“Reader” and “theoretician” in DI and SDC

Kudina and Novlianskaia, the creators of the literature curriculum adopted by the DI school, describe the course’s content in terms of the central relationship “author— literary text—reader” and see mastery of this relationship “as the ongoing process of the children’s own practical literary activity, alternating between the position of ‘author’ and the position of ‘reader.’”¹⁵ Furthermore, in order to successfully advance within each of these positions, the schoolchildren must master the position of “critic” (i.e., the ability to critically evaluate a work) and “theoretician” (i.e., “knowledge of the laws governing the literary form as substantial—the literary form often becomes the literary content—the knowledge that will become the tools used by author and reader in their work”).¹⁶
The main virtue of this course is undoubtedly the children’s mastery of the “author” position (i.e., the extensive incorporation of the children’s own creative writing in the course).¹⁷ Here we would like to examine something that raises doubts and objections for us—Kudina and Novlianskaia’s understanding of the positions of “reader” and “theoretician.”
The authors of this DI course define the “reader” position in accordance with ideas developed by Bakhtin about understanding literary works. Bakhtin talked about two tasks of the reader: first, readers have to understand the work as the author understood it, see the picture of the world described in the work “through the eyes of the author”; and second, they have to incorporate the work into their own mental context and see the work’s world through their own eyes, entering into dialogue with the author (their argument or agreement with the author).¹⁸ From this, Kudina and Novlianskaia conclude, the main orientation of the aesthetically developed reader is toward seeking “the viewpoints of the narrator and the characters, the viewpoint of the author, his thoughts, feelings, and assessments, and juxtaposing them with his own.”¹⁹ For the duration of their education, schoolchildren’s main practical task is to search for the author’s viewpoint and express their own.
In order to understand an artwork, Kudina and Novlianskaia write, readers must know “the law of literary form.” Working from the position of “theoretician” provides pupils the opportunity to discover this “law,” to “accumulate the tools needed to practice being a ‘reader-critic’ and ‘author.’”²⁰ As the DI authors explain, this work consists in pupils “discovering” and acquiring a number of the theoretical literary concepts and the corresponding methods for working with texts through the performance of teacher-assigned learning tasks. The introduction of theory, meanwhile, follows a particular DI logic. “We presume that the pathway followed in the introduction of theoretical knowledge must go from the general to the particular,” Kudina and Novlianskaia write, citing V.V. Davydov, the creator of the DI conception. “The central relationship in our course: that of ‘author—literary text—reader,’ orients our pupils toward the recreation of the author’s viewpoint in the process of reading and toward expressing their own viewpoints while writing. From these positions, the concept of ‘viewpoint’ is ‘the general’ that reveals the path to attain the author.”²¹
According to Kudina and Novlianskaia’s design, this concept of “viewpoint” becomes the main concept introduced in first grade. In second and third grades the “law of literary form” is introduced via the concept of “genre” and “type of literature” (children “discover” the task and structure of various genres and the features of literary types). The primary school curriculum incorporates texts best suited to the introduction of these concepts. Kudina and Novlianskaia emphasize that the position of “theoretician” is the pivot on which the entire course turns. “Preventing the course from ‘breaking into pieces,’ and giving inner impetus, the theory of literature on the outside serves the children as an ‘ancillary tool’ that is essential to the successful practice of acting as an author and a reader.”²²
Work from the positions of “author,” “reader,” “critic,” and “theoretician” begins in first grade and continues throughout the school years. The objective in primary school, according to Kudina and Novlianskaia, is to “place the pupils in the positions indicated above, help them consolidate these positions, and equip the pupils with tools and means to work from each position.”²³ The objective in middle school and high school is “the formation of a long-term orientation toward the action of the eternal law of literary form in a specific cultural-historical guise that changes over time.”
²⁴ To this end, the authors of this concept introduce a far-reaching course in world literature that continues from the fifth through the tenth grades [i.e., to the final grade of Russian school]. In middle school and high school, according to the authors’ design, the pupils should develop and concretize knowledge acquired in primary school by applying it to understand new works. “Pupils’ progress along the theoretical line of learning continues, first, as practice applying knowledge of the law of literary form in mastering new literary texts. . . . Second, as the process of discovering new literary forms.”²⁵
The fifth grade DI curriculum, the start of the transition to the study of world literature, includes literary works from the Ancient world: ancient Egyptian ritual poetry, Babylonian and ancient Greek epics (short fragments), ancient Greek poetry, the tragedy of Aeschylus and comedy of Aristophanes. And here we find an intriguing detail. In the fifth grade, Kudina and Novlianskaia write, as pupils are introduced to the works of the ancient world, “the emphasis in learning initially placed not on the literary qualities of these texts or on their place within literature and, but on the worldview foundation, the features of the mythological perception of the world that were reflected in ancient works of art. Without knowledge, however limited, of the mythology reflected in a particular work, this work remains absolutely inaccessible and alien to children, and with such alienation, any conversation about literary qualities or the form of ‘ideational-emotional nucleus’ is impossible. Therefore, a sort of propaedeutics is necessary—a stage of preliminary familiarization with what is hidden behind the text of the work, with ideas that are distant from contemporary ones about how the [ancient, mythological] world is put together and what man is in this world. And only then is it possible to examine the same work as a work of art.”²⁶
So, according to Kudina and Novlianskaia’s views on pedagogy, children learn the ideas of Aeschylus or the unknown author of the Epic of Gilgamesh about how the world is put together and what man is in that world not from their works, but from the teacher’s introductory talk about it. But then what does the child conduct dialogue about with the authors of these works? We think that the particular difficulty in understanding works of the ancient world by the DI schoolchildren described by Kudina and Novlianskaia is not associated with how poorly informed the children are. It is related to the fact that the theoretical concepts and those ways of studying work introduced by the authors of the DI approach in primary school cease to work (or prove insufficient) as soon as the DI pupils encounter works of other historical cultures.²⁷ We will venture to suggest that in this particular instance an overall deficiency in the logical foundation of the DI course is manifesting itself.
Kudina and Novlianskaia’s course is constructed in accordance with the ideas about theory, theoretical thinking, and learning that have been adopted by the DI school. According to Kudina and Novlianskaia, there is a modern theory of literature, in which some kind of “eternal law of the literary form” has been discovered and described. The task of school is to help children master this theory and acquire the modern theoretical concepts so that the students will be able to apply them to understanding any literary works.
Contemporary theoretical thinking, according to Davydov, is structured as an ascent of the abstract to the concrete and the general to the particular. Learning should be structured in the same way. First, through the substantial generalization, the “underlying relationship” defining the curricular subject is identified. Then the “general concept,” retaining this relationship, is formed. And finally, in each individual case this “general concept” becomes loaded with concrete content.
²⁸ Thus, in the DI course, the “general concept” turns out to be the concept of “viewpoint,” which allows the author’s attitude to the events and phenomena described in the work to be established. The belief is that this concept underlies any work and is the most important instrument for understanding it.
But what does this concept contribute to understanding, for example, twentiethcentury surrealist poetry or medieval troubadours? Neither surrealists—striving to free their consciousness from the dictates of judgmental reason and let out the true “I” that was exiled to the underground of subconscious and manifests itself in dreams and hallucinations—nor troubadours—virtuosos of poetic form, striving to say something about the familiar in a way that nobody has ever done before—were attempting to express their own authorial viewpoint. In our view, these examples demonstrate not only that it is impossible to reduce understanding any work to a search for the “author’s position,” but also the misguidedness of seeking some sort of magical “general” concept that would open up the “path to the ascent” of understanding of all literary works.
The desire to go from the general to the particular constantly leads Kudina and Novlianskaia astray.
Orientation toward the generic features of a work is an essential attitude for understanding an author’s position. If readers undertake a work of lyric poetry, they must concentrate on reading out the emotional experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the particular lyrical hero and tracing the development and changes of the hero’s emotional state. If they are reading an epic text, readers must follow the plot—the development of the acts and deeds of the protagonists, how the narrator evaluates everything he or she is narrating: the characters, thoughts, feelings, and deeds of the protagonists, and so on.²⁹
The courses’ authors believe that knowledge of the general (i.e., the genetically initial features) helps readers understand exactly what they “need to focus on” to understand the particular (a specific work of this literary genre).
Their Methodological Handbook for fifth grade contains a suggested set of lesson plans on the subject of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Kudina and Novlianskaia propose the beginning work on the tragedy with the following [imaginary] dialogue between teacher and children:
Teacher: To what genre of literature does this work belong? Why?
Children: This is a drama, because it was written for the theater, to be performed on the stage: it lists the characters and their lines, there’s no narrator.
Teacher: And what is the task of a dramatic work?
Children: To show the characters of the protagonists in the judgment of the author.³⁰
From this, Kudina and Novlianskaia assume, the conclusion can be drawn that understanding Prometheus Bound means “understanding how Aeschylus sees Prometheus, what character traits he emphasizes in this protagonist, and how he feels about them.”³¹
But ancient thought did not know the concept of authorship (in the contemporary sense of the word), and in his Poetics, Aristotle, in analyzing the tragedy by no means analyzes it as its author’s utterance. The definition of the task of a dramatic work that Kudina and Novlianskaia propose is absolutely inapplicable to Greek tragedy.
The goal of tragedy, as Aristotle so famously defined it, is to arouse “pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions” [Poetics 1449b21, trans. I. Bywater]. It would appear that as a result of the work proposed by Kudina and Novlianskaia, tragedy (whether imitation of myth leading to catharsis, as Aristotle would have it, or a collision between two equally justified truths, as Hegel saw it) disappears, with nothing ancient or tragic remaining.
In the SDC, we also believe in the importance of children’s acquisition of knowledge of literary theory, but we have a different idea of just what knowledge that is and how it is best acquired. There are different theories of literature. None of them provide the tools for an exhaustive understanding of any single work. Sooner or later, every theory reveals its limitations and turns out to be insufficient for “capturing” a meaningful aspect of text. To achieve a deep understanding of works, different theories that look at works from different angles and help to discover something else in the text must be integrated.
This is particularly true in cases where our goal is to understand not our contemporary literature, but works of other historical cultures. Different historical cultures have given rise to different ideas about the essence of literary creation and, accordingly, different ideas about what it means to understand a work and how it is possible to do so. In order to “understand a work as it was understood by the author himself” (Bakhtin), the reader has to master the logic for understanding literature that was peculiar to the culture giving rise to the work. At the same time, the strategies that arose during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can help to discover new “meanings” in a book.
It is impossible to understand Aeschylus’s tragedies or surrealist poetry based on abstract general ideas about the objectives of drama or lyric poetry. We feel that a truly deep understanding of ancient tragedy can be achieved only by integrating Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and the ideas about the tragic that have been conceived by scholars in the New Time. A profound understanding of modernist poetry requires the integration of theoretical views of ideologues of respective movements and, for example, the theories of the Russian formalist school. It should be emphasized that we are referring not to using them mechanically side by side, but conjugating them—using fundamentally different theories to complement one another. In other words, theoretical understanding of Aeschylus’s tragedies can be achieved through a dialogue between Aristotle, and, for example, Hegel, within the reader’s thinking. Correspondingly, schoolchildren’s mastery of literary theory must take the form of mastery of the principles of different theories—always those that are most relevant to understanding works of the historical culture in question—and by reproducing dialogue between proponents of these theories, allowing them to argue with one another.
Kudina and Novlianskaia demand that theoretical knowledge always be introduced using a particular method: “theoretical knowledge is not communicated to the child ‘readymade,’ but ‘discovered by the children themselves in their reading and writing practice,’” while solving learning problems assigned by the teacher.³² Bibler and his followers have repeatedly pointed to the limitations of the DI view of the theoretical concept [developed by Davydov]. Within the logic of the DI school, the concept is thought of as the result of the “ascension” of human thought [cf. the philosophies by Hegel and Marx]. Every concept was proposed by a scholar at some point, but now that fact is only of historical interest. Such a concept has become an anonymous part of a culture, an instrument of theory (e.g., literary theory) “in general.” Furthermore, according to Kudina and Novlianskaia, it exists “objectively” and can be “rediscovered” by children. America is an objective fact. If it had not been discovered by Columbus, America would have been discovered by someone else. It is as if every voyager crossing the Atlantic Ocean discovers America anew [cf. the notion of constructivism in Western pedagogy].
However, we daresay that without Aristotle, such important terms of literary theory as “catharsis” and “peripetia” might never have existed. Theoretical concepts are always shaped by the author’s personhood, and it is impossible to separate the author from the theories to which he gave life. To understand the meaning of “peripetia” it is necessary to read the Poetics and understand this theoretician’s [i.e., Aristotle’s] train and manner of reasoning and the foundations and ideas about literature informing him. In other words, as we see it, it is more logical and productive to familiarize schoolchildren, where possible, with works of literary theory and original artworks, rather than suggesting that children “discover” theoretical concepts by themselves.
At the same time, an understanding that comes out of a preset theoretical orientation is always doomed to one-sidedness. As we see it, it is possible to identify two fundamentally different types of understandings that correspond to two positions, which we will provisionally call the positions of “the reader” and “the theoretician.”
For “the reader,” each work is unique and unrepeatable. It does not fit any preset scheme (in terms of genre, category, or epoch). “Readers” perceive a text specifically as an artwork, as a speech directed to them personally, and they try to understand and interpret this speech.
They are exceptionally attentive to the text, they “imbibe harmony” and pick up on semantic collisions, but at the same time they take the book’s imagination a step further; they co-create it. “The reader” (and not “the theoretician”) is capable of being “moved to tears by fiction,” of experiencing “pity and fear,” who is capable of an conscious awareness and reexperiencing of the world created by the writer’s imagination as something real, and of perceiving the protagonist conceived by the writer as a living person. Perhaps the most important quality of a good “reader” is a well-developed imagination and the ability to feel empathy. A good “reader” is capable of seeing the grapes that “live like an ancient battle,”³³ or the predawn road along which Charles Bovary traveled before his first encounter with Emma, and is capable, in the extreme, of feeling the taste of arsenic when reading the description of Emma Bovary’s suicide (as Flaubert himself did when writing this description).³⁴
“Theoreticians” are primarily interested in the general laws of poetics of a particular author, genre, historical epoch, or literature as a whole. The particular is of interest to them as a variation of the general. For “theoreticians,” understanding a book means uncovering how rules of textual organization, the mechanisms by which meaning is generated, world view motifs, and so on, which characterize a particular author, genre, or epoch, are manifested in this particular text. They approach the analysis of a text with their own conceptual tools, applying particular comprehension schemes. “Theoreticians” are capable of detaching themselves from their own “reader” emotions—these emotions only interfere with study of the text. “Theoreticians” take pleasure in their cognition.
According to Kudina and Novlianskaia, “in the work of the advanced reader, the positions of ‘author,’ ‘critic,’ and ‘theoretician’ are merged.”³⁵ We see the work of understanding differently. Children understand a particular fairy tale, managing just fine without Vladimir Propp’s theory about how fairy tales are constructed. Coming at it from another angle, it is possible to understand Propp’s theory without having had the experience of being gripped by fairy tales as a child. In essence, at their logical extremes, the positions of “the reader” and “the theoretician” negate one another. I see a novel either as a unique story or as the interlacing of wellknown literary motifs. A book is either a subject of understanding or an object of study. I am either consciously subjective or I make a principled effort to achieve objective knowledge. And at the same time, these positions intrinsically require one another.
Reader subjectivity is realized through the subjective interpretation of metaphor, motifs, plot conflict, and other textual elements, but to be aware of these elements, to identify them, readers must have a mastery of theoretical concepts. To understand a book as the author’s utterance addressed personally to the reader, readers must study the language of the work and occupy the position of “theoretician.” On the contrary, anyone who attempts to make theoretical sense of their own reader’s intuition becomes a “theoretician.” “The reader” and “the theoretician” argue with and need one another. As we see it, it would be better to talk not of “merging,” but of these positions complementing one another in the advanced reader’s consciousness.
Another point concerns the rationale for introducing theory into our SDC literature course. “Theoretical knowledge is an essential precondition for developing the practice of different types of literary activity, which it is impossible to master without a certain minimal knowledge of literary criticism,” Kudina and Novlianskaia presume.³⁶ In other words, the authors of the concept adopted by the DI school believe that knowledge “of theory” is necessary only to enable the writing of one’s own texts and the interpretation and evaluation of others’.
However, the task of literary theory cannot be reduced to the service of “practice.” The theory of literature arises first and foremost as the search for an answer to the question, what is literature and how is it possible? (This is the question Aristotle ponders at the beginning of his Poetics, the starting point of Western literary theory.) The task of physicists and the academic subject of physics, in our view, is not just to teach how to create instruments and use them, but to understand the physical picture of the world, to understand how the world is possible as a physical world. In the same way, the task of the academic subject of literature is not just to teach children to read books, but to stimulate schoolchildren to think about the foundations and nature of verbal art.
In the model of SDC humanities education adopted in Kharkov, elementary school takes the shape of a school of dialogic learning. In reading class, children acquire a method for understanding books that we consider to be the most organic for young school-age children—“reading supported by literary studies,” as Sergey Kurganov put it. In primary school, children learn to be “readers”: they discuss books with one another, present their interpretations, and write compositions in response to what has been read (more about this in the following section).
Middle school and high school are structured as a school of dialogue among historical cultures. From sixth to eleventh grades, the subject of all lessons of the unified humanities course (which includes history, history of world cultures, world literature, art history, and Russian literature, which is closely tied to the course) is the study of specific cultures of world history (primordial culture and the culture of the Ancient East in sixth grade; Classical Antiquity in the seventh; the Middle Ages in the eighth; Renaissance culture in the ninth; the New Time in the tenth, and the twentieth century in the eleventh).³⁷ To quote Vladimir Bibler, “Culture lives in its works.” Studying an integrated course of historical, philosophical, literary, artistic, and other works of a particular historical culture in different classes, the schoolchildren become engaged in a “dialogue of understanding” with this culture, in comprehending its meanings (its ideas about the world, how it formulates the “ultimate questions” of cosmic and human existence, and the logic underlying its answers to these questions).
Every historical culture, it bears repeating, generated its own aesthetic and ideas about the nature and goals of literature, and without knowledge of these things it is impossible to truly understand works from this culture. It becomes necessary to devise new strategies for reading, and the teacher introduces new interlocutors into the conversation with the schoolchildren—“theoreticians.” These are important thinkers of historical cultures offering their views of literature, and twentieth-century scholars investigating the texts with which the children are working. The world literature curriculum includes not just literary works, but works of literary theory from different cultures: lengthy fragments from Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, a number of Plato’s dialogues, Horace’s Ars Poetica, fragments from Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, and Boileau’s L’Art poetique, Novalis’s “fragments,” excerpts of works by Flaubert, articles by Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Gasparov, fragments from the books of Mikhail Bakhtin, and so on. In lessons on Russian literature (a course developed by E.G. Donskaia), pupils encounter works by Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Lev Vygotsky, Lydia Ginzburg, Yuri Lotman, and Konstantin Taranovsky, among others.
As they become familiar with works by these theoreticians, the children engage their authors in dialogue about the foundations of literature and at the same time assimilate the theoretical concepts and specific ways of understanding works they propose. The children acquire the theoretician’s method, and they are able to apply it to understanding phenomena that were beyond the view of the scholars’ themselves. Each new theory is perceived as supplementing its predecessors, engaging in argument with them (since it is constructed on fundamentally different foundations), and while it does not negate its predecessors, it permits the discovery of something else in the text.
As they progress through middle school and high school, it is fundamentally important that children retain and develop the “reader” attitude that they learned in primary school. Understanding as a “theorist” does not supplant understanding as a “reader,” but becomes integrated with it based on principles of mutual complementariness. This is how DCS pupils assimilate the positions of “reader” and “theoretician.” We think that schoolchildren can become readers only in dialogue with other readers: their peers and adults. And they become theoreticians only in dialogue with other theoreticians: pondering works of literary theory, the questions they contain, and the means of understanding books that they describe.³⁸
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¹⁵ Kudina and Novlianskaia, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskie razrabotki: 1 klass, p. 3.
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ On children’s work as “authors” in SDC literature education, see V. Osetinskii [Osetinsky] and S. Kurganov, “Podrostki i ‘Iliada,’” Shkol’ nye tekhnologii, 2001, nos. 4–6.
¹⁸ Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva.
¹⁹ Z.N. Novlianskaia and G.N. Kudina, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskoe posobie: V klass. Chast’ 1. Praktika chitatel’ skoi raboty i detskoe tvorchestvo (Moscow: INTOR, 1995), p. 7.
²⁰ Ibid., p. 5.
²¹ Kudina and Novlianskaia, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskie razrabotki: 1 klass, pp. 24–25
²² Novlianskaia and Kudina, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskoe posobie: V klass. Chast’ 1, p. 5.
²³ Ibid., p. 6.
²⁴ Ibid., p. 10.
²⁵ Ibid.
²⁶ Ibid., p. 11.
²⁷ On how children encounter works of the Ancient East and classical antiquity in literature class in the Kharkov version of SDC, see Osetinsky and Kurganov, “Podrostki i ‘Iliada.’”
²⁸ V.V. Davydov, Problemy razvivaiushchego obucheniia (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1986): idem, Developmental Instruction: A Theoretical and Experimental Psychological Study (Happauge, NY: Nova Science, 2008)
²⁹ Novlianskaia and Kudina, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskoe posobie: V klass. Chast’ 1, p. 9.
³⁰ Z.N. Novlianskaia and G.N. Kudina, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskoe posobie: V klass. Chast’ 2. Istoriia mirovoi literatury (Moscow: INTOR, 1995), p. 78.
³¹ Ibid., p. 79.
³² Kudina and Novlianskaia, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskie razrabotki: 1 klass, p. 25.
³³ A line from a poem by Osip Mandelstam titled “The stream of golden honey that flowed from the bottle,” Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. David McDuff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), pp. 50–51.
³⁴ B.G. Reizov, Tvorchestvo Flobera (Moscow, 1955), p. 159.
³⁵ Kudina and Novlianskaia, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskie razrabotki: 1 klass, p. 4.
³⁶ Ibid., p. 23.
³⁷ For a more detailed description of the concept behind humanities education in the Ochag Gymnasium, see the essay by Osetinsky and Kurganov, “Podrostki i ‘Iliada.’”
³⁸ We are aware that to have true dialogue in the sense Bibler intended, it is not enough to simply be aware of different theories as nonsublated by one another, mutually complementary, and arguing with one another. It is essential to uncover the inner argument of each conception, where the arguments in contention are manifested not from without, but from within. Then other conceptions will appear not simply as outward opponents or competitors, but as intrinsically essential interlocutors. For now, however, this is a “horizon,” an objective for subsequent work. It is the same for the integration of the positions of reader and theoretician in the consciousness and thinking of pupils (see below) — we view our work as an essential first step in this direction.