Text-alteration as an interpretive teaching strategy: the case of "The Snow Man".(The Pedagogy of Literature)

However problematic interpretation is, it remains essential, even if close reading is now too often only a prelude to some more distant kind of reading. I will not quite argue here, with Rob Pope, that "The best way to understand how a text works ... is to change it: to play around with it, to intervene in it in some way (large or small), and then to try to account for the exact effect of what you have done" (1), but I will argue that text-alteration is at least one of the best ways to understand how a text works. Because of this, it is also an excellent strategy for teaching literature, close reading, and interpretation.

The kinds of focused and extensive text-alteration I propose and demonstrate below are novel and unusual, but text-alteration itself is not new. Paraphrasing a text might be considered a minor type of alteration, and critics often demonstrate the effectiveness of a turn of phrase or figure of speech by presenting alternative versions. Richard Ohmann alters texts more extensively, rewriting paragraphs of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence. His syntactic alterations manifestly alter the styles of the passages and confirm the commonsense truth that style exists in and through a text's linguistic characteristics, though Stanley Fish, in his famous but largely unsound attack on stylistics, rightly rejects any claims about necessary or universal connections between specific textual characteristics and literary effects (73-77). Jonathan Culler also recommends altering texts to investigate the reading process, though without demonstrating it (28). Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short alter prose texts effectively and extensively, typically at or below the sentence level (see especially chapters 5-7). Robert Scholes, attributing the technique to Roland Barthes, also alters texts to explore point of view (110-26), as does Paul Simpson (especially chapter 3).

As Willie van Peer has shown, even readers with quite different experiences respond to some aspects of literary style much more consistently than has been supposed (see also Martindale). He replaces highly foregrounded language in short lyric poems with lines of similar meaning without marked foregrounding and asks groups of informants "to rate the lines on a number of semantic differential scales," such as poetic/prosaic, strong/weak, and surprising/expected (139). The surprising unanimity he finds shows that there are limits to the subjectivity of literary response.

Rob Pope, who also emphasizes the use of text-alteration as pedagogy, suggests that it works best as creative and de-centering group play. And Jerome McGann uses "deformance" as a kind of performative criticism that destabilizes interpretation and opens texts up to imaginative commentary and response (105-35), though the effects of his deformations are sometimes bizarre rather than illuminating, as I have pointed out ("Hot-Air," "The End of the Irrelevant Text"). His Ivanhoe Game (209ff) provides one provocative answer to Pope's question: "What are we playing at?" (13).

My own practice accepts the value of creative play but focuses the play so that it continually returns to the text to deepen our understanding and enhance our appreciation. For example, my alteration of William Golding's The Inheritors tests two consequences of my claim to have isolated the chief textual features responsible for the novel' s unusual style: (1) without those features, its style should be radically different, and (2) the style of any text with a very similar constellation of features should seem similar (Language and Style 155). Removing the characteristic features of The Inheritors destroys its "Neanderthal" style, and inserting them in even so uncongenial a text as Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence creates a style suitable for a sequel to The Inheritors (156-68). More recently, I have argued that the absence of ordinary or expected features is sometimes even more important than the presence of unusual features, especially when the world of the text is an alien one ("Altered Texts," 105-10). This is one important lesson that students quickly learn when they begin to alter a text.

Text-alteration cannot easily precede interpretation, for reading itself is interpretation, and alterations are more effective if they operate upon intuitively significant textual features. As an interpretive teaching strategy, it can be practiced for many purposes and on many levels. Students can be asked to produce alterations, either of an assigned kind for specific purposes, or freely, as a way of exploring their own sense of what is important in the text. They can also be asked to respond to a text and an altered version of it, with the identity of the original version first concealed and then revealed. Text-alteration can change the point of view, the age, class, gender, or race of the speaker, or the tone, plot, or setting, or any characteristic that seems important. Such alterations are invariably useful in revealing the way a text operates, though they often disrupt its aesthetic effect, especially in poetic texts, in surprising ways. The disruptions themselves are pedagogically useful in emphasizing the aesthetics of the original, in indicating more sites of possible interpretive discovery, and in highlighting the process of literary composition. My own favored practice is to use text-alteration as a focused interpretive teaching strategy, one that necessarily varies with the nature of the text and author being studied because it grows out of an incipient interpretation, as I will show below. I use it both to help students understand and appreciate a particularly difficult or significant text and to help them focus explicitly on the text and on the relationships between text, reader, and interpretation-to explore the nature of interpretation itself.

The only effective way to discuss text-alteration is to demonstrate it. Wallace Stevens's famous and often interpreted "The Snow Man" provides my test case.