Who Ruined the Humanities?
July 14, 2013 11:41 PM   Subscribe

So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it. I am against taking these startling epiphanies of the irrational, unspoken, unthought-of side of human life into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works' mortal enemies. An essay by Lee Siegel (SLWSJ)
posted by chavenet (127 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
I was an English major, and a liberal arts major, and I never finished either. For one, it's useless for getting a job. But you'd think that would be made up for by giving us a deeper appreciation of the text. Not so! We pinned great works to corkboard like butterflies, with teachers insisting on dragging Byron down the pastoral level of a Wordsworth and teasing out mind-numbingly literal interpreations of Pope and Coleridge.

But once in the college classroom, this precious, alternate life inside me got thrown back into that dimension of my existence that vexed or bored me. Homer, Chekhov and Yeats were reduced to right and wrong answers, clear-cut themes, a welter of clever and more clever interpretations. Books that transformed the facts were taught like science and social science and themselves reduced to mere facts. Novels, poems and plays that had been fonts of empathy, and incitements to curiosity, were now occasions of drudgery and toil.

Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.


This, this, and a thousand times this! Though a literature degree is valuable for studying hard works in depth - my single courses on Ulysses and the Inferno taught me how to dig deep into those masterpieces.

It does seem like an essay like this pops up every year or so, like clockwork. And why shouldn't it? Even the smart set communicates mostly in memes and gifs these days.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:51 PM on July 14, 2013 [3 favorites]


from article: “Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.”

This comes close to the stupidest and most insulting thing I've ever read. As someone who's spent time studying literature – not always well, I admit – all you need is not a heart. There is value in careful and rigorous study; and measured, precise thoughtfulness is not the same thing as drudgery and toil. Yes, there is a very deep sense in which these classics are available to anyone to enjoy; but that doesn't remove the fact that there is work to be done on them, not terrible hideous painful work but true work nonetheless – perhaps the truest work. And this wholesale devaluing of the people who spend their lives working on literature, on reading it and on writing it – not just professional scholars, but everyone who works at these things – is disgusting to me.

It reminds me a bit of the pernicious nonsense that was about a lot among the beats in the sixties whenever they tried to talk about jazz music. "It's not western music – there's no theory at all! It's not about practicing or gaining mastery of an instrument, it's just about blowing, man! Any cat can get up there and blow a horn, and his soul will come out of it if he's pure enough!" No. Bullshit. People work at jazz, because that work is worthwhile, and because that work adds something great to humanity. Likewise, people work at literature. And thank god they do.

Not to mention the most glaring confusion here: literature and "the humanities" are not the same thing at all.

“Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.”

If you genuinely believe that there is nothing sacred about teaching, that teaching is base and vile, then I can understand why you'd come to this conclusion. But the premise seems innately ridiculous to me.
posted by koeselitz at 11:53 PM on July 14, 2013 [101 favorites]


Counterpoint: my undergrad lit classes forced me to read books that I wouldn't have read under my own volition. I have a working knowledge of Russian literature that I wouldn't otherwise have thanks to academic coercion.
posted by Avenger at 11:57 PM on July 14, 2013 [7 favorites]


Babies are scared by hats; the child was too young to understand war.
posted by thelonius at 12:00 AM on July 15, 2013 [35 favorites]


I mean – there are so many odd contradictions in this essay that it's hard to know which end is up. Take this, for example:

“We are told that the lack of a formal education, mostly in literature, leads to numerous pernicious personal conditions, such as the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness.

“These solemn anxieties are grand, lofty, civic-minded, admirably virtuous and virtuously admirable. They are also a sentimental fantasy.”


So it's "sentimental fantasy" that reading literature has a positive impact on daily life, that it gives us something essential. I guess. And then this fellow proceeds to spend paragraphs saying things like this:

“Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.”

"Sentimental fantasy," indeed. Mr Siegel seems to want to reduce literature to "sentimental fantasy," and only to "sentimental fantasy," and to insist that literature must not have any positive effects on human life lest it be debased and desacralized – as though thoughtfulness and wisdom were low and inferior and not to be aspired to but to be spurned. I'm all for transcendence, but I would have thought that "transcendence" didn't include a complete disavowal of human life.

I can see worthwhile points here. For one thing, I do agree that reducing education to simple economic valuations or some kind of sociologico-statistical measurement would be silly. But that doesn't mean the value ought not be measured at all; after all, learning what to value, learning what the good life is, learning what is most important – these are major goals of the humanities. And it is not ruining them to work toward that goal.
posted by koeselitz at 12:01 AM on July 15, 2013 [6 favorites]


"Sentimental fantasy," indeed. Mr Siegel seems to want to reduce literature to "sentimental fantasy," and only to "sentimental fantasy," and to insist that literature must not have any positive effects on human life lest it be debased and desacralized – as though thoughtfulness and wisdom were low and inferior and not to be aspired to but to be spurned. I'm all for transcendence, but I would have thought that "transcendence" didn't include a complete disavowal of human life.

But we've seen this so much: when you start talking in terms of moral instruction and moral rightness, you throw out works by writers who have had horrible views or done horrible things. You ignore work that doesn't fit your political views. You teach that it's laudable that Wordsworth wrote pastoral poetry about peasents and denigrate the glories of Byron and Coleridge because it can't easily be plugged into an agenda. You remove the wonder of a pure sentence in favor of 'meaning' and 'clarity'.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 12:12 AM on July 15, 2013


Charlemagne In Sweatpants: “But we've seen this so much: when you start talking in terms of moral instruction and moral rightness, you throw out works by writers who have had horrible views or done horrible things. You ignore work that doesn't fit your political views. You teach that it's laudable that Wordsworth wrote pastoral poetry about peasents and denigrate the glories of Byron and Coleridge because it can't easily be plugged into an agenda. You remove the wonder of a pure sentence in favor of 'meaning' and 'clarity'.”

Well – there are a couple of things there.

Probably most importantly, I said nothing about "talking in terms of moral instruction and moral rightness." I talked about wisdom, but it seems clear to me that that isn't the same thing. Having the wisdom to know that the person you love will only break your heart in the end, or to know that you'll be happier pursuing a career chasing butterflies or working in a machine shop, isn't the same thing as imposing moral categories on life. Wisdom might include moral rightness – but I'm not sure, and I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.

However – secondarily, merely because you mentioned it – I think we can talk about things without "talking in terms of" things. Talking in certain terms means making a lot of assumptions, and assuming that a particular frame of reference is correct. But I think it's really quite important for us to talk about what moral instruction and moral rightness mean.
posted by koeselitz at 12:22 AM on July 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


I wonder at the stats he quotes... Enrolment in university in Canada has rapidly increased, with many new programs introduced--some of which include literature (think Women's Studies, Cultural Studies)...

Also as universities grow, they sometimes break faculties into smaller units ( at the uni where i work the Arts and Sciences was broken into Social Science and Humanities, for example)

In any case i loved my best literature teachers in university. At their best they helped me enter worlds through literature that would have passed me by if i had read on my own, or not read the books grouped together so i could see how they each approached similar subjects differently. We talked about the issues raised in the books, the politics, the worlds they mAde visible.

(Smaro Kambourelli--was there ever a better teacher of literature written by immigrants to Canada?? It's been nearly 20 years and i am still reflecting on the conversations from her classes!)
posted by chapps at 12:24 AM on July 15, 2013 [3 favorites]


(Probably one reason this annoys me so much is that my focus is really philosophy – which Mr Siegel utterly ignores. He goes on about how literature must be "felt" with the "heart," not truly studied, but – as I said – literature is not the whole of the humanities. Does he really believe that we should stop working to understand Aristotle's De Anima or Hegel's Phenomenology of Right or St Thomas' Commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate and just bask in the transcendent feelings they give our hearts? If so, I wish him the best of luck in that endeavor.)
posted by koeselitz at 12:29 AM on July 15, 2013 [9 favorites]



(Probably one reason this annoys me so much is that my focus is really philosophy – which Mr Siegel utterly ignores. He goes on about how literature must be "felt" with the "heart," not truly studied, but – as I said – literature is not the whole of the humanities. Does he really believe that we should stop working to understand Aristotle's De Anima or Hegel's Phenomenology of Right or St Thomas' Commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate and just bask in the transcendent feelings they give our hearts? If so, I wish him the best of luck in that endeavor.)


Pretty much. If you view everything on a purely aesthetic level, you can read and embrace some truly horrific philosophy without needing to follow or believe in it.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 12:36 AM on July 15, 2013


This should be filed under "Essay against bad teaching," not "Critique of the humanities." There's nothing here that an intelligent, alert, well-read teacher couldn't set right.
posted by homerica at 12:45 AM on July 15, 2013 [7 favorites]


We can rightly deplore the influence of Miss Groby and her university equivalents, but even poetry addresses the brain as well as the heart.
posted by Segundus at 1:00 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


This argument reminds me of something I wrote in an "essay" in 9th-grade English class, which is something that I think every adolescent holds forth on at some point, and that some apparently never grow out of:
"Man, why we gotta dissect these books when that takes all the fun out of reading them?"
My comment combined two things that a lot of adolescents have in spades, ignorance and arrogance. I didn't know there was a there there, and moreover, I for some reason was sure there couldn't be.

I think that hiding your head in the sand, ostrich-like, definitely makes it easier to have fun reading. But, like any other kind of exercise, a lack of humanistic intellectual exercise just reduces your intellectual endurance. The range of things you can read with pleasure narrows. Books and ideas easily fall out of comfortable reach. Entire periods of writing become too much work to bother with, too difficult to enjoy. At some point you become an old bored crank who can't have fun.

Easy reading is stuff that was being written when your tastes formed, and all the pastiches of it that have been written since. Readers whose tastes in sci-fi center on Firefly often turn their nose at Silver Age sci-fi because it doesn't meet their expectations for what science fiction should deliver. People who only read books about girls with dragon tattoos may have trouble getting into Chandler (and vice versa).

The simple fact is that the vast majority of writing produced in the course of human history is "too hard." Shakespeare is impenetrable to all but the most dedicated reader without modernized orthography and a glossary of unusual terms and phrases. The poetry of the Romantics is predicated on a detailed knowledge of the Classics that very few people have today. And as you get into writing that's more obscure today, you need an increasingly rich set of apparatus to even make sense of it.

That apparatus is the entire point of the study of literature. Mankind constantly creates literary artifacts. The job of the academic study of literary culture is to roll that constantly growing mass of artifacts into the future. You may not want to be a scholar yourself, but if you want to enjoy something written before your time and for a very different audience, then you are relying on the meticulous, painstaking work of generations of teachers and scholars of various kinds, people who kept that work alive and accessible to a modern reader. Without a ton of scholarly effort throughout history, the Decameron would remain an obscure manuscript written in medieval Italian and none of the works of Greek Antiquity would have survived to this day.

It is one question whether you think Beowulf or the Homeric epics have any intrinsic worth. It is a completely different question, and one with a clear answer, whether either of them would be known to us today without many centuries of ongoing scholarly efforts.
posted by Nomyte at 1:03 AM on July 15, 2013 [30 favorites]


I saw that this was an essay by Lee Seigel, so it was easy to add this to my not-to-bother-with list based on prior experience
posted by C.A.S. at 1:06 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]



Easy reading is stuff that was being written when your tastes formed, and all the pastiches of it that have been written since. Readers whose tastes in sci-fi center on Firefly often turn their nose at Silver Age sci-fi because it doesn't meet their expectations for what science fiction should deliver. People who only read books about girls with dragon tattoos may have trouble getting into Chandler (and vice versa).


I'm not talking about sci-fi and Chandler. I'm talking about Joyce and Dante and Coleridge and Ginsburg. If you read it on its own terms and let yourself be taken by the language than its much more powerful.


The simple fact is that the vast majority of writing produced in the course of human history is "too hard." Shakespeare is impenetrable to all but the most dedicated reader without modernized orthography and a glossary of unusual terms and phrases. The poetry of the Romantics is predicated on a detailed knowledge of the Classics that very few people have today. And as you get into writing that's more obscure today, you need an increasingly rich set of apparatus to even make sense of it.


Shakespeare's plots are so lizard-brain simple that they're performed thousands of times a year with no translation to huge audiences, including rubes and yokels. You can tease out the deeper meaning, but with an okay performance any idiot can get the plot and the language still stands out. The Romantics - you can just enjoy the language without knowing the allusions.


It is one question whether you think Beowulf or the Homerian epics have any intrinsic worth. It is a completely different question, and one with a clear answer, whether either of them would be known to us today without many centuries of ongoing scholarly efforts.


Ironically enough, Beowulf's "go to place, kill monster, get treasure" narrative is probably more accessible to kids these days who are raised on videogames.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 1:06 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


C.A.S.: “I saw that this was an essay by Lee Seigel, so it was easy to add this to my not-to-bother-with list based on prior experience”

I was debating whether to mention this, but since you brought it up – a few minutes ago someone pointed out to me that this is none other than the Lee Siegel who invented the term "blogofascists" in a somewhat interesting circumstance. He's been discussed previously on Metafilter.
posted by koeselitz at 1:11 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Erm, no. You can't even read Dante. He has to be translated for you by someone who has made a detailed, possibly life-long study of medieval Italian. Someone had to give you enough of an idea of who the characters are and what the theology means. In two hundred years unprepared readers may have no idea what Ulysses is actually about, because they will have zero experience with any of the things described in it. When I read Edgar Allan Poe, who really didn't write that long ago, I keep running into things that were a common part of life for him that I either miss or find extremely unusual. For example, characters get bled as a remedy of first resort, people have occupations I'm not familiar with, people respond to events in ways I find extremely strange, but were unremarkable in Poe's day, etc. What the hell is the "Pierian Spring" and why should I drink deep from it? Beowulf had to be deciphered by someone who has studied paleography, because I find both Old English and archaic script completely unintelligible.
posted by Nomyte at 1:20 AM on July 15, 2013 [15 favorites]


Anti-intellectualism, as exemplified by the flavor of this article, is what's ruining the humanities. Really sad, and scary.
posted by polymodus at 1:23 AM on July 15, 2013 [11 favorites]


Is there any opinion piece on the WSJ that's not trolling?
posted by chortly at 1:25 AM on July 15, 2013 [15 favorites]


Ironically, if the author had studied more and basked in transcendence less, he probably could have written a better defense of ignorance than this.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:36 AM on July 15, 2013 [13 favorites]



Ironically, if the author had studied more and basked in transcendence less, he probably could have written a better defense of ignorance than this.


It's not 'igorance' that he's defending. Its approaching works on your own, on their own terms, and not mediated through some artificial meaning.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 1:38 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


homerica's point is key. Teaching literature like you are teaching reading comprehension for the GRE stinks. Teaching literature like you are embarking on a caravan across a barely charted mountain range, with a few landmarks shared by the professor but mostly the class muddles through to their own personal destinations, that's awesome. As an angsty adolescent*, I admit I did a lot of picking apart of texts for their "Deep Hidden Meanings" which was entertaining in that precocious overachiever kind of way... ask me how we read Joyce, oy vey.

I went to a fancy pants high school that prided itself on its English and History classes and a fancy pants university that prided itself on its English and History departments and I will say that the unabashed grade grubbing of my college classmates bummed me out in my lit classes the most. "Professor, so, what you are saying is that inherent in the use of this trope..." Very well meaning kids, smarter than me, but totally freaked out by the idea of staking out their own territory in the text. I dropped the idea of being an English major and geeked out in history instead because it felt less personal.

My best in-class literature experience was volunteering as a TA for a world literature course in the associates degree program at San Quentin State Prison back in 2000 or so. We read Radetzky March and after the first in-class discussion, I fell in love with literature all over again because the students, some of whom had been sentenced to life without parole and so really could give less of crap about their GPA, just tore into that text with gusto. Family, history, the military, even sublimated homoerotic tension, we talked about everything fearlessly. I honestly started reading fiction again because of that class.

*[My senior yearbook quotes were Kafka and Hesse. (eternal blushes)]
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:39 AM on July 15, 2013 [9 favorites]



My best in-class literature experience was volunteering as a TA for a world literature course in the associates degree program at San Quentin State Prison back in 2000 or so. We read Radetzky March and after the first in-class discussion, I fell in love with literature all over again because the students, some of whom had been sentenced to life without parole and so really could give less of crap about their GPA, just tore into that text with gusto. Family, history, the military, even sublimated homoerotic tension, we talked about everything fearlessly. I honestly started reading fiction again because of that class.


They just made another movie about this, kinda.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 1:47 AM on July 15, 2013


"... ask me how we read Joyce, oy vey. "

In Yiddish? Awesome.
posted by marienbad at 2:24 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human.

Holy Shit? What manner of beast or monster have I been teaching this semester? Basilisks? Zombies? Eldritch Abominations whose names cannot be spoken without going mad? Ferengi? Strangely ambulatory ficus?

I've often suspected the latter, actually. Or as Yog Sothoth would say, "the ladder."
posted by bibliowench at 2:25 AM on July 15, 2013 [11 favorites]


My experience studying English as an undergrad was radically different from Mr. Siegel's characterization. It was not about competition, or information accumulation, or turning literature into right and wrong answers and clear-cut themes. Rather it was about using these works (some "classics," some not) to explore history and theory. It was, for me, much closer to what spamandkimchi describes taking place in the San Quentin program.

However, the study of Literature as an academic discipline is not intended to appease those who read only for entertainment, wonderment, or transcendence, just as the study of Chemistry is not intended for individuals who think it's fun to mix Mentos and Coke.
posted by MetalFingerz at 2:33 AM on July 15, 2013 [7 favorites]


like MetalFingerz, my experience of English class as an undergrad or in high school was not about competition - all my memories of it are about the discussons - maybe not as deep as spamandkimchi experienced at San Quentin, but mostly eye-opening. Romantic Poetry was my favorite, and I doubt I would have gotten so much out of it without the guidance of our professor. I never felt, though, that there were right or wrong answers or clear-cut themes.

Recently I took a class on Emerson and Thoreau just for the hell of it, and it was pretty fantastic. I never could have gotten through Emerson without some guidance.
posted by maggiemaggie at 3:28 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


What is being complained about, really, is the idea that the humanities no longer takes a strong role in indoctrinating students into a common set of values, because we came up with all kinds of wacky theory that destroyed the idea that You Will Becomes a Gentleman. You may instead become an unapologetic bisexual Marxist who reads Superman comics at 40, and that doesn't make anybody rich. Well, maybe Warner Brothers and lube manufacturers, so there's your stock tip, WSJ readers.
posted by mobunited at 3:28 AM on July 15, 2013 [7 favorites]


It's not 'igorance' that he's defending. Its approaching works on your own, on their own terms, and not mediated through some artificial meaning.

Here's the thing: as a member of humanity, you, as an individual, are mediated through artificial meaning. It's called "society". This is what you delve into with great detail when you study the humanities with teachers/professors who know what they're doing. I learned this in elementary school for Pete's sake. (Do you know who Pete is, by the way?) We are all products of the societies/cultures/surroundings/families we are born into, and we carry their influences. There is no such thing as a blank slate individual. The gift of the humanities is opening us up to this reality, and giving us tools to better discern who we are as individuals in our societies; how our societies came to be what they are today; their cultural underpinnings; the cultural underpinnings of other societies and why they are what they are today, et cetera and so forth.

It's very difficult to hew to a black-and-white worldview when you've had good humanities teachers. Indeed, this is very unsettling to those who would like us to see Others as Not Us, and Us as Less Flawed than Others. Others can then be Hypocrites who Do Not Simply Feel from the Heart, while We Feel True Feelings, because We Know Things Others Don't. Which is why we can then proclaim that there are Things We Don't Need without seeing the hypocrisy – others are hypocrites, not us. There is nothing new under the sun, any number of ancient myths from around the world address the dangers of egoism, the Narcissus unable to see that his inability to recognize the trap of his enamored reflection is cutting him off from the world, and still here we are.

From TFA: the term "humanities" became code for "and you don't even have to show up to get an A."

Must have been in one of those Other Worlds. I was, at times, the only student who got an A in my French and comparative literature courses, with different professors, and at one of the "liberal" public universities (Eugene, Oregon, hippier than Berkeley) that articles against the humanities usually have in mind as their "baleful" stereotypes.
posted by fraula at 3:46 AM on July 15, 2013 [15 favorites]


This again! Cool!
posted by spitbull at 4:07 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


A while ago I wrote a long comment introducing the kinds of work one needs to do in order to read the bible or other ancient literature intelligently and a lot of that clearly sails right over this dude's head.
posted by Blasdelb at 4:19 AM on July 15, 2013 [3 favorites]


Of course you can read literature and such like and appreciate it to a certain level without any knowledge of when it was written or what inspired it. But part of studying literature is being told about the background of the author/work and how that was an influence.

I think part of the problem with literature at college is that there is this focus on exams and getting the "right" answer.
I did English in college here (Ireland), and while I got a lot out of it I know that I hadn't experienced enough of life in general for me to really get it all. I'm doing my second online course at the moment (Fiction of relationship on Coursera.org) and because I am now in my thirties and have lived more I find that I am getting more out of this literature.
Of course it is also voluntary whereas going on to college was something that while not obligatory was expected.
posted by Fence at 4:43 AM on July 15, 2013


I read the title of this post and the one below it in sequence.

Q: Who ruined the humanities?
A: Anthropomorphized animals.
posted by dismas at 4:56 AM on July 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'm sympathetic to this in the sense that I decided not to major in English, in college, even though my identity at the time was wholly built around being a "reader," because I shared this premise that reading books in class had a way of spoiling the books. I used to describe literature teachers as being like people who went around explaining jokes for a living.

So, for that reason among others, I majored in physics instead, then went to grad school in physics, and got a job in physics, and kept reading on my own time.

But I have heard very similar arguments, in the years since, about physics! That knowing about the dispersion of light ruins the simple joy of seeing a rainbow. That it is a shame to think of the stars as mere nuclear furnaces. That physics especially reduces the world to a meaningless, mechanical thing, because it is reductionist in its whole intent and approach.

So I have to conclude that it is an argument that can be made about the careful study of anything at all.

Nowadays I think Nomyte has it right, above.
posted by OnceUponATime at 5:19 AM on July 15, 2013 [3 favorites]


So Lee Siegel, who unquestionably would not be a widely published writer and editor of middle-brow periodical prose in New York without his top-flight formal education in the humanities, is now sitting in his overstuffed club chair bloviating to the unwashed masses about how they don't need a B.A. or M.Phil from Columbia. Okey dokey.
posted by FelliniBlank at 5:25 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


It's not 'igorance' that he's defending. Its approaching works on your own, on their own terms, and not mediated through some artificial meaning.

Eh, I don't buy this. I took a few film courses in college, but my understanding of film was matured by a roommate of mine who loved film. I was working and going to school, so he mostly rented the movies. I would come home after a long day and watch what he was watching, which could have been almost anything -- his tastes were truly catholic -- and we would discuss the DVD as it was playing (sometimes waiting until the commentary), and he was really good and pointing out what directors, good and bad, were trying to do visually. I don't think I would have gotten there unmediated, and I think the same about my understanding of literature.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:26 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


As has been mentioned above (more than once), literature does not encompass all of the humanities. Also, any discussion of an ostensible decline in the humanities that does not take into account the budgetary gutting of public institutions by most state legislatures and the political shenanigans we've seen tinkering with academic governance (e.g. the University of Virginia and the University of Texas) is, I would hazard, an incomplete discussion.
posted by audi alteram partem at 5:29 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


From TFA: the term "humanities" became code for "and you don't even have to show up to get an A."

Bullshit. You even do have to show up to get a D. Because when I tried to flunk out of my examen with "Sorry, I'm not feeling so well" aka "I didn't study for shit" prof was all: "Fine. Now at least show up and collect your D".
posted by ZeroAmbition at 5:42 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


People who read the Wall Street Journal Op-ed page ruined the humanities.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:48 AM on July 15, 2013 [9 favorites]


I'm on vacation. I swung by here to scan topics, before I went out to the gym and after I spent an hour and a half of my own time reading an 8-line 30-word Beckett poem that the Poem Flow daily poem app presented me. I chased down some online commentary and some Google Books references, as well as looking up the source of the Biblical allusions in the poem. I wrote eight pages in my journal about it, because I have time to waste right now. Most days I just read a poem and write a paragraph, and then bolt out the door to drive to work.

Here I find someone suggesting that the study of literature at least the modern academic school-based sort, somehow takes away from the "precious, alternate life" that is the wonderful experience of great transformative literature.

Yeah, I read the poem first, and liked it in an entirely unmediated, direct way. Then I went and found out what the scholars said about it (fascinating) and what the King James version of the allusion was, and what the interpretation of the passage was, and how that interpretation contrasted with the form of the poem. I reformed my opinion of Beckett, and though I will probably not go so far as to pay for a Beckett play performance, I can appreciate him a good deal better.

After that, I read the poem again, and liked it just as much, so it made it into my personal favorite-poem anthology.

Certainly, for various reasons, the participants in education can transform (and I would argue, always have transformed) the process into a grades-based, right-or-wrong-answer process. But without those insular, competitive, devotees of "drudgery and toil," I wouldn't have had so much dang fun on this, a vacation day. Just because many people in the world are devoted to reductionism (and I'd argue many who read the WSJ subscribe to that religion), doesn't mean that the life academic sucks the fun out of literature.
posted by Peach at 6:02 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's not 'igorance' that he's defending. Its approaching works on your own, on their own terms, and not mediated through some artificial meaning.

I'd include, within a definition of "ignorance," the notion that it is possible to approach a text in absent mediation. Indeed, I'd submit that such a notion is something that the humanities, when they are -taught right, are particularly well-suited to address, and that overcoming such a notion is of fundamentally more value (both in terms of intellectual rigor and of ethical living) than the aesthetically powerful experience of encountering a text merely through (the unwitting mediation of) one's own terms.
posted by gauche at 6:04 AM on July 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


Its approaching works on your own, on their own terms, and not mediated through some artificial meaning.

This is solipsism.
posted by PMdixon at 6:14 AM on July 15, 2013 [5 favorites]


Homer, Chekhov and Yeats were reduced to right and wrong answers, clear-cut themes, a welter of clever and more clever interpretations. Books that transformed the facts were taught like science and social science and themselves reduced to mere facts. Novels, poems and plays that had been fonts of empathy, and incitements to curiosity, were now occasions of drudgery and toil.

So wait, the entire problem is that he had bad teachers in college? I'm being slightly flip, but part of what makes this essay ring completely false is that this doesn't describe, at all, my experience of the teaching of humanities or literature in college. We read, discussed, and argued about; there weren't "right and wrong answers" there was a conversation. A conversation that absolutely helped me to understand and appreciate better what I was reading. Could I have approached them on my own and gotten value out of them? Of course, but I would get less out of them in a vacuum than I would have out of the conversation with a knowledgeable instructor and other students with different perspectives than my own.

In another section he talks about multiple choice quizzes, but I don't think I once saw a multiple choice quiz in a literature or humanities course. It looks like he went to Columbia, and I would be shocked to learn that he was given multiple choice quizzes on Shakespeare that often at Columbia. The whole article seems premised on the assumption that literature is always taught in a particular way; a premise that I know is wrong from my own experience and suspect wasn't true in the author's experience either.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:24 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Solipsism is the metaphysical belief that there are no other minds but my own. Believing in them but not caring about them is something else.
posted by thelonius at 6:31 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


I chased down some online commentary and some Google Books references, as well as looking up the source of the Biblical allusions in the poem.

Peach, now I'm curious. Which sources did you use?

Looks like the poem is "Who may tell the tale" by Beckett, right?

who may tell the tale
of the old man?
weigh absence in a scale?
mete want with a span?
the sum assess
of the world's woes?
nothingness
in words enclose?


I would love to know in more detail which scholarly sources illuminated your reading experience; that would indeed help rebut Siegel.
posted by shivohum at 6:37 AM on July 15, 2013


Of course, you can read Homer and love the poems without knowing anything about the society that produced them, or all the societies that have informed our own interpretations of them; you can be inspired by them by reading them the same way. But to celebrate knowing nothing about Homer's society, the way the Homeric poems got to be the texts they are, that people argue that the Greeks created their system of writing just to write the poems down so central were they to their civilization, or knowing nothing about the language* they were written in seems is idiotic. No, Homer - and a range of other texts - were not the product of one transcendental moment of inspiration - they are the products of cultures, of many people, of many moments in time. Looking more at those moments in time and knowing more about them can only help you find other great things about the Iliad and the Odyssey and other works of literature.

*Does he think a knowledge of Greek is something that comes magically to people?
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:40 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


I read a piece a couple of months ago by a guy (whose name I can't remember) who is apparently a s Big Deal in game theory. One of his kids was reading Pride and Prejudice for school; he'd never read it, so he decided to read it along with his kid.

He was amazed to find out that Austen had interesting things to say about game theory! That game theory exists in novels! From the 18th century! He learned something from it! It made him look at aspects of his field in new ways!

/rolls eyes
posted by rtha at 6:44 AM on July 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


Anyway, we have all been sufficiently sparked and stoked by literature to make it part of our destiny by the time we graduate high school.

What universe does this guy even live in?

If there is any hand-wringing to do, it should be over the disappearance of what used to be a staple of every high-school education: the literature survey course, where books were not academically taught but intimately introduced—an experience impervious to inane commentary and sterile testing.

Yes, it would be nice to have classes in high school where the students' only task would be to read and discuss great literature. (Provided, of course, that there was a different class designed to teach students how to write clearly and grammatically. Why are those things always bundled together in high school, anyway?) Bul high-school teachers don't trust their students enough to take it on faith that they've read the books, so you get idiocies like "journaling" and "themes." I think that, by the time they get to college, most students who care about literature are overjoyed to be in an environment where they can express and defend thoughts about books rather than "reactions," and where they can discuss the book holistically in self-guided critical essays rather than dismember it at the mercy of dumbass prompts. The idea that somebody might want to think seems very foreign to this guy.
posted by ostro at 6:48 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Re-reading that, I feel it came on a bit more harshly than I intended it to, CiS, but as PMdixon rightly points out there is a fundamental solipsism somewhere in your axioms without which, it seems to me, your statements about literature and mediation fall apart -- which is to say, absent a presupposition of solipsism, it's not clear to me that you are really saying anything at all, but of course the presence of such solipsism is itself an error (though to be fair an error which is really pretty common).

thelonius, that's the strongest form of solipsism, but by no means the only definition of the term.
posted by gauche at 6:51 AM on July 15, 2013


Everyone else has said what I would say, already—namely, that only teachers in bad movies believe that feeling litracha is sufficient to the text—but no one's remarked on Lee Siegel's love of sockpuppetting, so I will. HE MAY BE AMONG US!!
posted by octobersurprise at 6:52 AM on July 15, 2013


No, Homer - and a range of other texts - were not the product of one transcendental moment of inspiration - they are the products of cultures, of many people, of many moments in time. Looking more at those moments in time and knowing more about them can only help you find other great things about the Iliad and the Odyssey and other works of literature.

His argument is bad with regard to most literature, but it's especially bad with regard to Homer. Pride and Prejudice is the product of a person who was the product of their culture, The Iliad is most likely the literal product of a culture in that it probably derives from an older oral tradition that was written down and turned into the work we have today. That's a fact that you wouldn't have any access to without the mediation of experts in the field, whether you get that mediation through a classroom or the introduction to your edition of the book.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:52 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Lee Siegel's love of sockpuppetting, so I will. HE MAY BE AMONG US!!

If he is, I wish him luck. He's going to need it.
posted by rtha at 6:54 AM on July 15, 2013


This should be filed under "Essay against bad teaching," not "Critique of the humanities."

It's a Wall Street Journal piece. It should be filed under "Here is why replacing English professors with MOOCs and adjuncts would be just fine, and why even just closing the departments down completely and giving the money to worthy causes like business schools would be even better."

It's not 'igorance' that he's defending. Its approaching works on your own, on their own terms, and not mediated through some artificial meaning.

Nope. What he's defending, whether intentionally or as useful idiot, is closing down English departments because what they do is worthless.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:57 AM on July 15, 2013 [17 favorites]


I don't think I once saw a multiple choice quiz in a literature or humanities course. It looks like he went to Columbia, and I would be shocked to learn that he was given multiple choice quizzes on Shakespeare that often at Columbia. The whole article seems premised on the assumption that literature is always taught in a particular way; a premise that I know is wrong from my own experience and suspect wasn't true in the author's experience either.

Seriously, it seems like he started out making the reasonable but unnecessary argument that literature ought not be taught as though it were arithmetic and then some humanities majors started playing on his lawn between the first and second drafts, or something.
posted by gauche at 6:57 AM on July 15, 2013 [5 favorites]


I like this essay. It's a counter-point to the "Read like a Professor" or "How Literature Works" type books that we are all supposed to be reading with an academic point of view. It's as if literature is a complex puzzle to be figured out, and once you do the game is won. The rest is just fancy window dressing. In fact after reading this essay a few days ago, I read a short literary novel with the intention not to "understand it" (like a professor), but simply to be influenced by it, to relax and let it just do its magic (how I don't care). And I really enjoyed it (though invariably afterwards I did start to break it down). Anyway, the academic approach to literature is now so pervasive in culture there is a niche for a counter-view like what Lee Siegel wrote. It's radical and probably wrong about abolishing undergrad literature studies, but still a useful perspective.
posted by stbalbach at 7:12 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


We pinned great works to corkboard like butterflies, with teachers insisting on dragging Byron down the pastoral level of a Wordsworth and teasing out mind-numbingly literal interpreations of Pope and Coleridge.

As suggested by homerica earlier, this sounds like the fault lies with whatever professors you were unfortunate enough to have. I wouldn't call this a feature of the English major, just of whatever English department these bores were running.

But we've seen this so much: when you start talking in terms of moral instruction and moral rightness, you throw out works by writers who have had horrible views or done horrible things. You ignore work that doesn't fit your political views. You teach that it's laudable that Wordsworth wrote pastoral poetry about peasents and denigrate the glories of Byron and Coleridge because it can't easily be plugged into an agenda. You remove the wonder of a pure sentence in favor of 'meaning' and 'clarity'.

Again, if this is widespread then I'm lucky not to have encountered it, except in one or two professors who didn't have enough clout to quiet their more reasoned, interested, and studied colleagues. The English major that I took always had far more to do with the development and delivery of coherent thoughts than with the accumulation of proper books and meanings that could be evaluated using simple test items.

From the article:
The notion that great literature can help you with reading and thinking clearly is also a chimera. One page of Henry James's clotted involutions or D.H. Lawrence's throbbing verbal repetitions will disabuse you of any conception of literature's value as a rhetorical model. Rather, the literary masterworks of Western civilization demonstrate the limitations of so-called clear-thinking. They present their meanings in patchwork-clouds of associations, intuitions, impressions. There are sonnets by Shakespeare that no living person can understand. The capacity to transfix you with their language while hiding their meaning in folds of mind-altering imagery is their rare quality.

Of course literature won't help you think clearly, at least not all of it. I've never run into anyone who sincerely held this view and I'm not sure I'd like to. A good study of literature, however, grounded in but not bound to theory, can help you think clearly about what you read and how you react to it. And clear thinking—no matter what kind of object you are first taught to scrutinize—is tranferable, a basic assumption of the liberal arts.

The meticulous study of things like stories gets a lot of grief in articles like this, which almost always talk about the "startling truth and beauty" of books as if they go away on more exacting reads. I imagine this is because the study of literature is ingrained—wrongly, I think—as a moral imperative from an early age in a way that other subjects, no matter their importance, tend not to be. No wonder people rebel against it when they find it wanting. Suffice it to say that it isn't for everyone, but what is?

I have never carefully taken apart the components of a story or poem, looked at each one, observed how they interacted, prodded them to see what they did or failed to do on their own, judged where the teeth of the gears met or failed to meet, tried to discern where each piece came from and who might have tinkered with it before it came to me, then put them back together again, only to find the writing worse for the wear I put on it. As far as wonder, I usually have more for the thing after examing it closely with questions on the brain, unless I've found that it was bad after all—bad, at least, according to my principles. But it shouldn't be surprising that many people who love the same things love them differently.

The problem with these kinds of conversations is that they often end with someone declaring the study either good or bad, instead of a good or a bad match for some people.

Or, as Siegel does, they write off the study because there are bad students, some of whom are even mistakenly called "teachers."
posted by mcoo at 7:19 AM on July 15, 2013


Solipsism is the metaphysical belief that there are no other minds but my own. Believing in them but not caring about them is something else.

True; this doesn't even rise to the level of solipsism, which at least results from actual intellectual engagement. however misguided. These are the attitudes of someone more interested in feeling like an intellectual than in the difficult work of being a practicing intellectual.

Such a view reduces complex thought to greeting-card inspiration and perceives the study of culture and the consideration of context and rigor as so many cruel violations of unexamined personal sentiment, which is invoked as an inviolable right. Reading is an ornament; colorful, eye-catching, but thin, fragile, and impractical.

Only a profoundly, proudly unreflective reader experiences critical thought as a personal assault on her or his sensibilities. Art *is* artificial mediation; to complain that someone is mediating your encounter with art is like moaning that someone got your swimming pool wet.
posted by kewb at 7:23 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


To be honest, as a guy with an English degree who doesn't use it, I think that the "death of the humanities" is a reflection of the necessary specialization of knowledge. In 1800, it was practical for a true scholar to know pretty much everything about the state of the art in science and art; in 1900, it was far less so, and specialization began. In the 21st century, there is so much knowledge and information that it is simply impossible to envision an 18th-century style polymath. I make my living now because of an accidental specialization I made for myself when I was about eight or nine: beginning to program computers for fun. Without that, my life would be a lot worse ("What size?" "Medium," "Grande, you mean?").

Honestly, I think that we are too timid in specialization, in general. I make a good living by accident; the education system shuffled me through a second-rate public education and then a first-rate (but half-century out of date) liberal arts education. Wouldn't it have been better to teach me to read, and then allow me to explore and specialize as my talents/aptitudes arose, gradually? At this point, I honestly feel we could rip out about half the K-12 education in the US and lose nothing. If we added in things like elementary computer science and logic, we'd come out well ahead.

I will leave my opinion that we need to teach Chess or Go in elementary school on the shelf.
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:32 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Funnily enough the Humanities taught me that everything is defined by context. Nothing has an intrinsic meaning because meaning depends upon that-which-it-is-not. So, reading a text on its own without context is impossible because the context is already there. So, thinking where is a "pure sentence" without other sentences hiding behind it with rejected words, socio-economic factors, and other texts the author has read is a flawed premise. And that is before we even take into account the individual reader's own contexts.

And this is interesting because I think about many things in the same way I think about literature. I think about what is not being said every time I hear a politician making a policy announcement; when I watch the news; when I speak with my mother; and when I do my weekly shop. Contexts and absences.

Maybe I should ask for my money back because my degree is clearly useless and I don't have transcendental experiences with pure literature. Instead I just keep asking questions.
posted by kariebookish at 7:33 AM on July 15, 2013


It's not 'igorance' that he's defending. Its approaching works on your own, on their own terms, and not mediated through some artificial meaning.

The terms of the text is at least in part the context it was written in.
posted by Francis at 7:36 AM on July 15, 2013


I...but...if you read Shakespeare "with your heart," you are going to miss all of the jokes.
posted by like_a_friend at 7:36 AM on July 15, 2013 [11 favorites]


A few months ago, I was going through old notebooks from high school and I came across an essay that was something of this flavor. It was pretty much, "Why the hell do I have to read The Tale of Two Cities this summer when I could be reading dozens of books I actually enjoy?"

I'm still a bit torn about this question. I find I'm happier at times when I'm not assigned reading--high school and grad school and college all caused my reading to grind to a near-halt, and I enjoyed fewer of the books encountered in those settings. I also find the academic model ill-suited to some of the literature taught. Shakespeare is not impenetrable to modern teenagers--if you see it performed. Rushing through those Norton anthologies in college, reading The Sound and the Fury in a week meant that I couldn't really enjoy it, particularly as I knew I'd be quizzed on superficial aspects of plot, which seemed to me to be besides the point. I've always found discussion models of literature to be better, and more organic, particularly when there's room for the thesis: "I saw nothing of value in this book." There is so much to discuss, about society, academia, the canon, ourselves, our tastes, when there is room for questioning and disagreement. Why the hell did I have to read The Tale of Two Cities at sixteen, you know? Why did we read lots of Joyce but so little Woolf? How come Jane Austen was never even mentioned as part of my high school curriculum, but Emile Zola was?

But I admit that I'm better read because of compulsory reading, including both books I enjoyed (The Scarlet Letter) and disliked (Ulysses). It's easier to participate in cultural conversations, and there's value in that. But my own educational philosophies run closer to anarchist models, and part of me wonders how I would have done in a free school, when I was, in fact, able to read whatever I wanted, out of the pure thrill of it. I do think that making literature requisite and not entertainment is a problem. It feels in some ways like a misappropriation of art. But I'm not sure.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 7:39 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


The idea that university literature classes are all about reducing texts to a series of "right and wrong answers" is hilarious. It is the students who are desperate for such simplifications, not the teachers. I can tell you from years of experience that the hardest thing to coax students towards is the understanding that all texts worth reading contain multitudes, and often even contradictory multitudes. What students crave, by and large, is certainty. Any Professor who will say "here are the ten things you need to know about this text and if you learn them you wikk get an A" will be greeted as a savior. Fortunately, there are very few such animals to be found in a typical English Department.
posted by yoink at 7:39 AM on July 15, 2013 [12 favorites]


Oh, and I should add that when you hear a dim student complaining about a teacher reducing texts to "right and wrong answers" what it usually means is that the teacher pointed out a basic flaw in that students understanding of the text. This, I'm guessing, was a familiar experience for Mr. Siegel.
posted by yoink at 7:42 AM on July 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


Not only is this wrong about literature, it's also wrong about film, TV and video games, all of which should be required study in late High-School and college. It's not like just accepting what flops through our eyes in those genres without classroom guidance has lead to some mystical generation of art-film-buffs, any more than slashing English budgets has lead to more literate and critical-thinking populace. Narrative is how humanity understands itself. Without it, we wouldn't use any of the knowledge we gain through studying the world in the other departments.

More than anything else, this seems like yet another Neo-con argument for there being a secret class of Brain Kings that deserve to rule the ignorant masses who are too dumb to study anything but Dam Building and Code Cranking. Throw the poets out of the city! They're disturbing the pax.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:43 AM on July 15, 2013


The notion that great literature can help you with reading and thinking clearly is also a chimera. One page of Henry James's clotted involutions or D.H. Lawrence's throbbing verbal repetitions will disabuse you of any conception of literature's value as a rhetorical model.

Except that, you know, James and Lawrence were writers. They wrote prose to convey specific ideas and to produce specific effects. They wrote rhetorically. They didn't write fucking mouth-music to jingle-jangle by.

Jesus, I've rarely read such an encomium to idiocy. It's like an ode to cultural trephination.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:43 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


It is the students who are desperate for such simplifications, not the teachers.

Yes! Toward the end of my time in college I thought it delightfully funny that just about every professor would answer a question about a text the same way: with a sigh and the words "kind of, but really it's more complicated than that."

To me, that was the major lesson of a liberal arts education. Not that there are no wrong answers (for there surely are) but rather than even right answers are in important ways inadequate, that this world is complexity piled upon complexity.
posted by gauche at 7:47 AM on July 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


I like this essay. It's a counter-point to the "Read like a Professor" or "How Literature Works" type books that we are all supposed to be reading with an academic point of view. It's as if literature is a complex puzzle to be figured out, and once you do the game is won. The rest is just fancy window dressing.

This understanding of what "reading with an academic point of view" looks like is actually a belief that most professors I've ever met who teach literature spend the bulk of their time attempting to eradicate from their undergraduate students. Close reading is an accumulative and creative process and not really much like solving a puzzle at all. It also doesn't preemptively discard any aspect of the text as "fancy window dressing," since any detail can presumably be put in service of a particular textual interpretation. Maybe those books you mentioned paint an overly simplistic view of what close reading looks like.
posted by invitapriore at 7:48 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Oh, and I should add that when you hear a dim student complaining about a teacher reducing texts to "right and wrong answers" what it usually means is that the teacher pointed out a basic flaw in that students understanding of the text. This, I'm guessing, was a familiar experience for Mr. Siegel.

Eh, that wasn't my experience. The most vivid example of this was in the way "symbolism" was taught in my high school: "The green light represents _______________" and all that stuff about how the Old Man and the Sea is really about Jesus. I do agree that, as an instructor, it was difficult to get students to textually defend their theories about a work (one poetry student commented that she loved poetry because "it can mean anything you want!") but I think a lot of that came out of the belief that, if they just dug deep enough, they'd uncover some hidden "correct" answer about a piece's "real" meaning, which was pretty much how literature was taught to me in my public school tenure, too.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 7:48 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Didn't see yoink's comment above before posting, but, yeah.
posted by invitapriore at 7:49 AM on July 15, 2013


What we bitched about in high school were the very detailed book tests that one teacher gave. (Example: Whose name is on the boxing gloves that Willy Loman buys for Biff? (answer: Gene Tunney. I got this question wrong on the test.))

The point, I think, was to compel us to develop habits of close reading, but it would have been nice if this had been made a little more explicit.
posted by thelonius at 7:55 AM on July 15, 2013


Eh, that wasn't my experience. The most vivid example of this was in the way "symbolism" was taught in my high school: "The green light represents _______________" and all that stuff about how the Old Man and the Sea is really about Jesus.

This is how we teach a lot of literature in high school; his argument falls apart because he's not concerned with high school, but college literature departments, where this isn't the rule. There can be good reasons, I think, for a "this symbol means XYZ" approach for high school students; they're just starting to learn to think of literature as having meaning beyond the plot, and those "right and wrong" answers are effectively training wheels. They're also training wheels that should be taken off for adults in college. I think they largely are, at least at good schools.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:56 AM on July 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


Arguing that the academic study of literature takes the fun out of reading books is like arguing that the academic study of physics takes the fun out of playing baseball.

You teach that it's laudable that Wordsworth wrote pastoral poetry about peasents and denigrate the glories of Byron and Coleridge because it can't easily be plugged into an agenda.

Whoever taught you Wordsworth must not have done a very good job.

The most vivid example of this was in the way "symbolism" was taught in my high school: "The green light represents _______________" and all that stuff about how the Old Man and the Sea is really about Jesus.

I had pretty much the same experience in high school--I think there was an actual handout with a list of the symbolic meanings of every character in Moby-Dick--but pretty much the first thing I learned in my first college English class was that most of the interpretive techniques I learned in high school were a bunch of bullshit. (Or rather that they were very limited--if you're reading, say, The Faerie Queene, "What does this character symbolize?" is a reasonable question to ask--but it's the first question you ask, not the last, and the answer is almost always more complicated than could have been dreamt of in my high-school teachers' philosophy.)

On preview, what Bulgaroktonos said.
posted by DaDaDaDave at 8:05 AM on July 15, 2013


My elementary/high school was a very good school, and they pushed us very hard. This was often a great idea, but I am reminded of the time we were assigned Animal Farm as summer reading before 7th grade.

Do you know what I got from Animal Farm as a 12 year old? I thought it was about terrible talking animals! We didn't actually learn about the Soviet Union for years and boy, let me tell you, that was a radical moment.

I love reading, and there are books I love more as a reader than as an assignment, but that doesn't mean you can bootstrap yourself through every book without help.
posted by jetlagaddict at 8:07 AM on July 15, 2013


There can be good reasons, I think, for a "this symbol means XYZ" approach for high school students; they're just starting to learn to think of literature as having meaning beyond the plot, and those "right and wrong" answers are effectively training wheels.

It's an interesting way of thinking about it, but as someone who writes, I can't help but also think it's just wrong. I mean, Hemingway said that Santiago wasn't Jesus and there are so many more interesting things to talk about even in books that are religious allegory. Narnia can be illuminated when viewed through a Christian lens, but that's not all there is to say about Narnia. And I don't think that, personally, learning to deconstruct literary symbolism in this way made me in any way a better reader. It certainly didn't prepare me for deeper criticism of literature, which wasn't always present in college, anyway. I mean, tumblr does lit crit better than a few of my professors did.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:09 AM on July 15, 2013


I remember one high school English teacher pointing out to the class the phonemic resemblance of the word "country" in Hamlet to something more vulgar, and how that played into the cutting jokes the characters were making. It was a small thing, but I would never have thought of that on my own, and it made an impression. Also enlightening was reading the first bits of Chaucer, which seemed almost another language, and learning what they said.

I found that kind of fine-grained analysis, which broke open mysterious texts and rendered them intelligible, much more interesting than learning about broad, abstract themes and symbols that were supposedly the author's purpose to convey.
posted by shivohum at 8:20 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


I mean, Hemingway said that Santiago wasn't Jesus
" ... So you see, gentlemen, you never know and what you win in Boston you lose in Chicago. That's symbolism, gentlemen, and you can run a saliva test on it. That is how we now detect symbolism in our group and so far it gives fairly satisfactory results. Not complete, mind you. But we are getting in to see our way through. ..."
— Ernest Hemingway, "The Art of the Short Story"
posted by octobersurprise at 8:36 AM on July 15, 2013


Oh, and I should add that when you hear a dim student complaining about a teacher reducing texts to "right and wrong answers" what it usually means is that the teacher pointed out a basic flaw in that students understanding of the text.

OH how I wish I could find that John Finnemore sketch about the class on Macbeth.

Teacher: "Who is the stronger character in this scene, Macbeth? Or Lady Macbeth"
Student: "Macbeth?"
Teacher: "Now that's a REALLY interesting interpretation."
posted by like_a_friend at 8:39 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


I mean, Hemingway said that Santiago wasn't Jesus

Well, I guess that settles it. No latitude for the reader here, move along, plebs.
posted by Wolof at 8:40 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


I love to read that some emperor is unclothed (this extends into many fields, I was happy to read this morning about the dismal returns achieved by hedge funds). I should be a sucker for this essay. However, his descriptions of reading and studying literature don't ring true to me. I find that knowing more about a work, its author, and the context usually does make reading more enjoyable and enlightening. I've also found that time spent in the classroom and reading about literature has made me a better reader.
posted by Area Man at 8:43 AM on July 15, 2013


> "... when you hear a dim student complaining about a teacher reducing texts to "right and wrong answers" what it usually means is that the teacher pointed out a basic flaw in that students understanding of the text. This, I'm guessing, was a familiar experience for Mr. Siegel."

My first suspicion on reading it is that Siegel must still be really pissed that some professor sometime gave him a bad grade for misunderstanding why Astyanax starts crying in the Iliad (which, as thelonius has already pointed out, Siegel still apparently doesn't get.)
posted by kyrademon at 8:44 AM on July 15, 2013


thelonius: Babies are scared by hats; the child was too young to understand war.
It's a metaphor for war orphans, not a literal treatise on infant social skills development.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:45 AM on July 15, 2013


Here are the dog-whistles I picked out in reading through this:

- You can get a good education with a library card and a bit of gumption. Furthermore there's no economic benefit to being able to analyze a text and then write intelligently about it. Please ignore the fact that the author in fact has gained fantastic economic benefit from this very skill (well, at least some version of this skill, 'intelligently' is debatable).

- "Theory" is academic masturbation which gets in the way of pure hearted intuitive understanding of the canon. Ironically, this canon seems to solely include the dead, white modernists.

- The professor is an ogre who drills away independent thought and has no worth outside of assigning tests and grading papers.

This essay seems custom designed to appeal to the well educated right winger who wants to be intellectually respectable, and resents what they see as the left wing institution of the academy for denying them access to this. Let's call it the Dennis Miller syndrome. A quick look over Siegel's publications shows that he's a reactionary, and gives a just-so story from a "liberal" perspective that the right can point to, saying "see, even he says it!"

It's the perfect narrative from that perspective - one of the strongholds of leftist influence in American culture (the academy, and especially the humanities) has been "ruined" by those very same leftists themselves. The only problem is that apparently this man hasn't taught or been in an English class in any major English department... ever, maybe? Seriously, among those of us who've studied literature as a graduate or undergraduate, how close does this come to describing any of the classes that any of us have ever been in?

Unsurprising that the Wall Street Journal happily gives this hosting and page-space.
posted by codacorolla at 8:46 AM on July 15, 2013 [12 favorites]


Well the pathos of that scene, what it means for Hector, the last time he will see his wife and child, and the gulf between the man he has to be as a warrior and the man he might otherwise live as, is all still there. I was alarmed that Siegel was implying that the child had some kind of foreknowledge of events.

But I'm serious about the hats. I bet if those of you with small children come home tonight in a Bronze Age war helmet, they won't recognize you, or like it at all.
posted by thelonius at 8:49 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


> So wait, the entire problem is that he had bad teachers in college?

A really uncharitable reading is that he's actually, carefully and deliberately, giving WSJ readers a pre-packaged apologia for the decline of the humanities (assuming such decline exists). The story is that literature has a proper role in society as Literature, ennobling and succoring the solitary reader, that the academic study of literature removes it from it's proper role (and hurts poor little Literature!), and that the decline of that academic study is a return to proper form and a victory for Truth and Transcendence and the Solitary Reader over the English department.

First he narrows the humanities down to literature (decline in the study of history, after all, is more likely to ring alarms in the casual reader):
The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature.
Then precedes to talk about literature itself as just The Classics, which in this case is really just the Cannon as of 1950 or so, not Classics the field of study; those are used to point out that that back in the day everyone went to school for Greek, Latin and the Bible, and novels were "part of the leisure of everyday life," not lines on some joy-killing curriculum.

And then he says something pretty true and really sneaky:
With the waning of religious authority, the humanities were born as a means of taking up the slack. Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare were now put in the service of ministering truth to souls parched for higher meaning.
Which has a payload of A) Literature as authoritative propagandizing, and B) Literature as spiritual truth for parched souls. Both are stories we've all heard before. If he were on the traditional attack he'd run with A and talk about French theorists and cultural studies; he's sugaring everything so he takes up B and he gets all schmoopy about Literature:
Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.
And look how he peppers his argument with anecdotes about himself as a wide-eyed reader, succored in his "modest circumstances" by Stendhal, "enchanted" by looking up a joke number in the phonebook, like getting the reference was some nourishing ritual or secret knowledge.

Of course, the schmoopiness is a populist and really twee version of Literature which I'm sure Siegel could himself problematize in his sleep. (He's not so naive as he presents - if nothing else, he's clearly having a bit of naughty fun with "D.H. Lawrence's throbbing verbal repetitions.") That twee "Literature" is primarily a gloopy mix of self improvement and concern about cleaving to (and speaking a proper appreciation of) the Great Books. There's a lot in common with that recent five feet of books thread. It expresses itself with that familiar "damn it, Shakespeare makes life in this sad old world worth living!" romantic schtick.

Note that not one of the names dropped is particularly obscure or challenging. All are recognizable as Greats, reassuringly stuffed with cultural capital, the kind you read one or two of in college and can safely namedrop down the line. "Hello fellow member of my social class. I, too, have experienced a Literature. Quite a thing, eh?"
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.
How comforting. No need to study this beyond a spare introduction, like Sunday school basics. Some Shakespeare is so transcendent that "no living person can understand" it. How convenient.

And just like religion, this literary uplift has no place in classrooms. Not because it is worthless, no, no. Rather, it is worth too much:
So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it. I am against taking these startling epiphanies of the irrational, unspoken, unthought-of side of human life into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works' mortal enemies.
Because classrooms, as we all know, are basically little engines of rational maximization, with GPAs instead of capital. That was certainly my experience in college.

There's a lot more going on in this (the one instance of "university radicals," appeals to readerly individualism, a really suspect characterization of the GI bill) but yeah, like ROU_Xenophobe said, it's really just part of the same old attack on the humanities.

And on preview, codacorolla said it more succinctly than I did.
posted by postcommunism at 8:52 AM on July 15, 2013 [6 favorites]


Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.

Well, except that it was written by a human being, who presumably thoughtfully considered what to include or not to include in the text, and didn't merely mindlessly record every event that happened or would have happened. Why do children cry in fictional stories? To make you, the reader/listener feel bad about the event that caused it.
posted by empath at 8:52 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


codacorolla: Here are the dog-whistles I picked out in reading through this:...
codacorolla, "dog-whistles" refers to actual terms that are understood by the intended audience to imply a socially-suspect or unpopular point-of-view. You seem to be using "dog-whistle" to mean "reworded synopsis of the author's text". I hate to defend this guy, but you're making claims that aren't true, in implying Lee Siegel said those things literally.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:53 AM on July 15, 2013


> I hate to defend this guy, but you're making claims that aren't true, in implying Lee Siegel said those things literally.

He pretty much did say them, at least for the first whistle codacorolla lists, which is that the study of literature doesn't belong in classrooms and should basically be a hobbyist project instead.

From the op-ed: the experience offered by "Literary art" is "socially and economically worthless," and
Soon, if all goes well and literature at last disappears from the undergraduate curriculum—my fingers are crossed—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.
That Stiegel's romanticizing the "worthlessness" doesn't change the conclusion of his argument, just the scenery along the way.
posted by postcommunism at 9:05 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Well, I guess that settles it.

Well, no, I mean there can be religious readings of a text that the author didn't intend or didn't intend to have primacy. But I do think that reducing the discussion down to right and wrong, particularly when it comes to symbolism, has a kind of chilling effect when it comes to deeper interaction with literature. The way these things are discussed in high schools often goes no further than "here's a list of Jesus parallels." I know that was the case in my courses.

I do think the author of the original article is sort of on to something, in that I think the way we utilize literature in both college and high school ends up sapping the joy from the act of reading. And while that serves one cultural purpose--educating young readers about the canon, enhancing the common cultural ground and facilitating certain conversations--it also doesn't really help create a culture of people who actively read for pleasure. Teaching that there are right answers to literature suggest that, say, the act of reading for plot or story is invalid. I don't think it is! I think it's incredibly important! It teaches you that art need be esteemed but not especially enjoyed and I think that's all a problem, which is why, in some ways, I think the way we teach literature misappropriates literature.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 9:16 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


postcommunism, that's a great example of why learning skills like rhetoric and close-reading are important. A lot of hogwash can be make to sound palatable of even like "common sense", but unless you've got some skill in looking at the contextual framework, you may just swallow the argument without looking.

I've often thought that we ought to be teaching rhetorical analysis much earlier than college. Get kids looking at everyday things (Why are people in detergent and deodorant commercials always so anxious?) with a critical eye.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:16 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


CheesDigestsAll - some people are trying to teach that, under the name (I think) "media literacy"
posted by thelonius at 9:21 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Literature is the study of human communication. It's the study of how something written thousands of years ago can make us laugh, and move us to tears. It's the study of how stories tell us something about the societies they were written in, and how they can change the way people of an era think about their own era. It's the study of how self-contemplation, self-consideration, can change us, and how our own actions can provoke such self-consideration in others.

I hate standardized reading specifically because it means teachers are stuck teaching books they're not passionate about. I never read a book passed on to me by a teacher who gave a shit about that book and came away hating it, even if many of those books aren't ones I intend to read again. (Nathaniel Hawthorne why are you so boooring? But I appreciate you.) On the other hand, I am permanently scarred with regards to Shakespeare, even as I acknowledge his brilliance, because the multiple ways in which he was taught to me combined into something horribly unpleasant.

But that's a fault with the manner of teaching, not with the subject itself. And literature is an important subject. It's as abstract in its way as mathematics, because it concerns itself so strictly with the written word, with symbols representing thoughts that we must all try to reach some consensus on, or else society isn't really possible.

On preview, I also think that media literacy should be a required course in very early education, middle school possibly. Knowing how to appraise various kinds of constructed messages is important; it's also very different from literary analysis, and having a separate course teaching that might help kids focus on what the point of reading all those books really is.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:24 AM on July 15, 2013


In the 21st century, there is so much knowledge and information that it is simply impossible to envision an 18th-century style polymath.

Some people get awfully close. Douglas Hofstadter and Raymond Smullyan come immediately to mind. Really, it's entirely possible to read like an "intellectual" without a professor, just as it's possible to learn complex math and science without formal instruction. It's just really, really rare. In the first place, it requires a dedication that most people just don't possess.
posted by smorange at 9:28 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


But I do think that reducing the discussion down to right and wrong, particularly when it comes to symbolism, has a kind of chilling effect when it comes to deeper interaction with literature.

Sure--but as you yourself suggest, that's something you're likely to find in a high school English class, not a university one. And, from my own personal experience, it's something you're likely to find in a pretty crappy high school English class. None of my high school English teachers would have taught in such a ridiculously reductive way. I never encountered a single college English professor either as a student or as a colleague who would teach in such a way, either. I don't say it never happens, but it would be absurd to suggest that it is any kind of professional norm. You only have to read a random handful of academic literary criticism articles to recognize that the profession sets no store whatsoever by the idea that there is some single "right" way to read literary texts.

The problem, of course, is that poor students often don't understand that there is no logical extension from "there are multiple valid interpretations of this text" to "all interpretations are equally valid, and no interpretation can possibly be incorrect or unpersuasive." When you point out that they have come up with an interpretation that is internally inconsistent or is wildly anachronistic or what have you they simply retreat into the comforting belief that rather than having made a bad argument which was exposed as such they were crushed by the jackbooted heel of arbitrary authority which only accepts a single interpretation as the "right" one.
posted by yoink at 9:31 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


The gonzo argumentation in this piece is fantastic, especially that last graf. A whale-ship was one (fictional) guy's Yale College and his Harvard — so therefore let's forget about Yale and Harvard, to say nothing of public education, and instead we can just send everybody out on whale-ships to die!
posted by RogerB at 9:41 AM on July 15, 2013


Peach, now I'm curious. Which sources did you use?

Looks like the poem is "Who may tell the tale" by Beckett, right?
Oh, darn, now you want me to cite my sources? Dang. Going back and looking in my journal, and then tracking down the URLs again:

Kathryn White, Beckett and Decay, Continuum International Publishing Group, London. 2009

Isaiah 40:12

Rare Audio: Samuel Beckett Reads Two Poems from His Novel Watt, Open Culture, www.openculture.com 3/27/2013

Samuel Beckett Reads from Watt, YouTube video

Matthew Henry Commentary on Isaiah 40:12

Samuel Beckett, The Poetry Foundation

Since I never have to write a dissertation again, and I didn't have to prove anything, I didn't track down James Knowlson's book Damned to Fame once I found I couldn't search the Google Books version, and I didn't delve deeper into bibliographies, or skim the Critique of Beckett Criticism. But I didn't use Wikipedia as anything but a starting point, either :)

Confession: Though I have been a middle school English teacher for eleven years, I was a science teacher for ten years before that, I have a BFA in Fine Art (painting) and my graduate degrees are in education. I'm not a Real English Teacher, and I have no investment in defending doctoral degrees in English . . . okay, that's a lie, because my daughter is getting one, heaven help her. I am a Real Bad Influence, obviously.

Shoot. I was going to spend this half an hour making phone calls I was avoiding . . .
posted by Peach at 9:53 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


though I will probably not go so far as to pay for a Beckett play performance

Oh do, do! Beckett in performance is revelatory. Stuff that can seem just dry and dead (or simply tedious) on the page becomes funny, scary, heartbreaking. Beckett understood theater like very few other playwrights. Some of the most riveting experiences I've had in the theater have been performances of Beckett and I've never, in fact, seen a thoroughly poor performance.
posted by yoink at 10:00 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


we do not need to know about biology and physiology in order to love and to be loved

However, misunderstanding biology and physiology, and, for that matter, literature, can lead us to be unloving and unloved. Surely the goal of education is to save us from misunderstanding?
posted by No Robots at 10:04 AM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Beckett in performance is revelatory
So I've heard. I am more likely, if I have to spend real money and time, to see Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo in performance first. Again.
posted by Peach at 10:06 AM on July 15, 2013


Sure--but as you yourself suggest, that's something you're likely to find in a high school English class, not a university one. And, from my own personal experience, it's something you're likely to find in a pretty crappy high school English class. None of my high school English teachers would have taught in such a ridiculously reductive way. I never encountered a single college English professor either as a student or as a colleague who would teach in such a way, either. I don't say it never happens, but it would be absurd to suggest that it is any kind of professional norm.

I suspect that the English teachers you had were more unusual than you are assuming. At my middle class high school, this kind of education was bog standard (and seemed to be the type that my students, who mostly came out of public schools in Florida, encountered) and good professors were exceptions, not the rule, at the largely commuter campus where I attended undergrad. I'm not saying there weren't exceptions (there were!), but quality instruction is very much an artifact of economic and social privilege, which is in no way a universal.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:16 AM on July 15, 2013


Beckett in performance is revelatory.

I saw Waiting for Godot on Broadway (Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman, John Glover) in the summer of 2009. The whole theatre, the whole city, felt like it was waiting, waiting for the next shock, the next freefall.

“On the other hand, what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the ’90s.”
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:22 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


When I first considered teaching literature, it was because reading and discussing complex texts with a group of people exposed me to ideas and perspectives that I would have never gotten to on my own. Ideas about the texts themselves, but also about the bigger stuff: life, relationships, history, morality. I never wanted those discussions to stop.

He mentions that the study of literature wasn't even a part of university curricula until the end of the 19th century. I wonder if part of that is because reading went from something people did together, reading aloud to family or passing books around, to something people could afford to do on their own as books became cheaper and more accessible via public libraries and such. If I had learned to read literature with my parents modelling how they read literature, maybe careful teaching wouldn't have been (as) necessary for me. Additionally, we know that things like plays weren't necessarily meant to be read all by yourself in a quiet room and that a performance can reveal new meanings or even just make a plot clearer. Why should we limit reading (or all of the humanities, I guess) to something that happens between your eyes and your brain alone?

One of the most powerful reasons I eventually became a literature teacher (I've only just completed my first year) is that complex, nuanced discussion of things people are interested in helps students acquire skills that are useful to them as an individual and as a member of society. Lots of kids don't want to read Shakespeare because the appeal isn't obvious or it's too loud at their house or they're tired of failing at stuff. They may read Act II a lot more closely (or read it period) because I pointed out a few dirty jokes in Act I. With years of practice like this, students should end up with larger vocabularies and a knowledge of cultural touchstones. I'm in this business because I believe that they'll also habitually read as closely as they need/choose to and develop as ease and confidence in that skill. I think this will help them not get screwed signing a contract or wooed by political double-speak.
posted by MsDaniB at 10:30 AM on July 15, 2013


A few commenters above mentioned Media Literacy.
Media Literacy is part of the MN 6-12 Language Arts standards, and I don't think we're too far from Common Core. (Sorry I can't find the CC Standards to refer to.)
So it is out there, but I don't know how much rhetorical analysis there is beyond identifying valid sources. We did teach a class about decoding advertising to 6-8th graders while I was in my teaching program, but I think a lot of it is web safety.
posted by MsDaniB at 10:37 AM on July 15, 2013


postcommunism: > I hate to defend this guy, but you're making claims that aren't true, in implying Lee Siegel said those things literally.

He pretty much did say them, at least for the first whistle codacorolla lists, which is that the study of literature doesn't belong in classrooms and should basically be a hobbyist project instead.
So, you agree: the statements from codacorolla lists aren't actually in the article. That's codacorolla's rewrite to create what codacorolla is calling "dog-whistles". As I said.
posted by IAmBroom at 10:56 AM on July 15, 2013


It's funny because this article can only be accepted from within the intellectual confines the poor humanities education it posits is the norm. Take a single statistic ("plummeting" humanities enrollments) and look at it from a single paradigm--the omniscient narrator in the author's head--subjecting it to not a single critique or moment of self doubt.

Of course, in my non-stereotypical humanities classes if I had submitted this as an essay it would have gotten an F (well, maybe a C or B because I have to admit it isn't poorly written) for that very reason. It would also have gotten an F in a statistics class for its complete and lazy lack of any attempt to research its subject matter. Where are the interviews with students who decline the major? Lazy.

I can only read this article as a cry for help from a mind inextricably wrapped in a suffocating blanket of its own smug sense of superiority.
posted by lemmsjid at 10:57 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


I teach nineteenth-century lit for a living, and...it would be swell if my students could just sit down and read Romantic or Victorian poetry, but they can't, unless it's narrative poetry (plot tends to help comprehension) or something relatively simple (e.g., Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads mode). More complex poetry, like some of Browning's more tangled dramatic monologues, generates stares of incomprehension the next day. And almost none of them have ever tried to scan a line of verse before, so they miss the poets' technical virtuosity (and, for that matter, the metrical jokes). None of this is their fault, because they haven't come into the classroom with a lot of exposure to nineteenth-century vocabulary, poetic terminology, and so forth. But still, their "heart" isn't much use when faced with Swinburne.

Don't even get me started with the horror that is teaching eighteenth-century poetry, given that nearly all of the major works depend heavily on contemporary historical/political references and/or heavy doses of classical allusion. No way do you have a wondrous, heart-to-heart encounter with Pope, Dryden, or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. (Or Byron, for that matter, who is more an 18th-c. poet than he is a Romantic one; there's a reason M. H. Abrams skips him entirely in Natural Supernaturalism.) The Dunciad is hilarious, but all of the footnotes have to be footnoted!

(As for Shakespeare: of course, he's performed all the time, and yes, in the context of performance, audiences mostly understand what he's about. If you were to actually pin members of the audience down and ask them what this or that line meant, though, I suspect you'd have some pretty interesting results. "O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?" is only the most infamous example of a line that almost everyone misunderstands until corrected.)

Even nineteenth-century fiction tends to require a long adjustment period, thanks to the sentences that...just...keep...going and the punctuation that doesn't behave as expected. (It's much easier to teach 19th-c. pop fiction than, say, George Eliot, simply because the sentences are much shorter and the vocabulary more restricted.) Eighteenth-century fiction, again, is a nightmare, because students start wandering lost and alone amidst the piled-up clauses. Nonfiction prose is even worse. (I'd like to thank Edmund Burke for providing me with a great example in job interviews for "how do you cope when students don't understand something?")
posted by thomas j wise at 11:08 AM on July 15, 2013 [5 favorites]


I suspect that the English teachers you had were more unusual than you are assuming.

Perhaps so, I don't know. To be sure, I'm often shocked at what my students have brought with them from their high schools into university, though it's hard to say if that's the fault of the instruction they received or not. In any case, though, the article is about university eduction, not high school education, so the point is really moot with regard to the FPP.

He mentions that the study of literature wasn't even a part of university curricula until the end of the 19th century.


I suspect he'd be shocked to discover just how narrow a range of material was taught in most universities before the latter part of the C19th. Universities in the English speaking world were essentially places to go either to get a "gentleman's C" and pick up a certain badge of upper-class status or to train for the clergy. If not being a part of the university curriculum before the late C19th were any kind of guide as to whether a particular discipline is useful or not, the modern university would have to be reduced in size by about 90%. The modern-day "multiversity" really bears very little comparison to its early C19th predecessor.
posted by yoink at 11:23 AM on July 15, 2013


But still, their "heart" isn't much use when faced with Swinburne.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is actually a line from one of Swinburn's own poems.
posted by Nomyte at 11:25 AM on July 15, 2013


Perhaps so, I don't know. To be sure, I'm often shocked at what my students have brought with them from their high schools into university, though it's hard to say if that's the fault of the instruction they received or not. In any case, though, the article is about university eduction, not high school education, so the point is really moot with regard to the FPP.

I don't know that it is, though. It's a systematic problem with the way that literature instruction is approached, beginning well before college even if this article discusses college particularly. I think it's easy to say that the students seek easy answers to questions about literature and so the problem rests with them (and having been there, I empathize), but with standardized testing and NCLB, the truth is that most students have been trained to look for "correct" answers when it comes to academic subjects. A student who knows to look for correct answers is one who has successfully learned to navigate the system of American education. It's actually very smart of them, in a life skills sense, even if it's not really the right way to approach literature and books.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 11:30 AM on July 15, 2013


To a certain degree, though, a lot of learning is unlearning. As a graduate student, you wind up unlearning what you did as an undergraduate, just as undergraduates have to unlearn what they learned in high school. (And then you have to unlearn what you learned as a graduate student...)
posted by thomas j wise at 11:31 AM on July 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


I think it's easy to say that the students seek easy answers to questions about literature and so the problem rests with them (and having been there, I empathize), but with standardized testing and NCLB, the truth is that most students have been trained to look for "correct" answers when it comes to academic subjects.

You may well have a point, but this would be an argument that is directly contradictory to the one in the FPP. He isn't saying "students come to college looking for the wrong thing." He is saying "students have their inherent love of literature stamped out of them by wrongheaded college instruction.

An argument that students are, by and large, poorly instructed in literature in high school and that they would enjoy college-level literary instruction a great deal more if they were better instructed in high school is one I could heartily get behind; it is not, however, the argument we are discussing here.
posted by yoink at 11:57 AM on July 15, 2013


An argument that students are, by and large, poorly instructed in literature in high school and that they would enjoy college-level literary instruction a great deal more if they were better instructed in high school is one I could heartily get behind; it is not, however, the argument we are discussing here.

Yes, but your experiences in college instruction were far better than mine, from the sound of it. My experiences did, in fact, often jive with what he describes: "But once in the college classroom, this precious, alternate life inside me got thrown back into that dimension of my existence that vexed or bored me. Homer, Chekhov and Yeats were reduced to right and wrong answers, clear-cut themes, a welter of clever and more clever interpretations. Books that transformed the facts were taught like science and social science and themselves reduced to mere facts. Novels, poems and plays that had been fonts of empathy, and incitements to curiosity, were now occasions of drudgery and toil." This was particularly true in the general education courses (taught by overworked adjuncts and teaching assistants) at the public college I attended. Seminar-based instruction, which I encountered junior and senior year in my teeny weeny honors program, was a world apart from the worksheet-based reading comprehension I encountered in entry level English courses.

Yes, I'm saying that this problem is more widespread than he describes--I encountered it in high school, too. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen in colleges. If you never encountered it in either setting, then you are, in fact, very lucky.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 12:04 PM on July 15, 2013


But that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen in colleges. If you never encountered it in either setting, then you are, in fact, very lucky.

But when it comes to college settings I have a lot of experience, and personal knowledge, to draw on and there I feel extremely confident in saying that if your dominant experience was that your professors were reducing texts to "right/wrong answers" you either misunderstood what they were asking of you (something that I know to be very common) or you were incredibly unlucky in the instruction you received.

Again, it is far more common to hear students complain about the converse case; that professors just talk and talk on every side of the question and won't ever simply tell them what a given work is about. I remember a course I attended as an undergraduate where, one day, the prof lectured for half the class making a strong interpretive argument about one of the set texts, and then invited another prof in for the remainder of the class to make a strong interpretive argument against that reading and for another reading. Most of the class was pissed about this; one student even theatrically ripped up their lecture notes from the first half when the second half of the class began and the second prof explained what he was about to do.

But more importantly, absolutely nobody who is trained in a PhD program in English literature (the body of people who, by and large, go on to teach English in colleges) is trained to believe that what we are doing is seeking the single "correct" answers to "how to interpret major literary works." You are suggesting that it is a widespread practice for university level academics, when they enter the classroom, to teach in direct opposition to all the principles of their own academic training, professional formation and the literary critical institutions within which they advance their careers. Anyone who tried to publish an article in a journal of literary criticism whose thesis was that they had found the single correct symbolic reading of a given work of literature and that all other readings were clearly false would be laughed out of the profession. And yet somehow, when they go into the classroom, this is the great guiding light of their pedagogical praxis? I find that simply incredible; nor have I ever met anyone in my profession who, when we discuss pedagogical practice as we frequently do, suggests anything remotely like that as a pedagogical goal.
posted by yoink at 12:37 PM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


For what it's worth, I come out of academia, too--I have an MFA and have taught in a college setting. I also wasn't misunderstanding what was asked of me. I did well in my college classes (as in, 4.0 in my English major), even those that were taught poorly.

You are suggesting that it is a widespread practice for university level academics, when they enter the classroom, to teach in direct opposition to all the principles of their own academic training, professional formation and the literary critical institutions within which they advance their careers.

That's not my intention. I am, however, saying that good instruction is a function of privilege. You are more likely to encounter high quality discussions about literature in environments where students are wealthy and already well-educated by the time they reach college. Small liberal arts colleges. Ivies. Even at the state commuter school where I got my undergrad degree, the professors would fight tooth and nail to avoid teaching the general ed English classes. The quality of instruction was palpably better in honors seminars but the population of students was also less diverse racially and economically.

It seems like many answers to this article have been "you just need better teachers," but my point is that it's not always possible for students to get better teachers. In fact, many students have no control over whether they're taught by overworked adjuncts for whom worksheets and vocab quizzes (something I actually had to do in one college English class!) are a necessary evil if they're going to ever get through the grading for the seven courses that get them enough money to eat, or whatever. And it isn't to say that there aren't wonderful, engaged adjuncts and teaching assistants and even tenure profs at places like community colleges but . . . they're not always so easy to find from the student's perspective. And so I do wonder about what the damage is being done to students by the entire system--of exploitative labor practices in English departments of adjuncts and TAs and poor instruction in high schools and standardized testing and grade inflation--because all of that made me like to read a lot less during my tenure in academia, not more, personally. And I'm a big nerdy nerd nerd who loves books.

Like I said, I have experience with better instruction, too, and thank goodness I do! But it doesn't mean that crappy, reductive teaching of literature doesn't happen. And it doesn't mean it's all the students' fault when it does, either.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 1:06 PM on July 15, 2013


All that being said, my own educational philosophies do run closer to anarchist styles, and I'm personally more concerned with whether those who come out of schools are engaged casual readers than, say, well read in the canon. Regardless, awesome professors are wonderful and awesome and in my experience don't Ruin Books (and are more likely to engage with their students in a democratic and dialogue-based manner) and if you're a professor who doesn't, yay! We need more like that.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 1:37 PM on July 15, 2013



Its approaching works on your own, on their own terms, and not mediated through some artificial meaning.

This is solipsism.


What's wrong with that?


Of course, you can read Homer and love the poems without knowing anything about the society that produced them, or all the societies that have informed our own interpretations of them; you can be inspired by them by reading them the same way. But to celebrate knowing nothing about Homer's society, the way the Homeric poems got to be the texts they are, that people argue that the Greeks created their system of writing just to write the poems down so central were they to their civilization, or knowing nothing about the language* they were written in seems is idiotic. No, Homer - and a range of other texts - were not the product of one transcendental moment of inspiration - they are the products of cultures, of many people, of many moments in time. Looking more at those moments in time and knowing more about them can only help you find other great things about the Iliad and the Odyssey and other works of literature.


But that knowledge situates them in human terms, turns them from eternal poetry and songs of the muses to the work of one man, or of several men. And I'm not sure if that's a useful thing. Sure, its helpful to look up references - its hard to read Joyce and Dante without annotations. But "Midway through my life's journey I found myself in a dark wood and the truth path was lost" or "All hope abandon, ye who enter here" work just as well if you know nothing about Dante. And honestly, I liked the Inferno before I knew what a Nice Guy Dante was, and I liked Joyce before I knew about his letters.

A good line - a good word, a good phrase, a good image - works regardless of all content. Otherwise we'd all listen to music with Rap Genius open at our feet.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:27 PM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]



I...but...if you read Shakespeare "with your heart," you are going to miss all of the jokes.


I like it better that way.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:28 PM on July 15, 2013


Don't even get me started with the horror that is teaching eighteenth-century poetry, given that nearly all of the major works depend heavily on contemporary historical/political references and/or heavy doses of classical allusion. No way do you have a wondrous, heart-to-heart encounter with Pope, Dryden, or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. (Or Byron, for that matter, who is more an 18th-c. poet than he is a Romantic one; there's a reason M. H. Abrams skips him entirely in Natural Supernaturalism.)

I think people not understanding Byron is a result of a society that teaches us NOT to understand Byron, not to think like Byron, not to exult his heroes stepping beyond the bounds of humanity and rationality in search of something greater.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:31 PM on July 15, 2013


I think people not understanding Byron is a result of a society that teaches us NOT to understand Byron, not to think like Byron, not to exult his heroes stepping beyond the bounds of humanity and rationality in search of something greater.

What kind of fucked up university course on Byron wouldn't teach you that he's fascinated in heroes who "step beyond the bounds of humanity and rationality in search of something greater"? That's pretty much the definition of "Byronic Hero." Of course, it would also be a pretty fucked up university course on Byron that didn't teach you that this was a concept he could also subject to withering (and hilarious) satirical scorn (see e.g. Don Juan, where every "hero" has feet of clay). One of the central insights of Byron's "Byronic Heroes," of course, is that the search for "something greater" is always a failure. The only thing you find out there in the void is the power of your own will, and its only victory is to remain endlessly assertive until the inevitable end.

I think you're largely fighting a straw man here, CIS. There's no conspiracy out there to turn Byron into a version of Wordsworth. Neither Byronists nor Wordsworthians want any such thing. Of course, Byron toys with playing at being Wordsworth at some length in Childe Harold canto III, but he ultimately rejects the Wordsworthian language he's been emulating as "not my theme."
posted by yoink at 4:45 PM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


> A good line - a good word, a good phrase, a good image - works regardless of all content.
And what rough beast, it's hour come round at last,
slouches towards Amsterdam to be born?
Indeed.
posted by postcommunism at 4:46 PM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]



What kind of fucked up university course on Byron wouldn't teach you that he's fascinated in heroes who "step beyond the bounds of humanity and rationality in search of something greater"? That's pretty much the definition of "Byronic Hero." Of course, it would also be a pretty fucked up university course on Byron that didn't teach you that this was a concept he could also subject to withering (and hilarious) satirical scorn (see e.g. Don Juan, where every "hero" has feet of clay). One of the central insights of Byron's "Byronic Heroes," of course, is that the search for "something greater" is always a failure. The only thing you find out there in the void is the power of your own will, and its only victory is to remain endlessly assertive until the inevitable end.


Nah my point is that people can be taught it, but so many people reject Byronic values or don't understand them because they're part of a society that rejects, ignores, or mocks Byronic values and Byron's high-flown style.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:47 PM on July 15, 2013


I don't know why you even need literature, Chuck (or music or art for that matter). You always seem determined to make it all up for yourself, anyway, and you could do that on your own.
posted by octobersurprise at 5:35 PM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


But that knowledge situates them in human terms, turns them from eternal poetry and songs of the muses to the work of one man, or of several men. And I'm not sure if that's a useful thing.

What Muses ever were not human? What could be interesting or beautiful about a written work, except that it is a human artifact?

If you're just arguing against biographical and historicist readings of literature, it's worth noting that there are many critics who agree with you. Even if New Criticism is no longer at its height, a lot of English departments still teach it early on to help students develop their close reading skills.
posted by mcoo at 5:55 PM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's a Wall Street Journal piece. It should be filed under "Here is why replacing English professors with MOOCs and adjuncts would be just fine, and why even just closing the departments down completely and giving the money to worthy causes like business schools would be even better."

Ouch! That hurts! MOOCs are fine as course supplements, but for a complete educational diet, one cannot live on MOOCs alone..

I saw Waiting for Godot on Broadway (Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman, John Glover) in the summer of 2009...

John Glover from 52 Pick-Up? I would love to see him in a Beckett production.

(Also, many excellent comments on this thread).
posted by ovvl at 6:30 PM on July 15, 2013


Reading through this has made me appreciate how fortunate I was to have some very first-rate college teachers.

As for the power of the autodidact to get to the creamy center of great works like The Divine Comedy unassisted: I've read it, the whole thing, and, when I looked at this course, it was revealed to me how much I truly had missed in my reading. Some of that was stuff that I could have noticed, had I been more clever, like cantos in the three works corresponding to each other. But other things, like Dante's conception of Virgil's poetry as true philosophy, the courtly love tradition, or the complexities of European (and Florentine) politics in 1300, I would just be blind to without some guidance. You can get some of this from reading good notes or commentaries, sure. But there's just no substitute for a real teacher telling you: this is what's important, think about that, notice here, he does this thing again.
posted by thelonius at 1:05 AM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.

Really? So all literature needs to be only read at face value instead of trying to understand the nature of complex written prose. And film or paintings never have underlying symbolism and language that needs to be deciphered rather than just enjoying it as it is. Because any 21st century 20-something should easily understand an 18th century play. OK.
posted by JJ86 at 2:13 PM on July 17, 2013


The only thing you need to learn physics is mass. Any further examination ruins the purity of it.
posted by codacorolla at 5:05 PM on July 17, 2013


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