Some Key Threshold Concepts for English

Why is English as a subject, with its vigilant regard for language and stories, so bad at writing its own narrative? Can we articulate with confidence what knowledge in English yields the greatest cognitive benefit? Perhaps our curse is that we have swathes of wonderful but quite random content at our disposal. What should students be expected to know, to do and to believe? Surely the concepts that matter are the ones that students really need to engage with most often? These are the powerful transformative ideas, the ways of thinking, perceiving and apprehending that must help us to cohere and conceptualise our discipline.

It is, I hope, a given that we need to be able to help our learners develop and challenge complex ideas, recognise and accept ambiguity, explore authorial values and bias and attack texts from as many angles as possible. They need to know how to pull apart concepts and ideas through language. We must help them study the form, structure and rhetoric of texts, and to understand the social provenance and cultures of which they are a part. But this doesn’t help us to actually tighten up and give English a direction. These are not the Meyer and Land ‘threshold’ concepts. The core. Put another way – where exactly are students meeting troublesome knowledge and experiencing some conceptual difficulty? Exactly which concepts will generate ‘leaps in learning’? What are the terms that help to shape our own knowledge and way of thinking? Writers, critics and teachers alike are conscious of belonging to a tradition that goes back at least as far as Aristotle. English owes a great deal to such antecedents, so perhaps there is a good place to begin.

Aristotelian poetics and threshold concepts

The Poetics (c. 335 BC) was Aristotle’s attempt to define and explain the basic problems of art. He offers criteria for determining the quality and unity of a given artwork. It must have an imitative nature and an ability to bring an audience into its specific ‘plot’ while preserving a unity of purpose and theme. He suggests five key headings: Mythos, mimesis, catharsis, phronesis and ethos (essentially, plot, re-creation, release, wisdom and ethics). These perhaps offer a very significant basis to think about threshold concepts for students studying English. What could be the necessary student understanding is highlighted below in bold italics and an example from literature is given as an illustration.

Mythos 

This is highlighting the nature of a crafted storied structure. Things don’t just happen. Students need to understand that any plotted action is deliberate, orientated and cumulative. Every narrative has a constructed unity for a pay-off impact, and is told to us from a certain perspective and with a certain style. This could be in a particular genre, ranging from the epic to the digital, from text to hypertext, and should allow readers to see how past, present and future are interwoven by the writer. It does not mean that a writer controls our responses. Indeed, as Valery commented, ‘our memory repeats to us what we haven’t understood’ (1957), and Lawrence talked about writing being a means of shedding sicknesses (1981). Writers may well not have the control that they think. Nevertheless, all of these plot elements (as a synthesis of character, action, and thought) should coalesce to work towards a central theme or purpose, designed to affect the audience’s emotions in a particular way.

Example. When in the final moments of Act 5 in The Winter’s Tale Hermione’s statue comes to life, we need to understand that it is part of a carefully constructed Resurrection myth, plotted by Shakespeare to generate an experience of wonder and renewal. If this be magic let it be an art lawful as eating. Everything in the play has prepared us for the miraculous, the power of the word to create and to heal. 

Catharsis 

This is focusing on our capacity for emotional recognition. Our lives are a living drama. Students need to understand the roles of empathy and detachment in acknowledging the value of the lives of others. Stories can alter us by transporting us to other places and to experience things outside of our own pain. It encourages in us a compassion and empathy to know what it might feel like to live in someone else’s skin (albeit vicariously), as well as the detachment of the spectator to be able to recognise their existence as another. It does not mean that we should be offered false closures or remedies. Aristotle said that ‘pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves’ (Poetics) while Shakespeare simply wanted us ‘to feel what wretches feel’ (King Lear). 

Example. We need to suffer by being involved as well as to understand through being protected by distance. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner lends an impressive moral authority to both the sinner and to the witness. The mariner killed the Albatross, survived his innocent fellow sailors and his only relief is in the form of a witnessed confession. He becomes the medium of revelation and emotional truth.

Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns,
And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns. (Coleridge 1834)

Ethos 

This is essentially exploring the nature of evaluative charge. This forms part of our moral vocabulary. Students need to understand that every story carries with it its own values and emotional loading. Each narrative proposes its own weightings regarding the moral worth of its characters, ostensibly offered for readers to choose from. Aristotle points out that there is an employed relationship between character, virtue and fortune (Nicomachean Ethics). The scales of justice are weighted, and every story is loaded, but not necessarily by the writer’s original intentions. The writer can share an ethical viewpoint on the world and offer it up for the reader to relate back to their own life, but we can still choose from the variety of ethical options on show.

Example. Atticus Finch may be required to carry the heavy moral loading being suggested through the way To Kill A Mockingbird is written and structured by Harper Lee, but the final choice is still ours. As Hamlet points out, ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ It is up to us to stitch together an account of who we are and what we stand for.

Mimesis 

This is a creative retelling of the world. There is no such thing as a passive copy of reality. Students need to understand that gaps appear between real worlds and the recounting and recreation of fictional worlds. Every narrative is told within a genre which carries with it expectation, style and point of view that all reframe our interpretations. Picasso commented that art was a lie that makes us realise truth (1980). We recreate to capture what Aristotle calls ‘the essence’ (eidos) of our existence, the inherent universals of life. He laid out the elements that a writer must follow, to imitate either things as they are, things as they are thought to be, or things as they ought to be. So, we re-make and re-enact our world and recognise our lives by carefully interweaving our past, present and future, seeking a direction and a potential truth.

Example. The fifth and final section of ‘Little Gidding’ (and all of Eliot’s significant work) ends by analysing the role of endings and beginnings themselves. Ezra Pound described a journey where the traveller ends up back where he started as a periplum and this idea is core to the poem’s most famous lines, We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. (Eliot)

Phronesis 

This is looking at Narrative Truth. These are the truths that may be seen as the prerogative of fiction. Students need to understand both the particular and universal credibility in anothers’ imagined world. They accord with the laws of that fictional world and enable us to read it and to know things about the wider world. In this way, stories can be seen as world-making as well as world-disclosing. These are not the truths of the exact sciences. Only by understanding both the singularity and the commonality of human actions can we begin to feel and know more about the world that we live in. We need to feel that anyone else’s situation should have a nascent value to all. Legitimacy should be the basis of narratives, not absolute certainty.

Example. Kundera (1979) comments on the noisy foolishness of seeking certainty. He argues that we should, like Don Quixote, go out into a world of mystery and not judge what we see before us. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. . . . The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.