The MLA Wonders Why Literature Should be Taught. Again.

Perhaps I'm just a glutton for punishment, but I've been perusing the blog entries and reporting from the MLA over at the Chronicle, and I've been pleasantly surprised to discover a bit of a recurring theme amongst some of the postings:  that perhaps professional anxiety about the worth of teaching literature is linked to the fact that no one is really emphasizing that literature can be pleasurable and personally meaningful to read.

In the blog review of the panel titled, "Why Teach Literature Anyway," we get the usual responses: 

All of them suggested that by teaching literature, scholars were performing an essential educational function: changing the way students see the world.

(I'll gloss over the unspoken addendum of "because students don't see the world properly" that sometimes unfortunately accompanies this attitude, or else this entry will become WAY bloated.) Then a theory professor added:

When she first began teaching, she said, she taught students to apply the close reading they had learned in their literature classes to theoretical texts. "But for more than a decade," she said, "students have come into class not having learned close reading at all."

How odd that it would fall to her to teach the habit of literary reading, she said. "I'm wondering, if they're not getting that training, why study literature anyway?"

But the last portion is the most telling:

After the panel one member of the audience asked why none of the speakers had said anything about pleasure.

"We're all for pleasure," Mr. Bromwich assured him. "We just took it for granted."

Yep, and that right there is a big part of the problem - the academic process in English has been so geared toward the "tools of theory" for so long that they've lost sight of the fact that the texts they're studying haven't been around for centuries or more because they provide a fabulous insight into the subjugation of the Other, but because folks kind of liked reading them and finding personal meaning within them. 

I think what gets lost, the longer someone stays in academe, is the knowledge that the majority of the kids they're teaching are coming from high school envrionments where they've (the kids, not necessarily the teachers - okay, Hublet?) treated reading as "that thing I have to do to pass the test, to write the essay, to get the high score on the SAT and to get into college" and then these students find themselves confronted with professors who lay texts before them like corpses to be dissected by a variety of theoretical scalpels - with the focus on the scalpel.  Somewhere along the way all the fun and relevance (in terms of personal discovery and relevance, not political or theoretical relevance) has been sucked right out of teaching literature.

Maybe it's because I taught intro courses, and never got that sense of removal, that I was reminded daily that most of the kids in these classes would have only a brief brush with "High-Toned College Literature," and that if part of my job was to encourage literacy in general, it was important that I convince them that - guess what?  Reading isn't just about slogging through hundreds of pages about a peg-legged obsessive and his stupid whale nemesis and then writing an essay on what that tells us about Marx in order to get an "A," it was also about discovering what you thought the author was doing and why, and what that might mean. And that making those discoveries could be kind of fun.

And there was a panel on just that at the MLA this year, too - "Pleasure Now!" 

After the recitation, four scholars delivered "provocations" to the audience, calling for do-it-yourself lifestyles and a return to the "pleasure of close reading."

They referred to the contemporary "speed up" in scholarly output and workloads as a prime pleasure-killing force. But they also hinted at another problem closer to home for leftist critics. Namely: Scholars who analyze literature as if they are performing autopsies on the workings of power can get pretty dreary.

Is something wrong when reading literature becomes a performance of displeasure? That seemed to be one of the guiding questions among the scholars at "Pleasure Now!"

Gee, ya think that spending a couple of decades viewing texts as nothing more than windows into the myriad ways that "(insert aggrieved populace) gets screwed, usually by the West, or Capitalism, or Men, or All Three Together in An Unholy Trinity of Evil!", might turn some folks off?

It sure sucked the fun out of reading for me, which is why I read mostly genre fiction or history now.

Well, that and the fact that the "serious" modern fiction being turned out by grads of the MFA programs in this country is just one continuous dreary crap-fest, but that's a rant for another day.