Going all the way back to Plato, people have seen literature as a life-changing force, sometimes functioning as social dynamite, sometimes as a bulwark against barbarism. Better Living through Literature surveys the great debates, from the early philosophers to Jane Austen and Percy Shelley to contemporary battles over multiculturalism and book bans. In the process, it shares dozens of compelling accounts of poems, plays, and stories transforming lives.
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Only someone as knowledgeable about both literature and the human condition as Dr. Bates could write such thought-provoking and inspiring essays. Both personal and political, this book will change not only the way you respond to literature, but the way you respond to the world and its troubles. Highly recommended!
— Lauren B. Davis, author of Our Daily Bread, Even So, The Stubborn Season, and The Empty Room
This ground-breaking reassessment of imaginative literature across centuries and genres is capacious, inspiring, and persuasively rendered, a must-read for anyone who cares about literature’s power to change things for the better—and cares about teaching others to care.
–Dr. John Gatta, author of Making Nature Sacred and Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture
As we search for ways to create a better future, this thorough, thoughtful survey is recommended for all who believe in the power of reading to make a difference.
–Lory Widmer Hess, author of When Fragments Make a Whole
In this compelling, clearly written book, both scholarly and deeply personal, Robin Bates uses theoretical frameworks and personal examples to show how our interactions with works of literature shape our individual identities. Contending that engaged reading pushes us to reconsider the values and perspectives of our communities, he describes how reflective explorations of literary texts help us make sense of our individual and collective worlds while educating us to be better citizens in our own homes and in the global community. Better Living through Literature is a love-song to “the best books” and to their power to change lives and, sometimes, history itself. –Dr. Lois T. Stover, author of Young Adult Literature: The Heart of the Middle School Curriculum and Portrait of the Artist as Young Adult
This is a terrific read! I thought I might just dip in here and there, flipping it open to the passages about Horace and then to the chapter on W.E.B. Du Bois, but the writing was so compelling that I soon gave the book the attention it deserves and started from the beginning. I’m glad I did because the Introduction is one of the most elegant and eloquent arguments for reading—and for thinking about what we read—that has ever been written. Professor Bates is the consummate teacher as he walks with us through great literature and introduces us to great thinkers. He puts it all in context. And not just in literary or historical context, but in the context of our lives as humans. Bates makes a strong case for reading as transformative…. His book itself will transform readers’ ways of thinking about reading. He shows us how to use what we read to make connections and to make sense of our own lives and times.
–Dr. Valerie Hotchkiss, Azariah S. Root Director of Oberlin College Libraries
With boundless and infectious enthusiasm, Robin Bates takes us on an exhilarating ride through 2500 years of theorizing about and enjoying literature. Better Living through Literature contains worlds. It moves from Plato to Harari, from Du Bois to Brecht, from book bans and burnings to neuroscience and how the brain lights up as we read. Bates offers heartfelt and humane thoughts on how literature genuinely shapes lives. There’s no cant and he always keeps literature in view. You come away wanting to read more and more.
–Dr. Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana, author of Canadian Hockey Literature
FROM THE BOOK:
Without weighing in on the political merits of any of these attacks, it’s worth noting that they all assume that literature can have a significant influence on readers’ lives. Some adults, either because they genuinely fear such viewpoints or because they wish to avoid controversy, confine children to anodyne stories and poems rather than have them read works that touch on pressing issues of the day.
It’s not only contemporary works that raise controversial concerns, however. Although Shakespeare generally flies under the radar of conservative parents (with the exception of a Florida school district), that’s in part because many teachers fail to unleash his full potential to challenge various assumptions. If they did, the Bard might well join Morrison on banned book lists….
Imagine Twelfth Night: or What You Will (1601-02) being taught in such a way as to foreground its strong gender identity themes, which fascinate young people struggling to make sense of who they are. In the comedy, we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity. If teachers did more to advertise the play as a chance to explore gender identity, inviting students to explore their feelings about each of these characters, they could well generate new excitement amongst students, including some who would otherwise groan over a Shakespeare reading assignment.
Consider also a Shakespeare play that is often taught to high school juniors and seniors. While Othello may appear safe, it contains social dynamite, dealing directly with issues of race and interracial marriage that will challenge rightwing parents and perhaps some liberal parents as well. English teachers could generate powerful conversations if they taught Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello more intentionally as a case study in both White resentment (Iago) and Black insecurity (Othello). In expressing his hatred for Othello, Iago traffics in racist stereotypes of Black men as beasts threatening “the purity of White womanhood” (“an old black ram is tupping your white ewe,” he informs Desdemona’s father). At the same time, we see in Othello a status-conscious Black man who, while meritorious, desperately desires acceptance by his White peers, which helps explain why Iago can manipulate him so easily. Othello is both proud of having married a White wife (it’s a sign that he’s arrived) and insecure in the relationship (surely she must prefer a White man). These types of ambiguities are typical of real-life struggles, and the play’s failure to find a satisfactory solution to them renders the story tragic. Black and White teens, who are coming of age in a society where these issues continue to swirl around us, will appreciate how the play provides compelling characters and a narrative that foreground their anxieties. Literature discussions could become life discussions.
One can understand why teachers might shy away from teaching Shakespeare this way. Who needs to add angry parents and (in Florida) the threat of lawsuits to an already long and overwhelming list of responsibilities? Why detonate a literary bomb in the classroom? It’s a version of the choice African American poet Langston Hughes once described when his poetry became more political. “I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such,” Hughes writes in “My Adventures as a Social Poet.” “But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police.”
Unfortunately, when English teachers play it safe, they risk underplaying literature’s fierce urgency and its ability to speak directly to our life struggles. Taming literature down to a boring irrelevancy leaves its potential untapped. Students go unchallenged in ways that could lead to real and exhilarating growth.
This is why it’s useful to acquaint ourselves with stories of literature stepping up to the plate during tough times, often in the most unexpected of ways. Who could have predicted a Somali political prisoner falling in love with Anna Karenina or a kidnapped Pakistani girl turning to Little Women? Who could foresee Iranian women, banished from universities by fundamentalist mullahs, recognizing themselves in the character of Vladimir Nabokov’s Dolores Haze? (In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi reports that her students related to how Dolores is trapped in an older man’s fantasies.)
And then there are the South African freedom fighters who, when imprisoned by the apartheid regime, found purchase in the words of various Shakespeare characters. Nelson Mandela responded to Julius Caesar’s “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once”; his confidant Walter Sisulu saw himself in Shylock: “Still have I borne it with a patient shrug / For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”; and future Parliament member Billy Nair saw a kindred soul in Caliban: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak’st from me.” Why limit literature instruction to rhyme and meter when you could be preparing your students for life? When I come across stories of people attacking and sometimes banning works of literature, I think of a scene from the Lawrence Kasdan film Grand Canyon (1991). Danny Glover, in the role of auto mechanic, is confronted by a gun-wielding gang leader while attempting to help stranded motorist Kevin Kline. Asked by the man whether he respects him or not, Glover replies, “You ain’t got the gun, we ain’t having this conversation.” These contentious conversations about literature are happening because literature wields the power of a loaded gun.
