Interpreting The Urban Landscape
Operating under the premise that interpretations are valid if they can be backed up with sufficient evidence (and only that premise—not under any sort of umbrella of "theory"), I will arm my budding literary critics with pencil and paper, setting them to the task of interpreting a complex text. One guiding question will be: "What is the speaker's attitude toward the city/cities?" The first text will be something deceptively simple (Virginia Burton's picture book entitled The Little House), which I will elaborate on in the Teaching Methods section. An appropriate second text is Hilda Doolittle' (H.D.)'s poem "Cities".(18)
I will demonstrate how one might look for evidence of a particular attitude in such a text. "Cities" is a rather long poem, so it makes the most sense to break it into chunks in the "I Do/We Do/You Do" model of scaffolding instruction. The first stanza begins:
Can we believe—by an effort
comfort our hearts:
it is not waste all this,
not placed here in disgust,
street after street,
each patterned alike,
no grace to lighten
a single house of the hundred
crowded into one garden-space.
After reading the stanza aloud to students, I will ask: "What words are unclear?" Once we have established a baseline and all can comprehend the vocabulary on the same level, we will be able to move into a literal interpretation of the text: I will ask students to tell me what they think the topic of the poem is, then ask what the first stanza is about. Given that the title of the text is "Cities," it is likely that students will pick that out as a topic. (It might be interesting, though, to give students the text without the title to see what they tease out.) Beyond that, the students will likely need more guidance getting to the summarization of the first stanza.
To guide students to being able to summarize the initial lines, I will ask: "Who is the speaker? What kind of a person do you think he or she is? In what way would you characterize her or him?" There are conflicting ideas in the first lines of the poem—the words comfort/waste and disgust/grace, for example. Students will—perhaps with some prompting—be able to locate them ("See if you can find ideas or words that are the same and ideas that are opposites"). To establish the speaker's mindset, we will then discuss what it is like when someone brings up such opposing ideas about a given topic. H.D. is writing about cities; H.D. feels conflicted about cities.
The conflict further intensifies in the subsequent stanzas: the city is crowded; the city is beautiful; the city is decaying; the city is full of vibrant relics of the past. Students will likely be able to connect the speaker's apparent ambivalence around the topic of cities to the tension in The Little House. The question then arises: based upon these two authors' depictions of generic cities, what are some identifying characteristics of cities? Students can brainstorm lists using evidence from each text. The interpretative act comes in through using the evidence. (For example: "According to H.D.'s poem, cities are…")
Interpretation is not something that happens in isolation, though— not just something we simply "do" or can teach as a skill. There is much discussion in K-12 educator circles about what is often called "critical thinking," usually couched somewhere in the language of Bloom's Taxonomy. The thing is, interpretation requires one to work through all levels of the taxonomy before reaching the end. And, even when one does reach the "end," he or she is likely to revise the thinking to entertain a new interpretation. There are two tools I find useful for thinking about how the cyclical process of interpretation will play out in the classes I teach: The Literature Workshop and Paideia Seminars.
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