A potted guide

Whatever we think of it, the fragmented, fractured world of postmodernism with its post-colonialism and poststructuralism, the polyphony of its voices, is the one in which we live.

What lessons can we take from this for English literature teaching in Australian high schools?

During the recent debates, a letter written by a high school English teacher and published in one of the daily newspapers, shed illuminating light on the rationale for the so-called “postmodern” syllabus. She made the point that the English syllabus is now a much more complex beast than it had been a generation ago, and this complexity comes from the attempt to come to grips with the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the modern world. Where once Shakespeare was taught as a written text only, she said, now students learn to analyse the different stagings of the play. Each production is an interpretation, be it a feminist, post-colonialist, or simply “traditional” one, and unpicking the relationship between these and their relevance to the text needs expert guidance and the honing of students’ analytical skills. It teaches them to understand and evaluate critically the relevance of culture to the world in which they live.

And should we teach students to analyse pop as well as high culture? Of course - in the postmodern world there is no place for right choices of texts, nor for authoritative and authoritarian “right” readings.

This is not, of course, to say that anything goes: that some readings are not more correct and coherent than others in relation to the content of the text being analysed; that some texts are not more rich in meaning than others; that the choice of text in a syllabus should be chosen because it belongs to the traditional canon rather than because it relates to the world of the young reader. It simply means that texts invite a plurality of readings and approaches, and that texts should be chosen for their appropriateness to the student, linking the world he or she knows to the discovery other worlds.

Interpretation is always ideological. To insist on the exclusive teaching of the “canon”, or on one interpretation of a text over the many possible others, is to champion a dogmatic approach that refuses to address our present and harks back to an authoritarian and oppressive past.

It is more constructive then, especially in a debate on education, not to use “postmodern” as a term of abuse, nor as a synonym for incoherency. Whether he likes it or not, Howard is living in the postmodern world, with its uncomfortable lack of certainties. The way forward, both in education and politics, would be to confront our complex world courageously rather than to attempt to return to the reductionist, modernist dichotomies of the 1950s.