College English Majors Can't Read

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:English major here: I think this is a combination of phones and screens, which have killed reading for pleasure in many kids, and the fact that teaching of literature has become “politics by other means” and now almost entirely centers concern about inclusion and contemporary obsession with questions of identity at the expense of teaching challenging works. When you swap out The Scarlet Letter for some sort of Y.A.-level story about the challenges facing Identity Group X, it will have pedagogical impacts.

The Scarlet Letter is an overwrought and depressing story that relies on a visceral caring about social norms that have less power now. I agree that the current curriculum default is to assign identity politics literature. However, replacing long dreadful works with shorter dreadful works isn't going to fix things. Vanity Fair or Pride and Prejudice would be better choices.

My personal wish is to add more autobiography (including from diverse authors). I think real people do a better job of conveying their perspectives and struggles than fiction. It helps so much with the authenticity question. The difficulty of comprehending the writing would naturally vary based on the vintage of the material.

I also think getting kids interested in reading the type of writing found in the New Yorker would be useful. My own kid picked up a lot about voice and style from reading it during high school. The articles in the New Yorker are at a level that's reasonable for college grads who don't go into academia.

I've read a lot of the most acclaimed classic novels and liked very few of them. I'm not fond of depressing subject matter. A lot of them are dramatically tragic. I don't mind that they are long. They just aren't enjoyable enough.

I obviously can't defend my reading skills very well over the internet, but I had a 780V, am a PBK, and took a writing-intensive senior English seminar as a junior in college. I'm sure I would have at least made it into the top bracket of that Kansas reading study.

The way back from today's low baseline is to find content that stretches kids' reading capabilities while also being interesting to them. That just might involve permanently deprioritizing James Fenimore Cooper and others of that ilk. Most of the faces on a set of "Authors" playing cards. Times change.

Some things I would keep:

Canterbury Tales
Shakespeare
Anne Bradstreet
Colonial political writing
Vanity Fair
Moby Dick
Walden
Things Fall Apart
1984
A work by Jane Austen
A Chekhov play
Writing by Frederick Douglass
My Indian Boyhood by Luther Standing Bear
Textual analysis of fairytales

Of Dickens, I'd do Great Expectations if I had to. Certainly not Bleak House. I read most of Dickens' famous works voluntarily in high school (received a giant volume from a best friend as a birthday present in 1985). Bleak House was assigned in college honors freshman composition. I remember thinking there were good reasons it was less frequently assigned.

You speak very confidently for someone who didn’t major in English. Sorry, but your intensive writing class doesn’t qualify you to offer your absurd opinions on literature. And this statement absolutely disqualifies you, “I've read a lot of the most acclaimed classic novels and liked very few of them. I'm not fond of depressing subject matter. A lot of them are dramatically tragic. I don't mind that they are long. They just aren't enjoyable enough.


You just told us you have literally no understanding of the books you read or why they are important.

There is a big difference between the importance of a work and it's enjoyment. Or do you read the Bible and the Constitution for fun?

Oh hi, it's me, the castigated PP who doesn't like depressing classic books. I am well-educated and can definitely understand why certain novels are considered great and how the authors and works influenced other authors/thinkers/their era. I can listen to professors geek out about the beauty of the linguistic flourishes on display and yet I remain unmoved. I simply do not enjoy most tragedies and overwrought prose. Especially not 400-ish pages of a plot I don't like, important to the history of fiction though it might be. A lot of the classics read like upper middle class television shows for the people of a long ago time. Similar to how I feel about White Lotus, Breaking Bad, or Sex and the City, I don't find anything intriguing about the plot and characters of Middlemarch. I just had to read it for a senior English seminar. So I dutifully did.

I would actually be interested in studying the Bible and the Constitution more. I've done some Magna Carta tourism recently as well.

To get the full benefit of an English major, one should enjoy the works that are required. Perhaps it's a good idea to make sure that majors (which I was not) have read some of each category of whatever passes for canon. But don't expect continued hero worship for all vaguely famous long novels written in Europe between 1700-1900. I'd rather read Margery Kempe's diary than stuff like Wuthering Heights.

My biggest positive connection to the era of serialized novels was participating in the reading of a modern fanfiction that released chapters once a day for a year, with the author sometimes writing and releasing the chapter the same day (no stockpiled buffer of chapters). That was an interesting experience/piece of literary performance art. People on here would scoff at the quality of the fanfiction work but it definitely made a bigger and more relevant impact on my thinking about the power of literature than trudging through The Scarlet Letter in 11th grade.

To each their own. Just watch the count of BAs in the discipline. And don't blame it all on woke departments overthrowing the canon.

It's honestly hard for me to imagine not connecting to Middlemarch. Throughout my life I have felt an insanely strong connection to both Dorthea and Rosemund. But even if those novels didn't connect, there surely has to be something that's earlier than the 20th century from some culture that you care about or found enjoyable. If you don't like overwrought tragedies I'm guessing it wasn't the Greeks, though. Or any epic. What about something like the Letters of Seneca. Or you mentioned the Bible, which is definitely ancient lit.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I was a college English major and I’ve read and loved all types of literature. I think we need to separate different kinds of “hard,” because one matters and the other is a distraction. One reason Dickens is hard is the antique language. When Bleak House was written it was the beach read of the times - it wasn’t considered difficult. Because it was written in the vernacular. I see no real urgency in making sure people can read Shakespeare or Chaucer. Should English majors? Yes, even if they don’t love it, they should read some of where our language and literature came from.

All kids should be taught how to read, analyze, and understand meaningful text, though. Plot, metaphor, argument, character development, voice…those are all important. I’m not particularly fussed, though, about what sort of books kids read in order to understand those things, though. Pride and Prejudice is chick lit, but “hard” to read because of language. Harry Potter is easy to read because of its simple language written for children, but it can serve just fine to train kids to identify the important elements in literature and enjoy them.

I wonder if this study had used modern literature - say, The Kite Runner, Life of Pi, etc - whether they would have had different results. Archaic language doesn’t making literature better, it just makes it old.

I agree, well written. Archaic language turns a lot of kids off. There are so many quality books written in the last hundred years that are overlooked because they won’t let go of Shakespeare.

I like fiction with stories that happened during a significant time in history. A family living in Alabama in 1963 for example. There are excellent quality books about the civil rights movement or the Holocaust that have much more value than yet another Shakespeare play.

Here's the value in the Shakespeare play and Dickens and Homer that you don't get in a well-written modern book (most especially a well-written completely contemporary book): temporal bandwidth. Cultures from the past thought differently about things than us, had different blind spots than we do, had different values than we do, thought different things were sins than we do, thought different things were admirable than we do. Sometimes they were right about their differences and we are currently wrong. Having that temporal bandwidth gives kids a chance to assess modern culture in a way they simply can't if they aren't exposed to the past. And there's no better way to get exposed to the past than fiction, myths and fairy stories, and possibly poetry. Essays and history are simply just not going to give that up-close-and-personal view of the values of a time period.

If we could hear the perspectives of future cultures they'd be valuable for the same reason, but we can't. If we could talk to people from pre-literate cultures in the past that too would be amazing, but we can't. All we have is writing. And we should use it. Even if it's hard work.

It’s a whole big world out there but when I was in school we only focused on Western Civilization. Why not expand and start to limit books from England. You mentioned Homer and Dickens and they are readable for high school students. Shakespeare isn’t and plowing through ancient English serves no purpose. Asian authors should be studied. Tang Xianzu has a play translated into readable English. A nice substitute for Shakespeare whose works should be retired.

Shakespeare isn't ancient English. That's Beowulf. Both Beowulf and Shakespeare have value, and they are very, very different. Honestly in some ways Beowulf reads more like ancient Mesopotamian myths (like say Luglabanda) than it does like anything from the Renaissance or later.

When I was in school we did both Shakespeare and some really cool Chinese mystery novels in English. Why not both?

Anything to get away from so many bland English writers. Maybe one Shakespeare and that’s it. I had to go see the middle school play “The Winter’s Tale” because my son was in it. I had no idea what it was about. I left so confused.