peeling the onion: student teachers' of literary understanding

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Peeling the Onion: Studentteachers' of literaryunderstandingMaj Asplund Carlsson a , Márta Fülüp b & FerenceMarton aa Department of Education , GöteborgUniversity , PO Box 300, Göteborg, SE-405 30,Swedenb Institute for Psychology , Hungarian Academyof Sciences , PO Box 398, Budapest, H-1394,HungaryPublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Maj Asplund Carlsson , Márta Fülüp & Ference Marton (2001)Peeling the Onion: Student teachers' of literary understanding, ScandinavianJournal of Educational Research, 45:1, 5-18, DOI: 10.1080/00313830020023366

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Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2001

Peeling the Onion: student teachers’conceptions of literary understandingMAJ ASPLUND CARLSSONDepartment of Education, Goteborg University, PO Box 300, SE-405 30 Goteborg,Sweden

MARTA FULOPInstitute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, PO Box 398, H-1394Budapest, Hungary

FERENCE MARTONDepartment of Education, Goteborg University, PO Box 300, SE-405 30 Goteborg,Sweden

ABSTRACT Literary understanding can be studied not only as a theory of literature but alsoas a practice among readers. The purpose of this study is to gain an insight into what personaltheories student teachers hold about literary understanding, since the way a teacher conceptu-alises a problem has an in� uence on students’ learning of literature. Two separate studies werecarried out of how student teachers in two cultures, the Hungarian and the Swedish, understandthe concept of literary understanding. Twenty-� ve Hungarian and eight Swedish students wereinterviewed and the interviews were transcribed and analysed according to the phenomeno-graphic method of qualitative analysis. The student teachers’ conceptions were captured in twosets of categories describing how understanding took place and what they had understood. Thedescriptions of the process of understanding were then characterised in four qualitatively differentcategories: understanding as a linear process, understanding as a vertical process, understandingas a process of discernment and, � nally, understanding through variation. The descriptions ofthe outcome of understanding were also characterised in four qualitatively different categories:as the author’s intended meaning, as textual meaning, as a personal meaning and as thelegitimate meaning. The categories found capture a substantial proportion of the potentialvariation in how literary understanding can be seen. The three central aspects of humanawareness and understanding, variation, discernment and simultaneity, can all be found in thestudents’ conceptions of literary understanding.

Key words: Literary understanding; phenomenography; comparative study; teacher education.

BACKGROUND

In the empirical study of literature the study of literary understanding has so far toa great extent focused on readers’ cognitive processes and schemata (Zwaan, 1993).

ISSN 0031-3831 print; ISSN 1430-1170 online/01/010005-14 Ó 2001 Scandinavian Journal of Educational ResearchDOI: 10.1080/00313830020023366

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6 M. A. Carlsson et al.

This scienti� c enterprise has been directed towards the processes and outcome ofliterary understanding as it is re� ected through various research procedures; thinkaloud protocols, reading journals, interviews, etc. (Beach & Hynds, 1993). Literaryunderstanding has also been subject to theoretical and philosophical studies (Eagle-ton, 1989). Much of this work has become a vital part of the curriculum in literarystudies all over the world. Therefore, literary understanding can be seen as a � eld ofempirical study and a practice among readers, as well as a theoretical concern anda content of learning among students and teachers of literature.

The purpose of the two studies discussed in this paper was to gain an insightinto what kind of personal theories student teachers hold about literary understand-ing. The way a teacher, however, conceptualises a problem has an in� uence on thestudents’ responses to and learning of literature. Students may bene� t from theteacher modelling responses (Bell, 1988), they may simply mimic teachers’ re-sponses (Michalak, 1977) or they may reject them. It is anyway probable that theteacher’s conception of what it means to understand literature has some impact onthe students’ ways of understanding. From this point of view, it seemed fruitful totake a closer look at how young teachers in the making conceptualise literaryunderstanding. Two separate but similar studies of how student teachers in twocultures, the Hungarian and the Swedish, understand the concept of literary under-standing in their own contexts were thus implemented.

METHOD

The subjects were 25 Hungarian and eight Swedish student teachers from theuniversities of Budapest and Gothenburg. In both countries it takes several years(� ve in Hungary and four and a half in Sweden) to become an upper secondaryschool teacher. In Hungary the students practice teaching in their � nal year, whilein Sweden students practice for at least two weeks every semester until they passtheir exams. Both studies were carried out subsequent to a period of teachingpractice, since it seemed natural that the students in this context might have had anopportunity to re� ect upon and clarify their vague ideas about teaching, learning andunderstanding literature. We tried to catch them in a kind of self-re� ective phase oftheir education, although in the Hungarian study this took place in their � fth yearand in the Swedish study in their second year.

Procedure

The students were all interviewed in depth, the Hungarians by a trained psychologistand psychotherapist, Marta Fulop, and the Swedish students by a literary scholarand teacher, Maj Asplund Carlsson. The students were asked to give examples ofliterary texts they had understood or had not understood and examples of texts thatothers, fellow students or school children, had understood or had not understood.They were also asked to describe how they had managed to overcome dif� culties inunderstanding, how understanding could be characterised or how they could helpothers towards a (better) understanding. (The interview questions are given in

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Student Teachers’ Conceptions of Literary Understanding 7

Appendix I). The length of the interviews varied from 20 to 90 minutes; the Swedishones were rather shorter and the Hungarian ones longer. They were recorded andtranscribed verbatim.

The Analysis

Subsequently the transcripts were analysed according to the phenomenographicmethod of qualitative analysis (Marton, 1981, 1992). This is a research methoddesigned to discover and describe the qualitatively different ways in which phenom-ena that students encounter are experienced, conceptualised or understood. Wecollected all the statements concerning understanding from each interview andcompared statements between and within interviews.

In the analysis we were primarily looking for qualitative differences in the wayin which the students experienced the phenomenon of literary understanding. Thismeant focusing on differences and similarities in the answers. The evolving patternof differences and similarities was then captured in a set of categories of description.The categories of description were again applied to the data, which resulted inmodi� cation of the categories. The modi� ed categories were then applied to all thedata again, and so on. The results were arrived at through this iterative process. Inphenomenographic research the categories of description are seen as the main resultsand the analysis used to arrive at them is of a non-algorithmic nature.

The individual subjects could express several conceptions belonging to thedifferent categories of description very well. The categories of description are thusdecontextualised from the individual in one sense. A fundamental idea in phe-nomenography has been that once the categories of description are found, theycould be used by other researchers to characterise the data from which they evolvedor to characterise any other set of data generated by a replication of the experiment,although strict replication is not always feasible. Thus the categories of descriptionare supposed to be replicable, but the way in which they were found is not.

RESULTS

The phenomenon ‘literary understanding’ contains a relation in itself, i.e. betweenthe object of literature and the process of understanding. What we wished to studywas not how students experience understanding in general terms, but how theyexperience a particular kind of understanding, that of literature. Thus we found thatthe results of our interview studies could be well presented in a set of categories inliterary terms, i.e. in terms of the direct object of understanding. When the studentteachers described ‘literary understanding’ in literary terms, they described it interms of words, symbols, metaphors, images, characters, events, setting, allegory andcontext.

However, if we focus on the understanding, i.e. on the act rather than the directobject of ‘literary understanding’, we � nd that the students’ conceptions can bedescribed in two more sets of categories: describing their conceptions of the process

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of understanding, how understanding takes place and the outcome of understanding,what they have understood, which can be described as the indirect object ofunderstanding.

The Process of Literary Understanding

The student teachers’ descriptions of the act of understanding have been character-ised in terms of four qualitatively different categories: understanding as a linearprocess, understanding as a vertical process, understanding as a process of discern-ment and, � nally, understanding through variation. Within the � rst two maincategories several subcategories were found among the Hungarian students, who onthe whole were much more explicit than their Swedish fellow students as they madeuse of vivid metaphors.

The linear process. If we scrutinise the excerpts exemplifying this category with thethree subcategories, we become aware of a certain temporal dimension. Understand-ing a literary text is a process of putting a puzzle together, threading beads on anecklace or discovering new strata, one after the other, in a linear process. Since theinterview schema contained a particular question on re-reading texts, several stu-dents described how their understanding changed as they re-read texts in differentperiods of life.

1. Threading the beads. The process of understanding is a cooperation be-tween the author represented by the text and the reader. The text providesthe ‘main thread’, i.e. the key to understanding, and the reader is the onewho threads the beads onto it. According to this rather quantitative viewthere are a � nite number of messages in a text and if the reader does notloose them he can have the ‘necklace of proper understanding’.

Cecilia: Me and the author work together and construct the meaning, we‘prepare the necklace’. He is the one who puts the beads in myhand and I am the one who decides where to put them and I amthe one who decides if that particular bead is important for me ornot. Sometimes we lose the thread and it can be a kind of successif later we manage to � gure out where we have lost the preciousthread, the royal road to understanding. Only if we have acomplete necklace of beads can we say that we have understood.

2. Putting the puzzle together. Understanding is like taking the text apart,splitting it into separate parts and then putting them together again. Thepurpose of understanding is focused on the analysis of the smaller parts andthe recombination of them to form a whole again. However, no reader cantotally understand all the inherent messages, even if he manages to restorethe ‘whole’ picture again, as art is basically not understandable by nature.

Zsuzsa: I start with searching for meaningful things and I discover rulesthat have not been noticed before. I analyse, for example, whatthe structure or the pieces look like and how the author connects

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them to one another. Then I start to think about it and thensomehow I can combine them and I will have a general picture ofthe poem or novel. However, in spite of my best combination,which gives a general picture of the meaning of the literary work,it still cannot be the thing we strive for …

3. Having a cross-cut view. In this conception the literary text has different butequally important strata, which are parallel to each other. Every time areader reads the text a new stratum comes to the surface and becomesvisible. According to this view, the reader has a proper understanding onlywhen all these strata can be seen simultaneously, as when you cut somethinginto halves and see the different strata inside it.

Kornelia: Yes, one layer comes after another. Every time I read a book ora poem, a new line of thought comes into the focus of myattention, comes to the surface. Then I have to read and thinkit over many times… and yes, as this process of strati� cationgoes on you can almost see all the different strata togethersimultaneously. It is a kind of cross-section of all the possiblemeanings, as if you cut into halves something and you could seeall the different strata inside it … . And when this happens, atthat certain point, you can say, ‘Yes, I have understood it’.

Again, the temporality in this process is stressed. As a result of the process, onestratum is added to another and all the strata are present only in the � nal under-standing.

As far as this way of conceptualising the act of understanding is concerned, inaddition to the temporal dimension being present, the whole is seen as the sum ofits parts. Furthermore, all the parts have to be present simultaneously, as in aparticular pattern, in order to reach understanding.

The vertical process. This is an example of the notion that in the process ofunderstanding the reader proceeds from overt to hidden levels and goes deeper anddeeper into the text. Somehow there is a notion of a hierarchical dichotomy ofsurface versus deeper understanding underlying this conception. While the linearprocess emphasises the temporal dimension, a dimension of depth is more promi-nent in these categories. There are layers of meaning differing in depth. By passingthrough each one, the separate layers become integrated in the reader’s awareness.They are then tacit, implicit, taken for granted parts of the reader’s entire under-standing of the text. This is another way in which simultaneity is a de� ning featureof understanding.

1. Finding the core. According to this view, there is a core meaning in everyliterary work that is the same for everyone. To get to this core, to the ‘kernelof understanding’, one has to go through several layers of understandinguntil the centre, the essence, presents itself. Thus, one has � rstly to under-stand the less deep messages; the plot, the events that follow each other, etc.,

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everything that is on the surface. Only after grasping these is it possible tounderstand the hidden motives of the characters, to continue into deeperand deeper levels to � nally get to the kernel, the core of the text.

Ivan: Literary works, like every other work of art, has generally several,different possible understandings that differ in their depth. Theeasiest to understand is the exterior, the surface layers, because it ishighly evident. If we take a novel for instance, this upper layer is thestory itself: the scene, the characters and the con� icts evolvingamong them. You can easily understand a novel at this level.However, if we really want to catch the essence of a literary workand we really want to understand its core meaning, then we have towork more until we get to the core of it. But if we take the troubleto do so then we will have a long-lasting experience.

2. Peeling the onion. This conception is similar to ‘� nding the core’, but whilethe reader in both these categories goes into deeper and deeper levels ofunderstanding, there is no core in the middle, as in ‘peeling an onion’.According to this, understanding a text is a process which goes on foreverand although the reader gets more and more into the inside of the meaning,nobody can reach the essence as there are in� nite numbers of layers andthere is no stone or core in the middle, just as in an onion.

Fanny: When we read a book several times we understand it deeper anddeeper, but the greatest literary works especially have an endlessnumber of layers and so you can never say that I am at theessence. There is nothing in the middle, as in an onion.

3. The blooming � ower. This conception is in a sense the opposite of ‘� ndingthe core’ or ‘peeling the onion’. Understanding is not conceived of as aprocess going from the outside to the inside, but vice versa. First, the readerunderstands the central meaning, which is objective and has the samemeaning for every reader, and then he adds his own experiences andassociations to this core and creates an ever developing blooming of mean-ing.

Ildiko: You understand literature step by step. Understanding literature islike a bud that turns to be a rose. This is a slower process, I meanthe blooming and blossoming of the bud. But you have the budfrom the beginning. It can be there, it can be beautiful in itself andit is already understanding in itself.

This way of thinking about literary understanding, as a vertical process, is phrasedin terms of alternative ways of making sense of the text, hierarchically ordered and,in the case of the � rst two categories, a process from the outside to the inside. Theidea that understanding proceeds from the inside to the outside is only mentionedin the third category, according to which an understanding can be seen as the sumof a common core and a personal part.

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Discerning focal points and forceful features. According to this view there is a continu-ous linear process going on at different levels simultaneously. The reader takes intoaccount the whole meaning of the text, but there are certain kinds of discontinuitiesin this process; there are certain focal points. These focal points organise themselvesinto patterns of understanding, but these patterns are special and construed by theindividual reader, constituting a personal meaning. Many examples are also given ofsudden understanding as an ‘aha experience’, which implies an irreversible leap froma state of not understanding to a state of understanding,

Tibor: When you are reading the text you are above all receptive, but in thebackground there is a kind of continuous processing and evaluation:‘Yes, I know where to put this. Yes, I like this and I do not like that.Yes, I understand what it is about’, etc. If I stopped I could retell thestory, too. But in the course of this process going on in the back-ground there are focal points that somehow organise the whole intoa higher understanding. These focal points make the text into apersonal experience, and these points make the experience into apersonal revelation. The experiences organise themselves aroundone or more focal points and these are the moments of real personalexperience …. After a while these focal points can suddenly becombined and organised into patterns and this is the essence of theexperience of reading and gives the reader surplus energy to con-tinue.

In this case the simultaneous experience of a number of focal points in a certainpattern is stressed. The whole is thus more than a sum of its parts. The crucialconstituent parts have to be discerned and experienced in a particular way. Discern-ment and simultaneity are vital.

The process of intersubjective variation. Some students mention the group, or class,as a means of understanding, i.e. you do not understand until you have discussed thetext with others. This experience of literary understanding has to do with theconception that there is a variation in textual meaning and that no single readingcould do a text justice or no single reader can understand the meaning of a text, butthat a group can widen your understanding of it.

Disa: When I have read a text and I think I understand it, then that is truefor me, and maybe it isn’t true, until I have discussed it in class, whenI realise that I haven’t understood it at all in the same way as theothers have, but that depends on whether you see understanding assomething for the individual or something in relation to other individ-uals.

As in the second way of conceptualising the act of literary understanding, here againwe are dealing with different wholes, i.e. alternative ways of making sense of the text.The variation is thus social and simultaneous, rather than individual and distributedover time.

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The Outcome of Understanding

What a student has understood when reading a text is a result of the process ofreading and is expressed in terms of literary meaning. The outcome of understand-ing is presented in four qualitatively different categories of description; as theauthor’s intended meaning, as textual meaning, as a personal meaning and as thelegitimate meaning.

The author’s intended meaning. Although recent literary scholarship, in the form ofpost-structuralism and deconstruction, has claimed that the author’s intention witha text is not the main point of interest in literary studies, student teachers seem tothink differently on this matter in connection with their own education. On one levelmost students will not accept the notion that the meaning of a text is the author’sintended meaning, but on another level, when discussing their textual experiences,they admit that the author has some intention with his text, which might be the corethey strive for.

Beata: We have worked a lot with Far och Fjag (Father and Me) by ParLagerkvist in many different courses. Yes, I do think I understand it.I think, personally I think so because I can’t know, I can’t ask ParLagerkvist, but I think I understand what he wants to say, I haveunderstood how he has worked it all out with this mirror-likeconstruction, the simple and naive language, the whole way. That Ithink I can say that I understand.

Textual meaning or how the text is made. The students expressing this conceptiondescribe to a great extent both the workings of the text on the reader, as in theexcerpt below, but also how the text is made up by the author in order to producea certain response. Therefore both writer and reader of the text are playing theirparts in this kind of understanding.

Fanny: I really like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and it was above allher way of writing, the inner monologue and the changing perspec-tive and how she as the author can coax me as the reader and takeme into the text on her conditions. And I thought that was reallygreat to get to know.

It may seem that the textual meaning and the author’s intended meaning areclosely related. Both conceive of meaning as part of the author’s invention, while the� rst category places the meaning in the text, as re� ected in the way in which the textis constituted, and the other category puts the meaning more in the author’s subjectat a speci� c point in time. The two categories also contain a difference in kind asregards the reader’s level of awareness. While an author’s intentions lie open to thereader in the message, the textual meaning is how the text tacitly operates on thereader’s mind.

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Personal meaning. Personal meaning is essentially a relation between text andreader. It is often described as an aha experience, an experience of sudden insightwith deep relevance to the reader.

I: What do you mean by understanding a literary text?Anna: I mean when the text has something to tell me, that I � nd it meaningful

in some way.I: You point out that you � nd it meaningful.Anna: Yes, because I think that every person can understand texts in different

ways.I: And when you have understood a text, it speaks to you in a special way?Anna: It has some sort of connection with me or with my life.

Anna is very speci� c about understanding and what will come out of it; her personalunderstanding or the meaning for her. She returns to this issue several times duringthe interview, in which she talks strongly against an author meaning or the teacher’sway of forcing an accepted meaning on the students.

As pointed out above, personal meaning is often described as an aha experience,where a sudden implication of the text reaches the reader. The text becomesmeaningful, whereas it has been totally meaningless before this experience. Sincereaders change in an in� nite process, so does personal meaning, and a text canbecome meaningless again.

The legitimate meaning. As the interviewer asked Carl how he knew that he hadunderstood a literary text, he replied:

A very good question, you hardly know that, if you don’t want to go to theauthorities, if it is a question of well-known literary texts, this is the way itshould be read, without doing anything like that it is fairly dif� cult.

Carl is the only student who refers back to a legitimate meaning, which is neitherpersonal nor textual but rather a result of scholarly work which others have carriedout and that are part of the literary tradition. This meaning is ‘the best’ and whatteachers keep in their back pocket while letting students try to � nd out a meaningon their own.

If we compare these four ways of understanding in terms of literary meaning, wenotice that both the category of personal meaning and the category of textualmeaning put an emphasis on the reader, whereas the category of author intentionessentially re� ects the relation between author and text. This relation is also implicitin the last category, since the legitimate meaning is often a consideration of theauthor in a wider sense, his period, the genre and the social and political climate atthe time of creation. Most of the examples which Carl gives us deal with the originof the texts and although we can be misled into believing that it has something todo with the negotiations of the intersubjective marketplace of literary meaning, theinterpretations described in the examples actually have more to do with the authorsthan with readers or critics.

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The Relation of Process and Outcome

How then are the categories of process related to the categories of meaning? Doesone or the other speci� c process result in one or the other speci� c outcome?Theoretically, the four different processes and the four different outcomes wouldentail 16 combinations. Empirically, however, with our limited number of subjects,only some combinations have been found.

Since we have a particular question on the issue of re-reading texts, manystudents have examples of gaining a better or different understanding of texts as timegoes by. What they have understood in this process, the outcome in the form of asolved ‘puzzle’, a peeled ‘onion’ or a � nished ‘necklace’, is less focused in theiranswers. It could imply a personal understanding, but it could also be the author’sintention, which has been made more apparent. One can say that the linear process,which is an intra-subjective variational process also varies the several meanings of aliterary work. Thus, the nature of the process itself elicits a variation in outcome.

The same goes for the process of vertical understanding, where going deeperand deeper into the text could imply a change of meaning, from personal toauthorial, from authorial to textual or even from legitimate to personal, where thedifferent meanings are seen as more super� cial or more hidden, deeper. In all thesecases the ‘deeper’ meaning is considered better than the more super� cial by thestudents. The fourth category of inter-subjective variation could have exactly thesame effects of eliciting different kinds of meaning to a literary work.

The only exception is the leap or aha experience, since this process entails atransition from not understanding to understanding. The outcome of this under-standing is logically just as open as the others, but empirically it is more connectedwith a personal understanding or the author’s meaning. Identi� cation with acharacter or solving an allegorical puzzle are such examples, while becoming awareof the legitimate meaning is never connected with an aha experience, in theseinterviews at least.

If we turn our way of reasoning the other way around and take a closer look atthree students who are different in their inclinations towards certain kinds ofunderstanding, we may discuss whether a certain way of understanding is the resultof some processes but not others. We have Anna, who exclusively accepts personalunderstanding, Beata, who mainly focuses on authorial and textual meaning andCarl, who is the advocate of the legitimate meaning. These are their main issues inthe discussion, although they may also admit the existence of other ways ofunderstanding, which shows that although the same student could express severaldifferent ways of literary understanding, they have an idea of hierarchy, that one wayof understanding is superior in comparison.

Anna mentions texts which either have or do not have a personal meaning forher and she claims that she has reached this understanding through several pro-cesses. Through returning to a text several times she has either retained, changed orgained a personal understanding of it; she has also experienced a leap into personalunderstanding in one reading and tried to help others to a personal understandingthrough discussion.

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Beata also has examples of different processes when reaching an understandingof the author’s intentions and the ways in which texts are made. However, shemainly mentions the vertical process and variation when understanding the (deep)authorial or textual meaning. She has one example, though, of grasping the author’sintention in a leap when having � nished a novel by Eyvind Johnson, consisting ofmore than 1000 pages.

One interesting issue is when the students discuss texts they or their fellowstudents have not understood. They then have an idea of what there is to understandin the text, but since no understanding took place, they cannot give a description ofa process, except as a proposal. The suggestions they make are either re-reading, (alinear process), a more careful and probing reading (a vertical process) or a groupdiscussion (a variation), since an aha experience can never be arranged. Thus itseems that an absolute connection between one process or the other and a speci� coutcome does not exist a priori.

DISCUSSION

In phenomenographic research the categories of description are not predetermined,but are found in the analysis of the interview transcripts. The ideal is that once thecategories are found, they can be used to characterise data from a replicate study.On the other hand, new data might not always � t into these categories. In AsplundCarlsson et al. (1996), for instance, we found that a group of Chinese childrenanswered in a way which was different from a group of Swedish children in aprevious study (Pramling et al., 1994) and the category system had to be changedaccordingly.

The Hungarian study (Fulop, 1995) was carried out before the Swedish studyand even though we applied the same design in Sweden (Asplund Carlsson, 1996),we found that using the phenomenographic method of analysis on the two studiesseparately we ended up with two separate category systems with some overlap. Inthis article the two sets of categories have been merged.

In characterising the conceptions of the process of literary understanding, weretained the Hungarian way of describing the process in metaphors, although thisway of description was absent in the Swedish responses. The Hungarian studentswere most elaborate on this point, although their conceptions could only becategorised in the � rst three main categories. One could say that the Hungariansstudents in this study were more process-oriented.

The fourth category, the process of intersubjective variation, was not be foundamong the Hungarian subjects. One explanation could be that in the Hungariansample understanding a text by the help of other readers’ ideas becomes importantonly when the individual process of understanding is inhibited or unsuccessful, andonly as a facilitator of their own personal process of understanding. Literaryunderstanding among the Hungarian students seemed to be more of a dialoguebetween the individual reader and the text than in the Swedish sample, whereliterary understanding was more the product of social experience.

The Swedish students were, on the whole, far more text focused and told the

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interviewer using examples from different texts what they had understood in them.Therefore, it was possible to categorise their conceptions of outcome in fourdifferent categories. The Hungarian responses were more general and althoughconceptions from three categories could be found in the Hungarian sample, thecategory ‘textual meaning’ could not be applied.

We therefore claim that even if a new study is a replicate of a previous one, datacannot be categorised beforehand, but have to be taken into consideration intheir own right. Thus, a study of student teachers’ conceptions of literary under-standing cannot be characterised in advance on the basis of either the theory ofliterary understanding, although there are some connecting points between thetheory and the conceptions found, or a similar study of the same design or with asimilar focus.

The goals and the practice of teaching literature are kept up to date in bothHungary and Sweden. Although the subjects in the two groups had undergone asimilar education in their respective groups, the variation in conceptions of literaryunderstanding covers the whole range of literary theory from ‘the author’s intention’over ‘the socially accepted interpretation’ to ‘personal understanding’.

Teachers of literature have a notion that there is one way of literary understand-ing which is prevalent in the community of literary scholars, i.e. their own (AsplundCarlsson, 1986). They are also convinced that this way of understanding is whatthey teach. After having carried out this study we are convinced, on the contrary,that there are a whole variety of conceptions of literary understanding and thatteachers do not always teach what they think is the proper way of understandingliterature, but also show great variation in their teaching. Texts are different andsome ways of understanding are more relevant with some texts than with others. Onthe other hand, the categories were found in connection with different texts. Takentogether they capture, in all likelihood, a substantial proportion of the potentialvariation in how literary understanding is seen and can be seen.

On a more general level, it is interesting to notice that Marton & Fazey (1997)have recently addressed the idea that understanding in a general sense can be seenas the space of variation experienced. If we look at the categories that depict thedifferent ways in which the students make sense of the act of literary understandingwe can conclude that the variation is at the core of the last of the four different waysidenti� ed (‘the process of inter-subjective variation’). While in this case the variationis between different readers, in the second way of making sense of the act of literaryunderstanding (‘the vertical process’) we � nd variation between the same reader’sdiffering understandings of the same text. Furthermore, in the third conception(‘discerning focal points and forceful features’), as the very wording of the categoryimplies, discernment is a de� ning feature. And in all four different ways of concep-tualising literary understanding simultaneity is a fundamental aspect, sometimesbetween constituent parts on the same level, but other times between constituentparts on different levels, forming a � gure–ground relation. In the � rst case theremust be a simultaneous experience of the different constituent parts; in the secondbetween one’s own different understandings, which become successively integratedand tacit, taken for granted and, hence, form a � gure–ground relation with the way

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of understanding arrived at eventually; in the third between the focal points dis-cerned; in the fourth various readers’ differing understandings.

Marton & Booth (1997) have, on theoretical and empirical grounds, advancedthe idea that the three central aspects of human awareness (including humanunderstanding) are variation, discernment and simultaneity. Intuitively, and implic-itly, the students participating in the two studies reported in this paper seem to havearrived at a similar conclusion.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The research reported here has been � nancially supported by a grant from TheWilhelm and Martina Lundgren’s Scienti� c Fund.

REFERENCES

ASPLUND CARLSSON, M. (1986). ‘Krossa bokstavlarna’ i klassrummet: Larare, forskare och elever laserEkelof [‘Crush the letters’ in the classroom: Teachers, researchers and students read poetry byEkelof, in Swedish]. Svensklararen, 3, 23–25.

ASPLUND CARLSSON, M. (1996). Like peeling an onion? Student teachers’ conceptions of literaryunderstanding. Paper presented at The Conference for Knowledge Formation through Research andTeaching, June 6–9, Tanum Strand, Sweden.

ASPLUND CARLSSON, M., PRAMLING, I., WEN, Q. & IZUMI, C. (1996). Understanding a tale in Sweden,Japan and China. Early Child Development and Care, 120, 17–28.

BEACH, R. & HYNDS, S. (1993). Research on response to literature. In R. BARR, M.L. KAMIL, P.B.MOSENTHAL & P.D. PEARSON (Eds), Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. II, pp. 453–489. NewYork, NY: Longman.

BELL, R. (1988). Four readers reading. In M. BENTON, J. TEARY, R. BELL & K. HURST (Eds), YoungReaders Responding to Poems, pp. 88–156.New York, NY: Longman.

EAGLETON, T. (1989). Literary Theory: an introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.FULOP, M. (1995). Hungarian students’ concepts on understanding literature. Paper presented at the

6th European Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction, August 26–31, Nijmegen, TheNetherlands.

MARTON. F. (1981). Phenomenography—describing conceptions of the world around us. InstructionalScience, 10, 177–200.

MARTON, F. (1992). Phenomenography and ‘the art of teaching all things to all men’. Qualitative Studiesin Education, 5, 253–267.

MARTON, F. & BOOTH, S. (1997). Learning and Awareness. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.MARTON, F. & FAZEY, J. (1997). Understanding as the space of variation experienced. (manuscript).MICHALAK, D.A. (1977). The effect of instruction in literature on High School students’ preferred way

of responding. Dissertation, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (Dissertation AbstractsInternational, 37, 4829A).

PRAMLING, I., ASPLUND CARLSSON, M. & KLERFELT, A. (1994). Learning from a tale. How childrenunderstand ‘The Giving Tree’. Swedish Library Research, 5, 65–72.

ZWAAN, R.A. (1993). Aspects of Literary Comprehension. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

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APPENDIX I. INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

I would like to ask you some questions since I am interested in how people think about the things weare going to talk about. It is not a matter of being right or wrong, I am simply curious about howpeople think about understanding literature.

When I say ‘learning literature’, what do you mean by that?Can you give me any examples of instances when you have learnt literature?What do think that ‘understanding literature’ implies?Could you give me some examples of when you understood a literary text?How do you know that you have understood a literary text? How do you characterise this understanding?

What happens when you understand?How do you know that someone else, for instance a student, has understood a literary text? Could you

give me some examples?Is there anything that would help you in understanding a literary text? Is there anything that would

prevent your ability to understand?Could you give me some examples of when it was easy for you to understand a literary text? Was it

possible for you to achieve understanding? What made you achieve understanding in this case?Could you give me some examples of when someone else had dif� culties in understanding a literary text?

Did you try to facilitate his/her understanding, and if yes; how?Is there a literary text which you have read several times? What was your reason for doing so? What

happened to your understanding?Are there differences between different kinds of literary texts (drama, novel, short story and poetry) in

terms of understanding?Can you give me an example of when you have understood something which is not just a literary text?

How can understanding literature and understanding other things be compared?

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peeling the onion: student teachers' of literary understanding

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