Literature Is Where It's At

Abstract

California has gone transformational! my English teacher friend announced in tones reserved for coming of Deity or departure of superintendents. She was referring to latest triumph of new English, significant because occupancy of Golden Land clearly promises national conquest. My response was less than enthusiastic, for lately I've begun to feel that English teachers are distracted from their main business by seductive promise that new linguistics alone will deliver them from old English. As if, you see, grammar were our main business and that transforming study of grammar accomplished necessary transformation of English teachers and teaching. I oppose both notions. Our main business as regards can be nothing less than language in action, to use Hayakawa's phrase, and our main business as regards English is to act as if we hear what this particular time is saying to many of our students: Literature is where it's at. Rightly considered, literature has always been where it's at. It rubs against life, brings us to that place crazy priest in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Absolution warns us against, where past glimmering we see the heat and sweat and It is and always has been that way of going beneath our own skin and getting into skin of someone else. It is prime gift of imagination, capacity to make real a life beyond one's individual life. Its larger social utility is that of making appalling experiences of our time shared experiences, an intensely imagined reality which brings many of us up close to awful reality pressing on few. Within setting provided by formal education, literature today may be able to fill some of void being created by a growing disaffection for science and technology. Five years ago, Robert Jastrow of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, expressed fear that high school students regarded modem scientist as gray, colorless and unaware of what's going on around him. At last meeting of tlle American Physical Society, decline of interest in physics was a major subject of discussion. Dr. Harvey Brooks of Harvard observed, 'There seems to be a revulsion against science by whole society, but especially among young people. Although English in university has shown few signs of capturing young minds in search of a commitment, there are good arguments that it should and some encouraging signs that it has that power. Consider position of poetry today. Neither now, nor in any recent time, can it be said to flourish, but surely more poets are writing poems and many more are reading poems to audiences than ever before. Link this with dominance of a popular music which calls forth poetry of a very traditional kind. Little of this is poetry in a high sense, but is very much