Photos: Vintage Classics, Picador, Signet Classics, Penguin Classics, Penguin Classics, Harper Perennial
Wisdom, like the pursuit of truth more generally, demands hard work.
By way of a conclusion to this study, I would turn to two very real threats to the project of teaching for wisdom through literature today. This post addresses what many have seen as the increasing reluctance of students to read longer fiction. The following posts examines how generative AI threatens the process of wrestling with the complexities of a literary text. Rather than see these threats as indicative of students’ growing tendency to shirk hard work—an all-too-common assumption—I will argue that neither necessarily precludes the hard work that sustains the project of reading literature for a wiser world.
Shortly after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Columbia University scholar Mark Lilla published an op-ed in The New York Times previewing his forthcoming book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. The piece begins as follows:
Aristotle taught us that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so. This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods.
Increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the machinations of power. Others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning, like a draft deferment. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize ‘the people’ and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.
Although much of Lilla’s unease here is clearly directed at the MAGAverse, his point is effectively broader and still applicable to its critics. “Given how rapidly everything changes in life today,” he asks, “doesn’t it often feel better to rest on our intellectual and moral laurels? Why seek truth if truth will require us to do the hard work of rethinking what we already know?” Or to put the point in the terms with which I began this study, those of us who bridle at the stunning unwisdom of “preposterous prophets” like Donald Trump or “elite prophets of ignorance” like J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley must take care not to fall into the unwisdom (albeit hardly commensurate) of resisting “the hard work of rethinking what we already know.”
Wisdom, like the pursuit of truth as Lilla understands it, demands hard work. Longer novels are particularly valuable to the project of teaching for wisdom because they depict characters struggling to overcome their prior misunderstandings and challenge their readers to do the same.
Photo: Pride and Prejudice, dir. Joe Wright
For at least the past two decades, however, those of us who teach literature at the university level have grappled with a growing disinclination among our students to engage with long-form literary texts. A colleague in the University of California system who specializes in Victorian literature—surely a high point in the history of long-form fiction—recently confided in me that she now teaches the period almost exclusively through shorter works.
Journalist Rose Horowitch has published a pair of articles aiming to document this trend at several elite universities. It is not that students at schools like Columbia and Berkeley no longer work hard, she suggests. The sheer volume of their internships, work study commitments, extra-curricular activities, and (I would add) start-ups launched clearly suggests otherwise (“Gen Z”). Rather, the teaching of longer novels has suffered due to the conjoined effect of three mutually-reinforcing developments: students’ (and parents’) increasing expectation that the primary purpose of college is to land a good job; the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and other agents of distraction; and—less obvious but no less significant—the ways in which the pressures of standardized testing through initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Common Core have led middle- and high-school teachers to teach from shorter informational passages rather than entire books (“Elite College Students”).
Not so long ago, it was common to ask undergraduate students to read a long novel—say, Eliot’s Middlemarch or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain—in two to three weeks. Moving at that pace allowed us, as faculty, to work through our readings of key texts (often in anticipation of future publication) and to feel confident that, at term’s end, we had adequately covered a given genre or period. Of course, many of our students never finished these texts. Others read them quite cursorily. Teaching shorter works allows us to analyze texts more rigorously and hold to more stringent expectations for completion. Longer novels remain critical to wisdom-forward pedagogy, however, inasmuch as they allow us as readers to follow their characters’ developmental arc and experience their successes and setbacks, often through immersion in the values, struggles, and history of other cultures or ways of life. The best way to hack this dilemma, as I see it, is to balance the teaching of reasonably long novels—think Beloved or The Left Hand of Darkness—with notably rich shorter texts—say, Hamilton or Sans soleil—especially those that demand a slower, more recursive style of reading.
