Americans Need to Improve Adolescent Literature

 

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

American students once read good stories in literature textbooks. The stories were selected for their literary merit, but today many of the stories are banal and uninspiring. They are not chosen for literary merit as much as for their political correctness. 

The mediocre quality of American literature textbooks is due to the adoption process used in over 20 states, including Texas, Florida, and California. These three states purchase enormous qualities of textbooks. The books are selected by state committees rather than by literature teachers who must then try to teach their students how to write while reading inferior examples. This sad state of affairs suggests that the main concern of public education is to form young minds along the currents of contemporary culture.

Some stories in the literature texts receive a more favorable response than others. These demonstrate a balance between weird or exotic and familiar. They open before the students experiences and worlds that they have never imagined yet the characters are like them or like people they know in school. 

Many of our best readers are students who read to escape the bullies, the mundane, and the boredom of their daily routines. This is one of the reasons they return to classics like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. They want to read about worlds where young people are challenged, where they can be heroes, and where dangers and challenges develop strength and character.

What makes a good story? It should have memorable characters and it should entertain, but most importantly, it should have a positive impact on the character of the reader.

Related reading: Wendell Berry: The Writer's Obligation; The Challenges Writing Teachers Face; Read Well if You Would Write Well

Read Well If You Would Write Well

Writers must read good writing to learn to write well. That is the conclusion of all the great writers: Saul Bellows, Jorge Borges, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg and many more.

Wendell Berry said it well in a letter he wrote to my creative writings students.

The first obligation of a writer is to tell the truth--or to come as near to telling it as is
humanly possible. To do that, it is necessary to learn to write well. And to learn to write well, it is necessary to learn to read well. Reading will make you a better writer, provided you will read ever more attentively and critically. You will probably read a lot of contemporary writing in your textbooks, in magazines and newspapers, in popular novels, etc. The contemporary is inescapable. You may more easily escape the writing that is most necessary to you. I mean the books we know as 'classics,' books that have been read for generations or for centuries and so have proved their excellence.

As you learn to judge what you read, you will learn also to judge, and so improve, what you write. Reading, I think, is half of your responsibility as students of writing. The other half of your responsibility, of course, is to write, and your effort to write well, as I hope you already know, will make you better readers.

Read the entire letter here.

Why read old books?

Victor Davis Hanson


We all know the usual reasons why we are prodded to read the classics — moving characters, seminal ideas, blueprints of our culture, and paradigms of sterling prose and poetry. Then we nod and snooze.

But there are practical reasons as well that might better appeal to the iPhone generation that is minute-by-minute wired into a collective hive of celebrity titillation, the cool, cooler, and coolest recent rapper, or the grunting of “ya know,” “dah,” and “like.” After all, no one can quite be happy with all that.

Classics are more than books of virtues. Homer and Sophocles certainly remind us of the value of courage, without which Aristotle lectures us there can be no other great qualities. Instead, the Greeks and Romans might better remind this generation of the ironic truths, the paradoxes of human behavior and groupthink. Let me give but three examples of old and ironic wisdom.



I. The Race Goes Not to the Swift.

The problem with Homer’s Achilles or Sophocles’ Ajax was not that they were found wanting in heroic virtue. Rather they were too good at what they did, and so made the fatal mistake of assuming that there must be some correlation between great deeds and great rewards.

How many times has the natural hitter on the bench sulked at the novelty that the cousin of the coach is batting cleanup? How often has the talented poet suddenly turned to drink because the toast of the salon got rich with his drivel? He should read his Homer: the self-destructive Achilles should have enjoyed more influence among the dense Achaeans than did the university president Agamemnon. By any just heroic standard, Ajax, not Odysseus, the Solyndra lobbyist, should have won the armor of the dead Achilles.

In the tragic world, thousands of personal agendas, governed by predictable human nature, ensure that things do not always quite work the way they should. We can learn from classics that most of us are more likely to resent superiority than to reward it, to distrust talent than to develop it. With classical training, our impatient youth might at least gain some perspective that the world is one where the better man is often passed over — precisely because he is the better man. Classics remind us that our disappointments are not unique to our modern selves. While we do not passively have to accept that unfairness (indeed Achilles and Ajax implode over it), we must struggle against it with the acceptance that the odds are against us.

Again, think of the great Westerns that so carefully emulated ancient epic: what exactly does Shane win (other than a wound and a ride off into the sunset)? Or Tom Doniphon (other than a burned-down shack)? Or the laconic Chris of The Magnificent Seven (“The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.”)? Did he even collect his $20?

Or what about Will Kane (yes, I know, but a buckboard ride with young Grace Kelly to where exactly?)? Or Ethan Edwards (a walk to where after going through that swinging cabin door?)? Medals, money, badges? The lasting admiration of Hadleyville? Hidden gold from the Mexican peasant village? The mayorship of Shinbone? An hour with Jean Arthur?

Society is as in need of better men as it is suspicious of them when it no longer needs them. Most of Sophocles’ plays are about those too noble to change — Antigone or Philoctetes — who cannot fit in a lesser society not of their own making. Read E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed and cry over the great Marines who were ground up in the Pacific. So often they were like Lieutenant Hillbilly Jones and Captain Haldane who saved the U.S. and are now all but forgotten. In today’s collective history, they are simply the anonymous cardboard cut-out race and class villains who needlessly decimated the Japanese out of racially driven animus and thereby bequeathed to us the abundance that we take for granted and that allows us such self-indulgent second thoughts.

Thucydides’ Pericles warned us that orators had to be careful when speaking of the dead lest they so emphasize the gifts of the deceased that such praise invoke envy in the listeners, who in anger realize that their own lives fall short of the fallen.


Read it all here.