Literature - Why and How, Part One

Reminder that the monthly drawing for a $25 gift card is still going on for December. See December's first blog for details.

I'd like to begin a series of blogs on the why's and how's of curricula subjects. As we are at or nearing the half way point in most people's school years, we sometimes become bogged down in the day to day. It is like trying to drive from a small, short car. You can do it, but, when you drive from a tall car perspective, you can see where the road leads and where the dangers and exits are, bringing some peace to you as you drive. So this blog will be about the why's and how's of literature as a subject. Let's start in Part One with the why's, and, in Part Two, we will deal with the how's.

When your student asks, "Why do we have to read this stuff?", it would be good to have more of an answer than "because we have credit checks to do, and I want you to graduate." So, why DO we read this stuff called literature?

To begin, literature is different from books. Thousands of books are published every year, yet few will ever be deemed literature. Cookbooks, encyclopedia, stat books, textbooks, etc., are not considered literature, though they MAY be fine books. Many fiction books and other non-fiction would not be considered literature, either now or in the future.

To be considered literature, the book or piece has to have survived some element of time. How long depends upon the genre. An analogy might help here. In baseball, there is a Baseball Hall of Fame. Not every player gets to be in the Hall of Fame. Some get in, and we amateurs don't always understand why. Some are left out, and we amateurs don't always understand why. "They" decide. Who are they? Those who have chosen to make baseball in some form a career. Now, baseball as an organized sport has been around pretty much around a hundred years. So, there are quite a few players out there who could qualify for the Hall of Fame, and, indeed, the list gets longer every year, both of who is eligible to qualify and who actually makes it into the HoF. Some sports have been around less time. NASCAR has been around 50 or so years, and have fewer players than baseball. Therefore, they have fewer members in their hall of fame. Sometimes an impatient hall of fame will lower the qualifications for members in order to have a hall of fame worth visiting. Those who have been fans of a sport for a long time will usually find it easier to appreciate why some people make the hall of fame while others don't. Those new to the sport or having never seen it will struggle more with the choices, and will have to rely more on the choosers.

Literature is the same way as a sports hall of fame. Think of literature as a writing hall of fame. You would expect to see not only those who were good at writing, but also those who made distinct contributions to the world of writing. For example, we might expect to see the first mystery story, the first biography, the first piece ever written about honesty. We might also expect to see the best poet, the best biographer, etc. We would also want to see the bests and firsts for different time periods (especially when rules changed) and the bests and firsts from other countries or areas. This is indeed what one sees in a literature book. It is not meant to be the only collection of literature, but the editors of that book have tried to create a hall of fame for a particular segment of literature, whether for a person's reading ability, a country's writers, a particular time period, or a specific genre.

Who is (are) the editor(s)? That's a very good question, and one for which the teacher of that subject should have an answer. That answer will usually determine whether the teacher thinks the book is a good selection of pieces or whether it is not. If the editor shares the teacher's viewpoint on life and religion, the teacher is more likely to agree with the selections. If the editor does not, the teacher MAY not find the pieces particularly enjoyable. I say MAY as some teachers enjoy the mental fencing with the editor's choices. Some do not.

A good study of literature will include examples of all the finest players in the sport of literature, as well as those who contributed in an important manner, much as film halls of fame usually include the camera people, the sound people, etc.

So, now that we know why something might be considered literature, we can ask why we all must study literature in school. I mean, we do not all study the sports halls of fame in school, do we? There are several reasons we study literature.

First of all, literature is one way of our avoiding personal pain. In general, mankind as a creature, is one of the few who learns well from other creatures' experiences. (I did not say a particular person learns well this way.) So, we can read about someone so obsessed with a particular thing that they were willing to risk their life and the lives of many others to pursue their obsession, such as we see in Moby Dick. We can then ask ourselves questions such as, "Is it probably going to end well if I choose to pursue item X (a person, a fancy car, a hobby, etc.) regardless of the cost to my family or my marriage. We can read Little Men, and learn about the pain the author went through trying to make little boys behave like little girls and how she finally resolved that issue. Knowing that information may save us some of the pain of similar experiences or cause us to feel not quite so alone when we experience similar events. When an author describes his feeling of aloneness as like being in a dark cave or a dark Antarctic night, we can then know when we experience loneliness that someone else also knows what we feel. This learning from others' experiences is one reason we study literature.

Another reason we study literature is as a way to improve our own communications skills. We do not live in a vaccum. We live with other people. Seeing how someone saw things only from his or her own perspective and what trouble that causes can encourage us to try to see things from different perspectives, as Dickens teaches us through Little Dorrit, a book written twice - once from one character's view and then again from a different character's view. It has the same events, mostly, but seen through different eyes, and we see how easily it is to misunderstand a person. It teaches us kindness and wisdom.

Another communication skill received is that of improving our own writing. In Europe, students learned to paint well by going to the museum and copying the paintings of famous painters. I think this is an example of learning better through osmosis. The same technique works in writing. If you want your child's writing to improve, you must improve the quality of books he or she is reading. I didn't say length of books or quantity of books; I said quality of books. The 600 page Harry Potter books are written at a 4th grade level, and aside from difficult names, requires little thought to comprehend. The long Tom Clancy books are written at a 5th-6th grade level. Long doesn't necessarily equal quality. Some students will do better with short stories or selections from longer books (hence, textbooks). I promise you that, if you have your child reading pieces written in the late 1800's, you will notice a dramatic change in their writing ability, their speaking ability, as well as their vocabulary. Reading poetry teaches us to think concisely and precisely, often about emotional issues, which otherwise would take many pages to explore.

So, the why of literature is that we learn to experience life, we learn to understand other people, we learn to understand ourselves, and we learn to communicate verbally, both in spoken and in written forms.

Part 2: how to adapt a literature course to meet the needs and tastes of your own student without losing the quality of the program.