”Litteraturen, det är vad man undervisar om” – Det svenska litteraturdidaktiska fältet i förvandling

This dissertation takes its departure in the notion that a new research field, literary didactics, has strengthened in Sweden during the past few decades, whereas the position of traditional literature in society and in school has grown weaker. To understand this paradox the main emphasis of the present study lies on the examination of literary didactics in Sweden as a discursive formation within the humanistic and social sciences. The analysis focuses on doctoral theses that were submitted between 2000 and 2009, but also examines other scientific texts within the field, from the 1970s and onwards. The main purpose of this discursive analysis is to examine the relation between literary theory and literary didactics – especially the relation between theoretical assumptions and the methods used – that constitutes the research field, and how this relation influences the fundamental questions about the value and function of literature in society and education. In this respect the analysis points out that certain assumptions about the exclusivity of literature, or the idea of a special kind of knowledge found in literature, is essential to literary study in general, at the same time as this concept of exclusivity – in terms of canon or traditional genre definitions – is questioned within the discourse of literary didactics. In this analysis of the specific conditions of a certain research field the theories of Michel Foucault have been essential, both conceptually and in implementation. Consequently, didactic research is seen as a body of statements in a system of dispersion, constituting a discursive formation of scientific claims – that is a corpus of statements that are held to be true. The examination of the specific discourse, and its relation to the discourses that delimit it, leans heavily on Foucault’s concept of an archaeology of the sciences, initially discussed in Les mots et les choses (1966), and further elaborated upon in L’Archéologie du savoir (1969). Here Foucault discusses the notions savoir and connaissance. Savoir refers to an implicit or general knowledge in a society: different bodies of learning, everyday opinions, institutional and commercial practices and so on. This knowledge is fundamentally different from the formal bodies of learning – les connaissances – that one can find in scientific texts. The system of dispersion that forms a connaissance, the formalised statements of a certain discourse, constructs its own object, or rather, its object domain. In the case of literary didactics the main object domain – its delimited object – is that of the reading of literature, or the process of reading literature. This dispersion of statements scattered around its object of reading literature are constituted as a formal field of science – connaissance – depending on its relations to a larger area of episteme, which means in Foucault’s terminology, a historical a priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibilities within a particular society and epoch. The formation of a new scientific field – as in the case of Swedish literary didactics as a science – originates as a result of tensions and ruptures in this overall discursive condition, and in relation to general discourses of knowledge, to savoir, which, in the case of literary didactics, can be found in the educational system, in political opinions, in media debates and so on. In the first chapter of this study the theoretical framework is presented. In connection with this framework some metatheoretical complications are discussed, related to the fact that the dissertation is a part of the field it studies, and therefore subjected to the same forces that in the discourse of literary didactics separates the scientifically objective from that of subjective opinion. The second chapter is devoted to a historical background and to defining the modern conceptions of “literary studies” and “subject didactics”, and assessing their influence on the research field of literary didactics. Here the dualistic tensions between the subjective and the objective that constitute the field are traced back to the rupture in the modern episteme that determined the change in Swedish higher education in the beginning of the 19th century. This rupture could be described as a tension between utility and idealism, but also as a shift toward empiricism and individualism. As Swedish research on reading in school relies heavily on reader response theories, the second chapter also contains a brief exposition of these theories, from Roman Ingarden’s view of the literary text as a scheme for the reader to fill out, to David Bleich’s relativistic understanding of the text as something that only exists in each individual reading. Some of these reader-response theories play a more predominant role in the forming of the discourse of Swedish literature didactics, and are therefore discussed in more detail in chapter III and IV. This is the case, for instance, with Louise M. Rosenblatt’s dualism between efferent and aesthetic reading strategies, and with Kathleen McCormick’s concept of the matching or mismatching between the different repertoires of the reader and the text. The theories of Rosenblatt and McCormick are introduced in Swedish discourse by the so-called Pedagogical Group – an association of researchers at the faculty of literature in Lund, who were interested in strengthening literature studies in school by merging literary theories with pedagogy and sociology. In chapter III the significance of this group in the formation of the new didactic field is examined, from the late 1970s and onward, while chapter IV looks at some other tendencies in the formation of the discourse through the 1980s and 1990s. The main part of the analysis – chapter V to VII – is devoted to a closer examination of 13 doctoral theses within the field. These theses are analysed as examples of the systems of dispersion that constitute the discourse. The focus here is on the relation between explicit or implicit theoretical suppositions and methodical options, as well as on how the theses eventually try to answer the fundamental didactic question about the significance of reading literature. In the final section of this dissertation the conditions that govern the formation of literary didactics are discussed in relation to adjacent areas of savoir. In chapter VIII the focus is on the will to truth that regulates the discourse, especially manifest in the relationship between the subjective and the objective – on the level of scientific text, as well as on the level of the readings of literary texts that are subject to examination in the scientific texts. The chapter also includes an overview of the challenges of literary didactics in an international perspective, and a discussion of its possibilities and limitations outside of the traditional empirical classroom study. In chapter IX different concepts of truth are examined in relation to historical tensions between utility and idealism, and in relation to the present day debates in media about the Swedish school. In the final chapter, X, these discussions are brought to a conclusion. The questions about the significance and function of literature and of literary studies are brought full circle to the initial hypothesis that a shift of episteme has occurred in the past 30-40 years, a shift that provided the essential conditions for the formation of a new discourse of didactic research within the field of literary studies in Sweden. The central conclusion of a shift of episteme – important to the formation of a new didactic discourse – is visible in the 13 theses examined in the common discussions about a postmodern or cultural shift. It is also observable as an emphasis on the subjective experience of the reader; predominant in the formation of the discourse already in the late 1970s. Under the influence of constructivist theories, reader-response and cultural studies, the new didactics has transformed the study of literature from a positivist reliance on facts and cultural heritage to a more dynamic and interpretative view on reading. Nonetheless, the discourse of literary didactics focuses on the individual reader as the fundamental and stabilizing locus of language, and hence also of reading – it is the individual experience of the reader that gives the literary text its meaning. In this rupture in the connaissance of literary didactics, between an understanding of how knowledge is constructed discursively and an insistence on the individual experience of the reader, lies the fundamental tension that regulates the systems of dispersion around the object of literary reading. The tension, or rupture, leads to two main consequences. Firstly, the difference between theory and method, where the empirical, ethnographic methods that are commonly used stand out as incommensurable with the dominant concept of knowledge in literary didactics. Secondly, at the centre of the discursive formation there is a crucial tension between an objective, scientific distance and a subjective, identificatory proximity, that is mainly visible as tensions between different reading strategies, as in the efferent or aesthetic reading modes, but also apparent in the tensions between different types of texts or genres, such as in the tentative difference between fiction and facts, or between fiction and faction. Furthermore, a fundamental conclusion of this thesis is that the statements that constitute discursive formation of Swedish research in literary didactics are delimited by the concept of the classroom. In accordance with Foucault’s theories concerning the systems of exclusion, this thesis introduces the principle of the classroom as a governing principle of what can be said within the borders of the discursive formation and what is not possible to say. Ultimately, it is the relevance of the research to the practice of the classroom that delimits the discursive formation of literary didactics.