Why I Like Secondary Sources

A few reasons I read lit crit, beyond the fact that it is my job

I was pleasantly provoked when listening to

Henry Oliver

’s recent interview with the inimitable Zena Hitz yesterday. Oliver asked Hitz how many secondary sources one should read—in other words, when one is reading poetry, novels, plays, etc., how much commentary, criticism, and literary history should one read? Hitz responded: “I’m just going to take my contrarian public position of zero.” There were a few exceptions to this rule—explanatory notes, for example, that help a reader understand the meaning of a text. But a really great book, argues Hitz, “supplies what it needs to tell you on its own.” Great books appeal to readers regardless of historical circumstances, so it’s not important for readers to understand the historical circumstances that may have influenced a book’s composition. Sure, you can read more about the history surrounding a book if you want, but you don’t need to, argues Hitz.

Hitz goes further, suggesting that reading secondary sources can actually harm readers’ experiences. “It keeps you from noticing things that you would notice, and it tends to reduce the complexity of your reading to one bullet points, or two bullet points, and to give you a sense of what the whole thing means…it can limit your experience of [literature]…If [readers] are pressured to stay in the text, they’ll figure things out on their own…You can discover on your own things as interesting as you’d discover in secondary literature, only it matters more, because it’s yours.”

I am not as experienced a teacher as Hitz, so I may be wrong. But I want to jot down two reasons why I think secondary sources can be worth reading.

It teaches us to enjoy.

Early in their conversation, Hitz and Oliver agree that students love Shakespeare. Once they are able to understand the language, students love to read the bard! Hitz tells a story about a high-school classroom that, upon completion of one Shakespeare play, ask their teacher to assign another, then another. Great Books are just so appealing and universally liked that people will inevitably be attracted to them!

I would love this to be true in all cases. But it has nothing to do with my experience as a teacher. The students that I have taught tend to be not just uninterested in Shakespeare’s work, or literature more broadly, but to foster an active distaste and resentment toward it (for many reasons, some good and some bad). One or two students per semester, usually the humanities majors in my class, enjoy reading books, although almost all students are capable of reading and understanding even fairly difficult novels or poems. They are just completely uninterested in and unmoved by them. The two parts about literature courses they enjoy the least: poetry and Shakespeare. (Even the book-lovers I teach tend to dislike Shakespeare and poetry.)

One of my primary goals as a teacher of literature is to encourage the capacity for enjoyment among my students. This doesn’t mean that they have to like what I like, only that I want them to have some sense of literary taste—that they develop the capacity to like one book more than another book rather than to see literature as an undifferentiated mass of tedium, to be read for a standardized test and promptly forgotten as soon as possible. In my experience, this is the single most difficult challenge in teaching, and it must be surmounted, at least in part, before any real discussion of literature can begin.

So how do I do this? In part, by modeling enthusiasm and enjoyment for my students. But this strategy is not reliable for a couple of reasons. First, students detect that I want them to like literature, and so they will hollowly profess to like it in order to curry favor. Second, students often feel unable to disagree with or contradict a professor, although they usually feel free to (often enthusiastically) disagree with an essay that they have read.

Therefore, a good tool to address this challenge is to bring in secondary materials, including critical responses of varying kinds.¹ These materials might make controversial claims about a work’s meaning or value, giving students a way in to having a real conversation about the text.

Literature, for many students, is freighted with all kinds of emotional baggage, and learning to like literature can be a difficult and emotional process. For these students, literature is not loved automatically. It is an acquired taste. And how do we acquire tastes in food? Partially, simply by eating the same food over and over. But in my experience, this process can be sped along and helped by talking to someone who really loves the food. What do they like about it? I tend to not think very much, for example, about the texture of the food I eat, instead focusing on the flavor. But other people focus intensely on texture. When they tell me how or why they find a particular texture satisfying, I learn to notice that texture, and my enjoyment is transformed, enhanced. The same thing can happen if I listen to a nostalgic memory someone has of eating the food, say, on a cold winter morning, or by hearing that the food is a cultural mainstay or a family recipe—that it has a history behind it, that there is some real humanity behind both the preparation and the consumption of the food. Food and books are obviously not the same, but I think they share this: talking about how good they are makes them even better.

One of my favorite teachers once told me that liking a book is like falling in love, and disliking a book is like falling out of love. And falling in and out of love are both “processes of noticing.” We learn to notice collaboratively, by sharing our insights with one another. And some people are really good at noticing, and would notice things we never would. And some of those good noticers have written down what they have noticed, offering us erudite and often entertaining accounts of their reading. If we can learn to notice in the right way, I am convinced that we can learn to love. I think that we can learn to notice from reading secondary materials just as much as we can from extemporaneous conversation.

They help readers understand books and history.

Knowing more about history has allowed me to enjoy literature more. For example, when I first read Pride and Prejudice as a young man, I was bored out of my mind. I finished the book only through a sheer act of will. The reason I found it so boring was because I was profoundly ignorant of the manners and social world presented by the novel. I didn’t understand what was appropriate or inappropriate in the Regency social world, so when a character did something rude or inappropriate, I didn’t understand it as such. I didn’t understand why marriage was so important because I didn’t understand what it meant to these characters. I didn’t even really understand why it was so important to get “ten thousand a year” or why Wickham was such a jackass. (When I said “profoundly ignorant,” I meant it!) Only after learning more about the historical context of the novel could I get the jokes, understand how the plot moved, and sympathize with the plight of the characters.

So I have experienced historical context as something that makes novels way more readable, emotional, and fun. If the historical context that makes a book fun comes from a secondary source of some kind, then that is all for the better, as far as I am concerned.

But history doesn’t just allow us to like literature more. Literature gives us a window into history, and that is one of the reasons why it is important to read and study literature. By reading literature from the past, one can get to know, in a more intimate way, what it felt like to live long ago. People from the past were, at once, very different and very similar to us. Reading their literature reveals their obsessions, their insecurities, their prurient fantasies. This stuff is so interesting! But to really think about these kinds of things, you have to have some historical background.

Literature affords us a deeper understanding of the past, which allows us a deeper understanding of the present, too. But to really understand how literature illuminates the past, you have to also understand the past and how the book connects to it. That takes secondary materials. Why abandon this aspect of reading literature, even for the everyday reader? I am the first to admit that literary historians could, on the whole, be more readable and friendly. But this means that the genre of literary history should evolve, not that it should be abandoned or left unread by ambitious readers.

Caveat: “And”

Hitz raises a concern with secondary material that I think is real. Some students might consider other peoples’ reading to be authoritative. Instead of opening up a text and allowing new forms of noticing, reading criticism might close down a text and prevent readers from seeing things they might otherwise see. “The eminent literary critic said that this book is about X, so even though I notice a lot of Y about it, I must be wrong!” Students might learn to distrust their own impulses and experiences, instead relying on parroting others’ views about a text.

But this impulse to defer to authority is an intellectual habit that can be curbed by an attentive teacher. In a 2016 interview, the singer-songwriter Evan Stephens Hall (of Pinegrove) recalled a professor in a James Joyce seminar saying:

“When reading Joyce, it’s never either/or. It’s always and.” And that advice extends to just interpreting experience. It’s an adventurous perspective, and it also does not try to collapse or reduce or one-dimensionalize experience—there are many layers to everything that’s going on, and they’re not competing, they co-exist. And you don’t have to choose. In fact, to choose is a little bit foolhardy. Never either/or, always and…

I like this ethos for the classroom. Nobody has the final word, and everyone has something to add. Different perspectives are respected, but none of them can dominate or crowd out other perspectives.

Hitz and I clearly teach to different students, and I have no doubt that all of her students are remarkably lucky to have her as an instructor. (And I’m a huge admirer of the Catherine Project, from idea to execution.) So I don’t mean to suggest that she is short-changing students by depriving them of secondary materials or anything like that! In the spirit of “and,” I can acknowledge that she is teaching in a way that gives wonderful intellectual gifts to her students and that I can find some use in secondary sources. So I’m going to keep using them! Sharing different perspectives on a book is an opportunity to expand students’ experiences, not close them down. And wherever that sharing of perspectives comes from—whether it comes from a conversation, a lecture, a book, a blog post, whatever, I think it can enrich our connection with art, not smother it.

1. An earlier draft here suggested that “different performances of the same poem or monologue” might be considered a secondary source. That’s not right, as Hitz helpfully pointed out in the comments, so I’ve amended the sentence. But the original mistake is mine!