A shift in students’ reading habits

Lisey's Story by, yes, Stephen King. Photo by Amy Breen.

Ron Charles has an article in the Washington Post about the sad state of college students. Charles laments how students these days (even literature students) read drivel like Twilight and are no longer politically active in their reading.

Basically, he’s concerned that young people, “away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives” are instead picking up books best suited for “13-year-old girls” rather than books by people like Hunter S. Thompson or Sylvia Plath.

I can’t help but read the column and see Charles as an aging baby boomer, who was a teenager during the incendiary 60s, and who can’t understand the apathetic nature of today’s youth. I hate to tell him, but this isn’t the 60s anymore. The culture has shifted, the attitudes have shifted. I think most college students in the world today don’t feel that they can affect change.

But as for not caring about literature? Maybe it’s different in the states, but in my experience (going to university as a literature student) the people I take classes with care very much about literature, and read the so-called classics.

But they also read things that Eric Williamson — a professor Charles quotes in the article — would call “inferior texts.”

Says Williamson:

There is nary a student in the classroom — and this goes for English majors, too — who wouldn’t pronounce Stephen King a better author than Donald Barthelme or William Vollmann. The students do not have any shame about reading inferior texts.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Personally, I love Stephen King. But I wouldn’t call him an inferior writer to someone like Barthelme; he’s just a different kind of author. It doesn’t make him any better or any worse. My book shelf at home is a mismatch of titles, from East of Eden, to The Satanic Verses, to The Shining. The kind of ”high art” elitism that says if you’re serious about literature, you can only read Hemingway or Dickens, truly bugs me.

Charles doesn’t seem to understand that there aren’t as many politically charged authors anymore. And maybe a lot of students read nothing but Stephanie Meyer, and scoff at Milton, but I believe that they are the minority, and that reading “fluffy” books isn’t necessarily a bad thing.