Page 17 - Getting of the fence

language teaching became more and more utilitarian, aiming at being able to 1 properly function in society (Kwakernaak, 2012). The 19th century academic
views that literature education served a higher moral purpose was regarded more
and more as elitist. This change in views could have been inspired by a number
of radical changes in literary theory. Before the 1960s, the historical approach to literature, where literary works are studied in the light of the context in which the work was written, was dominant (Kwakernaak, 1997a). This means that facts about the author’s life as well as historical, social, and cultural circumstances were considered important in interpreting a literary text. In the 1960s, foreign language literature teaching in the Netherlands saw the rise of the text-immanent approach which had its roots in, for example, New Criticism, Formalism, and Structuralism (Kwakernaak, 1997a). All of these approaches to literary criticism share the notion that a literary text is an independent entity and insist on the intrinsic value of a text. In other words, the method of close reading is embraced and ‘external’ aspects such as the life of the author or contextual information is considered a distraction. The 1970s focused on socio-economic approaches, also called sociological criticism (Kwakernaak, 1997a). This type of literary criticism focuses on the relationship between the author and their society, thereby emphasising societal elements within the literary text as well as within the life of the author. The most common form of this approach is Marxist criticism which approaches the literary text itself as a social institution with a specific idealogical function. Studying a literary text through this approach means that especially the political and economic aspects will be highlighted. And finally, from the 1980s, the reader became the centre of attention in foreign language literature teaching in Dutch secondary education (Kwakernaak, 1997a). This approach was based on the ideas of Reader-Response critics such as Rosenblatt (1969) and Iser (1978) who believed that the literary text is not an independent artefact but creates meaning only when it is read and interpreted. According to this approach, our interpretation of a literary text is affected by our personal cultural, social, and religious values and therefore, different interpretations of a literary work are possible. “Literature education had to promote reading pleasure, and the student had to become a competent literature consumer” (Kwakernaak 1997a, p. 112). Because the different approaches were all valuable contributions to literature teaching, all of them were adopted and translated in the following four perspectives: the ‘literary-historical perspective, the literary- theoretical perspective, the person-oriented perspective, and the perspective aimed at developing a personal reading taste” (Kwakernaak, 1997c).
General introduction
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