Tag Archives: literature

Why lit classes should teach bad novels

Posted on September 7, 2014 | 2 comments

Looking though a catalog of books for use in English classrooms, I saw many of the old classics. Here are the contents of a bundle of books labeled “Common Core Literature Pack for Grades 9 and 10“:

The Odyssey, The Best of O. Henry, The Metamorphosis, The Grapes of Wrath,  Fahrenheit 451, Things Fall Apart, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Killer Angels, The Joy Luck Club, Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, A Doll’’s House, The Glass Menagerie, Great American Poems, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Great Speeches

This list seems tedious — it’s hard to imagine 14- and 15-year-old humans getting excited about reading Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Tennessee Williams — but this list is certainly full of books that are commonly considered to be worth teaching. These are good books, worthy of the title “literature.”

The tenth graders I’m teaching now are currently reading “Of Mice and Men,” another classic that this catalog company describes as “one of America’s most well-known naturalist stories.” As we read and discuss this book, I guide students in finding “textual evidence” to support their judgments of characters and their interpretations of themes. And Steinbeck’s novel/novella is very tightly structured; as I’m rereading this book this semester, I can see that Steinbeck foreshadows in the first 16 pages almost everything that will happen in the next 91.

The story works in the sense that readers can accept the text’s storytelling logic. Once these strongly defined characters are set together, they act on each other in ways that make sense. Curley starts a fight with Lennie because that’s what Curley likes to do, pick fights, we’re told. And once Lennie fights back and hurts him, Curley seeks revenge. This all makes sense (if maybe perhaps it’s a little too pat, too easy) and we readers are able to suspend our disbelief enough to accept this story as an entity worth discussing.

This isn’t always easy to do, as writers of fiction would acknowledge. It’s not hard to put words down on paper and say that one has written a story, but convincing readers that such a text is actually a story is a different matter. What exists on paper as merely words must build into a kind of (paradoxical) imaginary quasi-reality in a reader’s mind in order for a reader to think that there are “people” behind the words “George” and “Lennie,” and thus, to care about those people. (Perhaps psychologically, we readers think of fictional characters the way we think of our friends and family members who aren’t physically present to us. Maybe “Lennie” is a concept like my Dad, dead now 15 years, is a concept to me — it’s just that I also have a concept that my Dad was once alive, and Lennie never was. But, of course, it’s more complicated than that, because “Lennie” isn’t merely a fictional idea, either, as Steinbeck once said, “The characters are composites to a certain extent. Lennie was a real person. He’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman.”)

A text that doesn’t convince readers it is a functioning story isn’t a story at all — it’s the literary equivalent of a set of car parts that can’t drive anybody anywhere. But when those car parts are properly assembled, they produce a machine that works, that functions. The physical objects, acting in consistent ways (we describe these ways as laws of physics), can produce motions that seem useful to us — namely, by moving us. But when a text works in conveying a usefully coherent story to readers, is it acting according to some psychological laws? Some thinkers, including Aristotle, this guy, here and here and here, have tried to discern the laws of making a satisfying story. But if there existed an adequate explanation of how to make stories that are effective and attractive to audiences, certainly book publishers would not make books that don’t sell. Even when a new story may follow the model of an familiar story that works, this may feel too formulaic for readers to really engage with the story. Readers may stay aware of the text as a text, not transmuting into story.

If literature students read only those novels that are good, that are judged to have succeeded, students are studying the effects produced by a text — the story — rather than the text itself. To continue the car analogy, it’s as if students experienced riding in the car but didn’t look at the parts of the car, or how the parts contribute to the car working, except as how the car parts affect the car rider’s experience. Saying “Lennie kills the girl because he likes to pet soft things and he gets carried away” is like saying “I could see out the windshield because the dashboard doesn’t rise too high” — both of these things are explicit to readers and riders (and these things are obvious to a more experienced reader, but maybe not to inexperienced students in schools. On the other hand, maybe part of what literature instruction is trying to do is to get students to make their implicit understandings explicit).

If we really want students to understand how fiction texts work, maybe we should have them read novels that aren’t good, novels that don’t really lead readers to suspend disbelief and fully engage in the story. By reading only good novels, students might see how a writer intends them to interpret the story’s text, but students might not see how the writer constructs and even manipulates the story to produce certain effects in the reader (for example, why did Steinbeck’s novel deviate from the facts of the story of real-life Lennie mentioned above? Is Steinbeck, as author, trying to tell readers what they should think, as opposed to just describing what happened? What is the point of fiction, anyway?) Students  are learning to follow the text’s decoding instructions, but maybe students should also be wondering why these instructions are there, and are the way they are.

As someone who teaches classes both in reading fiction and in writing fiction, I’m often looking at published novels by adopting the perspective of a writer, by which I mean that I want to see how the text was made, how it works. In literature classes, novels are often presented as inherently valuable, as worth the class’s time to study, and thus it’s easy to see why lit students would start to think of writers of these assigned novels as Great Writers, and thus the mythology around these writers builds (into its own story). In becoming a writer myself, however, I had to tear down this mythology and realize that Steinbeck and other writers were my peers, not my unassailable geniuses. And in a literature class, readers often treat the text as being complete, or perfect, as they find it in the published version. It makes sense for readers to approach texts this way, and yet, writers often view texts as imperfect, as infinitely revisable. This is perhaps what Valery meant by “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” For instance, Whitman published multiple editions of “Leaves of Grass,” in which poems changed significantly between editions. It may give literature students a more realistic view of the novel to see it both as a reader and as a writer.

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Writer’s High: Are Writers Having Enough Fun?

Posted on July 2, 2013 | 2 comments

I’m gonna stake the claim: Writing, the act of doing the writing, is fun, and writers who aren’t having fun may be doing it wrong.

I find something enjoyable, fulfilling, satisfying — in other words, fun — about the act of letting my brain-words flow out onto the paper. Sometimes even editing and rewriting can be fun — fun not in the light sense of how eating ice cream is fun, but fun in the sense that being engaged in writing can completely absorb my attention and help me forget my worries (including any ego-worries about whether anyone will read what I write).

The reason I write is because I like to write. I write because it’s fun. Of course, not every single thing I write is fun; sometimes a person has to create a text to match an assignment or to fulfill a purpose in having an effect on a reader. But when I am writing on my own, I feel no need to write for anybody but myself.

Perhaps, Dear Reader, you’ve read enough of my posts to have already sensed that I had this priority. While I do appreciate knowing that readers have found what I wrote interesting or valuable, I don’t primarily write to appeal to readers. I don’t want to think about others when I write. (Richard Hugo writes: “Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing,
glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page.”) I want to think about what I find interesting. I want to be free to go wherever my writing and my thinking lead me. If that also interests others, OK.

And writing whatever I want to write is glorious. The things I write — journals, notes, blog posts, etc. — help clear my mind of extraneous concerns and concepts, but they also teach me new things — I have insights, epiphanies, that help me see the familiar world in new ways. It’s pretty terrific — it’s actually heart-poundingly exciting at times. I’ve had writing experiences (not yet with this blog post!) that feel transformative, transcendent, experiences that are beyond my normal daily mindset. Perhaps this is like “runner’s high” for those who use our minds rather than our legs.

I knew I liked to write but I got some insight into why after reading this essay by Alan Shapiro, in which he talks about the value of having one’s attention fully absorbed into one’s writing.

I recently posted a three-year-old piece I had written about fame, and I knew the desire for fame was juvenile. But since posting that, I’ve realized that fame may be actually the last thing I want if I just want to write. Publishing and promoting a book, giving readings, trying to make more money from writing — these are all things that actually take away time from my writing. If what I actually love is just the writing, I may not want to be famous, or even publish my work in any form more complex than this blog. Here are my words; I don’t need to have to do anything more.

It’s possible that some of my desire to be a Famous Writer comes from having taken literature classes where the teachers revered the Wise Writer and we read his (almost always it was “his”) writings that were canonical, revered (another attitude I had to get over was thinking that these earlier writers were special, were doing something truly Great. But there’s no need to think of them that way. They were just writers, putting words on paper, as I do. Some of their works are highly valued by others; some weren’t. I recall reading somewhere Whitman’s opinion that his frequently anthologized “O Captain! My Captain!” wasn’t his favorite work of his poems). In wanting fame, I must be partly thinking that if I become famous, my works would live on (to be assigned to students who’d rather be choosing their own reading materials).

But of course, worrying about one’s legacy is complete bullshit. What will I care whether people read my works when I’m dead — I’ll be dead! My time for writing is while I’m alive, and writing is one way in which I love spending the life-time that is allotted to me.

There’s a famous quote by Sam Johnson — “No man but a blockhead every wrote, except for money” — but this makes sense only if one doesn’t actually like writing. I love it enough to do it for free. I’m not saying I wouldn’t accept a hefty advance from any publishers reading this blog who find it brilliant beyond belief, but I’m saying that an advance is not my goal.

But I can’t control that. What I can do is use what free time I have to get the deepest satisfaction I can from writing, and that satisfaction comes from just doing it.

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Link: Talking about literature

Posted on July 2, 2013 | 3 comments

A cool description of the value of talking about literature from this lit. prof. As I’m teaching a lit. class this fall myself, I may also have my students write papers — hopefully from their own “germ” ideas — before class discussions. And as she says, hopefully literary texts’ ideas can apply to our lives. But I was reminded, as I read this, of Stan Fish’s line that we analyze literature simply because we like to do that, and we enjoy sharing that joy.

From Paula Marantz Cohen:

But talking and writing about literature are activities of great value, central to what I believe is a good undergraduate education. I want my students to appreciate this and come to enjoy engaging in them. First, consider the value of talk. What makes great literature “great” is that cannot be reduced to a formula or a simple answer;  it cannot be used up. This is a lesson that students need to learn in our sound-byte culture. When they talk freely about great literature, their ideas take new and exciting form, and they begin to discover who they are. The buzzword in education circles is that literary analysis teaches critical thinking. But this always struck me as a limited and rather condescending way of thinking about literary talk. Yes, literary analysis teaches critical thinking, but it also allows students to grapple with important topics that they might not normally discuss, and to apply the complex themes and structures that literature raises to their own lives. I have been told that my classroom sometimes resembles a group therapy session. I take this as a compliment. When students talk seriously about a great literary text this leads, inevitably, to their talking about themselves. Sometimes they can get very deep into the latter, though they always have the former near at hand to ground them.

Writing about literature adds a degree of discipline and rigor to the process I am discussing. Writing harnesses talk, though it also can give rise to more talk. Lately, I have begun assigning short papers for almost every class, with the result that students come to class with something codified to say. With these formed ideas, they then launch into further speculation. The result is often a subtle and original composite, taking everyone to a new level of thought.

In addition to assigning many more short papers, I have stopped prescribing topics for papers. Instead, I tell students that, as they read, they should be alert to how they feel. What they need to watch for is a dissonance or disturbance or, contrarily, a charm or seductiveness in the text that makes them stop in their tracks. Whatever it may be, it will serve as the “germ” for their paper. I’ve borrowed the term from Henry James. In his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, he spoke of the “germ” encountered in the course of daily life that served him as the basis for a fictional work. This germ was, as he put it, “the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible.” As a writer of fiction, James said that it was necessary to immediately remove the suggestion from the chaos and clutter of life, to let it develop within his imagination without further reference to the real situation in which it originally resided.

But for a literary paper, the opposite is required. The germ must be developed by reference to the text, by rummaging around for suggestive tidbits that support and elaborate it. To write fiction, James had to remove the germ of reality and place it in the world of imagination. To write interesting and original papers about literature, a writer must take the germ of self-reference that the text generates and return it to its native habitat. Only then can we trace the outline of our psyche as it lurks in the work of another’s imagination.

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‘The Great Gatsby’ and age: The older I get, the less I don’t know

Posted on May 31, 2013 | Leave a comment

So, there’s a new movie of Gatsby. This isn’t as newsy now as it would’ve been a few weeks ago, but, you know, the book has been around for, oh, four-score and some years now, and my high school’s students read it in our “American Lit after 1900” class, and I read it in high school and didn’t enjoy it (my memory is of my teacher flat-out telling us “the green light symbolizes money”) and I reread it in recent years and thought it was better than I had remembered it, but that it still wasn’t all that great. I mean, I liked that last line, about boats being ceaselessly  beaten back, etc. etc., but much of the book was not that lyrically beautiful.

And I found a fellow-traveler in  Kathryn Schulz’s critique of this book:

What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory. Gatsby takes place over a single summer: three months, three acts, three chapters each, with a denouement—the car accident and murder—of near-Greek (but also near-silly) symmetry. Inside that story, almost everything in sight serves a symbolic purpose: the automobiles and ash heaps, the upright Midwest and poisonous East, the white dresses and decadent mansions.

Heavy plot, heavy symbolism, zero ­psychological motivation: Those are the genre conventions of fables and fairy tales. Gatsby has been compared to both, typically to suggest a mythical quality to Fitzgerald’s characters or a moral significance to his tale. But moral significance requires moral engagement: challenge, discomfort, illumination, or transformation. The Great Gatsby offers none of that. In fact, it offers the opposite: aloofness.

When I saw that I wasn’t alone in my lack of enthusiasm, I started wondering why this particular book was taught and continues to be taught so much to high-school literature students. There are many, many other novels published in the last hundred years that could also be taught.

One of my colleagues suggested that the theme of the American dream in “Gatsby” makes it worth reading — and, sure, that’s a valid theme to discuss in a lit. class. But “the American dream” isn’t a theme at all until the author takes a position on that topic — “the American dream is hollow” or “the American dream is worthwhile” — and at that point, why do we need a story at all? Fitzgerald could just have written an op-ed to make that point, and have been done with it.

Instead, there is a long story that’s about as subtle in its condemnation as a fairy tale, as Schulz says above. To take a scenario as complex as Gatsby’s (ill-gotten gains, unrequited-and-then-illicitly-requited love, etc.) and just boil it down to something like “achieving our goals may not make us happy” feels like it deserves a “duh” response from adult readers. Teens may not know this yet, and maybe it’s worthwhile for them to consider it, but I’m not sure adults will take this book all that seriously. Maybe the readers who will most enjoy and appreciate a work are those who are younger than the author was when he/she wrote the work.

According to his Wikipedia page, Fitzgerald wrote most of “Gatsby” in 1924, when he would’ve been (1896 to 1924) 28 years old. Twenty-eight is pretty darn young for someone to comment on the nature of “the American dream.” Of course, chronological age does not always match personal maturity or artistic ability, but when a writer is only 28 years old — has been an adult for only 10 years — he doesn’t really have much authority, other than authority over those who are younger yet than he is.

I’m now almost 40, and I can now look back at my 28-year-old self and see that I strongly held certain beliefs and judgments about which I am now not sure certain. This is not to say that I was wrong, exactly, about the things I said then, nor that I am perfect now, but that I now try to be more humble about my opinions (Humble enough to blog them to the rest of the reading public, of course. Also, the delusions of grandeur endure).

And so I can now look at “The Great Gatsby” and admire some of the writing but I also look at the story and think that there’s not much there for me to learn. I feel like I’m smarter than the characters, and also wiser than the author. With other books and authors, too: I don’t have to agree with Hemingway’s biases towards his characters in “The Sun Also Rises,” written when he was 26, and I don’t have to think that Kerouac’s characters could find satisfaction in their lives “On the Road,” published when Kerouac was 35. I look at some of these books now and wonder why the authors really have to tell me about the condition of being alive that I haven’t already learned on my own.

It’s age-ism to say that I can’t learn anything from writers who are younger than me (or were when they wrote — and of course, I did learn from reading Hemingway and Kerouac when I was a late-teens, early-20s reader). And yet, as I get older, and as I get more familiar with the fuller range of ideas, the range of ways of writing, the range of tones/perspectives, etc. that writers can use, I find myself less thrilled, less enthused, to read the writings of most other writers.

That’s a huge generalization, of course. And I’m not talking about reading things for “escapist” purposes — a writer of any age, presumably, can write a story. But I often read in order to learn something, and the older I get, the less I don’t know.

That sounds terrible — terribly closed-minded, and typical of an old (read: inflexible) person. And not entirely true — I am able to better appreciate some things now — including some of the classic texts — than I was when younger. But when I now read Plato’s “Apology” or the epic poem “Beowulf” (as I read last year for the “World Lit” class I was teaching), I’m more likely to approach these texts as a peer of the writer — I’m less likely to cede authority to that author. I’m gonna question the author’s veracity, legitimacy, purpose, etc. — all that stuff that my college lit. profs. probably wanted me to question when I was 20.

But I’m here now, and some of the magic of the texts is gone, or maybe it was never “magic” — maybe I’m just more clear-eyed and less reverent when I approach texts. Maybe I’m not buying into the Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Kerouac myths that I used to accept — that there was something gloriously important and rapturously tragic (or vice versa) about Being an Author and Writing Novels, etc.

I don’t feel bad about my current approach — and once one is aware of the myths and the magic, one “can never return again.” Not only do I not feel bad about my current mindset, I feel pretty good about it — I feel wiser than I used to be. Where I used to see intellectual limits, I now see boundaries whose lines can be crossed. It feels pretty good.

And one thing I feel good about is not wanting to merely criticize others and their works. I want my fault-finding to lead me into a positive, substantial new direction — and I think for me, this means that I no longer really accept texts as beyond reproach and I no longer accept ideas as unassailable answers (everything is reproachable and/or assailable). But I trust now in the process, in the act of thinking and writing, and in this way, I can continue to discuss and consider even works I disagree with — I can continue to teach my students (and myself), and I can be humble enough to see also that I may also one day find something beyond process that I like even better.

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Link: Teaching reading is crap-detecting

Posted on May 30, 2013 | 1 comment

This New York Times article, saying it’s harder to raise students’ test scores in reading than it is in math, indirectly raises some cultural/epistemological questions about the differences between math and reading.

The article opens with this anecdote from someone who has apparently taught both:

David Javsicas, a popular seventh-grade reading teacher known for urging students to act out dialogue in the books they read in class, sometimes feels wistful for the days when he taught math.

A quiz, he recalls, could quickly determine which concepts students had not yet learned. Then, “you teach the kids how to do it, and within a week or two you can usually fix it,” he said.

Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. “It could take months to see if what I’m teaching is effective,” he said.

I have taught high school science and English, and I’m not sure I’d say it’s easier to teach science, because of what it means to “teach science.” The expectation (as I was informed after I pursued a different goal) is for students to learn and apply the set of science ideas (theory of evolution, atomic theory, Newton’s Laws, etc.) that are provided in the textbooks. The discipline of science observes and tries to explain the physical world, but most science classes don’t allow this. Students take notes, do equations, take tests. Real research is not done by most students (though some high school science competitions, such as this one, show that students are capable of doing impressive work).

Science classes, then, just teach a set of ideas — let’s call it a story, Science Stories — and so do math classes. Math classes could be theoretical explorations of these abstract ideas, but many high school math classes simply teach procedures (algorithms) for doing things: to find the area of a rectangle, multiply the base times the height. Sure, that’s useful information, but hardly intellectually all that challenging. Math, as taught to high school students, is a tidy system of right and wrong methods for arriving at an answer. What mathematicians do is far more abstract and creative, of course, but we don’t generally let students see that.

In English, however, we’re actually asking students to do the same things (though obviously adapted to younger minds) that English professors do — read and analyze texts and write about them. What I love about teaching writing is that students are truly CREATING texts. Students in our science and math classes are not making anything — they are just taking in the ideas that others have made.

Of course, creating something is more intellectually demanding than just memorizing and applying an idea (even Bloom’s Taxonomy, that education cliche, says so). So we writing and literature teachers give our students guidelines and models to help them “scaffold” (in the teachers’ vernacular) their way to completed projects.

But of course, there are very few right or wrong essays or literature interpretations — there are worse ones and better ones, and judging which is which is highly subjective. The student essays I like best are those that go beyond what is merely stated in a text to make connections that are not obvious. In other words, I like essays that are interesting, that say things I hadn’t read or thought of before.

Lately I’ve been suspecting that maybe the best way to teach this kind of creative thinking and individual judgment is to model it for my students. As a teacher, I have my own biases and peculiarities, and so I’m not an ideal (Platonic?) model — but maybe learning to be analytical and/or creative is really more of an apprenticeship anyway, rather than something that has set standards for students to adhere to.

And here’s where teaching the study of literature gets interesting and/or controversial. The recent Common Core State Standards for teaching literature include statements such as the following:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.2 Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

The very use of the the word “objective” in relation to a text is nearly an absurd statement to someone familiar with the critical theories used to interpret literature that arose in the last few decades. Taking undergrad literature classes in the mid-1990s, I gained just a limited understanding of some of these approaches, but judging by the enthusiasms of the younger professors and by the resistance of the older ones, I understood these ideas to be important.

But the Common Core standards seem written in ignorance of these developments in interpretation, as if the standards writers were just gonna elide the last 50+ years of criticism. And though the standards are careful to call their lists of texts for use in classes “illustrative” rather than “recommended,” this listing shows 14 texts, only two of which were published in the last 50 years.

So the act of reading and interpreting texts is something that, in addition to necessitating word-processing skills, also “requires background knowledge of cultural, historical and social references” (as the Times article states), and from these basic skills and resources, we ask students to make coherent, logical statements of analysis. That’s asking a lot of anybody. But then, all too often, standardized reading tests ask students to select an interpretation from multiple choices, which requires students to also analyze the test to see which of the many possible interpretations of a text is the one that the test will honor as the “right” answer. The student has to match minds both with the text-writer and with the test-writer. In the Times article,

But when [the teacher] asked [students] to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text.

Uh, yeah. Why only two descriptions? We ask students to make this complex, creative, personal interpretation, and then ask them to compare theirs to an adult’s?

This might all be despair-inducing, except for the fact that when we teach interpretation skills to students, we also empower them to see the tests and the standards as the bullsh*t they so often are. This reminds me of the Hemingway quote featuring his one standard of education:

“Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.”

(One, too, might employ such a crap-detector while reading Hemingway.)

 

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