“The fashion for [historicals] is gone, and nobody wants to bring it back. It was better in its time, and will wear better, than the smart cackle, cynical humour at second-hand from America, cruelty at second-hand from France, and gabble about so-called problems, which are the fashions of today. At any rate the style forms only a subordinate part of a lively and kindly story, which does not preach, which was written to amuse, and not that the author might pose in any one of the cynical, cruel, daring, or other affected attitudes with which we are tiresomely familiar.”
From the intro to a library reject copy of Marryat’s Jacob Faithful written by one David Hannay for this printing, 1895.
So many people have dismissed the entirety of nineteenth century literature as a monolith of Victorian dullness. I expect that for many of those, the only 19th C novels they’ve read have been the so-called classics they were assigned in college.
I’ve already posted enough about classics, books one was supposed to appreciate but didn’t, or books that were supposed to be trash that we loved. The thing that this particular quote got me to thinking about was how we were expected to read (and discuss) said assigned classics while in school and college.
There was a dramatic difference, for example, when I talked to a bunch of fifth graders about the latest Harry Potter. Every face was intent on me, the problem wasn’t Teacher Me trying to pry answers out of them to prove their reading comprehension, the problem was keeping some kind of order because everyone was talking at once.
These discussions always started off with favorite bits, and whom did you hate the most, but if the kids were given enough time, those discussions spun off into speculation, interpretation, debate, with kids recalling the text as best they could to prove their points. If I asked them to bring their copy the next day and read the problematical bit, they would.
And yet at literature time, these same kids would sit there, bored spitless, or twiddling pencils, writing notes, staring out the windows as I proceeded through the mandated study guides.
A writer friend over at SFF.NET linked to this crack-up of a bogus book report on a much-assigned book now lauded as a classic.
While I was watching and laughing, I was thinking back to my own experience with To Kill a Mockingbird. In my day, it not only wasn’t assigned, it was forbidden to many young readers, I guess because of the rape aspect. That went totally over my twelve-year old head. I assumed that the victim had died of an extra bad beating.
But at no time did I then, or later, identify the rising action, or examples of dramatic irony, or any of the other stuff that so many book reports demand. I don’t recall even the most sophisticated readers among my acquaintance ever discussing the rising or falling action of any book. Does that kind of requirement make better readers?
My feeling is, no. What makes better readers is reading, talking about what one likes or doesn’t like, what was puzzling, and always, going back to the text to reread the words, then discover what those words mean to other people. But academics feel that these study guides are shaping young readers’ intellectual tools.
When I looked at a study guide for To Kill a Mockingbird, I was so grateful that I’d read (and reread) the book on my own because for sure, those pages of tedious questions would have killed any possible investment in the story. I would have been forced to stay on the outside, watching for the bits the guide required.
This is not to say that all readers are the same. There are many readers for whom literature is a puzzle whose pieces need to be teased out. This reader is never inside the story, but gains pleasure from taking the work apart and then reassembling it via logic, or message, or intellectual process. Novels are mind games, and reading is playing the game.
No conclusions, here, outside of my conviction that most humans read for mental play. So here’s a question: what do you think shapes good readers—if you have a definition of what makes a good reader?
Now that you mention it, I remember getting the same “rising action/climax/denouement”-type instruction in my own English classes, and wow — how useless was that? Every kid is going to have a general sense that stories follow a pattern of “things get more and more exciting until they hit the big finale, and then after that there’s wrap-up;” I’m not sure what benefit anybody derives from sitting down and identifying what the “rising action” is, at least not in the way that I remember doing it in school. (I can see a benefit if you go “huh, that climax seemed short-changed” or “the denouement seemed awfully long,” and then realize that’s because the story’s real climax isn’t what you thought. But I don’t remember that being the kind of thing we addressed.)
Dramatic irony, etc — my teacher went on and on about how the line on the first page where it says the roof of the courthouse “was sagging” was Deeply Important because it symbolized the failures of the justice system. By then I was writing enough of my own stuff that I remember thinking, “or maybe Harper Lee just liked the image, or was basing it on a courthouse she’d seen.” I have no problem with us saying that word has the effect of harmonizing with the failures of the justice system; I’m just dubious of the attitude that any such thing is there because the writer was making an Important (and Conscious) Point. God knows I’ve written in enough such things without ever meaning to.
The thing I had the most fun with back then was making an argument from the text. Where did I learn to do that? On CompuServe’s Wheel of Time message boards, where we whiled away the years between installments by chewing over textual minutiae in support of arguments as to what had happened or would happen to the characters. Whether or not Moridin was a reincarnation of Ishamael, or who was going to rescue Moiraine and how, may not have been questions for the ages, but damned if they didn’t teach me about close reading and assembling quotes in support of my thesis. That skill, more than any lessons I might have learned about specific works of literature, has been valuable to me since then.
. . . which is totally a tangent from your question about what makes a good reader, but oh well.
But you are exactly on topic. One of the things I alluded to in the post was how my fourth and fifth graders were, exactly like you and your Wheel of Time friends, teaching themselves about close textual analysis in order to support their arguments. Only they were getting intense pleasure out of determining whether this character was a secret Dementor or that character was really a Slytherin, etc, instead of dreary test questions. I think the most annoying thing about those study guides was, how arbitrary some were–you had to pick the exact lines that someone felt were rising action, or symbolic (and symbolic of what overused thematic trope?) or you were RONG, RONG, RONG.
That arbitrariness may be an artifact of grading procedures. It’s much easier to grade if there’s exactly one right answer, and no wiggle room for discussion, or argument. So overworked teachers really like being able to go through answer sheets quickly and know at once whether a given answer is right, or wrong.
And unfortunately, that goes double in cases where the teacher’s authority is tangled up with their ego, such that they see any disagreement as a threat to their status as Being In Charge.
This is true about grading. (And can be true about classroom power dynamics.)
I wonder if the Twilight books had the same effect. Fan fiction would probably, er, fan it, too.
I heard some very interesting discussions about Twilight, yes!
I remember another ploy, when there were no big series going. A teacher gave the students the first half or or so of “The Birthmark”, and let them talk about how they thought it would end.
http://www.online-literature.com/poe/125/
Oh, that is a fun one!
A good reader is one who reads, right?
But I mean that in sort of a different way. I’m a person who likes analytics, who likes to figure out why things are a certain way and how they come about and what sort of structures exist. But the whole Death of the Author/not Death of the Author debate only annoyed me. Everyone was so worried about the author, but no one really wanted to know what it was like to write – how the act of writing influenced the text, how the language faculty to some extent predetermined the word choices and the sentence structures. It felt like faffing about. And it felt like cheating.
Because there isn’t one right answer about any piece of literature. Words have meanings, but they don’t have the same meaning to everyone – the same nuance, the same effect. Literature is always stabbing in the dark and hoping you were both specific and ambiguous enough to get something across while allowing the reader enough leeway to make it mean something to them.
But linguistic analysis isn’t reading. It misses the whole point of reading, which is sharing possible/impossible worlds with other people. Not everyone figures out that stories have structure – Narrative deficiency is something that Speech Pathologists have to work on. If you don’t figure it out, you won’t do it, and your stories are not that satisfying to others. So story structure is really important to learn, but not necessarily to be able to talk about.
Though, if you’re going to compare cross-cultural story types – which DON’T all have the same structure, then suddenly the rising action, etc, becomes interesting. Assuming something is natural and universal is a. usually a fallacy, and b. boring.
So here’s the question (one I never figured out the answer to) – what’s the point of English class? Is it to make kids read? Or is it to make them learn something about how people communicate using language? English class can totally be a natural science – and one that can really be functionally applied in your everyday life. And so many kids love to both read and write stories – stories that are interesting and flawed and cliched. Why not teach constructive criticism? Because, seriously, if the teacher tells you ‘this is a great piece of literature, now remark upon its greatness,’ what is there left to do?
Not a thing.
I used to ask myself that when I taught English. My own answer was to attempt to make readers of the kids, which (to me) meant getting rid of the anxiety and tedium as much as possible. Some were just not going to be readers. But for the others, marking them wrong because the study guide said that X was the symbol for Man Vs. Man and not Y, made them hate the text, if not the act of reading. Which is why I finally dumped all the study guides.
An understanding of the concepts and tools of literary analysis can add to the pleasure of reading a text. I do something of the sort in my Art History class, but those kids are volunteers. The problem seems to be that people who Love Literature and want others to share the love seem to me to impose the concepts, etc. and texts that mean so much to them on readers at too early a stage.
I have some of the same dilemmas teaching history, but I would never urge a kid to read the kind of hard core history I eat up. I wouldn’t even urge my colleges to read such books. Whee! Look at those footnotes–as long as the chapter. No. I don’t think so.
Yes, I think this is a good part of it. Then the question becomes, when is a good time for teaching those tools?
I think one can do it younger if answers are not arbitrary, that the sagging roof on the courthouse doesn’t symbolize the failing justice system because I say so, period, no discussion, F on the test if you don’t tick that box. Permitting kids to disagree, and to prove their point from the text, can take away the frustration and bring some of the pleasure back.
My high school English teachers made the point that novels conveyed or expressed or represented X, Y, or Z about the human condition, and that regardless of whatever story was happening, you could dig around and look for these basic things having to do with how people interact, human conflict, blah blah, in the story. At the time, I understood what the teachers were saying, but I was much more interested in the story as STORY, and if not that, then the ideas as ideas. The themes and stuff seemed simultaneously tired and abstract.
I don’t feel that way now, but I think that’s because now I’m *interested* in those themes now, and I just wasn’t when I was in high school. I hadn’t lived enough life to be interested in general characteristics about the human condition; the things I was experiencing were still new and particularistic.
Still, it was worth it, I think, to be given the notion that there were these overarching ways of thinking about human experience–it helped me recognize patterns in my own life, in history, and in stories, and as I say, later I got interested in that for its own sake.
… I guess I think a good reader is one who’s willing to entertain the notion that there’s more to a story than immediately meets the eye, and who’s interested in thinking about a story and mulling it over–whatever may come out of that, and whatever constitutes mulling.
That’s a good question. I tend to think that we humans, as pattern seekers, will find patterns in art that speak to us, the more patterns (or wider patterns) the older we get. But is it wrong to point out these patterns to young readers? Not at all. I think I balk at being hardnosed about it–that you can’t get a good grade unless you see the exploitation of the bourgeoisie in this novel, or Man Versus Nature in Old Man the Sea, while denying other patterns that a young reader might perceive.
I think this is why variety is useful. It’s good to read, as a class, both the kinds of stories kids/teens might not seek out for themselves (so as to help open their eyes, etc.) and also ones that are popular (or at least known to be interesting to kids/teens in general) so that they have a chance to practice literary analysis on works they are more comfortable with and may even have a connection to already.
Yes!
In haste….
I’m sure you’re right about what they do teach them in these schools. But ‘standing up above the story’ might also describe something good: seeing/feeling what it is building up toward, ‘woops, that’s a switch, he must be going for something else’, etc.
And there are good breakings of the fourth wall. Like when Jane Austen said to the reader, that the perceptive reader will have noticed that there are only X pages left, so the plot must….
See my comments to Tom Simon a few days ago.
Good points.
There’s no rape, per se. Scout asks Atticus what rape is when Ewell’s daughter accuses the one-armed black man, Tom of raping her when her father finds her making advances on the black man. And he does beat his daughter, but he doesn’t kill her.
There’s a mob that wants to kill Tom, even if he’s proven to be innocent of the charges.
The one who gets killed in the book is Ewell, perhaps by Boo Radley, because Ewell’s going after Atticus’s children with knife in the cover of the lynch mob — I’m not absolutely certain of this last bit, timewise, I mean the lynch mob + Ewell’s death though, because it’s been quite some time since I re-read.
As for the discouragement for teaching To Kill A Mockingbird, a lot of it came from the racial epithets and language, thinking this wasn’t appropriate for kids to see on the page, despite them hearing it on the playground, at least these days more and more.
This came from both white and black parents.
Though, on the other hand, the book was used in high school classes, generally, and is still shelved among the YA collections in our library system. But you won’t find it in the kids’ room, for picture books up to middle grades. It’s considered too sophisticated in matter, treatment and language for that level of reader.
I don’t think its taught that much in high school classes these days though, as considered quaint and out-of-date for the later generations and more recent ‘classics’ have taken the place that once To Kill A Mockingbird held.
It is now taught in many seventh grade classrooms. (Age 12.)
I once used The Vampire Diaries, newly popular among teen girls due to the TV show, as a vehicle to discuss epistolary fiction with my 8th graders. Eventually, we ended up talking about The Sorrows of Young Werther, which was a lot easier for them to understand when viewed through the lens of The Vampire Diaries. One of my students even wrote Werther fanfiction!
As for how not to do it, picking out symbols always annoyed me a lot more than the rising action/climax/falling action thing, because a lot of these symbols seemed so arbitrary. They also depend on the students’ experience radius. Many years ago, the German textbook required the students to discuss and analyze a classic poem which included the line “pale Diana rises”. One of the students assumed that this was a reference to the then recently deceased Princess of Wales and that “pale” symbolized that she was dead. Of course, there’s no way that a teenager could have understood that poem without a lot of historical context. We didn’t have any Latin students in that class either, so no one got the allusions to classic mythology.
As for teachers sticking rigidly to the “one true reading” and/or boring students to death with symbols, I had lots of those. They pretty thoroughly destroyed any appreciation I might ever have had otherwise for Hemingway, for All Quiet on the Western Front and for Max Frisch’s Andorra. Though my Andorra-related story is so funny that my students love it.
We also had one German teacher who kept assigning novels in which women either died, usually after having sex, and/or were abused by their fathers/brothers/husbands. The uncheery subject matter was made worse by the fact that this fellow kept regurgitating the received one true meaning he had been taught at university. Hence, Lessing’s Emilia Galotti is about the emancipation of the bourgeoisie and the honour killing of Emilia is an act of liberation. Said teacher was very surprised when a gaggle of outraged teenaged girls flat out refused to see it that way and pointed out that a) Emilia’s aristocratic lover had not forced her, but the relationship was consensual, and b) that if Emilia’s father had really wanted to strike a blow for liberating the bougeoisie, he should have tried killing the Count or whatever he was.
We had to read Emilia Galotti first year college German classes . . . and as usual, we had to write on the existential symbolism. Blargh, could NOT get away from that in those days.
I don’t ‘get’ a lot of symbolism. I read literal, and to me the Erlkönig is a fantastically spooky ballad about something that may or may not be real (either a fevered dream or, well, the Erlkönig) – but never symbolic. That seems like a total copout, and I’ve had the fantastic reading protocol – suspension of disbelief, that things _exist_ in stories that don’t exist in my reality – for a very long time.
And the best symbolism I ever saw was reading Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the same time as reading Kafka. Every ‘going down to the river’ became a metaphor for contemplating suicide. You can totally map two unrelated books and come up with an awful lot of meaning!
It is so very strange when that happens!
“What makes better readers is reading” is such a true statement and I think that whatever books we can get others to read that get them excited to the point that they want to talk about it are good books to read. I was always a reader, from my earliest recollection. So when it come time to study the classics in school it was a win-win for me. I was getting to do “homework” that was reading fiction. How cool was that? I developed a love of Shakespeare and Dickens because of those high school classes. But it was never because of some in-depth structured analysis of the book. It was being lead in discussion by a teacher who also loved the material and would teach us some advanced stuff while focusing more on the story itself.
If I was a teacher I would be fighting to teach what may be ironically called “modern classics”, those books that all the kids have read or are aching to read and I would use that as a springboard into more of the ‘classics’. I might be unsuccessful in that fight, but I would be trying.
I think that the best teachers do that–make literature fun. Then one can sneak in the tools!
I used to wonder what would happen to Harry Potter if it became ‘required reading.’
Would the enthusiasts continue to argue chapter and verse (literally)? Or would they say ‘homework’ and lose interest?
And what would the non-enthusiasts do, take interest because their friends were having a fun discussion – in class time, no less – or remain disinterested?
Good questions all!