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LITERATURE IS WHERE IT'S AT Kenneth Eble "California has gone transformational!" my English teacher friend announced in tones reserved for the coming of Deity or the departure of superintendents . She was referring to the latest triumph of the new English, significant because occupancy of the Golden Land clearly promises national conquest. My response was less than enthusiastic, for lately I've begun to feel that English teachers are distracted from their main business by the seductive promise that the new linguistics alone will deliver them from the old English. As if, you see, grammar were our main business and that tramforming the study of grammar accomplished the necessary transformation of English teachers and teaching. I oppose both notions. Our main business as regards language can be nothing less than 'language in action," to use Hayakawa's phrase, and our main business as regards English is to act as if we hear what this particular time is saying to many of our students: Literature is where it's at. Righdy considered, literature has always been where it's at. It rubs against life, brings us to that place the crazy priest in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Absolution" warns us against, where past the glimmering we see "the heat and sweat and the life." It is and always has been that way of going beneath our own skin and getting into the skin of someone else. It is the prime gift of the imagination, the capacity to make real a life beyond one's individual life. Its larger social utility is that of making the appalling experiences of our time shared experiences, an intensely imagined reality which brings the many of us up close to the awful reality pressing on the few. Within the setting provided by formal education, literature today may be able to fill some of the void being created by a growing disaffection for science and technology. Five years ago, Robert Jastrow of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, expressed the fear that high school students regarded the modern scientist as "gray, colorless and unaware of what's going on around him." At the last meeting of die American Physical Society, the decline of interest in physics was a major subject of discussion. Dr. Harvey Brooks of Harvard observed, "There seems to be a revulsion against science by the whole society, but especially among young people." Although English in the university has shown few signs of capturing young minds in search of a commitment, there are good arguments that it should and some encouraging signs that it has that power. Consider the position of poetry today. Neither now, nor in any recent time, can it be said to flourish, but surely more poets are writing poems and many more are reading poems to audiences than ever before. Link this with the dominance of a popular music which calls forth poetry of a very traditional kind. Little of this is poetry in a high sense, but is very much 38RMMLA BulletinMarch 1970 what a portion of the young are tuned in on and is in a way their own rather than that which highly professional and commercial lyricists bestow upon them. Books, like poetry and song, glut the present market, but there is some evidence that certain books are extrordinarily successful in turning students on. Salinger was the first to be taken up, and if Valley of the Dolls sells 8 million copies, the popularity of Camus' Stranger, Rilke's poems, and Tolkien's Hobbit fantasies helps maintain a balance. No one would be foolish enough to claim American culture L· a literary culture; one's claims in this respect are modest and sometimes peculiar, as, for example, the mating of literature, sex, and high fashion in Playboy and Harper's Bazaar. But witness the Evergreen Review's growth from a literary quarterly with a circulation of 7,500 copies in 1957 to a monthly claiming 150,000 circulation today. The evidences are there, even when one must concede that pruriency and protest are the handmaidens of literature in our time. Folk songs and poetry and books are connected today, as they have been in other times when...

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