However, throughout my studies as an English major and as a Christian, I often found it too easy to end my papers with “the moral of the story,” from a Christian perspective. This worked fine at my Christian college, but not at the very secular grad school I attended. And I found in grad school that my need to hold back from being so overt in my moralizing made for much better papers. I was forced to take the texts more on their own terms, and also to read a lot more criticism, in order to craft my arguments. And my arguments were much more nuanced, in a good way. I was still tempted to go the easy way with the moralizing at times, but it simply never felt really satisfying.

I believe that a truly well-written analysis will make the ethical implications of a piece of literature evident, it will not spend time laying them out in a didactic way. Just as the best literature is not overtly didactic, the best criticism doesn’t need to be either.

Yeah, and I find the dead white males Derrida and Foucault to be particularly oppresive. :)

But we have absolutely not gained from postmodernism and modern literary criticism’s influence on pedagogy. We have lost much: the ability to interact meaningfully with the author and his or her intent, the ability to engage with the text itself rather than merely our own emotions about it, and the ability to actually think critically—to critique—the text. When “the text is,” and all that we can do is say what we think or feel about it, without reference to any authority—moral, authorial, or otherwise—we are in a sad state indeed. And that is the state of most English classes.

That probably depends where you went to school, and when. I would certainly hope that professors teach students to think critically about words; up until a decade or two ago that was probably the case in most places; even now it might be the case in some places. (I was lucky enough that in my undergraduate work, in the 1990s, I had older professors, who did teach this way.)

The trouble is that the newer generation of English professors have been force-fed Derrida, Foucault, and their minions, as well as a host of other postmodern horrors related to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. (Everything written by a dead white male is oppressive, after all.)

Derrida’s whole point is that texts have no meaning, and that they break down into meaninglessness under “deconstruction.” Students are therefore asked to “deconstruct” texts routinely, to determine that they indeed self-contradict. (You can destroy absolutely anything this way, and it’s very depressing.)

Foucault’s whole point is that every text is about power; in every text, someone is being oppressed. If you don’t think you are being oppressed, you are either 1. a straight white male, in which case you are the oppressor, even if you don’t think you’ve ever oppressed anybody, or 2. you have internalized the oppression. If everything is about power, then reading texts becomes a kind of warfare: what dreadful thing is the author trying to do to me, and how can I fight back? The favored texts are ones that fight back themselves, generally by “challenging” the “conventions” of meaning (i.e. by discarding plot, character, theme, coherent language, etc.)

Finally, everything gets seen through the “lens” of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Reading a text thus becomes either a witch hunt (let’s find out how Shakespeare is racist!) or a hunt for examples of aberrant sexuality, real or invented, to glorify (let’s find ways to interpret Emily Dickinson’s poetry as images of female masturbation! — btw, I wish I were kidding, but I’m not; I’ve seen this), and the like. Friendship in literature, by the way, invariably gets reinterpreted in homoerotic terms.

I experienced this in graduate school, and I see it coming out in the teaching of some (not all, thank God) of my colleagues, in their assignments and reading lists.

So, there’s a bit more variety involved than just teaching kids that “words have no meaning,” but it all ends up in the same place: bored, disgusted kids, with a few of them buying into it because it lets them be cool and radical. And they don’t read, and I can’t blame them – why bother, if this is what literature is?

Fortunately, this is NOT what real literature is. And people respond to it, when they get it.

I agree that the author’s class was short-changed if they were not given the impetus to think critically through this story and face the difficult situational ethics it presents, but I seriously question the sweeping generalization that, “students aren’t dull enough to sit through hours of professors telling them that words don’t mean anything.” I don’t think modern professors are telling students words don’t mean anything, I think they are teaching them to think critically about them, both the words and the morals, and learn to make their own decisions about them. That was my educational experience anyway.

I’m always heartened when I hear about fellow teachers “fighting the good fight” to teach the meaning in literature.

I take the same approach to teaching my literature classes (I teach in a community college). I tell my students, “Literature matters because it helps us understand human nature better. Good literature helps us see more clearly, and more deeply. Ideally, literature helps us to become better human beings.” I focus on “what is the author trying to tell us / share with us / get us to think about?” and I choose texts that have solid moral / ethical content for us to think about.

The students absolutely LOVE it. They get fired up with poetry, Shakespeare, Beowulf – all the “classics” that a lot of modern professors say are dead and boring. For instance, Macbeth is a great launching point for talking about choices and responsibility – and about how Macbeth really does know what is right, but yields to temptation and does what he knows is wrong. The kids see how that helps them think through decisions in their own lives.

When we read Beowulf, I like to do it with a frame of the seven deadly sins / seven virtues. For instance, we look at pride and humility, envy and contentment, and the like, which are dramatized remarkably well in the poem. The students connect to it and get enthusiastic – one of my favorite comments from a student was that he “couldn’t wait to find out what happened” in Beowulf! :)

All readers: Now apply to the way you read your Bible immediately.

I remember that story. Your professor didn’t get Hemingway at all, probably because he didn’t want to.