Making Literature Relevant

...How does one account, though, for a shoulder-shrug in response to the jolting flash of love that lights up Gabriel Conroy's way to heartbreaking understanding in Joyce's "The Dead...

...Z., the very model of the student I have been describing, inadvertently summarize the problem...

...literary "seeing" can only be taught to students who already feel they have enough at stake to make sight worthwhile, then what is sharpened urgency except sharpened frustration...

...Yet it strikes me as more directly to the point that they think literature itself a waste of time and effort...

...We analyze a story together...

...These liaisons, of course, may involve a minimum of yearning for one reason or another...

...The students will understand, in theory, that some of what a story means is that it means something...

...Then they heave my students and me into a heap in the corridor, and set us ablaze...

...the virtue of spilling the beans, the virtue of arranging them once spilled...

...A boy who has not uttered a spontaneous word all semester will volunteer that he likes Kafka's particularly challenging "The Hunter Gracchus," though he won't be able to say why...

...by capitalism of Melville's Bartleby is too abstract to stimulate self-concern, or even empathy...

...But the indifferent—a new wave of Philistines, significantly more passive and marked by anxiety than any who have gone before—succumb to their debilitating illness...

...the value of identifying with literary characters in helping to create a personal identity, why identity is valuable...

...But when, on the first day of the course one semester, I advocated Socrates' dictum that the unexamined life was not worth living, a pale-voiced girl asked, "How do you know...

...He might have been talking about sluggish inventory...

...But their papers show that they do not lack concern for their own relationships...

...One can only hope that positive responses to literature are...

...There are exceptions to the prevailing indifference, usually of two kinds: among those who come out of Yeshiva schools—and are comfortable with the written word— and among the more politically alert (disgusted), who have begun a swing to radicalism...

...Or another, gentle but anxiously numb, will express a rueful liking for a story about numbness...

...One has a sporting chance to change minds concerned with change, even if those minds are antagonistic to the study of literature...

...Isolated or partial victories occur...

...Preoccupation, hopelessness, deadend materialism, these sharpen the urgency of teaching reading and writing—that is, of teaching "seeing" in the sense Conrad thought literature made possible...

...Yet mv own students, so politely but profoundly passive, have inspired me to the hypothesis that progress can probably be achieved in the presence of hostility, if enthusiasm is not available...

...And if Conroy's tragedy doesn't get them because he, like Ilych, is middle-aged, how can students fail to flinch at the fate of his dead rival, who has died for love at the age of 17 from standing in the rain...

...the reasons for difficulty in literature widely acknowledged to be worth the difficulty, the relationship between obscurity in literature and in life...

...Z. piped up sullenly from his back-row seat...

...They will understand, in theory, that since images from movies can stick to their brains like decals, images from literature can do the same...

...Aah, he didn't learn anything...

...Because they arc young, their melancholy increases my feeling for them—I shout at them, exhorting them to be passionate...

...They do not yet know the cost of apathy, and they may never...

...Are they too preoccupied to identify with yearning...

...How, then, does one explain the interest of these students in their grades and careers...

...and that the pre-radicals will not...

...But, having understood better, they offer no signs of caring that they understand better...

...Nobody's any different...

...No pain...

...In time, my enemies charge into the dark, into someone else's head...

...or variants thereof...

...Is yearning, given their view of the world, a waste of time and effort...

...My students deny that their general failure to respond to the stories they read is the result of tv poisoning—and their creative writing shows them capable of verbal logic and imagination, sometimes brilliance...

...They say, rather, that the problem is one of preoccupation: with themselves, school, war, school-war...

...Now they understand better, the students say...

...Can the blind be taught to see...

...In short, how to try to transcend mortality...

...And once, after I read aloud some papers in which the students had dramatized their self-image, and Mr...

...at least in some cases, simply delayed by a month, a year, five years...

...how to define and develop an energizing sense of tragedy...

...Stories are only stories, I imagine them thinking...

...Now, 1 know that students who invade classrooms are not ideal subjects for literary indoctrination...

...hubris—when to watch for it, what its consequences can be...

...Basically unexcitable people, their implicit "so what" seems almost instinctive...

...Z. once announced in class that all study but that in his major field, engineering, was useless to him...

...You are a white racist member of the decadent linear establishment...

...Let us argue that Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which sets forth with appallingly vivid pertinence the transition of an 18th-century American youth from cocky naivete to costly knowledge, is too far removed in time and atmosphere for today's students to enter into its spirit...

...Or to the triumphant lust of Rabbi Finkle at the end of Malamud's "The Magic Barrel...

...Perspectives MAKING LITERATURE RELEVANT BY RICHARD P. BRICKNER My English Composition students at City College the past two years have all been white, mostly Jewish and Italian, the children of small businessmen, elevator-men, cops, taxi-drivers, mostly Freshmen, many engineering majors-to-be...

...the size of the human imagination, what it contains, how to use its contents...

...Perhaps...

...self-awareness—how it helps to create reality, efficiency, and a legacy...

...We do not burn or scream...

...in a month or a year, jilt the language that clarifies for the tinny jargon of their profession...

...how tact is used in writing (and in conversation) to persuade or convince...

...Everybody's the same, average...

...The comparatively confident or comparatively angry are open to discovering what they do not know...

...Have our problems grown so swollen that the "ordinary" student must keep his sights low lest he feel more hopeless than he feels already...

...how form creates matter and matter creates form...

...Did Mr...

...B. tentatively expressed the belief that he had learned something from the assignment that differentiated him, Mr...

...Has the pond of our famously "shrinking world" shrunk every fish in it...

...But if, as may well be...

...Or that the death Richard P. Brickner, author of The Broken Year, holds a writing course al New York's City College...

...And, at the same time, hope that the verbally well-coordinated will not one day place their awareness of the word as a form of personal energy on the shelf behind their law books or medical books...

...And, mostly, so unperturbed by the whips of literature that at least once a semester I have had some version of the following nocturnal fantasy: A group of angry students, black and white, rushes into my classroom, storming the blackboard to slash there...

...Is a career, to them, merely as profitable a killing of time as possible...

...I reply that in many cases the stories are about their preoccupations, and that even if they weren't, they would still be about human existence: Relevant...

...The image Mr...

...What they will not understand, however, is that practical information, which they desire intensely, is exactly what they have been getting: why we all depend on metaphors, how and how not to use them...

...Let us grant that Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (which Stravinsky sorely regretted having read while he was in the hospital) has no impact on the students because they are too young to worry about death, certainly a death at middle age...

...Z had chosen for himself was that of a little fish, among many little fish, in a big pond...

...literature doesn't educate...

...Or does he think that because there is no future, why worry...

...They smile rather wanly, as if they were anemic patients...

...how literature can cause change...