In the Fuss Over Core and Relevance, What Will Happen to Rereading?

Students think: If I read Macbeth in high school, why read it again? (Image: “Macbeth and Banquo Meeting the Witches on the Heath,” Théodore Chassériau – Musée d’Orsay)

In 1987, when E.D. Hirsch published Cultural Literacy¸the book’s considerable attention was focused on Professor Hirsch’s extensive list of things one should know.

If nothing else (and I do think there was much else), the overwhelming response to Cultural Literacy played into American anxiety about keeping up, knowing the answer, not being made fun of, and acquiring the secret tools for getting ahead.

Misconstrued, “The List” could become a game-show archive of information, something like factoids, which wasn’t what the author had in mind.

I went to a college with a decidedly old-fashioned common core of great books. Books so great, in fact, that they didn’t even need to be capitalized as Great Books. They were what we had to, and did, read, sort of, in a whirlwind race through antiquity and on to the present.

My freshman year coincided with the release of a film called If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, starring Ian McShane, Suzanne Pleshette, and Vittorio De Sica. (If you know who they are, your head may hurt connecting Deadwood, The Bob Newhart Show, and Bicycle Thieves).

Racing from text to text, my classmates and I experienced something similar (“If it’s Tuesday, it must be The Bacchae”), dashing from one monument to another, lingering for a few 18-year-old hours before moving to the next locale.

Which brings me back to Cultural Literacy, whose fundamental concepts sit behind, or atop, at least some of the debates about the common core. My friend Nick Tampio has written about those debates in his recent Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy, which is more analysis than salvo.

What counts? we continue to ask. What should  count? What’s needed?

Some years ago, another friend, sitting on a curriculum committee, made the modest proposal that an English major should not be required to take a course on Shakespeare. Instead, my friend suggested, the department should obligate the prospective major to enroll in less familiar offerings. The thinking was that any English major would of course sign up for Shakespeare even if it wasn’t fulfilling a requirement. The motion didn’t pass committee.

Now we worry not about requirements for English majors, but whether we’ve managed to explain why studying literature is worth one’s time. Literature itself now feels like one of the university’s less familiar offerings.

Teaching is a bit like being a tour guide. There’s first encounter and multiple returns. Only so much can happen first time through a text, or through a city, for that matter.  

In the arguments about the core and preparation for college, I wonder increasingly about how we prepare students for rereading, which I hope isn’t an idle or precious thought.

A colleague used to say that students treat literature like childhood diseases. If you caught Macbeth in high school, you couldn’t catch it again in college. By which I think he meant that having gone through the text, a student felt confident of the play’s plot and themes and major speech-events, so wouldn’t have to reread it when it showed up on the college syllabus.

That immunity to literature – if it’s Tuesday, this must be Macbeth and I’ve already visited Macbeth so what time’s lunch? – isn’t new.

In the 1730s, Alexander Pope called out the dismissive attitude in his Imitations of Horace:

Or damn all Shakespear, like th’affected fool

At court, who hates whate’er he read at school.

How do we teach our students that the works, and documents, that mean the most, and give the most back, are lifelong projects, and not just for scholars? Not just the work of deceased pale males, but anything that continues to be urgent, speaking difference in many voices?

Read a book once, know where you can find the best photo ops. Read it twice, know where the locals go to eat. Read it a third time, and you begin to learn what it means to live in a space that’s not like anything you know.

You can follow me on Twitter @WmGermano