In yesterday’s Washington Post, columnist Ron Charles expresses his disdain for the “safe” reading choices of today’s college students: Stephenie Meyer, J. K. Rowling, Barack Obama, and Malcolm Gladwell. Charles writes:
In 1969, when Alice Echols went to college, everybody she knew was reading “Soul on Ice,” Eldridge Cleaver’s new collection of essays. For Echols, who now teaches a course on the ’60s at the University of Southern California, that psychedelic time was filled with “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “The Golden Notebook,” the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the erotic diaries of Anaïs Nin.
Forty years later, on today’s college campuses, you’re more likely to hear a werewolf howl than Allen Ginsberg, and Nin’s transgressive sexuality has been replaced by the fervent chastity of Bella Swan, the teenage heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s modern gothic “Twilight” series.
Aside from the fact that Charles gets Twilight wrong (Bella Swan is in fact rather unhappy about her vampire boyfriend Edward’s stricter morals), his snide tone here really disturbs me, as does his seeming blindness to the fact that today’s college students are attending for different reasons (because they have to get a degree in order to get a job) than the college students of the 1960s (enlightenment, liberal arts breadth, and all that). Plus, if today’s college students liked the same things that college students of the 1960s liked, how transgressive would that really be? I’m not really mourning the fact that they read fantasy instead of overrated tripe celebrating psychedelic drugs, narcissism, and suicide.
As a literature professor, though, I do wish that my students could set aside their personal reading preferences sometimes to approach what we’re reading in class with an open mind. For my freshmen, Stephenie Meyer and Chuck Palahniuk are the greatest writers ever; Sophocles, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and James Baldwin are all “dumb.” I don’t want my freshmen to be more rebellious–I want them to have a more teachable spirit, to be willing to learn from writers they wouldn’t necessarily choose in their spare time. Goodness knows I would never read Hemingway out of personal preference, but do I still learn from him? Absolutely. As a teacher, I see the confusion of personal preference with aesthetic appreciation (“If I don’t like it, then it’s not good”) as one of the biggest weaknesses of this younger generation.
Carissa Turner Smith is a compulsive reader, writer, and Irish dancer. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Penn State and currently teaches writing and American literature at Charleston Southern University. At age three, she announced that all she wanted to do was “sit at a desk and read and write,” and she has been trying to make good on that promise ever since. Fortunately, she is occasionally distracted from this mission by her husband Stephen and their cheese-obsessed cat. A loyal native of Arkansas, she has always loved the fact that Jesus dwelt in an underappreciated corner of Galilee (see John 1:46). 
I have to say that I at least sympathize with Charles. On the whole, it seems to me that college students are less interested in texts that deal with important questions; they prefer easy reads which confirm their own biases/beliefs. And, tripe or not, older literature does offer us a great way to engage worldviews. I would have my students read Plath over Meyer any day.
I think we’re actually sort of saying the same thing, Alan. I want students to challenge themselves and engage other worldviews in class . . . with the goal that they then become more critical readers of whatever material they choose during their spare time. I think the problem with Ron Charles’s attitude is that it’s totally dismissing their leisure-reading choices . . . and I think when students sense that their professors condemn their leisure-reading choices, they’re less willing to find value in what we assign them to read. I would certainly rather teach Plath than Meyer, but I’m certainly not going to condemn anyone for choosing the latter outside of class.
Besides, do you think the college students of yore embraced Plath and Ginsberg and Kerouac because they challenged their worldviews or because they confirmed them? I would guess the latter.
Before I read this, I was going to respond identically. Or nearly so. If there’s one thing we know about the beat generation and the youthful generations that followed them, it’s this: they were every bit as much followers as the kids today. Girls read Plath because there was something cool and maudlin about doing so. Plath spoke to these young women in a way that resonated. They liked her. Guys read Kerouac for the same reason.
It’s rare to find someone who is truly omnivorous in their reading, and if they are, it’s either because it is their job to be so or they have no taste at all and so one book is as much the same as another.
Even those who read quote-unquote challenging works are doing so because that’s what feels right and safe for them. People like Ron Charles evidently only feel safe in their reading when they aren’t reading something enjoyable but instead reading something heavy. Heavy books, though, aren’t for everyone and I don’t think there’s any reason we should encourage the world to think that it’s so.
Is the examined life necessarily better than the unexamined life? I don’t see anything that would leads us toward that conclusion save for our own preferences. Is the life of a literary critic more fulfilling than the life of a steppe nomad? Says who?
Ron Charles can be upset if he wants to, but he betrays elitist cultural-centrism in so doing.
Full disclosure: I read both J.K. Rowling and books that make Plath look like J.K. Rowling and I am able to enjoy them both without feeling guilty.
The Danes last blog post..20081119.ChurchLies
Since this is the most recent Lit post, I’m placing here: The Morning News’s 2009 Tournament of Books has begun. Think Photoshop Tennis, but between books (they even had Jim Coudal as a guest judge in the final round of the first year—2005).
The way it works. Sixteen of the best books of the year. Laddered challenges [PDF]. Books are winnowed by judges. When there are two finalists, they each have to compete against the zombified corpse of a previously failed favourite. Then at last the two victors of the zombie-round face off in a glorious finale.
Winners of previous years:
• The Plot against America (2005)
• The Accidental (2006)
• The Road (2007)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)
The Danes last blog post..20081119.ChurchLies
Oh, and Coudal has placed betting odds on this year’s matches.
http://coudal.com/tob2009.php
The Danes last blog post..20081119.ChurchLies
If Twilight is being considered better then all of those other books I have plenty reason to fear for my generation.