The Message Many Literature Professors are Sending to their Students: Literature Really Doesn’t Matter that Much

Imagine if a teacher of culinary skills, asked what sort of ingredients students would be using in their college courses, answered in this way:

The least expensive--our policy is always to go for the least expensive. Sure, it might make a difference with a lot of dishes to use high quality ingredients—they’re often better for your health, and they’ll often make a dish taste better. But our view is that the only thing that really matters is for you to pay as little as possible.

We would be taken aback by such a policy—and we would surely find it inappropriate. To recognize that cost is important—yes, absolutely. To say to students, “we use walnuts with this dish instead of pine nuts; a dish such as this will taste just about as good and using walnuts saves quite a bit of money”—that makes good sense. But to just always buy the cheapest? That surely sends an implicit but very clear message: the quality of the ingredients in what you eat is not worth bothering about. Food just doesn’t matter that much. It would be a very strange message to be conveying to a culinary class.

Now think of the approach that many professors in English Departments (and other departments that teach literary and other texts) routinely take with their students when they teach a work by Austen, or Plato, or Tolstoy, or Woolf:

There are some really good editions of this book available, including two or three that are quite inexpensive—under $20 for a bound book, under $10 for an e-book that you get with just a few clicks. Those editions offer a reliable text, helpful annotations, and useful historical context in the introductory material and the appendices. But I’m not going to ask you to pay $20 or even $10 for one of those editions. I understand that cost is an issue; that’s why I’ll ask you to go online and read a version that will cost you absolutely nothing. It doesn’t include any notes, any introduction, or any contextual materials, and the text itself may be unreliable in some places. But it’s free, and that’s what matters most when it comes to what text students should use.

When literature instructors say that sort of thing to their students, they are acting with entirely good intentions; they don’t want to add to the financial burden of students who may already be struggling financially. But the unintended message they send to their students is of the same sort as that of the culinary instructor: the particular version of a literary text that you select really isn’t worth bothering about. Literature just doesn’t matter that much.

Aren’t some students really struggling, though? Shouldn’t the amount they pay for books be a concern? Of course some students really are struggling, and of course getting good value for money should always be a concern of professors when they decide what books to assign.

I suppose it’s in large part a question of emphasis. Certainly a professor will send a very different message about the value of literature if they frame things this way:

For this course I’ve decided to assign the Broadview edition of this text [or the Norton, or the Hackett, or the Oxford, or the Penguin—whatever it might be], and I’ve done that for several reasons. It’s an edition that provides a completely reliable text, and annotations that I’m sure you’re going to find helpful. It also includes some background material that’s of real interest, some of which we’ll be referring to in class. Plus, it has a good introduction, which fills in some of the historical and cultural background that I won’t have time to go over with you in class. It will set you back $17 for a brand-new copy of the bound book version, but less than $15 for a used copy—and less than $10 if you decide to buy the e-book. Either way, I strongly encourage you to get this edition, which is classed as an assigned text, not a recommended one; I would really, really like us all to be on the same page! At the same time, I recognize that some of you may be finding it truly difficult to make ends meet, and if that's the case it may well be that even $10 may make a real difference. If you really can’t afford the $10, you will be able to find free versions of this text online. I can’t recommend them—having a good edition of a text really does matter—but I know that some students really are struggling, and I will of course understand if financial constraints force you to go that route.

That sends a very, very different message to students—one that can leave students in no doubt that quality does matter, and that literature does have value.

Of course it isn’t just with editions of Austen or Plato or Tolstoy or Woolf that these decisions are made. It’s also with editions of lesser-known works—often ones where the only in-print edition represents an effort on the part of its publisher and its academic editor to “recover” a neglected work—to bring it to the attention of academics and students, and to the attention as well of the reading public. It’s very frequently only as a result of such recovery work that a literature instructor becomes aware of a literary work that they then decide to assign to their students. In such cases, it makes an even bigger difference if literature instructors assign the published version rather than digitized versions of nineteenth-century editions of the work that are often available for free online. If the newly published editions of these neglected works do not sell in at least modest quantities, the publisher inevitably comes under strong financial pressure not to commission editions of other neglected works. In my experience, publishers rarely publish new editions of neglected works in the hope of making large profits from them; it’s a side of the business in which it’s very common for publishers to hope merely to break even, while doing something of real value to the academic and literary communities. But if publishers consistently lose money on such ventures—as is increasingly the case, I’m sorry to say—then far fewer such ventures will be undertaken. And the academic and literary worlds will be much, much poorer for it.