For some time now I’ve been thinking about how epistemology* – how knowledge is accumulated and divvied up – in English as an academic discipline. While I’m not at all sure that I’ve accomplished anything particularly profound or useful, I’ve identified four distinct areas which I’m calling metaphor, story, argument and pattern. These concepts underlie an understanding of what knowledge is in English. They are, broadly speaking, the lenses through which literature and language can be viewed and by which meaning is made.
Metaphor
Arguably, most if not all thought is metaphorical. Whenever we substitute a concrete meaning to shed light on an abstract concept we are thinking in metaphor. [“Shed light” is a good example: no actual light is being employed, but the quality of shining a light on something concrete makes it easier to see that thing.] Similarly, metaphor makes it easier to understand abstraction. Metaphor – or more properly, tropes (from the Greek tropos meaning ‘turn’) are a ‘turning away’ from the literal towards the figurative. Everyday language is so strewn with tropes that many metaphors are ‘dead’: we longer turn away from the literal when we say or hear “wake up,” “feeling down,” “black mood,” “white hot,” etc. So, while it’s almost impossible to communicate anything complex without metaphor, most often we are unaware of so doing.
Within English, metaphor acts to defamiliarise language, to express something in a new and surprising way. In Literature, Why it Matters, Robert Eaglestone argues that ‘metaphor-spotting’ is a craft. We can train ourselves to see the unfamiliar in the everyday and become attuned to new ways of restating old ideas:
…when you are taught the craft of metaphor-spotting, you are not really being taught to single some flower out from the hedgerow. Rather, by picking that flower, you are having your attention drawn to the whole ecosystem… (p. 42)
Metaphor is – at its heart – about substitution of meaning: this is like that. The ability to use and appreciate figurative language is a crucial aspect of English disciplinary understanding. It not only shapes our ability to think and understanding, it also helps us to better understand ourselves as well as other people in other times and places.
Story
Human beings have a bias towards thinking in narrative. In order to simplify the complexity of the world we frame our understanding in the form of stories with sequential events, characters and themes. We think in terms of cause and effect, heroes and villains and unifying morals which give meaning to otherwise random events. Every time we recount an event from our lives, we cast ourselves as the hero and, while our story may well be truthful, it is also, in a very real way, ‘made up’. We tend to conform to particular ways of structuring stories – chronology, climaxes, resolutions – and by doing so we make ourselves more understandable.
Over millennia, this artificial way of thinking has become increasingly natural but the story of storytelling is an essential component of knowledge in English: the structures and conventions of epic, tragedy, comedy; the various forms in which ‘stories’ are told: poems, plays, novels; the genres, or types, of story we’ve become familiar with (detective stories, romances, quests) and their associated conventions; the way in which narrative is constructed (first and third person, past tense) and the way stories build on and interpret one another (intertextuality) are all ideas which students need to be explicitly introduced to.
Stories can seem a little like dead metaphors – if we’re not trained to spot how they work, we mistake artifice for nature. All the components of stories were, at one time, new and surprising. Greek tragedy grew from epic poetry and Dionysian ritual into a brand new way of telling stories. Originally, actors took the stage one at a time and declaimed their part of the narrative, but then the dramatist Aeschylus – writer of the Oresteia – came up with the idea of introducing a second actor to the stage and thus dialogue was born. A bit later Sophocles experimented with a third actor on stage and gave us action. Today we take dialogue and action utterly for granted, but once they were startling and fresh. According to Natalie Haynes, the writers of Eastenders routinely and deliberately recycle the plots of the Greek tragedies within the context of Albert Square – the characters and setting are new but the plot is taken from Medea or Oedipus.
By examining how storytelling developed from its origins in myth and legend to its modern bewildering array of forms and expressions, students learn to appreciate their place in a conversation that has been unfolding throughout history.