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Quality literature in an electronic age?

It matters what we give young people to read. The stories of our culture offer us images to think with, alternative worlds to describe. Some works call for and develop particular forms of intellectual dexterity and literary competence. The capacity to deal in images, in metaphor and symbol is at the heart of being civilised; it is the rich heritage we should offer our children.

What we give young people to read comes down, finally, to how we believe literature contributes to our individual lives and what its place is in the grand scheme of educational purpose. And once we’ve decided this, we’re still left asking: which texts? And how will we teach them?

Once, it all seemed so simple. We believed that there was a body of fiction that was of agreed quality, that represented the high point of our cultural tradition and that it was our duty to pass on to the next generation. We also accepted, in a relatively unquestioning way, that these texts expressed important truths about objective reality - that part of literature’s power was to exert a high moral influence on the young and vulnerable.

Poststructuralist, psychoanalytical, feminist and political criticism have pointed out, in recent years, that language is ideologically laden. Every text is informed by the ideologies and discourses available at the time of its construction. Every author brings a belief system to the work and selects, emphasises or excludes on the basis of this conscious and unconscious framework. And every reader is positioned - by their culture, by their personal experience and by the way the narrative is crafted - into particular points of view. We still only see what we expect to see, we can only know what the author allows us to know. There is no transparent, uncorrupted truth delivered and no universal message received; each response to a text is not an interpretive, but a creative act.

This focus on decoding the ideological dimensions of texts, however, has tended to suggest that it doesn’t matter what we give young people to read, as long as they read it critically and with self-awareness. On this basis, the popular press, the cereal box or the T-shirt slogan are ‘as good as’ Jane Austen, Elizabeth Jolley or Cynthia Voight.

Certainly, a rich literary diet should include popular culture and everyday texts, as well as challenging contemporary works and those regarded as classics; and critical deconstruction should be applied just as strongly to Ms Austen and Mr Dickens as to Dolly magazine or Mothers Day catalogues - remembering that the purpose of deconstruction is informed social action.

But there are some texts that live with us and in us for longer and that ‘educate the imagination’ more beneficially than others. If we had to define their special qualities, we would probably agree with Robert Scholes that they have the power of relevance, the power of generalisation, and the power of art; that is, they connect with our personal lives, they reveal hidden truths about the essence of being human, and they are created with control and linguistic poise and power.

Perhaps an example is needed. Why is it that I deem Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and Robert Schoenherr, "a perfect picture book"? Because it has space and grace in visual artistry and design; because there is harmony between the word and picture texts; because the language has a sparse, haunting poetry; and because it deals with a matter of significance — the relationship between a child and its parent, and their relationship to the natural world — with insight and with truth.

It is not simply that ‘taking a computer to bed’ is damned uncomfortable, it is the fact that reading a good book is a different kind of experience. It is somewhat akin to the comparison between a fast train and a slow train travel experience.

A fast train is excellent if your only goal is to arrive at your destination quickly; with a slow train, you have time to view the passing countryside in some detail, to glimpse and wonder about the lives you see and to reflect on your own life and the nature of existence. In the experience of the book, the reader is active, not just in meaning-making, but in image-making and re-making….

In a high-tech world, we need images and feelings to counter the literal and the non-human; tired of explanations, we turn to narrative. Developing a shared symbol system, we move from personal meanings to those that can be shared with others — what Coleridge would have termed literary sensibility and what Vygotsky says education is all about — developing abstraction, distance and control.

It is the ‘power of the word’ to develop in our young people these ways of knowing, and some words, some stories, have more power than others; the best have a voice that sings for a long, long time.

Note: This article appeared in the final edition of "conTEXTs". Jenni Connor has kindly granted permission to publish it on the website.