Defining critical thinking in Literature is difficult partly because of the nature of literary study itself. Literature isn’t a natural subject area, in that what constitutes a literary text is the subject of much debate. The three genres that literary has traditionally focused on-- drama, prose fiction, poetry--are central to literary studies because of an historical accident. There is no real reason why other genres, such as autobiography, film, or even weblogs should not be considered for literary analysis. Furthermore, different faculty members in any Literature department have radically different and frequently incommensurate epistemological positions on the nature of literary texts and the manner in which they should be studied. It is thus unlikely that all would agree on a single definition on critical thinking

In exploring critical thinking in literary studies, it is useful first to consider the origins of the discipline. Literature came into the university curricula of many nation-states in the nineteenth century, and became a central part of primary and secondary school curricula designed to foster a national culture. Initially, literary study was often combined with the study of national history and the national language. Thus Shakespeare’s plays were discussed a representatively English, while American Literature claimed authors who were born well before the Declaration of Independence as key figures in a national tradition. Newly independent nations have also established a national literary canon in either English or a new national language: thus we have new templates for study such as Singaporean Literature or Indonesian Literature.

In early literary study in Britain, Europe, and America, an historical approach was supplemented by a concern with aesthetics. Students of literature would thus investigate the qualities that made good literature, the manner in which literature illuminated the human condition, and how literary texts fit into traditions, or developed from previous forms. In the early to middle twentieth century, stress was placed on the literary text itself, viewed in isolation from its background. In the late twentieth century, the influence of Philosophy, Political Science, Anthropology, and Sociology has led to the rise of what is sometimes, misleadingly perhaps, called “literary theory.” The definition of a literary text has broadened to television serials, films, and other media, although much focus is still given to writings in more traditional media. In general, theoretical approaches will examine literary texts—and by extension all texts--as in some way structuring our perceptions of reality. Texts are the means by which we apprehend the real, the everyday, and the qualities of texts may help or hinder us in gaining a critical distance from the everyday. For instance, a novel about a maid in Singapore might reiterate and reinforce widely held societal prejudices about maids or it might, alternatively, offer readers the possibility of seeing things in a new light, of perceiving events from a maid’s perspective and gaining a different apprehension of the reality they take for granted.

New approaches to literary studies have not displaced older ones, but rather entered into various forms of dialogue with them. What links all approaches to literary studies, however, is a stress on reading as a fundamental skill. Literary studies stresses in particular the ability to read slowly and carefully, and not merely for information. Rather, we prize the ability to read with a double sight, to become aware of how the medium of writing, the nature of texts themselves—and also, by extension, of drama, film, or other media—shapes, transforms, or even contradicts the content.

A way I often illustrate this to students is by analogy with the visual arts. An engraving of a hare by Albrecht Dürer clearly looks lifelike: it seems to attempt to present reality almost photographically, so that the medium of the paper and ink vanishes. In contrast, a modernist painting by Paul Klee may have a title suggesting its content, but we must work hard to see a pictorial representation of the title in the image. The Klee painting foregrounds the medium, while the Dürer foregrounds the content. Yet in each case to appreciate the object we must understand the interplay between medium and content, even to the extent of ultimately finding the distinction between form and content problematic.

Critical reading thus involves a student paying close attention to formal features of the text—elements that American critics René Wellek and Austin Warren once called the “intrinsic elements” of the texts, and relating these to extrinsic elements, the manner in which the text relates to a larger world.

My own experience is that students often come to us from “A” levels without close-reading skills, and also with a non-theoretical understanding of the text which gives pride of place to unexamined “common sense”—received assumptions--about the way the world is. Encouraging critical thinking thus first involves teaching students close reading skills through practice, allowing students to realize that there are frequently contradictions in texts, and that reading a text involves asking a number of questions, rather than moving too quickly to a solution.

As literary study develops, critical thinking is shown by a student’s ability to use various conceptual frameworks to read texts, but also to realize how the nature of the texts questions the frameworks, and indeed the “common sense” of the worlds in which the text is produced and read. While pedagogical practice in literary studies often refers to the variety of frameworks or critical approaches as a “toolkit” or a “menu,” my own feeling is that these are misleading analogies. The approaches are often mutually contradictory, and taking up one involves making certain epistemological assumptions about the way texts work. The notion of a “toolkit” may well encourage students to evaluate and compare different critical approaches from a position in which basic assumptions about the relationship of the text to the world are unexamined: working through the text through critical reading will often empower students to question the framework itself.

As an example of this process, I briefly discussed the poem “The Little Black Boy” by William Blake. It is a poem which often produces debate among students as to its final effect, as to whether it is a poem that condemns racism or whether it is a poem which is deeply racist. One’s final answer may well depend on the epistemological framework one draws upon to read the poem. Within a historicist context, it is clear that Blake is arguing against racism and for a universal idea of humanity which informs early Romanticism. A reading informed by postcolonial criticism might note that despite the rhetoric of equality, the poem makes an opposition between images of whiteness and blackness, and whiteness is clearly the favoured term. A poststructuralist reading might note how this opposition itself breaks down in the poem. A new critical approach might ask one to stand back from the poem, to look at its form and the manner in which it develops rhetorically. Each approach offers different possibilities, and collectively they offer the possibility of cross-fertilisation and mutual interrogation. For me, critical thinking would occur when students use the poem and begin to ask questions—to which there are no easy answers-- regarding the way the notion of race is put to use in their own lives. Students thus become aware of how their lives are mediated by texts, and begin to read their own lives as carefully as they would literary texts.

This form of critical thinking will likely take place as much outside the classroom as in it, but the literature classroom can be a place where it receives a new or a renewed impetus.

Contributed by Philip Holden, English Language and Literature ().