(The Kindle’s name, of course, is witty: while it itself is paperless it borrows its name from fuel for fire, something paper does quite well.)

As is want to happen in engaging conversations, I heard myself suggest something, that I hadn’t ever considered before: What if the sheer physiciality of reading literature factors into why some students resist reading?  The very things we at the table were holding up as the greatness of reading literature–the weight of the book, its thickness, the smells, the turning of the page, the writing of notes, the placing of finished and unfinished books on the bookshelf–might be precisely what prevents some students from reading literature.

We English teachers come from a very specific perspective.  We think reading is good, vital, and pleasurable.  We have come to enjoy the physiciality of reading; we love reading books.  Students often don’t.

Reading literature doesn’t have to be for our students what it was for us.  (In fact, all accounts it isn’t already and surely won’t be in the future!)  Imagine a classroom in which every student had a Kindle and could download any book they wanted in seconds.  Imagine English departments that didn’t spend thousands of dollars on books, but invested in a limitless subscription to Kindle so that students could download newspapers as well as literature.  What would students say are the differences between reading on a Kindle versus books?

I would love nothing more than to study this question.  (Amazon, if you are reading, I have emailed your PR department with a proposal!) I imagine it would offer at least new insights into our students’ relationship with literature, and might even change the way we ourselves teach literature in our own classrooms.

Related posts:

1. Kindle, Literature, and New Literatures
2. From the Journals :: When Students Struggle Reading
3. Reading Music, Reading Literature

As the author (and mother) of Click and Jane notes, her three-year-old son doesn’t mistake her Blackberry for a book.  For him, “the only time he describes what he and I do together as ‘reading’ is when we’re sitting with a clutch of pages bound between covers, open in front of us like a hymnal.”  He enjoys playing on book-like web sites for kids, but he doesn’t dare call it reading.  Importantly, the place of reading literature in schools is becoming increasingly complex as students and researchers spend more time engaged with various new/online literacies.  Things are not looking good for literature.  It’s track record, after all, looks fairly feeble.

Literature in schools hasn’t ever been able to defend itself the way other subjects of study have. Other subjects–physics, Spanish, history, for instance–have specific content and methods that, if push comes to shove, have some practical value. (A student can say, “I can send a man to the moon” or “I can communicate with others” or “I can better partake in the political system”). Utility drives education more often than many educators like to admit.  Students know this, of course.  Their frustrated cries of “Why do we have to do this?” are cries of pragmatists. Education loves pragmatists, so long as they do their work.

Literature isn’t practical. In fact, for much of its teaching in America, teaching literature has been justified under the canopy of Developing Character and Culture.  A weak defense. There is no value in teaching literature. There is worth, perhaps, but not value.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines value as “That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be an equivalent for something else; a fair or adequate equivalent or return.”  The literary experience is not a commodity.  In fact, attempts to demonstrate the practical or quantifiable value of teaching literature have resulted in its being defined in terms of reading skills or as a necessary companion to writing.  (Incidentally, writing has seldom had so difficult a time finding approval in academia. Programs and departments might argue over whose responsibility it is to teach writing, but none would question the importance of it.)  To this day, the New York State Regents exam as well as the AP Exam in Literature value literature in a particular way.  It is something to be parsed, like a dead frog in biology class.  Poke it. Prod it. Cut it up and discard it.

Worth is different. In addition to definitions of economy and markets, worth also conveys something more: “The character or standing of a person in respect of moral and intellectual qualities; high personal merit or attainments.”  With this definition, we start to approach the unspeakable nature of literary experience.  Words like “moral” and “intellectual” float in the ether.  A teacher would be hard pressed to score morality (though, unfortunately, they might do a more confident job with intellect!).

There is no reason whatsoever to argue for the value of literature.  Nevertheless, schools do indeed have a responsibility to ensure certain practical communication skills are taught.  Why not, then, give literature its own course of study?  Let there be a course on Efferent Reading or Communicative Arts, which focuses on the practical and necessary skills of information gathering, critiquing, and presenting.  Then, separately, study literature with an eye toward the intangible, immeasurable aesthetic effects it can create with imaginative readers.  What would be lost in such a curricular approach?

What’s more, the recent trend of using literature to teach reading skills–or, I would argue, even to emulate authors in students’ own writing–is distinctly non-literary.  It prevents any hope of aesthetic experience or, as Applebee writes in his Tradition and Reform, it privileges students’ experiences with literature instead of their experiences through literature.  Teaching literature resists evaluation, so do the students’ literary experiences through literature.  We read literature, to put it simply, because it’s worth it.

Related posts:

1. No Stimulus Plan for Literature
2. Kindle, Literature, and New Literatures
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As a singer, I can read music. Given a few minutes, I can scan through the musical notation after identifying the key signature and hum the song. Being able to read music, however, does not mean that I can compose music. To assume that one ability necessitates the other would be to overestimate my own skill-level and to underestimate the complexity of reading and writing music respectively. Does singing a song mean one can write a song? Hardly. Now, my analogy has its flaws and could be critiqued fairly. But at the heart of it is a simple point that is not easily ignored: reading and writing are two distinct acts and it behooves educators and researchers and theorists to pry the two of them apart.

“Of course reading and writing should be considered together,” one might argue, “because in order to write one must know how to read.”

True, but in order to read one does not need to know how to write. The two are not necessarily related. Consider these essential differences between writing and reading: students produce writing; they cannot produce reading. The prior is epistemological in nature, whereas the latter is ontological; the prior is a matter of production, whereas the latter is social/spatial; the prior is external, quantifiable, categorizeble; the latter is internal, qualitative, and ephemeral.
Historically, writing seems to have become primary, especially in the latter part of the 19th century when the values of industrialization placed value on product development. Reading began to be seen as a tool for the production of writing, rather than an end for its own sake. Here, we see a teleological treatment of reading—it is a means to a written end. But is that to say reading is purposeless unless the reader writes about the reading? This is troubling. What the reader writes about is likely not to be what was read at all. Rather, it might well be some second-rate version of the reading the student thinks the teacher wants him to have done. The clearest example of this can be seen on a state exam.

One question on a recent New York State Regents exam presented two passages. The student is asked to read an excerpt from a memoir and a poem in order to write a “unified essay about parenting as revealed in the passages.” While there is more to the prompt, including specific instructions as to how to read the texts—including showing evidence and identifying literary elements—I’m struck by the kind of reading the student is told to do here. Is this reading? My instinct is to say, No it isn’t. But perhaps that would be rash. It is a type of reading: teleological reading, perhaps. Using the modifier before the word reading could make a significant difference not only in the way educators or researchers or theorists talk about the act of reading, but it could make be revolutionary for students. I imagine other modified terms for types of reading: aesthetic reading–students reading for emotional impact or pleasure; social reading—students read for the purpose of discussing in a social-academic setting; analytical reading—students read for the purpose of unpacking the structural makeup of a text; laissez faire reading—where students are left alone to read whatever they like, however they like. In any case, students must be brought into the conversation about how they are asked to read texts in school. To neglect the conversation is to encourage dishonest readership where teacher and students go about their roles inauthentically.

It is the invisible ephemerality of the act of reading that we educators have ignored or dismissed. The result has been classroom pedagogy, methods books, and literacy research that have objectified the individual identity of student-readers in the name of knowledge production. Movements to restore the student-reader’s identity (most notably Reader Response and transaction theory) have failed precisely because they have ignored the subjective nature of readership, and the limits of pedagogy: teachers teach students, they cannot force students to be readers. Granted, they can impart and practice certain reading skills, but there comes a point where the student chooses to read or not to read: And the teacher can never know for certain. Only the student himself can choose read.

The divorce of reading and writing must be a group effort. It is a relationship so firmly established at the core of western culture, not to mention educational thought, that to pull them apart will require the ideas, musings, and practices of all involved: educators, researchers, theorists, and especially students. The reward could be great—a new epoch of learning, one of transparency and authenticity, of pleasure in schooling, of deep literary experiences that are as of yet unimaginable.

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