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FWIW, it wasn’t always this way

            About 100 hundred years ago, TS Eliot began pioneering for this thing called an English program.  It didn’t exist before then.  One of the key missions of the idea?  Teaching already literate people how to read literature.  That concept also did not exist before.  If you could read this paragraph, then congratulations you could read Shakespeare.

            TS Eliot (that tw*t) came along and decided that he didn’t want people to read it wrong (lol, what the hell does that mean?), and, I don’t know, he was scared we would taint the classics with our own peasant permutations?

                        An example

Here's a tale from graduate-level English classes.  I promise you this is one that I think just about everyone can relate to—especially non-literary people, in fact.  If you want to skip ahead to the point of the tale, though, just scroll down to the This is what you’re taught.

            So last year I read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (you may’ve heard of it) in a class run by someone who was probably part of the inaugural class of the Old School.  Well, one thing I was fixated on throughout the book was how much the account elucidated the racism of people from the 1700s.  Every land Robinson comes in contact with, he’s worried to death about the natives because he’s certain that they’re all savages and is supremely concerned with (and I’m being dead serious) being eaten by cannibals. 

I thought this was terribly interesting because it was a clue into so many of the race problems this world’s rooted in because even this so-called-Progressive writer didn’t bat his eye at regarding every brown person as potentially cannibalistic heathens who need some pedantic repentin’. 

This issue got brought up in one class, but it didn’t get the time of day.  “Look,” the teacher said, clearly excited to nail a well-practiced argument, “It’s completely anachronistic to apply those values to this book.  Defoe was actually a progressive.  You can’t judge him by our current standards when he lived four centuries ago.” 

            And that was that.  I simply should not take anything that applies to my world and apply it to my reading and use it to learn anything from the book.  That type of stuff isn’t even worthy of the class’s time.  Well here’s the thing:

            I DON’T GIVE A SH1T ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERSPECTIVE!  I read a novel to learn more about MY OWN god-d*mned perspective.

                        This is what you’re being taught

That the author had this one intended message that is timeless and never to be changed and never to be reapplied.  In other words, we’re taught that literature should be approached objectively. LOLWUT?  Literature . . . objective?  WTF, why would I ever approach literature objectively.  That approach is completely counter-productive to taking anything out of literature that’s useful to yourself and your world. 

Let me pause on that word: counter-productive.  I know you’re smart enough to know what it means, but it’s important to emphasize that I don’t mean a-productive—that is, merely not happening to lend to productivity— I actually mean anti-productive.  Worrying about what you should be getting out of a piece absolutely distracts you from figuring out what you do or can get out of it.  The more you look at it from the universal view, the less you’re seeing it subjectively—as, for example, a 21^st-century white, American, atheistic, male whose biggest victimizations to the human condition include contemporary existentialist issues and blah blah blah and blah blah blah.

            Another way to do it

People seem to get so caught up in what the author was trying to say and whether or not they achieved that and whether or not you agree with it that they don’t even realize how straightforward things are when you don’t think of it that way.  Just respond to it like you respond to any other story in your life.  That’s all a novel (or short story, or etc) is: it’s a story.  A carefully constructed story with themes, etc, but it’s still just a story.

You know what it is?  Did you guess story?  Okay, just testing. 

When your grandfather’s telling you a story about being a cop in the NYPD in the 60s, I assume you just respond by thinking, "This part was really interesting; I didn’t so much understand where he was going with that one; I learned a lot about treatment of hippies and black people; boy I hope cops have come a long way since that culture"; and so forth.  You don't get this paralysis through analysis of wondering if any of your thoughts are worthy intepretations or any of that.  

Well, the narrator of a novel’s doing the same exact thing that your grandfather's doing when he's telling you about being a cop.  Stop over thinking it.

This doesn’t make the way a lot of your teachers have approached literature “wrong”—heck, I could cite scores of pieces I may not have enjoyed at all if I hadn’t looked at it through this lens of “literature appreciation.”   I only mean to say that there is another way to read literature that better lends to personal connection with works, and, as such, better lends to you developing intellectually through it.

*Note: TS Eliot is pretty much always the first person I list when people ask me about my literary influences.  If they don’t ask specifically about literature, I list all sorts of other stuff, but I owe a ton to Eliot both as a poet and a critic.  But the more you know about this man, the more likely you are to completely disagree with at least one idea of his.