Snobbery

The fall semester has begun full-force and at this point I have already begun to feel the heavy blow of paper-grading. It is truly incredible how much time and energy it takes to grade and comment on student papers, especially when the intention is to give QUALITY feedback. Taxing! But I digress.

Today's post has to do with an attitude with which I have been typically associated with in my social circles; the attitude of literary snobbery. Far too many times I have found myself sticking my nose up in the air when a new popular novel has been recommended to me since, surely, I mustn't waste my oh-so-valuable time perusing a Terry Brooks novel or, God forbid, one of those overproduced and weary schoolyard rags printed under the Hogwart's banner. But as I have been teaching I have slowly been learning to reorient my otherwise derisive and dismissive literary views. This doesn't necessarily mean that I will ever get around to picking up a J.K. Rowling novel since I still believe, albeit stubbornly, that there are far better things to spend my evenings doing (provided no one asks me to justify the hours I've clocked at failblog.org). But as a professor of composition at two colleges I think I have recently learned the value of the pedagogical perspective.

About two years ago, before I began teaching, I found an article by a crotchety literary fundamentalist by the name of Harold Bloom. I call him crotchety but in reality I share a great deal of Bloom's views concerning the definition of truly valuable literature (I have, in fact, blogged on this very subject). This article, entitled "Dumbing Down American Readers" is essentially an ivory-tower literary critic's lambastation of two of our most prominent symbols of the commodification of literature, Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. As I read this article the first time I couldn't help but grin wickedly and tap my fingers together, imagining how I might use this very same article to indoctrinate my future students. Surely, young and impressionable college students reading the harsh derision of a figure so monolithic as Harold Bloom would be incapable of resisting his bludgeoning logic as he denounced two of the most read and, ironically, worst writers of the past decade.

But after a year of teaching composition I have realized something important about the function of an instructor in a college classroom. Beyond the simple fact that my opinion matters less than the intended product of any class, which is student proficiency, I believe I have also seen the real value of my position which is to aid students in expressing ideas that are uniquely and inextricably THEIRS. This is the first semester that I have actually used the Bloom article in my classroom and, despite my wholehearted agreement with the critic, I have been careful to present the article as a point of argument and have worked to foster a forum for open agreement or disagreement with Bloom's work. I have been happily surprised to find that a great many students are already in agreement with Bloom in that American readers have been served much softer and less nourishing fare in recent years. But the great part about it is that most of these students have expressed these views and are currently developing arguments along these same lines that they can claim whole ownership of. The same can be said for the students whom have reacted just as strongly in the opposite direction and in fact, strong disagreement with Bloom's essay seems to have been a more interesting starting point for class discussion. And I'm OK with it!

I had a recent discussion with a friend who will remain nameless (apologies if you read this) and she was expressing frustration at the notion that a friend of hers had become interested in reading a work that she (my friend) loved immensely for both its aesthetic and literary value. She was certain that her friend could not appreciate the novel the way she did and as we discussed this phenomenon (tragically common among literary types) we both realized the type of elitism that this very response demonstrated. I've done the same thing plenty of times but looking at it then from a second-hand perspective I realized the separation that I had developed between my teaching attitudes and my personal ones. Of course any literary type should do their utmost to help any audience appreciate a work of literature, even if they are incapable of accessing it on the same level or sharing the author's views. But that is what makes each of us individuals; the readers and the non readers, the literary bourgeoisie and the philosophical proletariat, the elitists, the humble, and everyone in between caught up in this marvelously picaresque game of "what did you read today?"