ABSTRACT
For scholars and teachers of literature in the United States, disturbing trends within the American education system are instilling a new urgency into old critical debates about the value of fiction, poetry, drama, and other forms of creative writing for the intellectual and moral development of their audiences. At American public universities, and atmany private schools across the country as well, institutional support for the humanities has been shrinking over the past several decades as increasingly scarce resources are routed toward disciplines that appear to have more immediate economic and social benefits. Seeking justifications for downsizing and eliminating programs focusing on literature, culture, and the arts, upper-level university administrators turn to the results of assessment protocols that typically apply the same criteria to research and teaching in all disciplines, putting the humanities at a disadvantage in comparison with the more “productive” social and natural sciences.1
Although the study of literature may appear to have a more secure position in American primary and secondary public schools, where it remains a key component of the language-arts curriculum, the same narrow pragmatism and the emphasis on quantifiable outcomes are reflected in a new set of curriculum recommendations, the Common Core State Standards, which were introduced in 2010 and have been adopted by public school systems in an overwhelming majority of the states.2 The Common Core prescribes an approach to literary analysis that relies heavily on a text-immanent orientation to literary analysis reminiscent of the American New Criticism, encourages the absorption and measurably “correct” application of critical terminology, and privileges “informational” non-fiction over novels, short stories, poems, and dramas. Critics allege that a pedagogy founded on Common Core recommendations reduces the encounter with intellectually, emotionally, and ethically challenging texts to one among many learning routines designed to prepare students for the tightly circumscribed demands of state-mandated standardized testing rather than for the complex challenges of social life.3
