The most important thing I learned in any English class was from my high school senior English teacher, who told us that the whole point of literature was to ask the question, “What does it mean to be human?” And that everything we studied (and we studied a lot of the English classics, from Beowulf to Wordsworth to Yeats) had some interesting take on that question, and that was why we were studying it.
That’s not to say that there aren’t tons of other works that also have interesting takes on that question, so there’s also the idea of historical context as well as a shared canon. But that’s the one thing I took from English class that I think was absolutely worth it, and indeed got me interested in Beowulf, Donne, Blake, Coleridge, Browning, Yeats, and a lot more. (And yes, I might have found my way to them later, but I don’t think I would have had the same kinds of thoughts about them.)
I sometimes think I would have appreciated the boring books from AP English more if the teacher had tried to make them interesting, provocative or relevant. I really think in my case it was a failure of teaching, at least not the way I wanted to be taught.
As I mentioned before, I have my favorite genres (science fiction and action romance) but I read broadly. I’ll give just about anything a shot. This past year I’ve read everything from Book 3 of the Expanse to Interior Chinatown and the Nobel-winning The Vegetarian which I picked up just because I was curious what kind of book wins the Nobel prize for literature. (FWIW, it was very good…was it better than Interior Chinatown though? I have to wonder about that sort of thing.)
I’m also a writer of sci-fi-ish romance and science fiction and romance are both genres that have been looked down on since time immemorial. When I tell people what genre I write, they assume I’m not good. I know very well how thin the line can be between genre fiction and books with “literary" merit. Many books today considered great literature were genre fiction in their time. Jane Austen was mocked for writing things that were of importance to women. Poe died drunk in a ditch. We don’t always recognize greatness right away. And we almost never agree on what’s great.
I’m a great fan of Quentin Tarantino because he took these pulpy cheap genre tropes that he loved and elevated them to the highest possible level. He proves you can have your genre cake and eat it too. Some of the most perfect things in existence are genre.
It seems to me if I were teaching an English class, I would want kids more than anything to understand just how many different things are out there so that they might, maybe, discover the thing that suits them. It would include the classics, and some great modern literature like Interior Chinatown, but also the best genre stuff like Stephen King and Hitchcock movies and yes, Maus. It would be like a sampler platter. “Here is a wide variety of things literature can be. Find something you like."
But you would have to pare it down to what could be covered in 160-180 days. It is a zero-sum game and everything you choose to include means something has to be excluded.
Am I wrong that English is the only core subject that teaches what is essentially entertainment? It’s not content just being a language course. Art History isn’t a required subject, nor is Drama or Pop Culture. Why is Literature mandatory and not the others?
In another thread a strong argument was made that story telling was the key development that drove human groups into societies. “The key” is perhaps debatable but of key importance there can be no doubt. User manuals mattered. Accounting mattered. But stories? They are more foundational.
A well-written user manual or op ed or law opinion is meant to clearly and concisely express a position or explanation. A well-written novel (or shorter work of fiction) is a work of art painted with words. As Mark Twain said (paraphrased) “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” And as I said (right now) it is the difference between hearing Ode to Joy played by a symphony orchestra and hearing it played by a guy with waxed paper wrapped around a comb.
Math, or chemistry, or P.E., or pretty much any class, teaches “what is essentially entertainment,” if you find the subject matter entertaining.
But the point of Literature is that it’s notjust entertainment. It teaches you something about people, and the world, and the human condition. It imparts wisdom, and empathy, and vicarious experience. It’s good for you, in the sense that you get something out of it that stays with you after you’ve finished reading it—or at least you should, and a big part of good teaching of literature is to help ensure that that happens.
FWIW as a practical matter - reading good fiction generally exposes us to a wider vocabulary and greater grammatical complexity than does any user manual or even op-ed or law brief (the latter with its own jargon to be sure but still limited).
I wrote user manuals for twenty years. Great for learning writing, not so good for learning critical thinking from the written page.
Law? Law students need to learn how to read a case. FILAC method, anyone? Try to read a case without knowing that, and you’re floundering. Hell, all of us law students did in the first few weeks of law school, when we had to read cases, but did not know FILAC. What is important and what isn’t? What should we take note of and what can we ignore? The FILAC method sorted it all out, but we had to learn that. I’d suggest that law is not for the novice.
Regardless, why shouldn’t graphic novels be taught in high school? As I recall from my own high school days, English Lit wasn’t always novels by long-dead writers. We always studied poetry (and I will thank my final year of high school English teacher for fostering a lifelong interest in the metaphysical poets in me). And, we studied drama—Shakespeare, of course, but more modern works as well; such as Tom Stoppard. And we also studied Greek myths, for some reason.
Point is, that if such different things as novels, poetry, drama, and myth, as disconnected as they are, are suitable for high school English, then why not graphic novels?
They sometimes are, but when they aren’t, perhaps one reason is that the teachers themselves never studied graphic novels in any formal way and thus don’t feel able to analyze and teach them properly?
I had to look this up. And then I had to refine my search because all my results were about “Fistula Laser Closure”, about which I really did not want to know.
For others unfamiliar with FILAC in a legal review context, it appears to be:
F - FACTS I - ISSUES L - LAW A - ANALYSIS C - CONCLUSION
I won’t say that they shouldn’t, but I have been given thought on the subject, including looking back over various graphic novels I have read or have read about, and I haven’t seen a single one that I would point to and say that it needs to be taught in school (though I wouldn’t necessarily look down on a teacher that chooses to teach from one, depending on the book). And I say that not as someone who has disdain for the medium: looking at the statistics option on my comic reading app, I have 1.57 million pages of comics, manga and “graphic novels” stored on my Kindle right now, spread across more than 14,000 volumes. (I accumulate them vastly more quickly than I can read them.)
Myself, I definitely would rule out something that isn’t self-contained: not something that to understand it requires that you already be familiar with other works in the genre (like the aforementioned Watchmen) and not something that is volume x of y (like the trade paperback of the first five issues of Mrs. Marvel that I see some places recommending, which not only is tied into other Marvel comics but ends in a cliffhanger for issue six, so is doubly not self-contained).
This, and, I think you are really onto something with the storytelling. Our history used to be primarily oral and as a species we got really good at telling stories. Indeed, as you noted it was probably a major factor in humans’ ability to organize, plan and progress.
Now I didn’t learn anything about storytelling in high school English - or college English for that matter. I know someone with an MFA who never studied it. I think comics could be a really good use case for teaching storytelling. And I think storytelling is fundamental to communication.
Some people pick it up naturally, some people don’t. I picked up writing about the first 40% of a story naturally and I’ve always had to fight that remaining 60%. It never fails (or I should say, it always fails.) I especially struggle with endings, though I’ve joked it’s because I don’t finish reading enough books to know how stories end.
I get that the average person doesn’t need to know story structure, but it seems to me like it could be a good way to get kids into literature.
“I hate this book," vs “I hate this book because the main character is too passive, there’s not a clear theme and the climax fails to deliver."
I understand there’s a huge difference between fantasizing about how an English class could be taught and actually making it work. Teachers have constraints I have no idea about. But I once planned to be an English teacher, and I wrote my college admissions essay about how boring my AP English class was and how I would fix it. So I’ve felt that way for a long time!
Very well said! That’s kind of where I’m going with this- I’m not saying that we need to teach some sort of dumbed-down curriculum of Marvel movies and comic books, but that there’s no reason that English classes have to lean into the classic literature so hard; the same basic concepts and lessons can be taught using far more contemporary stuff that students might be more engaged with than say… Emily Dickinson or George Eliot. Why NOT meet students in the middle, so to speak, and expose them to some of the classics, but also teach them on contemporary stuff?
I’d have actually enjoyed reading some bad AND good writing and compare/contrast the two. That would have been an interesting exercise in school- why is/was one writer considered bad, and another good. We never got that- we only read ones who were considered greats, and while I know it when I read it, I can’t say that I’ve got a good vocabulary or way to describe why some writers strike me as bad.
What’s interesting here is that the English class I loved, 10th grade English, was structured a lot more like that. We read Poe, Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, two Shakespeare plays, and watched The Birds and had to write a short story based on the movie. I felt far more engaged with the material. A graphic novel would have fit in nicely there.