Censorship and Selection in Literature Teaching: Personal Reconstruction or Aesthetic Appreciation?

The choice between the fusion of literature and life and a pedagogy of engagement, on the one hand, and the separation of literature and life and a pedagogy of detachment, on the other, is a painful one. Philosopher of education James Gribble would rather risk some form of aestheticism than allow that a great work of literature could be viewed in such a way that it (or what it 'presents') could legitimately be rejected in the light of a moral code. "Literary literacy" encompasses both engagement and detachment, both the feeling of coming to know certain "truths" about oneself and/or the world, and getting distance on that feeling. The acquisition of literary literacy would enable students to read literature as assertion, as a form of knowing, and as hypothesis, as a form of questioning. Awareness of the political context of the engaged reader is a first step in respecting each other's imaginative and psychological identities. Now that engagement with the text has been established as a fact of reading life, learning to stand outside engagement may be one of the basics students move ahead to. A definition of literary literacy encompassing the goals of transformation and enculturation by way of a pedagogy of engagement and detachment might help keep those odds even. In actual censorship cases, educators should maintain consistency and acknowledge their own political investment in the literature curriculum. (RAE)