It's Pick a Fight Day on LJ!
Feb. 5th, 2009 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_tower(No, it isn't. Just on my LJ.)
So, I'm mostly okay with this article in the Telegraph about how it's okay not to have read John Updike, or for that matter other literary greats. It's certainly true that it isn't possible for even the most well-intentioned of book lovers to have read all of the Great Literature that's been published in the last two hundred years, even if you aim only for the top tier.
But here's where the writer and I part ways:
Er.
Okay, middle first. I'm with him on the distressing notion that a whole book is too much for kids to read; God, I hope there aren't many schools doing that. But. But.
Dead, White, European, and Male. The blithe assumption that they've got a majority share on "quality and intelligence and depth." Gyah. I won't even waste space on arguing that one; you all can do that for yourselves.
The end; the end is where I start talking back to my monitor. The idea that you should form your taste by reading "proper" literature. That literary merit (as judged by, I presume, highly-educated White European Males) should be our primary criterion for handing books to kids -- because "relevance" and "accessibility" are silly little concerns, not something we should be wasting their time on.
How the hell does he expect anybody to learn to love reading, with that approach? How does an education in which you're forced to read books out of duty incline anybody to go on reading them when the duty is removed?
A couple of months ago, I finally managed to articulate one of the things that bothered me about high school English lit classes: I think they force-feed students lots of things the students have no particular reason to understand or care about, and they do it because this is the last chance society has to make you read those books. So who cares if Death of a Salesman is about a guy decades ago having a mid-life crisis and you're a sixteen-year-old barely aware that traveling salesmen once existed? Who cares if you have any reason to find Willy Loman's pain sympathetic or even comprehensible? You'll read it because we think you should do so before you die, and once you graduate our chance to enforce that is gone.
I don't think any power in the 'verse could have made me like that play, but I've got a tidy little list of authors I should give a second chance, because I might enjoy them now that I'm ready for them.
But I formed my taste by reading books I liked, books I cared about. It probably isn't the taste Mr. Dellingpole thinks I should have; it's okay for me not to read Updike, but probably less okay if the reason I'm not reading Updike is that I'm reading George R. R. Martin. But I submit that quality, intelligence, and depth exist as much in one's interaction with a book as they do in the text itself: all the literary brilliance in the world doesn't matter if my eyes are glazing over as I turn the pages. You want to know how I learned close reading? By obsessing over Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books and piecing together the fragments of prophecy and foreshadowing scattered through them. And it's entirely possible I never would have become an alert enough reader to survive Dorothy Dunnett had I not gone through those baby steps first. But if somebody had convinced me I ought to be spending my time on Zadie Smith instead of Jordan, it's also possible I would have never picked up Dunnett in the first place -- or, y'know, other books in general.
If I were in charge of high school curricula, you know what? Literary merit would not be my overriding concern. I would set out to give kids books they might enjoy, and then once they're engaged, teach them how to pay attention to what they're reading. Everything else can follow from there, because once you've done that, the chances of there being an "everything else" get a lot higher.
It's a fine irony when Mr. Dellingford decries readers who pick up literary books only out of a sense of obligation -- while also telling us we should obligate kids to do just that.
So, I'm mostly okay with this article in the Telegraph about how it's okay not to have read John Updike, or for that matter other literary greats. It's certainly true that it isn't possible for even the most well-intentioned of book lovers to have read all of the Great Literature that's been published in the last two hundred years, even if you aim only for the top tier.
But here's where the writer and I part ways:
This is not an argument against the literary canon. I do believe there are certain key authors – most of them Dead, White, European and Male – who jolly well ought to be studied at school by virtue of the quality and intelligence and depth of their writing. And I certainly don't believe in the modern anything-goes approach to teaching novels to children in school where they're served up in gobbets of "text" (whole books being considered too challenging for the Xbox generation) and where literary merit is thought of less importance than "relevance" or "accessibility".
All I mean is that once you've had a reasonable grounding in sufficient "proper" literature to form your taste, you should never again read a book out of duty.
Er.
Okay, middle first. I'm with him on the distressing notion that a whole book is too much for kids to read; God, I hope there aren't many schools doing that. But. But.
Dead, White, European, and Male. The blithe assumption that they've got a majority share on "quality and intelligence and depth." Gyah. I won't even waste space on arguing that one; you all can do that for yourselves.
The end; the end is where I start talking back to my monitor. The idea that you should form your taste by reading "proper" literature. That literary merit (as judged by, I presume, highly-educated White European Males) should be our primary criterion for handing books to kids -- because "relevance" and "accessibility" are silly little concerns, not something we should be wasting their time on.
How the hell does he expect anybody to learn to love reading, with that approach? How does an education in which you're forced to read books out of duty incline anybody to go on reading them when the duty is removed?
A couple of months ago, I finally managed to articulate one of the things that bothered me about high school English lit classes: I think they force-feed students lots of things the students have no particular reason to understand or care about, and they do it because this is the last chance society has to make you read those books. So who cares if Death of a Salesman is about a guy decades ago having a mid-life crisis and you're a sixteen-year-old barely aware that traveling salesmen once existed? Who cares if you have any reason to find Willy Loman's pain sympathetic or even comprehensible? You'll read it because we think you should do so before you die, and once you graduate our chance to enforce that is gone.
I don't think any power in the 'verse could have made me like that play, but I've got a tidy little list of authors I should give a second chance, because I might enjoy them now that I'm ready for them.
But I formed my taste by reading books I liked, books I cared about. It probably isn't the taste Mr. Dellingpole thinks I should have; it's okay for me not to read Updike, but probably less okay if the reason I'm not reading Updike is that I'm reading George R. R. Martin. But I submit that quality, intelligence, and depth exist as much in one's interaction with a book as they do in the text itself: all the literary brilliance in the world doesn't matter if my eyes are glazing over as I turn the pages. You want to know how I learned close reading? By obsessing over Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books and piecing together the fragments of prophecy and foreshadowing scattered through them. And it's entirely possible I never would have become an alert enough reader to survive Dorothy Dunnett had I not gone through those baby steps first. But if somebody had convinced me I ought to be spending my time on Zadie Smith instead of Jordan, it's also possible I would have never picked up Dunnett in the first place -- or, y'know, other books in general.
If I were in charge of high school curricula, you know what? Literary merit would not be my overriding concern. I would set out to give kids books they might enjoy, and then once they're engaged, teach them how to pay attention to what they're reading. Everything else can follow from there, because once you've done that, the chances of there being an "everything else" get a lot higher.
It's a fine irony when Mr. Dellingford decries readers who pick up literary books only out of a sense of obligation -- while also telling us we should obligate kids to do just that.
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 08:28 pm (UTC)The worst part to me is that the school boards pick out books that teachers don't necessarily like. I mean, I hate Steinbeck and Hemingway (and Updike). If I had to teach them, I think that dislike would come through. On the other hand, other teachers would hate what I love--Poe, Dickens, Faulkner and so forth. They would steal all the fun from those.
I think there's a lot of writing out there that could be more accessible if the teachers loved what they were teaching. The love is catching.
There's this fabulous Gerald Graff essay called "Disliking Books at an Early Age" that tackles this a bit. Look it up sometime.
Di
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 05:46 pm (UTC)Actually, that's a rant I'd like to hear . . . .
I think there's a lot of writing out there that could be more accessible if the teachers loved what they were teaching. The love is catching.
It can be. I went all the way through AP Physics because I had a teacher who was passionate about the subject. Then again, my pre-calculus teacher really loved him some math, too, and he was pretty much the nail in the coffin of my interest in the subject; the passion did not transfer from him to us.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 06:00 pm (UTC)He's the first father of New Criticism (aka formalism).
Then here comes T.S. Eliot. And he said that art should be difficult, complicated and that it must be understood based only on the words on the page (no going to look up stuff or thinking about authors or what have you). True art stands the test of time because it is deeply complex and yet everything is there to understand, but only if you have the skills to read it.
He created the notion that ordinary people couldn't understand or appreciate art without the mediation of oh, let's just call them 'priests' of literature, shall we? Only people credentialed through a process (like academia) were authorized to be critics or understand art. Which of course means that it wasn't for ordinary people. And hell, ordinary people don't like it because it was purposely complicated and difficult and often baroque and boring.
Anyhow, all of this led to New Criticism, which is was formed the basis for most teachers of literature for a long long time and stil does. So when teachers ask students what they think something means, and the student answers, the teacher disagrees and says no. Because according to Eliot, there's only one right meaning to a work and only priests are able to find it. Students/ordinary people aren't qualified.
That method, to my mind, teaches students not to engage in the literature cause their WRONG. And if they enjoy it, it can't be good because good literature is the stuff they don't understand and that they are WRONG about. And it's boring because they don't understand it and they can't formulate thoughts about it because those thoughts are WRONG.
It's funny. I was teaching a lit theory class a few years back and we'd just finished going over New Criticism and reading a lot of Arnold and Eliot and my students came in, many from this early brit lit class. They were complaining aobut the prof, about how he would ask questions and when they didn't give him the answer he wanted, he'd tell them they were wrong and keep asking the question, but they all shut up because they didn't want to risk being wrong. They kept going on and on and I just was grinning at them. Finally I asked them if they recognized anything in that teaching style. and then Bingo! A light! They realized he was totally a new critic and once they got that, the class was better for them because they realized it was a theoretical approach.
Anyhow, not exactly a coherent rant because I'm proofing a manuscript I have to send in, but there you go.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 06:07 pm (UTC)I can't help but think, in my more bitter and cynical (and reductive) moments, that they poisoned the well for everybody -- that the decline in reading is ALL THEIR FAULT.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 06:17 pm (UTC)