English as Math, What Were they Thinking?

Think back to your most frightening memory from middle school. Was it getting bullied on the playground? Was it dissecting a frog? Was it being asked if two trains left stations X and Y travelling at speeds A and B on the same track, what time would they collide and kill all the passengers on board? Maybe your math teacher was sadistic and added in that the trains picked up three times the number of passengers that got off at the last station, etc. Now, you are left not only deciding when these people will die, but what the death toll is.

Whatever your answer, I'll bet if you went to school in the 80's, at least one of you said sentence diagrams. If you didn't, would you like to change your answer? Looking back we might ask ourselves why we did this. What did that teach us about our language?

Literature is Dying, Literary Theory is the Cure.

You don't hear much about it any more, but people used to wonder--say five years ago--whether technology was destroying our ability to think critically. More recently, we might ask whether the novel is dead. The best-selling genres today are the relatively shallow story plots of "romance novels" and young adult fiction. Henry James would go unread today, because one does not simply read Henry James. One must re-read Henry James before he can be understood, and read a third time before we know why he wrote this. Modern readers are apt to miss the fact that The Great Gatsby is a homosexual novel because they read it too literally. (Some critics note that though Gatsby is in love with Daisy, Nick's infatuation with Gatsby borders on homoeroticism.) Biographer, writer, and teacher Emily Toth noted that students often ask if Robert  Lebrun in The Awakening is homosexual (because Edna asks her husband if Robert was "gay" when they met), and are confused whether Robert and Edna or Alcee and Edna "did it" because the answers are hidden in euphemisms. Literal reading makes Twain into a racist, and has led to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn's banning in schools (though it certainly isn't a book for children).