No one's gonna write me my songs

Most of us, in our high school English classes, were taught to think of the novels and poems we read as perfectly crafted, self-contained works of art. We can all probably remember sitting sleepily at our desks, hunched over a borrowed copy of Fahrenheit 451, listening to a well-meaning teacher point out the repeating themes, symbolic images, and perfectly constructed sentences in the novel -- all the literary elements that work together to produce the meaning or significance that explains why Ray Bradbury bothered to write the book (something about censorship, right?). Once the class, fumblingly and in unison, agreed on what the author's intent was based on those literary devices, everyone was satisfied and you could move on to the next book. Occasionally a disgruntled student would wonder aloud about how we could possibly know what Shakespeare or Dickens truly intended, seeing as famous authors are usually dead and from a different century, but such objections were usually silenced quickly because, after all, works of literature are pristine and perfect artifacts, and must be appreciated as such. Our job is simply to acquire the skills that allow us to stand back, admire, and understand the genius of the art.

There's something strange about this approach to English education, and the strangeness is apparent to anyone who has ever read and genuinely liked a novel; namely, that these high school classes didn't always or even often shed light on how books make us feel -- which (if it's a good book) is often a roller coaster of emotional turbulence. For example: why do all American teenagers, after reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower, feel like the scope of their existence can be expressed by the phrase, "I feel infinite"? How is it possible that even thinking about Dolores Umbridge's tenure at Hogwarts makes people feel legitimately upset? Why does everyone feel like they have a better sense of what's depressing about the world after reading a Vonnegut novel? There's something magical about novels, in the very fact that they can do these things, and this magic isn't usually satisfactorily explained by simply pointing out a whole bunch of literary devices. For this reason, a lot of people leave their English classes feeling like there's a vertiginous gap that exists between what they actually like about novels, and what they were told in school about why those novels were good.

It's only when you get to advanced levels of education on English literature -- the higher-altitude realm of 300-level college or graduate classes -- that you learn how to start to close that gap and unravel the mystery in a coherent way. A lot of English academics actually spend a good deal of their careers exploring the magic of literature, coming up with theories for why and how we find novels or poems so emotionally resonant and intellectually stimulating. You stop thinking about books as dusty time capsules and start treating them like living organisms, capable of evolving over time and responding in interesting ways when you poke and prod at them. Rather than pretending like there's a list of unchanging symbols and themes that automatically explain why a novel is good, you keep asking new and different questions, in the service of helping you understand why actual, fleshy human beings have strong responses to an author's words. Over time, you start to get real answers (or at least some pretty cool hypotheses) to the question of why certain books make you feel feelings so feelingly.

To illustrate, here's one hypothesis that I find particularly nifty: 

When it comes to novels, we tend to imagine that the author has given us this closed package, containing a fully mapped-out, detailed world, populated with fully developed characters waiting to perform for us. In reality, though, technically, novels don't make sense purely on their own. When you read To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, did Harper Lee have to tell you that Scout sleeps at night and is awake during the day, or that she needs to eat and drink water in order to stay alive? No -- those details are true for pretty much all humans, and there's no need to talk about it. And when you think about it, there are actually a whole lot of details about the "world of the novel" that the author never has to tell us, because Lee assumes that we already have certain pieces of knowledge. This includes even large, cultural concepts that are central to the plot. Once Lee tells us that the setting is in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1920s, she doesn't need to describe every detail of institutionalized racism against African Americans, because she assumes that we'll fill in that information ourselves. When you picture the courtroom where Finch defends Tom Robinson, Lee doesn't have to tell you exactly what the courtroom looks like, because you rely on visual memories of courtrooms that you've seen in the past to construct your mental picture of the setting.

How does this help illuminate the magic power of books? Well, when you read a novel, you're not just passively accepting a literary world that the author has constructed for you. The world that Lee wrote down in the text is profoundly unfinished. As you read, you become an active participant, building the world of the novel in your mind with the help of Harper Lee, using your own thoughts and memories. You're the one who gives Scout and Atticus their visible faces and bodies, and you imaginatively send them gamboling through settings that you've mentally sketched out. Your own, personalized brain is so deeply implicated in the act of reading, you almost have no choice but to get cognitively and emotionally involved. Logically, the more time and effort you put into imagining and enlivening the world of a novel, the more emotionally invested you're going to get. It's interesting to think about how authors might be manipulating their readers' minds, memories, and experiences in order to achieve certain mental or emotional effects.

That's the gist of one theory that explains literature's awesomeness, anyway. There are plenty of others.

For the record, I'm not suggesting that our current method of teaching high-school English classes is wrongheaded or useless. Theories like the one I just described involve a substantial amount of nuance and textual support and research that I completely glossed over in my summary -- at the core of any interesting literary theory, you tend to find the basic principles of formal literary analysis that also lie at the core of the high school English curriculum. No one expects you to be able to do calculus before you've learned algebra, and while literary studies are a different animal, it, too, is a discipline with different kinds of expertise: what you learn in middle school and high school are the basic tools and skills for literary analysis that allow you to do more interesting stuff with literature later on.

What's sad, simply, is that many -- and perhaps the majority -- of people never get past "the basics" of their literary education. They stop taking English classes before they get to the ones that show you how to bridge the relevancy gap and use your high school tools to figure out how literature can matter to our minds and lives. Too many people remain under the terribly ironic impression that English classes can't help them understand what's really special about literature.

Also, consequently, there are a whole lot of people who don't really have any idea what I do with my time when I tell them that I'm in an English grad program. Hopefully this blog has made it a little clearer.

P.S. You know that part where I talked about how our brains and memories are implicated in reading? It comes from a whole area of literary analysis called cognitive narratology, and if you think it's interesting, you should read Why We Read Fiction by Lisa Zunshine, and after that, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? by Blakey Vermeule.