It happened at the breakfast table the other day. Our 8th grade son, who regularly proclaims how much he dislikes reading, experienced for the first time the emotional response that great literature can create. As he finished John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, he gasped and said, “That’s really sad.” He was visibly shaken, as he was unprepared for the plot turn at the end of this classic and, even more so, for his own feelings that accompanied it. From the perspective of a parent who loves to read, I could not have been any happier; while I appreciated his sadness, I reveled in his discovery that reading can bring us to tears.
I have thought quite a bit about his revelation since then. Will this compel him to read more? The optimistic side of me hopes so; the realistic side warns me not to get carried away. However, on a broader scale, I wonder how often as educators we choose books for our students to read with the primary intention that they strike an emotional chord with our students.
So often in schools, we focus on the cognitive skills we want our students to develop. We want them to able to analyze themes, identify symbolism, and expound on character development. We ask them to dissect Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and we require that they look for quotations in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street that they can use for evidence in an essay. Don’t get me wrong--these skills are crucial and fundamental to being a literate reader. We should always ask students to demonstrate proficiency in these areas.
Nevertheless, do we also ask students to read with their affective brain? Do we ask them to not only think about literature, but also to “feel” about literature? A recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?,” discussed efforts to teach students emotional intelligence (EQ). Much of the piece pointed to various curricular efforts to help students develop their EQ as much as their IQ. As I read the piece, I wondered if perhaps one way to do this is to ask students to grapple with a variety of texts that evoke certain feelings that parallel the emotions the students experience in their own lives each day. Part of the reason that middle school students should read Romeo and Juliet is that they are the same age as the star-crossed lovers of Verona. As the students critique Shakespeare’s characters, they see their own angst and impetuousness anew.
In the classical Greek manuscript, Longinus: On the Sublime, the author describes what makes for good rhetoric in speaking and in writing. Referencing Homer’s The Odyssey, the author states, “Homer, however, does not for one moment set a limit to the terror of the scene, but draws a vivid picture of men continually in peril of their lives, and often within an ace of perishing with each successive wave...He has thus tortured his line into the similitude of the impending calamity, and by the constriction of the verse has excellently figured the disaster, and almost stamped upon the expression the very form and pressure of the danger...” Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez who helps us sniff the almond-like aroma of cyanide in the first paragraph of Love in the Time of Cholera or Ann Patchett who makes us swelter in the humidity of the Amazonian rain forest in State of Wonder, Homer puts us right there next to Odysseus as he sojourns home to Penelope. The struggle of the characters becomes our own plight--we think about them, and we feel with them.
Perhaps one of the most valuable gifts we can offer our children is to show them that reading great books connects them to their own scholarly and emotional lives. As students read to learn about others, they come to know themselves. University of Virginia Professor of English Mark Edmundson says it well: “The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated or more articulate...the best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an ‘alienated majesty.’ ”
