Does literature matter? Instead of framing the question that the fellows and I were addressing this summer
in such a blunt way, one that almost seems to invite a negative answer, we began with the assumption that
literature does matter.1 If that is the case, the only questions remaining – and they are
enormously complex and challenging questions – are those of why, and how, and to whom.
All our discussions focused on these three queries – to whom, why, and how? We began our reading with
a collection of twentieth-century children’s stories, then went on to classic texts by such nineteenth-
and twentieth-century British and American writers as Brontë and Faulkner, along with the work of a variety
of literary theorists; and we ended by reading a selection of multicultural texts.2 To give
some structure to our inquiries, we adopted a version of the device that M. H. Abrams used in The Mirror and
the Lamp to illustrate the various ways in which a work of literature can be approached, each of the
coordinates indicating a traditional school of literary criticism.3
 }})
Because the fellows and I were primarily concerned with meeting the demands of teaching, the effect of a text on
its readers was the relation that we considered in all our discussions. Next in terms of its role during
our meetings was the relation between text and world, both the world of our students and the historical world in
which a work of literature was originally created. The curved line pays tribute to the continuingly
important New Critical conception, now identified with close reading, that the relations that matter most are
the connections of the parts of the text to each other and to its whole. Many of the units produced in
this seminar treat the work of a single author, but when we looked at that coordinate, we tended to pay
attention to an author’s surrogate, the persona of the Dickens or Whitman or Dickinson that seemed to be
addressing us from a text, even when, as in the case of Ishmael of Moby-Dick, the voice of the story
was that of one of its characters. What this triangular device leaves out – and fortuitously so, I think
– is the relation between teacher and text: it goes without saying, though we said it often, that
another of the guiding assumptions of the seminar was that what students can come to know is more important than
what the teacher already knows.
Although Abrams’s mnemonic device might seem both reductive and mechanical, it actually encouraged probing
and profound discussions of literature and all the issues that it raises: race, status, family, identity,
inequality, even life and death. The practical value of this model was also made clear in the curriculum
units that emerged from this seminar, each of which asserts the value of literature by giving priority to one of
the coordinates in our device and by exploring its implications for the other possible relations to a text.
Prioritizing the author of a text, as Debra Titus and Kathleen Radebaugh do, turns out to emphasize the status of
that text as literary art and the student as a writer of potentially significant and complex texts. Deb
plans to focus on the craft involved in three novels by Sharon Flake, an African-American local author, with her
fifth graders in the historic Hill District of Pittsburgh. Once students surmount the challenge of reading
for craft, they will be able to “translate” what they learn “to their own writing.”
Moreover, in Deb’s words, they will be able to use “what they have learned to face any other
challenge” in their educations and beyond. Kathleen boldly and even courageously decided to teach
the poetry and prose of William Butler Yeats to eighth-grade students. By focusing on Yeats the man and
the pain of unrequited love and the impulse toward rebellion in both his life and his art, she hopes to make
connections between a twentieth-century author and school-aged children in Philadelphia. Like Deb’s,
Kathleen’s students will learn not only how to appreciate the craft of Yeats’s poetry but also how
to use his literary techniques in the poems that they write for their portfolios: if “Yeats used
metaphor and symbolism and varied the length and stanza structure of his poems,” then students will show
their understanding of those features by incorporating them into their own verse. In her unit Kathleen
writes feelingly of the “lack of expression” and the “lack of poetry” in the texts that
her students have previously produced in her classes, even when the subject that they were studying, such as
“the engineering process,” was full of “beauty and chaos.” By reading
Yeats’s poetry, her students, Kathleen predicts, will learn how to express what they feel in poetic
form.
Similarly, Carla Jones and Amandeep Khosa are using works by a single author to respond to their students’
needs. Carla hopes that literature will help her students imagine a future for themselves. For her,
this has been a particularly urgent aim ever since, in response to a challenge that she had set her students,
one of them, “an 8-year-old boy,” said that “he didn’t know how to set goals for his
life because he was going to be dead at 18.” To address such pessimism, pessimism perhaps more than
justified, Carla is turning, like Deb and Kathleen, to the work of one author, in this case Booker T.
Washington’s Up from Slavery. Even those in primary school, Carla believes, can find
inspiration and encouragement by reading excerpts from a difficult text that introduces them to a
“positive role model,” a man who was capable of rising above his “dismal
circumstances.” Carla, like Deb and Kathleen, then turns her students into authors by asking them to
“write and publish a family story of perseverance.” By having her students locate in their own
genealogies analogues to Booker T. Washington, she hopes to extend the lessons she teaches beyond the classroom
to the parents of her students: “In this unit I want to provide a space in which families can share
their family stories and therefore empower themselves and others by hearing about the resilience of their
families.” Aman finds in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh a text as demanding as Up
from Slavery, but it is one that will be used to encourage even third-grade students to appreciate the
virtues of empathy and to discover different modes of problem solving. Drawn to Winnie-the-Pooh
by its delightful humor and enduring charm, Aman also sees in this book a repository of skills crucial to both
her students’ social and intellectual growth. As Aman concludes, “through an imaginative text
like Winnie-the-Pooh, students develop a higher level of thinking that in turn helps them go from
factual to metacognitive knowledge and apply the examples from the book to their daily lives.” In all four
of the units that I have so far described, the focus on an author begins and ends in understandings of what
students most need to learn.
In the same way that Carla is bringing the past into relation with her students’ present, Tim Smith and
Maureen Becker and Sara Stillman have created units that will bring the past alive. Tim, who teaches
eighth-grade United States history, makes primary in his unit the connection between text and world so that his
students will develop “a greater understanding of the complexities of the issue of slavery” by
reading excerpts from a slave narrative, specifically Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography, and the
novel that, to a great extent, was written in response to it, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. Literary works like these, Tim believes, will help students move beyond simply
saying that enslavement was “socially and morally abhorrent” so that they can have frank discussions
in which “they argue and validate [that] claim in a more substantial way” than they would if they
were reading “a textbook alone.” Maureen counters conventional feminist readings of Tennessee
Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire by also giving priority to the world in which Williams
wrote. Nominating Blanche, instead of Stella or Stanley, as the main character of the play, Maureen
proposes that if her IB students pay attention to “post-war American values,” they will recognize
that Blanche represents an “empowered woman” who is so unsuited to that culture that her fate
involves being raped and going insane. Blanche also serves as a counterpoint to Williams’s practice
as a playwright: as Maureen explains, “While we read a play about a main character who is immersed
in an ever-disintegrating fantasy world and who even rejects realism in favor of magic, the work itself is
upsetting when one considers its all-too-real social and cultural commentary . . . . The observations that
Williams makes about the domestic life of a post-war working-class couple are astutely realistic and brutally,
unapologetically honest.” Finally, Maureen also explains that what her unit can give her students is
the opportunity to reach their own judgments about A Streetcar Named Desire by opening out subtle and
sophisticated possibilities of interpretation that earlier readings have ignored. Sara offers her students
the same opportunities, but she does so in a teaching situation unlike Maureen’s IB class and with a work
of literature that is even more canonical than Williams’s play: Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet. Because every student in Sara’s ninth- and tenth-grade Visual Arts class is an
English Language Learner, she will work with an adaptation of the play written by her fellow teachers, along
with “the No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novel Romeo and Juliet, Dire Straits’ song Romeo
and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet, as well as the paper cut
artwork by Elsa Mora.” This diverse material will allow Sara to explore with her students the
intricacies of metaphoric expression in both word and image – a subject often deemed too demanding for
ELLs. Like Kathleen and Deb, Sara puts the creative talents of her students at the center of her
pedagogy: “As an Arts educator, I do not want my students to simply be consumers of culture; I want
them to be contributors as well. Therefore my challenge is greater than teaching my students to understand the
metaphors they read, hear, and see; I must help them to think metaphorically.”
Last but certainly not least, Robert Schwartz and Mark Holston make their priority the needs and interests of
their students as readers. Both have chosen to introduce them to what are now known as culturally relevant
texts: in Robert’s case, a variety of works from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights
Movement, to be followed by James McBride’s The Color of Water; in Mark’s case, a memoir by
a Vietnamese-American, Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala. These pieces of literature are
culturally relevant because they speak to the experience of those whom Mark calls “hyphenated
Americans” – African-Americans and Vietnamese- Americans. Yet, as Robert points out, “A
story about race is a human story, as are stories about struggle, oppression, triumph, identity, family, and
survival”; and that point, he believes, can be made with “any literature that is accessible,
concise, appealing, relevant, and visceral.” Not surprisingly, then, both these fellows find
particularly significant how these texts represent the difficulties of defining one’s identity.
Robert’s goal is to have his students discover the joy of reading literature while they also discover
themselves in what they read. Mark has a comparable goal: he wants his students to become “excited
by what they read . . . and possibly even develop an understanding of the value of literature and become
passionate, life-long readers.” As he says, “Pham’s prose is challenging and full of
rich examples of literary writing that make it ideal for practicing analysis,” although “it is still
accessible to students at most reading levels.” Like Deb, Mark has chosen to have his students read
the work of a local author, his school being close to the town in which Pham was raised; and like Robert, Mark
has chosen literature that helps students find their places in relation to a dauntingly powerful dominant
culture. For Mark and Robert, as for all their colleagues in this seminar, the lessons taught by works of
literature are lessons that begin in the classroom and extend out into the world in which their students live.
These curriculum units emerged from seminar discussions that had many remarkable moments: among them were
Mark’s demonstration of what he calls the “circle of empathy”; Robert’s identification
of a physical “stir” that one feels when reading great literature; Sara’s proof that we
all could come up with a drawing that represented a metaphor; the exercise that Tim used to show us the deeply
personal ways in which we read literature by asking us to identify our equivalent to Ishmael’s recourse to
the sea; and our communal response to the news that one of the fellows, Victoria Parrish, would not be able to
complete the seminar. The most remarkable event, however, may have occurred during the hour when Jessica
Zelenski, a teacher of English at Hillhouse High School in New Haven, visited our seminar.
Jessica’s approach to teaching has been given quite a bit of publicity because David Denby featured it in
his 2016 book, Lit Up; and we were eager to share with her our reactions to his characterization of her
teaching and her students. Yet we were all so taken by her extraordinary commitment to those students, her
willingness to use any method that she could think of to engage them in what they read, and her ability to honor
the individuality of each of the tenth-graders in her classroom that Denby’s account quickly faded into
the background. Told that the topic of our seminar was “Why Literature Matters,” Jessica
– without any preparation and without any hesitation – listed many answers to the implied question
in that title, ending with the goal of giving her students a sense that they are part of a bigger world than the
relatively narrow one that they already know. At the end of Jessica’s visit, Deb offered an eloquent
tribute to the kind of model that she provides for every teacher – a tribute with which we could all
agree.
Charles Dickens hoped that his fiction would bring his readers together – as if they were all gathered
around the warmth of a sitting-room fireplace – so that they could unite in a common undertaking, one that
would allow them to share vicariously the same feelings, desires, expectations, and satisfactions. For
Dickens, this was an important ethical matter, a way of defining his work as a social good. When I think
back on the seminar that the fellows and I participated in and the literature that we read and the conversations
that we had, I am moved to suggest that in a classroom at Yale in the summer of 2016 we embodied Dickens’s
ideal. We had the advantage of being in each other’s presence – not something that
Dickens’s widely spread and diverse audience could manage, except when he was giving public recitations of
his work. Like his readers, however, we came together from afar, from Tulsa and Berkeley and Richmond and
New Haven, as people facing different challenges in the classroom, having had different previous experiences of
reading, and having come from very different backgrounds; and our discussions led to remarkable revelations that
we shared many of the same concerns and hopes and values. In sitting in that room together, we proved, day
after day, how moved we could be as we recognized the connections that reading a work of literature had created
among us. So I can now answer the more skeptical form of the question that we could have pursued:
Does literature matter? Yes, it does. And for the gift of that certainty, I will remain deeply
grateful to the fellows with whom I had the honor of working in this seminar.
Janice Carlisle
Endnotes
- There are so many books with the titles that are various combinations of the two words Literature and
Matters, that I was able to photograph a pile of them as an illustration to the talk I gave for all the
fellows in the 2016 Yale National Initiative:
 }})
- When in our last meeting I raised the issue of my discomfort with the way in which the readings of
our seminar could be construed as a marginalization of the works by African-American, Latina, and
Asian-American writers, the fellows explained how they solved that problem by arranging their syllabi
according to theme rather than according to chronology.
- The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1953), 6.
