Post-response: Setting limits to the poetry lesson

Abstract

While students of English are required to engage with texts from a variety of theoretical perspectives, these positions are often refracted through a personal-ethical paradigm which uses the text as a surface on which students' moral selves can be displayed for the corrective gaze of the teacher. A model of reading as productive practice, on the other hand, suggests that there is no innate reason for a text (poetic or otherwise) to be read in this way. In this paper the author offers an alternative mode of study, drawing on historical- philological practice, which allows students to approach poetry from a perspective that brackets the notion of the personal response