Just As I'd Kind of Maybe Suspected

After my previous post, I wrote a survey. I love literary fiction but what about my classmates?

I was curious to see if the heavy push of literary fiction permeated into their pleasure reading. The results were interesting if not predictable. Before I get to those, here are the questions:

"What genre of literature do you most often read in English classes?

What were the last three books (novels, short story collections, etc.) you read for class?

What genre of literature do you most often read for pleasure?

How have required readings influenced your reading tastes outside the classroom?

Have you ever sought the work of an author you discovered in class?"


Short and telling (I think). Any readers interested can find it here.


The Results:


My fifteen responders said they most often read literary fiction (novels and short story collections) with emphasis on personal narrative and realism. One said they took mostly science fiction courses, one said non-fiction.

The wonderful thing about university English as opposed to high school English is the variety of classes. In high school we're taught towards the canon--the list of authors I mentioned in my previous post. Hemingway, Twain, Fitzgerald, Melville, Hawthorne, Salinger. But at university, one can choose classes on a multitude of genres. For example, you might find yourself studying the mystery novel, the graphic novel, or even German fairytales.

While it may seem that this point contradicts the idea of literary fiction as the superior, I mention it only to preface the variety of literature I discovered in my survey. Also, these courses are mostly electives, not required.

In no particular order, here is the assortment of books my classmates have been reading for class:

 (A Visit From the Goon Squad - Literary Fiction, Time's Arrow - Literary Fiction, Vintage Munro - Nobel Prize Winning Literary Fiction, Cotton Comes to Harlem - Hardboiled Crime Fiction, All Aunt Hagar's Children - Literary Fiction, Super Sad True Love Story - Literary Fiction, The Things They Carried - Literary Fiction, Knockemstiff - Literary Fiction, Tragedy of Othello - Drama, "The Lottery" - Mystery/Horror, Cruddy - Grotesque Graphic Novel, Human Stain - Literary Fiction, The Woman Warrior - Memoir, The Mezzanine - Literary Fiction, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Fantasy, Red Harvest - Crime Fiction, Abbott Await - Literary Fiction, Ham on Rye - Semi-Autobiography (This doesn't represent all of the books because as this came from only two different English classes, they all had a few books in common.))

Of the eighteen listed:

Literary Fiction -  10
Crime Fiction - 2
Drama - 1
Memoir - 1
Fantasy - 1
Semi-Autobiography - 1
Graphic Novel - 1
Mystery/Horror - 1


Can you see the direction in which we are pushed? If not, blue pill.


With that in mind, here is the list of genres read outside of class (in the order and frequency in which they appeared in the survey):

-Science Fiction/Post-Modern Noir
-Historical Native-American/African-American Slavery Fiction/African-American Romance Drama
-Historical Fiction
-The news
-Science Fiction/horror/fantasy
-Literary Fiction/"whatever grabs my attention"
-Fantasy/Dystopian Fiction
-Fantasy/Science Fiction
-Fantasy/Short Stories
-Graphic Novels/Comic books/Vogue
-Mythology/Fantasy
-Fantasy/Science Fiction
-Romance/Historical Fiction/Romance Suspense
-Non-fiction/Short Stories
-Fantasy/Science Fiction



Red Pill

Okay, so maybe not as harsh as that. But if professors think that students are leaving Forms of Fiction class, meeting their friends at the Highland Coffee House, ordering espressos all around, and discussing the "I'll go to hell" speech in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a blue pill might be what they're taking.

I can admit I was a little surprised to see literary fiction turn up only once as the preferred genre. But this survey also yielded only fifteen responses. I have to believe that were I to get fifty instead, literary fiction might appear at least once or twice more.

What didn't surprise me was the strong presence of Fantasy/Science fiction. Having been in three creative writing courses, I can say that from my experience, there are more students interested in writing this type of fiction as opposed to the literary realism. Maybe the dragon fighting an astronaut on a newly discovered ice planet is much more enticing than the middle aged divorcee having a three-quarter life crisis in a Pennsylvania Walmart. But I digress.

When I asked about the influence of required reading on pleasure reading here's what I got:

"...it definitely widened my range..."

"...I kinda just want to read the opposite of whatever I'm reading in class..."

"...It exposed me to more realistic worlds. Made me consider reality."

"I have generally not noticed an major influence of what I choose to read for pleasure."

"...it has essentially created my taste in literature...I'm kind of a snob."

"Introduced me to books I've enjoyed but would never have chosen to read."

"...after reading so many [realism novels] for class I am tired of reading about ordinary life and I want something that has real life issues in a more creative world."


Once again, neither conclusive nor random. Students either rebel for the sake of rebellion and boredom or consider prospect of realism. While some see required reading as simply a to-do list, others see it as a way to broaden horizons. That the students of my survey largely choose to read Fantasy/Dystopia/Science Fiction after describing the ways literary fiction has "widened their range", is a little suspect. I suspect a poorly worded survey.

At the end of it, all my responders (with the exception of two sorry individuals) had at least one author with whom they'd discovered in class and sought outside the classroom. I'd like to put some of their pictures here because even sometimes I forget that real people with red blood and mothers and body image issues write these book that we all love.

Sylvia Plath

Edgar Allen Poe

Charles Bukowski 

Donald Ray Pollock

Jane Austen

William Shakespeare

Ray Bradbury

Flannery O'Connor

Ernest Hemingway

Kurt Vonnegut

In the end, I find that my love for literary fiction might be an uncommon one considering my relatively new introduction to the genre. And even though uncommon, it is vital to me nonetheless. My favorite moment in any story is when an unforeseen surprise becomes essential when looking back. When I look back on my own story, I see this moment as not a length of time but the pages of many books. A world opened up. 

If nothing else, this has taught me that the possibility of this moment occurring in one of my classmates is not just likely, but very probable. Instead of Flannery O'Connor and William Trevor though, it was Neil Gaiman and Stephen King or J.K Rowling and Suzanne Collins. Whether these moments occurred in school, I can not say. The results of my survey would say no. However, there is a distinct possibility that, by a strange chain of events and recommendations and surprise findings in dusty book stores, anyone genre of literature can lead in any direction. This direction depends upon the honesty and magic of words revealing something new and true. 

And with this, I leave on the words of William Faulkner: "Read, read, read. Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master...If it's good, you'll find out. It it's not, throw it out of the window."

--KRS

Why the HELL did we read THAT?

 I love literary fiction and I'm not ashamed to say it.

Hemingway, Melville, Hawthorne, Greene, Twain, Fitzgerald, Salinger, McCarthy, O'Connor, Trevor, Cheever, Munro, and Joyce forever and ever.

They make sense to me. The depth and heaviness and skill and wit and poignancy astound me. 

When Nick Carraway becomes paralyzed in Tom and Myrtle's apartment by the "inexhaustible variety of life," I want to cry.

When the Misfit says, "she would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," I can almost feel the three bullet holes in my chest.

My relationship now with literature is deep and enriching and vitalizing.

However, it wasn't always that way.

 In high school I was a punk that you probably hated. I didn't read the books. I rarely even used SparkNotes. My super power was to randomly pick a page and find a vague quote that sounded complicated to slap onto essays and the other--arguably more important--was that I could bullshit my way through pretty much anything. 

Regardless of never having read Frankenstein, or To Kill a Mockingbird, I often found myself asking, "Why the hell did we read that?"

Did I have the right to ask? No.

Did I do it anyway? Yes.

What did it have to offer me? It's just a book. As my dear friend Beau Spicer would say back in those days, "It's just lies, dude."

Fortunately for me, something changed.

I took a creative writing class on a whim. I was a Spanish major but writing I loved. Reading was a drag. Or so I thought, until I was required to read Flannery O'Connor's stories. One in particular, "A Good Man is Hard to Find", changed the way I thought about literature. In a moment of clarity, I saw that in order to write my best, I had to read the best. I felt ashamed for ignorantly denying all the rich and powerful books in previous years.

So I started with the ones I'd missed during my punk highschooler days. I needed to make up for lost time.

The Great Gatsby, The Scarlett Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I found that when you give yourself to them, they open up to you in ways you can't imagine. Especially with a newfound sense of maturity and perspective.

I even began to find the ways in which these intellectual, literary books were informing my writing. I saw immediate improvement in the quality of my stories. Something good had clicked.

So with an insatiable hunger for all things literary fiction, I noted every book recommendation form professors, classmates, literary journals, friends, and best-of lists in search of the next book to add to my perspective and feed me the magic of a damn good story.

And all of this self-reflection got me wondering...

What have these required books done for my classmates? 

Were they inspired to follow the direction in which we've been pushed as English students?

Are they enamored with literary fiction as I am?

                         Do my English classmates still ask, "Why the hell did we read that?"

              

                                                                    Comment below.

                                                                            --KRS