Cory Doctorow on Studying Literature

The joy of literature -- more accurately, of stories -- is that they can, in a single sentence or paragraph express what might otherwise take a chapter, article or entire book. A single paragraph in the opening passage of Corey Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe the does just this -- it lampoons the study of literature as a method by which the soul of a story is destroyed. As the protagonist complains

School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I had escaped into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals with polite, sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes en masse that told us what the story was about, but never what the story was. Stories are propoganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they're as naked as a nightclub in daylight.

My wife tutors a young woman. One of the assignments this seventeen year old is working on is a study of the evocative Khaled Hosseini novel Kite Runner. This story no doubt packs a powerful emotional wallop for any young person. She is being asked, however, to read it through the lens of one of three bodies of critical thought: psychoanalytic, Marxist or conflict theory. In grade 11.

How much critical theory did you know in grade 11? More to the point, is there any way that the wondrous experience of this book could be killed any deader? And is there any way that more life could be sucked out of a young persons love of reading and of stories?

This is the stuff of small graduate seminars, where the text and not the story is the thing and where theory dominates all. It is barely defensible in this mileu; it is indefensible in a grade 11 classroom. I learned a love of literature because I was allowed to explore and to take as valid what the story said to me. It would be refreshing to see more young people have this opportunity.