I don’t know if this is a universal experience, but back when I was in the early years of high school I remember having to dismantle various fragments of literature and scrounge in their remnants for “literary elements.” This term was a loose euphemism for things like metaphors, similes, etc. – basically any concept that could be easily defined and tested on the state Regent exam. As ‘teach explained it, if the selected passage we were given employed enough of these syntactical devices, it must be considered advanced literature. I mean, come on, just look at that enjambment!
I don’t know though. I mean, what if you brought this exercise to bear on something other than fragments of Macbeth? How about, oh, Nas’s seminal rap album Illmatic (1994). Would it past the test? Is it “literature”?
I’m about to start teaching creative writing and composition once a week to a group of 11th and 12th graders in Harlem. Many of them will struggle with basic reading and writing comprehension, but my goal is to get them excited about telling their own stories, but also to respect the craft: to understand that editing is an important part of any artistic process, that attention to details helps the final product, and that constant practice (via writing and reading regularly) can only make their own creative and academic writing better.
So what kind of stuff do I want to encourage them to read in order to get excited about books and about writing their own stories? My mind automatically goes to “the classics,” a list of books many of which I haven’t even read myself (cue the guilt). But are these the best works to get them excited?
The bigger question is this: Is a classic work of literature (fiction and nonfiction included) always “good” writing?
Sometimes I feel like a broken record. I say it over and over again — the Internet is making people more literate, not less. (We’ve written about this before — see Jennifer’s great post about “the new literacy” here).
Then a column like this comes along and I feel like I have to debunk it or at least go on a rant for a bit:
Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé…The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing. It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it…Meanwhile, a generation is tuned, increasingly and sometimes exclusively, to the cacophony of interactive chatter and noise, exciting and fast moving but plethoric and ephemeral. The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.
