Teaching Bad Books

In almost every class, I teach a bad book, an awful, poorly written, sometimes sexist, racist, reactionary book.

I do this for a few reasons. First of all, I do it to see if my students notice. I taught a selection of stories by Isabel Allende in a course on Latin American women writers while teaching in Peru. The day I walked in to teach the students were all mumbling under the breath, casting semi-hostile looks at me. They had hated it. Thought it was really bad. Thought she couldn't write, thought her stories were sexist and derivative of masters like Gabriel García Márquez. But they assumed that I had to like it or I wouldn't have put it on the syllabus. When they found out I hated it too, we had a great time in class trashing it critically and learning a lot in the process.

So now you know that other reason I like to teach bad books. I like to trash them. I like to teach my students that they can trash bad books. Too much reverence for the literary can float around graduate programs in literature. We feel besieged as our programs shrink and our students dwindle, and the result can be an odd, misplaced aura of the book. That is no good. All literature is not good. Some is really bad, and we need to learn how to talk about why it is bad. And we need to have some fun doing it. Without the recognition and railing about the bad book, there can be no real pleasure in the good one.

I just finished my graduate syllabus for this term. I have a really, really bad one on there. I wonder if the students will notice.