H i l l o c k s > T h e Te r r i t o r y o f L i t e r a t u r e
The Territory of Literature
George Hillocks Jr.
June 15, 1934–November 12, 2014
Edited by Peter Smagorinsky
Editor’s Note: George Hillocks Jr. wrote this essay shortly before his death in 2014 in his role as
an advisor to a research project that included his former doctoral student, Carol D. Lee, as a key
investigator. This study, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, is titled Project READI, and
is detailed at http://ies.ed.gov/ncer/projects/grant.asp?ProgID=62&grantid=991. I edited his essay
into its present form. It represents Hillocks’s approach to developing a literature curriculum. Although primarily known as a writing researcher, Hillocks was interested in the whole of the English
curriculum. This piece outlines the assumptions on which Hillocks believed that a literature curriculum should be based and the manner in which it should be organized to enable the scaffolding
of students’ learning of interpretive procedures. It was unfinished prior to editing; in addition to
shaping up the paper as a publication, I added a concluding paragraph that I envisioned would
correspond to what Hillocks himself might have written to finish the paper.
The curricular materials that Hillocks makes reference to have a fairly canonical ring to them.
His conception relies on works included in a standard (or even highbrow) curriculum, rather than
incorporating an abundance of newer, more youth-oriented texts from the young adult literature
catalogue or works that deliberately try to represent the world’s various races, genders, nations,
age groups, and social classes. Although George was born to working-class Scottish immigrants, his
literary training at the College of Wooster, Case Western Reserve University, and the University
of Edinburgh undoubtedly had a classical orientation. His 1959 doctoral dissertation concerned
“The Synthesis of Art and Ethic in Tom Jones” and was a work of literary criticism, as was the case
for many of our field’s founding researchers whose training was grounded in the humanities yet
whose faculty appointments were in the social sciences. His examples in this late essay reflect those
sensibilities, which were undoubtedly reinforced through his joint appointment in Education and
English at the University of Chicago and his association for years with the Department of English’s
Chicago School of neo-Aristotelian literary theory.
In spite of conducting his career within the bounds of exclusive institutions, Hillocks was no
ivory-tower recluse. His teacher candidates did their practica and student teaching in a variety of
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South Side public schools (and occasionally the University of Chicago Lab School), many of which
were surrounded by poverty and were bereft of basic instructional resources for teaching. He rarely
outsourced the supervision of these student teachers to an assistant, but instead was present in
the schools and well-acquainted with the challenges of teaching students living under distressed
conditions. His blue-collar soul often seemed to be at odds with the elite environment in which
he worked, and those who knew him well were often drawn to his pragmatic understanding of
teaching realities.
Hillocks also placed a premium on thoughtful instructional planning, a value that he passed
on to many decades of students he taught in Chicago’s MAT program and around which he built
his extensive research program. Instructional planning has its critics (e.g., Leander, 2015) who find
it stultifyingly restrictive. Hillocks’s notion of planning, however, defied conventional notions of
structured instruction in that it provided a blueprint more than a script, and planned what students
would do through activity rather than what the teachers will say as authorities.
With those issues foregrounded, I’m pleased to present George Hillocks’s final work of scholarship in the hopes that it explains his vision and outlines what it would look like in practice. It
would undoubtedly require modification in schools in which a curriculum is heavily prescribed
to prepare students to pass standardized tests, and among teachers for whom canonical readings
do not respond to the immediate needs of today’s youth. Ultimately, this essay provides readers,
regardless of orientation, with a practical way in which to think about curricular design and how
it works in classrooms.
—Peter Smagorinsky
What is the territory of literature? What does it include? What are its boundaries? What is important to its understanding?
First, high school curricula do not make it clear that, at the core, literature is concerned not only with character, plot, and setting but with moral1
and philosophical issues. That is never a consideration given any serious
thought. It is blithely ignored. However, if a curriculum is to be aimed at
evidence-based argumentation in the disciplines, then in literature, it will
be of primary importance to pay particular attention to how the moral and
philosophical issues of literature will be addressed. Without an understanding of the moral concepts, students will be unable to generate arguments
about the texts they read. For these moral concepts become the basis for the
warrants that tie the evidence that readers perceive to the judgments they
make about characters, groups, and societies, and the writers themselves
and their works as wholes.
Second, most high school anthologies designed for the study of literature would have us believe that a simple classification including fiction
(short and long), poetry, and drama, and perhaps some nonfiction such as
biography, memoir, and autobiography is adequate for the literary education
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of young people. The problem is that once we know this classification, we
are no closer to understanding the territory of literature. It tells us nothing
of the content or structure of literary works or the history of literature from
beginnings to the present day. If we hope that our
Without a way of organizing texts
curriculum building will have a salutary effect
on students, we need a classification that will in a theoretically principled manprovide much more information to guide our ner, a teacher’s decisions on what
curriculum building. Without a way of organiz- to include will produce a random
ing texts in a theoretically principled manner, approach to curricular planning.
a teacher’s decisions on what to include will
produce a random approach to curricular planning, such as reading short
stories for six weeks because the materials share the quality of being short
narratives, a quality that provides few opportunities to read texts in a meaningful sequence and with a clear goal in mind.
Some schools use the Aristotelian genres and other genres to guide
some of their decisions. These genres include Epic, Tragedy, Comedy, and
Satire. Other genres identified by literary theorists include Lyric, Picaresque, Science Fiction, and Detective Fiction (see http://smago.coe.uga
.edu/VirtualLibrary/Unit_Outlines.htm#GENRESARCHETYPES1 for a more
detailed list).
Unfortunately, most curricula do not even recognize satire as a major
genre, let alone differentiate between diatribe and Menippean satire. While
they may attempt to include tragedy, particularly one by Shakespeare, they
pay little attention to comedy or epic let alone give serious consideration to
the other genres. Further, even when all of these are included, the curricula
that I am familiar with have no way of examining the important links among
the types, such that a study of myth will inform the later study of tragedy or
comedy and provide no way of linking them to what schools call realistic
fiction and modern drama. As a result, students have the experience of studying a series of unrelated works that have no connection to any other works
they may read, a situation that necessarily impedes understanding. Yet these
links and relationships constitute some of the core knowledge that needs to
be in literature courses if we expect students’ understanding of literature
to grow (Hillocks, McCabe, & McCampbell, 1971).
Third, high school curricula treat what is often called the elements
of literature superficially. For example, students are taught that a plot is
what happens in a story, that a setting is where a story takes place, and that
there are certain points of view an author may take: first person, limited,
omniscient, and so forth. Kids have to learn to identify different figures of
speech, usually four or five, and are supposed to be able to identify and ex-
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plain irony. But all of these are normally treated by providing only simple
definitions with no practice in interpreting any of them in any depth. Is it
any wonder that kids cannot read thoughtfully?
Recommendations for the Literature Curriculum
Concepts: Moral and Philosophical Content
First, I strongly recommend that a good part of the curriculum be devoted
to conceptual units focused on ethical or philosophical ideas (see, e.g., Smagorinsky, 2008). One source for these ideas is Aristotle’s (350 BCE) Nichomachean Ethics, which has had a profound impact on Western culture and which
was adopted by Thomas Aquinas and many other medieval philosophers. It
remains important in the work of many modern philosophers, including
Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as many writers of fiction and poetry, from Henry Fielding to Ayn Rand and others. The ideas of
the Ethics permeate Western law, and even theology and the interpretation
of biblical scripture. They provide both (1) a framework for the analysis
for concepts such as courage, temperance, justice, friendship, generosity,
and prudence, which Aristotle regards as an intellectual virtue, being the
ability to perceive and choose the right action for the right reasons, at the
right time, and in the right way; and (2) a means for the development of
warrants in arguments of judgment concerning literary characters, works,
authors, and milieu. Other sources for other concepts might be selected as
useful and necessary. For example, Joseph Campbell’s (1968) The Hero with
a Thousand Faces provides a wonderful source for the comparison of mythic
figures across cultures.
A few years ago, I had the experience of observing a teacher teaching
a unit on war. She had no conceptual underpinning for the unit but simply
moved from one poem to another with no connections among the several
poems that her students were to read. The result was that the reading of any
one poem contributed nothing to the reading of the next. The teacher needed
some conceptual frame for linking the ideas from the poems.
Recently, a teacher in a workshop in Denver told me and my colleague
that she conducted a unit on the hero in her 11th-grade classes. One major
writing assignment asked students to choose someone as a hero and to make
a case for that nomination. There had been no earlier discussion about
what constitutes a hero and no discussion of criteria that would be brought
to bear in making such a decision. Students could use whatever ideas they
wanted in making the decision. The teacher said she saw herself as preparing her students for college writing. She said that her students could use
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whatever criteria or standards they saw fit to use. But without some fairly
well-developed concept of what constitutes a hero or heroic action, there
is little chance that any student can make a case that her nomination is a
proper one. Such an essay is unlikely to be accepted in first-year writing, let
alone in higher level courses, thus thwarting her goal of college preparation.2
Types of Literature
Second, for a literature curriculum to be coherent and systematic, it needs to
be more sophisticated than that used in most high schools. Such a typology
should be able to reveal and illuminate similarities and differences among
a wide variety of fictional, dramatic, and poetic works. It should provide insight into a wide variety of texts, and it should make it possible for students
to recognize, in works new to them, what they have seen in works previously
studied. They need to allow for connections that rise far above the level of
simply saying, “Oh, golly, this is another play.”
The “Theory of Modes,” the first essay of four in Northrop Frye’s (1957)
Anatomy of Criticism, provides a useful typology. It is based primarily on the
degree of power that a main character (hero) has and the level of probability
that occurrences have in the real world. In myth,
for example, we do not expect occurrences to be For a literature curriculum to be
bound by natural laws. We accept the miraculous coherent and systematic, it needs
and the magical as real for the purposes of the to be more sophisticated than
myth. Such supernatural events are also available that used in most high schools.
in modern novels, such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita, whose cast of characters includes a gun-toting,
fast-talking cat, along with the devil and a witch. But in a realistic novel, we
would reject such occurrences as bad writing.
Frye’s Modes
Here, then, are Frye’s (1957) modes.
Mythic
The hero is “superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of
other men, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of
a story about a god” (Frye, 1957, p. 33). This mode is still alive and well in
religion and popular culture. The Christian gospels are interpreted through
the dramatization of Christ’s Passion in the processions of Guatemala on
Good Friday every year. Scenes from the Hindu epic, The Ramayana, are
acted out annually in Indonesia, Singapore, and India. And the participatory
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services involving snake handling, glossolalia, and other activities in various
Pentecostal churches in the United States remain important cultural activities. In popular culture, heroes such as Superman and Spiderman continue
to enthrall audiences and make big bucks for the film industry. In schools
we encounter the Greek myths and African tales of Anansi and occasionally
myths from other cultures.
Romantic
According to Frye (1957),
If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the
typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvelous but who himself
is identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in
which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted
weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans
of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of
romance have been established. (p. 33)
The popularity of romantic stories and heroes has grown enormously
over the last decade or more. All three of my grandsons have read the Harry
Potter novels, as have millions of other youngsters and adults. The movies
continue to earn large amounts of money. Harry and his friends are represented as normal, but with superpowers due to their affiliation with the
school for witches. But in many ways, they remain normal children. The
graphic novel by Frank Miller, The 300, about the battle of Thermopylae,
falls into this category. Many of Grimm’s fairy tales fall into this category,
as do many other stories of enchantment. The Dr. Doolittle novels have remained popular since World War I. In addition, there are the heroes of the
medieval metrical romances such as Havelok the Dane, The Green Knight,
and the grail quest romances.
High Mimetic
Frye (1957) writes that “If superior to other men but not to his natural environment, he is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression
far greater than ours, but what he does is subject to social criticism and to
the order of nature. [This is the] hero of most epic and tragedy” (pp. 33–34).
The examples of this genre are legion: The Odyssey, The Song of Roland, Beowulf, Julius Caesar (with Brutus as the main character), Othello, Hamlet,
King Lear, Macbeth, and many more canonical works of literature. In more
recent popular culture, the movie All the King’s Men and various writings
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about the fall of Nixon and the assassination of President Kennedy are closely
related to this type. In popular culture, the heroes of many Westerns are
usually superior in mien to others: Shane, High Noon, The Virginian, and
Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven.
Low Mimetic
Frye (1957) asserts that “If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity,
and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in
our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of
most comedy and of realistic fiction. ‘High’ and ‘low’ have no connotations
of comparative value, but are purely diagrammatic” (p. 34). On this level,
Frye argues that the term hero has a more expanded meaning than do the
preceding modes in which the protagonist must meet more precise criteria
for being considered heroic. Thackeray, for example, calls Vanity Fair a
novel without a hero. But examples abound since the eighteenth century:
Tom Jones, Great Expectations, The Return of the Native, Of Human Bondage,
various novels of Robert Cormier, and many more.
The major theme of comedy is the integration of characters into the
larger community. Most heroes of modern comedy are ordinary people,
with similar faults and virtues. The major figures of these comic works have
somehow been ostracized or separated from individuals or groups. The plot
is concerned with bringing them together with the individuals or groups
with whom they prefer to congregate. Thus, much of comedy is concerned
with the bringing together of separated lovers, the return of the ostracized
to the group, or the reunification of entire groups: A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Tom Jones, The Divine Comedy,
and many other works.
Ironic
To Frye (1957), “If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that
we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or
absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode” (p. 33). For the last 150 years
or so, he continues, “serious fiction has tended increasingly to be ironic in
mode” (p. 35). There are many examples of works in the ironic mode, some
tragic and some comedic: Native Son, Death of a Salesman, One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich, Beloved, Dead Man Walking, Silence of the Lambs,
and so forth. Irony is at the heart of much popular cultural expression, from
Black Jesus to Doonesbury comics to the lyrics of South African musician
and social critic Johnny Clegg.
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In his discussion of these modes, Frye (1957) makes it clear that these
modes are to be used, not simply as distinctive categories, but as a framework
for analysis in which genres such as tragedy can appear across several modes
and in which modes may be intermingled:
In high mimetic tragedy pity and fear become, respectively, favorable and
adverse moral judgments which are relevant to tragedy but not central
to it. The particular thing called tragedy that happens to the tragic hero
does not depend on his moral status. If it is causally related to something
he has done, as it generally is, the tragedy is in the inevitability of the
consequences of the act, not in its moral significance as an act. . . .
In low mimetic tragedy, pity and fear are neither purged nor absorbed into pleasures, but are communicated externally as sensations. . . .
The best word for low mimetic or domestic tragedy is, perhaps, pathos,
and pathos has a close relation to the sensational reflex of tears. Pathos
presents its hero as isolated by a weakness which appeals to our sympathy
because it is on our own level of experience. (p. 38)
Examples of low mimetic tragedy include Hardy’s The Return of the Native,
Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.
Frye (1957) contrasts these low mimetic works with tragedy in the
ironic mode:
The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of the individual on our own level
from a social group to which he is trying to belong. Hence, the central
tradition of sophisticated pathos is the study of the isolated mind, the story
of how someone, recognizably like ourselves, is broken by the conflict
between the inner and outer world, between imaginative reality and the
kind of reality that is established by social consensus. Such tragedy may be
concerned, as it often is in Balzac, with a mania or obsession about rising
in the world, this being the low mimetic counterpart of the fiction of the
fall of the leader.3 Or it may deal with the conflict of inner and outer life
as it is in Madame Bovary and Lord Jim or with the impact of inflexible
morality on experience as in Melville’s Pierre and Ibsen’s Brand. The
type of character involved here we may call by the Greek name alazon
[braggart] which means impostor, someone who pretends or tries to be
more than he is. . . .
Tragic irony, then, becomes simply the study of tragic isolation as
such, and it thereby drops out the element of the special case, which is
in some degree in all the other modes. Its hero does not necessarily have
any tragic hamartia [fault] or pathetic obsession: he is only somebody
who gets isolated from his society. Thus, the central principle of tragic
irony is that whatever happens to the hero should be causally out of line
with his character. . . . Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense
of arbitrariness, of having been selected at random or by lot, and no more
deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be. If there is
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a reason for choosing him for catastrophe, it is an inadequate reason and
raises more objections than it answers.
Thus the figure of a typical or random victim begins to crystallize
in domestic tragedy as it deepens in ironic tone. We may call this typical
victim the pharmakos or scapegoat. We meet a pharmakos figure in Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, in Melville’s Billy Budd, in Hardy’s Tess. . . .
Irony descends from the low mimetic. It begins in realism and dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily toward myth,
and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear
in it. Our five modes evidently go round in a circle. This reappearance of
myth in the ironic is particularly clear in Kafka and in Joyce. (pp. 39–42)
This mode includes many works that are tragic, but that we would
never include under tragedy using classical definitions in which the hero
must be superior to other men or women. A number of stories may be classified as tragedies in the ironic mode:
> Gina Berriault’s “Stone Boy,” about a nine-year-old boy who accidentally kills his 15-year-old brother;
> Richard Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman,” about a child who
is a freak of nature and whose parents lock and chain him in their
basement;
> James Hanley’s story “The Butterfly,” about a boy who is locked in a
room and disparaged and whose caterpillar is killed;
> Richard Wright’s Native Son, in which Bigger Thomas is a protagonist whose social status leaves him fated to lead a life of desperation;
and
> Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, in that Willy is the braggart or
impostor who makes himself something he is not until he can face
the reality no longer.
In some works the modes are mingled. Arguably Alice Walker’s heroine, Celie, in The Color Purple begins in the ironic mode and ends in the low
mimetic by virtue of momentous changes in the ways she faces problems and
extricates herself from tyranny. Though less obviously, the same is true for
the heroine of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee. In both novels there are changes
in the personalities of the heroines, their worldviews, and their material
circumstances. In both novels, the characters begin with the circumstances
of ironic tragedy but rise above them and defeat them such that the novels
show a high level of their integration with those around them. In that sense
of integration, the novels can be considered in the tradition of comedy.
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The Rhetoric of Literature
Third, we need a much more expanded treatment concerning how literature works than is usually provided by traditional lists of the “elements of
literature.” These considerations should include expanded ideas of plot;
understanding of the distinction between narrator and author, particularly
the unreliable narrator; a cultural understanding of imagery and symbolism, including archetypes and allegory; and
We need a much more expanded attention to satire, especially the signs of stable
treatment concerning how irony that always indicate the need to reconstruct
literature works than is usually meanings. In addition, at some level, it will be
provided by traditional lists of the important for young readers to examine an
“elements of literature.” author’s underlying assumptions about people,
values, and events, as is the wont in postmodern
criticism such as Marxist and feminist criticism. I next draw more specific
attention to each of these interpretive needs.
Plot
The school idea of plot as the sequence of events in a story is totally inadequate
in terms of gleaning any meaning from a work. We need to consider how
events in conjunction with the characters involved give rise to emotional
response from the reader. How does the author ensure that readers have
the desired response? If an author explicates the response by describing
the required emotions, we are likely to decide that the writing is overly
sentimental and maudlin. Early in Steinbeck’s The Pearl, his son Coyotito
is stung by a scorpion. This is a frightening event for Kino and Juana. Such
an event may be frightening to us, and we may respond with pity for the
family and with fear for what might happen to Coyotito. But we still need
to consider how Steinbeck intensifies our reactions without being maudlin
about the event and how his techniques give rise to the suspense that drives
the reader forward. Thus, for a clearer understanding of a plot, we need to
understand how the interplay of character and events give rise to readers’
responses and to the construction of suspense.
Literary critic Ronald S. Crane (1952) has argued that any plot is the
synthesis of action, character, and thought involved in the matter of the
writer’s invention. All three of these elements contribute to the whole, but
one or another may be taken as the guiding principle. Accordingly, we may
say there are three kinds of plot: plots of action, character, and thought,
which are sometimes integrated. Plots of action result in material changes
in the material circumstances of one or more main characters. This kind of
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plot is typified by adventure stories such as Treasure Island, most Westerns,
and most detective stories.
Plots of character involve a series of events that result in changes in
the values and moral character of the hero. A classic example is Tom Jones.
More modern examples include the main characters of nearly all novels
classed as coming-of-age stories. By definition, the latter involve change in
the character of the protagonists. In plots of character, events occur because
of the actions of the heroes rather than incidental or coincidental events. A
major question becomes this: “How has the character changed in personality, perception, or attitude as related to his or her morality?”
Finally, plots of thought focus on the thinking of the character and
involve a thorough change in the character’s thinking through engagement
with his or her surroundings. I would argue that the changes in Celie in The
Color Purple provide a clear example of the plot of thought but conditioned
by action and character. The plot is centered on the several changes in Celie’s thinking. The excellence of this novel, as Crane might say, relies on the
manner in which the integration of character, action, and thought coalesce
to produce the reader’s emotional response to the work.
Author/Narrator
It is important for readers to recognize the difference between author and
the narrator of a literary work. To know that the author and narrator are
different and that the narrator may be first person or third person limited
or omniscient provides little insight. Far more important is the ability to
infer the assumptions and values of the author and those of the narrator,
which may not coincide. The narrators of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”
and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are quite different, although ninth graders judge
both simply as being crazy. Both are obsessive, perhaps, but about different
things, one about revenge, the other about guilt and fear. Teachers can tell
students the difference, but to become expert readers, students need practice
in making such discriminations for themselves.
More complex and far more difficult is inferring the sociocultural
values of writers that underlie their work. This attention to authors’ value
systems is the major focus of whole fields of criticism, for example, Marxist and feminist. When a delegation of educators from the USSR visited
The University of Chicago in the early 1980s, I spoke at some length with
a language arts educator who was responsible for the training of Russian
teachers of literature and writing. I asked about the interpretation of Crime
and Punishment and learned that it was essentially a criticism of capitalism,
and that capitalism was responsible for Raskolnikov’s crime. As far as I could
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determine, he could not see any other interpretation. Further, I learned
that such an interpretation was required in schools. This is a case in which
the reader’s ideology determines the interpretation. It is important to help
students learn to infer the various sociocultural values of both author and
narrator through attention to the evidence in a text. A reflective approach to
instruction should also help students interrogate their own values in their
dialectic relation with the literary work.
More important is the necessity to help students determine the extent
to which a narrator is reliable or unreliable (see Smith, 1991). In my experience, students have a strong tendency to accept whatever a narrator says
without questioning the degree to which he or she represents the author’s
thinking. But there are always clues to a narrator’s unreliability. Many
characters make statements that are unreliable, with their unreliability
evident in their misstatements, distortions of fact, and exaggerations. These
cues indicate what Booth (1974) calls stable irony and call upon the reader
to reconstruct the text’s surface meaning.
Imagery and Symbolism
Imagery and symbolism are rarely approached in a systematic way in
schools. Yet if readers do not recognize or interpret the impact of imagery
and symbolism, they will fail to grasp the full and rich meanings of many
texts from simple fables to highly complex fiction, drama, and poetry. Ordinarily, teachers provide definitions of imagery and symbolism and then
proceed to explain the meanings of the symbols and import of imagery in
various works, from fables to The Scarlet Letter. Experience and research
have shown that when teachers do the explaining, students learn little about
making their own interpretations (Hillocks, 1999; Marshall, Smagorinsky,
& Smith, 1995; Nystrand, 1997). Curricula need to provide a systematic approach to helping students interpret imagery and symbols, including allegory
and archetypal symbols.
Satire and Irony
Another important block to understanding is student failure to recognize
satire and irony, especially the signs of stable irony that always indicate the
need to reconstruct meanings. For Booth (1974), the interpretation of irony
involves collaboration between readers and the writer. The writer leaves cues
to her ironic intent. The reader must recognize the cues, ask if it is indeed
ironic, and further ask about locating the evidence for that possible conclusion. If the reader concludes that the language is indeed ironic, then his or
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her next step must be to reconstruct the meaning. Booth provides a list of the
most common cues or signposts for the appearance of irony. The author may
> provide an outright warning, perhaps in the form of an epigraph,
that what follows can hardly be believed;
> have the speaker contradict a known fact or misstate a popular
expression;
> include conflicts in the work and especially the language of the
work;
> construct clashes in style; and
> create conflicts of belief, as when a character or narrator makes
a statement that we know the author would not endorse (Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn being a good example).
My experience in teaching irony suggests that contrasts in the work and
its language and clashes in style are the most likely clues to a reader that a
text is ironic. In fact, the first time I taught irony in a unit on satire, in 1959,
I emphasized finding various contrasts in the language and events and style
of works. Booth’s (1974) A Rhetoric of Irony had not been published at the
time. But examining conflict in students’ sarcastic remarks, in cartoons, and
simple poems leading to much more difficult poetry, including T. S. Eliot’s
“The Hollow Men,” was very effective. Once students had enough experience with several texts, they were able to identify irony in their independent
reading and reconstruct meanings independently.
After reading and interpreting irony in a set of cartoons and showing
their understanding of the appropriate interpretive principles, my students
read “The Golf Links” by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn (full text available at
http://allpoetry.com/The-Golf--Links). The contrast between the children
laboring and the men playing alerts us to the irony immediately. In reconstructing the meaning, we do not say “Oh, golly, how lucky for the children
that they can look out and see the men at play.” Rather we say, “What is
going on here? The men ought to be working in the mill and the children
should be out playing.” There is no question. But I have actually interviewed
teachers who themselves miss the point of the poem. Irony, as humorists
from Jonathan Swift to Mark Twain to Tina Fey to Larry Wilmore know well,
requires astute attention to multiple textual cues, the ignorance of which
could lead to great misunderstanding. English teachers in particular should
know how to recognize it in literature.4
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A Matrix for Curricular Thinking
These three areas (Values, Modes, and Rhetoric) taken together provide a
three-dimensional matrix, with all values intersecting and all parts of the
rhetoric as intersecting each mode. The number of intersections will be
high. The goal should be to incorporate a broad spectrum of them in a curriculum. For example, let us begin with high mimetic mode and select texts
from within that and from related modes.
Epic: A Progression of Mode
Any epic can be examined from the perspective of rhetorical narrator or from
the values perspectives of courage, boastfulness, or prudence. Teachers might
begin with epics in the ironic mode. Possible texts include a translation of
Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” that features talking animals, including Chauntecleer, a vain rooster (about his crowing ability), and Pertelote,
his wife. Chauntecleer is the typical alazon or impostor of the ironic mode.
Chauntecleer dreams of his demise at the hands of a fox, and sure enough,
a fox flatters him to the extent that the rooster stands on tip-toe to demonstrate his prodigious crowing to the fox. As soon as Chauntecleer is about to
crow, the fox takes him by the neck in its jaws and runs away with him. The
remainder of the story pertains to how Chauntecleer, playing on the ego of
the fox, deceives him to escape. It is known as a beast epic or a mock epic.
The values focus has to do with boastfulness and the virtues of appropriate
humility and prudence. The rhetorical focus has to do with the interpretation of simple symbols and how we know they are symbols. (It could also be
about the narrator or some other aspect of the rhetoric involved.)
Another mock epic is The Wind in the Willows, appropriate for seventh
grade or higher. In this children’s story, Toad is the hero. It has distinct
parallels to The Odyssey, including a chapter titled “The Fight in the Great
Hall,” the climactic book of The Odyssey. High school students might, with
this preparation, be able to deal with high mimetic epics such as Gilgamesh
and The Odyssey. Note that the problems of Odysseus in returning home
are the result of his having taunted Polyphemous, the son of Poseidon. It
is a problem of boastfulness. Odysseus must learn prudence, just as must
Chauntecleer, the rooster.
Courage: A Progression of Value
Aristotle argued that courage is a foundational virtue. Without courageous
action, there could be no justice, no appropriate generosity, no upholding
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of any important principles. One text used in seventh grade is a chapter
from Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, which has been titled, by
various editors, “How I Won the Right to the Streets of Memphis.” Richard’s
mother sends him to the store with a grocery list and money. A group of
neighborhood boys bully him and beat him on his way to the store and steal
the money. He returns home, but, despite his pleading, his mother sends
him out to the store again, this time with a list, money, and a big stick. When
the boys attack him again, he panics and begins to swing the big stick at the
boys, cracking several heads and driving them away. He concludes that he
won the right to the streets of Memphis that night. Some students think he
has won the streets, but many think he has not because his mother made
him face the boys and because he fought them in a panic, not out of some
sort of resolution.
By 9th or 10th grade, students should be formulating a definition of
courage, establishing the boundaries between true courageous actions and
actions that may seem to be courageous but that are merely foolhardy, nondeliberative, and immoral acts, for example. Students who have developed
such a definition may read and interpret such a story as Crane’s “A Detail
of an American Battle,” which includes both a seemingly courageous and
a truly courageous act. The students’ task is to explicate the differences
between the two acts and use criteria developed in their definitions to make
the case about the differences.
In 11th and 12th grades, students should be bringing this definition
to bear on characters as they read and interpret novels and dramas such
as The Red Badge of Courage, Macbeth, Richard III, Henry V, An Enemy of
the People, and Giants in the Earth. And no doubt of equal importance, they
apply this definition to their personal experiences with situations requiring
courageous action.
Irony: A Progression of Mode
Failure to comprehend irony is responsible for many a protest against books
that might be found perfectly acceptable if people only understood them.
But people miss the contrasts that provide the clues to the presence of irony.
Even though it is usually absurd, it is easier to take ironic statements at face
value rather than go through the process of identifying the ironic clues and
reconstructing the meaning. We should begin early, perhaps with sixth or
seventh grade. Students at this age are capable of delivering sarcastic remarks
with cutting effect. They laugh at the ironic statements of TV characters
who say one thing and do another. With a little help they begin to identify
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the irony of political cartoons. By the eighth or ninth grade they can begin
to deal with ironic poems such as Cleghorn’s “The Golf Links” and Siegfried
Sassoon’s “Base Details” before moving to more complex poems by e. e. cummings, Robert Browning, and T. S. Eliot. At a higher level, there are plays and
novels that are developed primarily through irony: Twain’s Huckleberry Finn,
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Lemony Snicket’s
Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, and many others.
Conclusion
In a well-designed unit, all of these levels probably should occur, making
the transitions from easy to complex more navigable for student learners.
[Editor’s note: At this point, Hillocks’s text ends. What follows is a brief reconstruction of how he might have concluded this essay, based on knowledge of
arguments he has made consistently since the 1950s. PS] These principles of
designing instruction scaffold students’ learning through a series of increasingly complex texts, beginning with simple and accessible (e.g., Calvin and
Hobbes cartoons in which irony is in play) to less familiar but still accessible
works (e.g., Gnarles Barkley’s “Crazy”) to texts that make progressively more
challenging demands on readers’ critical faculties (Smith & Hillocks, 1988).
They further call for gradually more complex interpretive work commensurate with the complications afforded by the literature or other texts studied
(Johannessen, Kahn, & Walter, 2009).
This sort of sequencing relies on considerable knowledge of literary
construction by teachers, who use this knowledge not to lecture on the elements of texts but to design sequences of instruction that gradually broaden
students’ knowledge of related sorts of texts through multiple exposures and
critical attention to the manner in which texts are produced and arranged
(Lee, 1993). This method might seem superficially formalist, but instead
relies on an understanding of textual form to allow students to give serious
thought to the moral and philosophical issues that drive literary production
and readerly engagement. In contrast to the hollow emphasis on elements
of literature and literary techniques as ends in themselves that is typical of
school instruction, this approach is worthy of both teachers’ and students’
time and attention.
Notes
1. I assume that George’s reference to literature’s moral dimensions follows from
his reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a work that greatly influenced his thinking. Although I am hardly an expert on this text, I gather that Aristotle and Hillocks
both viewed morality as the course of action through which one becomes a good person
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who achieves an unadulterated sense of happiness, which is only attainable through
the cultivation of the virtues that make a human life complete. PS
2. It is also possible that large-scale writing assessments would be inhospitable to
such an essay, although Hillocks’s (2002) study of high-stakes writing assessments
suggests that good writing is not necessarily rewarded when a single, skeletal rubric
is used to determine writing quality. Perhaps that book has produced wildly radical
changes in writing assessment, although of course I’m just kidding. Nonetheless,
current writing assessments associated with the Common Core State Standards, if
they survive (and I’ve been confident all along that they won’t), discount students’
opinions as evidence, providing another reason to employ the sort of gateway activities
that characterize Hillocks’s approach to writing instruction. PS
3. I cannot help but think of disgraced ex-governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich in
this context. GH
4. And yet, according to the Common Core State Standards, students must learn to
“read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences
from it” (see http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/R/). Perhaps the
teacher Hillocks interviewed was an early casualty of this imperative. PS
References
Aristotle. (350 BCE). Nichomachean ethics. (W. D. Ross, Trans.) Retrieved from
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html
Booth, W. C. (1974). A rhetoric of irony. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Campbell, J. (1968). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Crane, R. S. (Ed.) (1952). Critics and criticism: Ancient and modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frye, N. (1957). Anatomy of criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hillocks, G. (1999). Ways of thinking, ways of teaching. New York: Teachers College
Press.
Hillocks, G. (2002). The testing trap: How state writing assessments control learning.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Hillocks, G., McCabe, B. J., & McCampbell, J. F. (1971). The dynamics of English
instruction, grades 7–12. New York: Random House. Retrieved from http://
smago.coe.uga.edu/Books/Dynamics/Dynamics_home.htm
Johannessen, L., Kahn, E., & Walter, C. C. (2009). Writing about literature, 2nd ed.,
revised and updated. Urbana: NCTE. Retrieved from http://smago.coe.uga.edu/
Books/Designing_and_Sequencing.pdf
Leander, K. (2015). Educational design is out of time. Research in the Teaching of
English, 49, 435–437.
Lee, C. D. (1993). Signifying as a scaffold for literary interpretation: The pedagogical
implications of an African American discourse genre. Urbana: NCTE.
Marshall, J. D., Smagorinsky, P., & Smith, M. W. (1995). The language of interpretation: Patterns of discourse in discussions of literature. NCTE Research Report No.
27. Urbana: NCTE.
Nystrand, M. (1997). Opening dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of language
and learning in the English classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
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Smagorinsky, P. (2008). Teaching English by design: How to create and carry out
instructional units. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Smith, M. W. (1991). Understanding unreliable narrators. Urbana: NCTE. Retrieved
from http://smago.coe.uga.edu/Books/Unreliable_Narrators.pdf
Smith, M. W., & Hillocks, G., Jr. (1988). Sensible sequencing: Developing knowledge
about literature text by text. English Journal, 77(6), 44–49.
George Hillocks Jr. was an emeritus professor in the Department of Education, with
a joint appointment in the Department
of English Language and Literature at
the University of Chicago. His teaching career included the preparation of
English teachers in the Master of Arts in
Teaching program and the mentoring of
Ph.D. students in the doctoral program
at the University of Chicago. His primary
research interests centered on the teaching of writing, literature, and language in
middle and high school English classes and on large-scale writing assessment.
Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor of English Education
at The University of Georgia. He earned his M.A.T. in 1977 and Ph.D. in 1989,
both from the University of Chicago under George Hillocks’s advisement.
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