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Connecting Literature to Students' Lives

1993; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 55; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/378585

2161-8178

Dan Morgan,

American and British Literature Analysis

ere is seldom mentioned but universally known fact of our profession, bluntly stated: the vast majority of our undergraduate students do not love or appreciate literature as we do. Indeed, the value of studying literature, the rewards of reading, are not immediately apparent to surprisingly large number of students, despite vaguely conceived (and externally imposed) notion that reading serious literature is somehow essential to becoming a wellrounded person. So we shake our heads in dismay, share our war stories in faculty lounges, rejoice in our occasional successes, and generally bemoan these students' lack of interest, spotty education, and limited life experiences; the sorry state of basic literacy in recent years; the dismal and misguided teaching conducted in high schools; and, eventually, the anti-intellectual strain in American culture itself, exacerbated by television, Danielle Steel, and Stephen King. Embedded in all this are unstated inklings that our entire enterprise may be suspect or indefensibly elitist. And it was ever so. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History is replete with accounts of MLA addresses from the turn of the century onwards which express concern over students' indifference to literary studies and to the latest professional trends in literary theory. Even the decades-long debates over scholarship vs. criticism chronicled by Graff on occasion find it necessary to deal, somewhat reluctantly, with pedagogy and classroom applications. Not often enough, it has always seemed to me. This and other sweeping generalizations that follow, along with some radical observations-and few suggestions-are intended to refocus attention on what I take to be the principal function of college literature teachers, their primary raison d'etre: teaching undergraduates.