On Being Literate

Auden's impossibly magnificent syllabus, Frankenstein's creature's induction through literature, and the humans we are fashioning without the story of their own humanity

W.H. Auden, poet & syllabus god

Every few months a post circulates featuring W. H. Auden’s syllabus for a course he taught at the University of Michigan in 1941 called “Fate and the Individual in European Literature.” Take a look at this colossus!

It’s a stout list, to be sure, topping off at nearly 6,000 pages, and that’s not including the “Recommended Critical Reading” portion at the bottom. You could take this syllabus and turn yourself into a highly literate person in our own time. I’d guess that reading these works would place you in the top 1% of all adults in the United States.

Over the course of my own lifetime, I’ve read most of these works, but suffice it to say I did not accomplish this feat between Labor Day and Christmas of my junior year in college! I would also suspect that this syllabus put together by the great 20th century literary giant was an outlier even within his highly literate milieu, and the much more elite era of higher education he was operating within. I think it is fair to say that standards have fallen. A broad immersion in “the classics” has not been de rigueur for quite some time, and it appears as if the erosion has been nearly complete. I have written about professors at Ivy League colleges bemoaning the fact that their students can’t read whole books, and the down stream effects of this on human flourishing:

The anecdotal evidence I get from my former students who come back to visit validates this basic truth: we are becoming much less literate with each passing year, even amongst our elite institutions. I know what my students have been put through here at the Abbey, and almost all of their peers have had nothing like it. Auden’s syllabus would be laughed out of the seminar room, with teachers proclaiming: “You can’t expect college students to read that much! They’ll just read the Spark Notes! They’ll just Grok the whole thing!”

And they are probably right. They will just Grok or Chat the whole dang thing, and if they are savvy enough, they’ll Grok or Chat all the writing prompts and massage them in to passable assignments. I have to be honest with you, the horizon looks quite bleak for a teacher like me who has devoted his professional life to the teaching and sharing of literature, philosophy, history, and theology. What if the students just simply refuse to do the real work of reading for understanding? What if the tide is too strong to fight against? What happens when we human beings no longer see the value of becoming a literate person?

And further, what does it even mean to be a literate person? What is the standard for judgment, and how much has it changed in my own lifetime?

Even the very words “literate” and “literacy” have been fought over. A minimalist approach might suggest that if a person can scan words and letters and order food or read instructions, you pass the test. There are a whole other group of people who use “literacy” to mean something quite a bit more akin to political activism and social transformation. You can read about these efforts to “increase adult literacy” through a variety of outfits, including The National Council of Teachers of English. But this is more about activism than “literacy”. It’s more catechism than deep learning.

To be literate, to be an educated person, once meant something akin to being widely read, with a firm foundation in “classics” stretching back to ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the lived world of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In the mid-century, it meant an additional familiarity with Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy (etc)…in other words, Auden’s (incomplete) list of greats. In addition to these primary sources, knowing big-think critical works like Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and others. In other words, there was a tradition of people writing and thinking and reading together, a kind of “perennial conversation” which indicated a kind of implicit “college”, both implicit and explicit, seen and unseen. To be “college educated” meant you had been put through the paces with someone who had a deep familiarity and engagement with this living tradition. You had been invited into the sanctum of higher learning. You, the student, were being oriented and inducted into a mode of being.

We are on the verge of losing this broader and more generative notion of literacy. Our universities no longer “select” on the basis of foundations, or a knowledge base, or even competency in disciplines. They select for something more akin to horse power, usually. There are a variety of different ways to game the system and gain access to these high status places, all playing the great guessing game with the great black box of college admissions. But you no longer have to have read a whole book to get into a place like Columbia. Just listen to a few professors bemoaning this fact here.

Now technically speaking these very bright young people are “literate” in so far as they can read English words. But what about this deeper sense? What about being conversant with the longstanding currents of thought that have occasioned the creation and perfection of language itself? What about the stories, philosophies, articulations of our deepest portrayals of our shared humanity? When Frankenstein’s creature hears the exchange of language for the first time, he is gobsmacked, declaring it to be “a godlike science!” It becomes the first step in his acquisition of insight into his own consciousness. The mentoring in and through language affords him access to some classic works, including Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.