What is the purpose of literary education, and is it being fulfilled? I have been taught to connect the blackness of Othello to the racial issues in current times, to find applicable examples for Emerson’s Self Reliance in my life, and to see The Crucible as a direct comparison to the Women’s March. My name is Jesse, and I am a junior in high school.

I have questions about the state of literary analysis and the portrayal of literature in educational institutions in an era when politics and education seamlessly (and haphazardly) mix, a time when traditional authors succumb to the vicissitudes of 21st-century opinion, and colleges make headlines for protesting literature classes almost as frequently or more so than they do for achieving substantive advancements in knowledge.

In search of answers, I talked to Professor Stanley Fish (esteemed literary theorist, legal scholar, and public intellectual) about my most pressing questions:

1. Has reader-response theory (a form of literary analysis) lent itself to be manipulated by readers (i.e., allowing them to project predisposed bias onto a text under the guise of analysis)? 
2. What is the purpose of teaching classical literature, and has this purpose been neglected?

The conversation was enlightening and gave me the insight that I didn’t know I needed. The following is a delineation of my conversation with Professor Fish.

The extent of my exposure to reader-response theory came from high school English classes. I knew that it was a type of analysis that allowed the reader to find new meanings in a given work by reflecting on the emotions that the text evoked in their mind. It meant that the author’s intent could be disregarded to discover new meaning and to draw connections to the readers’ life. It also meant that emotion-driven analysis could hold validity as objective analysis. This made me skeptical of this literary analysis, and I had to wonder if it had been created for this purpose.

Professor Fish is one of the foremost scholars on literary theory. He developed his work in the 1960s and 1970s to discover what the experience would’ve been for the first readers of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. “It was a historical notion,” Fish explained of reader-response theory. He examined various historical sources, including Milton’s thoughts on reading and education, and proceeded to examine the responses from the initial readers of Milton’s early editions. The process was methodical and carried out with the preciseness of scientific research.

After Fish explained the remarkably meticulous and objective approach to the analysis termed reader-response theory, I realized how mistaken my definition of the theory was, and how easily this theory could be misused. I asked the professor if he thought that today’s reader-response theory could perhaps be mistakenly misused as a medium to politicize classic texts or project predisposed biases onto them.

“I’m not interested in what you, the reader, just happened to be thinking of as you read the poem” he retorted, “that’s an inward report of your personality and an inward report of your personality isn’t relevant to anyone except yourself.”

I chuckled and then realized that this could be a real problem due to the absence of a systematic trail of intellectual thought in literary interpretation and analysis. A methodical analysis is necessary to track the evolution of ideas and separate thoughts concerning a piece of literature from an interpretation of meaning. Should Shakespeare’s work be disregarded because it has been dictated by some modern audiences as an agent of colonialism? Shall we shun The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because Mark Twain would be deemed racist by current standards?

The purpose of incorporating this literature into an academic curriculum seems to be lost in a sea of superficial impasse. So, at the quintessence of education, what is the point of teaching classics?

“Let’s take a book that people don’t read anymore in college which was once the second most widely read book in the West after the Bible; that is a book called The Pilgrim’s Progress,” explained Professor Fish, “It’s a great piece of work and it’s no longer read. Now I should think that a course which included The Pilgrim’s Progress would not be arguing for some political condition or religious convention.”

I had never heard of The Pilgrim’s Progress but nonetheless, I understood his point.

The professor emphasized that “a course should be asking questions like, ‘why was this such a powerful and popular book for 250 years, and why is it no longer so today?’” These are the sorts of academic questions, Fish expounded, that should be asked—if only provisionally—in classrooms of higher education. Teachers and students should reason the “value status” of works in history that have been abandoned over the more recent years.

“That’s what academic investigation or analysis is,” he explained, “and it has nothing to do with either supporting or attacking some kind of political set of ideas or attacking misogyny, racism, or classism, or any other isms.”

My mind wandered to the recent college protests in response to classic novel courses that contained primarily western canon literature and that supposedly lacked cultural representation. It is irrefutable that a more diverse array of texts provides a more encompassing perspective of the world, but perhaps the issue at the heart of the dispute is the forgotten purpose of literature, regardless of its origins; that in order to examine any novel for its brilliance and ingenuity, students must first and foremost put aside their own subjective prejudices in order to accomplish the primary goal of actual learning, lest the very institutions whose mandate it is to promote discourse, exploration, and, perhaps most importantly, discernment and critical thinking, should ultimately fail to move past simple, subjective analysis and pure opinion.

Reader-response is difficult to teach correctly and when it is diluted, it can allow students to draw politicized meanings and personal connections from a text instead of comprehending its meaning. At the high school level, Common Core has addressed this concern by directing literacy standards away from reader-response analysis in order to strive for higher levels of reading comprehension.

Common Core’s standards replace reader-response with new objectives that focus on parsing and comprehension. One standard, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2, says that students shall “Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.”

Perhaps the root cause of classic literature being denounced and the recent swell of heated protests has been the misemployment of reader-response theory. There is no Common Core at the collegiate level to curb the misuse of reader-response- nor should there be. The theory, when used correctly, can lead a reader to an incredible new depth of analysis; however, when it is misused, it can prompt the reader to unduly politicize a text and analyze the literature at a superficial level that allows bias to take the reigns.

Common Core has effaced reader-response from its standards because it is, quite frankly, hard to standardize. The meticulous process required for correct utilization is not feasible in high schools, leading to a greater likelihood of misuse. Whereas reader-response should, in fact, be used at the collegiate level, but perhaps revisited in its application.

I walked away from my conversation with Professor Fish with new acuity.

Literature does not exist for the purpose of reading and conducting to draw analysis based upon foregone conclusions and personal biases-both conscious and subconscious-that serve to distort the original meanings of a piece.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this trend is the development of a sort of artificially polarizing, superficial impasse way too soon in the exploration and conversation, limiting what might have been a deeper, more fruitful debate. Students and professors alike fall into the trap of accepting a prematurely concluded analysis that arrives at endpoints shaped by predisposed biases; one that fails to encompass any objectively observable, demonstrable truth.

After all, the truths founded in academic exploration should inherently stand separately from any sort of the political and social pressures or fashions of the day; a kind of checks-and-balances that allows students and professors to look past the “noise-du-jour” in order to find authentic roots and causes of a given subject, relatively uncluttered by superficial distractions and subjective temptations.

In this manner, politics stay separate from education as much as realistically possible, and interpretations that are drawn from a literary work are drawn with meticulous certainty, in a manner analogous to the exactness and reproducibility of scientific work.

It would be brazen (and ironically short-sighted) to assert that misused reader-response is responsible the entirety of college protests, or that using it correctly would wholly curtail the classification of certain texts by the moral and ethical standards of a particular epoch today. On the contrary, reader-response can allow the reader to connect with a text at a new level of depth; the reason it was originally developed by literary theorists like Professor Fish was to historically contextualize, to question responses of initial readers, and to ultimately determine what a reader should draw from a text.

However, we’ll never get there if we fall through the analytical trap-door of external projection of what Professor Fish calls the “inward report” of our individual personalities. Reader-response theory seems to be a balancing act at all levels of education; yet, rather then letting it be a projection of the politicized times, we should let it be a guiding force in practicing literary analysis with a degree of objectivity comparable to scientific work, and let this provide the framework for students’ thoughts and efforts (mine included) beyond the realm of education.

– Jesse Ferraioli

Author’s Note: As a current student, I wanted to gain Professor Fish’s insight on a pertinent issue facing American educational institutions: the influence of politics on education. The article focuses on how a general type of literary analysis deemed “reader-response” has created a susceptibility for students to politicize texts rather than comprehend them. Professor Fish created reader-response four decades ago, and he offered his insight into proper usage and the implications of its current misuse.

In recent years, Common Core has replaced reader-response with new objectives that remove the focus from drawing connections between the reader’s life and the text, replacing them with comprehension-focused objectives. The meticulous process required for correct utilization of reader-response is not feasible in high schools, and realizing its complexity, it is worth considering how misuse at the collegiate level could create even larger implications.