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Literacy and Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Florence Howe
Florence Howe*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, College at Old Westbury
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Abstract

In a period of few jobs, low morale, and powerlessness, teachers of English and modern languages—at all levels from elementary through graduate school—need to reexamine the value of their work. Central to understanding the crisis of the profession is the historical separation of the study of literature from the teaching of literacy. The separation rationalizes the profession's hierarchy and defines its practice in the classroom. Thus literature becomes a luxury and the teaching of skills empty of literary power. That our curriculum needs revision follows quite naturally, moreover, from the knowledge that more than 70% of our undergraduate majors are women and from the evidence that the curriculum from elementary school on is male-biased and thus distinctly harmful to at least half the population. Whether we choose to renew our responsibility for teaching meaningful literacy, or to work cooperatively as literature teachers within interdisciplinary programs, we will also need to reevaluate and change the canon of literary study, especially to include those who have been traditionally bypassed: women, minorities of both sexes, and working-class people. For all these, literature and literacy can provide courage and skills necessary for survival and growth.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 3 , May 1974 , pp. 433 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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Footnotes

*

The Presidential Address delivered at the 88th Annual Convention of the MLA, in Chicago, 27 Dec. 1973. This talk could not have been written without the women's movement, the MLA's Commission on the Status of Women, the Women's Caucus for Modern Languages, and the special support of my friends at The Feminist Press and of Louis Kampf. I want to dedicate the talk to my students, to Paul Lauter, and to Tillie Olsen, the teacher of us all. Her fiction, her life, and her learning sustain us and inspire us to continue the work she has begun.

References

Note 1 in page 441 “The Beginning, Development, and Impact of the MLA As a Learned Society: 1883–1958,” PMLA, 73 (1958), 33.

Note 2 in page 441 Janet Emig is Associate Professor of English Education at Rutgers Univ. ; her work is in progress.

Note 3 in page 441 For a bibliography of such studies, see Feminist Resources for Schools and Colleges, a publication of the Clearinghouse on Women's Studies, Box 334, Old Westbury, N. Y. 11568.

Note 4 in page 441 “Responses of Adolescents to Feminine Characters in Literature,” Research in the Teaching of English, 6 (Spring 1972), 48–68.

Note 5 in page 441 In a new publication, Who's Who and Where in Women's Studies (Spring 1974). See address in n. 4.

Note 6 in page 441 “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English, 34 (1972), 18.

Note 7 in page 441 See, as representative samples of the work of recovery, By a Woman Writ: Literature from Six Centuries by and about Women, ed. Joan Goulianos (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973); American Voices, American Women, ed. Lee R. Edwards and Arlyn Diamond (New York : Avon,-1973); Fragment from a Lost Diary and Other Stories: Women of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, ed. Naomi Katz and Nancy Milton (New York: Pantheon, 1973).