What of their ideas about them, their interpretations, their relationship with those texts? Learning about the Kings of France at school (which, when, kinship) never led me to take any particular interest in them: that chronology, that list of names, remained just that - something to learn by heart because of the exam, but something definitely outside of me, something that didn't touch me, or involve me, or ask me anything but to memorise.

Working with texts, on the other hand, means using the text for what the material they give us to think from, and to think with. What matters then is not that Dickens is a major figure of English fiction (and of the 19th Century): what matters is what the text leads us to imagine, think about, visualise, re-create: 

'Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth (...). Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city (...) Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds'                  (opening page of Bleak House). 

Working with Literature means that now, it's not about listing metaphors or saying ' wow, this is great!', it is about Observing (the vocabulary, the concepts (mud, fog, cold), the words used to describe people, streets, sky). Then it will be about Interpreting that, in other words, it will be about asking for a relationship between reader and text - that is Working with texts rather than just introducing them.

You could show this extract to the whole class for example, and work through it more or less line-by-line, identifying recurring words, how they create a certain atmosphere, pointing out verbs, say, (like 'slipping, sliding, wheezing, pinching), asking how people are described, or described doing or feeling - some close-reading, in other words.

You could then discuss with learners how they see that scene, what they think people in London felt like, how it could have been to go from one place to another in such a weather, if they think people's mood could have been influenced by it - there's no shortage of interpretive questions here.

Finally, you could link those interpretations to a more personal, evaluative, response.