Mark Twain's Dead. Forget him.

Mark Twain's dead.

I realized a few years ago that that information is more than just a statement of fact.

I have been an English teacher for more than 20 years, including for a while in a junior/senior high school program for troubled youth. I kept trying to come up with ways to reach out to my students, hoping to encourage some of them to read more than the materials we were reading in class. That included independent and extra credit reading assignments, with all sorts of great books on recommended lists.

But I saw in many the same reactions to older book, books like Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer.

I saw how many reacted to the books. If one my students was looking at the books, and picked up something like  The Prince and the Pauper,  he'd ask what it was about. As soon as it came out that Twain (or others) were old-time authors and were now dead, the student would invariably put the book back on the shelf.

At almost every school where I have taught - even at the college-prep high school were I later taught - many students looked disdainfully on the classics. They would ask for more contemporary and popular books on those lists I gave out. Books by authors still writing, still alive.

Not old and dead authors.

Then it hit me. This was a kind of literary criticism. The fact that Twain and the others were dead apparently made their books one not worth reading.

Now I've encountered many kinds of literary criticism over the years - New Criticism, Feminist Criticism, Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, and more. Some of them are even as valid as this dead author one is.

Those criticism methods have rippled over the surface of the academic seas, lapping on the shores of educational institutions, leaving behinds all kinds of detritus.

There are further possibilities for this.

A friend of mine used to work at a group home for developmentally disabled adults. She took a group of them to see a production of Annie. When Annie meets President Roosevelt late in the show, the voice of one of the residents boomed from the balcony, "Franklin Roosevelt's dead. Forget him."

Theater and history dismissed in one critical masterstroke!

The Fifth Symphony? Beethoven's dead. Forget him.
The Thinker? Rodin's dead. Forget him.
Mona Lisa? Leonardo da Vinci's dead. Forget him.
"Mr. Tambourine Man"? Dylan's ... oh, wait, he's not dead. He just sings that way.

This whole "He's dead. Forget him" school of criticism could lead to a spate of articles in scholarly journals. It could lead to workshops and seminars in academic institutions across the country.

There's money to be made.

I can imagine Twain laughing about this. After all, if we are to reject books by dead writers, then the only works they would have been reading during his day would not have been ones by Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or Milton, but rather by living writers like Twain himself.

It might have helped him pay off his debts.

As for me, Steinbeck and Hemingway and Bradbury and Dickens and Dostoyevsky are all dead, so maybe if I ever finish my novel or my poetry collection they will sell and people might actually read them.

Or, at the least,  people may even read these blog posts.

God willing, I still have a couple of decades left before I officially become a dead author.

Pax et bonum