Appleman, Chapter 1 - The Case for Critical Theory in the Classroom

Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents
Deborah Appleman

Appleman makes the case immediately for teaching theory in the classroom, and does so while tackling the naysayers head on. She recognizes the arguments people will have about the practicality of teaching theory when we're struggling to just get students into the classrooms in the first place. How can literary theory apply to the lives of students? Appleman argues that not only will literary theory give students the tools they need to respond analytically to the texts they read in school; it will also give them the tools they need to interpret the “text” of their own lives (2).

Through theory, students will learn new ways of seeing and this will allow them to interact with the world around them in different ways. I like that Appleman continually stresses that what we learn about the written text applies to the living text of the world in the same way. Literary theory gives us a new way to approach multiculturalism.

I found the discussion about New Criticism versus Reader Response theories to be interesting because I was taught with both methods at different times in my career without knowing the name of either. I didn't know that my teachers were applying a literary theory to their pedagogy. Perhaps they were not aware of that either. Truthfully, I liked both methods. I liked searching for the “hidden truth” in a difficult poem and I liked discovering the truth in me that was like the text I was reading. Looking back, it would have been nice to have been given some tools and a language to employ while analyzing and interpreting text.

Appleman concludes the chapter with a statement I'd like to keep clear in my mind as I go through this book: “The purpose of teaching literary theory at the secondary level is not to turn adolescents into critical theorists; rather, it is to encourage adolescents to inhabit theories comfortably enough to construct their own readings and to learn to appreciate the power of multiple perspectives” (9). Theory, then, becomes more than a tool to use or facts to memorize. Theory is a way of seeing or even a way of being.