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Democratizing and Dehegamonizing
Literature*: Endeavours of Empowerment

APoint of Departure
The rampant prevalence of a technological-rationalist

stance in our educational settings has done more harm than
good to the use of literature in language teaching. Under its
hegemony, the teaching of literature and writing about it have
come to be viewed in narrow, reductive terms. In the ‘interest
of measurable efficiency’ (Lehtovaara in Kohonen et al
2001:145) literature appears to have been increasingly subject
to one right reading, received understanding and objectified
rhetoric. This has set off a pernicious ‘methodological
scrupulosity’ (Alter 1996:11) that has led our students to
believe that the premises of discussion about literature are

more important/valuable than the discussion of literature itself. Such a belief system
neither allows our students to understand the edifying role of literature nor appreciate the
sense of personal gratification it promotes. Therefore, ‘a whole generation of professional
students of literature have turned away from reading’ (Alter 1996:11). How can we expect
our students to invest in their personal engagement with literature when the very
endeavour of teaching and writing about literature comes in their way of personalizing
their experience of reading literature and the sense of agency it promotes? This is an
educational malaise, which if left unchecked can weaken their capacity to understand how
their world is affected by their reading and writing, and in turn how their reading and
writing affect their world. In this respect, our students should be seen as illiterate even if
they can read and write. This kind of illiteracy has far-reaching implications. It not only
threatens the economic status of a society but also constitutes an injustice by preventing
the illiterates from making decisions for themselves or from participating in the process
of educational and social change. In short, it strikes at the foundations of democracy.

This poverty of reading and the culture of ignorance it creates need to be addressed
in institutions of higher learning (McCormick 1994; Rosenblatt 1995). I hasten to
suggest that by proposing a concept of literacy which encourages democratic and
liberatory change, it might be possible to educate our students about the dialectical
relationships between them and the world on the one hand, and language and change on
the other (Freire and Macedo 1987). In light of this, literature pedagogies and practices
that promote students’ experience and response assume immediacy and primacy. It is
argued that such pedagogies will teach our students to assert their rights and
responsibilities. It will not only teach them to read, understand and transform their own
experiences, but will also teach them to redefine their relationship with their society. As

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Sivakumar
Sivasubramaniam



a result, our students will be better equipped to process knowledge that is beyond their
experience and to view their reading and writing as acts of empowerment (Freire and
Macedo 1987).

The issues discussed so far signpost my faith in the potential literature for nurturing
critical consciousness, especially when delivered through pedagogies of response.
However, most of us are fully aware as to how our institutional practices and dictates
come in the way of implementing our well-informed choices. Many universities
homogenize their teachers into teaching in a particular way and their students into
learning in a particular way. This is because they believe that homogenizing their
teachers and students into particular ways of functioning will provide for better control
and power relations (McCormick 1994; McRae 1991).

The unrewarding and unchallenging institutional practices offer little or no scope
for both the teacher and the students to reclaim their language both while reading
literature and writing about it. In other words, neither the teacher nor the student will
have an opportunity to reformulate their language of response and involvement. As a
result, the teaching and learning of literature fails to develop critical consciousness in the
classroom thereby promoting an illiteracy of disengagement. In order to promote
learning through response and experience, we need to ‘democratize and dehegamonize’
the deployment of literature (Carter 1997:109) in our educational settings. Only then can
we draw on the challenging content of literary texts to demolish the culture of ignorance
and the illiteracy of disengagement created by a commodified approach to literature. I
hope to address these matters in the following sections of this paper.

What is Literature?
We can see it as a body of written texts produced by a culture and valued within that

culture. At another level, literature is seen as discourse. Such a view articulates the
interpersonal/intersubjective nature of literature, which serves to illustrate how a
particular way of language use is intrinsic to the social, economic, technological and
theoretical needs of the cultures concerned (Fowler 1981). 

If we accept Fowler’s view of literature, then we should see it as a social artifact
constructed and validated within the discourse practices of a society. Viewed from a
constructivist standpoint, literature as social discourse could be instrumental in
promoting interpretive discourse among our students and, as a result, democratize and
free literature from its exclusionist and elitist shackles (Carter 1997:109).

Literary critics and linguists have always raised serious issues regarding the
division between language and literature. While literary critics uphold the centrality of
literary criticism, the linguists have been critical of the deviant use of language in
literature and the privileged status accorded to it. The current adherence to meta-
discourse centered approach to literature appear to favour such practices that emphsise
the premises for ‘about talking about literature’ rather than talking about a reading
experience of literature.

Jacobson (1960) has made an attempt to synthesize these conflicting views in his
paper, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ (Lodge 1988: 32-57). The paper states that ‘A linguist

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deaf to the poetic functioning of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic
problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms’.

Jacobson’s view suggests that literature, primarily, is to be taken as text, as
discourse. The language of literature is the medium through which a writer conveys a
message about reality to the reader. Proceeding along this line of inquiry; Jacobson
suggests that ‘literariness’, meaning, the language of literature is its poeticity. It is like
oil in cooking. It cannot be had on its own. But when used with other foods, it is more
than a mere addition; it changes the taste of the food to the extent that some dishes no
longer appear to have any connection with their oil-less ingredients. This is to suggest
that there is some connection between poeticity (i.e. literariness) and reality. 

The connection between poeticity and reality might serve to illustrate the
indestructible link between the human mind and the figurative aspects of language and
thought (Gibbs 1994). As my position rejects an exclusive/isolationist view of literature,
it looks upon the notion of literariness as one of disposition brought to bear upon the text
by the reader. If this position is accepted, then one needs to accept that literature with a
capital ‘L’ – canonical literature, and literature with a small ‘l’ – non-canonical texts
ranging from proverbs to advertisements, could co-exist (Carter 1997; McRae 1991). 

Teachers, who support an exclusive view of literature, (one in which canonical texts
reign supreme) might view this co-existence offending. However, it is argued that the
canonical status of literature is not as important as the creative and imaginative potential
of literature in facilitating an emotional engagement with the target language for the L2
learner. Given that literary language is patterned in creative play, the emotional
involvement of the reader results in creative and imaginative interpretation of the words
and structures, which sets it apart from a literal reading (Carter 1997). 

In the post-modernist/deconstructionist age, the hegemony of the classical cannon
has been challenged and its reverential status has been rendered untenable. Today, our
view of what literature is has been expanded to ‘include feminist and gay writing, genres
such as detective fiction and horror, and – most notably–the new literatures developing in
countries such as India and Singapore…’(Maley in Carter and Nunan 2001:181).
Furthermore as observed by Alter (1996:19), ‘Literature is not just a self-referential
closed circuit but it is connected in meaningful and revelatory ways with the world of
experience outside the text’. If we accept this position, then, the weighty historical and
cultural baggage which assume centrality in canonical approaches to literature are not
only irrelevant but are also not so useful in signposting the attractiveness, colour and
magic of literary language. In light of this, we need to recognize the frequent occurrences
of literary devices such as parallelism, rhyme, rhythm and metaphor in adverts, graffiti,
public notices and even television soap-operas. The immediacy and relevance in these
texts are easy for our students to understand (Maley in Carter and Nunan 2001).

The provisionality of these interpretation provides scope for multiple readings
through renegotiated discourse, which in turn might serve to rehearse the readers’
meaning-negotiating capacity. Therefore, I situate literature in tentative readings of text
and discourse rich in creativity and imagination (Carter 1997; Sivasubramaniam 2004). 

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Imaginative Language/Literary Language and its Place in Human Existence.
Having attempted a view of literature that frees it from an elitist/exclusionist view, I

propose to focus on the role of imagination and how its unavoidable prevalence in literary
language confers agency and voice to human existence in this section of the paper. 

Britton (1993) claims literature can be assigned its rightful place by understanding
the continuing role of creative language in our everyday life and its intrinsic link to
human existence. Vygotsky (1978:93) explains how this creative language represents a
transition from make-believe behaviour to imagination: “Imagination is a new
psychological process for the child; it is not present in the consciousness of the very
young child, is totally absent in animals, and represents a specifically human form of
conscious activity. Like all functions of consciousness, it originally arises from action.
The old adage that child’s play is imagination in action must be reversed: we can say that
imagination in adolescents and school children is a play without action”.

The above quotation serves to illustrate the developmental link between make-
believe play in infancy and the practice of all the arts at all stages from childhood to the
grave. This link, which could be formulated in many different ways, is characterized by
Piaget (1951:155) as ‘symbolic assimilation’ and is reassigned into thought as
imagination. Vygotsky (1978) is of the view that the poet does the same things as the
child at play in that he/she creates a topsy-turvy world which he/she views with animated
joy and delight and deliberately sets it apart from reality. 

Continuing on this line of analysis, Vygotsky points out that by dragging a child
into this topsy-turvy world we provoke his/her intellect as a preparation for mastering
the laws regulating the real world. Although rhymes and stories are rich in this effect,
they will only serve a diminishing purpose as the child matures into adulthood.
T.S.Eliot’s poem entitled “Animula” (Britton 1993:7) shows how the imperatives of ‘is’
and ‘seems’ weaken over time.

Vygotsky suggests that, while adults have no such conditioning of ‘seems’ over ‘is’
to contend with, there is a similar duality for them to see in any form of art. Art serves
to modify and distort perceptions of reality, and by doing so strengthens the viewer’s
understanding of reality, at the same time helping the viewer to explore the structures of
‘what might become’. This perspective is very much akin to what John Stuart Mill
(Britton 1993:1) has said ‘That which enables us, by a voluntary effort to conceive the
absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings
which, if it were indeed real, would bring along with it.’

Viewed in light of the above-mentioned insights, literature by signposting the
language of imagination and creativity, not only becomes an art but also a way of building
life. The paper considers this underpinning particularly important to an expressivist-
process approach to reading literature, as it has a large store of pedagogical benefits for
the learner. It is only through a reading of literature and responding to it that students
come to know and realize how human development and creative use of language are
inextricably intertwined (Vygotsky 1978). Such an edifying realization is often lost when
students of literature are trapped in a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Alter 1996:11), which
makes them feel disenfranchised about their encounter with the literary texts.

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The notion that meaning is created through interpersonal and interactional
exchanges presupposes the futility of an isolated self signifying ‘the objective’ at the
expense of `the social’ (Vygotsky 1978) and ‘the creative’. The same notion finds an
equally succinct expression in the French philosopher, Georges Gusdorf (1965:48): “In
essence, language is not one but of many; it is between. It expresses the relational being
of man.... The self does not by itself alone have to carve out for itself an access to
being–because the self exists only in reciprocity with the other”.

Volisnov (1973: 118) in providing a corollary to this view claims: “Everything vital
to the evaluative reception of another’s utterance, everything of ideological value, is
expressed in the material of inner speech. After all, it is not a mute, wordless creative
that receives the utterance, but a human being full of inner words. All his experiences....
exist encoded in his inner speech and only to that extent do they come into contact with
speech received from outside. Word comes into contact with word”.

This perspective locates encoding in biological, psychological and social aspects of
life reflected in a process of individual responsibility. Besides the biological,
psychological and social influences on what has been encoded, there is a possibility that
a person’s changing conception of the world could either shrink or expand the encoding.
If our students’ responses/reactions to literature fail to reflect this, then teaching and
writing about literature becomes pointless.

I will now focus on I.A. Richard’s “Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary
Judgement” (1935) to cite a real-life situation that can illustrate the dangers of trained
appreciation and judgement of literary texts. I believe that this can further strengthen the
belief and value systems underpinning my paper.

I.A. Richards asked his class at the University of Cambridge to write responses and
reactions to some unidentified poems. He avoided giving clues to title, authorship,
period, and school, as he wanted to test his students’ capacity to engage with poetry
through personal response. The students were expected to base their responses on their
own sense of engagement with the poems. Most of the students found their experience
with the poems bewildering as their training in literary traditions, critical approaches,
and judgemental methods was of little or no use in their handling of their plain
responses. As a result, their responses showed a barrier to understanding and
appreciating the poems in spite of the specialist training they had received. Their writing
indicated how exposure to ready-made responses and associations interfered with their
personal sense of literature. This can be further supported by Rosenblatt’s (1995:92)
observation that ‘the impact of the literary work is dulled when the reader brings to the
text a fund of ready-made, sharply crystallized ideas and habits of response.’

The points discussed so far have served to explain the purpose of literature and the
dangers that can accrue when the interpersonal and intersubjective credentials of literature
are discarded in favour of those approaches that objectify literature. If one accepts the
poetics of mind, that is, the capacity of the human mind to produce and engage in creative
thought and language (Gibbs 1994), then one should trust in the power of literature which
employs imaginative language to assign meaning and purpose to our existence (Britton
1993; Vygotsky 1978; Gibbs 1994; Langer 1992; and Rosenblatt 1978, 1995).

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Perceptions, Priorities and Procedures Ahead.
The discussion so far has articulated the urgent need for the fostering of

interpersonal and intersubjective discourse in the practice of literature teaching. Does
this mean that it is possible to process literary expression without any reliance on trained
analytic attention? As illustrated earlier (see the preceding section), it is possible to do
so because ‘we read literature with the same set of complex skills we use to read
newspapers, legal rulings, menus, advertisements…’(Alter 1996:23). This is to suggest
that there are strong commonalities and complementarities between the ways by which
we read literary texts and the ways by which we read other types of texts. We do not
require specialized training, ‘like taking courses in Sanskrit or calculus, in order to make
sense of the simplest story or poem’ (Alter 1996:24).

In order to democratize literature, we need to subvert/challenge the belief system
that upholds the ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘referential stability’ (Mackenzie 2002:46) of the
literary text. Only then can we free a literary text from its author’s words in order to
signpost the creative consciousness that operates behind it. Such a position opens the
door to ‘applicative reading’ (Mackenzie 2002:46), which can empower our student
readers of literature to interpret it according to their own beliefs and desires. The ensuing
vibrant accrual of a plurality of meaning can assign a new sense of agency and voice to
the reading process undertaken by our students (Rosenblatt 1995). In light of this,
literature, which is often viewed as a product that contains objective meanings is
transformed into a robust productive process. Such a transformation dispels the author’s
reverential status in the text as an arbiter of objective meanings, thereby freeing the
reader from following the roles and conventions prescribed by the text. As a result,
literary reading need not limit itself to attempted communication, one in which a
heuristic stimulus for the creation of new meanings overwhelm the compulsions of
recovering a particular set of explicatures and implicatures contained in the text
(Mackenzie 2002:46).

By accentuating the role of the reader and his/her personal sense of literature, we
lay the groundwork for a personal enrichment approach to literature, which will free
literature from its exclusivist shackles. This approach uses literary texts to promote a
personal sense of literature in students. By providing an emotional and intellectual
engagement with literary texts, this approach fosters a personal sense of involvement
in students. As this sense of personal involvement develops, students begin to look
upon reading literature as a gratifying experience. The scope for group work through
frequent interactions is a key feature of this approach. It is argued that the emotional
security provided by group work to students can make them feel emotionally secure
rather than feel intimidated in their encounters with literary texts. When their personal
sense of involvement strengthens, it can promote learner autonomy in them with which
they can make independent explorations into texts. Texts/materials used in this
approach reflect students’ interest and its link to personal involvement. The presence
of theme-based texts in the approach alerts us to the potential they have for addressing
educational and social concerns (Lazar 1993; Freire and Macedo 1987; Rosenblatt
1995).

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Democratizing literature in the educational practices of reading and writing requires
the support of a learner-centred educational ideology, which views education as a way
of empowering learners to teach themselves how to learn. Synonymous with
progressivism, such an ideology articulates the centrality of experience to learning and
the outcome of that learning as growth. Viewed in light of this ideology, knowledge
assumes speculative and perspectival attributes (Clark 1987). So, it cannot be value-free
and close-ended as seen by the traditional approaches to literature reminiscent of
classical humanism and reconstructionism. As an open-ended approach to knowledge,
progressivism makes for emotionally and socially enriching learning experiences, which
help the learners to view themselves as whole persons rather than fragmented
individuals. Such a process is important to this undertaking as it opposes homogenizing
students on the basis of norm-referenced learning and assessment (Clark 1987; Nunan,
1988). Therefore, personalizing learning through a personalizing approach to literature
becomes the most important priority for this inquiry. It is hoped to discuss this further in
terms of the pedagogy of response to be proposed in the subsequent sections of this
paper.

A personalizing approach to literature necessitates the learners’ active involvement
with it, by which the learner becomes an active participant in the learning process. This
is in contrast to the passive role assigned to the learner in classical humanism and a
subservient role demanded of the learner in reconstructionism (Sivasubramanaim 2004).
The active role envisaged for the learner encourages the learner to react to and reflect on
learning process. Such a role can help both the learner and the teacher to take an
associative/negotiative view of learning and assessment. In this regard, the learner finds
it an educating experience to voice and share his/her perceptions of what has been
learned. As a result, learning and assessment become a learner-centred undertaking. This
is not to suggest that the teacher will assess the learner as the learner wishes to be
assessed. But it is to suggest that the participatory role of the learner can make him/her
take responsibility for learning and take control of how the learning tasks and strategies
proposed by the teacher should be handled (Clark 1987; Nunan 1988). The concern for
learner involvement and autonomy expressed by progressivism can be matched with its
similar emphasis on empowering teachers into becoming reflective practitioners. 

Very often teachers carry out the choices and pre-determined objectives of a
curriculum designed by someone else. Because of this they do not critically examine the
role of the curriculum and their role in deploying it. An uncritical engagement with the
curriculum reduces their teaching role to that of a perfunctory task. As a result teachers
become ‘curriculum clerks carrying out other people’s decisions about subject matter
and classroom management’ (Delawter 1992:101). In the light of this, the progressivist
emphasis on teacher empowerment leads teachers to believe that they need to voice their
professional beliefs and concerns in order to consider and construct new perspectives on
their role as teachers. It is argued that metaphors in current educational use liken
educational practices to those followed in the fields of business, computer industry and
the military. Such a likening projects educational practices as prescribed systems to be
followed with utmost care. As a result the teachers’ role gets basalized (Smith 1988). It

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is further argued that there is urgent need to discard the teacher as a curriculum clerk
metaphor and put in its place the teacher as an explorer metaphor. Such a metaphor can
reinforce the progressivist concern for teacher empowerment through reflective teaching
practice. By voicing their beliefs and concerns, teachers can experience a sense of
freedom. This sense of freedom can alert them to new alternatives to perspectives on
their teaching practices. Thus they can become explorers of knowledge through
reflective teaching practice (Smith 1988) if literature is democratized and
dehegamonized from its exclusivist shackles.

At this juncture, it should be stressed that promotion of literature in society is
contingent on the teachers’ belief in its educational and social values for the students. In
the light of this point, when teachers empower themselves into becoming questioning
professionals, they will encourage their learners to empower themselves into becoming
questioning citizens. 

The issues and insights discussed so far signpost a process-centred view of reading
and writing about literature as the mainstay of a pedagogy of experience and response
that has assumed special prominence and substance in this paper. Viewed in the light of
the attitude and beliefs underlying my stance, received knowledge, pre-determined
learning behaviour, tutored learning in the guise of focused instruction and norm-based
assessment of goals, and are believed to be detrimental to current educational practices.
The following views of Skilbeck (1982:20) support my rejection of classical humanism
and reconstructionism: “Externally imposed syllabuses, text books, and examinations all
define educational values and set certain standards which are important from the
standpoint of the individual as well as for national and social purposes; however, they
make the spontaneity, flexibility and diversity which are an equally important part of
education much more difficult to achieve”.

It is argued that spontaneity, flexibility and diversity can accrue only through a
process-centred pedagogy of response. A prolonged neglect of spontaneity, flexibility
and diversity in the literature/language classroom will not only impede the
democratization of literature but will also hasten its extinction. Therefore, it should be
noted that progressivist concerns would determine the form and substance of the
pedagogy of response that is central to this undertaking. Such a position is consistent
with a constructivist epistemology that underpins our approach to democratizing
literature.

At this juncture, I wish to stress that the process-centred approaches to learning
have thrown up a new emphasis, which has come to be known as constructivism
(Applebee 1992: 12-16). Constructivism can be looked at metaphorically and
philosophically. As a metaphor, it means understanding knowledge and learning through
experience. As a philosophy of learning it emphasizes the premise that by reflecting on
our experiences we construct our own understanding of the world we live in. In doing
so, we make sense of our experiences by constructing our own mental models to
interpret new experiences (Reagan 1999; Osborn, 2000).

Constructivism as a philosophy of learning opposes transmission-based approaches
to literature. In this regard it challenges the tenets of classical humanism and

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reconstrustionism. In a constructivist model of learning, learners personalize their
experiences in order to construct knowledge. It should be recalled here that this position
is consistent with the living through experience by students and the telling of the story
of reading by them in the process of aesthetic reading as envisaged in reader response
approaches to literature (Rosenblatt 1995).

The living through experience and the telling of the story of reading serve to
exemplify the two strands of constructivist perspective: 1) radical constructivism and 2)
social constructivism. Radical constructivism relates to knowledge as an outcome of the
learner’s active mental effort emphasized by the living through experience. Social
constructivism relates to knowledge as an outcome of the learner’s personal effort in a
social cultural context where telling of the story of reading unfolds as a social event
(Rosenblatt 1995; Reagan 1999; Osborn 2000). I believe that by synthesizing the two
strands of the constructivist perspective we can facilitate a constructivist-learning
environment for the deployment of a pedagogy of response. In light of this, I believe it
will be helpful to visit the eight characteristics proposed by Jonassen (1994: 34-37) that
describe a constructivist-learning environment which aim to synthesize the two strands
of the constructivist perspective. Constructivist learning environments:

1.  Encourage multiple representations of reality.
2.  Avoid oversimplification to represent the complexity and diversity of the real

world.
3.  View knowledge as ‘constructed’ not as ‘given’.
4.  Emphasize authentic activities and meaningful contexts.
5.  Focus on real world settings and non-linear instruction.
6.  Provide stimulus for reflecting on experience.
7.  Articulate context-bound characteristics of knowledge.
8.  Acknowledge collaborative construction of knowledge through inter-personal

associations/negotiations.
I hasten to suggest that these eight characteristics not only serve to reinforce all the

key theoretical issues raised so far, but also necessitate an understanding of a problem-
posing model of education situated in a constructivist approach to literacy education
proposed by Freire (1973). In order to understand ‘the problem-posing model’ we need
to look at its antithesis, the banking-model of education. According to Freire the
banking-model of education is one where the teacher’s primary objective is to deposit
information into students as they would deposit money into a bank. Such an approach as
mentioned by Freire (1972: 46-47) has the following characteristics:

The teacher teaches and the students are taught.
The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.
The teacher thinks and the students are thought about.
The teacher talks and the students listen.
The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.
The teacher chooses and enforces his choice and the students comply.
The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action

of the teacher.

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The teacher chooses the program content and the students adapt to it.
The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional

authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students.
The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere

objects.
These characteristics envisage an order of learning in which students are

discouraged from finding out how and why they are being asked to do certain learning
tasks because the teacher imposed them to be done. So it is unlikely that they will feel
involved or engaged with the learning tasks. Thus they pick up on a survival orientation,
which directs them to believe that passing a course is the primary objective of their
learning. Such a belief not only defeats the purpose of education but also feeds into a
culture of illiteracy as pointed out earlier.

The problem-posing model of education encourages a dialogic nature of learning.
This means that the teacher and the student interact with each other as ‘knowledgeable
equals in a situation of genuine two-way communication’ (Freire 1972:52-59).
Therefore, the lecture-based learning dominant in the banking model is replaced by a
model in which teachers and students discuss issues of concern in their lives in a non-
threatening encounter. The use of themes in the form of open-ended texts provides
unrestricted scope for discussing and problematizing the issues seen in the texts. The
open-ended questions encourage students to elaborate and hypothesize on what they see
in these texts. Thus, the process discussed here can reverse the culture of illiteracy by
teaching students to read the world. Such an outcome is not only vital to literature
education but also central to our understanding of the efficacy of literature in our
educational and social process (Freire 1972, 1973). Therefore, the problem-posing
model of education and its constructivist underpinnings assume centrality in our
undertaking to democratize literature. As a result, we are now better placed to understand
the curricular shift that is required and along with that, the perceptions and procedures
for democratizing and dehegamonizing literature from its exclusivist shackles.

Signposting a Curricular Shift.
The problem-posing model of literature education demands a curricular shift in

order to maximize its beneficial outcomes. This according to Schon (1983: 333) will
view the literature curriculum as: “…an inventory of themes of understanding and skill
to be addressed rather than a set of materials to be learned. Different students present
different phenomena for understanding and action. Each student makes up a universe of
one, whose potentials, problems and pace of work must be appreciated as the teacher
reflects-in-action on the design of her work”. 

Such a curricular position will conceptualize each reader as ‘a universe of one’
dispelling the notion of the normative responses to literary texts that overwhelm
traditional approaches to literature. As such it can answer several questions that underlie
our agenda for democratizing and dehegamonizing literature:

1. What different processes operate during reading/writing?
2. What types of responses are readers likely to make?

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3. What orientations do readers bring to literary texts?
4. How has their awareness of textual and social conventions and their reading

encounters at home and in class influenced their responses?
5. What types of strategies do they use in responding to literature?
6. How does their knowledge, ability, attitude, interest, personality or purpose

influence their responses?
As a sequel to above mentioned points, I wish to question the notion of native-

speaker competence, which presupposes that native speakers have the requisite
linguistic, literary and cultural competence to read texts and write about them. This may
not be true if viewed from a perspective of interpretive literacy, which is analogous to a
capacity for reading the world. The problem of literacy for native language as well as
foreign language readers is that there is no uniform competence. As Kern observes
(2000: 116): “All interpretation is partial because all competence is partial. Foreign
language readers need not see themselves as hopelessly handicapped by their
‘outsideness’ with respect to the texts they read. On the contrary, their very outsideness
can provide them with insights that would not necessarily occur to ‘native’ readers.
When learners feel that the knowledge they can bring to a particular text is illegitimate
or inappropriate, they will feel like keeping their interpretations to themselves. What
teachers need to do, therefore, is to motivate learners to share their varied interpretations
in order to make them aware of how all reading is mediated experience, and that many
factors will contribute to the particular ways in which that mediation takes place during
a given act of reading”.

I am aware at this juncture that there are many dimensions to writing and
individuals can be found at different points on each dimension. So we should never
assume, as Smith (1982: 5) observes ‘that the way we ourselves write is the way
everyone writes. Teachers must not assume that their own idiosyncrasies are the only or
even the best way to write.’

Writing, like the language, can contribute to every aspect of our lives. It can extend
and reflect our efforts to develop and express ourselves in the world. Any mystification
that regards writing about literature as an esoteric skill that only a few can master at the
cost of great effort, should be dismissed. The benefit of writing extends to anyone who
can speak and read (Smith 1982). By the same token it is unbeneficial to view writing
as a special kind of activity that requires exceptional talents or extensive training and one
which can be used for specialized ends that might concern select individuals. 

Writing not only requires reading for its completion but also promotes the kind of
reading it requires (Lodge 1977). Given that both first and second language writing involve
similar processes (Kern 2000), we need to adopt a sympathetic/positive attitude rather than
a dismissive/punitive attitude to students’ writing about literature. So accuracy and
objectivity in writing should not be a cause for concern in the scheme of things proposed
in this paper. To this effect, motivational factors and personal response factors should be
tuned to initiate students into writing. In order to inspire students to write, we can use
situated practice, that is, the students’ immersion in writing as an act of designing meaning
rather than fulfilling a mechanistic act of literary response predicated on trained use of

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conventions such as grammar, vocabulary and syntax (Kern 2000; Smith 1982). Through
situated practice, we can facilitate immersion techniques, which will foster free writing,
response chronicles and dialogue/response journals. Over a period of time these
interactive, facilitative, negotiative and associative investments can evolve into
cooperative classroom literature, which will not only humanize students’ involvement with
literature, but will also aggrandize its merit and lasting value in our educational practices.

Some Possible Outcomes.
Democratization of literature envisages an order of learning and teaching literature,

which can help promote the following outcomes: 
1. It might reduce the examination-oriented mentality and take reading beyond

mere performance in an examination.
2. It might emphasize reading as a space for the exercise of mental energy and

creativity.
3. It might initiate an understanding of the exigencies of text and student, and

above all, of communication.
4. It might instill a love for books in students by which it is hoped, it will

encourage them to acquire books for themselves both for their own enjoyment and for
their longer term education benefit, as their range of reading expands.

5. It might encourage students to explore other texts, which might not have been
read in class and to start building up a library of books they are happy to own.

6. It might foster a high degree of reader autonomy which will not only develop
extensive reading but will also take them far beyond the imaginative learning benefit of
the original classroom encounter with the texts.

7. It might use reading as a valuable input to develop writing as a response to
reading.

8. It might help students discover the personal utility of writing and the life-long
joys and delights associated with writing.

When viewed from a soco-psychological perspective, the process of learning
literature in a second language itself takes on special significance. From this viewpoint
(Lambert, et al 1960), one would expect that, if the student is to be successful in his/her
attempt to learn another social group’s language he/she must be both able and willing to
adopt various aspects of behaviour, including verbal behaviour, which characterizes
members of the other linguistic-cultural group. Democratization of literature will
promote receptivity to the experience of becoming a speaker/reader/writer of another
language or somebody else’s language. It will encourage the teachers to shed their
traditional pedagogue image and take on the role of facilitators who would be keen to
deal with their students on a first-name basis. By doing so, the literature classroom will
promote receptivity to the teacher as a person and by stressing group work in class, it
hopes to promote receptivity to fellow learners notwithstanding the need to address the
inter-ethnic or political prejudices of the learners by emphasizing diversity in class as a
learning resource to the learners (Allwright and Bailey 1991). 

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This journey of understanding has so far served to point out the urgent need to
democratize the literary texts so as to reverse the culture of ignorance and illiteracy
through a response-centered reading-the-world approach to literature. In light of this, it
is argued that the educational and social developments of our students are inextricably
linked to their reading and writing about literature. In this respect, the stultifying and
disempowering role of a canonical approach to literature needs to be eliminated with the
help of the issues and insights articulated in this paper. It is only through reading and
provisional understanding of literary texts that our students can come to realize its
transformative and the empowering influences on living and learning. Such a realization
is crucial to the functioning of civilized societies and democracies. As Rosenblatt (1995:
171), observes: “Education in this era of social transformation must serve both critical
and constructive ends. On the one hand youth need the knowledge and the intellectual
tools required for critical appraisal of ideals and social mechanisms -new and old. On the
other hand, youth need to develop positive emotional drives that will quicken intellectual
insight. Thus they will be enabled to free themselves from antisocial attitudes and will
be impelled to achieve a world that will safeguard human values”. 

Therefore a safeguarding of human values demands an assimilation of ideas and
attitudes, which can only accrue through a personal and provisional reading of literary
texts and writing about them. Needless to say that the prevalence of literature is
fundamental to our educational practices, a well-informed democratization of the ways
in which we encourage our students to read and write about what has been read will
enhance all that we stand for as human beings in a world that is being increasingly
characterized by a predominance of consumerism, corruption and moral/social decay. 

Notes:

* The stimulus for this paper derives from Professor Carter’s valuable insight
discussed in his book “Investigating English Discourse”, published in 1997. This
paper was delivered as a sub plenary address at the Second International
Conference of the Armenian Association for the Study of English (AASE), held at
the Yerevan State University, Yerevan on 16 -19, October 2007.

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