How students in Eritrea and Norway make sense of literature.
This study explores how students at two institutions of teacher education, one in Norway and one in Eritrea, make sense of literature. The underlying assumption is that culture, especially how national identity is constructed, maintained and challenged, influences the discoursal positions and interpretive strategies available to readers. The students’ responses are analysed in the light of their national cultures and the social, educational and institutional contexts that they share.
The bulk of the research material is provided by twelve Eritrean and ten Norwegian students of English, who wrote about three Eritrean literary texts: a fable, a short prose narrative and a play. They also answered a questionnaire about their experience and expectations of literature. To contextualise the literary texts, I review the political and aesthetic space of literature in Eritrea, and provide an overview of Eritrean literature in English.
Both groups of students reported finding fiction useful for what they could learn, and the pleasure it gave them. Unlike the Norwegian students, the students in Eritrea looked to literature first and foremost with the expectation that it should contribute to upholding a better society and their own moral integrity. The students in Eritrea were confident about finding the meaning of the texts they read, using strategies apparently developed in earlier encounters with oral literature. The students in Norway were more likely to point out the individuality of their responses, acknowledging the possibility of there being other ways of understanding. The two groups responded most differently to the nationalist play The Other War. The students in Eritrea consistently reproduced a national narrative template whereas the preferred interpretive strategy of the students in Norway was to offer an understanding in terms of the characters’ interaction, emotions and earlier experiences.
Student texts provided a rich material and they were well suited to a research situation where transparency was an important consideration. A broader understanding of context than is usual in earlier studies of reading has proved conceptually valuable in accounting for the strategies and discoursal positions of the two interpretive communities.