Reading and Teaching Literature as Writing

Abstract

Christer Ekholm's point of departure in this article is Gert J. J. Biesta's call for a new pedagogical attitude that takes a stand against the current trend in education. At present, the dominant approach is to make what we do in school into something wholly predictable, measurable, and assessable, which (as Biesta argues) misses important aspects of what education actually is or should be. One such aspect has to do with “subjectification,” that is, events where someone makes an appeal to me, singles me out in my uniqueness, and makes me ethically responsible to the other one before me. What role can literary education play in facilitating such events? What kind of reading strategies should be promoted with the aim of such an ambition? On the basis of a critical analysis of the discursive construction of an opposition between reading as engagement and reading as distance, Ekholm argues that the answer to these questions is to be found in an alternative literature didactics, where the work of fiction is understood not as text, but as utterance; not as something written, but as writing; perhaps even, not in terms of object(ification), but of subject(ification)?.