Ouch! Some hard questions (and answers) about literature in the classroom

 At the heart of every literature class, there are some questions we hardly ever hear asked, or even acknowledged. Yet, in order to determine what we do, why and what for, it is essential that we do ask those questions, however uncomfortable they may make us feel. Ignoring them means missing the very point of our classes: why do we do what we do, what do we want to achieve, and the most important of all: do we in fact achieve what we claim? Can we achieve it?

 Q.1: How difficult is it to read fiction?

That is something we tend to forget, especially if we like to read ourselves: reading is not easy, and it’s one of those things where the reward might be long delayed, or, in any case, will take long to reap.

Reading is time-consuming: chronophage, as we say in French, it eats (devours) time. Watching a complete episode, with a beginning, middle and end, of a series on Netflix will take 45 minutes; in that time, you will have read, what, 20 pages of a normal quality novel? Fewer? And then onward you must because there are another 300 pages to go, that’s perhaps 20 or 30 hours of your time - if not more. 30 hours! And that’s if the text is not too demanding: you don’t read Kafka at high pace, you shouldn’t read Frayn or Sebastian Barry at that pace either. Literary reading is not commensurate with fast-reading.

And that’s the other thing: reading requires attention, concentration: devotion to the task at hand. How many times have you read the same paragraph in a book more than twice? In fact, have you read the paragraphs above with complete attention? Have you skipped lines, jumped to the end of a paragraph perhaps? Or, God forbid, would you perhaps have skipped an entire paragraph? But then you missed stuff: who’s to say that stuff is not important or relevant? So go back, and make sure you know whether it was or not. See how much concentration is required? And we know concentration is hard to come to, and very easy to break, so that every time you’re interrupted when reading, it will take you at least a few minutes to find focus again.

That’s why reading is hard: time-consuming, attention-heavy, solitary, static, non-interactional. It’s a discussion, an internal dialogue between inanimate marks on a page and the mind of a person. It might be beautiful, it might be educational and whatnot, but it remains, lest we forget, a hard thing to do. And that’s without even considering what to understand of a text, if anything!

 Q.2: Is reading fun – should it be fun?

Ah, a divisive question this. Most teachers I’ve had in class would say Yes, it’s got to be fun. And that makes sense, seeing what I’ve said above: reading is hard. And yet: fun is the sugar for the pill, so that you swallow the pill without even considering its existence. But the pill is the thing, right? The sugar is not the cure, the pill is: the pill is what matters, it’s the one you should be dealing with, not the sugar. Now, I understand that the fun might help get to the story, it might make engaging with the text easier – and that’s fine, of course it is. In fact, I strongly believe that the narrative engine of a story is supremely important for all readers, and by far the most important for non-readers, or reluctant ones.

But you must not expect that, first, what you find ‘fun’ is found so by others. I find it very fun to doodle at the piano or on the bass, you might not; I find it exquisitely fun to browse dusty second-hand bookshop shelves, you might not.

 Second, you must not confuse fun for substance: as long as you know what you want to achieve with your text, you know your aims, you know the themes and topics you would like to bring out, fine. But if you give a text just because it’s fun to read it, then, well, see above: shouldn’t you have other aims? How long can such ‘fun’ be sustained by your learners on their own? If there’s no substance, the text comes to compete with other sources of fun: games, social media, whatever – the book will lose, guaranteed (except for the occasional, lovable, immensely likable nerd).

Reading is hard: we must accept that. We can sugar-coat it to some extent, but reducing reading to ‘fun’ is doing a great disservice to reading. Reading is its own thing, and must be worked with on its own merits and characteristics. Fun might be fun, it can be made fun, but ultimately that’s not the goal. If it is, the next generation won’t read at all.

 Q.3: How much can literary reading be taught, realistically?

Now, this one hurts and yet, when you think of it, it’s completely logical: reading well – in the sense of ‘getting the message of a text’, seeing its subtleties, its mechanisms, interpreting it – is like any skill really: it’s hard work, and it cannot be achieved without repetition. Repetition. Repetition. You cannot hope to be able to read a text quickly if you’re not used to reading, just like you don’t become an adequate pianist if you don’t…play your piano regularly. People are not surprised it takes ages, and loads of repetition, loads of practice, to become, say, a competent high-jumper, horse-rider or cabinet-maker. Yet many of the same people seem to think that reading a couple of low-level books will be enough to ‘get it’: it won’t. You need to read, and read some more, and read again; you need to be confronted with a wide variety of styles, narrative techniques, plots and ways to handle them, different concerns, approaches to writing and what it’s for, different voices and characters. Only then will you start to see all the connections I wrote about once here, but more than that, you will start to see shapes and contours, and not just the one text you’re reading: you will see how that text resembles other texts in this or that way. And that is the gateway to competent literary reading: recognising how the text itself is connected to many others.

So you can teach all the terminology you like until you’re blue in the face: without reading, your learners will never get to your level just by seeing you do it. And that is also true for those teachers who have never read much, or who only read one type of texts: diversity brings means of comparison, which in turn bring understanding through contrast. If you read 100 romance novels a year, that won’t help you become a better reader: diversify, open your eyes, find what you don’t like as much as what you like, give different genres a chance, don’t pre-judge.

And equally important: your reading has to be, at least from time to time, complex: it won’t do to only (or mostly) read, I don’t know, interesting young adult novels or Dan Brown stuff, you’ve got to mix in some complexity in there as well. Complexity of narrative and narration, of style, of genre. After all, that complexity is the hallmark of literature, and the more you encounter it, the less daunting and the easier to recognise and deal with it becomes.

To summarise: read abundantly, across genres, styles, time-periods and levels of complexity. The more comfortable you feel about reading fiction, the more choices will open up for you as a teacher.

 Q3+: Then if it can’t be taught, why bother?

No, wait: there are ways around this, to help yourself and others. There is a method, really, a step-by-step ascent to Meaning 😊 At least I think it is: you can find many elements of it on my website here.
And there is this: we’re not trying to ‘teach literature’, whatever that may mean.
We are trying to teach WITH literature.
And that changes everything.

 More such questions next time!