| originally published in Commentary Magazine |
|
Why College Kids Are Avoiding
the Study of Literature
07.01.15 - 12:00 AM | by Gary Saul
Morson
Go to just about any English
department at any university, gather round the coffee pot, and listen to what
one of my colleagues calls the Great Kvetch. It is perfectly summarized by the
opening sentence of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s recent book: “We are in
the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance.”
She is not speaking of looming environmental disaster or the proliferation of
nuclear weapons. You see, those are threats we can discern. The danger Nussbaum
is highlighting “goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely
to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government.”
When a writer invokes the
insidious progress of a cancer, you know she hopes to forestall the objection
that there is little visible evidence to support her argument. What is this
cancer threatening democracy and the world? Declining enrollments in literature
courses. Her book is titled Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the
Humanities.
And why is it, in Nussbaum’s
view, that students are choosing to study economics or chemistry rather than
literature? When I was growing up in the Bronx, the local Jewish deli owner,
whose meats smelled vaguely rancid and whose bagels seemed to start out already
a day old, attributed his failing business to the vulgarization of Bronx
tastes. As her title indicates, Nussbaum arrives at the same self-serving answer.
Students are interested in profit and therefore care only about
pre-professional degrees. Another answer popular among literature professors is
that students spend so much time on Twitter that they have the attention span
of a pithed frog. But can it really be that
students are more materialistic now than in those proverbial eras of
backwardness, the 1950s and 1980s? And why did those Twitterized adolescents
once immerse themselves in seven volumes of Harry Potter?
Could it be that the problem
lies not with the students but with the professors themselves?
Why Take a Literature
Class? One reason I wonder at the Great
Kvetch is that my experience has been so different. For well over a decade, I
have been teaching the largest class at Northwestern University, with an
enrollment of about 500 students. The course is about Russian literature.
Students are generally not aware that there is such a department as “Slavic
Languages,” which teaches “Russian literature.” For them it’s all “English,”
which is the shorthand for studying novels and poetry, and so it is only by
word of mouth that the course manages to perpetuate itself. The material isn’t easy. We read
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,
and I devote another course entirely to War and Peace, attended by 300.
Now, Northwestern is supposed to be the model of a pre-professional school. So
why, of all subjects, should these students be attracted to Russian literature? I speak with students by the
dozens, and none has ever told me that he or she does not take more literature
courses because every moment at school must be devoted to maximizing future
income. On the contrary, students respond by describing some literature course
they took that left them thinking they had nothing to gain from repeating the
experience. And when I hear their descriptions of these classes, I see their
point.
Why Not Just Read
the Wikipedia Summary? What can students learn from
literature that they cannot learn elsewhere? Why should they bother with it?
For understandable reasons, literature professors assume the importance of
their subject matter. But students are right to ask these questions. All courses
are expensive, in money, time, and opportunity costs.
Will Rogers once remarked that
“we are all ignorant, only on different subjects.” To teach anything well, you
have to place yourself in the position of the learner who does not already know
the basics and has to be persuaded that the subject is worth studying. You have
to subtract knowledge and assumptions you have long since forgotten having
learned. And one of those assumptions is that literature is worth the effort of
reading it.
The first task is to get the
student to want to read literature. Students certainly see the point of wisdom,
guidance in how to think about their values and decisions. But professors tend
to laugh at such a conception as somehow philistine. Clara Claiborne Park, who
taught for years at Williams, devoted an essay to the experience of teaching
literature at a community college. At the end of the semester, one farm boy
asked: “Mrs. Park. We’ve read what Homer says about the afterlife, and what
Plato says, and now we’re reading what Dante says, and they’re all different.
Mrs. Park. Which one of them is true?” She recalls her reaction:
Many years ago, when
Northwestern student course evaluations appeared in book form, I came across a
response to a course on Dickens: “Don’t take this course unless you want to
read a lot of Dickens!” The instructor assigned a novel a week. The first
lecture was devoted to Dickens’s life and the second to the social conditions
of the time. It obviously made no difference whether one read Bleak House
or CliffsNotes.
Time and again, students tell me
of three common ways in which most high school and college classes kill their
interest in novels.
The most common approach might
be called technical. The teacher dedicates himself to the book as a
piece of craft. Who is the protagonist, and who is the antagonist? Is there
foreshadowing? Above all, this approach directs students to look for symbols.
It is easy enough to discover Christ symbols. Water symbolism can almost always
be found, since someone sooner or later will see a river, wash, or drink. In Huckleberry
Finn, the Mississippi symbolizes freedom, while the Widow Douglas’s house
symbolizes civilization. In Anna Karenina, trains symbolize fate. Or
modernization. Or the transports of love.
At a more granular level, this
approach involves teaching a dense thicket of theory focused on “the text.” But
literary works are not texts; that is, they are not just words on a page linked
by abstruse techniques. Does anybody really believe that Dickens set out to
create a sort of puzzle one needed an advanced humanities degree to make sense
of? And that he wanted the experience of reading his works to resemble solving
a crossword puzzle? Would he have attracted a mass audience if he had?
Literary works are not texts in
that sense. The text is simply the way the author creates an experience for the
reader. It is no more the work itself than a score is a concert or a blueprint
a creation capable of keeping out the rain. No, the real literary work is the
reader’s experience. This means the first thing a
teacher needs to do is help students have the experience the author is trying
to create. There is no point in analyzing the techniques for creating an
experience the students have not had.
Students need to have such
experiences, and not just be told of their results. It is crucial for them to
see how one arrives at the interpretation and lives through that process.
Otherwise, why not simply memorize some critic’s interpretation?
I once delivered a paper in
Norway on Anna Karenina, and a prominent scholar replied: “All my career
I have been telling students not to do what you have done, that is, treat
characters as real people with real problems and real human psychology.
Characters in a novel are nothing more than words on a page. It is primitive to
treat fictional people as real, as primitive as the spectator who rushed on
stage to save Jesus from crucifixion.” Here is the crux of it: Characters in a
novel are neither words on a page nor real people. Characters in a novel are
possible people. When we think of their ethical dilemmas, we do not need to
imagine that such people actually exist, only that such people and such
dilemmas could exist.
Readers who mistake theater for
reality are vanishingly rare, but almost every reader spends time wondering
what she would do if she were to find herself in the same fix as the characters
she is reading about. Would we wonder about being in the circumstances of words
on a page?
Death by Judgment The second most common way to
kill interest in literature is death by judgment. One faults or excuses
author, character, or the society depicted according to the moral and social
standards prevalent today, by which I mean those standards shared by professional
interpreters of literature. These courses are really ways of inculcating those
values and making students into good little detectors of deviant thoughts.
“If only divorce laws had been
more enlightened, Anna Karenina would not have had such a hard time!” And if
she had shared our views about [insert urgent concern here], she would have
been so much wiser. I asked one of my students, who had never enjoyed reading
literature, what books she had been assigned, and she mentioned Huckleberry
Finn. Pondering how to kill a book as much fun as that, I asked how it had
been taught. She explained: “We learned it shows that slavery is wrong.” All I
could think was: If you didn’t know that already, you have more serious
problems than not appreciating literature.
In this approach, the more that
authors and characters shared our beliefs, the more enlightened they were. This
is simply a form of ahistorical flattery; it makes us the wisest people
who ever lived, much more advanced than that Shakespeare guy. Of course,
numerous critical schools that judge literary works are more sophisticated than
that class on Huckleberry Finn, but they all still presume the
correctness of their own views and then measure others against them. That
stance makes it impossible to do anything but verify what one already believes.
Why not instead imagine what valid criticisms these authors would advance if
they could see us?
Us. When intellectuals condemn what is wrong with “us,” they
usually mean Americans without postgraduate degrees. This “us” is a strange use
of the first person plural, for it excludes the speakers. It’s an us
that excludes us. Perhaps we need a new grammatical category to
designate it—let’s call it the “self-excluding we.” By the way, the
“self-excluding we” exists elsewhere—for example, when parents talk to
young children. “We’re having a little diarrhea today, aren’t we?” If one does not allow other
perspectives to show the limitations of our own, literature easily becomes
pointless. In a real dialogue, new insights can emerge.
The Documentary Fallacy One can kill a work a third way:
by treating it as a document of its time. “The author didn’t write in a vacuum,
you know!” In other words, Dickens is notable because he depicts the deplorable
conditions of workers of his age. True enough, but a factory inspector’s report
might do even better.
This approach puts the cart
before the horse. One does not read Dostoevsky to learn about Russian history;
one becomes interested in Russian history from reading its classics. After all,
every culture has many periods, and one can’t be interested in each period of
every culture, so the argument about Russian history is bound to fail except
with people already interested in Russian history.
What makes a work literary is
that it is interesting to people who do not care about its original context.
Literariness begins where documentariness ends. Dostoevsky illuminates
psychological and moral problems that are still pertinent, even outside Russia.
A few years ago, when I was
talking to a group of students, one of them asked why I teach the books I do,
and I replied simply that they are among the greatest ever written. Later one
of my colleagues told me she experienced the thrill one hears when a taboo is
broken, because it has been orthodoxy among literature professors for some
three decades that there is no such thing as “great literature.” There are only
things called great literature because hegemonic forces of oppression have
mystified us into believing in objective greatness, whereas intrinsically
Shakespeare is no different from a laundry list or any other document. If this
sounds exaggerated, let me cite the most commonly taught anthology among
literature professors, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Its
editors paraphrase a key tenet of the dominant movement called “cultural
studies,” which has set the critical agenda:
In universities, this approach
often leads to teaching documents instead of literature. Or perhaps
cultural theory itself, taught pretty much without reference to the cultural
documents in which it is supposedly grounded. Or perhaps second-rate literary
works, which are a lot better than great ones either as documents or as
providers of simple political lessons. At Northwestern, our engineering
students have room in their schedule for perhaps two humanities courses,
so—just think of it—a professor chooses to expose them not to great
writers such as George Eliot or Jane Austen but to second-rate stuff or, still
worse, some dense pages written by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida or
Michel Foucault.
In each of these
interest-killing approaches—the technical, the judgmental, and the
documentary—true things are said. Of course literature uses symbols,
provides lessons in currently fashionable problems, and can serve as a document
of its times. The problem is what these approaches do not achieve.
They fail to give a reason for
reading literature.
What Literature Is Good
For Is there something one can learn
from literature one cannot learn just as well or better elsewhere?
There is an obvious proof that
the great novelists knew more about human psychology than any social scientist
who ever lived. If psychologists, sociologists, or economists understood people
as well as George Eliot or Tolstoy did, they could create portraits of people
as believable as Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke or Anna Karenina. But no
social scientist has ever come close. Still more important: Many
disciplines can teach that we ought to empathize with others. But these
disciplines do not involve actual practice in empathy. Great literature
does, and in that respect its study remains unique among university-taught
subjects.
When you read a great novel, you
put yourself in the place of the hero or heroine, feel her difficulties from
within, regret her bad choices. Momentarily, they become your bad
choices. You wince, you suffer, you have to put the book down for a while. When
Anna Karenina does the wrong thing, you may see what is wrong and yet
recognize that you might well have made the same mistake. And so, page
by page, you constantly verify the old maxim: There but for the grace of God
go I. No set of doctrines is as important for ethical behavior as that
direct sensation of being in the other person’s place.
Early in Anna Karenina,
there is a remarkable scene in which Levin comes to propose to Kitty, who plans
to refuse him. But when she sees him, she is shaken: “And then for the first
time the whole thing presented itself in a new, different aspect; only then did
she realize that the question did not affect her only—with whom she would
be happy, and whom she loved—but that she would that moment have to wound
a man whom she liked. And to wound him cruelly.” Kitty puts herself in his
position, feels for him, suffers the pain and humiliation he is bound to feel.
This is how we know she is a good person. Kitty does what the reader is
constantly invited to do. Empathy is not all of morality, but it is where it
begins.
It is really quite remarkable
what happens when reading a great novel: By identifying with a character, you
learn from within what it feels like to be someone else. The
great realist novelists, from Jane Austen on, developed a technique for letting
readers eavesdrop on the very process of a character’s thoughts and
feelings as they are experienced. Readers watch heroes and heroines in the
never-ending process of justifying themselves, deceiving themselves, arguing
with themselves. That is something you cannot watch in real life, where we see
others only from the outside and have to infer inner states from their
behavior. But we live with Anna Karenina from within for hundreds of pages, and
so we get the feel of what it is to be her. And we also learn what it is
like to be each of the people with whom she interacts. In a quarrel, we
experience from within what each person is perceiving and thinking. How
misunderstandings or unintentional insults happen becomes clear. This is a form
of novelistic wisdom taught by nothing else quite so well.
Reading a novel, you experience
the perceptions, values, and quandaries of a person from another epoch,
society, religion, social class, culture, gender, or personality type. Those
broad categories turn out to be insufficient, precisely because they are
general and experienced by each person differently; and we learn not only the
general but also what it is to be a different specific person. By
practice, we learn what it is like to perceive, experience, and evaluate the
world in various ways. This is the very opposite of measuring people in terms
of our values.
To be sure, there are other
disciplines that sometimes tell us we should empathize, but only literature offers
constant practice in doing so. We follow the life of Dorothea Brooke or David
Copperfield moment to moment, and we live with them for hundreds of hours,
always living into their experience, growing along with them, approving
or disapproving their choices, and perhaps changing our minds as they change
theirs: This long process offers a lot of practice in empathy, enough to make
it a habit. There is a big difference between inferring that someone else is
humiliated or injured and knowing moment by moment what that feels like. But
once we have the practice of that moment-to-moment feeling, we can infer what
other people in real life are experiencing all the better.
It is even possible to empathize
with our failures of empathy. That is one of Anton Chekhov’s key themes, where
we feel from within why it is that people who are not fundamentally unfeeling
often fail to consider the other person’s point of view. Chekhov’s story
“Enemies” describes a doctor named Kirillov, whose son has just died,
comforting his grieving wife as his face displays “that subtle, almost elusive
beauty of human sorrow.” We empathize with him, not only for his grief over his
son, but also because of his empathy for his wife. It’s a chain of empathy, and
we are its last link.
Then the wealthy Abogin arrives
to beg the doctor to visit his dying wife, and the doctor, with extreme
reluctance, at last recognizes he has no choice. When they finally arrive, it
turns out Abogin’s wife has only feigned illness to get rid of her husband long
enough to escape with her lover. As Abogin cries and opens his heart to the
doctor “with perfect sincerity,” Kirillov notices the luxurious surroundings,
the violoncello case that bespeaks higher cultural status, and reacts
wrathfully. He shouts that he is the victim who deserves sympathy
because the sacred moment of his own mourning has been ruined for nothing.
Nothing makes us less capable of
empathy than consciousness of victimhood. Self-conscious victimhood leads to
cruelty that calls itself righteousness and thereby generates more victims.
Students who encounter this idea experience a thrill of recognition. Kirillov
experiences “that profound and somewhat cynical, ugly contempt only to be found
in the eyes of sorrow and indigence” when confronted with “well-nourished
comfort,” and he surrenders to righteous rage. In this story, each man feels,
justly, that he has been wronged by the other. And so neither receives the
understanding he deserves. We empathize with both but also feel that they could
have chosen instead to empathize with each other. But, as the author explains:
“The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both. The unhappy are egoistic,
spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than
fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart.” That
is still more the case when unhappiness makes us feel morally superior.
How to Teach We all live in a prison house of
self. We naturally see the world from our own perspective and see our own point
of view as obvious and, if we are not careful, as the only possible one. I have
never heard anyone say: “Yes, you only see things from my point of view.
Why don’t you consider your own for a change?” The more our culture presumes
its own perspective, the more our academic disciplines presume their own
rectitude, and the more professors restrict students to their own way of
looking at things, the less students will be able to escape from habitual,
self-centered, self-reinforcing judgments. We grow wiser, and we understand
ourselves better, if we can put ourselves in the position of those who think
differently.
Democracy depends on having a
strong sense of the value of diverse opinions. If one imagines (as the Soviets
did) that one already has the final truth, and that everyone who disagrees is
mad, immoral, or stupid, then why allow opposing opinions to be expressed or
permit another party to exist at all? The Soviets insisted they had complete
freedom of speech, they just did not allow people to lie. It is a short step,
John Stuart Mill argues, from the view that one’s opponents are necessarily
guided by evil intentions to the rule of what we have come to call a one-party
state or what Putin today calls “managed democracy.” If universities embody the
future, then we are about to take that step. Literature, by teaching us to
imagine the other’s perspective, teaches the habits of mind that prevent that
from happening. That is one reason the Soviets took such enormous efforts to
censor it and control its interpretation.
We live in a world in which we
more and more frequently encounter other cultures. That is part of what
globalization means. And yet we are often baffled by them. Americans have the
habit of assuming that everyone, deep down, wants to be just like us. It simply
isn’t so, and I assure you that others assume that deep down we want to be just
like them. When Russians listen to our leaders express their views about what
people really want and how nations ought to behave, they think our leaders must
be lying, because no one could actually think that way. They are as deeply
convinced of the obvious correctness of their perceptions as we are of ours,
and so they cannot imagine that others can sincerely perceive things
differently.
But great literature allows one
to think and feel from within how other cultures think and feel. The greater
the premium on understanding other cultures in their own terms, the more the
study of literature matters.
Because literature is about
diverse points of view, I teach by impersonation. I never tell students what I
think about the issues the book raises, but what the author thinks. If I
comment on some recent event or issue, students will be hearing what Dostoevsky
or Tolstoy, not I, would say about it. One can also impersonate the novel’s
characters. What would Ivan Karamazov say about our moral arguments? How could
we profit from the wisdom Dorothea Brooke acquires? Can one translate their
wisdom into a real dialogue about moral questions that concern us—or
about moral questions that we were unaware are important but in light of what
we have learned turn out to be so? Authors and characters offer a diversity of
voices and points of view on the world from which we can benefit.
Such impersonation demands
absorbing the author’s perspective so thoroughly that one can think from within
it, and then “draw dotted lines” from her concerns to ours. Students hear the
author’s voice and sense the rhythms of her thought, and then, when they go
back to the book, read it from that perspective. Instead of just seeing words,
they hear a voice. It is therefore crucial to read
passages aloud, with the students silently reading along. Students should sense
they are learning how to bring a novel to life. “So this is why people get so
much out of Tolstoy!”
At that point, students will not
have to take the author’s greatness on faith. They will sense that
greatness and sense themselves as capable of doing so. Neither will they have
to accept the teacher’s interpretation without seeing how it was arrived at or
what other interpretation might be possible. No one will have to persuade them
why Wikipedia won’t do. Students will acquire the skill
to inhabit the author’s world. Her perspective becomes one with which they are
intimate, and which, when their own way of thinking leads them to a dead end,
they can temporarily adopt to see if it might help. Novelistic empathy gives
them a diversity of ways of thinking and feeling. They can escape from the
prison house of self.
About the Author Gary Saul Morson is the Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. |