You've Got to Be Carefully Taught: Learning and Relearning Literature (review)

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught: Learning and Relearning Literature is a personal memoir, and as a memoir, the book does not develop a thorough pedagogical theory regarding the learning and relearning of literature. Nor does the book provide the results of research, as the term “research” is ordinarily understood. Following the conventions of the personal memoir, Jerome Klinkowitz relates a story about his development as a teacher of literature, a story that thoroughly condemns our current approaches both to teaching literature and to training graduate students.

The book is organized in three chapters, with an Introduction and Afterword. The trajectory of the narrative traces Klinkowitz’s education in literary studies beginning in high school, moving through his experiences as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and culminating with his current academic position at the University of Northern Iowa. The greater part of Chapter One addresses Klinkowitz’s adventures or perhaps misadventures as a doctoral student, especially his encounter with the comprehensive examinations administered by the Department of English at Wisconsin. These examinations serve as a kind of touchstone for Klinkowitz’s life as a graduate student and represent one of the better examples of the problems inherent with graduate education in general. For Klinkowitz, questions on one of his doctoral exams reflected “gobbledygook being spooned out” in courses taught by young assistant and associate professors whom he had shunned (36). Klinkowitz’s graduate education concerned relations of power more than learning, where who you know is more important than what you know. For example, Klinkowitz tells us about “Harry Hayden Clark’s immense professional power and his homely, offhand way of exercising it” (44). Clark possessed the power to “arrange a Fulbright appointment” for a colleague, and he wielded his power to make sure that Klinkowitz received an assistant professorship at Northern Illinois University. Finally, Klinkowitz’s Wisconsin “Education,” the title of his first chapter, introduces one of the major themes of the book: “Much in the standard curriculum [of literary studies] fails the purpose of literature, which is to provide artistically written expression, in a culture’s common language, of its most imaginative thoughts” (163).

Chapter Two is titled “Home Schooling” and relates Klinkowitz’s account of the largely deplorable teaching conditions at Northern Illinois University and at the University of Northern Iowa during the 1970s and 1980s. Klinkowitz explains, for example, that at the University of Northern Iowa during the 1970s many English department faculty “picked up” their doctorates “at the University of Iowa, ninety miles to the south, no one ever questioning the propriety of a tenured faculty member on full pay seeking credentials from a sister institution governed by the same Board of Regents. . . . A traveling trophy moved from one member to another as each new doctorate was received. In some cases, these people went from being high school teachers to full professors without ever being a resident doctoral student at all. The notion of a university, so novel here in Cedar Falls, was something the faculty knew very little about” (70). Klinkowitz, however, managed to overcome the obstacles placed in the way of his academic success, primarily obstacles erected by the seemingly dysfunctional faculty that populated the Department of English at the University of Northern Iowa. Because he takes himself out of the running for a distinguished professorship elsewhere, “UNI . . . rewarded [him] with a six-hour teaching schedule” and allowed him to teach his “two courses in a concentrated half-semester format” (87). In this format, he began to teach the department’s Introduction to Literature course designed for non-majors, and his “course’s success delighted the administration and annoyed the English department faculty.”

In Chapter Three, Klinkowitz describes in great detail the subject matter covered in his Introduction to Literature Course as well as the successes that he achieved in the course. As I indicated previously, Klinkowitz does not present any sort of pedagogical theory here or elsewhere in the...