The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article recently called Against Readings by Mark Edmundson, a professor of English. Edmundson addresses it to those who teach literature. His argument is that teachers should not teach literature from a lit crit perspective. In other words, it is not a good idea to teach a book or poem in class and analyze it–read it–with the students from a specific school of literary criticism, at least not if the students know nothing about Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, etc texts and have not read them. He asserts it is not fair because the teacher is imposing their own thoughts on the work at hand and not allowing students to discover for themselves what may or may not be in the text.
Edmundson suggests that by the time students get to college they have had a lot of ideas, thoughts, opinions that are not their own shoved down their throats by parents, friends, teachers, guidance counselors, society at large, all telling them what they should do and be and value. Edmundson is a believer in the transformative power of literature and reading and thinks literature professors have the prime opportunity to help students find out about themselves and what they really believe. But that can’t happen if the lit prof foists a particular interpretation of a text onto the students.
It all sounds so touchy feely when I describe it, but it isn’t really. It is a long article and Edmundson writes well. He wants teachers to “befriend” the texts they teach, to help the students understand what Blake or Emerson, or whoever is saying within the context of the author’s framewor. After the students have a grasp on that, have had a chance to figure out whether they agree or disagree with the author’s view, then teacher and student can begin examining the text from other angles and points of view.
The way Edmundson sees it,
To be against readings is also not to be against criticism. Once the author’s vision of what Stevens calls “How to Live, What to Do” is made manifest, it’s necessary to question it… But this sort of questioning needs to occur once the author’s vision is set forth in a comprehensive, clear, sympathetic manner. Criticism is getting into skeptical dialogue with the text. Mounting a conventional academic reading — applying an alternative set of terms — means closing off the dialogue before it has a chance to begin.
And might I add, turning off the students to the study of literature.
One of the best parts of the article, however, was the end, when he criticizes the way teachers do academic criticism in their own books:
The books that we professors of literature tend to write now are admirable in many ways. They are full of learning, hard work, honesty, and intelligence that sometimes, in its way, touches on brilliance. But they are also, at least in my judgment, usually unreadable. They are composed as performances. They are meant to show, and often to show off, the prowess of the author. They could not conceivably be meant to provide spiritual or intellectual nourishment. No one could read a representative instance of such writing and decide based on it to change her life. Our books are not written from love, but from need.I think that it is possible to write books and essays in behalf of literature that will demonstrate its powers of renovation and inquire into the limits of those powers. Such books can and should be inspiring not only to members of the profession but to educated (or self-educated) and curious members of the general public who are willing to do some hard intellectual work.
I’d be willing to do hard intellectual work if more academics wrote books that weren’t completely opaque to the uninitiated.
I’m not a teacher but I have been a formal student of literature, and with all the doom and gloom and questioning of late about what good are the humanities, maybe if teachers taught literature from a befriending the text approach their passion and love for literature would be better served because it would not be hidden beneath confusing jargon and ideas that students don’t understand. And instead of turned off, students might become energized and engaged and interested in literature and what it might hold from them as life-long readers.
I recently read Edmundson’s Why Read? (in which he expounds on the same point) and couldn’t help but think he’d the nail on the head with his observations. I’ve been taking a number of grad lit courses this semester and have found myself feeling rather frustrated by all the theory that seems part and parcel of the process. I feel that we spend most of our time crabbing around the text, examining it through a multitude of ‘understanderscopes’, and coralling parts of the text together into little evidence pends to support preferred theory.
For me at least it really sours the study of the texts and its sad to see the steady stream of lit lovers transferring out of the course week after week.
Thank god I have all these amazing book blogs to buttress against this despondance!
Hmm, I’m torn about this. On the one hand, I think he makes some excellent points and his way seems very, well, true to text and student. But I also know that once I started in college to study literature from a feminist perspective a whole world opened up for me…one I was thoroughly engaged and challenged by. Perhaps I understood the true vision of the author for some books, but I certainly didn’t for all…
I think it partly depends on the teacher. A good teacher can make it possible for students to learn and enjoy literature without presenting his/her own interpretation and while making sure the student notices the little pips that are deemed “important”. Most teachers, however, are fairly standard and prefer to teach by the book (pun intended) and not by letting students reach their own conclusions.
This is part of the reason I opted for self-education rather than returning to formal schooling — At forty-four, I get to choose.
Especially since my learning is personal growth and not career oriented, I didn’t want to be indoctrinated. I wanted to be able to study literature from a perspective that mattered to me and I could apply to my life. Not that that never happens in a classroom setting, but you know what I mean.
Great post!
Lezlie
This was a major peeve of mine when my daughter was in college. She would talk to me about how her lit prof would insert her own agenda into everything they read – she found it very annoying, and not very enlightening. Unfortunately, when you are anxious about your grade, it is difficult to approach the reading from a perspective that does not jibe with the teacher’s. I think Edmundson has the right angle on this one.
Have you read The Human Stain by Philip Roth? Edmunson’s argument gets given human form when Roth pits his two fictional academics against one another, one is the sympathetic, humane-but-broken character who wants students to think for themselves, the other is a ball-grinding, madly ambitious feminist literary theorist. In a sense Roth also points out something inadvertently here about Edmunson’s argument: it makes theory the bad guy out of a misunderstanding of what it’s there for and what it is intended to do. I wish with all my heart that there were more good books published that show students how to deal with theory in a way that helps them get a grip on their thoughts and yet prevents theory from overwhelming their own ideas. In my experience, students often find it very difficult to find the words to express what they dimly but intensely feel about a book. Other readings give them a chance to measure their reactions and to borrow vocabulary. But good literary teachers are always encouraging students to argue with what they find written elsewhere, and to take their own individual and original line.
It may well be that some teachers rely too heavily on other interpretations as the ‘right’ answer to a text. But that’s poor teaching. I feel uncomfortable at the thought that we can only circumvent that obstacle by dispensing with a lot of interesting, helpful and potentially rich material.
Maybe I need a disclaimer – in the classes I took for my undergrad English degree, not once did we do what the author is calling a “reading”. Every prof I had was a friend of the text.
Having said that, isn’t there value of picking and working with a narrow perspective? It’s focuses attention, it breaks strudents out of their received ideas, their comfort zone.
I don’t want a lit prof who teaches nothing but his own agenda. But maybe I do want a prof who teaches multiple agendas, maybe even some with which he strongly disagrees, as a way to teach critical thinking.
Shouldn’t a really good reader, especially a credentialed reader, know how to criticize books he loves?
Antipodean Owl, you’re a radical! I don’t think even the Chronicle author wants to remove theory from grad school.
Sounds like an interesting article. I couldn’t agree more that literature professors should do everything in their power to get students hooked on literature and not turn them away by imposing certain lines of thought. I like to study literature, but in an open-minded way. Thanks for sharing this.
I only teach kids up to the age of 16 but if i didn’t give them some direction of where to go to a text and what type of thisng may be beig discussed many wouldn’t get far.
This year my top set have been introduced to politics – dictatorships and totalitarian worlds, the horror of the holocaust, we’ve discussed the treatment of females in the 16th century, learnt about court cases and now about a whole host of political issues from across the world – many of these things they know little about to start with. I think the books and poems we study are opening up the world to the kids.
Although I have to say at uni I had a lecturer who tried to convice up that there was a phallic symbol in every Romantic poem we studied – we ofetn wondered about this as we couldn’t see it and often seemed like he found the tiniest link just for something to say
Amateur Reader – I’m not sure I want to see theory go altogether either, that would be radical! (though I do wonder how different classes would be!) But when a reading list is slanted so far in favour of crit that in some cases we don’t even read the full text – only those excerpts that illustrate the theory – I can’t help but think that something is slightly amiss.
It leaves my little history trained brain screaming, ah! Don’t we start with the primary source first and then engage the theory? I think as Biblibio pointed out – it depends on the teacher and I’m not yet convinced mine is a friend of the book!
A thought-provoking article. I think, really, that every interpretation of a text offers some kind of reading, even the sort of interpretation where the teacher is trying her best to “befriend” the text — so to suggest that teachers not teach from a particular lit-crit perspective doesn’t make sense to me. They always teach from a particular perspective, because you can’t do otherwise. But it does make sense that teachers should try to entertain various types of readings and be open in class to different ideas and to refrain from forcing readings down students’ throats.
Hmm, maybe it’s just as well I didn’t study literature in university! Seems to me that the first way to approach literature is as a fellow human being. Other readings may be intellectually stimulating or politically relevant but I don’t think they are as essential or as deep. I have my suspicions that a lot of it is make-work.
This is an interesting discussion indeed!
First of all, I don’t think a teacher can be totally objective in teaching. Any reading is an interpretation and I don’t believe that the word of the author can be 100% transmitted, we can never be sure of what the author really meant, we can only speculate. Each of us will receive the text in a different way, depending on our own circumstances and on our previous reading, this is what intertextuality is about.
Therefore, I don’t have a problem with a teacher having an agenda, the problem is when the teacher is not open to other interpretations and forces down your throat his/her own agenda/interpretation. Literature should be about discussion and about a sharing of ideas. I find it great to see a teacher (with an agenda) who is so passionate about what s/he is teaching, as long as s/he doesn’t dismiss the students’ own ideas.
I’m sorry to say that, once a group of people sits around a table and discusses a work of literature, all the angels — free of preconceptions, open to all meaning, ready to appreciate a work of art — disappear. They are displaced by individuals with preconceptions, expectations, limits, and demands. I have encountered readers who: don’t want to read about poor people, don’t want to read about rich people, don’t feel that authors should force us to read about “unsympathetic characters,” don’t think novels should be “depressing,” want every novel to have a message, hate novels with a message, and on and on.
Of course, we all have tendencies such as these, though perhaps less extreme. We are entirely ready to challenge the author, and much less prepared to challenge ourselves. I find many literary critics irritating, but I’m not prepared to dismiss them, because so many of them are much better readers than I am. My favorite example is J. Hillis Miller, whose insights even include the problem of demystifying literature through criticism.
Wanting to be an empathetic reader is like wanting to be an expressionist painter. You shouldn’t try to do it in a classroom. It will ruin you. On the other hand, just because you’re doing it, doesn’t mean you’re good at it.
Sylvia, that’s some heavy-duty prof-bashing! Do you mean it?
My impression is that most lit profs are doing what they think is pedagogically useful in the classroom, trying to push whatever set of students they have to whatever the next level of reading is, at the same time working on a whole list of other issues – composition, argumentation, basic facts about the world.
Some of the profs are probably wrong about the effectiveness of what they’re doing, but I don’t think they mean it as make-work. They mean it as real work!
Amateur Reader, you should have seen the stuff I deleted from my comment!
I just get the impression that academics get caught up in finding new and jazzy ways to look at a book whether or not that adds any real human value to it. I think it comes down to whether one views literature as an intellectual exercise or as something that is truly relevant to our personal and collective lives. I suppose there is nothing wrong with the former, but it is sort of like the biologist/naturalist dichotomy. Biology is great but it’s natural history that speaks to the people and enriches their lives.
That was certainly an interesting article. I think he raises some good questions and it’s clear he’s passionate about literature and its influence on a developing mind. Maybe I am overly optimistic, but I think that most teachers do keep the aspects of the primary text first and foremost in their mind when they’re introducing that text to their students.
His point about how academic research gets written is a valid one, there is probably a bit too much showing off and that is a shame – but I’m not sure whether that showing off makes its way into the classroom as much as we worry it does. In my experience, literary professors are mainly interested in sharing a love of language and helping students become critical thinkers so they can discover the ‘reading’ which will be meaningful for them later on.
I didn’t know there was a biology\natural history split along these lines. Does someone making a computer model of mitochondrial functions think of her work as any less enriching or human than a naturalist studying the life cycle of the dumbo octopus? I recently read E. O. Wilson’s memoir, Naturalist, in which he devotes a chapter to his wrangling with James Watson. Their arguments over priorities and resources were quite serious, but Wilson had no doubt that the discovery and study of DNA was enormously important.
Another way to describe “new and jazzy ways to look at a book” is “scholarship”. Whether a particular direction of research ends up being valuable, who knows, but that’s true in every field.
Rohan Maitzen has just been writing about the research side of the equation. People interested in this post may find her questions interesting, too. Her fundamental assumption is that literary scholarhip is valuable – the issue is how to best communicate new ideas.
You always find the most interesting articles–lots to think about and in the comments as well. I do think sometimes too much is “crammed” down a student’s throat, and I do like the idea of being able to come fresh to a text and being able to discover what’s there (or not) for myself, too. I like what Litlove has to say as well–I’ve not studied lit at all, and there are times I’m confused by what I’ve read, or I have an idea what it’s about, but I can’t always articulate what I’m feeling, and criticism can help refine those feelings and give them words. So I guess I’m somewhere in between. Too much criticism or to sophistcated and complicated I would be lost with that, too.
This is great stuff!
While we are interpreting profs methods we should look at their motives. Teaching Lit. is a very competitive field. In order to stay on top or relevant one has to come up with these new ideas and takes on a text, “accurate” or not. This in my opinion is what ruins a text for the reader. I once wrote a paper with a very original interpretation, but I didn’t believe it myself. I still feel sick about that. It’s a business. Also some of the responsibility belongs to the students. If a prof says something that I think is crap, I’ll say “I think thats crap.” More respectfully of course, most profs are OK with that and hopefully it helps the other students to be OK with disagreeing.
Literature is Platonic, not Aristotelian. If it is broken down into all its parts it no longer exists. If you try to explain to me why I love my tattered old teddy bear, you’ll fail miserably. It can not be done. Break down Mozart into mathematical equations, who cares. Play on.
I get in trouble for this all the time. The only interpretation that really matters is Authorial Intent, and Reader Response. All that exists in the equation are the author, the text and the reader.
Rock on Edmundson.