Opening up the world of the text:
teaching ‘thick analysis’ at
secondary school
Louise D’Arcens
English Teachers’ Association NSW
Annual Conference
November 28, 2014
Context for today’s discussion
• Secondary-tertiary nexus
• “The First Year Experience in Australian
Universities: Findings from 1994 to 2009”,
[www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/research/FYE_Report_1994_to_2009.pdf]
• Learning pathways from secondary to tertiary
• First year students’ expectations
• 1 in 2 students felt prepared by school
• Advocated robust relationships between
universities, schools, and communities
Australian University Heads of
English (AUHE): http://auhe.org/
AUHE Secondary and Tertiary English
Working Group: 2014 discussion paper
• Identify students’ specific disciplinary
expectations on entering tertiary ENGL
• Disseminate “aims, approaches and outcomes of
secondary English” to tertiary teachers
• Amplify relationships between secondary and
tertiary teachers of English
• Objective: to identify base from which to develop
first year curriculum
Secondary-tertiary nexus: an educational
ecology
Secondary
student
Secondary
teacher
Tertiary
student
Modelling the nexus
• Lisa Fletcher: UTas / TATE collaboration
• Community of practice model: shared
passion, dedication to discipline’s future
• “Cross-sector collegiality”
• Opening a dialogue on how the learning
pathway can be smoother
• Interviews with secondary ENGL teachers
• Findings now being drafted
Points of difference and overlap
• Tertiary reading practices and positions
more reflexively highlighted, not self-evident
• Emphasis on historical and theoretical
rather than broad humanistic reading
practices
• Increased move toward research-led
learning to encourage originality
• Tertiary teachers’ concerns about students
echo those in HSC markers’ comments
‘Thick analysis’ of literary texts
• Adapted as ‘thick analysis’ by numerous fields
of research
• Texts embedded in worlds rather than simply
the product of an author
• Analysis should recognise that “[textual]
artefacts draw their meaning from the role they
play in an ongoing pattern of life”
Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures.
(1973)
Thick analysis cont’d
• Complexity: texts must not be “purified of the
material complexity in which they were located,
and then attribute[d] to autogenous principles
of order, universal properties of the human
mind, or vast a priori Weltanschauungen
(worldviews)”.
• Detail→context: “the aim is to draw large
conclusions from small but very densely
structured facts”
• Open-endedness: “coherence cannot be the
major test of validity for a cultural description
... cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete”
Thick description as hermeneutic
practice
• “the art of clarifying and mediating by our own
effort of interpretation what is said by persons we
encounter in traditions. Hermeneutics operates
whenever what is said is not immediately
intelligible”
• aims to “clarify the conditions in which
understanding takes place”
• Interpretation as “fusion of horizons” (the text’s
and the interpreter’s)
Gadamer: Truth and Method
(1960)
Benefits of teaching thick analysis
• Text brought into complex relationships
with numerous related cultural texts
• Leads to more sophisticated and textured
close / formal readings
• Offers multiple entry-points into texts rather
than aiming for textual closure
• Essays are more differentiated and original
• Students become researchers
Case study: teaching troubadour lyric
to undergrads
Mediaeval music sheet, images of loves, map of
Occitania, castles and contemporary singer removed.
• Teacher: initial world-building: social structure
(feudalism), social practices (marriage etc),
discourses (love) ideologies (gender, rank), textual
conditions
• Students (individual/small group): differentiated
reading tasks in relation to the above, to understand
lyrics’ ‘cultural work’. A range of related texts used.
Presented to class. Class builds collaborative archive
• Class: close readings of lyrics, moving back out
from textual detail to context
• Students: examine afterlife of courtly lyric:
comparative reading of lyric and modern pop song
HSC case study 1 (Area of Study): The
Tempest
Maps and images relating to
• The Tempest
• Prospero’s books
• Of cannibals
• Pre-Raphaelite Mirandas
removed
The Tempest and ‘Discovery’
• Context: Age of Discovery (travel writing,
maps, Donne’s Elegy XIX)
• Context: theatre/theatricality (theatre research)
• Creativity (19thC interpretation)
• Gender and power (esp. recent interpretations)
• Close work on dramaturgical structure, scenes,
lexis, dialogue, character arcs
• Textual afterlife: 19thC ‘sensation’ and
upholstered drama, cinema in the Space Age
Building a research archive: open
access encyclopedia projects
http://www.luminarium.org/
• Screen shot of home page removed
Performance resources
http://www.rsc.org.uk/education/resources/bank/the-tempest/images/
• Screenshot of home page removed
HSC Case Study 2: Tennyson/Anderson
Jessica Anderson
The Lady of Shallott
Idylls of the King
Le Morte D’Arthur
Trigg: Medievalism and the Gothic in
Australian Culture
• Pollock: Vision and Difference
•
•
•
•
•
Thick analysis: Tennyson and
Anderson
•
•
•
•
•
Medievalism (British and Australian)
King Arthur legend, esp. Thomas Malory
Imperialism/colonialism
Second-wave feminism
Setting in TLBR, characterisation, key
motifs (faces, creativity, waste/regeneration)
• Narrative voice, conclusion
Victorian related texts and archives
http://www.victorianweb.org/
Open-access database
http://ausmed.arts.uwa.edu.au/
• Screen shot removed
Visual resources
http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Collection/searchResult.jsp
Case Study 3: Sylvia Plath
(Extension: After the Bomb)
Images removed:
Fromm: Escape from Freedom
Judgement at Nuremberg – film
Plath Ariel
Image of Trial of Eichmann
Ted Hughes
Thick analysis of Plath as post-war
poet
• Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941) political psychology
• Adolf Eichmann trials
• Cinematic revisitation of WWII
• Debates over instrumentalisation of history
• History vs mythology
• Afterlife in feminist scholarship
• Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters
General: building a research archive
• http://uow.libguides.com/hsc
General: building a scholarship archive
open-access journals
• Early Modern Literary Studies
(http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlshome.html)
• CLCWeb (Comparative Literature and Culture)
(http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/)
• RAVON (Romanticism & Victorianism on Net)
(http://ravonjournal.org/)
• JASAL
(http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal)