Liv i texten: om litteraturläsningen i en svensklärarutbildning

Abstract in English

The overall aim of this doctoral thesis is to widen and deepen the understanding of reading practices and the functions of literature in a Swedish teacher education programme. The aim is also to contextualize the reading of literature in this education programme by discussing literary studies and teaching more generally. The theoretical framework incorporates theories within literary theory, reception study, New Literacy Studies, and discourse analysis that share the view that texts and practices are socially situated. In this thesis reading practice is the overarching term within which other terms or concepts, such as reading act, reading event, and form of reading, but also discourse and ideology, are seen as embedded. The research design is inspired by ethnography and the data consist of audio recordings from teaching activities, questionnaires, interviews, and guidance documents. In guidance documents, questionnaires and interviews, there are numerous discursive elements, which are combined in different ways, but it appears that there are two principal discourses that exist in parallel. One discourse emphasizes the literary text, analysis, interpretation, aesthetic tools and the overall understanding of text-internal aspects. The second discourse emphasizes readers, students, teaching situations and understanding of both text-internal aspects and phenomena outside the text. These two prominent discourses can create a contradiction between emphasis on text on the one hand and on students and teaching on the other hand, but they can also work together. Three recurring core issues are identified in research on literature education in the last decade in Sweden. The first one has to do with the intrinsic value of literature as opposed to the uses of literature. Most scholars nowadays emphasize reading literature in its own right, and claim that literature has a value in itself. Most of them oppose the use of literature, when there is a predetermined purpose such as the students using literature to examine ethical, existential, social and historical issues. The second issue is that of the relationship between literature and reality. There are often claims that students read literature as true stories or even as a collection of facts and not as fiction, and that is considered a problem. The third issue has to do with understanding. Understanding is an every-day word but when it has to do with literature reading and education it can have different meanings. It could refer to the understanding of content and plot, or narrative structure and metaphorical language, but also to the understanding of the world outside the fictional world. Most of the literature education scholars in Sweden today most highly value the understanding of narrative structure, metaphorical language and the meaning of the text. In research and debate it seems as if many people take for granted that students read literature as factual and use it as a means for achieving something else and that this is seen as something negative. This view seems to lead to an attempt to isolate literature and literature reading from the surrounding world. But this study shows that the reading practices are considerably more complex, and there are several examples where the students combine different forms of reading such as symbolic, analytical and personal. Aesthetic aspects, narrative technique as well as ethical, existential, and social issues are present in the reading practices. All these aspects – and others – are not present all the time, but there are examples in practice of how they are combined and interact.