Teaching Literature : Contemporary
Gothic, threshold concepts social
justice and dialogue
Gina Wisker
Centre for Learning and Teaching
University of Brighton
The novel is ‘the stage upon which the great debates of
society can be conducted’ (Salman Rushdie, Is Nothing
Sacred?, 1990, p.7)
Literature teaching and learning is a risky and dynamic
experience, an interaction, a dialogue between people, ideas,
language, text to create meanings. It is more of a form of
praxis than the gaining of a body of knowledge.
My pedagogic practice, teaching literature, aims to engage
students in active learning, in a dialogue with the texts,
considering the arguments and values with which these texts
engage, and how they engage with them.
Threshold concepts (Meyer, Land and Cousins 2003,2006)
inform the strategies I use so students engage with ways in
which texts use representation, language and form, in context,
to enable transformational learning and change.
learner centred, .
Constructive alignment (Biggs and Tang, 2007,
2011) well-planned, managed structure
Some technology enhanced learning, -returning
some of the agency to students to construct
knowledge.
contemporary Gothic literature, enables
interactions between learner centred dialogue
with the text, and issues of social justice.
• Louise Rosenblatt’s (1978) ‘transactional ‘(p
xii) view of reading and interpreting, values
different readings, and an active reader.
• dialogue together, making meaning and coconstructing knowledge, involved as subjects,
engaged people in a context, and emotions
come into play as well as cognitive processes.
• Raphael Samuels -social, liberal, liberational,
adult education traditions lying behind
literature teaching, nuanced with research,
• Ben Knights : ‘we have to use our authority to
hold and protect the spaces within which
formative interchange between the affective
and the cognitive may take place’ (Knights,
2001).
• Bakhtin (1984)Ben Knights emphasises
dynamism.
• ‘The difficulty of reading is simultaneously the
challenge of creating and performing
imaginative systems adequate to represent
and change our world, and the enterprise in
which teacher and student join is, in a
Bakhtinian sense, a boundary activity. Every
‘internal experience ends up on the
boundary.... To be means to
communicate.’(Knights, 2001).
• Meyer, Land, Cousin- ‘troublesome
knowledge’
• ‘our uncomfortable business’, Knights
• Aronowitz and Giroux call ‘border pedagogy’
(1991), picks up and encourages the edginess,
the newness, as well as dynamic dialogue in
the study and discussion of texts – which are
never fixed and finished.
• Literature is political
• Engagement – threshold concepts and the novel
inspired by beliefs
• (1) Toni Morrison and Beloved--Teaching African
American women’s Gothic writing
• Recuperating hidden histories
• Slavery and history – realism
• Gothic and the imaginary
• (2) Teaching Neil Gaiman and (i)the comic horror
Gothic, (ii) digital Gothic
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• Genre and pedagogy interact with work on
contemporary Gothic writing because it
engages with contradictions and contested
knowledge,
• conflicted views, parallels, sometimes parallel
worlds, alternative perspectives and hidden
histories,
• questioning boundaries and breaking silences.
• I believe that literature should cause us to
question what seems given, how meaning is
made, knowledge constructed and shared and
how histories, experiences are seen differently
from different perspectives of culture and
context.
Working with contemporary Gothic
• Enables essential questioning, problematising
and exploring.
• Learners work together in dialogue with the text,
the context, and each other, making and
considering their own and shared interpretations.
• The destabilising of set views, readings and
complacencies opens a vital gap for discussion
and the construction of alternative
interpretations backed by evidence from text and
critic and driven by students’ own developments
of articulated argument.
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Beloved
And the
Gothic
Toni Morrison
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• There are some texts which switch students
on to important politicised issues and one of
these is Toni Morrison's marvellous,
beautifully written engagement with the
continued, lived, haunting presence of the
damage of slavery, 'Beloved' (1987). It uses
the literary Gothic engage them with issues
of race and ethnicity, historical and cultural
context, politics, gender , power and voice.
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• Toni Morrison led the way with the ghost
narrative Beloved which used Gothic strategies to
indicate ways in which the legacy of slavery and
its effects are still tangible and palpable as a pall –
in this case in the form of a returned baby ghost
acting as succubus on her mother, Sethe, and who
must be exorcised for people to move on
• Hauntology of location
• Haunting of a people
• But speculative fiction is/was unusual for African
Americans/Afro Caribbean writers- it goes beyond
testifying
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• The novel is ‘the stage upon which the great debates of
society can be conducted" (Salman Rushdie Is Nothing
Sacred?, p7)
• it is the only [form] that takes the 'privileged arena' of
conflicting discourse right inside our heads. The
interior space of our imagination is a theatre that can
never be closed down; the images created there make
up a movie that can never be destroyed. [p 13]
• "A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at
frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world
and stop it from going to sleep . . . and if rivers of blood
flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will
nourish him" (The Satanic Verses 97)
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• There is a growing danger that, individually
and collectively, we will find ourselves slipping
into a fragmented, storyless condition. The
loss of the capacity for narrative would
amount to the ultimate disempowering of the
human subject. [Democracy's Discontent,
Sandel, p351]
• "Political community depends on the
narratives by which people make sense of
their condition, and interpret the common life
they share" (Sandel p 350).
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Threshold concepts
• Meyer and Land –define threshold concepts as
• “transformative” – leading to significant, and
probably irreversible, shifts in perception;
• “integrative” – exposing previously hidden
interrelatedness of something;
• “bounded” – bordering into new conceptual
areas;
• “troublesome” – conceptually difficult, counterintuitive or alien.
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• English teaching colleagues responding to the
Conjunctions and Connotations project said:
• “…I think there’s a real threshold moment when
students are introduced to theories of language,
particularly the structure in theories of language,
which opens up a gap between language and the
world and the idea that actually language is the
way in which we construct the world and bring
the world, and its being rather than just simply
reflecting a world…” (Lecturer 8) (Wisker,
Cameron, Antoniou 2007, 13)
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• “…they have to get to grips with the theory of
ideology because it’s the absolutely core concept
that helps them theorise the relationship
between literature and society…”(Lecturer 11)
(Wisker, Cameron, Antoniou 2007, 13)
•
• “…you’ve got to get the excitement, you’ve got to
get the sense of discovery… Enquiry is an
absolutely key concept I think, enquiry, discovery.
If you don’t get that what is the point? There is
no point, you might as well do something else”
(Lecturer 3) (Wisker, Cameron, Antoniou 2007,
13)
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• Representation – something (signifier) stands for
something else (signified )it is more than a copy
of the real- using the ‘real’ to suggest something
-a message a value...
• Context – the engagement of the literary work
with time, place, people’s worldviews and values
– and with the time, place worldviews and values
of the reader• Formal expression – this is all vehicled
by/articulated by way of the match with, and
through the form, structure, language, genre etc
• Interpretation, “questioning and reading from
other perspectives” (Eaglestone 2000a, 22);
Through - excitement, engagement, ideologies, the
personal
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• I refuse to let them off the hook about whether
I’m a Black woman writer or not, I’m under a lot
of pressure to become something else. That is
why there is so much discussion of how my work
is influenced by other ‘real’ writers for example
white Southern writers whom I’m constantly
compared to.(Morrison, interview with Stuart,
1988, p.15)
• Writes the histories of African Americans in
periods in which they seemed silenced – hidden
from history
• Slavery, lynchings, transatlantic slave crossing ,
brutalisation (see bell hooks Aint I a Woman)
• Her engaged aim is a full record which recreates
and revitalises history through factual testimony
and a recreation of the imaginative world.
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• Cincinnati- slaves escaped to the free North
• Harriet Tubman and the underground railway
• 1855 is a significant time when the Northern
States gave homes to freed slaves, but
provided escapees with no protection from
slave-catchers crossing to recapture their
property
• Historical tale of Margaret Garner 1854
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• ‘Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eightyseven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky;
four colored schools burned to the ground;
grown men whipped like children; children
whipped like adults; black women raped by
the crew; property taken, necks broken ‘
(Beloved, 180).
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•
Harris (1981, History, Fable & Myth in the
Caribbean and Guiana, p.27) ‘the imagination
of the folk involved in a crucial inner re-creative
response to the violations of slavery,’ and that
‘the possibility exists for us to become involved
in perspectives .. which can bring into play a
figurative meaning beyond an apparently real
world or prison of history.’
• liberating powers of the imagination record
different histories and presents, envision
alternative futures.
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•
I needed to address my fear that I would not
be respected if I wrote about the supernatural
(Tananarive Due in interview March 17, 2002)
• the tone in which I could blend acceptance of
the supernatural and a profound rootedness in
the real time at the same time with neither
taking precedence over the other. It is indicative
of the cosmology, the way in which Black
people looked at the world, we are a very
practical people, very down to earth, even
shrewd people. But
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•
within that practicality we also accepted what
…..I suppose could be called superstition and magic,
which is another way of knowing things. But to blend
these two works together at the same time was
enhancing not limiting. And some of those things
were ‘discredited’ only because Black people were
‘discredited’ therefore what they knew was
‘discredited’. And also because the press upward
towards social mobility would mean to get as far
away from that kind of knowledge as possible. That
kind of knowledge has a very strong place in my
world.
• (Toni Morrison 1984 )
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• Postcolonial, African American and postmodernist writing
-a form of ghosting, haunting, the repressed hidden
histories of the past lingering alongside those of the
present.
• Speculative fictions can re-read the past, and the present
through their projections into a future or alternative
reality.
• To engage with and dramatise issues of oppression,
silencing and then empowerment in relation to gender
identity, history, and ethnicity.
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• It utilises and re valorises the forms used more by
the popular imaginary-is less likely to offer
realism and autobiography straight up , ‘a little
black pain undressed’(Barbara Burford,1980’s)
• Historical moments and
• acceptance of the supernatural and a profound
rootedness in the real time at the same time with
neither taking precedence over the other.
• (Morrison in Evans [ed.], 1985, p.342)
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• Beloved is essentially a novel about the vitality
and intrusiveness of memory, the memory of
racial oppression under slavery. Memory or
‘re-memory’ is acknowledged as present,
solid, vital:
• If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place
 the picture of it  stays; and just in my
rememory, but out there in the world... it’s
when you bump into the re-memory of
someone else.
• (Morrison, 1987, p.36)
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• Schoolteacher, an intellectual whose
dehumanising cruelty to his slaves dresses up
denial of human rights in the cloak of academic
authority-teaches the boys to put Sethe’s human
characteristics on one side of the page and her
(longer list) animal characteristics on the other
• Use of first person language of those recapturing
the slave family gives us insight into the mindset
of dehumanisation – helps us understand why
Sethe tries to kill her children – In order to rescue
them from the worse horror of slavery – we too
accept the unacceptable as a result of the worse
situation- slavery
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• History is portrayed as all around us, a
tangible, visible existent that a community
can experience, bump into. In this novel,
the insanity and absurdity upon which a
capitalist society dependent on slavery is
founded, translates itself into the lived
madness, the haunting of the past within
the house where first Baby Suggs, the
grandmother, then Sethe, the mother, and
Denver, her daughter, live. tangible
history-supernatural events
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• Beloved uses figures and tropes familiar in the
literary Gothic: the return of the repressed,
revelations of hidden stories and secrets,
silencing and voicing, language such as that of
schoolteacher, which deceives and hides, liminal
spaces i.e. the swamp from which Beloved arises,
124, the house on the border between a free
state and one relying on slavery, and the space in
the clearing where the community reunites.
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• Beloved articulates and embodies a history
and experience which have been ostensibly,
literally and ‘safely’ recuperated but one
actually still raw. The final page claims ‘it was
not a story to pass on’ (1987, p.275), using an
established literary trick. Creating a readership
ensures it will be passed on.
• Beloved directly confronts racism in a novel
which combines lyrical beauty with an assault
on the reader’s emotions and conscience. It
traces, embodies and focuses on the legacy of
slavery, using forms derived from a traditional
Black folk aesthetic.
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How does Toni Morrison engage us
with the political issues of
example of close reading questions
race
gender
politics
and
Literature:
through
• historical reality
• and the supernatural?
• How does she put us inside the mind of the
slavecatcher? Look at the language• How are slaves being defined here?
• What’s happening?
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Putting the e in e Gothicist
Teaching C21st Gothic writing in a
digital age – a few starts
IGA 2013
Gina Wisker
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• Importance of using the digital (social media,
Youtube, blogs etc) in teaching C21st literature
• My journey as an enthusiastic novice –
through literature and other subjects
• Neil Gaiman
• Some products and processes –for teaching
learning and assessment
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• Engaging students and engaging a readership
using social media and digital technologies
• Keeping up
• Step by step
• Transferring
• Its troublesome and rich (new, ever changing
possibilities)
• and enables creative thinking and producing ,
group and peer work, interaction, co
construction of knowledge
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Digital/Gothic
• Importance of the digital to authors and
readers and to students
• Opportunities it offers are generally
transformational and troublesome – uncanny
– like the Gothic, they disturb familiar forms
and expressions and offer parallel worlds as
well as constructing knowledge
• Gaiman, Hopkinson and others engage their
readership and students with working in these
forms so we experience, contribute , complete
and are part of it
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Novice teccy background
• Trying to keep up through working with others
• Using Youtube instead of a tape recorder
• Publishing online –slayage -it lasts- (my most
sourced writing ever!)
• http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage2/wisker.
htm ‘vampires and schoolgirls:high school high
jinks on the Hellmouth ‘
• The challenge- transfer from LSHTM and SEDA
teaching online-posts and chats blogs wikis group
interactions
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The students and the
authors lead
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C21st Literary Creative writing –
online support and engagement with
readership
• Neil Gaiman
• uses liminal spaces of technology,
• blogging and Facebook to communicate and
share the developmental processes with
readership.
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Why use e and blended for the Gothic?
• Working in the liminal e space like working in
the liminal Gothic space
• We are drawn in as readers, researchers and
teachers – and so replicate for our students
what draws us in and enables us to constructin order to enable them to go on similar ,their
own journeys
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• The digital world is already uncanny – unheimlich
as is the Gothic – this defamiliarisation of familiar
forms of engagement and expression naturally fit
together, couple this with authors who work in
fantasy and the Gothic, who expose and
expresses and embody a layered uncanny world
or more for us – and you have a perfect mix • Gaiman has embraced this
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Engaging students in co construction
• Much of the tension and effectiveness is about coconstruction – interaction, inventiveness, engagement not necessarily of the close stalking sort and rather like
ways in which Dickens readers would debate the ending
and developments
• You’re coming into their work – the gamers, the teens, the
onliners – they’re going into the virtual worlds of the
authors
• And together they’re making something more than the look
or the merchandising, as teachers and students this must
relate to co-construction of knowledge and engagement
aims as a part with the use of social networking to maintain
student engagement and sense of community
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• We are fascinated by digging down, into
behind and around the text –
• By showing our journeys we encourage
students’ journeys to construct knowledge
• Histories of writers, places, sources ( link or
add that information, ask questions)
• Textual references and intertexts ( link or add
that information, ask questions)
• Critical responses – blogs, interviews, reviews,
excerpts from critical texts (elicit, link, add ,
ask students to produce)
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Neil Gaiman
• Working in the popular domain –uniting the
popular , the high literary , the digital and the
presence
• Comic books/graphic novels the Sandman
• Films
• Short stories
• Novels
• Appearances
• A blog since 2001
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Accessibility – and draws you in
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• NG: I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I
started blogging, it was dinosaur blog. It was me and a
handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries
like, 'the tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.'
• These days there are 1.2 million people reading it. It's
very, very weird. We have this enormous readership, as
a result of which now I feel absolutely far too terrified
and guilty to stop. I'd love to stop my blog at this point,
but there's this idea that there will be 1.2 million
people's worth of pissed-off-ness that I hadn't written
anything today. The time mag interview p 5
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Neil Gaiman's Translatlantic comic
horror translation- from H P
Lovecraft to Monty Python, Pete
and Dud .
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‘For the world shall be cleansed with ice and
floods, and I’ll thank you to keep to your own
shelf in the refrigerator’ (Gaiman ,‘Only the
end of the world again’.)
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H P Lovecraft
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://24.media.tumblr.com/bb68e2f6a737607970c77332f5b94c5c/tumblr_mje4vvCcKs1rxpuyto1_1280.jpg&imgrefurl=http://fcky
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Lovecraft – ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and
‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’
• ‘When a traveller in north central Massachusetts
takes he wrong fork in the junction of the
Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s corners he
comes upon a lonely and curious country’
• Locals tell of
• ‘the bygone magic of old Whateley, and how the
hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful
name of Yog- Sothoth in the midst of a circle of
stones with a great book open in his arms before
him.’
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Theakston’s Old Peculiar
Harrogate Theakston’s crime writing weekends and prizes
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Shoggoth’s old Peculiar
‘All British seaside resorts contain a number of
Bed and Breakfast establishments who will be
only too delighted to put you up in the ‘offseason’ was one such piece of advice. Ben had
crossed it out and written ‘All British seaside
resorts contain a number of Bed and Breakfast
establishments, the owners of which take off to
Spain or Provence or somewhere on the last day
of September, locking the doors behind them as
they go.’
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• The gentlemen in grey raincoats, who had
been sitting in the corner, finished their game
of dominoes, picked up their drinks and came
and sat beside Ben. ‘What you drinking?’ one
of them asked curiously’....
• In an effort to appear polite, Ben asked ,in his
turn, ’So, what are you guys drinking?’
• The taller of the two strangers, who had been
looking lugubrious, brightened up. ’Why,
that’s exceedingly kind of you. Pint of
Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar for me, please’.
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• “you know what eldritch means?” Ben shook
his head. He seemed to be discussing
literature with the two strangers in an English
pub while drinking beer. He wandered for a
moment if he had become someone else,
while he wasn’t looking?’
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• ‘In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies
dreaming’ (Lovecraft Cthulhu)
• ‘the acolytin’ is not really what you might call
laborious employment in the middle of its
busy season, that is of course because of his
bein’ asleep’ (Gaiman )
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• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvQq_tqB
0jA
• Pete and Dud in the pub 1969?
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• How do you involve students in working with
literary texts?
• Do you work with the Gothic?
• With the digital?
• How do we engage students so that
• transformational learning takes place?
http://keepmoving.blackberry.com/desktop/en/us/ambassador/neil-gaiman.html?CPID=KNC-cr244154_p8&HBX_PK=rim|0aa9b423-917b5a49-2aea-0000758228d4
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