Bruce Fleming: “Leaving Literature”

“My students at the U.S. Naval Academy, for example, mostly male and conservative, scream bloody murder if, as I sometimes do, I ask them to read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as part of our introductory course. (Tenured full professors teach freshmen here at Navy.) They come to class the first day — they’ve read up through Emma’s disenchantment with her boring husband, Charles — incensed.

(I saw this article in The Chronical of Higher Education via Arts and Letters Daily. I had the same initial reaction to Madame Bovary – well, not incensed, exactly, but extremely irritated with her foolish behavior.)

And normblog has this to say about the article here: “So, I’m all for literature as a vehicle of learning about life, whether in the one sense or the other, but with the qualification that there can be very well-read folk who are… er, swines. But there’s something else which Fleming touches on in passing but to which he gives too little space. ‘Love of reading’, he says, ‘was… what got most of us into this business to begin with.’ That’s just it: love of reading. Probably you’ll learn – and if you love reading, it’s hard to think you won’t – or maybe you won’t learn that much. But the enjoyment of literature is at the core of why people read it, and any way of teaching literature that kills this is letting down the people being taught.”