[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 10 | March 31, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The crux of the problem in teaching literature is how to guide the learners to develop an individual response to literature. Such a guidance will have to focus on the values linguistic units acquire in contexts of use and in orienting learners to discover these values on their own. H.G. Widdowson in his epoch-making work Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature underlines this observation:

Since poetic meanings are of their very nature unspecific and ambiguous . . . there is no such thing as a definitive interpretation. What is important, however (particularly from the teaching point of view) is that the individual interpretation should be based on an understanding of how linguistic items take on particular values in discourse1.

This paper can be described as an attempt to evolve a practical methodology for the teaching of literature with this specific objective in mind: how the learners can be led to discover independently the way language items are conditioned in the context to take on meanings other than those they have in the language code and to infer the message the writer is trying to convey as part of it. (more…)