ABSTRACT
School English is compulsory in most English speaking countries up to the last years of schooling, providing evidence for its status as a subject of significance. In practice, school English has several components, for, like the university studies from which it derives, it exhibits a ‘horizontal knowledge structure’ (Bernstein 2000), with segmented and often incompatible areas of interest (Christie 2012; Christie and Macken-Horarik 2009, 2011). These include, for example, school English literary studies (henceforth SELS), essay writing about social issues, discussion of visual images including films, or producing speeches and other oral presentations about various topics. In addition, in many jurisdictions, such as the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW Board of Studies 2015), there are available units of study beyond compulsory units, for interested students to pursue an expanded range of literary texts or engage in creative writing of stories or poems. My concern here is with papers common to all students in the last years of secondary schooling and, specifically, the literary component examined in these papers. I explore SELS because, despite the range of areas now taught as subject English, literary studies appears to have enduring value. Curriculum documents on official websites across the Anglophone world reveal that, though often proposing a range of texts, what some call the ‘literary canon’ or ‘literary heritage’ remains well established. Why does SELS receive such continuing attention? What constitutes success in SELS? How can we characterize the knowledge practices of SELS? I argue that a reading of questions set in SELS in senior years reveals that, while students are apparently asked to develop ‘personal opinions’ about literature, in fact they are required to express judgements shared with the imagined examiner. A shared set of culturally-valued understandings about life and human behaviour is what is at issue. To express such understandings students must acquire an appropriate ‘gaze’ on the story. ‘Gazes’ vary in nature depending on the subject of inquiry (see Maton 2010, 2014b). With SELS the ‘gaze’ involves the cultivation of a particular attitudinal stance towards a literary text and a set of procedures for its expression.
