on teaching “A Modest Proposal”

While teaching Writing 121 last year, I always taught Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” — indeed, I think all the TA’s here did. I think before the students read the text I never gave them any background, except once when I accidentally let it slip that it was a satire. The other times, no background information. When I ask myself why I did this, I see two reasons: a) an assumption that a good reader will figure it out anyway, and b) to see how many students will come in apalled after reading it, ammounting to a sadistic joke on my students.

I’m reading Sheridan D. Blau’s The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers, and he brings up “A Modest Proposal” and how TAs often don’t give background information to Swift’s essay before their students read it in their classes. After reading this, I feel guilty. To quote at length (which I am wont to do):

A classic example of how teachers sometimes misrepresent the gap in knowledge between themselves and their students may be found in teh way I have seen teaching assistants in college freshman English courses teach one of the most widly taught texts of such courses, Swift’s satiric essay of 1729, “A Modest Proposal.” The usual apporach to teaching this essay is to have students read it without warning them (and most freshmaan English textbooks conveniently conspire in this suprise) that it is a satire and that it must be read ironically rather than literally. Then the essay is discussed in class under the direction of the teacher, with the teacher eventually pointing out that no such proposal could possibly be offered or taken in earnest. The teacher would then prove his point to the still doubting students by elucidating the many places in the text where Swift reveals, through his requent denials of having any self-interest in his apparently civic-minded plan and a number of humorously exaggerated details, that he is being satiric rather than serious in his proposal to rescue the impoverished Irish by having them sell their young children to butchers as tender meat for more prosperous people — and especially for the exploitative British business classes—to eat. Bot the method and manner of instruction commonly employed in such classes communicate the idea— an idea I have often heard stated explicitly by teachers in conversation — that skilled and sensitive readers will recognize the proposal as satiric immediately and also be able to detect the abundant evidence of satire in the text, while those who take the proposal as a serious one are somehow less skilled readrs, if not intellectual clods.

Yet much of the pedagogical exercise I have described entails a misrepresentation of the interpretive skill of the teacher and of the presumed illiteracy and ignorance of the students. For, in a post-Holocaust era, why shouldn’t student readers assume that a proposal to butcher and eat the children of the poorest Irish peasant would be offered and taken in earnest by a ruling British colonial government? Why is it more outrageous or impossible to conceive of the commodification of children as meat in the eighteenth century than as lampshades and experimental animals in the twentieth? Would Nazi documents outlining procedures for collecting the gold teeth or using the skins of millions of dead Jews seem any less outrageous to readers in the years beffore the Holocaust than the wild proposal advanced by Jonathan Swift? And if such proposals in recent history are known to have been made in earnest and acted upon as the official policy of an established government, why should readers who know nothing of the source of what may be an even less barbaric proposal from the eighteenth century assume that it was offered as satire?

Nor is it the case that the teachers (always graduate students in my experience) who presumed themselves such superior readers to their students actually employed their superior interpretive powers to determine that Swift’s proposal was a satire. Rather, they knew it was a satire only because it was presented to them by their professors and literary history as satire. And how did literary historians or the document’s earliest readers establish that it was a satire? Only because (as the distinguished modern critic Hugh Kenner was fond of pointing out) it was attributed to England’s great satirist, Jonathan Swift, who was also the dead of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

In other words, we have here another instance in which intertextual literacy, or knowledge of prior texts and background information, is crucial to producing an accurate reading of a literary work, but is also the exclusive possession of teachers and not of their students. Yet this privileged knowledge is not recognized by the teachers themselves as the knowledge that they need to transmit or otherwise replicate in their students so that their students may function as competent readers. It rather becomes the instrument for a mode of mystifying instruction that positions the teachers as readers who are capable of extraordinary interpretive insight, while their students appear to be (and see themselves as) insensitive and unperceptive clods, wholly dependent upon their teachers for all but rudiementary interpretive observations. (91-92, emphasis mine)

Sorry for such a long quote, but I think Blau does a great job with detail here that really explicates how the way we don’t give background information can continue a perception of great disparity in reading skills that really has to do with background knowledge.

I’m surprised with how much I am enjoying this book, despite my initial fears that it would very similar to other books of similar topics on conginitive reading skills.

Blau, Sheridan D. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.