Reader Response of Toni Morrison - Teaching Controversy

When it comes to teaching in our English Language Arts and Reading classrooms, reader response is probably the most practiced technique to creating literary analysis. In secondary English classrooms, teachers select texts that engage with a variety of controversial topics. From coming of age novels to texts about brutality, teachers are given the opportunity to discuss these matters with students in an environment where they gain their own voice through writing. Yes, teachers have overused reader response to distinguish textual meaning, however there is still some merit in reader response and teaching controversial novels. Based on Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, where the text and reader will each have a unique interaction with each other, journals allow students to experience extreme emotion through the work of Toni Morrison.

            Two novels that are widely used among American Studies literature and are banned in some districts are Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize wining American novelist. She is known for her epic themes, exquisite language, and African American characters, which are central to the narrative. Her novel, The Bluest Eye, teachers utilize reader response as a means to have the student react to their experience reading the graphic language. In the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 1993 issue, a 11^th/12 grade teacher describes her time teaching the novel and dealing with it’s controversy. In the novel, students are exposed to graphic sexual language and even a brutal rape between a father and daughter. Teachers, specifically English, have to be careful with the content they choose and the reception of the students/parents. In order to understand the student’s perspective of these sensitive topics, the teacher learned not only the maturity within her students, but their capacity to relate their emotions to the text. The Bluest Eye emphasizes American idealism versus harsh reality. With this in mind, students were able to respond to topics such as dreams, the abused becoming the abuser, disappointment, rape, and even the act of emotional love becoming only physical love.

 In Morrison’s Beloved, students are able to use reader response to not only make predictions, but to grapple with Morrison’s linguistic ability to relate to the past. In the 1998 NCTE issue, reader response was utilized in Morrison’s Beloved as a means to creating discussion among classrooms. Students utilized their journals to make reactions to their reading and ask questions they encountered with the reading. Again, students took notice of Morrison’s literary techniques and were able to construct a similar structure within her novel. To emphasize meaning, narratology is a form of structuralism, used by Morrison, which allows the reader to gain a unique meaning based on the character speaking in the novel. In all, through the use of reader response journals, teachers were able to derive classroom discussion based on her students findings.

Gaining a better understanding of a student’s perspective is crucial to a secondary English teacher. In general, teachers must be able to help their students and teachers need a baseline to what a student knows or doesn’t. Although reader response is used more nonsensically in a classroom, they still have a merit. English teachers strive to not only create literary scholars, but independent and self-reliant thinkers who employ language and literature to enrich their lives. Reader response journals are a great tool for engagement and allow for teachers to gain a sense of what their student’s interpretation is of the work.