Narrative form and the social enactment of belief: Why beginning college students have trouble interpreting literature

This study focuses on composition students' responses to literary texts and the role of culture in shaping those students' approaches to unconventional depictions of human experience in literature. Working from a sociocultural perspective, the study views responses to literature as part of the larger cultural activity of telling and responding to narratives. It recognizes that both casual and well-formed narratives such as literary texts contain literary form that foregrounds the act of expression through rhetorical artistry, or repetition and contrast of sounds, meanings, rhythms and connotations. Literary texts often use these rhetorical techniques to call upon and recast readers' cultural beliefs about human experience. This study illuminates the intersection between the commonplace beliefs about human experience disseminated through culture and the rhetorical techniques that embody and represent various views of cultural theme, like love, war, etc. In short, it focuses on the intersection of belief and the literary forms that shape those beliefs.; Through analysis of students' spoken and written responses, the quotations to which they referred, and interviews with focal students, this study found that students often resist interpreting literature when the literary form suggests meanings that complicate or contradict their cultural beliefs about people's motivations and behavior. Instead, students most often 'psychoanalyze' the characters, explaining their actions not by looking at the language of the text, but by ascribing their preexisting cultural beliefs to the characters. This activity carries over into their writing so that their arguments are not supported by the language of the quotations that they cite. The findings of this study underscore the need for the explicit teaching of literary interpretation, as well an increased understanding of the cultural beliefs that enable and constrain students' responses to literature. At a period when scholars are questioning the value of literature in teaching composition as well as literary studies at large, these timely findings highlight the value of literature in expanding the ways students represent and thus experience their own lives.