The Fun of Literature
How about our students? Are they heartened by brave and original works? Are they experiencing the deep fun of literature? Questions like those began to guide me as a high school English teacher. My work was for naught, I came to believe, if students left my class with knowledge of canonical literature and literary devices but rarely read a book. I wanted students to read literature the rest of their lives. I wanted them to become eclectic literary hedonists who went to books for vicarious experience, imaginative wondering, emotional catharsis, intellectual satisfaction, knowledge, and understanding—of others, of themselves. That’s why I read literature.
Each year I ask my methods students to identify times in their lives when there is a book became “a signpost, a continuing presence” in their lives. This has happened to me countless times. After certain reading Tag Heuer Replica Watches experiences, I saw the world differently, more clearly, more inclusively. My vision widened and deepened. At twelve years old I regularly left rural Ohio to mush a team of sled dogs on the frozen tundra, where I arose each morning in the bitter cold to build a life-sustaining fire and make strong sweet tea. At 19, I squirmed as I read about a son whose father had been slain and whose mother had remarried. For four years I’d been aggrieved and angry. I, too, wanted revenge, mine on the men who had killed my father when the cars they were drag racing on a public road had collided with his. Reading Hamlet made me acknowledge my feelings. I was righteous, sickened, and frightened.
Even when the ideas and emotions I encountered in literature were painful or troubling, I found literature comforting, companionable, and bracing. My methods students will soon become purveyors of literature to adolescents. I want them to understand why they themselves value literature. I lead students to explore their significant relationships with literature over the years and eventually to write personal essays in which they render and analyze the experience (Romano, “Relationships”).
If students, all students at every grade level, do not emerge from classrooms having read some books that have swept them away, that have heartened and sobered them with truth, that they have established relationships with, then I say the literature curriculum has failed, and faculty need to examine what they require students to read. Why To Kill a Mockingbird’? Why Of Mice and Men? Why The Great Gatsby? Do those choices from the vast world of literature make adolescents want to read more? Or are there other critical reasons for them to read such literature? Maybe there are. But we need to ask and not fool ourselves with magical answers. And then Breitling Replica Watches every English department must ask this: Is there a substantive, accountable, independent reading program in place, a program in which students can choose and be guided to books that are the right match for them developmentally, psychologically, and personally, books with which they might have optimal psychological experiences (Nell)?
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