Preface

Very few students in my literature courses read the texts I assign.

Early in my career, I would enter the classroom in ignorance of this fact, prepared to draw on students’ reading experiences to facilitate a discussion that would increase curiosity, reveal biases (my students’ and my own), and inspire a richer understanding of the texts I’d so wisely put on our syllabus. My goal was to facilitate an improvised discussion (not a predetermined lecture) with each participant riffing on the others’ commentary.

Over time, I got better at drawing out the truth of my students’ reading experiences. What I learned was that most hadn’t actually read. Instead, they had skimmed summaries and commentary to find something to say during class. While our discussions were filled with discoveries, it was hard to bring the discussion back to the text because it wasn’t emerging from it. Instead of my dream of an improvisation, I was conducting a performance of preparedness, with dutiful students sharing genuine reactions they’d written in a required response paper and others paraphrasing what they’d gathered from a quick survey of the Internet.

I have finally recognized that I cannot facilitate a rich discussion of assigned reading with unwilling participants. At my university and many others, literature courses fulfill general education requirements, which means many students come into these courses motivated by something other than excitement about my reading list. These circumstances are not conducive to my dream of authentic discussion. Improvisation doesn’t work so well when the band is required to perform (and not everyone remembers their instrument).

Once it occurred to me that students might not want to read what I was assigning, I found myself encouraging actual reading the way my dental hygienist emphasizes the importance of flossing. “I know it’s extra work, but it’s important!” Try as I might with collaborative annotation and other technologies (little travel-sized containers of floss), I couldn’t make my students read. And the exercise was demoralizing. Experiencing literature should not be like flossing your teeth.

I was working with colleagues across the humanities to find strategies to address this when I found Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories. In it, Angus Fletcher presents narrative technologies (like the plot twist and the soliloquy) as inventions and explains how they do work on our brains. He does this by explaining the neuroscience behind a range of human experiences with narrative. The most fundamental of these experiences is wonder, the uplifting emotional experience of discovery that makes us pause in astonishment as we encounter creative works.

I realized that while wonder is what inspired me to pursue a career as a literature professor, my students were very rarely reporting this experience while reading what I’d assigned. In fact, I was almost always encouraging them to admit when they didn’t like what I’d assigned in the interest of helping them write authentically. Could this emphasis on the emotional experience of literature be a solution? I wrote Angus an e-mail and asked him how he was teaching literature. Step one, he said, was to eliminate assigned reading so students could follow their own interests. He shared the techniques he was using with MFA students and very generously agreed to answer my questions as I adapted that technique for use in literature courses.

I had already seen the power of student-selected texts in first-year writing courses (inspired by Ryan Crawford’s Emotional Value in the Composition Classroom). But everything I’d experienced about teaching literature took for granted that my students should all read the same text. I had no idea how this could possibly work, but I had to admit that what I was doing wasn’t working either. Even the best class discussions left me feeling like students were doing their best to say things one should say in a literature class. So, I experimented with a survey course in spring 2024. It was rocky at first, but my students were willing to explore with me and by the end of the semester we’d found the structure I’m sharing in this book:

• Instead of working together to interpret a shared text, students select their own texts within the parameters of the course and are given the responsibility of bringing their texts into class discussion.
• Assignments are organized around elements common to all stories (for example, the elements of narrative), allowing students to take the lead in exploring something specific in the story they choose.
• Instead of typical English papers (interpretive, argument-driven, contextualized with secondary scholarship), students produce careful descriptions of their actual reading experiences, identify the narrative technologies that prompted those experiences, and experiment with those technologies in creative projects.
• Instead of assigning secondary reading or giving a lecture to front-load context for a specific text, I provide context and suggest further reading when giving feedback on individual projects. Feedback on assignments then becomes less an assessment of student work than a conversation that continues for the rest of the semester.
• Students have the option of sharing their work with classmates and making their work public on a course website at the end of the semester. My feedback is presented as a nudge to keep students hunting for the narrative technologies that prompted their experiences.

Aside from my occasional fear that the curriculum committee would burst in and charge me with crimes against the literature survey, I thoroughly enjoyed teaching the course. Student reflections and course evaluations reinforced my sense that the change had been transformative. Students reported appreciating the freedom to explore and many shared that they were analyzing far more than they ever had with assigned reading. Why? Because they were curious and wanted to figure things out for themselves.

Needless to say, I think of the students in my first iteration of this course as co-creators of this book; I could not have found this method if they hadn’t shared their experiences with me. I know that each time I use this method I will make more changes, and I’ve openly licensed this book because I expect that this technique will be most useful to others if they also feel free to adapt and modify what I’ve gathered here.

I spent that entire semester and the months that followed interrogating this practice and trying to understand how and why it worked. I started by tracing the role of assigned reading in the long history of literature instruction, discovering that a practical consideration—the scarcity of physical texts and information about them—had established a practice that was no longer necessary in the Information Age. I grappled with the parallels between the professorate and the clergy in interpreting texts for the betterment of humanity, concluding that even if I wanted to transform lives by helping students appreciate the brilliance of George Eliot or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen (and I have wanted this), I have rarely inspired more than 30% of a class to experience their work. And without actual reading, any appreciation that emerged was for my analysis (instead of the authors I most wanted students to experience).

Of course, it still seems blasphemous to suggest setting aside a practice that is, to many, the defining feature of a literature class. How could I teach a class in which students might not encounter the authors I most admire? I found myself wanting to ask these authors what they thought about their work being required and I realized that I could use story to think through these questions. Once the idea occurred to me, I couldn’t stop imagining conversations with my favorite authors.

My first attempt involved Charlotte Brontë bursting her way into one of my dreams to scold me for requiring my students to read her novels. Her complaint was that from her position in heaven (a heaven where dead authors can observe how people on earth are experiencing their works) she was pained by the bad attitudes my students were bringing to her work. She came up with an elaborate analogy to help me understand, asking me to consider what it would be like if my mother required my entire family to read my most recent article before coming to Thanksgiving and then facilitating a seminar-style discussion about it after pie.

I then imagined what George Eliot would say about required reading and her angle was entirely different. It was far more about the experience for the student than her legacy (she was no longer alive, she reminded me). I imagined myself in a rare book reading room, consulting manuscript pages of The Mill on the Floss and finding an addition, very faint in the margins of the second book of the novel (the chapter detailing Tom Tulliver’s painful education in classics and geometry). Just next to the teacher’s observation to his young pupil (“You feel no interest in what you’re doing, sir”), she’d written in the margin “How often are we Mr. Stelling, so committed to the value of what we teach that we neglect the importance of curiosity?” As I looked around the room, amazed at my discovery, she appeared. “I’m not sure why I left that bit out—it’s quite good,” she said as she sat down at the table next to me. We chatted for hours.

In short, I saw my students having a blast experimenting with the narrative technologies in the stories they chose to read and I wanted in on the fun. It was so productive that I’ve incorporated it into a workshop designed to help faculty prepare to teach literature without a reading list.

Perhaps the percentage of students who read what we assign has dropped over the years. Or perhaps our shift away from lecturing makes it much easier to recognize something that was always happening (I certainly bullshitted my way through a few discussions as a student). I don’t think it matters which it is or if it’s worse now than it used to be because I believe the solution is in our curriculum.

I should also say that I don’t believe a rich discussion of assigned reading is an unattainable ideal that has never existed for anyone. I am a professor today because I participated in these discussions as an undergraduate; I know how transformative they can be because I experienced many more as a graduate student. My goal in developing these resources for required courses (that is, courses that fulfill general education requirements) is to inspire students to seek out opportunities for these discussions in more advanced courses where assigned reading would be a welcome roadmap for learning.

The most important thing, I think, is that we encourage students to search for wonder in whatever period or genre we are teaching. The second most important thing is that we give them the tools to make sense of their experiences reading. I want to inspire students to read more—much more than I could ever force, cajole, or encourage them to read in a single semester. I want them to reclaim their agency as readers. That’s a tall order, but I think this new structure is a step in the right direction.