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PARTISAN REVIEW
immediately it seems to me you're involved in a discussion of moral
issues. That's not the same thing as teaching morality the way a
preacher teaches morality . It seems to me that what has to be
answered, that is if you want to take an absolutely moral view of the
task of teaching, what has to be answered is Denis Donoghue's
challenge that if literature is a form of interrogation of moral issues,
among other themes, how do you teach literature and avoid that fact
of literature? I would like that issue
to
be pursued in discussion.
ROGER SHATTUCK: May I add that at no point did I advocate the
teaching of morality or character. I was quite careful in this to
suggest that this is inevitably the result of the very texts we choose.
We could teach texts, and I 'think that a great deal of modern
criticism tries to homogenize literary works into objects that raise no
moral issues, and I find that a great deal of structuralist criticism
doesn't face these issues. I simply think a teacher, by necessity, faces
both the demands of the students in front of him and the realities of
the texts that they are reading together. And these force him to have
to deal with questions of morality and character.
DONALD MARSHALL: Peter Brooks is saying: we've heard that the
classroom is a battlefield but I'm not sure what kind of battlefield it
is. It is sometimes a battlefield where the values and interests of the
student are opposed to the values and interests of the teacher, but I'm
not always sure it should be.
If
a student makes a demand on you that
a discussion of
The Red and the Black
ought to lead to a considera–
tion of moral and political issues, then in my view he's right. And if
the teacher doesn't want to do that, why? Well, because modernist
literature has taught him literature is not supposed to do that. It's
supposed to be autonomous. I mean, he learned that from a critical
theory. He brought a certain critical theory to bear. And I'm not sure
that I finally believe in that critical theory. I can see it as a battlefield
appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober and saying to the
student, "Yes, you want some discussion of the moral and political
issues involved in
The Red and the Black,
but you want a good
discussion of those, you don't want a simple-minded one, do you?"
And it's hard for me to imagine my students saying to me "Yes! I
want a simple-minded discussion."
So let me say just one more thing and that is that I agree with
Denis Donoghue's remark that in the last hundred years or so
literature has been chiefly a form of interrogation in the society and
has been largely hostile. I just got through reading Roger Shattuck's
book and one can see how interrogative it has been. It was not always
