Tag Archives: teaching 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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Limits of simple stories: Real Lennie didn’t get shot in the head

Posted on January 15, 2014 | 2 comments

“Of Mice and Men” may be a strong story, but it’s got very little to do with the world that we live in.

I’m teaching the Steinbeck novel to my high school sophomores this semester, and I was not looking forward to it. I read the book for the first time a couple years ago, and I thought it was a rich novel, with compelling characters, powerful scenes, and symbolism a-plenty. It’s the kind of dramatic narrative that feels sublimely moving, like a Shakespeare tragedy.

But as I started reading “Of Mice and Men” for the second time a few days ago, with the knowledge of how the book ends, I felt like the foreshadowing was heavy handed. In the first few pages. George talks about how Lennie just got them in trouble for how he treated a woman, and how he always seems to kill the mice he picks up to pet. And then they get to the farm and meet the flirtatious “Curley’s wife,” and some of the ranch hands talk about shooting a dog that “ain’t no good to himself” and that by shooting the dog “right back of the head,” “he wouldn’t feel nothing.” We get it, John Steinbeck: Lennie’s gonna die. As Key and Peele recently said, “Steinbeck, y’all!”

Fate closes in — the story funnels Lennie to slaughter like cattle in a chute on the kill-floor. (To add one more Lennie-as-animal metaphor to the “bear” and “terrier” Steinbeck uses in just the first few pages.) This is a grim world Steinbeck shows us. Life is hard, life is harsh, life is unfair, and then you die.

I just don’t accept that worldview. The experience of being alive can be harsh, but being alive can also be fun, glorious, and beautiful, and sometimes hard experiences arrive right after fun ones, and vice versa.

But certainly our world is not as tidy as a story. I spent years wishing that my life were more like a story, had more “perfect moments,” etc. It took me years to accept the idea that the way stories unfold is seldom the way life unfolds.

Even in Steinbeck’s story, life wasn’t so tidy, if this anecdote is accurate:

Steinbeck explained the origins of the story in an interview with The New York Times in 1937: “I was a bindlestiff myself for quite a spell. I worked in the same country that the story is laid in. 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. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times. I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.”

So the real-life Lennie wasn’t shot in the head by his friend-protector. But the logic of the story requires Lennie’s death. Comedies end with marriages, and tragedies end with deaths, I heard someplace. If the story-Lennie doesn’t die, we audience members might feel shortchanged, somehow, which is weird, because having that feeling seems to make us audience members akin to the crowds who would demand to see a gladiator put to death. Perhaps readers know the tragedy story-form well enough that we want to see it fulfilled — we want “Of Mice and Men” to follow the familiar pattern, and we might feel mildly annoyed if it doesn’t. We would be deprived of the catharsis we began to expect as we read from the beginning of “Of Mice and Men.” If story-Lennie doesn’t die, then the story hasn’t been properly framed, and needs to be retold differently.

And if story-Lennie doesn’t die, there’s no divine justice, there’s no sense of a world purified by a death, each beginning matched to an ending, amen. I’m not trying to be facetious by using “amen” there: I get a feeling that John Steinbeck (there seems no evidence to separate the narrator from the author in this novel) tells this story as if he were the Creator, the dispenser of fates to characters that aren’t fully real but are symbols themselves. It is only Steinbeck’s voice and vision that is carried out in the story — this can be seen by juxtaposing the current text of “Of Mice and Men” against a version of the text that would, say, have an unreliable narrator. If there were narrative “tricks” (for lack of a better term) such as that, the spell cast by the story of “Of Mice and Men” would be broken.

I want to suggest here that “Of Mice and Men” pleases readers in that it delivers a story that is, in a sense, a fable, a myth, or a dream: the plot is simple, the characters are more like one-note strawmen than fully conscious humans, the text repeats (the foreshadowing mentioned above prophesies and echoes the later action) in an almost incantatory way, and the theme or message is made as plain and obvious as that of a parable.

But what wraps all these elements together is an authorial voice that is strong, swift, and sure. There is no unreliability in this narrator: if we’re told “Slim’s opinions were law,” then we are to understand Slim’s opinions were law (of course there’s the possibility that the entire narration is done by a character who had a worldview that allowed for no nuance or possibility, but that would render the entire book as partial, biased, and thus, moot). The narrator is in charge here, and maybe it’s not an accident that this is the same sort of narration as conveys some of the stories in the Old Testament of the Bible.

And perhaps what readers of “Of Mice and Men” — itself a title that could fit one of Aesop’s Fables — appreciate about the story is what we also appreciate about Bible stories, and even dreams: that we listeners can surrender responsibility for a time to the storyteller. Perhaps even we adults enjoy, for the duration of the story, feeling like the world is simple and knowable and that there is a single correct way to understand life and reality, and that there are good and bad things in the world, and we can be told what these are, and then we will know them.

Being told a simple, rich, resonant story maybe takes us back to a childlike mentality where we could trust absolutely the parents and grandparents who told us or read us these stories. These simple stories can soothe, can ease — we just can accept and not have to think too much. Like many people, my wife reads genre fiction as a way to relax in the evenings, and she has said she wants to read stories that are not too similar to real life (she prefers supernatural and historical romances). She has said that she has to spend all day at work confronting complicated realities, and so she wants some relief from that in the form of tidy fiction.

I don’t mean to be too hard here on genre fiction or Biblical stories or fables, etc. I’m not saying we should never read these. However, I’m not sure that these stories are of very much use to us. Maybe we need to take these simple stories and shelve them and not expect them to tell us anything about the world in which we live.

The world in which we live seems a complicated place, where there are definitely many voices, many points of view, from which come a lot of testimony and opinions about what did or didn’t happen, what is or is not good/healthy/optimal, etc, a lot of text that we audience members need to evaluate. This is a good thing, I think. A recent Slate article praised some Life magazines from 1945, but the writer noted that

“The magazine could get away with a universal we that no magazine would dare today. (This is not to say we has vanished from journalism. But what persists is an ideological we, a we of the left or right that’s opposed to a wrong-thinking them—not a we that includes all Americans.)”

Likewise, the voice in which Steinbeck narrates his story is not one that acknowledges that the real world is filled with people who see events and who judge events from unresolvably distinct perspectives. Acknowledging this, and allowing more diverse voices to be heard in the larger culture, has perhaps been one of the ways our modern culture has matured in recent decade. (For one example, in “Of Mice and Men,” we see how “normal” people think about Lennie, but we never get a good understanding of how Lennie sees things. In contrast, the recent novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” also features a character who has a distinct worldview, but this character does the narrating.)

Assuming a monolithic narrative tone that doesn’t even allow for the possibility of its own fallibility seems an act of hubris. Novels that have unreliable narrators or multiple narrators (such as epistolary texts) at least allow for the world to be uncertain, not fully knowable, beyond human understanding. And allowing the world to be unknowable also means that the world contains possibilities, that we have more to learn, that none of us real people are trapped in fates we cannot change (as the characters in “Of Mice and Men” seem to be).

And this isn’t just a matter of Steinbeck being from an earlier era — Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Joyce’s “Ulysses” demonstrated the limits of perspective and the limits of traditional story structure in their use of stream of consciousness narrative technique more than a dozen years before Steinbeck published “Of Mice and Men.” Sure, Steinbeck may have held different artistic and aesthetic goals than these other writers, but Steinbeck’s texts perhaps gain resonance and accessibility to readers at a cost of pertinence to the actual lives of those readers. And there’s some irony there, in that Steinbeck’s ostensible subject was the real lives of average working people.

Steinbeck may have been more interested in creating a lovely object of art, a perfect story (a Faberge egg — exquisite, but useless), than he was in tackling the underlying questions of what and how texts mean, how they work, how reliable they are, and how weird it fundamentally is that we can use texts to communicate with other minds across great separations of time, space, identity, and even language (through translation). In other words, Steinbeck elides many of the issues involved in telling a story, and just tells his story. He can do that, but doing that doesn’t mean the issues go away. I want to say it’s OK that Steinbeck does this — I don’t want to say that every artwork is flawed if it doesn’t conform to what I think ought to be artistic and philosophical priorities. I can just think of these as two distinct kinds, two different categories — story-stories, and real-stories (or people-stories? reality-stories? I don’t have a good label yet) — and I can then teach “Of Mice and Men” while also teaching its limitations as art and text.

P.S.: Here’s another “Of Mice and Men” post I wrote a year ago but forgot about having written. Apparently even then, before I knew I’d be teaching it this year, I was skeptical of the book.

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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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