Learning how to deal with emotions through literature
GRAPPLING with the way books make students feel – not just analytical skills – should be part of the high-school English curriculum.
Students spend a lot of time learning academic skills and rarely even talk about the emotional reactions they may have to what they read – even when stories, as they often do, address dark themes.
Students are usually encouraged to become clinical crafters of arguments and masters of academic language. While these are essential skills to possess, or the fact that other students appear perfectly comfortable not acknowledging and discussing emotional responses to literature, there are those students who will just all suddenly burst into tears when read with or asked to watch stories they can relate to. Inundated with video games, movies, and memes, teenagers often seem hard to shake up.
Characters are fictitious abstractions, and, without actors to bring them to life and makeup and digital tricks to make the drama feel real, students may strictly do the analytical work teachers expect without the interference of a significant emotional response. It is not human. And this is why literature is under humanities in college; because an emotional response is needed and is healthy for humans, thus, literature should be part of the curriculum.
High school students should read about pre-adolescent boys who bully and murder one another; a man, fearing shame and betrayal, who smothers his wife and commits suicide; and another man who hangs himself as colonizers pulverize his culture.
They should also read about a woman who kills her baby daughter so she will not experience the physical and emotional horrors of slavery. They should be introduced to a man who shoots
a guy on a beach because the sun is in his eyes, relishing, as he later marches to the gallows, the prospect of incurring society’s hatred.
These stories should be familiar. Many of these revolve around stories such as Lord of the Flies, Othello, Things Fall Apart, Beloved, and The Stranger. English teachers do not teach these important stories because they want to batter students with the darkness in human nature. Or because they want to remind them of history’s hideous chapters or emphasize the absurdity of existence.
Academic goals aside, fellow teachers told me they want to help students cope with real life – even when portions of that reality are unpleasant and disturbing. Emotion and cognitive researchers and experts suggest though that literature can play a vital role in helping people understand the lives and minds of others, and that individuals and communities can benefit from that ability along with literacy and analytical prowess.
It is easy to see the trends of death, war, destruction, and oppression in our current society. There is a certain level of honesty reflected in art which deals with the psychological, social, and emotional fallout of such violence.
A teacher should help students process the book’s depiction of characters’ traumas, guiding them toward greater empathetic heights. The process of entering imagined worlds of fiction builds empathy and improves your ability to take another person’s point of view. It can even change your personality.
The emotional empathy that is critical to our day-to-day relationships also enables us to picture ourselves living as the characters do when we read fiction. Literary study should provide us with many complex models for understanding and responding to others and to ourselves. ( Paid article)