“This is what school literature is
about and what is has been about. It’s not supposed to be fun; it’s supposed to
be a mental discipline. Students are learning a disciplined way of reading,
watching, or listening and a disciplined way of talking, writing or composing,
which teachers believe—or someone believes—will help them later in life. It is
an intellectual discipline, like programming, like talking and writing about
history, like talking and writing about science, mathematics, business, law, or
medicine. Ours is primarily a discipline of letters and what is known as the
humanities, a version of discourse about the arts and their relation to the
human imagination…we are training a habit of reflection and refraction about
what one reads and the thoughts that reading engenders” (Purves 214).
Studying literature at a university
level enhances and cements the skills that students begin to master in high
school. When we engage in such study at higher institutions of education, we
enter a conversation that has been ongoing for several decades (and in some
cases, even longer than that). Entering that conversation requires us to
quickly gain an understanding of theoretical methods and interpretations, while
we begin practicing mastery of certain skills, like writing about literature, talking
about literature, and thoroughly understanding the interpretation of
literature. Purves tells us that these skills are transferable and useful in
later life; this is almost certainly the case. When one can intelligently write
about and discuss literature, using evidence from a text and forming a logical
explanation of an interpretation, one can write about and converse about almost
anything else.
The way students of literature gain
these skills are through the constant, unending process of literary analysis
and discourse they undertake. We become so accustomed to the process of
searching through a text to understand it clearly that it is easy to do those
things when we face any sort of project or assignment (whether academic or
otherwise). In classes, we usually have no choice but to speak up about what we’re
thinking, and so we gain practice in speaking well about many subjects. No one
who studies literature escapes writing about it, and therefore students gain
mastery of writing down their thoughts and forming persuasive, eloquent, and
professional articles and papers. These skills, so highly used in study, can
almost become second nature—it is no wonder that such skills are transferable
and allow greater success throughout life.
