Lecture 1

Effective Teaching of Literature
Lecture on Dickens

(Outside reading for lecture)
Hard Times, Charles Dickens. Chapters One and Two
ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext97/hardt10.txt

    Every year I find myself wrestling with the mystery and beauty of words wondering of what use they are in a world so set on the business at hand. At the end of every self-reflective struggle with this question, I am left with the same answer: that there is power in the word, power that is uniquely human, and thus potentially humanizing in the sense that literature can instruct us not as engineers, not as computer scientists, not as historians or businessmen, but as humans.
Nearly all the other fields of study instruct us in what to do with the 40 to 60 hours we end up working each week. Literature alone shows us by example what the end of all that work is, or ought to be. It was a silly notion of this last century that Art is for Art’s sake, as though Art had a say in it at all. The verbal arts are for our sake, a gift of the gods. For in the word we participate by analogy in the divine act of creation, using the same means: the Word, the Logos. Literature is in the end, a verbal means to a non-verbal end. This creative Promethean fire is taken into the heart and there used to forge words, stanzas, and entire books.
     But something happens in that process that appears to make students unappreciative of this verbal magic. There have been no peoples anywhere in recorded and oral history who do not have stories. From the advent of the printing press in the late 15th Century books have been the repositories of these stories. Nearly everyone can remember the first time he held a book in his hand while learning how to read, and how full of wonder the world suddenly became when books came alive in his imagination. When I was in the first grade, I remember distinctly taking my first trip to the school library to check out my very own choices of books. It wasn’t long before I wanted more to read. But somewhere along the way, somewhere in the school, I lost my sense of wonder, having to read so many pages per night, answer so many questions following the reading, giving oral reports on the books that I had read. What was, at first, something I turned to entirely of my own accord, was before long something that I had to do to complete the assignment. My argument is that the “something” had a lot to do with school and the way literature was taught.
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     As I suggested at the beginning of my lecture, literature has a problematic position in the curriculum. This difficulty may be better understood after raising some fundament questions about what literature is to begin with. It is, in the first place, a verbal art, and like all arts, its chief design may be said to give pleasure and instruct. Those stories that do both over time become what we refer to as classics. Very few people would dispute with the idea that literature enriches our lives by engaging the imagination in a way that satisfies a deep impulse inside us about our place in the totality of being. When this insight is accompanied by vicarious pleasures, we can read happily to the end of the book.
     But as soon as we remove this activity from the privacy of our own experience and place it in the curriculum, questions arise about how we are now supposed to teach what normally renders pleasure and a teaching. And when everything in the classroom must be measured with some kind of assessment tool trouble begins. Now the story becomes a means to an end. You read a story to learn a language, not to challenge your understanding or merely to gain pleasure. You read a story not for pleasure, but to answer the questions the teacher may ask you on the exam concerning the elements of fiction, or symbols hiding in the story. You no longer read a story on the train to pass the time, but to ready yourself to write an analytical essay on one of its themes. All these classroom assessments hang over the book like a cloud ready to rain. And yet, few writers would ever admit that their books were meant to be treated in this fashion, where the experience of reading is relegated to a secondary consideration. We test for information forgetful of the deeper understanding. We test for facts, and forget the pleasure. In the end, we often lose sight of the reason we first read and the reasons we still read. Did any great writer get to his place by the methods we use in the classroom?
     “Give me your definition of a horse” asks the caricatured teacher of literature in Dickens’s Hard Times. Thomas Gradgrind was “a man of realities, a man of facts and calculations, a man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over…With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.”
     Isn’t this exactly what we have come to fear about literature in the classroom? It seems that something is amiss here.
     Good literature enriches our lives by enabling us to live beyond the limitations of time and space. It opens us up to the possibilities of beauty that do not always require a defense, that stand as ends in themselves. These are the very reasons for our education in the first place, to live an enriched life, and yet ironically enough, the very means to that end, kills the end. What do we want from our students ten years after they leave the classroom? Do we want them returning to the books they were introduced to in school or university? Do we want them to find respite in those hours of relaxation after the worries of the work world are put away? Free reading? Why not? Open discussions of the work in class? Why not? This is the real training for the future: learning how to live the best life one can in the limited time we have.  

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