A case for popular fiction within a school or university literature curriculum.

Of making many books there is no end........
-Ecclesiastes 12:12

Suppose you are reading Eliot's The Waste Land, Shakespeare's King Lear, Joyce's Ulysses, Chekhov's Ward Number Six, Demosthenes's Philippics, Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial or the sermon on the mount from the New Testament, then you are categorically reading a poem, a play, a novel, a short story, a work of oratory, a scripture and - a work of literature.(New, 1999:1) Suppose finally you are reading Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal or Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid - "we might also say that you are reading literature, but we would scarcely say it was serious literature - it is 'popular' or light literature. Or some might say it was not literature at all." (New, 1999:1) Popular fiction as it is, is an interesting phenomenon. It includes a wide array of artistic products spanning the conundrum of prose, poetry, drama and theatre made available to the reader through various media; print, television, cinema, theater, and the Internet. A narrower definition would be aligned along the lines of print alone, dealing with writings that interest the general populace. The range of interest includes fictions dealing with adventure, war, space exploration, crime busting detectives and high tech sci-fi series and the effervescent romance novels. One rather trite criticism against popular fiction is that it is almost always tied down to the economics of writing and publishing. Writers of the canononical text on the other hand are associated with nobleness as they were wont to have written solely for the pleasure of writing as they say and hence on the most part, some of them lived a pauper's life. There was then the notion of "art for arts sake." Or it could simply be that some of these works were a failure in their own time due to the challenge from predecessors of an earlier canon, rendering the works economically unviable and leaving the authors in a state of economic flux. However writers of popular fiction are more down to earth in producing what sells. The readers get what they want and the writer makes a living and sometimes even a fortune; a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship.
Coleridge in his "Biographia Literaria" differentiates between Imagination and Fancy. Serious writing is the product of the imagination while the lesser creative talent produces a fancy. 'Fancy' according to Coleridge is the product of the lesser creative faculty, the recycling of old ideas, or the ready made creativity, the creation of something out of something else.
One can always sense, firstly the difference between serious works and popular fiction. Serious fiction is fresh and original. As a work of the imagination it stands out among the trash. Popular fiction following as it does a form or convention, can only be termed fanciful. Proponents of the canononical text argue that for the most part, even if a work of popular fiction does something unexpected or unique, the uniqueness is still merely a re-shaping of what has gone before. It is the works of serious literature which draw us back over and over again, because they posses a timeless quality not found in the popular varieties. It is undeniable that when we read stories like Earnest Hemingway's Hills like White Elephants, or Steven Crane's The Opera Boat or Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, we know instinctively that we are reading something which is fresh and new as when the authors first completed those works. These arguments may hold true in a comparative study of popular fiction and the canon. However the inclusion of popular fiction in university and school curriculum is inevitable considering that:
"Our task as English teachers is ..... not to hand over predigested meanings, but to teach our students to read and interpret for themselves .... to be reasonably skilled and sensitive readers, able to feel and judge for themselves, with fidelity to the textual facts, in response to any work of literature they may choose to read....."
(Rodger, 1969:89)
It is not the role of the teacher to make value judgements on behalf of the students. More often than not literature classes become boring, formulaic lessons when the teacher does the thinking for the students and hands over as Rodger says "predigested meanings." In relation to this Hyland says:
For most students coming new to literature, value judgements have already been made. The very fact that a book has been enshrined in the university course guarantees its literary value whether or not the student can see this value for himself.
(Hyland, 1986:3)
It leaves little room for interpretation and exploitation by the students themselves. Such a situation can prevail in a classroom that adheres closely to the works of canonical text. Text which have been read time and again and "digested" in every possible way and regurgitated through the medium of the teacher to the students. For example, Shakespeare's plays have been read and discussed for several centuries. Hamlet and King Lear have been read and thought about and recorded in a hundred possible ways. There are almost no avenue left for any new interpretation in an academic sense. Popular fiction on the other hand is something fresh and new and in no short supply. It gives a chance for the student and teacher to explore new ideas, styles, meanings and definitions and most importantly of all in the context of a world that is more relevant to the student. It is in light of these that Bloom(1993:9) states that "Fresh metaphor, or inventive troping, always involves a departure from previous metaphor, and that departure depends upon at least partial turning away from or rejection of prior figuration." There is a need for the academia to "open it up (the curriculum)to the subordinated, ignored or silenced forms of popular literature, historical documents, autobiography, women's writing, black literature, song, TV and film."(Hyland, 1986) To this I would definitely add the products of the post colonial New English literatures.
The emergence of English as a world language has resulted in an abundance of many new varieties of the English language, for example Malaysian English, Singaporean English, Indian English, and Nigerian English.(Kachru 1986:127). Subsequently the richness and functionality of these varieties have produced a large corpus of new writings. However a number of unsatisfactory and prejudiced labels have been tagged to these new literatures in English. They have been variouly called Commonwealth Literature, Post Colonial Literature and Third World Literature, effectively projecting an image of poor writing as compared to the literary canon. As teaching resource they provide a new avenue for the English language teacher especially in the context where they were produced. Edwin(1994) makes a well argued statement when he says that "literary text from these new sources should be exploited to enrich the language learning experience of both first and second language learners."
It is also imperative that teachers understand the full import of inadvertently introducing the cultural hegemonies lying implicitly within the products of the western canon. As it were text of the canon were the products of a predominantly white, male Caucasian, middle-class, liberal, individualist authorship. Their writings reflect the concerns of the establishments that they belonged to and cannot avoid the underpinnings of ideological implications evident within the text. Post colonial readings of text such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe have revealed instances of racism, white supremacy and subjugation of the natives. A recurrent theme not only in these novels but many others including the canonical Huckleberry Finn of North America. As Tan says in his newspaper column on literature, there is a "lie behind the seemingly innocent, romanticised character of Robinson Crusoe."(N.S.T, 30.1.01) Based on such findings the moralistic virtue that uphelds the inclusion of canonical text in university and school curriculums have been questioned. Bloom(1993) surmises that "If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation." He further states that to "read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgement to read at all." In a way it justifies than to reduce the role of canonical text and increase the content of popular fiction in school and university curriculums.
Popular fiction is contemporary fiction. It is usually devoid of the cut and dried patronising, moralistic and ideological formulas. The writers are of both sexes and hail from all walks of life. Furthermore in a borderless world there is no place for cultural, political, racial and religious hegemonies. Society, thanks to the years of exposure to the canon is now more aware of such prejudices in literary works. Writers of popular fiction are well aware that text which promote cultural biases do not go down well with readers. In third world countries where censorship is strict, governments are quick to ban any book that would create social chaos. Hence popular fiction is better suited to be studied for its literary qualities as well as for the purpose of language development in a benign school environment. The teacher and curriculum developers have less to worry about the poisoning of young minds with the subtle nuances of an imperial or dogmatic agenda.
It is not the intention of this essay to promote popular fiction as the panacea of the collective ills that constitutes the canon. Popular fiction due to its very nature of being widespread is subject to various deformities in a literary sense. The progeny of popular fiction could be viewed back to an economical cause on the part of the writer. Hence it may be coloured with phonological, syntactic and semantic variations which deviate from an acceptable norm of the English language, so much so that it discharges itself from being of any qualitative use in a Language Model(Carter & Long, 1991:2) of the literature classroom. Proponents of the canon, "the school of resentment" as Harold Bloom calls them argue that the language of popular fiction does not have the marked quality of literariness. Carter and Nash(1990:34) state that "the notion of literary language as a yes/no category should be replaced by one which sees literary language as a continuum, a cline of literariness in language use with some uses of language being marked as more literary than others." The cline proposed by Carter and Nash outlines a set of criteria that is instrumental in the selection of popular fiction for the use in a school or university curriculum:
A) Medium Dependence - The notion of medium dependence means that the more literary a text the less it will be dependent for its reading on another medium or media.
B) Re-registration - The notion of re-registration means that no single word or stylistic feature or register will be barred from admission to the literary context.
C) Interaction of levels - Text that is perceived as resulting from the additive interaction of several superimposed codes and levels is recognized as more literary.
D) Polysemy - Its lexical items do not stop automatically at their first interpretation. (possibility of text being decoded at several levels of interpretation)
E) Displaced interaction - The context bound interaction between author and reader is more deeply embedded or displaced.
F) Discourse Patterning - At the suprasentential level discourse effects can be located which help further differentiate degrees of literariness.
(Carter and Nash, 1990:38-42)
The cline can be employed to evaluate and justify the literary value of popular fiction. A value that has been reserved without question for text of the canon. Based on the cline it is justified than to include any text of popular fiction which passes the acid test of literariness within the literature curriculum.
Whether in a third world country or in the developed nation it is undeniable that students at school or university level today face a multitude of options and choices in their everyday affairs ranging from social to the academic slices of their lives. The developments in Information Communication Technologies has opened up barriers erected by political, racial and religious divisions across worlds. A students "lifeworld" today is much different from the days of the canon and the English grammar school. Education is a lifelong wholistic affair and such teachers be it in a literature class or a science class have to make amendments and preparations for teaching and equipping students with the critical, creative and analytical skills that they would require to lead a meaningful life in a world where borders are fast diminishing. According to Kalantz and Cope(1999:5):
Language, discourse and register differences are markers of "lifeworld" differences. As lifeworlds become more divergent and their boundaries become more blurred, the central fact of language becomes the multiplicity of meanings and their continual intersection. Just as there are multiple layers to everyone's identity, there are multiple discourses of identity and multiple discourses of recognition to be negotiated.
Popular fiction is a fact of life in the here and now. It constitutes the very element that builds the backbone of today's information and entertainment hungry populace of the world. Popular fiction is a reflection of the multiplicity of identity and lifeworlds. It may be removed from the pedestal of the canonical text but it far more relevant to the student especially one that is grappling with the essence of mastering the English language in a third world country such as Malaysia. The American scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson was quoted as saying that "Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit."
Material selection and material adaptation are two major factors that need to be considered when choosing text for a literature curriculum. In selecting materials teachers need to consider factors such as students interest, difficulty level of the text and accessibility. Edwin(Star, 8.3.92) feels that "a text could be of interest to students in terms of the relevance of the theme to their experience." He further states that an interesting text is one that presents an issue in a fresh or different point of view. This is especially useful to utilize in a literature class as it allows students to see the various perspectives of a certain theme. In light of these statements consider that a Malaysian student would find the themes in popular fictions such as K.S.Maniam's The Return, Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid and Gopal Bharatam's Only People Make You Cry to be more relevant to their own experiences. These texts are also easily accessible to the students. The semantic and cultural meanings in the texts could be accessed effortlessly as they already posses the relevant background knowledge needed in decoding the cultural and historical metaphors. Kachru(1980) makes an appropriate observation, "In using such texts then, both teachers and learners see English as part of their culture, and their day to day communication modified and nativized by the neighbour, the farmer, the money lender, the coolie and the politician." Such cultural experiences are not necessarily available when one teaches the canonical works of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens in rural Malaysia, India or Nigeria.
In conclusion teachers should not deprive students of the rich literary resources available within the pantheon of popular fiction by any unfounded allegiance to canonical text. The inclusion of popular fiction in school and university curriculums are well justified in the sense that it has the literary potential to provide a fresh and new outlook in the teaching and learning of literature.

References

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Edwin, Malachi. Adapting Text For Literature Class. The Sunday Star. 8.3.1992

Edwin, Malachi. English Across Cultures, Cultures Across English. Greta(Granada) Vol. 2. No.2. 1994.

Hubbell, Jay. B. 1972. Who are the Major American Writers. North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Hyland, Peter. 1986. Discharging The Canon. Singapore: Singapore University Press.

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Kachru, Braj. B. 1986. The Alchemy of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope. "Multiliteracies: Rethinking What We Mean by Literacy and What We Teach as Literacy in the Context of Global Cultural Diversity and New Communications Technologies." Ambigapathy Pandian. Ed. 1999. Global Literacy: Vision Revisions and Vistas in Education. Serdang: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press.

McRae, John. 1991. Literature With a Small 'l'. London: Macmillan Publisher.

New, Christopher. 1999. Philosophy of Literature. London: Routledge.

Roger, A. 1969 Linguistics and the teaching of Literature. Applied Linguistics and the Teaching of Literature H. Fraser and M. O Donnell. London:Longman.

Sunny, Tan. The Hidden Side of Crusoe. New Straits Times. 30.1.2001