Traditional Literary Study Breaks Down in the Digital Age

As an English professor who has been teaching students the analysis of literary works for a couple of decades, I am very interested in the process of reading. I value books of all kinds, but especially works of a more literary nature, and I have a real investment in using (and teaching) ways of reading that are substantial. We literary types are all about close, careful readings. We teach literary theories that help to plumb the depths of content, and we comb carefully through the formal qualities that give works clarity and aesthetic texture.

That's all for the good, but the way that literature is taught in the traditional classroom is breaking down in the digital age. What's served generations well is not serving the present generation. I'd like to shine the spotlight on these weaknesses by talking here about typical classroom practice for literary studies.

In classroom practice, we literature professors follow a very established pattern: we assign lengthy readings that require intense discipline on the part of our students (merely to complete the reading assignments); then, we assign formal essays that require the application of literary theories and methods of formal analysis. As our students create arguments about the literary works they study, they acquire a valued kind of literacy that we hope is a transferable skill beyond merely saying something about Shakespeare.

I'd like to analyze this from the point of view of CONSUME, CREATE, and CONNECT, the three principles I believe we need to understand for digital literacy today.