Part 1 – What is Literature?
Edna Krabappel: Okay class, please turn to page 357 of Tedious Times, where we left off yesterday, analyzing Dryprose’s prophetic critique of education under industrial society. As I was explaining before, for those who were listening, we noticed the savage irony of a teacher who could not even conceive of his pupils or their cultural interests as human beings— Mr. Simpson!
Bartocrates: [doesn’t respond – though his book is open to page 357, inside of said book resides one copy of a comic book called The Rise and Fall of Krustyland, earbuds in ear playing Otto da Busman’s newest single (“We Ride the Bus”), Chromebook open to Youtube cycling through “The Itchy and Scratchy Show” TikTok shorts. Another window is visible on which Bartocrates is playing some sort of repetitive jumping and running game involving an image of his baby sister Maggie bouncing up and down. Bartocrates is also doodling apt-but-obscene shapes in the margins of Tedious Times, focused especially on body parts metaphorically related to the characters’ thematic roles]
Edna: Bartocrates! Which part of the school’s acceptable use policy are you not in violation of at this moment!?!?
[pupil next to Barocrates nudges him – who respectfully removes a single earbud]
Bartocrates: Yes Ms. Krabappel.
E: Please see me after class.
[bell rings, everyone else leaves, Bartocrates remains, not because he’s been asked to stay after, but because he didn’t hear the bell]
E: We need to talk.
B [finally removing both earbuds, closing Chromebook, packing up book and graphic novel, stowing pen used for obscene doodles]: Yes?
E: This classroom behavior must change. It is simply disrespectful, and, as I said earlier, in violation of several school rules for you to occupy space in my classroom like this.
B: I want to understand – I thought you told me we were here for critical thinking, as a space where we might push back against, how did you put it in that grandiose lecture on day one, well day two, after that awkward teambuilding activity – “push back against the tides of consumer-driven Fahrenheit-451-style voluntary illiteracy” – that was this class right?
E: In fact yes, though it hardly seems like the message has gotten through.
B: How do you mean?
E: Have you even read a single page of Tedious Times?
B: Admittedly, no, but you talk a lot about the book, I think I know what you want me to know about it.
E: But that’s not the point of class – I want you to read it, to experience it, to form your own opinions.
B: If that’s so, why is every class discussion a fishing expedition? “Class, does anyone know what 19th century philosopher and economist Professor Pupilpounder represents? Anyone?” Then we’re all quiet for a while and you tell us. Or maybe Lisalthea happens to know, raises her hand, reassures you that at least someone knows who Tomasso Badergo is, and then we move on.
E: What am I supposed to do when none of you show any interest in the opportunity you’ve being afforded here? You’d rather churn through hours of brainrot on your feeds than engage in the noble tradition of AP English Literature [pronounced with 3 syllables] and Composition [emphasis on the first syllable].
B: I’m so glad you reminded me why I’m here. This course – that’s what it’s called – AP English Lit-er-a-ture and compo…what’s it now? Comp-o-sition?
E: [rolls eyes] Yes, I’ve been teaching this class for 22 years.
B: Well then I must ask you a question I’ve been thinking on today, though of course, I’ve only lived 17 years, and only been in this class maybe 22 weeks, so I get it if I’m confused.
E: [perks up] You have a question? I’m all ears.
B: Well, I have several but the core I want to ask you about is, “literature and composition,” what are they? What is literature, and what is composition, and — see I thought I was engaging in them. I’m reading Krusty The Klown, listening to Otto da Busman, watching Itchy and Scratchy, I’m even annotating Tedious Times.
E: Well, let’s start there. Of all those things you named – “texts,” as some authors who have been banned here in Florida called them – you’re not recording this are you? – of all of those, only Tedious Times is literature. And Composition? You haven’t turned in a single one of your essays, even the timed writing we did in class.
B: Before we talk about me too much, I want to learn more from you. I’ll ask again, what is Literature? What is Composition? Apparently Tedious Times is literature, but not none of my other pursuits. So what else is literature?
E: That’s easy – it’s what’s on my curriculum. Each work we read is a work of literature – We started with the classic epic Leofox, the moved onto the ribald and scandalous “Butcher’s Tale’ (not that any of you even detected the ribaldry), then Quid Pro Quo, a deeply coded condemnation of James I’s reign set in the Vatican City (as was the fashion of the time), then we read Elizabeth Devonshire’s Idylls and Idleness, and now we have moved on to Tedious Times. Later in the year we’ll cross the Atlantic when we come to modernist classic, James Beckoner’s Signifying Nothing, later the Canadian dystopian The Secretary’s Narrative and finally, Skinfolk, a book that wasn’t even written until 1985! I’m no slave to the canon. And Composition – that’s the essay writing we do after we read each book.
B: My goodness Ms. Krabappel – where I asked for one, you have given me EIGHT! Two more than wives that Henry the VIII survived, right?
E: Yes, I’m surprised you’d even know that— [momentary optimism rises in her voice]
B: Well I saw three seconds of an ad for Six come across my feed before I skipped it.
E: Oh of course… [dissappointment returns]
B: Eight books, that’s what literature is?
E: They are all literature – this cannot be disputed.
B: Before we assess that claim I’ll need to ask you some more questions. For one – are these eight books all that “literature” is?
E: Actually “the Butcher’s Tale” isn’t a book, but part of a larger collection.
B: “…as was the fashion of the time”?
E: Do I really say that so much?
B: You utilize repetition, it really gets your message across. But again, literature is just those 6 books and one short story?
E: To call it a “short story” is a bit anachronistic but I’ll allow it. And no, literature is far vaster than these 8, umm, “texts.” And if it weren’t for this new block schedule, and your sadly declining reading stamina, I’d share more of them with you – when I first started teaching this class, we read 20 books! Five each quarter, entirely outside of class! We had brilliant discussions, students wrote 10-page double-spaced papers each time, all deeply compliant with MLA standards. And if they weren’t, they earned the grade they deserved, and learned from the experience. I sometimes message with a student from one of my first classes – she’s 40 now, has three children of her own, and teaches AP Lit across the country in Arizona. Can you believe it?
B: Literature is far vaster? I want to understand. All 20 of those books, it sounds like, those were literature too, yes?
E: Yes those 20 but many, many more. It’s a notoriously complicated question, but I’d basically argue, “literature” is a set of books that have established sufficient reputation for greatness – there’s no one list somewhere, I’m not going down that alley, and neither is the AP Literature and Composition curriculum. There is plenty of flexibility in the definition – before 2020, on question 3—
B: Question 3? How many questions are on our exam, I thought it was just one.
E: Are you even? Look at that! [points to large poster that says “THE AP LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION EXAM INCLUDES 3 FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS AND A MULTIPLE CHOICE SECTION”]
B: Just pulling your chain Ms. K – you were saying about before 2020?
E: Before 2020, Q3 had a simple phrase – “or another work of comparable literary merit.” That’s showing just how vast literature is.
B: So literature is any “work of fiction of literary merit.”
E: Yes. And I can see your next question already.
B: Please.
E: How do we determine “literary merit”?
B: Precisely. If we are to explain “what is literature” by saying “works of fiction of literary merit,” we would need to further define each word in that phrase, lest we end up back where we started. And my 4th grade English teacher—
E: Ms. Kelp?
B: Yes Ms. Kelp – taught me not to use a word in its own definition – “literary” and “literature” being cognates, it seems like we need something else.
E: “Cognates,” well aren’t you something. And in an absolute clause no less.
B: Didn’t you know I take Latin?
E: I don’t, no, I didn’t know that. We haven’t exactly gotten to know each other through the year.
B: You were about to offer a different definition–
E: Well, sad as it makes me to say, I suppose we’ll have to set aside “literary merit,” at least for the sake of argument. To be honest I feel abandoned, even betrayed by the College Board. I thought there was one place we could maintain standards –
B: Well if you are willing to make that concession, surely you have something else in mind
E: I suppose a definition I can live with is just this – literature is any book that English teachers decide to teach. Provided it’s of sufficient complexity to engage with Q3. Which is by no means every book.
B: By no means? Care to explain.
E: Well, like, Krusty’s what is it?
B: [shows cover] The Rise and Fall of Krustyland.
E: In some nominal sense that is a “book.”
B: It does have pages, it’s bound.
E: But it has more pictures than words! But I know, I’ve read on the AP forum, some people find great meaning in other such titles. I suppose I’ll need to accede to that as well, as sad as it is to say.
B: What’s sad about that? But Okay so where are we – literature is a book of sufficient complexity…
E: Yes, but if I’m being honest, I have serious doubts about your ability to write a complex essay about Krusty’s Last Stand. I’m just trying to set you up for success.
B: We’ll have to agree to disagree about that but it’s not what I’m really in this conversation for in fact. Since it sounds like you haven’t read this book (you can’t even get the title right) I’m not sure how you could know. But we can both agree there will be edge cases – some books of debatable literary merit. Again, not what I’m really interested in though, and probably not what you’re really interested in either.
E: No?
B: What I’d really like to know is, why does literature need to be limited to books at all, much less books with a lot of words in them, and not so many drawings?
E: Ah, well there I can let you know something about me. I too studied Latin – still do from time to time on my commute.
B: Really?
E: The Aeneid was actually the first truly great book I ever studied. And I want to pass that along to you. But that’s not the point I was after. “Literature” – from “littera, litterae, f., letter, i.e. on a manuscript, by synecdoche, as in English, a written work composed of many such written letters.” Works of literature are written. On this I think we can both agree.
B: So a work of literature has lots of words, primarily words, enough complexity to withstand scrutiny through a student writing a Q3 style essay about it. But aren’t music, films, video games, all those things, capable of similar scrutiny?
E: Perhaps, but those aren’t works of literature. Those or other sorts of works are proper for other classes to study, but not this one.
B: So all examples of literature are works, but not all works are literature, right?
E: Yes – we might also find works of art, for example. Our everyday speech shows the distinction I’m making. And someone could take AP Art History if they wanted to learn about them. We don’t say “works of music” or “works of television’’ or “works of film,” but we do borrow another word from Latin – “opus, operis, n, meaning ‘work’” to describe them sometimes. Especially the phrase “magnum opus” – a “great work.” All of these fields have their own “great works,” but not all of them are literature. Literature is a work primarily involving written words. A great work of literature attains sufficient complexity to merit study in my class.
B: I did take Mrs. Pommelhorst’s AP Lang class last year, and something I remember her saying – I actually liked her class a lot more than yours if i’m being honest – was “etymology is not argument.” It has a nice ring to it I think. Where a word came from is interesting, surely, but not sufficient to establish a line of reasoning. Where words come from is generally difficult to prove, and also irrelevant to what they should mean in any given context.
E: Even if the etymology of “literature” doesn’t prove that I’m right, I do think everyday use is a good starting point for definitions in contexts like these.
B: That might be the smartest thing you’ve said so far. Everyday use. Words as they’re used by non-experts, you find some value in them, yes?
E: At least to start a discussion. But now I’ll continue it. Defining literature as written is necessary because these other things – music, television, film, [waves hand dismissively at Bartocrates’s backpack, which now contains all of his belongings] – they all require other skills to study. What we’re here to study is BOOKS WITH WORDS. There’s a stable skill set they all require – and I want to help you develop those.
B: I do have another question. It’s kind of about that skill set actually.
E: Of course you do.
B: Now is when I’ll talk about the Odyssey actually. You said the Aeneid was formative for you, yes?
E: Absolutely! Virgil crafted each and every line in flawless dactylic hexameter. It was actually incomplete when he died, he had worked on it for so long. Pored over each line with his pen and parchment.
B: Dactylic hexameter – why did he use that meter?
E: To align himself with the epic tradition, especially Homer. As it sounds like you know, with The Aeneid, Virgil wanted to construct an Iliad and an Odyssey in one text. And Homer wrote in dactylic hexameter (only in Greek).
B: Homer wrote in dactylic hexameter?
E: Yes, you didn’t know that?
B: I know the Iliad and the Odyssey we have are composed in dactylic hexameter, yes, but that’s not what you said. You said Homer wrote it using that meter.
E: And he did.
B: Are you sure? I went down a rabbit hole from a Wikipedia article I found on The Homeric Question– I stumbled on back when that Wikipedia Kevin Bacon game was trending.
E: Ugh Wikipedia? That’s not even, why do you trust—
B: a worthy conversation fo another time, but the Homeric Question—-
E: Oh my, this is more of a discussion than I thought we’d be having. What is “The Homeric Question”? When I taught freshmen (that was many years ago), we studied books 1, 8, 9, 23 and 24. Before that, we read the whole thing – again, back when kids would read whole books. Students had lots of questions about Homer. Now all they do is say they can’t understand the “old English.” I’m glad I don’t teach freshmen anymore.
B: Well, the question the phrase “Homeric Question” refers to is, who was Homer, and did he (or she, or they…) write the Iliad, the Odyssey, both, or neither. It’s been a live question for millennia, since we know little to nothing about Homer’s biography.
E: Oh yes, I seem to remember something about this from grad school – even more years ago! I remember my professor waving his and and saying “I always say, the Iliad was written by Homer, or by another fellow of the same name.” He had quite a laugh about that, and started coughing awkwardly at the end. I think he has since passed away.
B: Well, all due respect to your professor – what was his name?
E: F E D Upton. This was my year abroad at Oxford. Those were wonderful days.
B: It’s possible Woodson was one of the last remaining Homeric “unitarians” – people who believe Homer was one man, who wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey. ML West was perhaps a student of Upton’s? He has also since passed away, but before he did, he engaged in a fearsome polemic with Gregory Nagy – it was as vicious as Kendrick and Drake, in its own way. Several articles back and forth. One night I stayed up way too late and read them all.
E: And?
B: Well, let’s just say I’m on team Nagy. So is most of the rest of the classics world as far as I can tell. Here’s Nagy’s central claim: there was no “Homer,” and therefore “he” didn’t write anything. What we have is a manuscript tradition that likely began hundreds of years after those stories were orally composed in illiterate Greek farming communities like the then still-extant Serbian ones Alfred Lord and Milman Perry studied in the 1920’s.
E: Is this a conspiracy theory? Like how Shakespeare was really Lord Bacon? I appreciate your zeal but really! Homer – how much more canonical can you get?
B: This is not a conspiracy theory, but a different way of understanding the Homeric texts. For Nagy, as for Lord and Perry before him, “Homer” is really more of a unifying metaphor provided as a name to the tradition that produced what we call the Homeric texts. His books The Best of The Achaeans, Homeric Questions and Homeric Answers all argue this very clearly – and he’s by no means alone or a crackpot academic – in fact he represents the mainstream of classical scholarship at this point.
E: Ah yes I remember a bit more now. Upton felt this was all a waste of time but, go on.
B: One part of Nagy’s argument, since o know you’re a mean of etymology – the etymology of “Homer” is “joiner.” The person who joined all these traditional oral stories together. Likely “Homer” is a name that arose around the time that they were redacted into a written text in the 5th century, to work as stable texts for poetry recitation contests at the Panathenaea festival, where people from across Greece came to Athens with their own versions of the stories. His name works sort of like ‘Jim Crow” or “Willy Lynch” – metanyms for traditions, not actual historical people. The fact that “Homer” has a functional etymology, that the name itself describes the meaning of the labor he did – this is a great clue that it’s likely a retrospectively applied fiction, a “just so” story. Similar things are true, at least according to Nagy, about Aesop and Hesiod. “Authors” whose texts precede the classical period (unlike, for example. Plato or Aristotle, whose manuscripts we can be fairly certain were created in their lifetimes).
E: Interesting, but what’s your point here? We can study the Aeneid; we can study the Odyssey; we have written texts. Now let me come back to Upton’s point as I remember it. Going on about how it’s “oral literature” is, oh I see how West puts it in this article you’ve shared – “a red herring.” However we came to possess the Homeric text, we can study it as literature now. It’s an organized sequence of words, with recurrent motifs, imagery, a coherent plot, consistent thematic commitments…
B: “As literature” – I like the sound of that – we’ll come back to it. For now though, what I don’t think West or this, Upton quite get is, part of my point is that the original circumstances of composition of those texts is relevant to our engagement with them. If we just treat the Odyssey like an earlier Aeneid – like a written book, or “novel,” as my classmates say when describing literally any book you put in front of them, we will miss a great deal of nuance. Studying the oral nature of the composition of the text is essential to understanding its meaning. If the Odyssey is a work of sufficient complexity to withstand Q3-type scrutiny…
E: It is certainly that. One of my favorite students ever, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek myth, and wrote about Odysseus as a “morally ambiguous character” on the 2004 exam. At least he told me so. And he earned a 5.
B: Can I tell you about a student who took your class last year?
E: Sure.
B: Aristotleia – she loves Kendrick Lamar. She knows every word of To Pimp a Butterfly – and you know what she told me? She said “Bro, if you think about it, that question on the exam, about memory, we totally could have written about Kendrick?” “Did you?” ‘No – Ms. Krabappal was very clear – they’d take points off!
E: I remember Aristotleia – she did a brilliant analysis of a speech from Quid Pro Quo. But the grammar was all wrong.
B: Hold that thought until we talk about “composition.” But you were saying about your student – he wrote a great essay 22 years ago. And even though you didn’t read the essay, you believed him. And I don’t doubt it. Sometimes what we hear can become as important as what we read. And if we are going to consider the Odyssey as “literature,” I would suggest that your earlier definition has some issues as a principle of exclusion.
E: How so?
B: If we are to fully study the Odyssey, we will need to make an effort to study the pre-literate tradition that gave rise to it. I suspect your former student’s essay, though doubtlessly good, would have been better if he had studied Nagy, Lord and Perry. If he had done that, something he would have discovered is that the Odyssey is arguably not “literature” in your sense at all. And yet intuitively, it feels like it should be, right?
E: You’ve gotten a bit more intelligent since we started. I’m suspicious, is ChatGPT doing this somehow?
B: How much do you really know about your students’ interests and level of knowledge?
E: I make an effort! Thaficebreaker, and there was a survey. You drew a large penis on it. I felt it best to pass over in silence.
B: [has a good chuckle] Fair enough. I know a lot about this stuff – but I’ve never gotten to study it in school ever. Not even in Latin.
E: I am more than willing to make space for that sort of study in my class. Is that really what this is all about?
B: Not quite. The Odyssey – it’s not the only book like this. It’s not the only text like that. I think actually every book is like this if we look at it in the right away.
E: There’s that word again, keep your voice down, postmodernism and cultural Marxism have been officially excluded from Florida curricula, as I said before.
B: Well let’s call the Odyssey a hybrid, umm, book. It was composed orally, over the span of hundreds of years by anonymous, working-class migrant workers who spoke lost dialects of Greek that came together into “Homeric” in the 5th century. I don’t know if you know this, but likely they were also performed with instrumentation, to maintain rhythm. And they weren’t memorized, at least not for the first few hundred years, but they were orally composed, that is, improvised on the spot out of smaller tropes and formulae. Dactylic hexamater was a meter that was especially conducive to this. These were free-styled in a sense. Lord’s description of this in The Singer of Tales is fascinating
E: I still do not understand what this has to do with what is or is not literature.
B: My point is simple: every text both is and is not “literature” in your sense. Every text can be written down, and every text has a context or composition and of reception that can and does persist in other forms as well. It’s more of a continuum than a binary. On the far end we have, for example, Anna Karenina, which is very difficult to remember and seems almost entirely the product of print culture at its height, and on the other end we have, for example, nursery rhymes that everyone knows and very few people who know them have ever seen in writing. Or the “Happy birthday” song or “Take me Out to the Ball Game” for that matter. Texts everyone knows but no one has read, texts learned ans transmitted almost entirely orally. Homer is somewhere in the middle – strong oral contributions, to the point where the text we have is more of a transcript of an earlier performance, but it is a script. No argument there.
E: The way books are created is definitely interesting but that doesn’t mean we can’t study them as books. It just means we have to consider that context when we study them. I’m all for that – it’s one of the ways to earn the sophistication point – by placing the interpretation “into a broader context.” I used to say that’s what made a 9 a 9 – but alas, now we have this silly rubric that rewards mediocrity.
B: 9? I thought 6 was the goal.
E: My point exactly.
B: If I may, let me point something out – you’ve said “as literature,” “as books.” And I agree – there is something to that. But it will only become clear once you’ve acknowledged that “literature” being defined as only books is conceptually incoherent.
E: I’m not sure I‘m ready to concede that but if you actually think I actually have some expert knowledge to contribute, about “as literature,” let’s build on that.
B: Okay. Where I think you need to adjust your thinking is here: the question of “what is literature” is better answered, I want to say, “adverbially” – we can study something “as literature” – “literarily.” This is better than saying something is or is not “literature” as a thing. As things we have to analyze (sorry, I won’t call them “texts”).
E: I’ve told you before, don’t say “thing.” Find more specific vocabulary!
B: Most objects of study we have – we can study them as literature, regardless of the media context that produced them. Or I should say, regard-ing that media context. We should study them as literature and as media constructs. We can do all the things you think we need to do with books, but also focus on the nature of their “medial” aspects, let’s say. And it will be much more interesting and, as you say, potentially sophisticated.
E: So then the question is less about what sort of a work it is, and more about how we study that work?
B: Exactly. But the issue is, those different media environments really do matter, not just for sophistication but for a root sense of meaning. If we ignore that dimension and flatten them into “books,” we miss important aspects of their meaning. That’s where I think Upton and West were wrong. Erasing, in that case, the working class communal context of construction, “canonizes” the Odyssey at the expense of appreciation of the people who created it, and how we might process the rhetorical devices used and their possible meanings.
E: I suppose I can live with that. Still seems like a lot more teaching I have to do about media environments that frankly my students cannot handle. They can’t even read books! Why would this go any better?
B: Those books though, they have means of production and distribution too, you just don’t see them as that because they’re the default. They’re the “water” you swim in as an English teacher – but like David Foster Wallace’s younger fish like in that cheesy video you made us watch, you need to ask “what the hell is water?”
E: Water is like media?
B: Yes, it very literally is a medium through which, for example, sound travels, but I was using it as a metaphor.
E: Still, how are my students supposed to understand all of that?
B: Something I think you’d know if you took our culture more seriously. We know a ton about media. Ask a room full of us to describe the important stylistic and rhetorical differences between different social media sites, different audiences of different streaming services, Spotify vs. Soundcloud vs Apple Music as means of music distribution. Shows that work as background vs. ones you need to pay attention to.
E: That’s all just commercialism overtaking your critical intelligence! I’m trying to help you.
B: You think we don’t know we’re being sold to? You think we’re not acutely aware of every last piece of capital someone’s trying to make out of us? And more importantly, you think our culture itself doesn’t interrogate that? We have a whole body of work that does all of that, right under our noses. That we can also study “as literature.”
E: If you’re saying I need to learn Serbian to study those bards you mentioned earlier, no can do.
B: No, I am saying you need to learn AAVE, and study hip-hop! It is a contemporary example of oral composition- perhaps one of the most intricate form of oral composition ever to exist, with one small but important addendum that may be important later. But for now – hip-hop is performed over music to preserve the beat, and in its original incarnation, as free-styled. It involves working-class communities constructing stories out of tropes and formulae in the after-work hours.
E: Homer is greater than that. More complex. Have you studied Achilles’ shield? There’s a whole theory of anthropology embedded within.
B: Have you ever listened to To Pimp a Butterfly? I could say the same- a whole theory of anthropology embedded- and I would not be exaggerating. “Homer” was produced by everyday working class people over centuries. Of course it embeds a whole theory of anthropology. You know what though, hip-hop does too. Like Tupac says to Kendrick at the end – “it’s the spirits, we ain’t even really rappin, we just letting our dead homies tell stories for us.” That line could almost literally be dropped in Homer at any number of places and you wouldn’t bat an eye. Hip-hop grew out of enslaved communities that were legally forbidden from learning to read, so all the mnemonic devices of oral performance became essential tools to construct and distribute meaning. We can study them as literature. I think we need to. If we leave that whole tradition on the side, we ignore a vital part of the American experience. And I think your AP English class is the best place we have in school to do this.
E: Tupac? I’m hardly bring that into my classroom. Tupac was murdered by a rival gang.
B: So was Patroclus.
E: Touche. But even so, it’s so much sexuality, violence, commercialism, won’t I just be adding to the problem? How can you study this as literature?
B: The commercialization of hip-hop is perhaps one of the biggest topics of conversation within hip-hop, and not by accident. A better example of commercial exploitation you will not find than slavery – and I promise you, the descendents of the enslaved are themselves quite able to interrogate consumerism, even if you may not always see that from the outside looking in. In fact, nearly every poetic device you can find in Homer (and therefore in Virgil), you can find in Cardi B, and for similar reasons. Henry Louis Gates, again, not a marginal scholar my any means – in his book, The Signifying Monkey, explores the ironic and historical contd ts of all of this, hip hop’s rhetorical strategies – even in and then that sexuality and violence – are devices of construction, constitutive of meaning, not commercialistic flourishes or decoration.
E: [rolls eyes] We’re going to read Kinfolk, and also I have taught the novels of Gina Lewiston before they were also banned. I have nothing but respect for those books and the tradition they come from. But hip-hop, that’s not literature. Cardi B had an onlyfans for god’s sake!
B: And yet you were okay with “The Butcher’s Tale.” What did you tell us about the “tail”/ “tale” double entendre? How when he was interrupted by his wife as he was “laying out the sausage” into long segments made of “tail”…
E: So you were listening.
B: I was, but did you really think we’d have a conversation about that with you in class?
E: But I – the thing with Lewiston, what she’s got that Cardi B lacks — there’s a gravitas, a complexity, a literary-ness. She can write books, in fact, it seems demeaning, even racist, to say that somehow hip-hop should be put on that same level… And its authors are hardly illiterate. This feels like cultural pandering.
B: Have you actually studied hip-hop? And yes, they are literate. This was the qualification I mentioned before. Hip-hop is hybrid – written and oral. Some rappers write down their lyrics, some don’t; some use tropes from years ago, others compose new stretches. They allude both to other hip-hop, to pop culture and to books generated by print culture. Especially from the vast tradition of Black literature of which Lewiston in your classroom represents the entirety of.
E: No – It’s not literature.
B: Even after it’s composed, performed and recorded, are not its lyrics written down? Have you visited genius.com? And have you noticed the role music plays in Lewiston’s works? Or August Wilson’s? In the African American tradition, what you’re calling “music” and “literature” are coproductive and it would be really one sided if you insist on centering only one of the two.
E: I see, like the Odyssey – lyrics written down from an oral tradition.
B: So if we’re allowed to study the Odyssey, we ought to be allowed to study those lyrics as well – which, I assure you, are every bit as dense, complicated and yes – ribald – as anything else on your syllabus. We need to listen to the music to fully understand their circumstances of composition.
E: I am okay with analyzing the lyrics as a poem, but I expect it will pale in comparison to Ode on a Grecian Urn or a Shakespearean Sonnet.
B: Funny you bring him up. He didn’t “write” the folio (it was published after he died and reconstructed from actor’s recollections, which likely included their own free-stylings in addition to whatever contributions he had made as an author), he didn’t intend it for reading but performance. I remember when we read Shakespeare you made these points and encouraged us to build them into our analyses.
E: That is true. But Shakespeare is just… Shakespeare.
B: And Kendrick is just… Kendrick. That doesn’t in itself prove anything. You’re expressing an awe for the complexity and intricacy of his poetry, right? I get it. I just don’t think it’s unique to him. And part of what you’re appreciating is that context or reception – that Elizabethan media universe. That appeal he makes to multiple audiences simultaneously, that mixture of sacred and profane. It’s all there in hip-hop, I promise you.
E: I suppose we can include hip-hop, IF (and it’s a BIG IF, let me tell you, young man) it’s as complex and intricate as you say.
B: You will not be disappointed. That excitement you have for Shakespeare’s verbal dexterity? Hip-hop really can do that for you, and it already does that for your students.
E: And I suppose all the other props you began this story obviously setting forth – the bouncing-Maggie video game, the Itchy and Scratchy Show shorts, even the lewd drawings in the margins of Tedious Times.
B: Yes, we can make a similar argument. They’re all hybrid. So also are the other novels you’re so sure rest on one side of the line. Each in different ways and to different degrees but, once we accept the central hybridity of oral-and-print culture, and for that matter visual, film and televisual culture, this class can become something bigger and better.
E: How am I supposed to keep up with all of that? Don’t you think students will get lost? I’m pretty good at teaching them to analyze poems and prose. I don’t have that for hip hop, for video games, or any other media types.
B: I think once you accept that these are all rich texts for analysis, you will also discover they’re texts about which your students know a lot about as far as media form is concerned as well. You don’t need to keep track of this- you don’t need the level of scaffolding you may think you do. Let your students guide it. Ask them. Once you give up the gatekeeping and perceived necessity for a certain type of written text, you can discover the complexities inherent in so many more media forms. But you have to be able to step outside the deficit model and to be honest, a culture of racism, literary elitism and anti-youth and new-media bias, and see those things as worthy of study. That’s less about any definition of literature and more just about prejudice and lack of knowledge. Remember those stuffy men in Jane Austen who think novels are destroying young lady’s minds, and what they “really” need to study is history and philosophy? Jane Austen’s performance contests all that itself – and so does Cardi B’s, and so does Kendrick Lamar’s, mutandis mutatis. See, ablative absolute.
E: Even if I accept what you’re saying and let kids write about that on Q3, the AP exam includes texts in the narrow sense, in Q1 and Q2 anyway. Aren’t I setting kids up for failure if I lower the standard and allow anything?
B: What do you mean “let”? – nevermind. But again, it’s not a lower standard, even it’s a wider one. The expectation of complex and incisive analysis doesn’t get any lower. We still need to talk about that part. Kids will work hard to analyze these other text types as literature. And I think you may be placing more emphasis on “text types” as distinct tasks of interpretation than they really are.
E: Call me old school but different types of things are analyzed in different ways. I don’t want kids to show up the day of the exam and see a poem and treat it like a song.
B: On that point, I’m not sure if it’s illegal for me to say but Max Adorno once wrote that the fundamental task of criticism is “to treat all images as writing.” By which I think he means not that print culture is central, and the other peripheral, but that everything has its own language of argument – its own kind of “writing.” We may just have to agree to disagree but I think students who can say “if I can analyze a movie I can analyze a novel” will do better analyzing both than ones who believe each “text type” is a different isolated problem to solve.
E: I want my test scores to stay high.
B: Is that your only goal?
E: It may be my district’s only goal.
B: I hear you, my parents’ too. Even if that’s your goal though. I think kids whose media contexts are validated as previous knowledge seem more likely to master unfamiliar types than ones who are looked down upon as less than capable of “serious analysis.”
E: I just don’t believe those media contexts or my students’ capabilities ARE what you say they are.
B: If that’s the case, it may not matter what they study. If you see them and their works as less than, as James Baldwin said, “A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him.” I’d say the same about that child’s media. And what Baldwin is saying is specific about Black children – they are especially likely to be despised for their linguistic and cultural proficiency, an ready for their proficiencies to be denigrated rather than celebrated. “That’s not literature” is something they’ve heard before, even if in other words.
E: I don’t despise my students. I want to hold them to high standards.
B: At the risk of starting over, what’s so “high” about the traditional canon? Plus, like it or not, the world your students are entering is a world that, aside from test prep considerations, you should be helping us to navigate. Music, movies, television – these are things we spend a long time with. Why set that aside and demonize it? Why not see it as a resource for your classroom, AND something you want to help us understand when we leave here? Of course there is bad television, bad music, bad film – but like we said before about novels – there are bad ones and of course, there will be edge cases. It’s no bigger of a problem for any particular media type than any others.
E: And the obscene annotations of yours? Are those writing in Adorno’s sense too? Am I allowed to despise them?
B: Well, we’re only halfway through – we still need to talk about COM-position!
E: Maybe another time Bartocrates, my planning period is nearly over, and I imagine you need a pass.
B: Nope, I can talk my way into class. [yes, that’s foreshadowing].
Original Positions 