Today's Topic: Challenging books in the classroom

As I likely mentioned in class last night, it was only a matter of time before another story like this one hit the media. What do reactions like the one from this parent assume about why we read the books we read in school?

Pam Russell, an Anne Arundel County mother of three, did something last fall that surprised her a little.

She objected to a book that her daughter, Bridget, a freshman at South River High School in Edgewater, was assigned to read in English class: Maya Angelou's famous 1969 memoir, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

Russell was among the parents who objected to book's use of profanity and its depiction of sexual violence.

The fact that "Caged Bird" has been hailed as an American classic has not stopped parental objections, which have dogged the book for years. The same is true for any number of literary works, from Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" to Dante's "Inferno."

From On School Reading Lists: A Big Eraser (washingtonpost.com). It's possible you may have to register at The Washington Post website to read the whole story online. It's well worth your while, as there's often lots of interesting stories there.

This article also mentions a couple of important sites connected to this debate: Censoround, a site that tracks calls for the censorship of books, and Parents Against Bad Books in Schools "a website that tracks concerns about library books and classroom texts used in Fairfax County public schools. To enter the site, users must assert they are 18 or older and read a warning about "objectionable or inappropriate" material."

Helen Vendler: The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism

From this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, an article on Helen Vendler which refers to her as the The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism.

This passage is particularly revealing about her approach:

Hence the respect for Dame Helen. Hence, too, the grumbling. Whole sectors of the poetry world have complained about the limits of her sensibility. She doesn't like experimentation, one complaint goes. Her attitude toward poetry is too academic, says another. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, literary scholars often consider Ms. Vendler far out of touch with their profession.

Her approach is, so to speak, rigorously untheoretical: A poem speaks to her, or it doesn't, and the critical essay is Ms. Vendler's preferred medium of reply. "When I was writing my dissertation on some really abstruse works by Yeats," she once noted, "my notion, which is still my notion, was that if what I write pleases the poet, then what I have done is all right."

Few literary scholars now consider the author's intention as the final criterion in discussing the meaning of a work. So Ms. Vendler's desire to win the approval of poets seems even more striking -- a mark of temperament rather than of professional standards. Perhaps the death of the poet only makes the challenge more interesting.

[. . .] At first Ms. Vendler appears simply to have assumed a new role in her capacity as elder stateswoman of poetry criticism. But her lectures themselves amount to a solemn warning about the state of cultural literacy and the function of literary studies. The reading of poetry, she contends, requires a set of skills and dispositions being lost in the scholarly rush to interdisciplinarity.

Discussion Question: Comments on the readings from Richter so far

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This week's readings have us starting to look at the history of English studies. It is crucial, I would argue, to know this in order to come to any conclusions as to what is English studies today.
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What did you think? Any surprises?
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