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How Does Nathaniel Hawthorne Use Literature In The Classroom

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Sophomore year I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter with my American Literature class. I remember admiring Hawthorne’s intricate descriptions of the coastal village and all of his complex characters that lived within it. Though the book brought up topics like religion, morality, and purity, our class discussions mainly focused on the text itself and how wonderfully Hawthorne has crafted it. Our class also had discussions surrounding larger topics like morality, impurity, and religion, but we always discussed them in relation to the book. See, great literature will bring up important topics like religion, racism, and sexism, and those topics should be talked about. However, in Francine Prose’s essay, I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read, she argues that using literature to teach values is wrong because it takes away from the art of the text itself. Though books may present important topics that can spark discussions of values in classrooms, I agree with Prose that teachers should not use books …show more content…

The context surrounding a piece is extremely important in truly understanding what you are reading. When a piece of literature is taken away from its context in order to teach some other values, it can alter the true meaning of the text. For instance, I recently read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. The book is written in the form of a letter from an African American dad to his son. One passage of the book focuses on the corporal punishment that is so present in black homes. Being that I am a white suburban female, I do not personally understand the reasoning behind such punishment, and therefore it may seem immoral to me. But if a teacher were to teach their class that child abuse is wrong, and use this book as support for their values, it would completely take Coates’ words out of context; it would force a context of caucasian suburban values on a passage about African American

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