Reading bad books
An issue I think many of us run into, particularly the farther along you go, is that what we in English Studies believe we are teaching is often at odds with what students believe we are teaching. In short, that many of us (though not all of us) feel that we are using literature and other written texts in part to teach analytical and interpretive skills, skills that can then be applied to students’ day-to-day encounters with other written texts (including literary ones). Somewhere along the line, though, students begin to understand these texts as texts that can be discussed, but not denigrated.¹
I don’t think any teacher of literature would suggest, if asked, that students can’t dislike the texts we assign. But, I also think students aren’t incorrect in their assumption, as we tend to teach from the canon, which is presumed to be the best of all that has been written, etc.² This stems from our own roots and disciplinary debates over what the purpose of English Studies is — i.e., is it meant to teach literature as aesthetic in order to cultivate a student’s morality? Or is the text itself the object of study?³ I don’t think many of us would assert the former, at least not wholeheartedly, and yet we choose our reading lists as if we’re trying to represent only the best works.
So, I enjoy Daniel Ma’s argument for teaching bad books and think we should all take time to assign and discuss works we think are not good for one reason or another — at all levels, not just at the high school level. As he writes, students should be able to tear into the works and express their frustration with them through their projects — and again, although I think that in theory, most of us would say that our students are free to do this, in practice I think we’re generally far less comfortable with it than we suggest. Also, though, I think we undermine our own aims by assigning only works that we think are good, for one reason or another. If we want to teach students to recognize good literature (which I don’t think is the aim, but nevertheless), they need something to compare it with; if we want to teach them analytical and interpretive skills, we need them to be able to wrestle with the works. But moreover, students need to feel as if they’re open to wrestle with them and criticize them. If students understand our reading lists as “good literature that can be discussed and dissected, but not criticized”, that’s a problem, and in my own experience, that’s exactly how many understand reading lists — even if they privately grumble about hating the works. More overtly getting away from having those lists represent “good literature” might ultimately help our goals.
¹ I’m keenly aware of this mentality — I once had a teacher in high school who lashed out at our class because she overheard me say that a book she’d assigned sucks in the hallway between classes (not even in her own class). A much older me recognizes that the book in question does not, in fact, suck, but I think a much more productive approach would have been to interrogate why a teenager might not like the book and remain open to the possibility that some people might genuinely dislike works of art we consider to be great.
² This is, of course, hotly contested, but that doesn’t change the perception of it to students, a perception developed in large part by us.
³ See, e.g., Graff’s Professing Literature among many others for the history of this debate.
