What does it mean to “teach” literature? What about it needs teaching? This is a heck of a lot harder question than it first appears.
Jerry and I read Ross Douthat’s recent column, “The Academic Apocalypse” in the New York Times, (Jan 11, link below) which led to one of our lengthy lunchtime discussions. I have been ready to raze the profession to the ground and start fresh. Jerry, more conservative as always, has talked me back from the brink.
Douthat says, “The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it. Jobs are disappearing, subfields are evaporating, enrollment has tanked, and amid the wreckage the custodians of humanism are ‘befuddled and without purpose.’”
He calls it a crisis of faith that echoes the crisis in Christianity. He sees an entire world “dissolving underneath our feet — institutions crumbling, authorities corrupted, faith in the whole experiment [the humanities and especially the study of literature] evaporating.
[A side note: a friend just got back from the Modern Language Association meeting, basically the chief job fair of the profession. He said there are no jobs. Period.]
Jerry and I saw this crisis arrive while we were teaching. The canon [the mutually-agreed-upon Great Books] rightly opened up to such diversity that it was no longer possible to teach our students a body of knowledge. So the profession set about justifying itself by claiming different goals, such as “teaching discipline and habits of mind.” But think about it—those could as well describe a philosophy class, or a math class . . . .
The teaching of literature has long involved philosophy and psychology. It’s long involved examining underlying tensions—political, psychological, biographical, etc.—in the work.
Here’s the thing, though: when teachers felt that “the best that has been thought and said” wasn’t an empty phrase, their prime reason for teaching was to teach their students to value the best. And to examine why it might be The Best.
So if the faith that there is such a thing as superior/transcendent collapses, if our belief in the balance of powers in the government collapses, if our faith in the F.B.I, the E.P.A., in all our public institutions collapses, if our belief that certain words are to be valued above others collapses, then what?
When you lose your faith that one book can be better than another, then what reason do you give for studying literature? Well, besides “teaching discipline,” you could use it to unearth the biases in the culture, the author, and/or the reader. You’ve then turned the book (the story, the art) into merely a tool to examine culture.
That seems right for America, yes? We like morals to stories. When I was visiting high school classes, helping young teachers, over and over I watched them teach poems as if the reason for the poem to exist was to allow us to ferret out of it some life-lesson.
Back to what is meant by “teaching” literature. Jerry says, yes, there is such a thing as superior and inferior. Push me into a corner, and I’ll say okay, let’s not raze the profession to the ground after all. Let’s take up again the mantle of transmitting value. Value, meaning a belief that truth and beauty aren’t culture-dependent, and can be identified. Well, at least we can point a finger and say here is where it seems to be. We no doubt can’t “explain” it.
I feel the philosophers smirking at the idea that “beauty” has any objective value. How to reconcile Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle with Keats’s “Truth is beauty; beauty, truth”? What can possibly be certain or measurable?
Here’s what I’ve come up with: I think we who teach literature might approach the novel/poem/story/play as if it were another person, which it kind-of is. Then we can ask questions of it, see what it’s made of, where its humanity lies, and how we can love it. If we love it, it will show us its beauty. And here’s the thing: if it’s too flawed, too much a lie, we have a responsibility to let it be known that the emperor has no clothes.
I’m wondering—whether you’re an academic or not—what you think about why or how literature might be taught.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/opinion/sunday/academics-humanities-literature-canon.html