Against Skimming

Assigned readings can be a Sisyphean task. But the proverbial boulder isn’t as heavy as it should be.

Harvard requires that all its undergraduates take courses in aesthetics and culture, arts and humanities, and expository writing. This classical curriculum makes it likely that most students will leave the College having taken a few literature-focused courses — whether they concentrated in English or Physics.

But enrollment in literature classes, of course, does not necessarily translate to being well-read. That many students skimp on or wholly skip assigned readings is a well-documented reality. And even those students who diligently read, annotate, and engage with assigned texts may miss a work’s broader value when professors preemptively encourage them to read through a particular lens or with a singular theme in mind.

Perhaps inspired by a certain artistic spirit flitting about in the end-of-summer air, several of my colleagues on the Editorial Board have recently responded to the less-than-stellar literary environment on campus by urging our peers to make greater use of Harvard’s libraries and dedicate more time to autodidactic reading.

Now we are in autumn, plunging, as Baudelaire wrote, into cold darkness — and in keeping with the seasonal mood, I present a somewhat less audacious argument: When students are assigned literature for class, they ought to strive to engage with the work as a whole, not just wizen up on the components most likely to come up on a graded assignment.

After all, the point of reading literature is surely not to develop the skill of picking out a professor’s interests from a dense classical text. Rather, reading’s greatest reward is to become more conversant in one’s culture and more virtuous in one’s morals and attitude toward the world.

Human beings — a long chain of Harvardians among them — have since time immemorial passed ideas to one another in the form of literature. How can one understand the transcendentalists of the nineteenth century in America without the verse of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Class of 1821, or former President Joe Biden’s aspirations to national unity without the inaugural poetry of Amanda S.C. Gorman ’20? And in deepening one’s own erudition, how can one parse the epochal work of T.S. Eliot, Class of 1909, without first knowing Chaucer and Shakespeare?

As for morality, literature hardly needs to come in the didactic vein of the Book of Exodus’ Ten Commandments to impart moral value on its readers. Rather, experiential knowledge from one’s own life and from the lives of other people, real or literary, stimulates thinking about one’s purpose and the principles to inform one’s approach.

The beauty of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment lies not in some moral prescription — arrive Raskolnikov at repentance of his crimes as he may — but in its forcing the reader to weigh the consequences of rebellion against society and the nature of guilt.

None of this is to denigrate instructors’ focus on a given aspect of the assigned literature. General Education 1074: “The Ancient Greek Hero” is, for instance, necessarily just as much about heroes as it is about ancient Greece, so it’s perfectly logical that students in that class be asked to focus on expressions of heroic glory when reading the Iliad. Yet there is value in a broader reading of that classical work — and so students should also devote attention to its other elements.

Insofar as instructors agree, some power is in their hands. One model I’ve found helpful is that employed by the teaching team in English 121s: “Shakespeare from Beginning to End: A survey of works, both plays and poems, across his whole career,” which requires students to read a Shakespeare play over the weekend ahead of a potential quiz on an unspecified topic pertaining to that play at the beginning of the following week. Due to this ambiguity, I find myself reading with a broadly opened eye. We only hone in on, say, particular motifs or linguistic patterns in lecture — after I’ve obtained a fairly broad understanding on my own.

At the same time, students can not outsource responsibility for learning. Reading quizzes or not, the onus is on students to do the intellectually virtuous thing. And, despite our busyness, it would not kill us to slow down the skimming and pause to introspect about the words on the page once in a while.

Sisyphus’ boulder might get a bit weightier — and there might still be no reaching the mountaintop — but the eternal literary journey will prove more rewarding.

Michael Isayan ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Cabot House.