Literature Is Dead; Long Live Reading!
Over the course of several entries on this blog, I’ve called into question the value of traditional approaches to teaching literature. My objection has been two-fold:
- It’s a shame to ruin perfectly good literature by force-feeding it to students. Worse, doing so inspires in those students a distaste for reading, so they’ll avoid other good literature in the future.
- The choice of texts is always motivated by agendas imposed both by cultural assumptions (”Everyone should experience Anne Frank’s story”) and market forces (”Our competitors include ‘Flowers for Algernon’ in their texts, so we can’t afford not to”).
As we travel forward into the Information Age, both of these objections become increasingly significant.
We can’t afford to persuade anyone—not anyone—that reading is dull or onerous. The Information Age depends predominantly upon reading—an active, engaged investigation of collected human knowledge. No one can learn or understand all that collected knowledge, so what is essential is the ability to find what is applicable to the current task, to “mashup” concepts and details in new ways for new insights.
Nor can we assume that a few specific texts will convey a cultural unity the way they once did. The world is growing too small for regionalism. Tomorrow’s citizens—today’s students—must have the skills to recognize a difference of understanding/opinion between themselves and whomever they might meet (from next-door neighbor to a blogger from halfway around the world), to investigate the reasons for that difference, and to use the gathered information to bridge the gap between them.
Notice how similar are the required skills described in both of the previous paragraphs.
Now, having said all that, I’ll make one concession. There is nothing wrong with a teacher introducing a class to a piece of literature of his/her choice—as a fellow reader in a workshop environment. Literature is meant to be shared, as one friend to another.
It just isn’t meant to be imposed, like a regent to his/her subjects.
—Les
October 18th, 2008 at 9:31 am
I hear what you’re saying. I lament the fact that we cannot have some kind of cultural unity.
I would suggest, however, that the class can have a shared experience and that might suffice. Of course, my ideal of a shared context may run afoul of my personal experience. I formed an after-hours reading group with my editorial staff. They wanted to start with Capote’s In Cold Blood and, even though I consider the book to be neither fish nor fowl, I acquiesced. I even gained from rereading the book. We had a great discussion and then, we debated what we should read next.
One faction was adamant that we should read Frank Millers 300 while another faction felt that was frivolous. Another faction wanted to read Kafka or Dostoevsky while another felt like their subjects were so dark that it would be depressing after Capote’s rather dreary exercise. I foolishly suggested F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. I say “foolishly” because the bulk of the editorial staff was a group of 20-somethings and neither the protagonists nor the author’s take on them offered any appeal to the bulk of the group. My suggestion disintegrated the group. Perhaps, as the boss, it felt like I had imposed the title, but I didn’t. I would have been much happier with exposing them to Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, or Upton Sinclair. Of course, if Fitzgerald didn’t float their boat, the muckrakers would have sunk their boat in even deeper fathoms.
Now, I find it ironic that a group of professional writers didn’t groove with Fitzgerald. In retrospect, I wish we’d done the graphic novel just for variety. So, I understand your dislike of literary imposition. I just wish it didn’t have to be so. I took a special studies course in Hawthorne and Henry James when I was working on my B.A. I wanted Hawthorne, but didn’t want James. In retrospect, I still like Hawthorne better than James, but I am so glad I had that concentrated experience with James. By the way, I like Daisy Miller and The Aspern Papers better than Turn of the Screw and The Ambassadors significantly better than Portrait of a Lady. I doubt if I would have read more than one novel by James had they not been “imposed.” I’m glad to have those experiences in my database. There must be a balance here somewhere.
November 13th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Johnny:
I’m currently reading Of Human Bondage because my daughter is reading it, and I had a copy available (the title having caught my eye a few years ago). My daughter is reading it because one of her friends read it a while back. This sequence demonstrates, of course, the sort of pass-it-along interest in reading proposed in the blog post above.
While reading this novel, however, I’m struck by how embedded it is in its own time period. If I weren’t already cognizant of the history, the book wouldn’t really mean much. Some other tales (Heart of Darkness, for instance) are more timeless.
On the way to work this morning, I was reflecting on the French and German in Of Human Bondage, then on an old friend’s insistence that only Latin is really worth studying, then on my wish that Esperanto had caught on as a neutral meeting ground, and finally on the fact that Latin used to serve that purpose.
It was, however, a language of scholars, and Dante and Luther killed it. Since that time, a democratization of knowledge has seemed to battle against the idea of a core set of classics. It becomes ever more difficult to defend a choice of which titles to impose on students.
My opinion is that the time has come to stop trying. Recommend, yes; impose, no. Speaking to your own experience, if you hadn’t read those novels by James, I’m sure you would have read something equally valuable. (And you might even have discovered James at a later point in life.)