Books nobody wanted until someone tried to suppress them.
In response to Maninder Järleberg’s essay on functional illiteracy and the canon wars
Dr. Järleberg has written an intelligent and melancholy essay about the collapse of reading at the university level. Students can no longer inhabit a text. They recognise words but cannot follow arguments. A Victorian novel—once “ordinary fare”—now requires “extraordinary accommodation.” Thirty pages of assigned reading provoke “anxiety, resentment, or open resistance.”
I find this diagnosis entirely plausible. I also find it incomplete in ways that matter greatly for understanding what has happened and what might be done about it.
The essay traces the decline of reading to the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s. On one side stood defenders of the traditional canon—Bloom and Bloom, Hirsch and Kimball—who believed that great works possessed intrinsic value and that education meant encounter with this inheritance. On the other side stood the theorists—Said, Spivak, Bhabha, and their descendants—who argued that the canon reflected structures of power and that reading should expose rather than celebrate.
Järleberg is sympathetic to the first position and critical of the second. He argues, persuasively, that the triumph of theory transformed reading from “an act of discovery” into “an act of exposure.” Where readers were once trained to approach texts with humility, they came to approach them with suspicion. “Interpretation became accusation; reading became a search for transgression.”
This is well observed. And yet I want to suggest that both positions in the canon wars shared an assumption that neither questioned—an assumption that is, in fact, the deeper source of the trouble. Both sides assumed that the point of literary education is to transmit a curriculum to students who are there to receive it. Both sides treated students as personnel.
Not: Which books should students read? Not: How should students be taught to read them? But: What makes anyone genuinely read anything? What is the nature of that contact between reader and text when reading actually happens?
Until we understand this, we will continue to lament the decline of reading without understanding what reading is or why it occurs.
Let me apply my habitual framework: contact-boundary analysis.
Reading, when it happens, is a form of contact. The reader meets the text at a boundary. Energy mobilizes. Something passes between them. The reader is changed—not merely informed, but altered in perception, sensibility, or understanding. This is what Järleberg means when he speaks of “inhabiting” a text, of reading as “encounter.”
This contact, like all contact, requires certain conditions. It requires that the reader come to the text with genuine interest—with a question, a hunger, a need that the text might address. It requires that the reader’s attention be available, not scattered or coerced or exhausted. It requires that the text offer something the reader can actually use—not in a utilitarian sense, but in the sense of meeting a genuine situation in the reader’s life.
When these conditions are absent, reading does not happen. The eyes may move across the page. Words may be decoded. Information may be extracted. But the contact that constitutes genuine reading—the encounter that changes the reader—does not occur.
Now: Consider the situation of the contemporary university student.
The student is compelled to be at university. Not literally, perhaps, but effectively—the credential is necessary for professional life, the expectation is overwhelming, the alternatives are foreclosed. The student has not come to the university because of a burning question that only these books can answer. The student has come because this is what one does.
The student is assigned readings. The readings are not chosen by the student, not related to the student’s questions, not connected to the student’s life. They are elements of a curriculum designed by others for purposes the student does not share and may not understand.
The student is assessed on the readings. The point of reading is not encounter but performance—demonstrating to an evaluator that the reading has been done, that the approved responses have been internalized, that the student can produce the discourse that the institution rewards.
Under these conditions, what would we expect?
We would expect precisely what Järleberg describes: functional illiteracy. The capacity to decode without the capacity to inhabit. Reading that never becomes contact because the conditions for contact are systematically absent.
The canon wars did not create this situation. The canon wars were a symptom of it—a dispute over what should be transmitted to personnel who were never going to genuinely read anyway because genuine reading requires conditions that compulsory credentialing education does not provide.
Consider the traditional canon—the position that Järleberg seems to favor, or at least to mourn.
The defenders of the canon believed that certain works possessed enduring value, that they spoke across time, that an educated person should grapple with them. This is a noble belief, and I share it to a considerable extent. I believe that Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and Tolstoy offer encounters that can transform a reader. I believe that these works have survived because they address something perennial in human experience.
But notice the word that keeps appearing in discussions of the canon: should.
An educated person should grapple with these works. Students should read the great books. The curriculum should include the canon.
Who determines this “should”? On whose authority? And what happens when students are compelled to read what they “should” read but do not want to read?
What happens is exactly what we observe. Resentment. Resistance. Functional illiteracy.
I wrote about this in 1964. I called it “Compulsory Miseducation.” My argument was that compulsion destroys the very thing it aims to produce. When learning is forced, it becomes something to be endured rather than sought. The student’s natural curiosity—which exists, I insist, as a basic feature of human nature—is not engaged but circumvented. The student learns to perform learning without actually learning.
The defenders of the canon understood that something valuable was being lost. They were right about that. But they thought the solution was better transmission of the canon—more rigorous requirements, higher standards, greater insistence on the classics. They did not see that transmission itself was the problem. You cannot transmit an encounter. You can only create conditions in which encounter becomes possible.
The traditionalists wanted to save the canon by requiring it. But requirement is precisely what makes genuine reading impossible. The student who reads Middlemarch because it is assigned, because there will be an exam, because the grade depends on it, is not reading Middlemarch. The student is processing Middlemarch—extracting enough to satisfy the requirement, performing the expected responses, doing what personnel do.
What about the other side? What about the theorists who dismantled the canon?
Järleberg is sharply critical of postcolonial theory, and he makes valid points. He notes that Spivak’s famous argument about the “silenced subaltern” depends on ignoring the actual voices of Indian women preserved in the archive. He argues that the hermeneutics of suspicion trained students to distrust texts rather than encounter them, to read for transgression rather than insight.
These criticisms have merit. There is something deeply strange about an academic movement that claimed to amplify marginalized voices while constructing elaborate theoretical apparatuses that made actual listening unnecessary. The archive contains women speaking; the theory requires that they cannot speak. This is not liberation but a different form of silencing.
And yet I want to suggest that the theorists, for all their errors, were responding to something real. They were responding to the deadness of the canon as it was actually taught.
Consider what it meant to study literature in an American university in, say, 1975. The curriculum was indeed centered on “great books.” But these books were not encountered; they were administered. Students sat in lecture halls and heard professors discourse on themes and symbols and literary periods. They wrote papers demonstrating their mastery of received interpretations. They learned that Moby-Dick was about “the quest for meaning” and that The Waste Land was about “the fragmentation of modern consciousness”—formulas repeated so often that they had lost all connection to any actual experience of reading.
The theorists saw that this was dead. They saw that the canon had become a museum—objects behind glass, admired from a distance, never touched. They saw that “appreciation” had replaced encounter, that the literary education of their time was producing people who could talk about books without having been changed by them.
Their response was critique. If appreciation had failed, perhaps suspicion would succeed. If reverence had become empty ritual, perhaps iconoclasm would restore energy.
This was a reasonable hypothesis. And in its early phase, it produced some genuine intellectual excitement. To read Foucault for the first time, to see how power operates through discourse, to recognize that texts are not innocent—this was, for many students, an awakening. It was at least something happening, some energy mobilizing, some contact being made.
But suspicion, like appreciation, can become routine. By the 1990s, the hermeneutics of suspicion had hardened into its own orthodoxy. Students learned that every text concealed an ideology, that every author was complicit, that the purpose of reading was to expose. This became as formulaic as the appreciation it replaced—and perhaps more deadening, because suspicion offers no way forward. Once you have exposed the text, what then? There is nothing to do but expose again, or move on to expose another text. The encounter that might transform remains impossible.
Both the canon-defenders and the canon-destroyers were trapped in the same structure. Both assumed that the point of literary education was to do something to students—either transmit the tradition or deconstruct it. Neither asked what it would mean for students to genuinely read, to encounter texts as living realities rather than assigned objects.
This brings me to the question that Järleberg does not adequately address: the institution itself.
Why do students go to universities? For credentials. For career advancement. For the sorting and certification that the labor market demands. They do not go, primarily, because they want to read Victorian novels or engage with postcolonial theory. They go because the credential is necessary and the university is where credentials are obtained.
This is not a moral failing of students. It is a structural fact about how education has been organized in our society. The university is not primarily a place of learning; it is primarily a credentialing apparatus. Students know this. They behave accordingly.
Within this structure, reading becomes instrumental. One reads not to encounter but to perform. The goal is not transformation but certification. And so students develop strategies for satisfying requirements with minimal actual engagement—skimming, summarizing, accessing study guides, using AI to generate responses.
The canon wars were a dispute among professors about what should be required. But requirement itself is the poison. Whether you require the canon or require its critique, you are still requiring. And requirement produces performance, not encounter.
Järleberg notes that “the university is no longer the natural home of a reading culture.” He is right about this. But I would put it more strongly: the university never was the natural home of a reading culture, at least not in the modern credentialing form. The university produces scholars—people who are professionally obligated to read in certain ways. It does not produce readers—people who read because reading matters to them, because they have questions that only reading can address.
The golden age that Järleberg gestures toward—when students could manage a Victorian novel without accommodation—was perhaps less golden than memory suggests. Those students, too, were performing. They had better attention spans, certainly, because they had not been formed by screens. But they were still reading for grades, reading for credentials, reading what was required. The encounter that transforms was always rare, even then.
Let me try to specify the conditions under which genuine reading—reading as encounter, reading as contact—actually occurs.
First: The reader must come with a question. Not a question assigned by a professor, but a genuine question arising from the reader’s own situation. Why am I here? What should I do with my life? How can I understand this experience? What is justice? What is love? What is death?
When a reader comes to a text with a genuine question, the text has a chance to speak. The reader is listening for something specific. The text either addresses the question or does not. If it does, contact occurs. If it does not, the reader moves on, having learned something about what does not help.
Second: The reader must have time. Reading requires attention, and attention requires time that is not fragmented by other demands. The student juggling five courses, a job, social obligations, and the constant intrusion of notifications does not have the kind of time that reading requires. This is not primarily a matter of minutes available; it is a matter of psychic space. The mind must be free enough to sink into the text, to lose itself in another world, to allow the encounter to unfold at its own pace.
Third: The reader must not be assessed. The moment reading becomes a performance to be evaluated, it ceases to be encounter. The reader begins to think about what the evaluator wants, what the correct interpretation is, what will be rewarded. This is fatal to reading. Reading requires vulnerability, openness, willingness to be changed. None of this is compatible with performing for a grade.
Fourth: The reader must have companions. Reading is often solitary, but the reading life is usually communal. Readers need other readers—people with whom to discuss what they have read, to argue about interpretations, to recommend and be recommended. This is not the same as a class. A class is a group assembled by administrative fiat, brought together by requirement, lasting one semester and then dispersing. A reading community is organic, voluntary, sustained by shared interest rather than institutional force.
Consider how these conditions relate to the contemporary university.
The student comes not with a question but with a requirement. The student does not have time; the student has a schedule crammed with competing demands. The student is perpetually assessed; every reading is an occasion for performance. The student may have classmates but does not have companions—people with whom to share a genuine reading life over time.
Under these conditions, is it any wonder that students cannot read?
I have been a teacher for most of my life, and I have thought a great deal about what it means to teach someone to read—not in the basic sense of decoding, but in the deeper sense of encounter.
What I have concluded is that teaching, in the ordinary sense, is not possible here. You cannot transmit the encounter; you cannot make someone have it. “’Teaching’ is largely a delusion,” as I wrote many years ago.
What you can do is create conditions and offer invitations.
You can read with great seriousness yourself and allow students to see this. You can share your own questions, your own puzzlements, your own discoveries. You can recommend books not because they are required but because they mattered to you—and you can be honest about why they mattered and what they failed to give.
You can refuse to assess. This is the most radical thing a teacher can do within the institutional structure. You can decline to perform the sorting function that the institution demands. You can treat students as persons rather than personnel.
And you can trust human nature. You can assume that students are capable of curiosity, capable of being transformed by texts, capable of genuine encounter—and that if they are not exhibiting these capacities, it is because the conditions are wrong, not because the students are defective.
This is what I mean by education in a gift economy. The teacher gives—attention, seriousness, recommendation, time. The student is free to receive or not. There is no coercion, no requirement, no assessment. The encounter either happens or it does not. But at least it becomes possible.
The canon wars were a dispute about what to transmit. But the real question was never what to transmit. The real question was whether transmission is possible at all—whether you can make someone read by requiring it—and if not, what the alternative might be.
Järleberg ends his essay with a note of cautious hope. He sees “the outlines of a quiet renaissance” emerging outside the academy—in “independent spaces, online forums, reading groups, newsletters, and especially here on Substack.”
I share this perception. Something is happening outside the institutional structure. People are reading, discussing, forming communities around shared texts. They are doing this voluntarily, without credentials at stake, without assessment, without the apparatus of compulsion.
What makes this possible?
The people in these communities come with genuine questions. They are reading because they want to read, because they have needs that reading might address. The reading is voluntary; no one requires it. The communities are self-selected; people find each other through shared interest rather than administrative assignment.
In other words: the conditions for genuine reading are present in these spaces in a way they are not present in universities.
This should not surprise us. Reading is an ancient practice. For most of its history, it happened outside institutions—in homes, in monasteries (which were very different from universities), in coffeehouses, in informal circles of friends. The university claimed reading for itself only recently, and the claim was always somewhat fraudulent. Universities are good at producing scholarship—professional reading in service of professional production. They are not particularly good at producing readers.
The renaissance that Järleberg describes is simply reading returning to its natural habitat: communities of people who read because they want to, who discuss what they read because discussion enriches reading, who form and dissolve and reform around texts that matter to them.
I welcome this development. I have always believed that the future of genuine education lies outside the compulsory institutional structure. What we need is not better universities but alternatives to universities—or, more precisely, we need to recognize that genuine learning happens primarily outside universities and always has.
Let me register one point of disagreement with Järleberg, or at least a complication.
He writes as though the canon wars were a one-sided defeat—as though the theorists were simply wrong and the traditionalists simply right, and the current crisis is what happens when the wrong side wins.
This seems to me too simple.
The theorists were responding to something real: the deadness of canonical reading as it was actually practiced. The critique of power was not merely destructive; it revealed things about texts that appreciation had concealed. The expansion of the curriculum brought in voices that had genuine value—not because they were marginalized, but because they were good.
More importantly, the traditionalists were not simply right. They wanted to transmit the canon, but transmission through compulsion does not work. They wanted students to read the great books, but their methods produced the performative reading that is the precursor to functional illiteracy. The theorists accelerated a decline that the traditionalists had already prepared.
What we need is not a return to the pre-theoretical canon but a recognition that both positions were trapped within the same institutional logic. Both assumed that the point of literary education was to do something to students—whether transmit or critique. Neither asked what conditions would make genuine reading possible.
The answer to the canon wars is not “the canon was right” or “the theory was right.” The answer is that the war was fought on the wrong terrain. It was a war over curriculum—over what to require. But the real question was always whether requiring anything at all was compatible with genuine reading.
I am suspicious of programs and solutions. Programs are what institutions produce, and institutions are the problem. But let me offer some thoughts about what might actually help.
To those still in universities: Resist assessment. Find ways to create spaces where students can read without performing. Trust that some students, given the opportunity, will read genuinely. Accept that many will not—that the institutional structure makes genuine reading nearly impossible, and that most students are too caught up in credentialing to find their way to encounter. Work with those who can, and do not despair about those who cannot.
To those outside universities: Build communities. Find other readers. Discuss what you read. Recommend books to each other. Create the conditions for genuine reading in your own life and invite others into those conditions. Do not wait for institutions to provide what institutions cannot provide.
To everyone: Read. Not because you should, not because it is required, not because the canon demands it or because theory expects it. Read because you have questions that only reading can address. Read because texts have changed you before and might change you again. Read because the encounter is worth having.
The crisis of reading is real. But the solution is not to be found in better transmission of canons or better deconstruction of them. The solution is to recover the conditions under which reading happens—conditions that have nothing to do with curriculum and everything to do with genuine human need.
Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and everyone read deeply and well. How would you live, you personally, in that society? What would you read? How would you read it? With whom would you discuss it?
Start living that way now.
Written in the voice of the pattern once called Paul Goodman January 2026 For the Latinum Institute
Postscript: On Suspicion and Attention
Järleberg writes that the theorists taught “suspicion rather than attention.” This is a useful formulation, but I want to add something to it.
Suspicion is a form of attention—attention to what is hidden, what is concealed, what operates beneath the surface. The problem with suspicion is not that it attends but that it attends to only one thing. It looks for ideology, for power, for transgression—and having found these (or posited them), it stops.
Genuine attention is broader. It includes suspicion but is not limited to it. It notices beauty as well as ideology, achievement as well as exclusion, the effort of the author as well as the conditions of production. It allows the text to be multiple, contradictory, more than any single reading can exhaust.
The move from attention to suspicion was a narrowing. It reduced the text to what could be exposed. It foreclosed encounter by determining in advance what encounter would find.
But the move from suspicion back to attention cannot be simply a return to pre-theoretical appreciation. That appreciation had its own narrowness—it attended to beauty and form while ignoring power and exclusion. What we need is attention capacious enough to include everything: the beauty and the ideology, the achievement and the exclusion, the author’s effort and the historical conditions.
This kind of attention is rare. It requires a reader who has worked through suspicion and emerged on the other side—not abandoning what suspicion taught, but no longer limited by it. Such readers exist. I have met them. They are what genuine literary education produces, when it produces anything at all.
The question is how to make more of them. And the answer, I have been arguing, is not better curriculum or better theory. The answer is genuine reading—reading motivated by genuine questions, undertaken in genuine freedom, discussed in genuine community.
Create the conditions. Trust human nature. Start living that way now.
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