With the liberal arts seemingly in a perpetual budgetary and identity crisis, I find myself delighted to encounter the rare think-piece that respects the importance of humanities education. Sure, I’m a little biased on the matter: I went to graduate school in English literature and then taught high school English. I’m not in the classroom anymore, but after twelve years in the field, the humanities will always remain near and dear.
So I eagerly read my colleague Daniel Buck’s recent post “How not to read a book with students: A rebuttal to NCTE.” A fellow English-teacher-turned-Fordhamite arguing that literary theory is “deceptively consequential”? Heck, yeah! Plus, Fordham loves a good policy debate between staff. So I volunteer.
Buck dug into a recent policy brief by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), denouncing their advocacy of “critical” approaches to teaching and interpreting literature. For him, critical theories reframe books as “cultural artifacts,” often undermining books’ true meanings by crushing them into submission to a simplistic, politically progressive narrative.
But that’s an oversimplification. Inevitably, books are cultural artifacts. They don’t emerge from an ahistorical vacuum. That’s not a bad thing, nor should teachers ignore that reality. Buck writes admiringly of Orwell’s books on “the horrors of authoritarian governments”—and yes, that core theme is critical to understanding Orwell’s work. At the same time, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was inspired by Allied leaders’ efforts to divvy up the globe into “Zones of Influence,” and Animal Farm (1945) is a weird barnyard fantasy absent the context of the Russian Revolution and Orwell’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell could not have “removed himself and his emotions from his work,” even if he had wanted to—nor can any writer. Teaching students to situate books in their historical context doesn’t mean that the books can’t also retain universal, timeless meanings. If anything, doing so helps reveal continuities, both good and bad, between past historical moments and our own.
Literary interpretation isn’t a zero-sum game. Buck worries that, “were students to read Romeo and Juliet through a feminist lens, gone would be Shakespeare’s varied perspectives on love.” Perspectives on love don’t have to go anywhere, though; they can co-exist alongside feminist readings. Students can handle more than one take on a text. In my own schooling, I first read The Tempest (1611) with an eye toward themes of revenge and conflicts of man versus nature. Of course those ideas permeate the play, but decades of postcolonial readings also offer an alternative interpretation, with protagonist Prospero as colonizer and antagonist Caliban as colonized. What better fodder for class discussion than to have students examine whether Prospero is the hero or the usurper, and whether Caliban is the monster or the disenfranchised? It’s not only possible, but also productive for students to grapple with multiple possible interpretations.
Here’s where I expect some readers (such as Buck) will say, “But Shakespeare didn’t intend for his work to be read through a postcolonial lens!” Perhaps not, but books can and do have meaning beyond what we imagine the author intended (to the extent we can even claim to know intent). We can reasonably say that Joseph Conrad meant Heart of Darkness (1899) as a critique of Belgian colonialism, but that doesn’t preclude Chinua Achebe’s famous postcolonial reading of the novella as racist in its dehumanization of African characters. Achebe didn’t pick this book “at random” or “muffle the voice of the author,” but rather paid close attention to certain characters and reported back on what he read. He didn’t suppress the text’s meaning, but instead complicated our understanding of it. In a secondary English classroom, students can explore the tension between Conrad’s intention and the impact of his words. Actually, doesn’t that sound like a classic exercise for an English class?
I also disagree with Buck’s suggestion that critical interpretations offer the same story, over and over. “Critical theory acts like a photo filter, distorting and coloring every book until each text displays much the same message,” he writes, and: “Critical theory...is almost cultish in its repetition of one message over and over again.” This line of argument oversimplifies a significant body of scholarship while implying that there isn’t much point in advancing research on older works. That is, if we can’t bring new approaches to older texts, then what more is there for scholars to say? Contributors and editors for English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Dickens Quarterly, and quite a few others might be surprised to learn that there isn’t value in new readings of classics.
Ultimately, Buck and I agree on plenty. Understanding the “classics” matters, and how we teach students to read books matters a great deal (+1 for those of us who still believe in the urgency of a humanities education!). I also share several of Buck’s suspicions about the NCTE’s specific recommendations. It’d be tough to convince me, too, that Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) offers a relevant lens through which to consider masculinity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
Yet I believe it’s worthwhile to examine masculinity in Gatsby—at least for students to consider such readings, even if they ultimately argue against them, based on the evidence. To give students the tools to read books through critical theory is not “doing it wrong,” but rather empowering them to attend to detail, to consider multiple views at once, to advance academic discourse, and most importantly, to think for themselves.
