Reading Students Reading in the Post-Canonical Age

Like many discussions of teaching, this one will turn eventually to stories, but I want to begin with a few statistics. At the highly ranked and fairly selective public research university where I teach, nearly 30 percent of the first-year students reported in the 2003 National Survey of Student Engagement that they had not read a single book on their own initiative all year "for academic enrichment or personal enjoyment." Nationally, first-year students reported reading an average of about two books on their own and about eleven assigned books over the course of a year; reports from seniors responding to the same survey—which involves more than four hundred colleges and universities and half a million students annually—are virtually identical (www.indiana.edu/nsse). Much the same thing is true outside the university. A 2002 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts puts the number of "literary readers"—people who read even one literary text during the previous year—at 46.7 percent, a precipitous decline from twenty years earlier (arts.endow.gov/news/news04). Even bleaker news comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (www.nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard), which reports that scarcely one-third of twelfth graders who took the 2003 reading test showed an ability to read "proficiently," demonstrating "competency over challenging subject matter." More than a quarter of test takers scored "below basic," failing to show even partial mastery of written texts, whether those were intended to convey information, provide instruction, or be read for literary pleasure.

These empirical studies address factors—of literacy, access, and engagement—at work not only in the making and reception of the literary canon but also at stake in the teaching of literature in what the organizers of a recent series of MLA panels have termed "the postcanonical age." Whether we teach the lucky few, the struggling many, or those who have been mostly excluded by circumstance or choice from the reading community, these studies suggest that the books they read in our classes will not ordinarily take on a rich context in wider reading, an ongoing conversation about books, even a lively dialogue of written texts across a semester's course work. The context they have is to a great extent the one we create for them within our classes and, ideally, within our curricula.

My point in turning to surveys and assessment tools is not to disparage the stories by which we live, choose, and strategize in the classroom or to suggest that survey data should trump firsthand experience. Nor do I want to set aside talk about the teaching relationship—our attunement to student voices in all of their need and vitality, our commitment to friendship as the ethos of teaching. Instead, I want to think about the complex work that precedes and runs steadily through this relationship, work I want to call reading students reading. This is interpretive work of a highly challenging kind, involving multiple sources of information and advanced on a moving target. Even the most able of the students we teach get to be postcanonical readers without having been—in any meaningful or comprehensive way, at least—canonical ones. They learn terms like postcolonialism and postmodernism without having encountered either the texts or the cultural logic of colonialism or of modernism. A single example might be illustrative here. In contemporary American literature courses, I frequently teach Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, a novel addressing the intersection of a colonial past with an American present. In one chapter of the book, Lucy, Kincaid's protagonist, reflects ironically on Wordsworth's "Daffodils," which she memorized perfectly as an Antiguan schoolgirl, though she had no experience of daffodils or of English springtime. The poem comes to stand for the colonial schooling at which she excelled but under which she chafed. Unlike Lucy, my students know daffodils and spring, but most of them have not encountered Wordsworth's "Daffodils," or—in a few cases—any of Wordsworth's poems, and they can only speculate about what the poem might signify for a postcolonial writer.

For me, Kenneth Burke's...