Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture

Altierí, Charles

doi:10.1057/9780230507906_8

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Use brief target language statements to raise issues of significance, purpose of literature, universality vs. private expression (e.g., Enzensberger 1964: 'Poems are not consumer goods'); for advanced student, incorporate discussion of theory (Culler 1997) or context of intellectual history (Altieri 2001).…”

Section: Select Work Of Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Altieri prizes the ability of the lyric genre to help us conceive the world: ‘If we are to clarify what poetry makes possible for cultural life, the teaching of poetry will first have to attune students to the work that poems do in binding the forms of syntax to the possibilities of feeling. Then this teaching needs to be able to characterize those possibilities of feeling so that we understand the imaginary as a mode of realization’ (Altieri 2001: 277). Translated into concrete terms, it is often argued that poems promote enhanced learning by calling on specific abilities that are not exercised by other types of materials: students can play with the language of concrete poems (Maxim 2005), notice conspicuous organizing structures (Peskin 1998; Rosenkjar 2006), and better remember poems than other texts (Hanauer 1998).…”

Section: Why and How Do We ‘Do’ Literature?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The style, rhetoric, and conventions of poetry make it fertile ground for the study of the formal properties of literary works by students (see e.g., Culler 1997). The skilled reader needs to be able to appreciate what Altieri calls poetry's ‘restraint and excess’ (Altieri 2001: 266), not as distractions, but as qualities intrinsic to textual thinking (see also Peskin 2000: 28). So conceived, the study of literary convention corresponds to other fundamental exercises of the mind, such as gestalt powers of visual perception (see Arnheim 1954).…”

Section: Why and How Do We ‘Do’ Literature?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, Altieri argues that readings of poetry must reach far beyond an interpretation of surface meaning. ‘Perhaps the lyric is important for our culture,’ he explains, ‘because it invites our exploring values that are opposed to the entire psychological apparatus set in place by Enlightenment idealizations about knowledge and judgment in accord with stateable criteria’ (Altieri 2001: 260). Such deep exploration of cultural values would, however, require either the professional investment of a scholar-teacher engaged in on-going research about the topic at hand or a practical compendium of resources that would annotate texts for the classroom with supporting materials for teachers (e.g., Internet resources, historical documents, illustrations, and interpretative essays by scholars or critics).…”

Section: Why and How Do We ‘Do’ Literature?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the purpose of this discussion, I'm treating close reading and reader-response readings together as similar modes of interpretation and greatly simplifying how these approaches would work (for a discussion of the legacy of close reading, see Bredella & Delanoy (1996: vii–xi); concerning reader-response, see Rosenblatt 1978). To perform a close reading of this poem, the teacher might: a) present the text; b) gloss unfamiliar words, e.g., Trommelfeuer ‘drumfire’, Hütten ‘huts’, Ziegeln ‘tiles’; and c) elicit from the students a paraphrase of the text that elucidates the implied meanings, poetic imagery, and aesthetic unity of the text (see Altieri 2001; Dutta 2001). Alternately, one reader-response exercise, following Benton's (1995: 338) recommendations, might involve a) copying out the poem text, b) asking students to annotate it with responses and to map their readings and reading strategies, and then c) setting the task of writing a single-sentence comment before these responses are discussed by the class in pairs.…”

Section: Three Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Between the lines: When culture, language and poetry meet in the classroom

Melin

2009

Lang. Teach.

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Teaching poetry in second language (L2) classrooms raises theoretical and practical questions about how best to treat literature when target language and culture is also being negotiated. Current pedagogy derives from disparate sources, including the experientially-driven practices of individual teachers, the quantitative and qualitative research methodologies of Second Language Acquisition, and the aesthetic, historical, and philosophical traditions of literature and cultural studies. This paper surveys the knowledge base that shapes literature pedagogy, examines the conceptual implications of two common approaches (close reading and genre-based treatments), and argues for new teaching objectives.

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Section: Select Work Of Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Why and How Do We ‘Do’ Literature?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Why and How Do We ‘Do’ Literature?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Why and How Do We ‘Do’ Literature?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Three Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Between the lines: When culture, language and poetry meet in the classroom

Melin

2009

Lang. Teach.

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Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel

Hale¹

2007

nar

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Dramatic audition

Capp¹

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The "dramatic monologue" is curiously named, given that poems of this genre often feature characters not only listening to the speakers but responding to them. While "silent auditors," as such inscribed characters are imperfectly called, are not a universal feature of the genre, their appearance is crucial when it occurs, as it turns monologue into dialogue. The scholarly attention given to such figures has focused almost exclusively upon dramatic monologues by Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and other male poets and has consequently never illustrated how gender influences the attitudes toward and outcomes of communication as they play out in dramatic monologues. My dissertation thus explores how Victorian and modernist female poets of the dramatic monologue like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, and Charlotte Mew stage the relationships between the female speakers they animate and the silent auditors who listen to their desperate utterances. Given the historical tensions that surrounded any woman's speech, let alone marginalized women, the poets perform a remarkably empathetic act in embodying primarily female characters on the fringes of their social worlds-a runaway slave, a prostitute, and a modern-day Mary Magdalene, to name a few-but the dramatic monologues themselves end, overwhelmingly, in failures of communication that question the ability of dialogue to generate empathetic connections between individuals with radically different backgrounds. Silent auditors often bear the scholarly blame for such breakdowns, but I argue that the speakers reject their auditors at pivotal moments, ultimately participating in their own marginalization. The distrust these poems exhibit toward the efficacy of speaking to others, however, need not extend to the reader. Rather, the genre of the dramatic monologue offers the poets a way to sidestep dialogue altogether: by inducing the reader to inhabit the female speaker's first-person voice-the "mobile I," in Èmile Benveniste's terms-these dramatic monologues convey experience through role-play rather than speech, as speaker and reader momentarily collapse into one body and one voice. Such a move foregrounds sympathetic v ABSTRACT The "dramatic monologue" is curiously named, given that poems of this genre often feature characters not only listening to the speakers but responding to them. While "silent auditors," as such inscribed characters are imperfectly called, are not a universal feature of the genre, their appearance is crucial when it occurs, as it turns monologue into dialogue. The scholarly attention given to such figures has focused almost exclusively upon dramatic monologues by Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and other male poets and has consequently never illustrated how gender influences the attitudes toward and outcomes of communication as they play out in dramatic monologues. My dissertation thus explores how Victorian and modernist female poets of the dramatic monologue like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, and Char...

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Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture

Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

Between the lines: When culture, language and poetry meet in the classroom

Between the lines: When culture, language and poetry meet in the classroom

Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel

Dramatic audition

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