Do literature teachers and students pay attention to questionable representations in literary texts? Insights from an interview study on a Dutch literary classic
Submitted by:
Jeroen Dera
Abstract:
One of the most widely read texts in Dutch literature education is the novel De aanslag (The Assault, 1982) by Harry Mulisch. The novel explores the gray area between perpetrators and victims in World War II: when is someone guilty, and what role do fate and chance play in human actions during dark times?
Since the publication of the novel, it has been a staple on reading lists in Dutch education. Based on excerpts from essays circulating online, students seem to primarily engage with the aforementioned question of guilt and prominent literary motifs in the novel. However, The Assault also contains a passage in which the twelve-year-old protagonist is touched by a female resistance fighter while in a prison cell, and this sexually connoted touch is compared to an African initiation ritual. This raises the pressing question of how contemporary readers of a school classic respond to such scenes, which could be critically approached from a gender-critical or post-colonial perspective.
In my paper, I will present a study with the guiding question: How do Dutch literature teachers and Dutch students (11th grade) react to potentially questionable representations in The Assault, and to what extent do the responses of teachers differ from those of students? To answer this question, semi-structured interviews were conducted in which teachers (N=25) and students (N=40) responded to the prison cell scene described above, which was used as a vignette in the research. The analyses of the interviews reveal that both teachers and students initially noticed little on their own about the sexually connoted touch or the comparison to an African initiation ritual. However, when explicitly asked to comment on the depiction of Africa, many students, more so than teachers, quickly drew connections to negative stereotypes.
The results show that a critical stance towards representation is not automatically present among teachers and students when approaching a canonical text, emphasizing the importance of developing a pedagogy that is more attuned to the political dimension of literary representations.