Culture, Digested: Are Teens Too Woke to Read?
In the New York Times piece about the University of Michigan’s efforts to diversify their campus with a heavy investment in DEI initiatives, Nicholas Confessore includes an anecdote about a literature class. A student complained because her white professor had read aloud the Faulkner short story “Barn Burning,” which includes a racial slur. She complained, her complaint went viral, and everyone had an opinion about it.
I’ve been reading these anecdotes now for over a decade. The kids! They don’t want to read the books! Because of woke! They need trigger warnings, they need safe spaces, they need books with dragons and fairies because dragons don’t use racial slurs.
And it is true that children are annoying. But I do think that all these hysterical stories that people love to circulate to prove that the younger generation is doomed because of wokeness, illiteracy, pro-Palestinian politics or whatever, overlook one very important fact: teens will do whatever it takes not to read William Faulkner.
Also Shakespeare, Joyce, Morrison, or any other book you want to put in front of their face and demand they read. They’re teens. Reading is difficult. Faulkner is difficult. And teens have always been inventive in their methods of circumventing efforts to make them read The Scarlet Letter or Portrait of a Lady or whatever else. Oh suddenly I have to have surgery, yeah, who knew you could have two appendixes and both get infected. Oh yeah I don’t like John Proctor’s vibes this seems oppressive to me.
It’s the job of the university and the professor to push students past discomfort and disinterest and disassociation and get them to engage with the material by impressing upon them the importance of understanding the human project in which we are all participating. And that human projects includes horny fairies in Shakespeare and racial slurs in Faulkner and cuck fantasies in Joyce etc etc.
I think if you go to the New York Times or some other publication to complain officially that the teens they just don’t get it you have in some way failed as an instructor. But I think the real difficulty here is the existential crisis that humanities departments are having across the United States. Asked to legitimize themselves in the face of declining enrollment and AI apocalypse fantasies and a horrifying job market for anything related to art or letters, they are really struggling. The idea that art or literature is important just as their own pursuit is really kind of hard to defend now that you’re charging tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege. Universities sold the dream that hey pay us money for the rest of your natural life (and maybe the lives of your children too) for the opportunity to have the career of your fantasies a little too well. A lot of people believed it, and they are pissed that they paid the money but the career didn’t come.
So what else have you got? It’s important to read Faulkner because…… we’re kind of choking on the fumes of the whole “it makes you a better person” stuff. Because if reading just makes you a better person by creating empathy, reading is an inherently good act, then why Faulkner and not Harry Potter? Why something that offends me or makes me extremely uncomfortable or I don’t see myself reflected in when I could read a book where the reader stand-in character gets to fuck a werewolf?
It’s important to read Faulkner because………………….. it helps you understand racism, I think this is what a lot of people are going with these days. Does it? I don’t know that leaning into wokeness and using literature as little moral fables is so great either, but this seems to be what universities are doing now to keep their students happy. This is the “the customer is always right” approach that colleges are using to keep the money coming in. Letting students decide what is important is related to grade inflation and letting plagiarism and AI assistance slide, because having standards is inconvenient to the payment structure of the institution.
I think the most interesting part of that story is that the students involved have had some time to reflect and now most of them feel chagrined. Yeah, maybe I took that complaint too far, yeah, maybe I was lashing out over here because I felt powerless in this other area but it was too dangerous to do anything there and the energy had to go somewhere. The fact that the complaint was allowed to go so far is not the fault of the student, it’s the fault of an institution that no longer really understands what it is there to do. If it is an institution built to educate, it’s not performing as such. If it is an institution built to hoard wealth and gatekeep opportunity, well, great job guys. You’re thriving. If it is an institution built to meet markers and stats and satisfy the god of numbers, you’re doing great sweetie.
Is it important to read Faulkner? Probably not, but I think you should do it anyway. (I don’t like Faulkner, just fyi.) Because it’s good to do difficult things. Because hating something can be as interesting, sometimes more, as loving something. Is reading Faulkner going to make you a better person? Absolutely not, but the whole universe wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized. And sitting around and reading a work of art when it is not your job to do so is a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop that is fed to me. And developing the parts of myself that are unproductive, ugly, and a drain on resources is a beautiful act of rebellion.
Recommended:
I recently rewatched Vaselka Grisebach’s Western, and it’s so good guys. It’s available at Metrograph at the moment.
I miss the Here Be Monsters podcast. But I enjoyed this episode of Snap Judgment about a Chicago newspaper that opened a bar to tempt politicians to do corrupt shit in front of reporters.
I am sure there is some meme about “I haven’t heard that name in years….” that is applicable here, but I was surprised to see Chuck Johnson in the news recently. Do the kids know about Chuck Johnson? Spare them if not. But if you’re old like me, you might find this story about a lawsuit against him interesting.
When I am truly enjoying art, the feeling is multilayered. I am both locked into its textures and patterns, and being invited further into the its hidden intentions. I watched Irma Vep for the first time time a few nights ago, and the scene where Maggie Cheung’s personas collide as Sonic Youth’s “Tunic” kicks in gave me goosebumps. It’s a sensation that is impossible to codify, and I cannot believe that a director could have created it for didactic or financial reasons. Watching the movie did make me look at a lot of film blogs to try to understand what I was feeling.
Great art teaches you to think as a byproduct, but never as an intention. The best quote I’ve ever read related to justifying the pursuit of aesthetic enjoyment for its own ends, is by Guy Davenport. He wrote an essay, “Finding”, about collecting arrowheads with his family as a child:
“I was with grown-ups, so it wasn’t play. There was no lecture, so it wasn’t school. All effort was willing, so it wasn’t work. No ideal compelled us, so it wasn’t idealism or worship or philosophy. . . . Yet it was the seeding of all sorts of things, of scholarship, of a stoic sense of pleasure. . . . I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer.”
“Because if reading just makes you a better person by creating empathy, reading is an inherently good act, then why Faulkner and not Harry Potter?”
This exact thing already caused a dustup a few years back in the book community. An undergrad student opposed the inclusion of a YA novel in her college’s reading recommendation list. She suggested that it be swapped out in favor of a legal memoir. All of YA Twitter and half of our contemporary writers assembled to call her a bitch. Even though the memoir in question was written by a Black attorney and would also teach the reader about racism - so, still firmly in the confines of most liberal author’s politics.
Even if you are a student who wants to push yourself, none of the intellectual industries seem to want that. They’ll hide it behind some cultural talking point or another but the end result is the same - they need a horde of uncritical consumers to keep themselves afloat. Endless growth is the death of all things, I guess.
And as much as everyone complains about kids these days being so sensitive over language — whenever kids move beyond the realm of language and start agitating for things in the material world, the pitchforks come out from all sides. Complaining about the racial slur in a short story is ultimately more palatable a thing for the University to deal with than ousting whichever faculty member is actually a racist terror.
And, let’s be honest, do most parents think being able to dissect and understand Faulkner is a worthwhile use of anyone’s time? Or should their kid use those dozens of hours to earn a LinkedIn digital marketing certificate so that they can do graphic design for the latest startup unicorn?