To simply state that I love losing myself in a book, would undermine my true feelings for literature. My experience as a reader has been a long, hard fought road. During my early years of education, with the help of a wonderful teacher, I battled illiteracy and came out on top. As a tribute to my personal struggles against illiteracy, I plan to become a reading specialist and help others wage their own war. My dream is to not only teach them to read but inspire them to become lifelong readers. Now, I find there is another battle to be fought and this one will affect the approach I take to the teaching of the academic discipline I love. The battle of which I speak, leads me to question what qualifies as literature and how it should be taught.
What is appropriate Literature? To me this is a personal question, I get upset by the so-called “intellectuals” that take it upon themselves to dictate what is acceptable literature and what is not. Literature is any written or spoken text, and ranges from creative writing to technical or scientific works. Literature speaks to people about who we are, our culture, and traditions as well as the culture and traditions of others. It shows us, where we have come from, our history, and the limitless possibilities of our future. Literature can add a certain spice to our everyday lives by taking us to new worlds and sharing new experiences with us. It can lead us to self improvement by handing us the keys to an empowering knowledge. It can be humorous and enduring while challenging us to question or confirm our own beliefs.
This being the case, I will encourage my students to read anything that strikes them as interesting and call it literature. I feel all text, and all forms of text have the potential to serve an instructional purpose and should be allowed in the classroom. Robert Scholes emphasizes this belief in his Textual Power, as he explains a need for a restructuring of the English department. Here he describes the division between literature and non-literature.
The field of English is organized by two primary gestures of differentiation, dividing and redividing the field by binary opposition. First of all, we divide the field into two categories: literature and non-literature. This is, of course, an invidious distinction, for we mark those texts labeled literature as good or important and dismiss those non-literary texts as beneath our notice.
It’s this distinction we place on the value of certain text that put us at a disadvantage as educators. By deeming a text unworthy or unacceptable for the classroom we risk the possibility of losing the attention of many of our students. Whether it is to enhance fluency, comprehension, building on vocabulary, or creating situations conductive of critical processing, it is the interaction, reading, writing, and analyzing dimensions of meaning between the student and the text that defines the work as appropriate literature. My classroom philosophy will be, if you are interacting with words you are working towards a better you and gaining the knowledge that will empower you to greatness. It is Scholes idea that we stray from this labeling of what is considered literature and non-literature and focus more on the text. “All texts have secret-hidden deeper meanings, and none more so than the supposedly obvious and straightforward production of journalists historians, and philosophers” (Scholes, 8).
Two summers after the fog of illiteracy had been lifted from my mind, I had a harsh encounter with a teacher that almost changed the way I feel about literature. The summer before seventh grade, I got turned on to the genre of horror with a book I found at a garage sale, The Breeze Horrors by Candace Caponegro. It was so gross and fast paced; I devoured it in one setting and asked for more. I began reading the likes of Steven King, Dean Koontz, and V.C. Andrews. Then, I felt the full brunt of Mrs. So and so’s disapproval over my choice of reading material. She was my seventh grade literature teacher and she explained to me that the drivel I had been reading was not literature and that I was not accomplishing a thing by reading it. I felt ashamed and embarrassed by my chosen reading material. In that one statement, she took away my free choice and all that I felt I had accomplished in my battle against illiteracy. In return, she gave me reading assignment that I didn’t understand or possess the maturity to connect with, time schedules that didn’t allow free reading time, and a new emotion to associate with literature----loathing. I became an uncommitted reader, only reading what was forced upon me by my teachers in a timely manner. Had she only known the value I saw in what I was reading, she could have encouraged my reading habits and challenged me with other text. If she wouldn’t have been so opposed to taking a new outlook on literature, and the approach to teaching it, she may have reached countless numbers of students. Instead, she stuck strictly to her traditional believes and almost lost me, in the process.

I’m not so naive as to think my definition of acceptable literature won’t be challenged. There are those who believe only the works from the traditional canon of Western culture should be included in the curricula of secondary schools. As a self proclaimed literature advocate, I am not afraid to teach from the traditional works of the cannon. As an educator it will not only my job, but my privilege to expose my students to the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Shakespeare, Jane Austin, and Harper Lee, but I also see room for much more. And this is where I will take a stand by implementing non-traditional literature. I am preparing myself for battle by studying literary theory and the works of pioneer educators who have accepted the call to educate teachers, like Kylene Beers, and Louis Rosenblatt.
Kylene Beers, an educator and Senior Reading Researcher at Yale University, has committed herself to helping struggling readers by educating their teachers. She believes appropriate literature may also mean, “sometimes choosing young adult literature over classics. Young adult literature offers students the chance to read about characters, conflicts, and situations they relate to more quickly” (Beers, 275). When we want our students to make emotional connections, and find some relevance to what they are reading, we must allow them the freedom of choice they crave and deserve, why not turn to young adult literature as suggested by Sarah K. Herz in From Hinton to Hamlet, “When I accepted and understood the possibilities of YAL(Young Adult Literature) I found a powerful tool to help students take pride in their reading and to help them develop into confident, critical readers.” Isn’t this what literature teachers are looking for, tools that will empower their readers, to built upon their confidence as readers so they may tackle the more complex texts and become critical thinkers. Ultimately, it will be my goal as a teacher of reading and literature to lead my students in a way that they may discover meaning in literature, by looking at what the author says and how he/she says it. I want to encourage them to interpret the author's message. In academic circles, this decoding of the text is often carried out through the use of literary theory, using a mythological, sociological, psychological, historical, or other approach. It will be my routine to prompt them into discussions after a selected reading that will guide them into taking both an efferent stance to reading as well as an aesthetic stance. The difference between the aesthetic stance and the efferent stance of a reader has been explained in Louise Rosenblatt’s The Reader, the Text, the Poem:
In aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text. In non-aesthetic [or efferent] reading, the reader’s attention is focused primarily on what will remain as the residue after the reading-the information to be acquired the logical solution to a problem, the actions to be carried out.
It is my hope that by teaching them to take this duel stance to reading, it will allow them the enjoyment found in reading for pleasure as well as guiding them into a collegiate preparedness for critical responses to literature and literary theory.