I fell into teaching through my love of reading long, ambitious novels. This inclination led me to graduate school, which in turn opened the door to becoming a professor of rhetoric. My motivation has remained the same: to share the love of words and language. Recently I’ve been teaching novels in my classes. The usual texts for rhetoric are nonfiction essays such as Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” since that’s the type of first-person nonfiction that students are usually asked to write for four years—pieces that combine a personal voice with some larger social narrative or construct. Maybe my motive is selfish—I like reading novels and want to teach them—but I’ve also been swayed by growing evidence that reading novels can be instrumental in developing critical thinking.
Reading novels is the best way I’ve found to truly embrace the goal of the humanities: to make us more human.
I work at a small, career-focused college in Vermont. There is a pervasive philosophy around campus that we are preparing students to be viable employees upon graduation. The primary attribute we hope to develop in them: critical thinking. We’re not alone—the phrase populates just about every syllabus I see. The idea that reading novels helps build critical-thinking skills has recently taken on currency. Consider the way we assign and establish narrative from disparate events; the connections among interdisciplinary ideas; the unpacking of complicated theories—iit’s not too fantastical to imagine every 19-year-old on the campus walking around with a creased and marked copy of Dickens, Woolf, or Joyce.
For the pro-novel-teaching contingent, there are plenty of practical arrows in the quiver. Research suggests that reading novels increases empathy and social perception—crucial interview skills for an increasingly competitive job market. Reading novels also introduces complexity through multiple narratives, ethically compromised situations, and linear causality—useful concepts for the world our graduates will soon navigate. Novel reading also improves language and writing skills.
I could argue—using my best professorial, stentorian voice—that novels nurture critical thinking. Reading novels, students have to collect, remember, and collate facts; order events to make sense of the story; identify themes like community or democracy or equality and relate them to other empirical sets of circumstances. By teaching novels we will have—hallelujah!—taught critical thinking to our students.
The only problem is that I don’t believe in any of it.
I believe it, of course, but don’t believe in it, the way a good acolyte should. What I believe in is a bit amorphous, poor fodder for campus-tour sound bites.
It occurred to me recently while reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch that I wasn’t really improving myself in any quantifiable way. The book is brilliant and funny and stupefyingly boring, but it hasn’t made me smarter in the way I’d argue it should make my students more intellectually nimble. It doesn’t feel as if it’s making me more critical—at least in the way that we define critical thinking at the collegiate level.
And while the researchers may be right—there could be some unconscious increase in my sense of empathy—I’m not receiving any bankable academic capital from the experience. I don’t really—yet—know what I think of Middlemarch, or what role its narrative will play in helping me understand either myself or the world.
Reading is geologic—it takes vast amounts of time and pressure. Worse, however, is that I’ll forget most of what I read in Eliot’s masterpiece. Even now, close to finished but still immersed in the text, I confuse characters: Was Fred Vincy the one who owed money, or was it Ladislaw? And what’s the young, ambitious doctor’s name again?
The payoff for me—and what I secretly hope for my students—is something else. Yes, I want them to develop critical faculties for decoding the world, but what I’m really after in teaching the novel is the insight to develop meaning through their experiences. I want them to notice what they notice, both in the world and—more important—within themselves. Reading novels, I believe, acutely calibrates these internal receptors. Readers are able to hear the voice in their head more clearly. Students engage in an insistent reckoning with their own personal mythologies through reading long, complex, literary books. Reading novels is the best way I’ve found to truly embrace the goal of the humanities: to make us more human.
When reading a long novel, we start to pay attention to that running line of commentary in our heads because we’re hopelessly bored. For me, the situation is similar to long hikes in the mountains. There’s no structure or “entertainment,” and we’re left with nothing but our own thoughts, which get amplified by the lack of distraction. Our students—taking five or six classes; hustling to work-study and outside jobs and campus events, plowing through the mounds of work we assign—may have been robbed of the necessary stretches of extreme boredom that reading an 800-page Victorian behemoth like Middlemarch provides.
In 2010, Sven Birkerts wrote in The American Scholar: “I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking.” I can’t argue very well for my secret mission—that I want my students to read without purpose or quantifiable dividend—nor can I claim some broader pedagogical or curricular importance for this sort of experience. But reading novels changes us—it spurs that mode of thought that is “intransitive and experiential,” according to Birkerts. It’s something that happens on its own, for itself. For ourselves. This reflective state can’t be commodified—it’s valueless.
When we come away from any big, tough, ambitious novel—beasts like In Search of Lost Time, Mason & Dixon, Infinite Jest, and White Teeth—we’re left in a state that’s not quite aware of itself. We engage in a subconscious conversation with the book we finished, wondering about the hows and whys and wherefores of the novel and the person we’ve become after reading it. We don’t realize that this is what we’re doing, of course. What we’re actively thinking is more along the lines of, “Whoa, that was long. I wonder what’s in the fridge.” But the murmured discussion is there, humming along below our notice, like the refrigerator that we hear only in the middle of the night, when everything else is quiet.
What interests me is a chance for students to get past the idea of the logical progression of ideas and facts that results in some standard liberal-studies payoff, the sort of experience that could be summed up in the dreaded five-paragraph essay. Andrea Lunsford, of Stanford, whose research has focused on how and what the current college generation writes, has noted that college students write in a way that is transactional. They are used to getting things done through their writing—even if it is only receiving “Likes” on Facebook.
My goal is to get students to read without traditional academic conclusions and to live in ambiguity, even if only while turning the pages. There will be no grand understanding—only a more accurate cartographic rendering of their own internal terrain. I don’t want them to “find themselves,” as the college brochures promise. I just want them to be lost.