Literature: December 2007 Archive Page

Since entering prison Smart has completed two master's degrees, one in law and one in English literature. Those studies have kept her focused.

And she said her favorite book is "The Scarlet Letter," which is the tale of a woman condemned for having an illicit affair.

"Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' is a story that I could really relate to," Smart said. "I feel like I'm this modern day scarlet letter that I can't ever get rid of."

"I'll be forever punished by my own bad choices," she added.

One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades -- or accosts -- the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next victim.

Drive-by poetry seemed like an exercise in bad manners and an embarrassment to all concerned, and I wanted no part of it. Rich mentioned that I was free to plan my own event, but I was never very good at organizing field trips. I was cursed with a lack of the field trip gene, along with the papier-mâché gene. My classrooms tend to be devoid of decoration, and we never leave them. As a writing teacher, I'm concerned with rearranging the mental furniture of my students -- at least, that's what I've always told myself. For the last five years I've taught juveniles in a lockdown facility, where field trips are happily -- for me at least -- off the table.

"It seems most people these days equate literature with the novel, which is obviously a relatively recent form, and then judge all other literature by that standard, which is a terrible measure of digital literature," Joseph said in an e-mail interview. "My feeling is that younger audiences already do accept digital lit as lit; for the elder population it may well happen through cell phones rather than computer screens, as for most people the latter are too cumbersome, related to work tasks, and too uncomfortable to read on for long periods of time."

The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial. No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott's masterpiece Blade Runner. (If you want to see just how great Scott's film is, the seventh and "final" cut has just been released in cinemas and on DVD. It's visually enhanced and, says Scott, "tweaked". It looks, and is, superb.) The further oddity is that fantasy - Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Philip Pullman - is not embarrassing to us at all; indeed, it's downright respectable. Perhaps this is because these are seen as children's books that grown-ups can read, whereas SF is seen as irredeemably adolescent. This is to ignore the fact that it tends to be much more demanding and much bleaker.