In the comments to my post on the NEA study about American reading habits, University of Missouri-Kansas City English professor George Williams poses some interesting questions:

Given some of the comments here and in other posts on Critical Mass, I'd like to ask commenters in this thread the following questions in the most open, non-hostile way possible:

1) What is it you believe English professors are doing in their research and teaching?
2) How did you come to your conclusions?
3) What is it you think we should be doing?

What the professors have done is convince Joe Six-Pack that the "classics" are reserved solely for university-trained (and therefore intelligent by definition) readers, that the mysteries of interpretation can only be learned in academe by enduring years of seminars and roundtable discussions and other forms of intellectual circle jerking.

And they wonder why people read less and less.

The professors have won. I hope they're savoring their victory.

addendum: Part of the problem, it occurs to me, is that we have made a mistake in setting "literature" on some kind of pedestal. In doing so, the suggestion that there is some kind of secret one must posess to enjoy or understand the work in question is simply taken for granted. Of course, there is no secret, but to admit it is to admit that Enligh Lit grad school programs are nothing more than a practical joke (and, for the universities, a lucrative one).

George...I think *some* English professors are seriously attempting to understand various "texts" (a word of which I am not over-fond) in the contexts in which they were written, and to understand the possibilities inherent in language. But I fear that a large and increasing number are focused on advocacy for pre-defined theoretical templates into which they try to pour reality, whether it wants to fit or not. See "The Dictatorship of Theory" here:

http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_photoncourier_archive.html#105629616754638278

1. Some worthwhile research, some worthless research. Mostly pretty good teaching.

2. Intimate acquaintance with general academic practices.

3. Work to overthrow Theory? (All that Foucault/Derrida/Frankfurt School et al stuff just seems a painful waste, all headed for the dustbin of history anyway, but I could be wrong).

I don't think of what English profs do, and neither do I care. The only ones I care about give lectures for the Teaching Company, and I buy them. So far, I've got all their lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer (as well as a history of the English language). I hope they don't have a Dickens lecture yet, because I've imposed a buying moratorium on myself.

In any case, I hope those lecturers are getting some good royalties off of these things.

1) It appears that too much research done by English professors is conducted with reference (or even entirely constructed on) a pre-existent ideological basis rather than a true research basis. It is as though they aim to fit reality to an ideal rather than add to wealth of knowledge and understanding of life and society at large.

The teaching that evolves from this seems to be almost anti-knowledge. Where only certain ideals are regarded as allowable and the rest is derided or outlawed.

They are inhibited by self applied bindings - and they seek to impose these bindings on others.

2) Interraction with the academic community and their 'subjects'. General interest and research.

3) Change the wheel. Too many academics appear trapped in a looped minset, in which everything they do cicles back around to reinforce their bad habits. They need to step back from ideologies and learn how to teach useful habits that further knowledge and understanding, rather than teach restrictive habits which inhibit them.

I have to agree with the early sentiments here, although with slight modification:

1. There are essentially two groups - the readers and the reductors. The readers are those professors who maintain a strong love of literature as experience and who teach that kind of experiential reading to their students. The reductors are those who bring an outside extra-literary force to the reading and attempt to impose that extra-literary reading/interpretation on both the work and the discipline, reducing literature to a simple byproduct of gender, social and historical factors.

2. Nine years in higher education: five years as a student in English Lit programs and four years as an non-teaching employee of an English department.

3. That's a much tougher question. I'm beginning to wonder if the reason for the work of the reductors is a reaction to the question of the value of literature in the modern, technological world. In some ways, the traditional role of literature has been usurped by television and movies. Perhaps the reductors are attempting to show the value of literature by reducing it to these small constituent elements that, in turn, reflect what is good and not good in the society around us. This, of course, ultimate fails in both the task of showing literary value and in the task of attempting to illuminate values in society. So, I guess what we could do is discover a new value, or rediscover the old value, of literature.

I agree in many ways with Charles but would also like to broaden the scope of discussion (should that be acceptable to the owner) to include everyone who does literature (think those folks who live in the foreign language departments).

1) As Charles wrote there seem to be two sorts of people who are teaching--those who seek to instill a love of literature in their students and those who hope to give their students the technical ability to communicate in a disciplinary way. I don't mean that these two groups cannot overlap nor do I mean them to be universal--I also believe there are people teaching who just want to get out of the classroom as fast as possible with the least work (endemic to academia). While both of these are laudable goals and are appropriate in given situations I find that neither group is fully evaluates the needs of the students and matches their teaching goals to those needs. (generalities here--some folks do, but most don't)

For example, even in a class of majors in the discipline there are a great number who have no intention of going to graduate school and never will (at least in the discipline) so how will they be better served? Similarly, there are students in intro courses who just might be completely turned on by what 'research' entails but either aren't exposed to it or don't know that they are being exposed to it (because we don't tell them).

How might we resolve these tensions? More individualistic assignments in classes for one--don't make non-grad school bound students write theory-based papers, instead have them write apprec. papers in which they make a strong argument for the inclusion of MMM in the school curriculum or something...

What do the researchers do? Attempt to understand the human existence; our search for meaning, but sometimes (often) this is lost in the overly-technical language that we employ.

I know, I know there are significant arguments for and against tabla rosa and reader-response and all the rest, but heck, they are all ways of reading that have some ability to tell us something about our condition. At it's heart, any piece of work that I write seems to tell me about what I value and find interesting (very little more and certainly not less). I don't think this is a problem at all because I'm certainly part of this mass we call human and if I can come to a better understanding of myself, well, then that's a step on the path isn't it? If other people want to read about me, well, let em. If they don't, that's fine too. If you can find some way to get paid to do it, good for you. If you can't, well, do it anyway and maybe explore new ways to investigate who you are...

2) How did I arrive at this set of beliefs? A bunch of work in both English and Spanish lit with some mathematics and education intermingled.

I think many people would be surprised at the extent to which canonical literature continues to be taught in most colleges and universities. The departments that are completely converted by cultural studies remain in the minority. In my own department, British and American literature still dominates. Only 2 faculty members out of 20 spend more time teaching cultural studies than teaching lit. Also: those of us who do minority or post-colonial literature usually also teach a good deal of familiar canonical stuff (I do British modernism).

It's interesting that very few people have addressed George Williams's question 3. I think Charles Parsons is on the right track when he says that the role of literature in our era is changing.

But that's not the same as saying it's dying, or even that it's declining significantly. Literature is changing, as it must, but I think it's still very vital. I'm also optimistic that imaginative writing in some form (perhaps not always in books) will always be there. For example, note the number of commercially successful movies that are based on books -- that is synergy, and it reflects well on the continuing centrality of literature to our culture. Popular books like Harry Potter are not just glorified screenplays; they are more than that. That they become successful movies reflects well on their authors as well as a culture that recognizes a good story when it sees it. (There is more to say about this, but I'll spare you.)

Back to #3. Interestingly, the creative writing classes in my department are always overflowing --even if people are apparently reading less on the whole, there sure are many young people want to try their hand at writing! [Perhaps it represents a cultural shift to a Do-it-yourself mentality?] Thus, one proposal I have for reinvigorating excitement about literary study is to expand the teaching of writing, but NOT in order to produce more interpretive/theoretical papers. Rather, I think English depts. should expand their teaching of creative writing, imaginative non-fiction, and journalism.

I think the problem elucidated by the NEA study begins much earlier than college. Perhaps it begins earlier than high school.

I'm not sure whether the problem is too much video stimulation, or just the genreally poor quality of public education, but I think that as far as teaching goes a combination of critical revelation and unabashed wonder is vital. Perhaps this can be introduced as late as college to good effect, but it is certainly better at a younger school age: after that, no amount of college theory can destroy a love of reading.

Also coming from the music side of things, I agree very much with an emphasis on writing. Writing provides a unique portal to the comprehension and love of literature.

That is an excellent question. I know what some English majors were doing for their research because I asked them and the stuff was fascinating. What the other ones are doing I used to assume was worthless (what worthwhile research *could* an English type do?), except now I assume that it is more likely than not to be fascinating (since all of the research I've talked to PhDs about was, though that may just be my friends).

Generally seeking insights and perspectives either for specific authors or groups of authors, often correcting prior conceptions about them and their work.

The comments to this post and the previous one are fascinating. I do think the study's restriction of reading to fiction is not helpful, but I think the hostility in some of the comments (here and at Joanne Jacobs' site as well) to reading in general is interesting. If the Surgeon General told us we weren't exercising enough (and that's hardly news), I don't think people would be so shirty about it.

I _am_ a college professor of English who teaches at a third-tier teaching institution. I regularly see students in my classes who have _never_ read a book all the way through. What I try to give them (especially in the general education classes I teach) is a love of literature. But this is an almost impossible thing to transfer. I can show them how much I love Jane Austen or Wilkie Collins and I can show them why I love them, but I can't _make_ them love the authors and the works in the same way I do. I can hope that they do and I can try, but you can't make people take pleasure in exactly the same things that you do (in this case reading literature). I hope they are excited and interested in Jane Eyre's journey and that they can't put the book down because they want to know if she ends up with Rochester, but I can't make them feel these things. I can make them do the reading, I can try to make the reading interesting, I can give them certain kinds of knowledge about authors and texts; you can teach knowledge--you can't teach love. And love of reading is what makes people read on their own when they don't have to do it for a class.

Despite this, I do believe my students are better off for having taken an English class and done the reading even if they don't become lifetime readers.

How much of the problem with reading is simply that students weren't taught to read *well*, due to bad teaching methodologies in the primary grades? If something feels unnatural and uncomfortable to a person, he's unlikely to do much of it for fun.

1) English professors are constructing their own little world in their research, mainly writing for each other. But I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing since that is how almost every field works. What they are doing is of course a whole range of things. Some are intersted in appreciation, some in psychology, some in social issues and comentary, some in language, and so on. What this all adds up to is a more complicated understanding of how we make sense of our worlds, especially through words. This research informs what professors do in their teaching, but is not necessarily the same thing. (Many professors who are interested in theory, what many here have lamented as the undue attention to Foucault, Derrida, etc., never bring up those names or ideas in their undergraduate literature courses.)

As for teaching, that again is a mixed bag. I think to reduce the idea of teaching literature to a single goal is a big problem because there is such a wide range of literatures (goals, styles, approaches, etc.). What English professors generally do with teaching literature is merely to engage with the readings, to get students both to understand what is going on in the literature and to be able to talk about it. Talking about it might entail analyzing the formal qualities, the political commentary, the underyling assumptions, or making sense of the literature through students' personal experience. The hope is to encourage, to use the trite phrase, "critical thinking," the ability for students to read thoughtfully and discuss or debate intelligently. (Some might take all of this further into rhetorical analysis.)

2) I'm a professor-wannabe, teaching literature for the first time this coming fall semester as part of my graduate student career. Of course, I spend a lot of time worrying over the utility of my career and what I want my students to get out of class.

3) I think we should continue doing what we're doing. We should consider incorporating new communication technologies into our understanding of writing and reading. We should think about why people are reading literary fiction less. I agree that literary fiction shouldn't be the sole determinant of literacy or the reading tastes of the public, but even so, the extent to which people are willing to read literary fiction over nonfiction and other genres says something about cultural value.... We should make our cases for why reading literary fiction is still useful, and I don't think there is just one compelling reason but many. For example, reading literary fiction can lead to a greater awareness and knowledge of the references with which we build cultural meaning. We all probably encountered the idea of allusions or intertextual references in high school or college literature classes. This mode of making meaning to building on earlier work is crucial to how we understand things.

English professors and how they do their jobs has absolutely NO effect on American reading habits. In fact, the practices of secondary school English teachers has little effect as well. Reading is a practice learned in the home - if you're looking for avid readers of fiction, look at parents and the leisure activities they teach their children to value.

The real question, IMO, involves the future of college-level literature departments. As we value reading less and less, the justifications, such as they are, for maintaining huge numbers of English professors will diminish.

I was last in college in 1983. I suspect that English professors now as then are required to publish or perish.

1. and 2. Since the internet came into being, I have read numerous complaints about the stranglehold the foucauldian left has had on acedemic research and hiring. There appears to be good evidence of this being the case, as supported by subsequent books (and even novels).

3. What should English professors be doing? Well, not 1. and 2., in short.

Frankly, I think they have missed the boat entirely. Novels tell us about life in a far more acceptable form than nonfiction. However, fiction has been taken over by the same leftist groupthink infecting acedemia. As a result, the most touted novels are just plain bad. Straightforward prose has been jettisoned in favor of pretentiousness and obscurity.

I think people are reading fewer novels because much of recent literature is simply not worth reading, despite what the NYTimes says. I'll pick up a used copy of a recent criitcal favorite and stop reading after a single chapter.

My advice: Stick with nonfiction until writers awaken from their awful dream. Try reading B.R. Myers'
A Reader's Manifesto ....spot on criticism of modern lit.

Several people have argued that reading of novels has declined due to poor quality of recent novels. But even if this were true...the stock of good novels written in prior times is virtually inexhaustable.

Marc and Ellie are spot-on: the problem begins much earlier than college,and so in many respects George Williams' questions are moot. Two points:

1. We have been an instant-gratification culture for a while now, exacerbated by the rise of the internet and the eternally-expanding catalogue of cable channels. It is much, much easier to sit and watch TV/a movie (things which I enjoy very much, myself) than it is to slog through, say, Crime and Punishment.

2. Bush's "soft bigotry of low expectations." My sister works in a bookstore handling orders for the city's school districts, and judging by most of the pap these kids are reading (for example, reading in 5th grade books I read in 2nd) that it's no wonder they think books are boring and dumb. There's no challenge, and this not only bores them but paradoxically instills a resistance to challenging literature in the future.

She has also overheard parents in the store telling their excited child, who has just picked up a book labeled "Ages 7-8," that at 6 years old the child is too young--regardless of whether the child actually demonstrates the ability to read at the book's level.

OT: So, Julia...when are we going to see some new posts at Winston's Diary?

Yeah, yeah...we've been a pair of bad bloggers. I promise there'll be something soon.

BOT: In the paperback edition of Diane Ravitch's The Language Police--an excellent book on censorhip and banalification (wasn't a word; is now) in textbooks--there is an appendix with a truly excellent list of suggested readings for children by age level.

I regularly see students in my classes who have _never_ read a book all the way through.

Cordelia, here's the flip side of that: are college lit classes conducive to reading a book all the way through? Do college professors really believe that a kid taking intro Java programming, organic chemistry and a history class, playing lacrosse and wooing a girlfriend is going to read the Aeneid in a week? And Ulysses the next week? A decade later, Ulysses is still sitting on my shelf waiting for me to free up time to give it real attention.

A TA of mine commented that Don Quixote tilting at the windmill is the quintessential image from the book, not because it's so central but because it happens on page 11. I did finish that one because I was stunned at how modern a sensibility the second half has, where Don Qixote, who has modeled himself on books familiar to the reader, travels in a world where he himself is now a famous literary figure. The fact that I've never heard anyone discuss the book in those terms had me wondering if anyone else has read it through.

It's hard for me to imagine anybody getting through middle school and high school without reading a book all the way through. But my daughter tells me it's possible.

As to readers being created at home: I had a coworker whose daughter went to the same elementary school as mine. I know they had a good reading program. This coworker was distressed because his daughter didn't read; it wasn't that she couldn't, it was that she disliked it and never read anything she wasn't forced to. He told me that he would bring teen magazines home (when she was a teenager) and offer to take her turn washing dishes if she would read those magazines; but she preferred washing dishes. What can you do with that?

(a) I have *never* read any critic who argued that it's the quality of contemporary fiction that is responsible for the decline in reading habits. Only a utter moron would dare suggest a decline in the quality of fiction today -- that's an impossible statement to prove. Joanna Scott, Steve Erickson, Stewart Home, Iain Sinclair, J. G. Ballard, Heather McGowan, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Jeffrey Eugenides, Colson Whitehead, Peter Ackroyd, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, etc., all suggest to any reader with taste that fiction is alive and well and living in Paris.

(b) Having taught *Ulysses*, I can say that nearly *all* of my students not only read the novel but also wrote interesting papers about it. In my experience, many of the non-English majors attempt to do well in lit courses precisely because it's one of their few chances to have face-to-face contact with a professor. The student majoring in computer science may never be more than a student ID number to his or her prof.

(c) Having had to read novels like *The Good Earth* in grade school and *Lord of the Flies* in high school, I'm amazed that I ever wanted to read another novel.

1. In my college Great Books courses, the pace at which we had to read was so great, it was hard to enjoy or even fully comprehend the book. (~300 pages of Plato in a week, on top of, for me, Chem II, Calculus, Genetics, Intro to Linguistics - none of which were heavy reading courses but all of which had homework). Also, there was the fear (largely unfounded) that "understanding" the book required picking out and noticing some subtle point, which was easy to overlook when speed-reading.

And there were the essays. I didn't like having to write on what I had read all that much. And often the essay topics were over more subtle or mentioned-in-passing parts of the text.

Also, I had a TA one semester who had to make everything political, which tired me out. Sometimes I just want the *story*, ok? I don't want to worry about how it's like modern American politics according to one person's view.

There was also, sort of a subtle feeling that there was a "secret society" of people who had some special understanding of the books (sorry, I REFUSE to call them "texts," that's part of the secret-society thing) and when a common person suggested an interpretation, they would look down their nose and say "how....INTERESTING" (meaning: wrong).

I also had a high school French teacher who claimed that any interpreation you put on a novel or poem or story was correct, which just confused me.

I will say I had some excellent high school English teachers who helped my love of literature. They did stuff like have us act out parts of Shakespeare (I remember, very effectively, using peeled grapes for the eye-gouging scene in King Lear).

I do agree with those who say readers are made early in life. Both of my parents were readers, library trips were a weekly occurrence, both my brother and I were read to (to fairly ripe old ages) before bed, books were Christmas gifts. Books and reading were just *around* and were something I absorbed.

2. I'm speaking from personal experience here.

3. I'm not sure the whole onus is on the professors. (I will say I had one professor, who taught Dante's Inferno, who was just wonderful - some of my classmates thought he was insane because of how worked up he got about the book). I think if someone's not a reader by the age of 18, it may be hard to change that. I do think it's maybe possible to turn readers off with too much heavy-handed political interpretation, or with requiring them to remember every detail of a long book for exams.

I will say, at least among the lower-level classes, don't let people force-fit every text into being a parable of politics, or sex, or race relations in modern America.

What I love about reading "literature" is the realization that people had some of the same feelings and problems that we do now, but that they may have dealt with them very differently (e.g., the relative uncommonness and serious stigma of divorce would have made an unhappy marriage more a burden to be borne than a situation to be ended; less interaction among men and women than there is now). I'm not saying this very well, but I guess it's the realization that there are universal things, but also that times have changed. Maybe that could be an interesting basis for a class on 19th c. literature.

1. I have to agree with whoever said it earlier: 'publish or perish'. People I know who have gone into English have done it either because they love English or because they couldn't come up with anything else that they both wanted to and were able to do. In 'doing research', a lot of English professors are trying to ensure that they continue to remain employed. They didn't get into English to do research; they did it because they loved literature and reading, and publishing is the price of being paid to do what they love.

English - as well as many of the other 'soft' humanities fields - is very easy to succeed in for people who are either not particularly bright or for those who dislike being held to some objective standards, as is the case in the sciences. In order to fail in this field, you either have to work very hard at failing, or else try to buck prevailing politically-correct viewpoints in the profession.

As for teaching, well, no one can destroy the pleasure of reading good literature more quickly or easily than a professor who requires that you a) dissect and interpret and b) then tells you that your interpretation is either wrong, not the prevailing one, or too simplistic. What's wrong with just enjoying it without analyzing it to death? I don't have to analyze the composition of the pigments used to paint the Mona Lisa in order to appreciate the skill and artistry of the artist.

2) Direct experience of multiple professors in multiples schools in both undergrad and graduate school, 3 years working for a college academic dean, a lifelong love of reading of anything from great classical literature to pop novels to comic books, 26 years of scientific research including numerous publications and patents, 11 years teaching writing skills to degreed professionals, and in recent years writing, publishing, and editing both fiction, science, and history texts.

3) What can you do? Stop cheapening the study of English and literature by requiring students to study trash whose only claim to fame is that it was produced by a 'diverse' author. The classics are classics for a reason. Your job as a professor is to teach. So teach about what the students should know to become educated persons.

The problems are too large for colleges to solve, however. How can students appreciate great literature when they don't understand anything about the context of the events and times when it was written?

As an anecdote, my brother absolutely loathed reading. Then in seventh grade, he took a journalism class. The teacher spent most of the first semester teaching the kids how to speed-read. And he found out (or he already knew, I guess) that most of then hated reading because they couldn't read very well and/or couldn't understand what they were reading. Learning speed-reading, along with constant drilling on comprehending what they were reading, was the key to a major change in their attitudes and school work, my brother included.

(a) There is no "secret society" demanding that we call books "texts" or enforcing a "correct" interpretation. The term "text" is useful because in literature, we're not always talking about a book (i.e., a single, material object). If you wanted to discuss the Child ballads, Walter Scott's *Waverley*, and the film *Braveheart* all together, text is the only decent term that can contain transcribed songs, novels, and films. It's really no different than when the "hard" sciences take concrete and sensual human experience and refer to it as "data."

Secondly, the teacher who claims that there is no incorrect interpretation is a fool. There are a wide variety of *types* of interpretation: a content analysis may come to very different conclusions than a formal analysis or a contextual analysis. But there are plenty of dead-wrong readings of texts out there; Christopher Ricks on Bob Dylan being a recent favorite example of mine.

(b) There is a huge difference between "art appreciation" classes and classes in specific artistic disciplines. I find it ironic that the very folks who complain about the "softness" of literary studies also complain about having to analyze or "dissect" a book. If you want to sit around and swoon over Ovid, do as the movie usher said to the teenage lovers: take it outside. And if closely analyzing what you consume is distasteful to you, you're truly a robot.

(c) Literature is an inherently political discipline, because the vast majority of texts are themselves political. You can whine until the cows come home, but take a close look at the classics of American prose: Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, the James boys, Faulkner, Ellison, etc. These are overtly political writers. Of course, politics is more than race, class, and gender. But so are the political readings of literature. Dig Fredric Jameson or Franco Moretti, for example.

And you can complain about having to read "diverse" writers who aren't as good as the classics, but don't tell me that "there's a reason why a classic is a classic." Those a gross and ridiculous simplification of a complex issue. There are many reasons why the classics are the classics, and not everyone agrees on the classics anyway, even among those folks who believe in such things as classics. *Uncle Tom's Cabin* is a classic for a very different reason than, say, *Moby-Dick*. The former is the more important novel in terms of historical consequences; the latter the more important novel in terms of literary history. Both are about the politics of their times.

Furthermore, it's impossible to understand the "great" fiction of a certain historical period without some knowledge of the popular fiction of the same period. Hemingway and pulp detective fiction being a perfect example; or Nathaniel West and comic books; or Hawthorne and sensationalist captivity novels; or Faulkner and the Klan novels.

Wow, thanks to everyone for their responses to my questions! I am struck by the diversity of opinions; clearly this is not just a two-sided issue.

A few things occur to me after reading through these responses:

First, while there are many assertions about what English professors should *not* be doing, not many have articulated in any detail what they *should* be doing. It's one thing to say, for example, that we should inculcate a love of literature, but it's quite another to explain how to do that.

Second, no one explains that they came to their conclusions concerning research based on exposure to the one outlet where the overwhelming majority of that research appears: journal articles. Have you read many of them in the major journals? There's a great deal of interesting, sophisticated but accessible stuff there. I have my students at all levels research and read at least one recent article in every class I teach. It is a grossly inaccurate assertion to say that it's all heavily influenced by theory in its various flavors (or by "political correctness"). You can always find work that you don't agree with (and I challenge you to name one discipline in which this is not true), but this does not mean that most of it has no value. (Note that I am not saying that theoretically-inclined work has no value.)

Third, aside from some vague references to "the Classics," no one here or over at Joanne Jacobs' site (in the discussion on Tupac Shakur) actually goes into much detail about the classic literature that they love, which I find curious. What is it that you love about your favorite author? How did you develop that love?

Finally, there seems to be a general sense that a definition of "the canon" or "the classics" has always been around and that we are only just now tinkering with it. This is patently and demonstrably false.

I am not attacking the value of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton (or Aristophanes or Sophocles, for that matter) when I say that we can find specific points in history when readers and critics did not place them high upon the pedestal of great literature. Opinions have always shifted.

To take one example, in England, the genre of the novel (including those we now consider classics) was initially greeted with the kind of disdain that some reserve for gangsta rap or videogames today. Or to take another, in the early twentieth century, T. S. Eliot resuscitated the critical fortunes of the seventeenth-century "metaphysical" poets after they had been held in low regard for generations.

More generally, opinions on what constitutes great literature have always been in flux, as a reading of the early sections of any textbook survey of literary criticism will reveal. Contrast, for example, the attitudes of eighteenth-century critics with those of the Victorians in the following century.

And works of literature have been entering and exiting the list of "classics" for centuries. Although it was written as long as 1300 years ago, _Beowulf_ was not taught regularly (or even made available in a contemporary edition) until after transcriptions were made in the late eighteenth century. A poem titled "A Funeral Elegy" was attributed to Shakespeare by Don Foster in the 1990s and added to the collected works editions typically used for teaching; then scholars decided this poem was not by Shakespeare, and it was taken back out again. _The Interesting Narrative_ of Afro-Briton Olaudah Equiano, an eighteenth-century bestselling autobiography every bit as engaging as Ben Franklin's, is now attracting a great deal of scholarly attention and is taught with much more frequency than it was even ten years ago; this is in large part because of a meticulously researched Penguin edition of the work (full disclosure: done by my dissertation advisor), which by the way you can find in just about any bookstore, evidencing its appeal beyond the "ivory tower." These are three examples among many. Scholarship matters: it affects what we do or do not read.

I'm heartened that so many people are concerned with the fate of reading and writing, and I'm going to work on doing a better job on my own 'blog of explaining what it is I'm doing in my research and teaching.

And with that, I'm off to do some research on eighteenth-century Bibles.