I stare at my copy of Dante’s Vita Nuova and say to myself,” Maybe this summer I’ll finally finish it.”
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| Ellesmere Chaucer, Huntington Library |
What keeps us from reading the great works of
literature? Professors in the humanities continue to lament that today’s
college students are not only not reading the great books in classes, but
they’re seldom taking humanities classes period. Elizabeth Corey in a recent
article in First Things attempts to
address this major problem of the so-called crisis in the humanities by
proposing the partial solution of mentoring and relational “evangelism.”*
As Corey points out, the great texts are
there “ready to be picked up.” In fact, “anyone can read them at any time and,
if one is ready, harvest what they have to offer.” Never has this been more
true than now, when electronic versions (PDF scans, e-texts, Kindle books) are
available to readers 24/7.
Yet, we likely all agree with Corey that
“these books are far from easy, and they often quickly end up back on the
shelf. I cannot count the number of eager freshmen,” she says, “who have told
me they wanted to get a head start on Plato’s Republic before reading it in class. I do not think a single one
has ever successfully made it past Book 1. Nor do I blame them” (43).
I suspect that this anecdotal statistic
extends to sophomores, juniors, seniors, and even grad students. I dare say it occasionally
extends to professors. How many times have I picked up (true confessions) a
Great Text for summer reading, whether Homer’s Iliad or William Langland’s Piers
Plowman or Dumas’ The Count of Monte
Cristo, and not finished it? Would I have finished that work had it been
required reading for a course or a group? Yes. Would I have finished it had I
been sitting under a professor or even been part of a reading group of my
peers? Yes, but what’s more, experience suggests that with the guidance of an
instructor and/or peers I would have come away with more insight into and
appreciation for the work.
This is the point that Corey comes to in her
article: “[A]lmost all of us,” she states, “. . . require more than bureaucratic
exhortation or the abstract knowledge that the study of humanities is
important. More is required even than strong personal desire and a sense of
incompleteness.”
“We need a particular person to tell us about
a particular book or author or field of study, to demonstrate its significance
in practice, to act as a master to whom we can apprentice ourselves,” says
Corey. “We must, in quasi-religious terms, be evangelized so that we come to
desire what we see and to understand it as beautiful, compelling, worthy of
pursuit. We must see why it is worth loving” (43).
I think this is so true, even if there’s not
quite the master/apprentice relationship. In my classroom of anywhere from 5 to
30, I am trying to help my students see why the great works are worthy of
pursuit and worth loving. How many of them would have picked up Chaucer in
Middle English on their own? Answer: maybe 1-2 per large class. And yet so many
will come to appreciate and even enjoy reading Chaucer after grappling with the
text with guidance, instruction, and discussion.
Milton’s Paradise
Lost would not be one of my favorite texts today had I not first read it
under the direction and instruction of a good professor. Neither would Laurence
Sterne’s 18th-century novella A
Sentimental Journey (a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek work which I now greatly
enjoy inflicting on my own students). My hope is that my students will come not
only to see why that particular text is worthy of pursuit, but come to
desire such qualities in the other things they read.
And according to Corey, this takes a personal
connection.
* Elizabeth Corey, “Learning in Love,” First Things (April 2014): 41-46.
