This lesson establishes the purpose of literary writing:

Students are not writing to show they remember the story or spot techniques. They are writing to synthesise material knowledge (the text) with methodological knowledge (how literature produces meaning).

This lesson directly displaces:

• PEE / device-spotting
• “This shows / this suggests” loops
• Text-as-object thinking

And replaces it with:

• Text-as-material
• Literature-as-discipline
• Meaning-as-produced through methods

This follows on the key distinction in the work of Bloom, Anderson and Krathwohl who refer to Material and Methodological knowledge forms. Michael Young’s work on “Powerful Knowledge” is the backbone of the knowledge-rich curriculum movement. His theory argues that schools should give all students access to specialised, structured disciplinary knowledge that they cannot acquire through everyday experience. This idea directly underpins contemporary knowledge-rich curriculum design. E,D, Hirsh also explored the importance of ‘core’ knowledge’ that is the transferable and mandatory element within a discipline. It might also go by the terms of substantive knowledge or epistemic knowledge. This is referred to by these lessons as the methodological. It is important that students recognise that Literature as a field of enquiry contains a substantive knowledge that is not within the text, but to be applied to the text. These lessons are built around the substantive knowledge to be applied to any text being studied.

The issue for studying Literature as an academic discipline is that the ‘academia’ of Literature is not a fixed, nor an agreed-upon construct. Firstly, Literature is rather surprisingly not an old and obvious field of enquiry. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been established for 800 years before English studies were established as courses.

Part of the problem with defining the course is that there exists a literary text to read, but knowing the text alone is not particularly academic. No investigation, no hypothesis, no tools are being used when a report merely knows the text. It took early lecturers of English studies such as F.R. Levis to begin defining some ‘procedure’, some ‘selection process’ and some ‘method to apply’ upon the text that became the tools of literary investigation. Levis’ approach has not been widely adopted however, in part because his process was not well defined, nor replicable. It still suffered from subjectivity meaning different investigations were going to arrive at wildly different conclusions.

A general solution as to the ‘ways and means’ that comprise the field of enquiry has been to adopt those of other literary fields; Marxism, Freudianism, structuralism, feminism, semiotics for instance. These conceptual positions did not originate within Literature, but their approaches are deeply informative. They each provide a terminology and procedure that allows readers to dismantle texts in ways that refer to external agents, as opposed to the non academic approach which circulates discussions internally within the logic of the text. These conceptual frameworks apply cultural logic texts.

These cultural logics are of course non-fiction – they engage in the real world around us and attempt to observe and parse elements of society; attaching signifiers to abstract phenomena. This requires us to read the text as a non-fiction artifact, so that the theoretical (which is ultimately the language of non-fiction ) can apply.

These three distinctions (that literature is a methodology applied to a text, that literature is not well conceived as ‘fiction’, and that literature is a historical structure) mean that PEE, PEAL, PETAL, SQUID type writing frames are not well placed to support students in writing their essays. These scaffolds do not impart any disciplinary knowledge. This curriculum is also cynical of mere ‘semiotic’ or ‘linguistic’ curriculum which does not teach students to interpret the history of literary signs.