Robert Scholes: Textual Power

Oh, academia. 

During my years teaching public school in America, I came to the classroom with a very clear set of goals for the students.

1. For them to read, watch, and listen to some interesting things, and have something interesting to say or write about them.
2. For them to walk away with a definition of literature that includes more than just old books.

That was it.  To that end, I filled my students' minds with comic books, telenovelas, advertisements, and yes, Shakespeare, and didn't care for a moment whether their perspective matched mine.  I didn't ask them what the underlying themes in the telenovelas were, I asked them "What makes this a telenovela?"  Their answers to the latter question would serve equally well as answers to the former--revenge, betrayal, power, lust--but the difference was that they were not receiving textuality from the text, they were creating it as part of a community of viewers with an implicit understanding of the medium. 

And so for the first half of this book, I was pumping my fist in the air with Scholes.  "We have an endless web here, of growth, and change, and interaction, learning and forgetting, dialogue and dialectic.  Our task as teachers is to introduce students to this web, to make it real and visible for them, insofar as we can, and to encourage them to cast their own strands of thought and text into this network . . ." he urges (21).  "Right on, brother!" I concurred.  "We move from a submission to textual authority in reading, through a sharing of textual power in interpretation, toward an asssertion of power through opposition in criticism" he advocates (39).  "Preach! Testify!" I responded.  "We neither capture nor create the world with our texts, but interact with it" (112).  "Amen!  Come lord Chaucer!" 

It is unclear at exactly what point he lost me.  His transition from the argument for teaching students of literature to construct a web of understanding and connect it to the existing web where they can, to a specific assault on certain of his contemporaries is so subtle and gradual that I am at a loss to give it a page number.  If this were a thesis and I his advising professor, I would stop him around chapter seven and guide him back in the direction of actual teaching practice.  For lack of such a guiding hand, Scholes tears off in a direction that is guilty of some of the sins against which he rails.  His invective against Stanley Fish is positioned at the apex of the book, in a way that would lead a reader to believe that such an assault was the primary reason for the book's existence.  His takedown is thorough and decisive, and one would have hoped that he returned at the last to the question of what this means for teachers.  He never does.  The result is that he spins a beautiful web of pedagogy, at once subversive and practical, then departs that web for another.  He does this seemingly with the intention of connecting the two into one great tapestry, but gets entangled in academic point-counterpoint, and dies there, covered in sticky, silken arguments.