WELCOME TO MY HOUSE! ENTER FREELY OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL! : LITERARY EXPERIENCE AND THRESHOLD CONCEPTS

“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!” He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince. - Bram Stoker, Dracula An interrogation of the idea of “threshold concepts” might usefully start from the metaphoric nature of the description of the concept itself. Of course, the analysis of figurative language is the business of Literary Studies. This presentation will demonstrate the usefulness of using literary concepts and methods to consider the teaching encounter and, specifically, to consider the idea of threshold concepts. The paper will consider the experience of liminality as central to the learning experience and will offer examples of literary texts that not only describe liminal experiences but also, in themselves, involve the reader enacting such experiences in the process of reading. In this way, the paper proposes a similarity between the act of reading and the act of learning and, in making this analogy, offers a new way of understanding the place of thresholds in thinking about teaching and learning. At their core, both reading and learning seem to involve moments of self-forgetfulness and yet both draw on and contribute to the ongoing process of identity formation; in this way, both reading and learning seem to involve the self and other at the same time. This paper will seek to illustrate this curious dynamic in order better to understand it.