Notes from the Literature Core Curriculum Trenches.

Since sometime in the 1960s, when literary scholarship went into theoretical overdrive, we members of the college educational proletariat increasingly found ourselves in deeper and deeper distress. This is not necessarily because literary theory distresses us in and of itself, but because this shift in methodological emphasis has brought about a polarization of labor.

English departments designate graduate students and, in many cases, non-tenure faculty as the front line enforcers of core curriculum education while their tenured mandarin colleagues handle the teaching of the technical theoretical material. We graduate students and non-tenured faculty are the grunt workers of the academic humanities. We face the masses of students taking mandatory courses. It is usually we alone who separate the vast herds of non-select from the select.

The young teacher of "Modern Literary Perspectives 201" (or, for undergraduates, known as "arts elective #3" on the diploma check-off list) receives none of the benefits of grade inflation in the upper echelons of doctoral course work. There the curve begins at "A-" and extends to "potential for publication."

No, in the core curriculum trenches, Darwinism rules. The core curriculum literature curve begins at "functionally illiterate" or developmentally arrested, bulges into a large hump of "able to summarize a story plot, and then tapers precipitously toward "enjoy reading books voluntarily and able to make figurative connections between as many as three books read in the past." And this would probably be fine -- if the less talented students in the class admired the stronger students. The trouble is, however, that core curriculum literature in the academy allows very little common currency of admiration for students. As literacy rates and reading competence among high school students seem to fall, the greater the likelihood that students taking required literature classes see them as odd, archaic forms of torture. Students who don't like reading have difficulty reading. This seems obvious. What disturbs us who teach these students is how easily and quickly difficulty turns into dismissal. Failure of mastery causes pain and much more so as the object of mastery is seen as an absurd pursuit. To the mediocre undergraduate reader, the sophisticated undergraduate reader simply possesses a lucky genetic quirk or, worse, is "just weird."

As the semester proceeds, so does the testing and the sifting, and talented literature students are transformed by their peers into a hated minority, the teacher into a "far out" eccentric figure speaking in tongues, or a self-indulged tyrant. My hunch, based on my experience, -- is that most assessors of literature classroom effectiveness provide scant evidence that students have acquired a great deal of subject matter from the literature course, i.e., transferred "stuff' from the outside of their brains to the inside. It's rare, for example, to see a student's course evaluation mentioning his having "learned the crucial structural differences between Acts I and II of _Waiting for Godot_" or his or her having come to "distinguish between the rising action of a story and its denouement." More commonly, student evaluations discuss the teacher--the teacher's fairness, the teacher's love of the subject ... how much the teacher seems to care about his or her students.

It is easy to understand why literature teachers often end up mistrusting student evaluations--even teachers who get good evaluations--because they often have so little to do with literature and so much to do with personal presentation. Students forget (or never experience) the shaking of their philosophical foundations that the reading of a novel might cause; they remember the teacher's nifty pedagogical delivery.

Poor readers do not admire good reading, I think, for two primary reasons. First, literature itself has been "devolved" out of the class of essential education by our predominantly consumer culture. Freshman students reflect this culture. University and college administrations still give nominal weight to the importance of literature. After all, we are still teaching them a required course. We end up with a clash of economics and historical tradition. As universities and colleges fred themselves in fierce competition with one another for students, they give themselves over to the same marketing strategies of the larger consumer culture. Students become "customers," and professors and teachers "product vendors." Historical academics, however, has defined education as something like a refining fire students must abide. In consumer culture, education is an acquisition. Historical academics sees curriculum as something students must confront or something confronting students. In consumer culture, curriculum is seen as negotiable according to preference.

It's easy to see why literature has trouble competing with business and engineering courses for funding. These are the preferred acquisitions-- the investments that pay off. It's also easy to understand, then, why frustrated students in literature classes can mm "the poem I can't understand" into "the poem I never wanted to read in the first place" into "the poem I hate paying someone to teach to me."

The first condition leads to the second. Consumer culture breeds the kind of narcissism that encourages individuals to see meaning or significance as mostly private. One only has opinions about what one reads. All opinions are equally valid. Since people read books to satisfy their own peculiar tastes, and since the corporate virtual bookstore is giddy with eagerness to sate those particular tastes, book buying has degenerated into yet another layer of self-affirmation. Interpretation of a text, if it occurs at all, becomes a form of creative autobiography by which the reader reinforces what he already believes. It's easy to see, then, why we core curriculum literature teachers encounter so many students who, when asked what they thought of a piece of literature, simply shrug their shoulders and respond, didn't like it" or "I thought it was weird," and then expect the teacher to let class out early. Presumably, if the text is so difficult that it does not affirm their abilities as readers, then the text should be put aside and class dismissed. The teacher has not stocked the proper product.

But we core curriculum laborer cling to hope. Most of us still remember when we became pleasure readers. For most of us the event was not the result of an educational administration mandate. Maybe it emerged by a chance encounter with a book. But so often it occurred because a teacher turned our heads and made us acknowledge reading as a talent or ability. Whatever that original event was, a process of self-perpetuation took hold. As opaque text after opaque text washed clear with persistent effort, the love of the washing clear gradually led to an appreciation of effort, and that, in turn, led to an appreciation of opacity itself. In the core curriculum trenches, literature teachers must choose whether to surrender to the sheer dead force of intellectual mediocrity or confront mediocrity head on and become that teacher who somehow found us worth confronting.

Steve Long is a doctoral student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Along with writing his dissertation on narrative structure in selected Victorian novels, he teaches introductory literature courses. He points out that because of the dominant consumerism philosophy within American education, his students often expect a "product" when taking a literature course. They anticipate neatly packaged bundles of answers from the instructor. But as Long argues in his essay, great teachers are those who inspire curiosity instead of product and foster among their students "an appreciation of opacity itself." Dr. Ben Yarner, University of Northern Colorado, Academic Exchange Quarterly Senior Editor <[e-mail]>.