What Do We Do?

At a recent party, I was asked “Why read Shakespeare? Kids [meaning high schoolers] don’t like it. They aren’t going to try. It doesn’t matter to them.” My response? Foolishly, I tried to play the canon card — I said “Ask the people you meet tomorrow if they know or have read Shakespeare. I bet all of them will know his name, and 95% will have read something he wrote.” “But,” was the reply, “People today don’t enjoy reading his work. They just have to in school.”

Ugh!

Upon later reflection, it seems to me that English departments have done a horrible job of selling themselves. And academia, both college and el-high, has moved on. What are English departments traditionally supposed to do? Study the language. Teach people how to read, understand, and interpret words, both written and spoken — and then respond to the ideas they present. And what do we do? Cultural studies. Film studies. “Fun” stuff, not “rigorous” stuff. Why? Because we need to keep up enrollment. (And, yes, we enjoy teaching it... but then, we also enjoy teaching Shakespeare and other stuff that's not "enjoyable," by my friend's implicit standards.) It seems we've lost sight of our initial mission, and we've not really defined a new one for ourselves.

But we'll never disappear — we’re the workhorses of colleges, walking all freshmen through composition for the benefit of every other program. We’re also the broom closet of the college, as a colleague argues. Our comp classes are the places where students have to not only learn how to produce research papers, which is fair, but they also learn how to use the library, how to use word processing programs (usually Microsoft Word), basic grammar and punctuation, and often some introduction to public speaking. Oh, and since we have to write about something, add in some content.

There's still the idea that we’re not teaching “marketable skills” when we get to do what we want (i.e., read texts) — that is the province of other programs: science, business, etc.

Is this because we learn to read as children, and the skill we use is considered mastered before college? Not perfected, perhaps, but good enough by 6th grade to get through bestsellers? (Yeah, I’m thinking of Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, and J. K. Rowling, however much I enjoyed reading Harry Potter.) Is anything that demands a higher reading ability just not worth the effort? Or is it not profitable? That is, my ability to read Shakespeare (or Chaucer) is really just showing off, and won’t get me a better job because it is, somehow, not valued by society. Or by the sectors that pay well.

Yeah, I’m frustrated. But so it goes. I wouldn’t choose another discipline. I am happy with my choices, with my direction. I do like teaching English, I like teaching literature, I even enjoy teaching composition. I just don’t enjoy being the freak that didn’t pursue a career that promises big paychecks.

I’m too smart for that.

Studying Literature: Piling Pebbles to Reach the Heights

As I was talking to some students and pondering my choice to study literature, a powerful metaphor struck me. Studying literature is hard because we pile pebbles to reach the heights of greatness. Think of it this way: science is very goal-oriented, and it has an end. It is like a ladder. (So I’m mixing metaphors and similes — at least I recognize the difference!) You start with basic information and move up the chain of difficulty to a specific goal — the point at which you have to create your own next step by doing research (experiments) that expand the realm of science. And there’s a pretty defined hierarchy of knowledge: biology starts with basic cell structure, chemistry with atoms, etc. Then you move on to more complex systems (organs, molecules), then groups of those systems (circulatory system, molecular interactions), and so forth.

Literature’s not like that. Sure, we have easy literature and hard literature, but there’s no set order, no specific books everyone has to master (or simply read) before moving on. There is no hierarchy of knowledge — instead, in literature, we reach the heights of mastery by building a mountain of piled pebbles. Each work adds something else to our mass of knowledge, but none is more important or unimportant. Reading the complete works of Shakespeare is impressive, but reading the complete works of Stephen King is no less impressive — it’s just less influential on Literature. Reading the complete works of Chaucer, or Hemingway is, perhaps, more impressive, but none of these milestones will result in some profound wisdom in themselves, they won’t identify the reader as a master.

This is not to equate all reading; as I said earlier, there’s a spectrum of difficulty. Some difficulty is in the language (Middle English in general), some in the style (Henry James); some authors are simple in style, but profound in ideas (Hemingway). These are the authors and works that get trotted out as classics, whose inclusion in the canon are often taken as obvious. Some works are hugely popular, but have little literary merit (Brown’s The DaVinci Code; Meyer’s Twilight series). But they lack can be instructive in lacking those qualities — that is, these poor books can help define quality and genius.

I think the final idea I want to toss out is one of skill. We learn how to read very early on; some take to it quickly, others struggle to make sense of texts throughout their lives. And I wonder if this is one of the problems literary studies has. Dr. Seuss’s books are some of our earliest reading experiences, and they’re seen as simple. But they are often poetry, and although they’re short works, and presented in fairly simple ways, I think they’re pretty complex books to read, in that the reader needs to construct a narrative from very short, often declarative sentences.. Even Shel Silverstein’s poetry is fairly advanced wordplay. Is it E. E. Cummings? No, but what is (other than the poet himself)? Silverstein can certainly be more advanced than Shakespeare or Poe in terms of wordplay and sounds.

In any case, I start to wander. Do think about the idea that literature students have no hierarchy to climb, but only a collection of disparate stories from which to build their experiences, and that process of reading (and if we’re lucky enough, re-reading) only enriches our experiences and ability to form a coherent argument about literature. Unlike science, the cutting edge is unique to each of us, as we read new materials and add those works to our pile of stones in the quest for the heavens.

Let me know what you think!