Reading the literacy essays again, I decided that in high school English, literature just
plays too big a role. Even in classes here, which are supposed to be about writing, I see too much literature of the fiction variety. One faculty member’s syllabus had five, six, and even seven short stories assigned for a single class. That much literature crowds the students’ writing out of the class.
Most high school and college students are not going to be English majors. But they are going to need to be effective communicators, and most literary assignments don’t provoke genuine communication. Does this thesis convince you that the author is burning to tell you that
“Amitai Etzioni’s use of the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be applied to William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Miss Emily” and the town of Jefferson, Mississippi that Faulkner portrays.”
OK—it doesn’t have to be this bad, but it usually is.
To prepare for the real world, students also need practice reading a variety of texts, not just fiction. Why did most students last fall refer to Zeitoun as a ‘novel”? It’s non-fiction, a perfectly good genre. In fact, most of the reading for college and life is non-fiction, so students need more of that. They need to analyze rhetorical strategies and evaluate the reasoning in arguments. Funny, but some students in the literacy paper told me they learned more about how to write in History or Philosophy than they did in English.
Yet literature exposes students to great ideas and—if you read it attentively—lessons in how to craft a sentence. And as P.M. Forni says, it can instill empathy through imagination. Literature makes us human. We need literature, but not so much.
