from Marshall Memo

Two English Professors Debate the Literary Canon

            In this article in Kappa Delta Pi Record, Katherine Landau Wright (Boise State University) and Matthew Thomas (University of Central Missouri) discuss whether students should be required to read “classic” books, versus choosing among more-contemporary books. At the beginning of their dialogue, Wright described a moment when she was in tenth grade: students were reading The Grapes of Wrath and she raised her hand and confidently answered a question the teacher had posed. “The teacher said no, I was wrong, and provided the correct answer,” says Wright. “Then I stopped reading.” She never did finish The Grapes of Wrath, and despite teaching middle-school English, earning a PhD in reading education, and being a university professor, she hasn’t read a number of classics and is against requiring students to read such books.

When Wright shared this view with Thomas, who has had a similar teaching career, he was “gobsmacked” and they began a lively debate about how to help students become lifelong readers while also exposing them to a variety of literature and building their knowledge and understanding of a diverse world. Some excerpts:

Thomas – Clearly not all books that have been written are of equal value to K-12 students. “Life is too short for bad books,” he says. “Let’s not throw out great books because they can be challenging to read and difficult to teach… Don’t let choice be more powerful than a good teacher.”

Wright – Sure, some books are more important than others and teachers should steer students toward better literature, but in many middle- and high-school classrooms, there’s zero choice. Even with a few recent additions, the canon is decidedly Eurocentric, mostly books by white authors about white characters.

Thomas – True, students need to see themselves in what they read, but we also need to stretch students beyond their current horizons. “Nobody alive today in our schools can lay claim to completely identifying with Julius Caesar or Othello,” he says. “However, the themes and wisdom in these two works are nearly universally applicable to all of us, no matter who we are, what language we speak, what nationality we are.”

Wright – Maybe what’s needed is first, providing students with more-diverse authors and characters, and second, supporting teachers to help their students “identify the global themes in literature that allow them to connect to any character, regardless of who wrote the story.”

Thomas – Agreed! But there’s something to be said for reading the original classic. “Is teaching Macbeth-like themes through student reading choice an acceptable substitution whereby students never study Macbeth itself?... Students should not miss out on those powerful and poignant whole-class discussions that come when wrestling through important literature together. It becomes a shared, and often high-impact, experience.”
            Wright – She’s skeptical about the value of discussing Macbeth for many of the students she’s taught. Yes, it’s possible to make connections between The Grapes of Wrath and immigrant students’ experiences, but a more-contemporary novel might work better with increasingly diverse students. Surely the canon needs to be mixed with newer works.

Thomas – “Maybe we need a kind of canon-review rubric,” he says, “with the realization that some works need to drop out; there are only so many books that can be read.”

Wright – The question is why students need to read certain books. How many students really understand and appreciate Shakespeare’s deeper themes – or are they just getting the plot-lines from the Spark Notes? Wouldn’t it be better to choose “more accessible, relatable texts that can hit those same targets?”

Thomas – Isn’t the problem the varied quality of teaching? “Before I substitute Twilight (Meyer, 2005) for Hamlet,” he says, “let’s figure out whether the teacher or the text is the problem.”

Wright – Good point: “The text itself is neutral; it’s how you use the text that is problematic. I do not think The Grapes of Wrath is inherently evil, but requiring students to read it without considering why is misguided and can have long-term consequences… We want kids to read many genres to become truly mature readers; however, if our classroom practices turn them off to reading, we have done more harm than good.”

Thomas – True, but let’s focus on teacher preparation and PD rather than losing Shakespeare and Steinbeck “from our shared knowledge base and our cultural treasure box.”

Wright – Yes to teacher training and support, but “until that point, I would rather err on the side of developing and preserving their love of reading.”

Thomas – “I am more and more convinced that we need both,” he says. “We need very rich choices that go beyond the canon; you have made this clearer to me. We should also simultaneously adore, defend, prune, revise, and find good ways to teach our literary canon. We need times for the whole-class novel, and it needs to be very carefully chosen and very well-taught. And, I will admit that in some settings, The Grapes of Wrath might not make the cut. But it needs to be looked at long and hard.”

Wright – She began this debate opposed to assigning “so-called classic novels,” and now sees that the way books are presented is critical. A good mix of contemporary books matters, but classics are sometimes “the right book for the right situation.”

Thomas – He concedes that the debate “has exposed several of my blind spots… To insensitively foist Great Books on today’s students smacks of being stodgy, narrow, and tone deaf, and perhaps even bigoted. But to dismiss the Great Books as only ‘dead white male’ tools of oppression is too simplistic and, I believe, is a mistake; these issues deserve deeper analyses than that.” After all, To Kill a Mockingbird was once regarded as pop culture and is now part of the canon – and part of building cultural literacy in all students.

In this debate, Wright and Thomas clearly influenced each other’s thinking, and they ended up agreeing on several suggestions for classroom practice:

• Students should be offered a choice from a wide array of books tailored to different interests and achievement levels. Teachers should have well-stocked classroom libraries, and should provide the support students need to experience success.

• All students need to be exposed to great literature that makes up the “DNA of our culture,” say the authors, with an eye to including social-justice themes that touch on diverse students’ voices and values.

• “We must provide opportunities for deep discussions about the global human themes presented in both classic and modern literature,” they say. Perhaps The Grapes of Wrath could be paired with A Long Walk to Water (Park, 2010), a contemporary story of refugees and displacement.

• “Any time difficult books are taught,” say Wright and Thomas, “they need to be well-taught” – which means better training and support for teachers to explore with their students each book’s underlying themes and engage in “deep conversations about power and injustice.”

• The Reading Workshop model should be used in secondary as well as elementary classrooms, giving students the chance to choose some of what they read and engage in frequent small- and large-group discussions about texts.

“Who Cares About The Grapes of Wrath? Arguments for Balancing Choice and Classical Literature” by Katherine Landau Wright and Matthew Thomas in Kappa Delta Pi Record, October-December 2019 (Vol. 55, #4, pp. 148-153), https://bit.ly/2JvpRNM; the authors can be reached at katherinewright@boisestate.edu and mthomas@ucmo.edu.