Hit and Miss / vol. 2

May 5, 2008
What to teach and why.

“Literature teachers use literature to teach history.” I didn’t fully understand this quote by a college professor, who was a rebel among other English professors, until I started teaching high school. As I began to plow through the rather intimidating list of classic texts in my 10th grade (world literature) and 11th grade (American literature) classes, I inevitably had to face the question: “So what?” Indeed, why read early American authors, The Scarlet Letter, Oedipus, etc.? Without being aware of it, my answers privvied history. These texts were important because they raised key questions, yes, but they also spoke to the grand chronology of human accomplishments. In order to appreciate The Great Gatsby, my students would have had to have read The Scarlet Letter.

Indeed, my own shallow knowledge of history comes from survey courses I completed for my literature major. At the time, I loved learning literature in this way because it allowed me to see how so many disciplines are connected. I’ll never forget my first semester of college and the overlap that happened in my Western Civilization, Art History, and British Literature classes. Each class offered a new layer into the knowledge presented in another class. The connections were ubiquitous.

To go back to my professor friend’s quote, I have wondered to myself, if I am not teaching history, then when I teach literature, what am I teaching?

Of course, there is the transcendent power of literature, the beauty. I know when I read a well-written book carefully, I become a better reader of my own life’s minutia. For every book I read, I gain a sophisticated backdrop against which to compare and consider the plot, setting, characters, and conflict of my own life. Poetry condenses these connections even more and offers ways of seeing my life I could not otherwise imagine.

With all these serendipitous connections, why rely on historicism in an English class?

One word: Fear.

Those magnanimous, beautiful literary connections are so personal. Doing such a reading in a public classroom can feel…lewd…exposed. How can I sit and allow 34 students watch as I revel in the power of language? And even more frightening is the possibility that they won’t get it, that they will feel distanced from whatever text I am mooning about.

Side-stepping the pull of history, I have spent years using literature to court history’s second-cousin: Social Justice. Using films juxtaposed with short stories, I’ve tried to get students to use their reading of literature to analyze contemporary issues. [If we couldn’t use literature to make more sophisticated judgments of contemporary issues, what was the point?]