Think you know how to read, do you?

A new throng of authors wants to save literature from our nefarious English departments and teach us how to read their way. Now, class, pay attention.

By Tom Lutz

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March 8, 2007 | I am surprised that I am not a novelist. I am an inveterate liar, so I have at least one of the necessary skills. I love the novel as a form in as deep and devoted a way as any man loved any art, and writing novels is the only thing in the way of a life's work that I've ever really wanted to undertake. Still, I remain novel-less.

I have Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson to blame for my early misdirected energies. They encouraged me to believe that the essence of writing was the wild life that preceded it, to believe that I was doing the better part, and the most important part, of novel-writing by imitating them not on the page, but in the bars and on the highways. I realize now this was an error in judgment.

So, too, was my decision to get a Ph.D. in literature as a step toward the nice cushy professorship that would allow me to lay back and watch myself write novel after novel, with perhaps a collection of stories here and there. The graduate work and academic gigs that followed meant that I had to teach and write a bunch of other things, those publish-or-perish scholarly books and the requisite pile of articles full of words like "overdetermination," "supplementarity," "hybridity," "imbrication" and "polyvocality," words that produced the squiggly red underlines of my spell-checker and earned me the enmity of the very novelists and poets I wanted to join.

Francine Prose, for instance. In her latest book, "Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them," Prose rails against the FemiMarxiDecons in English departments that are destroying literature and everything holy. Students, she writes, are now discouraged from loving novels and instead are "instructed to prosecute or defend ... authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers' origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds." Prose went to graduate school in literature herself briefly, she tells us, probably with the same idea I had, but she quickly bolted. She found that most of the teachers and students didn't share her love of books; it was hard, she writes, "to understand what they did love." And that was before the real fall, when "literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading 'texts' in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written."

Prose is one of a new throng of authors bent on correcting this sad state of affairs, this horrible split between the writers and the critics that has riven every college and university in the country. Over the past 15 years, I taught an average of a semester a year at the University of Iowa, the home of the famous Writers' Workshop. When I started the writers were on the fourth floor and the critics on the third. I often had a Workshop student or two in my graduate courses, and I would bring the creative writing faculty in to meet my undergrads. By the time I left two years ago, that had long ceased. A durable and unbreachable wall had been erected between the writers and the scholars. They looked at each other not as allies in a common project, but as enemies. Now the Workshop has moved across campus and the divorce is final.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say I have since gone over to the other side myself and teach in a creative writing program. But I still don't understand, frankly, why people hate literary scholars for having a professional vocabulary while remaining perfectly content with economists' using "devaluation" or philosophers' using "existentialist," or physicists' talking about a "projective Hilbert space endowed with the Fubini-Study metric." These days even Tucker Carlson uses "deconstruct" and George W. Bush has developed quite a fondness for "ideology," which half my dissertation committee rejected as jargon. So what's the big deal? Have there been excesses of obscurantism and pomposity? Yes, but as our literary writers have long known, from Laurence Sterne to Herman Melville to James Joyce to William Vollmann, sometimes nothing succeeds like excess.

What the writers always insisted was that people are better off reading Tolstoy than some yahoo from the University of Akron deconstructing Tolstoy, and who would disagree with that? Whoever it is, they seem to need a lot of convincing, because scads of authors have published books advising them to beware the snobs and schoolmarms in academia and look at "the text itself." The "how-to-read" genre is venerable, already well under way when Noah Porter published "Books and Reading, or What Books Shall I Read and How Should I Read Them?" in 1871. There is something odd, though, about the latest slough of anti-academic books offering to teach us "how to read." Perhaps it is the fact that they are written by academics like professor Prose of Bard College. But perhaps it is because most of these books are only masquerading as guides to reading. What each really offers is a series of explications of famous passages, much like, well, academic criticism.

Like professor Prose, professor Harold Bloom, in "How to Read and Why" (2000), has the same antagonists, albeit more legion. Like Prose, he upbraids wayward academic critics, especially those "who believe all of us to be overdetermined by societal history" and who "regard literary characters as marks upon a page, and nothing more." Huh? I've spent a horrendous amount of time in the halls of academe, and I've met some real numskulls, but never anyone who fits that description. "Marks upon a page, and nothing more"? What does that even mean?

Next page: What the authors are really telling us