Transactive Teaching: Cordelia's Death

Norman N. Holland

doi:10.2307/375673

College English Nov 1977

Transactive Teaching: Cordelia's Death

Norman N. Holland

Abstract

BY TRANSACTIVE I MEAN explicitly basing our teaching of literature on our transaction of the text. Now it might seem that many English teachers have been doing just that for a number of years-ever since we began to emphasize texts in our teaching at the expense of value judgments, biographical information, cultural surround, and all materials from either reader or background extrinsic to the text. Ever since we adopted the once-New Critical program we have been claiming that we are teaching texts. In fact, however, we can never teach texts apart from our own and our students' relation to them. We cannot even talk or think about a text without establishing a relation to it. Hence, teaching is always de facto transactive, whatever else anyone might claim. Then, by being explicitly, de jure transactive, we can make clear what the conventions of the critical profession often obscure. The old game of formalism evaded the human by concentrating exclusively on text. The new games of structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, or deconstructivism all, by claiming a transpersonal validity for some set of rules, seek the same dehumanization (and therefore de-politicization) of literature. The thing I like best in Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics is the Tel Quel critic he invents as adversary:

Journal: College English
Published: 1977-11-01
DOI: 10.2307/375673
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Topics: teacher development
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Transactive Teaching: Cordelia's Death

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