Journal of Reading Behavior
1991, Volume XX1I1, No. 4
STUDENTS AS LITERARY CRITICS:
THE INTERPRETIVE EXPERIENCES, BELIEFS,
AND PROCESSES OF NINTH-GRADE STUDENTS
Theresa Rogers
Ohio State University
ABSTRACT
The interpretive beliefs, processes, and instructional experiences of 8 ninth-grade
students were studied as they participated in instructional subcommunities within
their existing English classes. An observational analysis of the instructional
communities was undertaken, and the students' interpretive processes were
analyzed as intertextual transactions, which include reasoning operations and
inference sources. Overall results revealed that students reasoned about literary
works at an interpretive level, and that their inferences were largely textual
focussing on characters and events, reflecting the type of literary instruction they
receive. After participating in an alternative response-centered instructional unit,
students were more intertextual in terms of their preferences related to the
interpretive process and more interpretive in their reasoning about literary works.
The shift in the range of inference sources students drew on—the intertextuality
of their transactions—varied by individual. Individual students were profiled to
reveal the relationship of beliefs, experiences, and processes that form their critical
interpretive stances toward literary works.
One of the primary goals of English and reading education is to help students
learn to interpret literary works, yet we know very little about how to accomplish
that goal; indeed, we know very little about the interpretive process itself. One
thing we do know is that it is a complicated process and that many of our students
have limited experiences with literary interpretation. Recent studies from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading (Langer, Applebee,
Mullis, & Foertsch, 1990) indicate that few students are able to adequately examine
meanings and support analyses and interpretations of literary passages.
This study was undertaken in order to understand more about the process of
literary interpretation. The interpretive processes of adolescent readers are examined from the perspective that literary interpretation is a complex process that must
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be understood in the contexts of students' beliefs about how literature ought to be
interpreted, including their preferences for particular ways of interpreting literature,
and their instructional experiences related to literary interpretation. This perspective
attempts to be at once responsive to theories of literary criticism and to the interpretive processes and experiences of real student readers. As Purves (1985) argues,
this kind of comprehensive perspective is needed in order to reconcile conflicting
theories of interpretation and to conduct meaningful research in response to literature.
Toward a Model of the Interpretive Process
Much of the research on story comprehension focuses on readers' structural
comprehension (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Stein & Glenn, 1979) or character
understanding (e.g., Bruce, 1981; Nicholas & Trabasso, 1980; Omanson, 1982).
Research on literary response, on the other hand, has been more concerned with
additional aspects of understanding, including analysis of a literary work
(Applebee, 1978; Purves & Beach, 1972; Purves & Rippere, 1968; Scribner, 1960),
symbolic interpretation (Svennson, 1985), and readers' personal involvement, belief systems, and stances (Cox & Many, 1989; Galda, 1982; Golden & Guthrie,
1986; Hynds, 1985; Lytle, 1985; Many, 1990, 1991; Mauro, 1983; Squire, 1964).
Together, this research suggests the complexity of the literary interpretive process,
and points to the developing ability of readers to become more interpretive (i.e.,
in terms of their ability to analyze and generalize) with age and experience
(Applebee, 1978; Cooper, 1969; Purves & Rippere, 1968; Scribner, 1960); although, even young children have the ability to generate thematic statements (Dorfman, 1988; Lehr, 1988).
The primary purpose of this study is to examine the nature and complexity of
the interpretive process as illustrated by ninth-grade students reading modern short
stories. Although there was no intent to establish a priori assumptions about the
nature of their interpretive processes, it was necessary to develop an overarching
heuristic model to guide the research in which the complexity of the process was
preserved. This model draws on literary theory, research on response to literature,
and reading theory, and assumes the interpretive process to be a complex intertextual transaction between readers and texts and between readers.
For the purposes of this study, the term transaction is used in the sense introduced by Rosenblatt (1978), who describes the reading of literature as a dynamic
process in which the reader and text are part of an event, rather than separate
entities acting upon each other. As part of this event, readers are continually trying
to make sense of the work through various reasoning processes. Intertextuality is
used here in its broadest semiotic sense (cf. Barthes, 1974; Culler, 1981; Hawkes,
1977), where texts (as signs) are no longer viewed as autonomous entities, but as
"intertextual constructs; sequences which have meaning in relation to other texts
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393
which they take up, cite, parody, refute, or generally transform" (Culler, 1981,
p. 38). Texts, then, are interpreted by means of other texts which include any
chunk of unified meaning (Siegel, 1983) such as personal texts, texts of an author's
life or philosophy, and other readings of the text as well as other literary texts. As
Scholes (1986) argues:
Every poem, play and story is a text related to others, both verbal pre-texts and
social sub-texts and all manner of post-texts including [students'] own responses,
(p. 21)
One underlying assumption of this intertextual model of the interpretive process is that the richest readings of a text will include references to a number of
texts. For instance, a reader who focuses solely on the story structure will likely
produce a more limited interpretation than a reader who simultaneously focuses on
a character's reaction, comparisons to characters in another text, and his or her
own personal responses (or texts). Just as some texts may be more open or closed
(Eco, 1979), readings can be more open or closed.
Another important assumption of the model is that since readers (especially
student readers) participate in interpretive communities (Bleich, 1986; Fish, 1980),
those communities will play a role in shaping a reader's interpretive process. Fish
(1989) argues that reading strategies "follow from being embedded in a context of
practice" (p. ix). Rosenblatt (1938) also notes the "importance of the personal,
social and cultural context, observing that a [a reader's] reaction, as well as the
author's work of art, is the organic expression not only of a particular individual,
but also of a particular cultural setting" (p. 139ff). Mailloux (1989) argues that
rhetorical communities shape the individual interpretive acts of individuals, pointing to the role of literary rhetorical traditions, as well as larger cultural influences,
in shaping local interpretive events.
The rhetorical tradition that has most clearly influenced literature instruction
in this country is the New Critical tradition that privileges the text over the reader
and author in interpreting literary works (e.g., Wellek & Warren, 1956; Wimsatt
& Beardsley, 1954). Several studies of high school literature instruction have documented the vestiges of the New Critical approach, often referring to the academic
or element approach to interpreting texts (Barnes, 1976; Marshall, 1987, 1989).
That is, in these classrooms, the teachers and, therefore, the students focus on
textual elements of a literary work. As a result, students' responses play a limited
role in the interpretive process as it is manifested in classroom discussions of
literature.
A heuristic model that attempts to bridge the study of instructional context and
readers' interpretive processes and beliefs represents a new direction in research
on response to literature. This study examines how variations in instructional environments or communities, particularly variations in student participation in the
interpretive process, may influence students' approaches to and beliefs about liter-
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ary response and interpretation. This intertextual model assumes that readers draw
on sources of information in the text itself and from extratextual sources, such as
information about the author, about other works of literature, and on personal
reactions, knowledge and experiences; and that the interpretive process is influenced by their literary experiences and beliefs.
In short, a general question underlying this study is, what happens when students are encouraged to become literary critics themselves? Specifically, this study
examines the nature of the interpretive processes (defined as intertextual transactions) of 8 ninth-grade students, and addresses the following questions: (a) What
is the relationship between students' interpretive processes and their instructional
experiences? and (b) What are the students' beliefs related to the interpretive process and how are those beliefs related to their own interpretive processes and
experiences?
METHOD
Site and Participants
The study was undertaken in collaboration with a high school English teacher
and two of her intact ninth-grade classes (N=38) in a highly selective universityaffiliated high school in a small Midwestern city. Eight students (four from each
class) were chosen from a list of volunteers to be case study students, which
involved participating in extensive individual interviews with the researcher. From
the volunteer pool with each class, a stratified random sampling procedure was
used to select a group of students with varying ability (as ranked by the teacher)
balanced by gender.
Materials and Procedure
The researcher observed the regular classroom teacher over the course of two
months prior to the study. Three baseline observations of the teacher and students
discussing short stories were videotaped and transcribed in order to understand and
describe the existing interpretive community. In turn, the regular classroom teacher
attended all of the classes during the researcher-led short story unit and kept a
journal of her own observations.
The interviews. To gather baseline data on interpretive processes and beliefs
of the case study students, each of the eight students was interviewed once before
and once after the researcher-led instructional unit. The researcher met with each
student individually for one to two hours. During the first stage of this preinstructional interview, the students were asked four general questions about their
interpretive beliefs, processes, and experiences: (a) How do you generally go about
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395
interpreting a story (or any work of literature)? (b) How are you taught to interpret
stories in school? (c) How would you teach someone to interpret a story? and (d)
How do the other students and the teacher in your class help you to interpret a
story?
During the second stage of the interview, the students were asked to think
aloud while reading and interpreting a story by William Faulkner, "A Rose for
Emily," after practicing with a shorter story and reading a biographical sketch of
the author. Students were told to say out loud any thoughts that occurred to them
while they were reading. No further training procedures were utilized in order to
influence the nature of their responses as little as possible. As Ericcson and Simon
(1984) have argued, as long as subjects report information they would normally
notice while doing the task (as opposed to being asked to attend to certain information), it is unlikely to alter the structure of the overall process. Non-content probes,
such as "What do you mean by . . . " o r "Can you say more about . . . " were
used to get clarifications of vague responses. To prompt thematic generalizations
after finishing the story students were asked: "How would you go about interpreting
this story?" Students thought aloud while forming a thematic generalization.
In the third stage of the interview, students were asked to rank four critical
paragraphs written about the Faulkner story according to preference and to explain
their rankings. These paragraphs were adapted from actual critical pieces written
by literary critics and published in literary journals (see Appendix A). Each paragraph is a fairly clear example of the use of textual or extratextual (comparative,
authorial, or personal) evidence in developing an interpretation, reflecting different
approaches to interpretation. While they were ranking the paragraphs, the students
gave verbal explanations of the rankings. These preference rankings were used
as an indication of the students' preferences for particular ways of interpreting
literature.
The interviews that followed the researcher-led instructional unit were parallel
to the pre-instructional interviews with two modifications: (a) in the first stage,
students were asked to elaborate on the four questions in relation to their experiences during the unit, and (b) there was a debriefing section at the end of the
interview in which the researcher explained the rationale behind the critical paragraphs and invited students to comment further on the four critical perspectives.
The story used for the think-aloud in the post-interviews was "Barn Burning" by
William Faulkner. All interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed.
The instructional unit. The purpose of the researcher-led instructional unit was
to create an environment in which students played a larger role in the literary
interpretive process than was apparent in the observed discussions or than is generally observed in classroom discussions of literature (e.g., Marshall, 1987, 1989;
Rogers, 1987). The researcher met with the two classes for approximately 3 weeks
(14 class days). For the first 2 days, the students in both classes completed a written
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version of the interview in which they completed a questionnaire, read the story,
"A Rose for Emily," and ranked the critical paragraphs with explanations.
Students were encouraged to participate in the interpretive process in three
stages (each stage requiring one class period). They were asked: (a) to read and
respond to a story and construct a preliminary interpretation (thematic generalizations) in essay form, (b) to share their responses (including themes) and to hear
other students' and critics' responses during a discussion of the story, and (c) to
construct a final revised interpretive essay. Three stories were chosen in collaboration with the teacher and the chair of the English department from a list of stories
that were typically taught to ninth graders in the school. The stories chosen were
"A Clean Well-lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway; "A Worn Path" by Eurdora
Welty; and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. The discussion
technique used in the current study had three salient features (Rogers, 1987, 1990b)
designed to give students more input into the interpretive process and to expand
their interpretive strategies beyond drawing on textual information. First, discussions were initially based entirely on the students' responses as written in their
preliminary essays rather than on teacher questions. Later in the discussion, professional critical pieces (similar to those used in the interviews) were introduced as a
way of exposing the students to interpretations that may or may not have been
raised up to that point. The use of critical pieces in the classroom is supported by
both Rosenblatt (1978), who argues that the critic stimulates interpretive growth,
and Scholes (1986) who states:
By bringing the critical text inside the classroom we make a greater textual power
available to students. The point is . . . to make the object of study the whole
intertextual system of relations that connects one text to another, (p. 31)
Second, one extratextual (either comparative, authorial, or personal) approach to
interpretation was highlighted in order to increase students' awareness of the various perspectives that might be taken in the interpretive process. Third, disagreements and argumentation were encouraged in order to nurture reflexivity, wherein
disagreements are a vehicle for prompting students to reexamine their own responses. All discussions were videotaped and transcribed for analysis.
At the end of the unit, all of the students were given a written post-instructional
questionnaire asking the same four questions that appeared on the pre-instructional
questionnaire, but with reference to the instructional unit. They were then asked
to read "That Evening Sun" by William Faulkner and to rank critical paragraphs
according to preference with explanations of those rankings. Therefore, all the
students completed the three-part interviews, (either individually or in a group)
participated in an instructional unit, and again completed three-part interviews.
Analyses
Four analyses were carried out. First, an observational analysis was completed
in order to describe the regular classroom discussions observed prior to the instruc-
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397
tional unit and to contrast them with discussions that took place during the
researcher-led instructional unit. Second, the case study students' think-aloud protocols were analyzed in order to describe their interpretive processes based on the
intertextual transactional model of literary interpretation. Third, the case study
students' preference rankings and explanations were analyzed. Fourth, short profiles of selected case study students were developed, describing the relationships
among their interpretive beliefs, processes, and experiences.
The observational analysis. The observational analysis involved an examination of the videotaped, transcribed discussions. The interaction patterns of two key
discussion events in one class were analyzed; one that took place during the observation of the regular teacher and one during the researcher-led instructional unit.
The interaction patterns of the two discussions were analyzed using a modified
sociolinguistic analysis technique (Saville-Troike, 1982) that provides a description
of the topic and purpose of a classroom event, the nature of the act sequences, the
rules of interaction (who can talk to whom, when, about what), and the norms of
interpretation (the way those rules can be or are understood by participants and
observers). These data were then compared to the comments in the teacher's journal
and the students' questionnaires before and after the instructional unit in order to
triangulate the findings (Denzin, 1978).
Analysis of the think-aloud protocols. In order to analyze the interpretive processes of the case study students, their think-aloud protocols were scored using
two categorical scales (see Appendix B), one based on their reasoning operations
(as a measure of their attempts to transact with the text), and one based on their
literary inference sources (as a measure of the intertextuality of their responses).
The reasoning operations categories were developed by ascertaining the most
parsimonious list of reasoning operations that accounted for all the responses in
the data. The categories were culled from the work of several researchers who have
done analyses of reading and writing processes using verbal and written protocols
(Applebee, 1978; Langer, 1986; Lytle, 1985; Purves & Rippere, 1968).
The literary inference source categories were developed to reflect the interpretive process as an intertextual transaction. Working from the assumption that readers may draw on both textual and extratextual (authorial, comparative, and personal) sources of information, a listing of these inference sources and their
subsources was developed.
To categorize the 16 transcribed protocols of the case study students (8 from
the pre-instructional interviews and 8 from the post-instructional interviews), the
protocols were first parsed into response units that are grammatically similar to
T-units (Hunt, 1965). However, if two distinct reasoning operations were identified
in one longer clause, the clause was divided so that one response unit equalled one
reasoning operation. Each unit was scored twice: first it was assigned a reasoning
operation and then an inference source. Occasionally, two sources were assigned
to one response unit. One third (6) of the protocols were scored by the researcher
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and an independent scorer. The interrater agreement for the reasoning operation
scoring was 82%, and the interrater agreement for the inference source scoring was
90%. Because the protocols differed in length, total scores were calculated for each
category in each protocol and then expressed as a percentage of the total response
units for that protocol.
A log-linear analysis for cross-classified categorical data (Feinberg, 1980) was
carried out on these data in order to ascertain the model that best fit the data.
Log-linear analyses are used to create models for qualitative cross-tabular data
(Kennedy, 1988). Several key variables were entered: inference sources (extratextual vs. textual); the reasoning operations (less interpretive (1-5) vs. more interpretive (6-10)); the stories (pre-instructional vs. post-instructional); and subjects (8
case study students). A 2 x 2 x 2 x 8 contingency table was created and all possible
models were tested; the model chosen was the one that was the simplest yet not
significantly different from the full model. In a follow-up loglinear analysis the
inference source variable was broken down into five key categories (structure,
character, texture, author intention, and extratextual) to produce a 5 x 2 x 2 x 8
contingency table. The other inference source categories were dropped because
there were too many empty cells.
Preference rankings analysis. A nonparametric paired ranking analysis
(Critchlow & Verducci, 1989) was carried out on the ranking data of all the students
in order to test a drift in preference from the pre-instructional to the postinstructional rankings. These findings are discussed in light of students' explanations for their rankings.
Individual profiles. Four of the eight case study students were profiled in
order to examine the relationship of a student's interpretive beliefs, processes,
and experiences in more integrated fashion. These profiles draw on the entire
interviews.
RESULTS
The results are reported in four sections: first is the analysis of the variations
between the interactions in the classrooms before and after the instructional unit;
second, the analysis of the students' response protocols; third, the analysis of their
preference rankings; and, fourth, the individual case study profiles.
Looking at Variations in the Interpretive Community
In order to examine the ways in which variations in the participation of the
students in the interpretive process might have influenced their interpretive processes and beliefs, it was necessary to identify the differences between the teacherled and researcher-led discussions. The results of this analysis include an examination of the differences in the topic and purpose of the discussions, the act sequences,
Students as Literary Critics
399
the rules of interaction, and the interpretive norms. The interpretive norms were
characterized in two ways: (a) the differences in the types of interpretive strategies
that were supported in each, and (b) the differences in the roles the students and
teachers played in the interpretive process.
The Teacher-led Discussion
Topic and purpose. The regular classroom teacher led a discussion of the story,
"The Open Window," by Saki. The students had read the story the night before
and the purpose of the discussion was to guide the students through the story's
elements to an interpretation and, then, as the teacher put it, to have a "mini
posttest" asking the students to compare a character in "The Open Window" to
a character in a story read previously, "Down at the Dinghy," by Salinger.
The act sequence. The teacher began by writing these words on the blackboard:
"Plot," "Characters," "Setting," and "Structure." She then called on a student
to summarize the plot, occasionally asking for clarifications or elaborations:
T: . . . In terms of the plot, though, can you tell me briefly what happens in the
story, G?
G: Well, this guy, Framton Nuttel . . .
T: Framton Nuttel . . .
G: . . . goes to this house.
T: Okay, why does he visit them?
G: He is sort of shy and nervous and he needed to meet people to help him . . . .
T: Okay, you said he was nervous. Yea. Okay. To answer the question, "Why is
he visiting these people?", was his sister embarked on some idea for him to
cure his nervousness? G . . . ?
G: Yes.
The discussion moved very quickly into analyses of the characters—first Vera
and then Framton Nuttel. The teacher wrote one-word descriptors on the chalkboard
that represented the ideas of the students. In general, the interaction cycle (e.g.,
Mehan, 1979) proceeded in the following way: The teacher asked a question, a
student answered, the teacher then either evaluated the answer, evaluated and
elaborated the answer, asked for more information, or provided a response herself.
In this case, the teacher embedded her preferred answer (Rogers, Green, & Nussbaum, 1990) in her final question because she had not received it by simply asking
questions.
When the character analyses were over, the teacher posed the question: "Can
you see which [character] Saki is making fun of? Who is he elevating and who is
he mocking?" She then discussed the satirical nature of the story:
T: Saki likes to make fun of or satirize characters that think they are selfimportant—high society, the idle, the rich—those segments of society. So the
story we've got today, besides being a strange, supernatural ghost story, is a
satire.
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Toward the end of the discussion, the teacher emphasized that Saki writes
satirical and witty stories and often elevates children while taking "jabs" at adults.
Then, as an impromptu mini-test, the teacher posed this question to the students:
If I asked you to write an essay . . . comparing the two characters seen in these
two stories, Lionel [from "Down at the Dinghy"] and Vera, how are they similar
and how are they different?
The students volunteered comments and at times disagreed with each other.
The teacher continued to evaluate the responses and elaborate on them, but she also
accepted conflicting responses and encouraged students to react to other students'
comments.
The rules of interaction and the norms of interpretation. The rules of interaction during the bulk of the discussion were that the teacher asked the questions and
the students provided responses. If the teacher did not hear certain information,
she asked for it or provided it herself. In discussing the theme of the story, the
teacher virtually supplied all of the information necessary to form a thematic interpretation. An exception to this characterization is the mini posttest segment at the
end of the discussion. At that point, analyses were supplied by the students and
the teacher accepted differing responses.
The way these rules can be interpreted is that in general it is the teacher who
possesses the social and interpretive authority. Her strategies for interpreting the
story were to lead the students through a question-answer cycle related to the textual
elements of the story and culminate with a thematic interpretation; although, some
extratextual sources of evidence were also introduced such as some ideal reader's
responses to the language and structure of the story, and general information about
the intent of the author's work. For a short period at the end of the discussion, the
interpretive strategies changed somewhat. The students were encouraged to make
comparisons between characters across stories based on their own responses.
The Researcher-led Discussion
The topic and purpose. The researcher led a discussion of the story, "A Clean
Well-lighted Place," by Ernest Hemingway. The students had read the story and
written preliminary response essays about it the previous day. The purpose of the
discussion was to have students share their responses and interpretations and to
introduce critical pieces about the relationship between Hemingway's own life and
his work. The students were asked to revise their essays the following day based
on the discussion.
The act sequence. The researcher led a discussion of the story. Using a list of
the themes the students had written about in their essays, the researcher called on
individual students to explain the themes they had written about. As themes
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401
emerged, students raised their hands to volunteer additional information or to raise
new issues. The researcher occasionally interrupted to clarify or elaborate on students' comments and sometimes redirected the discussion. For instance, the researcher held off a discussion of the meaning of the nada prayer so other themes
could emerge first. Generally, the interaction cycle consisted of the researcher
calling on individual students or accepting volunteers to offer a comment; the
researcher would then evaluate and either ask for clarification or elaboration, or
call on another student to elaborate.
A good part of the discussion was spent talking about the theme of young
versus old as illustrated by the relationship between the old waiter and the young
waiter since there was a theme that occurred most often in their preliminary essays.
Several contrasts emerged during this discussion: reflectivity versus impulsivity;
confidence versus lack of confidence; cleanliness and light versus dirtiness and
dark; and materialism versus human compassion. In the excerpt below, a student
elaborates on the theme of young versus old as illustrated by the relationship
between the two waiters:
B: Well, I think the older waiter might have looked at the younger waiter and said
that's what I was like when I was his age, you know. I was materialistic and
overbearing and why don't I try . . . .
Researcher: Why do you say materialistic?
B: Well, because they are always talking about how the guy had all the money
and that's all that mattered in the world and so he shouldn't have killed himself,
because he has plenty of money. And so the older waiter might have said to
himself, "Well, that's what I was like so why don't I try to do something
worthwhile, with my last remaining days or months or years," and so he decided
to help the people on the streets who might want to come into the cafe during
the night.
Researcher: Compassionate. K . . . ?
Toward the end of the discussion the theme of nada, or nothingness, was
discussed. One of the students had a very sophisticated explanation of the existential
nature of the story as illustrated through the older waiter's prayer:
Researcher: Okay, this whole idea of nothing is obviously an important theme and
a couple of you came up with . . . it's a difficult theme. A, you had some ideas
about it.
A: Well, I thought that was the main theme, actually, because it's the part where
you focus the most on one character and that's what Hemingway was trying to
do was to, all this stuff was leading up to the bar and him turning into himself
and recognizing his fear of nothing. And that's why I kind of thought it was an
existentialist theme. . . . He's saying that nothing, he's replacing all the nouns
in that [prayer] with nadas, they're really nothing in the whole focus of life.
They're really just not important and you think nothing is really important except
cleanliness and, well, good lighting.
The researcher then questioned the students in order to introduce the idea of
dignity into the discussion. At this point the interaction cycle changed to a more
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conventional classroom interaction cycle because the researcher was looking for a
particular answer and kept asking for it in various ways.
Copies of the critical pieces, several of which drew on information about
Hemingway to interpret the story, were then distributed. The discussion continued
for 10 minutes, focusing again on Hemingway's life, philosophy, and writing style
as they related to the story.
The rules of interaction and norms of interpretation. In general, rather than
answering predetermined questions, the students explained or elaborated on the
themes they had written about the previous day or volunteered new ideas. The
researcher did introduce the topics, direct the discussion, and occasionally interrupted to elaborate or to ask for clarifications or elaborations, but the interpretations
were largely supplied by the students.
The rules of interaction during most of this discussion were that the students
were to elaborate and argue for their own interpretations of the story using whatever
evidence (textual or extratextual) they deemed necessary; therefore, some of the
interpretive authority was shared by the students. The strategies for interpreting
did not consist of segmenting the story into elements and then introducing a theme.
Instead, thematic ideas were used as a unifying basis for viewing the contribution
of the story detail. The students largely focussed on textual evidence in arguing
for their responses and interpretations; however, several times throughout the discussion, the students alluded to Hemingway's life and philosophy (a focus on the
author was also introduced via the critical pieces) and on their own personal reactions to the story.
A Comparison of the Two Discussions
The discussions differed in several ways. The topics or stories discussed and
the purposes of the discussions were different. In the teacher-led discussion, the
purpose was to review the story elements and to develop a particular interpretation,
and then to compare characters across stories. In the researcher-led discussion the
purpose was to elaborate and develop the students' initial responses to the story
and to draw students' attention to the ways critics sometimes draw on the life of
the author to interpret their works. The purposes were reflected in the act sequences
of the two discussions. In the teacher-led discussion a more typical interaction cycle
was established, with the teacher generally providing predetermined questions,
evaluations, and elaborations. In the researcher-led discussion, the students volunteered or were encouraged to elaborate their own and other students' responses.
The rules of interaction and underlying norms of the teacher-led discussion
point toward a community in which the teacher is the interpretive authority, and
analysis of the text itself is more important than students' individual responses.
This characterization is not unlike those provided by other researchers who have
observed high school English classrooms (e.g., Barnes, 1976; Marshall, 1987).
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403
For instance, Marshall (1987) describes the classroom he observed as illustrating
an academic approach to the study of literature:
By carefully monitoring the questions that are asked (and by modelling the nature
of appropriate questions), [the teacher] succeeds in her purpose of guiding students
toward a conventional interpretation of the story . . . [the student's role] is not so
much to interpret the story as to flesh out the interpretation that is embodied in
her questions. Though in the end a standard critical reading of [the story] was
achieved, students played a rather small part in constructing it. (pp. 36-37)
In contrast, the discussion in the instructional unit during the study had a
slightly different set of interpretive norms. The students participated in the interpretive process by presenting and arguing for their own responses and themes, and
particulars of the story were used to support those interpretations, so that the
interpretive process was more a process of whole to parts than parts to whole.
Intertextual (including personal) responses were supported. Evidence from the author's background, comparative allusions, and personal responses as well as textual
information were all considered evidence that could lead to a response. In addition,
students were encouraged to reflect back on their own responses after hearing those
of other students.
When the students participated more fully in the interpretive process they also
supplied the bulk of the talk; that is, the length of their utterances, in relation to
the teacher's, was much longer. In the teacher-led discussion the average length
of the teacher's utterances was 47 words whereas the average length of the students'
utterances was 22 words. In the researcher-led discussion, the average length of
the researcher's utterances was 29 words and the average length of the students'
utterances was 25 words. In addition, during the instructional unit students began
to ask the researcher questions and to talk directly to each other.
To some extent, the students recognized the variations in the two instructional
contexts. In the pre-instructional interviews, responses of 32 of the 38 students
who participated in the study indicated that they were either not encouraged to
interpret literature at all or that they were encouraged to analyze text features such
as structure, characterization, or texture (mood, style, imagery) of literary works.
Only a few students felt that information about the author, other works of literature,
or their own personal reactions were part of the classroom interpretive process.
Analyses of the student questionnaires after the researcher-led instructional unit
revealed a mix of responses. Sixteen students did not mention any differences, but
22 students named a range of new strategies, including "looking more carefully at
the stories" or at the story as a "whole," looking beyond structure and characterization, looking for more than one theme, and considering other stories, other
students' responses, and the author's background. Thus, more than one half of the
students reported experiencing a more holistic, intertextual and less fragmented
approach to interpretation during the researcher-led discussions.
404
Journal of Reading Behavior
The regular classroom teacher's concerns as expressed in her journal reflected
the more general concerns of literature teachers about the need to guide students
toward a particular conventional interpretation (e.g., Marshall, 1989); for instance,
in one entry she wrote, "I feel the need to step in and say, 'Okay, guys, here's
what it all means'." As a teacher, she represents the larger academic community
that supports this approach to the study of literature (cf. Edwards & Mercer, 1987;
Mailloux, 1989). Although the students seemed to feel more positive about the
researcher-led community than the teacher, several were also sensitive to the demands of the larger community and were concerned about whether they were
learning the right interpretation. They also experienced some frustration in being
encouraged to interpret on their own. As one student said, "We were all kind of
mad at [the researcher] for not giving us [an interpretation], but it may be better
for us because it gives us a chance to interpret the way we want."
Case Study Students' Interpretive Processes
In order to describe the students' interpretive processes in general, and to
analyze differences in those processes during the teacher-led and researcher-led
instruction, the protocols of the eight case study students were analyzed in terms
of reasoning operations and inference sources. Table 1 contains the percentages of
each reasoning operation by each student for each story with averages by story and
averages of the stories combined. In general, these data tend to be fairly consistent
with those of previous response to literature studies that have looked at the reasoning operations of adolescent readers (e.g., Applebee, 1978; Purves & Rippere,
1968; Squire, 1964). That is, these students were fairly interpretive in the sense of
being able to analyze, generalize, and draw conclusions about the stories, as well
as to retell, engage, and hypothesize. In fact, an average of nearly 40% of the
protocols consisted of analysis. Yet there is also quite a bit of variation between
the students in this study. For instance, two students (see Jenny and Gary in Table
1) relied quite a bit on retelling in their protocols, while others did not. This
variation is even more evident in the engaging, questioning, and monitoring categories.
In terms of differences between the pre- and post-instructional stories, there
appears to be a shift away from retelling, elaborating, questioning, and hypothesizing toward analyzing, generalizing, and evaluating. It could be argued that these
shifts represent a movement toward more interpretive responses (cf. Applebee,
1978; Purves & Rippere, 1968). This finding is similar to Wilson's (1966) finding
that college students become more interpretive after a series of response-centered
discussions of three novels.
Table 2 contains the percentages of the inference sources each student drew
on for each story with averages by story and averages of the stories combined.
This table reveals the general tendency of students to make inferences related to
Table 1
Percentages of Response Units in Each Reasoning Operation Category by Story
Jenny
2b
1"
33.0
00.5
00.0
02.0
15.7
32.5
12.7
01.0
00.0
00.5
02.0
29.7
00.0
00.0
00.0
02.7
37.8
10.8
13.5
00.0
00.0
00.9
Joan
1
2
1
2
1
2
03.7
01.9
05.6
02.5
14.4
38.1
16.9
03.1
01.9
03.7
08.1
07.5
00.0
13.2
03.8
15.1
24.5
09.4
03.8
05.7
09.4
07.5
16.0
08.0
04.0
06.0
13.0
31.0
12.0
01.0
00.0
02.0
07.0
08.9
00.0
03.3
10.0
08.9
52.2
03.3
06.7
00.0
03 1
03.3
20.8
02.2
09.9
08.8
04.4
31.9
06.6
02.2
01.1
00.0
02.2
11.8
00.0
00.0
00.0
02.3
55.8
14.0
09.3
00.0
02.3
04.7
"Story 1 is the pre-instructional story, "A Rose for Emily."
b
Story 2 is the post-instructional story, "Barn Burning."
Susan
2
1
05.9
00.0
05.9
20.6
14.7
11.8
05.9
02.9
02.9
23.5
05.9
00.0
00.0
10.9
01.6
04.7
51.6
14.1
00.0
01.6
09.4
06.3
Pam
Gary
Bob
1
2
1
2
1
2
02.5
05.8
14.2
02.5
15.0
34.2
07.5
05.8
00.0
03.3
09.2
02.3
00.0
02.3
02.3
02.3
72.1
07.0
07.0
00.0
00.0
04.7
08.9
00.0
00.0
00.0
08.8
50.9
22.8
05.3
01.8
01.8
00.0
02.9
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
51.4
34.3
02.9
05.7
00.0
02.9
45.3
01.2
00.0
00.0
02.3
30.2
16.3
01.2
00.0
00.0
03.5
18.0
00.0
00.0
04.0
04.0
48.0
08.0
04.0
04.0
12.0
00.0
Average %
by Story
1
2
18.25
02.45
04.95
05.30
11.04
32.58
12.59
02.81
00.96
04 35
04.74
09.96
00.00
03.71
02.71
05.00
49.18
12.61
05.90
02.13
04.55
03.79
Combined
Average %
14.08
01.23
04.33
04.00
08.02
40.88
12.60
04.36
01.55
04.45
04.27
1
9
j Lite
Retelling
Elaborating
Engaging
Questioning
Hypothesizing
Analyzing
Drawing Conclusions
Generalizing
Evaluating
Monitoring
Miscellaneous
Dora
nts
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Karl
2
Q
2
Table 2
Percentages of Response Units in Each Inference Source Category by Story
Jenny
TEXTUAL
Title
Structure
Setting
Sequence
Conflict
Character
Attributes
Psych. States
Relationships
Narration
Texture
Mood
Style
Imagery
Author Intention
Genre
EXTRATEXTUAL
Authorial
Comparative
Personal
Reactions
Experience
Knowledge
Karl
Dora
Joan
Susan
Pam
1
2
1
2
Bob
Gary
1
2
Average %
by Story
1
2
Combined
Average %
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.00
00.00
00.00
00.0
32.3
00.5
00.0
34.2
00.0
06.7
07.2
02.6
07.7
11.5
00.0
02.1
27.1
00.0
01.2
22.4
00.0
02.1
34.8
00.0
00.0
11.6
00.0
00.0
42.5
00.0
00.0
05.0
06.7
02.5
14.3
02.5
06.8
04.5
00.0
03.5
17.5
00.0
00.0
08.6
00.0
00.0
45.4
03.5
00.0
23.1
03.9
02.11
27.64
01.14
01.96
15.08
01.33
02.04
21.36
01.24
28.3
33.8
01.0
00.0
13.2
44.7
02.6
00.0
40.1
10.5
06.7
00.0
36.5
05.8
07.7
01.9
35.4
22.9
03.1
00.0
28.2
21.2
02.4
00.0
26.1
08.7
04.3
00.0
37.2
25.6
11.6
00.0
25.0
15.2
00.0
00.0
28.3
33.3
01.7
00.0
25.2
17.7
07.6
02.5
13.6
27.3
3..1
00.0
36.8
28.1
12.3
00.0
31.4
54.3
00.0
00.0
11.6
37.2
00.0
00.0
50.0
11.5
00.0
00.0
32.09
21.76
04.38
00.31
29.80
27.96
07.13
00.00
30.95
24.86
05.76
00.16
00.0
01.0
01.5
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.6
05.9
02.6
03.9
00.0
00.0
00.0
01.9
00.0
00.0
00.0
03.1
01.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
07.1
11.8
01.2
00.0
01.1
02.1
01.1
01.1
00.0
00.0
00.0
04.7
02.3
00.0
00.0
00.0
15.2
03.1
00.0
00.0
05.0
06.7
00.0
00.0
00.0
05.0
00.0
03.4
00.8
00.0
00.0
02.3
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
01.8
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
05.7
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
01.2
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
07.7
00.0
00.0
00.21
02.14
03.05
01.44
00.10
00.00
01.51
05.10
00.44
00.00
00.11
01.83
04.08
00.94
00.05
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
01.3
03.3
05.8
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
01.2
00.0
04.4
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
11.7
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
02.3
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.16
00.96
02.19
00.44
01.18
00.70
03.0
00.0
00.0
02.6
02.6
00.0
06.7
01.3
00.6
21.2
00.0
00.0
04.2
01.0
00.0
02.4
00.0
01.2
09.8
04.4
00.0
07.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
01.7
00.0
00.0
15.1
02.5
00.8
09.1
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
00.0
01.2
00.0
03.8
00.0
00.0
04.85
01.30
00.18
05.98
00.33
00.15
05.42
00.82
00.17
|
§
a.
to
1
Students as Literary Critics
407
the structure and characterization of the stories. An average of nearly 25% of each
student's combined response units were related to structure and an average of over
50% were related to characterization. Again, these findings are consistent with
other studies of adolescent responses (e.g., Purves & Rippere, 1968). Slightly more
of the students' response units were associated with character in the postinstructional story (total of almost 65%) than in the pre-instructional story (58%)
and fewer responses associated with structure (total of 18%) in the post-instructional
story than in the pre-instructional story (31%). Other individual findings include
the variation in students' tendency to draw on character attributes versus their
psychological states (cf. Beach & Wendler, 1987) and their tendency to draw
inferences about the texture of stories (cf. Svennson, 1985).
Only an average of about 8% of the students' response units were related to
extratextual sources of information, most of which were personal reaction inferences. There was only a slight increase in the average number of extratextual
inferences in the post-instructional protocols and much of this change can be attributed to one student (Karl), who is profiled below.
Results of the first loglinear analysis showed that the model that best fit the
data included two three-way interactions between inference source, reasoning operation, and subject, and between story, reasoning operation, and subject, X2(16,
N = 8) = 25.33, p>.05, suggesting the importance of individual variation in the
subjects' transactions with the stories. Even with the inference source category
broken down into five categories (extratextual and four textual sub-categories with
sufficient data in each cell), the best fit model again included two three-way interactions involving subjects as a variable (inference source by reasoning operation
by subject, and inference source by story by subject). However, this model also
included a two-way interaction between story and reasoning operation, X 2 (39,
iV=8) = 51.61, p>.05. This last interaction suggests that the relationship between
story and reasoning operations was independent of subject and inference source
levels, supporting the finding that students were more interpretive in their responses
to the second story.
Table 3 indicates the relationship between the reasoning operations of the
students and the sources of their inferences across the two stories. (These percentages are not averaged for each student as in Tables 1 and 2; they are percentages
of the overall raw response unit data, so that they vary somewhat from the previous
tables.) Consistent with the previous data, over half of the response units are
accounted for by analyzing, hypothesizing, or drawing conclusions about the structure of the stories and the characters. Another 14% of the data consists of retellings
of the sequence of events; however, a large percentage of these response units are
associated with only two students.
Two other relationships evident in Table 3 are worth noting: of the 4.6% of
response units categorized as thematic generalizations, 1.5% are also categorized
as personal inferences; and of the 1% of evaluative inferences, .4% are also catego-
s
Table 3
Percentages of Response Units in Each Inference Source Category by Each Reasoning Operation Category
TEXTUAL
Title
Structure
Setting
Sequence
Conflict
Character
Attributes
Psych. States
Relationships
Narration
Texture
Mood
Style
Imagery
Author Intention
Genre
EXTRATEXTUAL
Authorial
Comparative
Personal
Reactions
Experience
Knowledge
Retelling
Elaborating
Engaging
Questioning
Hypothesizing
Analyzing
Drawing Cone.
Generalizing
Evaluating
Monitoring
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.1
14.4
0.1
0.1
0.1
0.0
0.1
1.0
0.0
0.1
1.0
0.0
0.7
1.1
0.1
0.9
2.6
0.9
0.2
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.2
0.0
0.6
0.0
0.2
1.2
0.0
1.1
0.2
0.0
0.0
0.7
0.3
0.0
0.0
0.7
0.1
0.2
0.1
1.2
0.5
0.0
0.0
3.5
3.6
0.1
0.0
17.0
10.9
3.3
0.2
3.3
7.2
0.7
0.1
1.0
0.7
1.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.6
0.3
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.1
0.3
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.7
0.1
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.1
0.1
0.0
1.0
1.7
0.3
0.0
0.0
0.1
1.3
0.4
0.0
0.0
0.1
0.1
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.3
0.3
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.3
0.0
0.1
0.5
0.2
0.0
0.0
0.3
0.1
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.1
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.3
0.2
0.0
2.1
0.1
0.0
0.1
0.0
0.0
0.3
0.0
0.0
0.4
0.3
0.0
0.7
0.1
0.1
1.2
0.3
0.0
0.4
0.0
0.0
0.3
0.0
0.0
0.0
g
*«>50
1
s»
1"
1
5*
-I
Students as Literary Critics
409
rized as personal inferences. The important role of personal response in interpretation is discussed at length elsewhere (Rogers, 1990a). Briefly, the role of subjectivity in interpretation has been highlighted by reader-response theorists (Bleich, 1978;
Rosenblatt, 1978), and there is increasing evidence that readers' personal engagement is a necessary prerequisite to understanding and evaluating complex works
of literature (Golden & Guthrie, 1986; Many, 1991; Purves, 1981; Squire, 1964).
The Students' Preference Rankings
The preference rankings are presented as a measure of the students' preferences
for certain ways of interpreting literature. This measure, along with their explanations of the rankings and other interview data, was analyzed in order to understand
their underlying beliefs about how literature should be interpreted. A more in-depth
analysis of individual students' beliefs are discussed in the case study profiles.
It was assumed that exposure to extratextual approaches to interpretation during
the researcher-led instructional unit might affect the students' preferences for particular critical approaches. For instance, personal responses were encouraged and
supported during the researcher-led unit, so it was hypothesized that such responses
would be preferred more often after the instructional unit. Table 4 presents the
preference rankings of the case study students before and after the instructional
unit. In general, these data reflect the interpretive process data as well as the
literary instructional experiences of the students. That is, before the researcher-led
instructional unit, the textual paragraph—which deals mainly with characters,
events, and texture—was preferred (ranked with a one or a two) more often than
the authorial, comparative, and personal paragraphs. For the story read after the
instructional unit, none of the case study students gave a high ranking to the textual
paragraph.
The students' explanations of their rankings shed some light on their decisions.
For instance, several of the students felt that the textual paragraph related to the
post-instructional story, "Barn Burning," was too limited, whereas the personal
paragraph captured the "main point"—the boy's internal struggle played out in
his relationship to his father and the feelings thus evoked in the reader. Yet,
several of these students had said they disliked the personal paragraph for the
pre-instructional story, "A Rose for Emily," because it reflected personal feelings
of the critic. Thus, there is some indication of more tolerance for the personal
approach after the researcher-led instructional unit.
The comparative paragraph was ranked highly more often for the second story
than for the first story, but the preference rankings for the authorial paragraphs
remained constant even though the students were dealing with their second Faulkner
story when ranking the post-instructional paragraphs. In their explanation, students
expressed resistance to drawing on information about the author when interpreting
a story.
410
Journal of Reading Behavior
Table 4
The Pre- and Post-Instructional Paragraph Rankings of the Case Study Students
Pre-instructional
Story "Emily"
High
Low
1 or 2
3 or 4
Textual
Extratextual
Authorial
Comparative
Personal
Post-instructional
Story "Barn Burning"
High
Low
1 or 2
3 or 4
6
2
0
8
3
2
5
5
6
3
3
4
6
5
4
2
In order to test the drift in preference rankings of the two entire classes
(N = 38), it was necessary to posit an idealized (more intertextual) post-instructional
ranking (Critchlow & Verducci, 1989). The idealized ranking was posited in the
following order: Personal, comparative, authorial, and textual. Controlling for order of presentation and random movement, results of the ranking analysis revealed
a drift toward the idealized ranking from the pre- to post-instructional story
[W(a)=-3.47,/><.001].
In general, these rankings illustrate a relationship between the students' preferences related to the type of information that can be drawn on during the interpretive
process and their own interpretive processes, although there is overall less preference for the textual paragraphs than might be suggested by the process data, and
more of a preference for the personal paragraphs, as well as a general shift in
preference toward the extratextual paragraphs after the instructional unit.
Students as Literary Critics: Four Profiles
In order to examine the complex relationship of individual students' interpretive beliefs, processes, and experiences that form their critical stances toward literature, four of the case study students were chosen to be profiled. There were two
criteria for selecting these four students. Since the model resulting from the analysis
of the process data pointed to the importance of individual variation in the intertextuality of their literary transactions, two students were chosen as clear examples of
a tendency to take either a textual or intertextual stance toward interpretation. Two
additional students were chosen because of their clear shift/lack of shift in interpretive stance before and after the researcher-led instructional unit.
Dora and Pam were chosen because of their particular critical stances toward
literary interpretation. Whereas Dora has a very textual stance, Pam relies quite
heavily on personal responses and is able to draw on many intertextual elements
Students as Literary Critics
411
to interpret stories in rich and complex ways. Karl is profiled because he exhibited
a shift in his beliefs about literary interpretation during the study toward a more
intertextual (particularly personal) critical stance. In contrast, Gary steadfastly refused to acknowledge or accept the premises or assumptions underlying the study;
he believed interpretation was a simple process of examining what happens in a
story in order to extract a moral statement. The data presented in each profile are
drawn from the transcripts of the students' entire interviews (see Rogers, 1988).
Dora. The teacher ranked Dora highly in terms of general ability and interpretive skill, and very highly in terms of class participation. Dora expressed a fairly
textual critical stance toward the interpretive process in her interviews; for instance,
she believed in "sticking" to the text when interpreting stories. In particular, she
believed that analyzing the events and the characters of a literary work was a "safe
bet." Indeed, her response to "A Rose for Emily" revealed insightful understandings of the character's psychological state:
I guess [Emily] thought one way to get her romance was to do something desperate.
The theme, the meaning would be that to sometimes, at least in Miss Emily's case,
to preserve something she couldn't have, you have to take desperate measures.
In the first interview, Dora rejected the personal approach to interpretation
calling it "too opinionated," but in the second interview clarified that position by
saying personal inferences may be a good route to interpretation if they are translated into textual "evidence." She felt that drawing on the author and comparing
stories were "dangerous" ways to interpret stories.
During classroom discussions with the teacher, Dora often volunteered answers
to questions about plot and offered textual justifications for analysis questions. It
was Dora who offered the answer to the teacher's question, "Who is [Saki] elevating and who is he mocking?" during the discussion of "The Open Window."
Dora simply responded, "He is elevating Vera and mocking Framton." The teacher
then provided an interpretation of the story (see discussion analysis).
During the researcher-led discussion of "A Clean Well-lighted Place," Dora
offered an analysis of two parallel events in the story that pointed to the similarity
between the older waiter and the old man. Contrary to her belief about not drawing
on information about the author, Dora did volunteer comments on the relationship
of the story to Hemingway's apparent existential philosophy during the discussion
of the critical pieces. For instance, she commented on how the old man in the story
continued on in the face of a meaningless existence.
After the unit, Dora was open to the idea of "broadening" interpretation by
considering several thematic strands instead of just the one that is expected on a
test:
You find out what other people are thinking and your ideas, too, get expanded.
And then the critiques (critical paragraphs) are when you have more, older opinions
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or whatever and then you see how weird theirs are or how different or how similar
and you can compare them with yours.
In her debriefing comments, Dora said that although it was "intimidating" to
interpret stories on her own, she didn't totally dislike it:
Since we probably have to do it someday we might as well get used to it because
I don't think there's always going to be someone there telling you what it is so
it's good to figure it out for yourself. Usually you find out what the themes are
from the teacher. They have to tell you before a test.
Pam. Pam was ranked highly by the teacher in terms of general ability and
classroom participation, but lower in interpretive skills. In contrast to Dora, Pam's
initial critical stance as expressed in the first interview was more complex (i.e.,
intertextual) in that she readily drew on personal responses and made connections
across a broad range of textual inferences, including inferences about narration,
texture, genre, and author intention, as well as structure and characters. As she
said:
The whole point of reading is to experience what the author is feeling when he or
she writes the story.
Pam's interpretation of "A Rose for Emily" reflected this belief in the role of
personal response in understanding a story:
She [Emily] has something she just doesn't want people to know. It's just like a
secret or something and I don't think people should be pressuring her that
much. . . . I don't feel sorry for her the way the town does—they sort of feel pity
for her because she's such an out-of-it type person, but no one is helping her be
like the rest of the people in the town. I feel sorry for her because the town is like
that.
During the majority of teacher-led discussion of "The Open Window," Pam
often had her hand raised but was only called on to answer specific questions such
as, "What kind of person (referring to Frampton Nuttel) always talks about their
ailments?" ("a complaining type"); and "What kind of person is Vera?" Near
the end of the discussion, when the two characters were being directly compared,
Pam was called on and offered this comment:
I sort of feel sympathetic to both of them because of their surroundings. . . . Vera
lives in a surrounding where she's the only person her age. And Nuttel, he lives
with a mean sister, so I feel sympathy to both of them even if they're a little nasty.
During the researcher-led discussion of "A Clean Well-lighted Place," Pam
often asked for clarifications and noted parallels across characters and events. When
the theme of "nothingness" was introduced, Pam said:
I talked about nothing in my essay and I thought it was almost the opposite of
what Andrea said because in the biographical sketch it said that Hemingway killed
Students as Literary Critics
413
himself and I think that's sort of like the old man who doesn't have anything that's
important to him.
Here Pam spontaneously brought in information about Hemingway before the critical pieces were introduced.
Although Pam had a very open critical stance in terms of the range of information she drew on, she understood the role of justification and interpretive conformity
in the classroom. As she said, students are usually "conservative in that we talk
about things that everyone can relate to; so when [the teacher] says in the post-test
'write the theme,' we'll write something that is almost unanimously justified, which
is much easier for the teacher."
Karl. The teacher ranked Karl highly in terms of general ability and interpretive
skill, but lower in terms of class participation. Karl is profiled because he exhibited
some rather striking theoretical shifts in his critical stance from the pre-instructional
to the post-instructional interview. Although his protocols were consistently a mix
of textual, personal, and even authorial inferences, he only acknowledged and
theoretically corroborated this approach in his second interview.
During the initial interview, Karl described his guiding principle for interpreting stories: to look for the author's intended purpose or message and to look
for supporting evidence in the events of the story or in the characters' actions.
He had strong negative reactions to the authorial and comparative approaches to
interpretation. About the comparative paragraph on "A Rose for Emily," he said:
I don't care whether it corresponds with Greek mythology. I can't stand Greek
mythology. I want to hear about the story.
And about the authorial perspective he said:
Can't stand this background stuff. . . . The story itself is the most important thing
because, isn't that what you are interpreting?
However, Karl's responses to the second story ("Barn Burning") revealed
changes in his perspective:
It shows that a family sticks together to a point, maybe until a family like this
can't take it; for example, at the end the son just couldn't take it anymore. . . . I
wouldn't want him as my father. . . . I would do just what the son did after a
while.
When asked how he interpreted the stories during the instructional unit, his response
indicated a very different critical stance:
I first read through the story, then I thought about what feelings I had during the
story.
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He described the difference in approaches between what he originally described
in the pre-instructional questionnaire and what he was describing on the postinstructional questionnaire:
This one [the post-instructional interview] I'm more into the story. . . . I'm getting
more emotion. This one [the pre-instructional interview] I'm interpreting like it's
a math paper or something. . . . That's how I look at it now. I read and see how
I feel instead of looking at the author's point.
During the teacher-led discussion of "The Open Window," Karl played a
limited role. He offered descriptive comments about the characters ("Vera likes
mischief . . .") and answered when the teacher asked for the meaning of the name
Vera ("It means truth"). As Dora had in the other class, Karl supplied the answer
when the teacher asked, "Who is the author satirizing?" ("Nuttel").
In the researcher-led discussion of "A Clean Well-lighted Place," Karl offered
thematic analyses several times, such as an analysis of the theme of young and
old:
Well, the old man is ready to die, but it doesn't mean anything, it's nothing. And
at the end, the young waiter has his whole life ahead of him so it's something.
That seems to be a contrast.
Karl contributed quite a bit to the discussion of the critical pieces, but commented that "What a critic should do is analyze a story. When it says 'nada' so
many times, you know it's about 'nada,' but why is it about 'nada'? In fact, Karl's
comments about the instructional unit itself were cautious, indicating that perhaps
there should be "a happy medium" between using the "element" approach and the
approach used in the instructional unit in which all the elements are "interrelated."
Gary. Gary was ranked lowest in general ability and participation, and very
low in interpretive skill by the teacher. Gary indicated in his interview that he
believed that literary response should be strictly limited to an analysis of the characters and the events in a story (although he realized some symbolic interpretation
was expected in school):
I just look at the plot and see where it's headed. Like if anything happens to the
characters, like if they do something and something happens to them and that
might be the theme.
In this way, Gary's thematic generalizations were extremely consistent with
his interpretive beliefs. Of "A Rose for Emily," he said:
She [Emily] represents old fashioned ideas and how being strict kills her and the
new ideas, the new people come and she dies. . . . Old ideas eventually just go
completely.
Gary said very little during the teacher-led discussion of "The Open Window." He offered the word "hypochondriac" to describe Frampton Nuttel, and
Students as Literary Critics
415
commented that, "We get to see Vera as the focus of evil." He offered no responses at all during the researcher-led discussion of "A Clean Well-lighted
Place."
Gary said no other student's opinions convinced him during the instructional
unit but some of the critical paragraphs did. He felt that if the students are left to
interpret, most of them will not think of anything and others will find what they
always find. At the end of the interview, Gary concluded that the unit was "sort
of interesting, seeing the strange sorts of ideas people came up with," yet, he was
virtually unaffected by the experience.
DISCUSSION
This study examined the literary interpretive processes of adolescent readers
in the context of their beliefs about interpretation and their instructional experiences
in literature classes, providing a beginning look at the relationship between how
we teach literature and what students learn. The interpretive process was conceptualized as a complex intertextual transaction that is related to readers' interpretive
beliefs and experiences. Consistent with other studies of adolescent responses to
literature (e.g., Applebee, 1978; Purves & Rippere, 1968; Squire, 1964), the processes of the students in this study can be described as fairly interpretive in terms
of their reasoning operations and fairly textual in terms of the sources of their
inferences. That is, in reading complex literary works, these students tended to
analyze, generalize, and draw conclusions about the characters, events, and to
some extent, the texture of the stories. Relatively few of their inferences were
related to extratextual sources of information, such as information related to the
author, other works of literature, or their own personal reactions, although in this
(Rogers, 1990a) and in other studies (e.g., Golden & Guthrie, 1986; Many 1991;
Purves, 1981; Squire, 1964), a relationship has been found between personal response and thematic generalizations and story evaluations. The important role of
personal response in interpretation has also been argued by literary theorists (cf.
Bleich, 1978; Rosenblatt, 1978).
The tendency toward textual responses reflects the type of literary instruction
they typically receive which focuses on characteristics of the text. This approach
has been variously labelled as academic, New Critical, or the element approach to
literature, which focuses on textual elements, at least initially, and allows students
only limited roles and limited authority in the interpretive process. This approach,
as illustrated by the regular classroom community in this study, encourages students
to reduce rather than expand the complexity of the interpretive process. That is,
students are encouraged to focus on separate textual aspects of a literary work, and
to rely on the teacher to guide them toward a standard interpretation, rather than
being encouraged to draw also on a variety of extratextual sources of information
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in developing their own interpretations. Teachers find support for and, indeed,
learn this approach in the larger academic and literary rhetorical communities
(Bleich, 1978, 1986; Culler, 1981; Fish, 1980; Mailloux, 1989).
In this study an attempt was made to create variations in the existing interpretive communities of the classrooms in order to examine the effects of providing
students with a slightly different literary context—one in which students were given
a larger role in the interpretive process and in which they were encouraged to
provide a variety of intertextual responses. After participating in the researcher-led
instructional unit, the students became more interpretive in their reasoning operations and tended to prefer intertextual critical perspectives more and textual perspectives less as indicated by their preference rankings of critical pieces related to the
stories they read. However, the shift in intertextuality of their interpretive processes
(as measured by their use of various influence sources) varied by individual. In
fact, looking at students individually revealed a complex interrelationship of their
interpretive experiences, beliefs, and processes. Each student had particular perspectives and approaches to the process of literary interpretation that were to varying degrees shaped by their experiences prior to and during the study.
There are clear limitations to this study. The first is the difficulty of creating
real changes in a classroom community in such a short time and under the constraints of operating in an already established community. As a kind of coinvestigator, the teacher revealed her allegiance to the larger community in which particular
ways of teaching literature are supported. As for the students, they are understandably reluctant to accept a situation in which the rules are changed by someone
outside their community which is established over time in school and reestablished
in each classroom.
A second limitation was the necessary use of different albeit similar short
stories in order to draw comparisons of students' interpretive processes and preferences before and after the instructional unit. Clearly, some of the changes are due
to differences in the stories themselves, differences that we will need to find ways
to analyze in future studies of change in interpretive processes. However, some
important implications may be drawn as well as issues raised for further study.
One implication of this study is that if it is our goal to help students become
sophisticated and critical readers of literature, our larger and smaller instructional
communities will need to reflect that goal. For instance, we need to give students
a more equal role in the interpretive process as it is played out in classrooms. The
importance of sharing interpretive authority with students has been argued by Bleich
(1975) and Holland (1975). When interpretive authority is shared, Bleich argues:
The whole activity of reading and literary involvement becomes an interpersonal
affair with genuine give and take, and authority flows openly where it belongs—
from the personal integrity and persuasive capacity of the critic-reader, (p. 63)
Holland (1975) argues that "such sharing, be it in a learned forum or a classroom,
leads to a truly critical and humanistic discourse" (p. 249).
Students as Literary Critics
417
This study provides a beginning point, but more research is needed to understand what kinds of classroom interpretive communities are created and supported,
how they shape students' interpretive processes, particularly the relationship between the development of students' interpretive processes and the subtle and overt
messages they receive as part of their instructional experiences related to literature.
It is also apparent from this study that, ultimately, a reader's critical stance is
highly individual. As illustrated in the case study profiles, these budding literary
critics are influenced by a complex combination of their own beliefs about how
literature should be interpreted, their literary experiences, and their abilities, which
will in turn influence the complexity or intertextuality of their responses. Therefore,
in developing interpretive communities, we need to be sensitive to and, indeed,
encourage the individuality of students' critical stances.
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APPENDIX A
The critical paragraphs for "A Rose for Emily"
TEXTUAL
Emily becomes monstrous (like her house) when she resists the passage of time. In the
story, Emily passes from the normal time-world to a world in which she denies Time, even
to the point of ignoring (Homer Barron's) death. It was unnatural—even monstrous—for
Emily to deny death. Death is the final sign of the passage of time, and Emily pretends that
it, like the sheriff's tax bill, does not exist. Likewise it proved fatal for Homer Barron to
deny the traditional obligations of social decorum. Ironically and significantly, Emily's
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resistance is better than Homer Barren's, for, while it is no more effective in the long run,
it is certainly more "heroic."
EXTRATEXTUAL
Authorial
Faulkner's attitude toward the South is one of ambivalence. He cannot live with it, yet
he cannot live without it. He lashes the South with bitter satire; but the virulence of his
anger is the reflex of a great love. His torture arises from the conflict in his soul between
the ideal South which he knows ought to be and the real South which is so far from the
vision. In none of his works, it seems to me, is his ambivalence so neatly compressed as
in Emily. The whole texture of the story is wrought of this ambivalence of love and hate,
respect, and contempt.
Comparative
Emily is like Persephone in mythology, holding in herself mysterious forces of creation
and destruction. The final strand of hair is analogous to the Greek ritual of cutting off and
leaving a lock of hair at the grave of a beloved person, especially since this beloved dead
person is named Homer. I would note, too, that the colors associated with Emily are those
of the dread triple goddess (the colors Apuleius explains as being derived from the moon):
black, yellow or gold, and red (here, rose). As a goddess for growth and decay, or the
ever-changing moon, Emily comes to stand for bigger things such as the American South
or, all of us, as we reveal but fail to ward off the painful realities of time and change, as it
is all too horribly embodied in the final image of the story.
Personal
I find I have a special feeling toward Miss Emily. She seems to me a sealed, opaque
being, flat as a marble wall, but hiding within her something bizarre, wild, grotesque—and
I want something out in the open. The idea of retention is depicted in the story by what was
to me a startling image—a description of the aging Miss Emily, "She looked bloated, like
a body long submerged in motionless water." Emily had difficulty giving up prized things
from her house (or body). She had something and she wanted to keep it.
APPENDIX B
Categories and Examples of Reasoning Operations
1. Retelling (summarizing, reiterating, or paraphrasing the text with no relation to hypothesizing, analyzing, drawing conclusions, generalizing, or evaluating)
Example: "There's a smell in the house and they break in and spread lime all over."
2. Elaborating (visualizing or elaborating on features of the story)
Example: " I already have a picture of what the whole town is like. . . . It's the type
of thing where people feel guilty if they don't send their Christmas cards out on time."
Students as Literary Critics
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3. Engaging (showing signs of relating, identifying, or particular interest in an element of
the story)
Example: "If I lived back then, I would be married by now."
4. Questioning (expressing a question or uncertainty with no attempt to guess, hypothesize,
or otherwise attempt to resolve it)
Example: "What does 'perpetuity' mean?" or "Is Miss Emily Black?"
5. Hypothesizing (predicting and/or confirming or revising a prediction; shows awareness
that there are other possibilities)
Example 1: "I have a feeling she's going to kill herself with it."
Example 2: "Was it because they spread the lime or did [the smell] go away because
she felt some kind of pride?"
6. Analyzing (noticing or describing features of the story, such as similarities, differences,
relationships, and using the analysis as a basis for hypothesizing, drawing conclusions,
generalizing, or evaluating)
Example 1: "Every sentence is 'the old Negro, the Negro'." (conclusion: "In other
words this is saying the Negro is not important.")
Example 2: "Her speech is very, very stuffy." (conclusion: "I can tell she's the
stuffneck of the town.")
7. Drawing conclusions (drawing a conclusion, making a judgment, or generalizing based
on analysis of a feature of the text—including judgments about characters)
Example: "It looks to me like people are afraid to approach this woman." (analysis:
because they just avoid her.)
8. Generalizing (making a generalization about the meaning of the story as a whole—
thematic generalizations—as distinct from more local generalizations coded under
"drawing conclusions")
Example 1: "And I think that's the theme: old generation, new generation. . . . "
Example 2: "It seems like [they are trying to get across] at what point do you feel sorry
for a person like that?"
9. Evaluating (evaluating the quality of the story as a whole)
Example 1: "It's an all right story."
Example 2: "It's just too bizarre or strange."
10. Monitoring (keeping track of understanding)
Example 1: "I don't know what the point was."
Example 2: "I'm confused about what happened here."
11. Miscellaneous (any fragments or any comments totally unrelated to the story)
Categories and Examples of Literary Inference Sources
TEXTUAL
Title
Example: no examples were found in the protocols, but the following example comes
from a critical piece: "One implication of the title is . . . that Miss Emily deserves a rose
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for having attempted . . . to triumph over time and place in her quest for l o v e " (William
T. Going, The Explicator, 1958, Vol. 16, Item 27.)
Structure
Setting
Example: "The seventies, I guess it's a modern story."
Sequence of events, foreshadowing, flashback, climax, outcome
Example 1: "Do you ever find out what happened to Homer?"
Example 2: "Actually, in the story there are a lot of turning points."
Conflict
Example 1: "There's a clash between the old and the new in the story."
Example 2: "The new people come in and she dies. The new generation takes over;
old ideas will eventually go completely."
Characterization
Attributes: Descriptions, actions, names, etc.
Example: "She was really old and really fat."
Psychological States: motivations, plans, intentions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, values, attitudes, etc.
Example: "She thought she was too good for everyone."
Relationships: interactions, conflicts, etc.
Example: "He was always pushed around by his father."
Narration: point of view
Example: "I also think this [the narrator] is a person you would know in the town."
Texture: This term is borrowed from Allen Tate (Lemon, 1971). Tate defined texture as the
rhetorical, stylistic, and metaphorical elements that give a work its distinct effect.
Suspense, mood, atmosphere
Example: "Hmmm, Ominous. . . . "
Style, wording, description
Example: "This description here gives me the idea she's from the old generation."
Motif, imagery, and symbolism
Example 1: "I think that's symbolic, 'For Rats'."
Example 2: "The way he walks is so symbolic of his attitude."
Author Intention: bias, tone, irony
Example 1: "I guess Faulkner is trying to make the reader be less and less sorry for
her than in the beginning."
Example 2: "I think there is a paradox in this (because he's telling the father we can
hide the corn or not pay the fine and he's talking about we can break the law; then he goes
and tell on the father when he is going to burn down the barn)."
Genre
Example: "It seems like a mystery-type thing."
Students as Literary Critics
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EXTRATEXTUAL
Authorial: author's background, socio-historical information, other works
Example 1: "All I got out of that background is I know it's going to have something
to do with plantations in the South."
Example 2: "I can tell this is definitely a Faulkner story."
Comparative: allusions to or associations with other works of literature or to other arts in
general
Example 1: "I read another story like this about an old woman shut up in a
house. . . . "
Example 2: "Rotted into the bed? My sister takes me to horror movies a lot, but still,
yuk. . . . "
Personal
Personal reactions, opinions, beliefs
Example: "I wouldn't want him as my father."
Experience
Example: "This sort of shows what happens to a reject of society."
Knowledge
Example 1: "This story could almost be political: in the 1920s there was the depression."
Example 2: " . . . since the Southern and Northern towns at this time from what I've
heard about really were picky about who the ladies and men hung around with."