Writing Teachers Need to Rethink the Classics

Why praise what's no longer publishable?

I just dropped out of a writing class because Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” is on the mandatory reading list.

I read that book while getting my undergrad in creative writing almost 40 years ago, wrote a term paper about Woolf, and STILL couldn’t tell you much about what happened in Dalloway. In the past decade, I’ve tried no fewer than nine times to read it again. I just can’t.

Yes, it was a seminal work 101 years ago when it was published. Yes, it captured stream of consciousness in a way literature never had before. Jumping from one thought to the next, interrupting a thought then going back to it in the next sentence — or even a dozen pages later — to reflect how our brains do that? Absolutely revolutionary at the time.

But we are all too aware of how our stream of consciousness is fragmented now.

The lament of our age

Fragmented stream of consciousness is what we feel all day, every day, as we jump between the work we’re doing on screen — four tabs open in the browser for work, two for our social media feeds — to answer a text message on our phone, see an incoming notification about our Amazon delivery (two days late, what’s the point of paying for Prime anyway?), wonder if we should order DoorDash for lunch or pick it up ourselves, check our calendar (35 minutes to the next Zoom call), reply to that text (“Drinks tomorrow after work?” “Great! See you at 5:30”), peek at our Twitter feed to see if anyone’s commented on this morning’s post (why do people insist on turning everything into a political discussion? It was a photo of a cat, for crying out loud), then return to the task we were working on (DoorDash is too expensive, we’ll just grab lunch at the place downstairs, it’s Monday isn’t it? They usually do a big salad for the day’s special) until a new text comes in from our best friend who just finished bingeing the show we’re both watching but we haven’t seen the final episode yet and now it’s spoiled.

See how painful that is?

That’s the kind of life we read to escape from, to make sense of, not to experience more of the same. That bouncing around, broken stream of consciousness is the source of our stress. It’s what’s killing us.

I’m not signing up to learn how to write for a 1925 audience. I’m not trying to learn to tell stories that don’t take into account the pressures and the pain of the lives we lead now. To hold up as an example for would-be writers works that would never be published today is one of the greatest disservices you can do to writing students and to the field.

Classics have enduring appeal

Part of the problem is that what we consider “the classics” haven’t been updated to reflect the past 10-15 years. Our workdays are lived on the same screens we turn to for entertainment, sometimes in the very same seat. The world is smaller now, the answers to everything seemingly at our fingertips, and yet we’ve never understood less or been more divided.

What we read needs to reflect how we live, yet every year much of the literary canon grows more out of touch with our lives.

The consequence of ignoring change

Continuing to praise literature that would never see publication in the present teaches that “good writing” must be difficult to read. It tells people they’re wrong to want literature to make sense, that reading must be painful and something they must force themselves to do.

And it arrogantly says they should spend money and time enduring things that offer little insight of how to understand and live in this day and age.

We can’t lament the death of reading then praise books that bore people to death.