On Literature and Teaching

  (the first part of this post is here ) Q. 4: Is reading educational in and of itself? That one is easy: of course it isn’t. Wait, what? No, it is, of course it is: didn’t you learn while reading? So what do you mean then: which texts? You mean text-books, or novels? You mean entertainment, or serious literary stuff? More to the point: are you being educated just by being exposed to a text? Is it enough to be given an extract from, I don’t know, Shakespeare, for Understanding, Illumination, Depth, to suddenly come down to you? Baudelaire, the French 19 th -century poet, thought it the greatest error possible to confuse Beauty and Morals – more exactly, the confusion between the Beautiful (‘ le Beau ’) and the Good (‘ le Bien ’): ‘ Morality seeks the Good; Science seeks the Truth; poetry – and sometimes the novel – only seek the Beautiful’ . This idea that literature is an immediate path to Morals (i.e. to Thinking, Reflecting, Understand, all those big words), which we could

 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? Few