A literature curriculum is not just random books and personal preferences

 A few months ago, I was talking to secondary school teachers about the literature line at their school. By ‘literature line’, I mean the way literature teaching is organized over one year and also over the years, how it is (or not) seen as a line of continuous development, and how texts are selected and on which criteria. One of them told us – and this happened so many times in the past that this example will have to stand for many – that she intended to put a book on the reading list of her upper-form kids (havo 5 in the Netherlands, which prepares for Professional universities but not full-blown academic universities).

Which book? Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song.

Even the other teachers around us were…shall we say surprised?

Now, don’t get me wrong: everyone who has read that novel praised it, thought it superb and profound and all those things. But everyone who has read that novel knows about its idiosyncrasies as well: run-on sentences, absence of clear dialogue marks, missing punctuation, complex narrative, and a historical background so intricate and yet contextual and meaningful it would take many weeks of history lessons to just get into it. Is it a good novel? Sure, why not. Is it a Prize-winning novel? Yes it is. Is it proper material for mostly non-readers of 16 or 17 years of age? I do not think so.

But the main problem here is not that novel proper, it is the mechanism that led to its selection by that teacher. Her reasoning, when asked why she wanted to put that novel on the reading list of her learners, was, unfortunately, pretty typical: ‘I loved this novel so much’, she said, ‘it made me cry, and it’s so powerful’. When someone raised an objection based on the difficulty of the text (‘Do you think it’s at their level?’), the teacher replied: ‘I know it’s going to be difficult for them, but it’s such a great novel, I loved it so much, and I think it’s an important book’. And that, I think, is very much the wrong way to go about putting together a reading list at school. Not that the novel is difficult as such (although in this particular case, I do think – I know, in fact – that challenging narrative structures and voices are a real impediment to getting into the story for non- or occasional readers): after all, schools and higher education institutions have a duty to challenge learners and to introduce them to things and ideas they wouldn’t otherwise come across. No, it’s the wrong way because there are principles that should organize a reading list, and personal preferences or lack of reading should not be central to them.

Some basic principles:

First of course, there is the reading level of your learners: how much can they read (volume), and at what linguistic level: the difficulty of the language itself in terms of vocabulary and grammar. But a text might be difficult even if the language isn’t – you can check my remarks on the wonderful Magnus Mills here, as he’s a prime example of a different kind of difficulty: at a narrative level.

Occasional readers, and certainly typical readers of mass fiction, tend to be quickly baffled by atypical narrative voices or complex narrative structures. Anything that smacks of experimentation is bound to put most readers off, or at least make their engagement with the text very difficult. A story without details, or context; a narrator who’s uncommon or vague – those aspects need to be taken into account. And remember: it isn’t what YOU can take, do and read: it’s about what THEY can take, do and read. What’s the use of handing out an obscure, high-level text if none of it gets through?

That brings us to the second principle: teachability. The question is, as always, very simple: what exactly are you trying to achieve with this text? And that translates into this question: can you teach anything with this text? Teachability is not about taste, or personal interests and liking, nor is it about ‘giving them something to read’: it’s about using the text to achieve certain aims. So the text has to have a number of qualities, among which a level of complexity in ideas and situations that will enable you to elicit different perspectives, highlight diversity and personal response, and engage with topics and themes in a much richer way. I taught The Outsiders for several years because it is an eminently teachable novel. It’s simple, poorly written and badly set-up, it’s full of clichés and romantic ideas about life: I do not like that novel as novel at all. But it is those very same things that make it a very teachable book: it’s accessible, you can focus on the clichés as a means to discuss gender, imagination, knowledge of the world; its romantic ideas chime with those of teenagers. What’s more, its very American ethos, its full-on capitalist vision of an ideal bourgeois world, provides you with great material to discuss our current societies, and what your readers think and want of the future and of themselves. Not to mention friendship and its limits, sacrifice and all that.

The Outsiders is a simple book but with enough complexity at the level of your readers that it can make for very effective literature lessons where your focus is not on academic analysis, style, high-minded Literature or beauty, but on ideas about the world and ourselves.

Rather obviously, the above links back to the first question you should ask when considering texts to use: what are my aims with this lesson (or string of lessons, or project). Which topics, which themes (see here for the distinction) within these topics, do I want to discuss? Which ideas would I like to elicit through those texts? If you only have one idea per text, that will severely limit the extent to which learners will be able to contribute, and it will plant in their minds the idea that a text can only be about one thing – incidentally, the thing the teachers wants. So if you choose a novel because ‘It’s about love, and how it unites us all’, or because ‘It illustrates how difficult it is for migrants’, you have already limited the scope of the text, and you’re perhaps not ready to accept different interpretations. But your goal is to generate interpretations so that discussions can take place, it is not to impose one view and leave it at that. That is why, when you choose a text, you do so deliberately identifying which topics and themes you can extract from it: forget the blurbs, forget the reviews, forget the claims of the editor: what could YOU get out of the text, and bring to the class?

Finally, a text should not be read and discussed in isolation – and I’m not talking about novels only, it’s the same for poems and short-stories. Each text you handle has to be thought in relation to the other texts you did in class: what links them? Which idea, which theme can you carry from one to the other, even if it’s not the main theme? When you’ve discussed a text with learners, they acquire a new layer of understanding which you want to encourage them to add to the next text: everything they’ve been exposed to (e.g. ideas, narrative experiences, voices, type of characters) is relevant to make sense of the next book. That next book (or text) could be completely different in tone, setting and direction, yet even there you can highlight differences and contrasts and squeeze yet more understanding out of that.

So making a reading list means that each text is not a one-off, done then forgotten: a reading list requires forethought over time. There needs to be a progression in difficulty (linguistic, narrative, thematic) over time – within a year or across years – and there needs to be thematic glue between them, however thin. A reading list must be constructed like a Lego set: each piece is different but they all connect, and it’s only in the addition of all the pieces that the final figure is made.

And of course, let’s not forget: the priority behind your literature lessons and the texts you used for them (novels, poems, plays, short-stories) remains the same: identify your aims (link). What do you want to do with those lessons, what do you want learners to get out of them, is it realistic, is it relevant: what’s your goal, and how do you get there? Your reading list is an instrument to help you reach those aims, and that’s why it’s so important to put enough thought into it.