The Italian author Umberto Eco once wrote that texts are "lazy machineries that ask someone to do part of their job."¹ That someone is of course the reader: You.

Developing critical and creative thinking

Especially in English classes, it is important to think about what you are trying to achieve by studying and writing about literature. The immediate and obvious answer might be: "An A." But what personal growth do you think can be had from reading and from learning to read better?

• Are you just in class to fulfill a requirement?
• Because books are a nice escape from the real world?
• Because reading is easier than math?

Some or all these might be true, but it is important to consider what deeper implications there are in learning to read and write when complex ideas are involved. Hopefully we are learning to communicate better and to understand more deeply when others communicate with us.

Implicit in many literature classes is that by learning to read what are sometimes very difficult works and by being forced to generate some form of writing based on reading, we can actually develop the more generally applicable skills of critical and creative thinking. But what is critical and creative thinking?

They are really two activities that can be thought of as independent of one another but that are actually deeply connected. To think critically is to be able to see how arguments are being made without just accepting them. Critical thinking means seeing the mechanisms behind texts. Critical thinking is the ability to read against the grain.

Creative thinking is the ability to put things together in new ways and to consider the implications of those new combinations. You can see how critical thinking and creative thinking go together. To think critically is to consider how an argument is built; creative thinking is the next step of considering how that argument could be put together in different ways.

Take advertising, for example. An advertisement is a kind of argument: it wants to persuade you to believe a certain thing. Imagine that this is like the advertisement trying to "move" or "push" in a given direction. What happens if, instead of just going along with that direction, you stop the flow and read critically. You look at how the argument of that ad is put together and how it wants to operate. You pay attention to detail—a skill implicit in good reading—you ask questions like what claims are being made, what does the language really say and is it honest, what supports are in place to prove the claims. Imagine that critical and creative thinking is like developing a different direction, a line of flight that moves in its own path, not in the direction the argument wants to push you.²

Can literature be practical?

There is a general cultural trend toward privileging the immediately practical over what is considered the impractical. For example, I received some junk mail inviting me to a school that would teach me "things that are useful." They claimed that "You don't spend time on subjects that are unrelated to your career goals." Even colleges and universities feel pressure to gear classes and content towards practical, career-oriented goals.

How does reading poems ever fit into such a scheme? Would you only read poetry if you were planning a career as a poet? Literature is not generally considered practical, since reading produces no immediate, tangible, saleable results. But remember that our ideas about what is practical are always formulated by a number of different kinds of forces. Consider that the common definition of practical favors that which is economically profitable. So practical and profitable are almost like synonyms. But consider also the Western world's rather dubious track record when it comes to profitability as a motive. Slavery, for example, was considered for a very long time to be practical simply because it was economically profitable. Depleting the world's resources (often the third world's resources) is still considered practical because it is economically profitable (for some at least), despite the fact that it often does great harm to people and places.

Consider for a moment what it means to say that literature is impractical. Is it impractical simply because it does not yield economically profitable results? Could it only be practical if it could somehow be made to generate profit? Can you imagine a factory full of people reading books?

Let's reconsider the term practical. What if we think less in economic terms and more in social terms? Is reading practical if it makes us more aware of the world and the people around us? More able to see how things like advertising operate by trying to make us believe what are sometimes ludicrous arguments? To enable us to question the kinds of pressures and powers operating on us in our daily lives? To think and act in socially responsible ways?

By a different definition, literature is very practical, since it teaches us to be individual, imaginative, and critical thinkers. Learning to read carefully and to write effectively can teach us awareness of ourselves and can help us to think through the complexity of the world around us. Reading and writing teaches us to think for ourselves and not to believe everything we are told.

¹Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader
²The idea of lines of flight is borrowed from a book called A Thousand Plateaus, written by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze (see pages 3 and 4, for example).