The Twin Cities Book Festival on Saturday was a good time. It was heartening to see so very many bookish people out and about in the same location. There was a bookfair with local bookstores, publishers, and authors selling their wares. There were also several friends of the library groups there, the Loft Literary Center and Minnesota Public Radio. It was crowded and overwhelming and as a result I didn’t buy any books, but just walking around was fun enough for me.
The festival is put on by my local literary review magazine, Rain Taxi. By local I mean they edit and produce the magazine here because I believe they are a national publication. And let me just say how awesome they are. They review fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays and graphic novels in high quality essays. Even better, they tend to review books that don’t get much attention in the big media outlets and review magazines. So if you are looking for an excellent literary magazine, do check them out.
In addition to the bookfair there was a children’s area with kid things to do. It was sequestered behind curtains so all I could hear was the fun band they had going when we went by. For the adults there were panels of speakers and individual authors. We attended a panel on classics and a talk and reading by Nicholson Baker. First, the panel.
The panel looked at the role of literature in high school and how it is taught there and talked about whether the classics should be taught or more current, “relevant” work should be taught instead. The panel consisted of an English professor from Harvard, a writer born in Kingston Jamaica who now lives in the Twin Cities and teaches literature at a local university, another Minnesota author who teaches creative writing at a local university, and the author of the recent book Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School. I thought it was interesting there were no high school teachers on the panel, but all the participants seemed to have occasion to work with teens in one way or another.
They all concluded that it is important to teach the classics to high school students because they are unlikely to be exposed to them on their own. Trying to sex up Jane Austen or dumb down Moby Dick is the wrong way to go about things. As Alison McGhee, one of the writers, suggested, to teach teenagers the classics as though they couldn’t possibly understand past times and places is distrustful of their intellects. They can do it, they just might need a little help. She said one of the great things about classics is that they are classics because they are not fixed in time, we still read them because they still speak to us. She said reading a book together, especially one that might be hard, creates an experience that can affect a student for the rest of his life. She held up a photo of her now 18-year-old son’s back. From shoulder to waist it was covered in a tattoo done in a lovely sepia-colored text. The text? His favorite part of Paradise Lost, a poem he would not have read on his own but was challenged with in a high school class and he loved it so much he permanently inscribed part of it on his skin. It’s pretty powerful when you think about it.
Stepehn Burt, the professor from Harvard, put forth the idea that there are two kinds of classics. There is the institutional classic that gets put into the canon and there is the reader’s classic. He said the reader’s classic is the book that gets passed from hand to hand, the OMG you have to read this book, the book that feels dangerous and subversive. Many of the institutional classics started off as a reader’s classic, but once they get accepted into the canon they lose their subversive appeal.
Marlon James, the writer from Jamaica and only person of color on the panel, had some especially interesting things to say. When he was in high school he said education was still very colonial and he spent his years reading books by dead white men. He said he developed a resentment to the canon because it did not reflect his reality; he was unable to separate Shakespeare from imperialism. But at the same time he fell in love with literature. In spite of his educational experience he doesn’t think teachers should take pains to make the classics agreeable to students.
James said he has had students tell him they hate a certain book because they could not relate, they did not see themselves or their cultural experience in the book. At this he rolled his eyes and said, “empathy is not the book’s job, it’s the reader’s.” Oh I loved that! Something to say to the next person who says she didn’t like a book because she couldn’t relate to or like any of the characters. James suggested what matters when teaching classics is that the book sparks a desire to think.
Kevin Smokler pretty much agreed with everyone else. One thing he said that I really liked was that we should teach and advocate for great books as though they were coffee shops, not cathedrals. Meaning, we should be able to argue about them and do all sorts of things to them instead of setting them up as eternal and sacred and therefore untouchable.
It was an enjoyable discussion. The question came up about what classic novel they didn’t like and all of them said The Scarlet Letter. None of them really said why they didn’t like it. I haven’t read it since high school but I recall it being a rather twisted book and I liked it very much. But every book its reader, right?
This has ended up going long so I’ll save Nicholson Baker for tomorrow.
I read ‘The Scarlet Letter’ for ‘O’ level and I can’t remember a thing about it. I’m not certain whether that says most about the book, the teacher or me, but something must have gone wrong in the mix.
I also love that quote about empathy not being the book’s job but the reader’s. Too often we forget that reading is active not passive and we have to do some work as well. I’m going to ‘pinch’ that and bring it out next time someone blames the book for their own shortcomings.
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Alex, I can’t say the details for me are anything but fuzzy, but I remember being appalled by Dimsdale’s hypocrisy as only a teenager can be, and finding the whole Puritan ethic to be totally bizarre yet frighteningly recognizable.
I hope the empathy quote serves you well. That it even might be useful is sort of sad though.
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I read The Scarlett Letter before anyone could ask me to, and liked it pretty well; one of the things I liked is that no one in the book ever said what the “A” stood for. I think a lot of dislike of books stems from people not wanting to read something they’re assigned, but I’m not sure why, as I’ve always liked being assigned books to read.
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Jeanne, you’re right, no one ever says what the “A” stands for. They of course would know so it’s nice that the reader is left to figure it out. I liked Hester a lot, I thought she had chutzpah. I agree, people teens don’t especially like being assigned books to read, but then they generally don’t like being told what to do. I liked all the assigned books because they were often ones I had never heard of before and I felt like I was discovering whole new worlds.
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I liked a lot of the books I was assigned in high school. For me, being assigned classics was a good thing because it gave me confidence to then read them on my own. But when I taught high school, the trend was to guide students to read books of their own choosing, which also had advantages, especially with kids who usually hated reading. With suggestions from me and their classmates, they usually did find something they liked, but it wasn’t often a classic. (Lots of Michael Crichton and Stephen King, from what I remember.) I think providing a mix of experiences is ideal.
That’s a great quote from Marlon James! (His novel, The Book of Night Women, is one of my favorites from recent years.)
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Teresa, You know, my sophomore year of high school my English teacher made us read all the required classics but then we had to read an additional book each semester from a list he gave us of contemporary titles. It was quite an eclectic list and that included the likes of Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. It sort of felt like we were getting away with something which made the required report we had to write on the book not so bad.
I have not read James, had never heard of him until the panel, so I will have to see about reading The Book of the Night Women!
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I’ve never read The Scarlet Letter – I do remember we asked our high school English teacher to assign it because it sounded like it could be scandalous but she said we didn’t have time to fit it into the syllabus! Isn’t that sad. She should have ditched whatever other book we were supposed to read and let us read something we were all interested in.
Anyway, sounds like a very fun time at the festival. I’ve read Rain Taxi before! It’s been a while though. That is a great publication.
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Iliana, a high school class begging to read Scarlet Letter and the teacher saying no? Wow, you’d think the teacher would jump at it with such expressed interest. I hope you have had to chance to read it since then. And glad to hear you’ve read Rain Taxi before!
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What a wonderful literary event! Thanks for reporting all the different views and thought-provoking discussions. Of course they should continue to teach the classics to young people. Just like they shouldn’t drop the history subject from the curriculum. And… I particularly like the empathy’s the reader’s job argument, and the coffee shop not cathedral metaphor. Wow… I can only admire from afar. But yes, Stefanie, you’ve done a marvelous job to make me feel as if I were there. 😉
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Arti, glad you enjoyed my event recap! I am glad I had the chance to go especially since I haven’t been for many years which is a shame really. The classics panel was really good and no one resorted to a “because they are good for you” argument which I appreciated.
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What a fascinating discussion! About the only books I really disliked for most of my life were the ones I was taught aged 14-16. It wasn’t the books’ fault – it was the way they were taught. I’d still advocate classics despite my own experience, usually because the devices authors use are clearer with a hundred year’s distance. So they can be useful in their way. But I think it’s good to balance them out with contemporary books and movie adaptations. After all, it’s the age for exploration.
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Litlove, yes, I think the way the books are taught is often more a problem than the books themselves. Curiously, none of them offered any comments on how they might be taught differently, especially to kids who are not readers. A combination of old and new seems a good idea. I didn’t much like my 9th grade English teacher but when we read To Kill a Mockingbird we also saw the movie and then reenacted the courtroom scene in class. It all made me love the book even more.
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What a fun day! I think I’d agree with Litlove on this one, that surely a balance is possible. Why not do some classics and some contemporary works, or allow the students to choose some? You would read fewer classics that way, but perhaps that’s okay.
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Rebecca, it was a fun day. I think a mix is good too because there are so many more recent books that are excellent and have something to say too. My 10th grade teacher gave us a list of books, many of them contemporary, that we got to choose to read outside of class for each semester. Everyone wanted to read Interview with the Vampire so he had to put his foot down and say only two people per book. He was a grammar nazi so the “extra” reading made the class almost bearable.
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So much depends on the poor teacher to get students enthusiastic about classic texts. I am glad I read Scarlet Letter out of school (even gladder I wasn’t introduced to it through the terrible Demi Moore movie!). I wonder what the UK equivalent to The Scarlet Letter might be – candidates would probably include Lord Of the Flies, Catcher In the Rye and Wuthering Heights.
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Ian, it does doesn’t it? I feel bad for the teachers really, so much is expected of them. Oh, Lord of the Flies. I didn’t read that one until about four years ago and wow was it good! I probably appreciated it more as an adult than I would have reading it as a kid when it all feels a bit too close to home.
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