Who Killed Literature?

The article "Who Ruined the Humanities?", by Lee Siegel, has been making the rounds lately (you can find it here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323823004578595803296798048.html). His argument, essentially, is that through the teaching of literature and its analysis in the classroom, the pleasure of reading has been lost. He argues, for instance, that the "socially and economically worthless experience" of reading literary art, of feeling the "sudden, startling truth and beauty" of the world through this act of reading, "is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank on that. It is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read." Further, he argues that "just as we do not need to know about biology and physiology in order to love and to be loved, we do not need to know about, for example, Homer's rhetoric or historical context in order to enter into Odysseus's journey of wandering, rebirth and homecoming. The old books will speak to the oldest part of us." Ultimately, Siegel wants literature to "disappear from the undergraduate curriculum," so that "increasing numbers of people will be able to say that reading the literary masterworks of the past outside the college classroom, simply in the course of living, was, in fact, their college classroom."

I apologize for the amount of quoting in the above paragraph, but I wanted to encapsulate as much of his argument as I could before calling bullshit on about 95% of it.

The 5% that isn't bullshit mostly has to do with the contempt he has for testing in general and quantitative measurement of the "correctness" of literary analysis specifically (there is also something to be said for the relationship between the lack of immediate and obvious monetary worth in humanities education and its somewhat recent declines in both numbers and reputation, but that's a subject for another rant). Texas mandated tests like TAKS and the recently adopted STAAR are utter tripe, testing routinzed knowledge and constricting teachers from doing their jobs properly. Students aren't encouraged to expand their knowledge by these tests; they're just asked to vomit as much information as they can memorize from their remarkably confining coursework (in fact, I was once told that my short essay responses on a practice TAKS test were "too good," and when I was an education minor I was encouraged to create syllabi that talked down to the students). Clearly there is a problem here, and it extends to college English classrooms that stress "correctness" over exploration and intellectual vigor, that deemphasize active student involvement for pontificating at the front of the classroom (I myself have taken classes like this, and they are indeed miserable).

But it does not follow from this that literature classrooms are killing literature. It also does not follow from this that the only way to enjoy and engage with literature is via some kind of ghostly metaphysical encounter with the sublime. It certainly is a way to enjoy literature; I know because I've experienced it. But it is not the only way.

Siegel's central fallacy here, I think, is assuming that critical reading and transcendent reading are mutually exclusive phenomena. There is a certain kind of pleasure I get from unpacking a work of fiction, or an advertisement, or an article online, disassembling it, understanding its biases, its context, its reflection and refraction of the world. There's a certain pleasure in the absolute messiness of down-and-dirty literary analysis, the way it tends to explode every preconceived notion, forcing a reassessment of the way I read, the way I write, the way I think. Critical and theoretical paradigms give me new and exciting ways to read a text, beyond only the aesthetic or emotional pleasure I get from a good book.

In other words, far from ruining a text, analysis and interpretation enlivenit, granting it new agency over time, place, and distance. To suggest that such an exercise isn't valid is ludicrous to me. Why would it not be valid? Is it too intellectual? Too critical? Does it not pay enough heed to the "classics"? Is it too complicated, too messy? (Not that there's any such thing as too complicated or too messy). And why on earth would we not want to teach this? Why would we want to confine our students to an uncritical reading, uninformed by decades of cultural and textual theory? What's so scary about semiotics, anyway?

I'm currently reading a novel by Eowyn Ivey called "The Snow Child." It's a beautifully written book, and its aesthetic pleasures are many. I often feel like I'm there with the characters: shivering in the violent snowstorms, or trekking through the immense, silent forest; the characters' emotions are vividly realized, so that I, too, feel my chest constrict with heartache and depression, fully excercising my capacity for empathy with people who aren't even real. But at the same time, I can take a step back, and also plunge forward: I can ask questions about how the book portrays the relationship between humans and nature, the extent to which the real and unreal intermingle in a postmodernist bent, how the novel simultaneously upends and reinforces the concept of nature as "red in tooth and claw," how it grants agency to the forest and how this problematizes human agecy as well. I can apply the theories of Karen Barad, Lawrence Buell, and Donna Haraway.

I can do all this and feel, too. It is not impossible to do both. And it would be a great shame if such a reading process disappeared from college curricula.

tl;dr version: See picture above, in which I have stealthily hidden a personal message for Lee Siegel.