I’m sure it has been noted before, but Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007) makes a persuasive defense of literary instruction. The goal, she writes, is to transform fluent readers into expert readers:
If a common letter pattern or a word like “bear” appears to an expert reader, it will trigger its own network, rather than individually activating the large number of unrelated individual cells responsible for the lines, diagonals, and circles within its letters. This operating principle is the working example of the biological maxim “Cells that fire together stay together,” and is the brain’s basic tool for creating ever larger circuits that connect cell assemblies into a system of networks distributed across the entire brain. (146.)
The more networks the reader has, the more quickly s/he can read a text. More importantly, synaptic networks make the reading process more efficient, saving brain space for higher-order intellectual work—inference, analysis, critical evaluation, and the other skills we are desperate to teach our students and to practice ourselves.
If the goal is to make expert readers, literature has two advantages over other sources—online or professional, say. First, literary writing is with few exceptions richer in analytical and inferential material than other kinds of writing. Second, literary writing promotes sympathetic reading in a way that other kinds of writing often cannot.
Those two advantages are topics Wolf discusses, but there is a third that I think her review implies: literary writing rewards and often requires rereading, which I would assume would make a reader more expert.
I can’t help but wonder if we should use some of those valuable hours at the beginning of an intro lit course reviewing the science of reading. If that class is the last literature course a student ever takes, oughtn’t it make a strong case for the medical and ethical value of reading?
