The fiction of fiction

I've had my kids read two short stories which are accompanied by interviews with the authors in which the authors say, basically, that people read too much into their stories.

One of my classes, the technologically advanced one, ps, is okay with this. I've stressed to them that authors are people, and that unless they are super-brilliant-geniuses, there is no way they could have planned every theme and metaphor.

The other class, the one which has actually turned out to be more talkative and involved, was less impressed with these authors' statements. "Why do we do this then?" A student asked me. "It's a waste of time, none of this is real. We're reading too much into it."

We got into a discussion of literature and the nature of literary endeavors, but I'm not sure I've convinced them. This one student in particular seems to feel quite disenfranchised with literature at the moment.

I've been trying to think of other ways of approaching this problem. Other ways of getting to the students. I want them to see the authors as people, for sure. I think it's important to look beyond the idols we have made of authors and see that at heart we are more alike than different. Kind of like my special snowflake rant.

Although, of course, brilliant genius authors exist. I just don't think students should be taught to blindly venerate them. I want to have them question authority, literature, the cannon... But perhaps this is too radical a challenge for people new to literature. Maybe the questions should be reserved for people who are really steeped in the academic culture. These are sophomores, mostly, and many of them definitely are not readers.

However, I somehow just can't stomach the idea that I shouldn't challenge them because they are, in the parlance of our times, newbs. I want to pull down curtains and all that. And I want them to come to love literature despite its origins. Or perhaps more honestly, I want them to love literature because of its origins. I feel as though if I can take literature down to them, to the level of real-human-people-like-us, then they might in the end feel its force all the more powerfully.

A girl can dream, right?