My first “serious” post! This is a first attempt to get out some ideas I’ve developed over all the years I’ve spent studying literature. I was moved to write this post upon reading this article, which I largely agree with, but which DOES NOT GO FAR ENOUGH.
My grand manifesto (slash series of interconnected rants) (future TED Rant?) about the study of literature boils down to this: the study of literature is important; the study of specific works of literature is not.
We read because it’s fun. If it isn’t fun, the whole point kind of collapses. Fiction serves an important social role in expanding people’s empathy, yes, but the way it does that is by being gripping and engaging. So forcing people to read texts they don’t like because they’re “~*~100 BoOkS yOu HaVe To ReAd~*~” (did I make my disdain clear enough) (in addition to the caps lock button there should be a “camel case lock” button) (but I digress) – is not, as they say in the halls of academe, Good For The Humanities.
Why do we teach the analysis of literature? At the secondary-education level, I think we want to make sure everyone in the country comes out knowing:
–how to read clearly and comprehendingly (buhlike if my Harvard graduation is any guide, people are graduating from Harvard without this skill, so whoops);
–how to write clearly;
–how to think critically about texts. Texts, obviously, include song lyrics, company-wide memos, greeting cards, political speeches, etc. etc. The world is full of texts; you will encounter them. You will listen to a misogynistic pop song, hear sports announcers use words like “legend” and “leadership” and “hero”, have to figure out which politician is closest to your viewpoint when your viewpoint is too radical for any candidate to openly endorse – interpreting the use of language is not a dispensable skill. Language is everywhere and it is fundamental to living a full adult life that you be able to understand the subtexts underlying the explicit.
–how to read clearly and comprehendingly (buhlike if my Harvard graduation is any guide, people are graduating from Harvard without this skill, so whoops);
–how to write clearly;
–how to think critically about texts. Texts, obviously, include song lyrics, company-wide memos, greeting cards, political speeches, etc. etc. The world is full of texts; you will encounter them. You will listen to a misogynistic pop song, hear sports announcers use words like “legend” and “leadership” and “hero”, have to figure out which politician is closest to your viewpoint when your viewpoint is too radical for any candidate to openly endorse – interpreting the use of language is not a dispensable skill. Language is everywhere and it is fundamental to living a full adult life that you be able to understand the subtexts underlying the explicit.
But making sure everyone who graduates from high school *has read* To Kill a Mockingbird or (vom vom vom vom vom ugh ugh ugh) Catcher in the Rye – I fail to see the utility of that. If it’s a matter of making sure people share a vocabulary of cultural references, ugh fine sure whatever i guess, but then we should also have every high schooler read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day, because not a day goes by without some highly-placed pundit deploying the phrase, “X and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Y”. Anyway, “shared cultural vocabulary” strikes me as a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have. So people whose liberal education ends at 18 might not know that the phrase “give up the ghost” comes from Julius Caesar or be able to identify the Gettysburg Address. That’s a shame, but teaching them those things is competing with other things, like:
–Logic, in all its applications anywhere, STEM and otherwise – how to evaluate competing evidence and avoid common fallacies;
–What we know about the natural world, how we know that we know it, how to observe it;
–History, in all its complexity, interconnectedness, and effects on the present (and not just US History, and not just European history, ffs);
–The geopolitical world. How to fucking locate Ukraine on a fucking map.
–Maybe some math?
–A foreign language or two?
–Basic life skills like emailing, budgeting, nutrition, consent?
You see my point. There isn’t an infinite amount of time in which to teach what we need graduating high school seniors to know about how texts work. When people defend the teaching of Shakespeare, or any other “classic”, their point, other than shared cultural vocabulary (how “influential” he is), boils down to:
Shakespeare’s great!
Before I roll up my sleeves and get into this, let me just say: I love Shakespeare. As an actor, I love how memorable his language is; how vicious and savage his characters are; how he gives them, by and large, enough humanity to make his works malleable and enduring – The Merchant of Venice is a fundamentally
anti-Semitic work, but you can stage it in a way that isn’t anti-Semitic. My Facebook profile picture is of me playing Henry V.
But Shakespeare being great doesn’t make Shakespeare mandatory. Lord knows I would be so much happier if every English speaker knew how Early Modern English conjugation works, but again – nice to have, not need to have. And as for his greatness – that’s a matter of opinion. Literary greatness invariably is. Literary merit is subjective; someone’s not going to get a lot out of a text if they hate it so much they can’t get through the whole thing. And then what was its merit, to them? Every time my middle school and high school classes studied Shakespeare (and we averaged a play of his a year) someone in the class would complain that they hated Shakespeare. It’s so easy to thoughtlessly dismiss those people, but they’re talking about their own reading experiences. They’re voting against a given text, saying that it does not have the meaning for them that their teachers are alleging it holds. And that’s a subjective question, so they’re not wrong.
At this point you’re probably going to ask – is there then nothing separating Shakespeare from 50 Shades of Grey? Surely there must be! I wouldn’t suggest there isn’t – the complexity and prosody of the language is obviously a lot better in (most of) the works of Shakespeare. But so many people automatically jump from that admission – to concluding that Shakespeare is spinach and E.L. James is ice cream, that Shakespeare is mandatory and E.L. James luxurious. I don’t think that follows logically. Yes, if prosody and subtle metaphors and well-written speech and, in general, what is called good writing are all that matter in a text.
But they’re not.
Let’s leave aside the fact that other writers, including people alive today, are masters of style just as the “classics” were, but unlike the “classics”, they have to compete for recognition with millions of writers, the dead as well as the living.
Let’s talk about other things that make up a text’s value.
I’m not proposing that we decide all texts have equal value. I’m just saying that there is such a thing as moral infamy on the part of a work of literature. Yes, even a great work.
The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic. Hamlet is misogynistic and ableist (the discussion of mental illness is, gee I wonder why, centuries out of date). The Taming of the Shrew is sexist. Henry V promotes monarchy, colonialism, xenophobia, and frivolous military adventures. Othello is pro-domestic violence (the only reason, we are supposed to understand, that Othello is wrong to murder his wife is because she wasn’t actually cheating on him… 
).
).
This shit is important, dammit. I spent years and years studying literature, and was trained in a very particular style of literary analysis – one that exalts the author by default, assuming that the important thing to figure out is what the author is trying to say. At no point was it appropriate to say, “The hell with the author – he sounds like a raging bag of dicks.” After learning this through middle school, high school, and a college major in a literature field, I can’t take it any longer. I need to be able to damn authors as raging bags of dicks. Dostoevsky is a raging bag of dicks. Homer is a raging bag of dicks. The list goes on.
The issue with establishing a “literary canon” (besides the fucking overt racism of trying to limit ourselves to a “Western canon” – because apparently the world comes to a fucking end if a white person knows more about Three Kingdoms than about Huckleberry Finn) is that there really isn’t such a thing as timeless wisdom. Shakespeare wrote a play in which being cheated on (as a man) is so humiliating that it’s totally understandable that a man in that situation would murder his wife, and we’re expected to believe this guy has stuff to teach us? I’m sorry, it looks like we have a lot more to teach him! Read the great works of Shakespeare and a disturbing pattern emerges: the villain of Othello is Othello. (If you’re more disturbed by Iago’s vague, one-dimensional villainy than by Othello justifying murdering his wife as “lov[ing] not wisely, but too well” then you are wrong.) The villain of Henry V is Henry. (“God told me I can conquer France! If tens of thousands of people die… oh well!”) The villain of Hamlet is Hamlet. (We’ve been indoctrinated to believe this zombie idea that Hamlet’s flaw is that he “couldn’t make up his mind. BULL. SHIT. Hamlet being unable to make up his mind is THE MOST SYMPATHETIC THING ABOUT HAMLET. If a ghost – a GHOST – told you to kill your uncle, I should fucking well hope that it would take you at LEAST four acts to decide to do it. A GHOST. No, his “tragic flaw” is that’s he’s a misogynistic, murderous maniac.)
I’m not saying we should auto-da-fé the works of Shakespeare. (Auto-da-fé is a verb now.) I’m against censorship, and again, I love Shakespeare. “A likely story”, you say, but like I said, I think these works have latitude. I think you can stage a Hamlet that’s serious about mental illness, a Hamlet that is feminist (maybe), a Hamlet that has its moral priorities right. An Othello that is a searing comment about domestic violence. A Merchant of Venice that is a sober examination of why oppressed populations resort to radicalism.
What I am saying is that if we weigh the value of a work on a scale, if we put on that scale the vividness of its imagery, the beauty of its language, the life in its dialogue, the dimensionality of its characters – then we also get to put on that scale the morality of what the work is saying. If a work advocates invading another country and systematically starving entire cities (“besieging” them), and calls the guy who does that “the mirror to all Christian kings” – then that does not mean we toss that work onto the ash heap right away, but it does count against it. It is a thing to talk about. It does mean the work can’t exactly get an A. What I’m against is the conservative writers who are furious that people are holding the “classics” to the standards of modern morality (or, as I like to call it, correct morality). The conservative and mainstream-liberal writers who just take it for granted that a “classic” by a dead white man is, we all somehow secretly agree, better than a work by a living woman of color, even if everyone alive who’s read both disagrees.
Things get dated. Things get old. Is it any wonder that a student now might have more difficulty relating to Chaucer than to The Hunger Games? And honestly, if more readers are connecting with Collins than with Chaucer – that means that right now, at this moment in time, yes, The Hunger Games is a “better” work than The Canterbury Tales. A more valuable work. Not perfect – no work is perfect! Kids need to learn to question what they read. But the Cult of Great Books is working against that. The Cult of Great Books is teaching kids that you can’t question “the classics”, and anything else you read – or listen to, for that matter – is not worth analyzing. (On this subject see: Weinersmith, 2011.)
I get furious when people complain about how college literature courses have become “trendy” instead of teaching some core set of knowledge. Literature has always been about what is trendy. We make art for other humans who are or will be alive. We don’t make art to delight the Art God Who Collects Art, for Pete’s sake. ART IS FOR PEOPLE. People die and other, different people are born, so what art is good art changes over time. I once tried to get into a class that had a lower admissions rate than Harvard. 200+ people showed up to apply for a seminar that the professor designed for eight students. It was a children’s literature class. Harry Potter was on the curriculum. Does that sound like waning interest in the humanities? Does that sound like students deciding literature just isn’t important anymore? To me that sounds like an expression of tremendous vitality in the humanities. To me that sounds like hundreds of people who loved a reading experience so much that they wanted to spend an entire semester understanding it in context. People still read. People still hunger to understand what they read. Here’s the difference: people don’t necessarily hunger to understand what you read.
So here are my suggestions: let’s limit “the classics” to college-level literature courses aimed at English majors. Homer, Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – these are crucial for understanding the history of English letters. The people who need them are future writers and critics. And maybe toss some small number of them into the high school curriculum as well – as museum pieces as much as anything else; to discuss their morality, their influence, who decided they were important; to look at what writing style looks like when done with technical mastery. Other than that, high school English should focus on meeting students where they are. Spend two weeks discussing Beyoncé. Spend a week discussing Twilight. Make these things – the texts the students live with and love every day – the centerpiece of the curriculum, instead of implying they’re guilty pleasures. Teach kids how to read, not what to read.
Notes From Punderground 