Disliking Books at an Early Age is an excerpt from the book Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education written by Gerald Graff. The book is about new ways to teach young students literature, because when it was written, an increasing number of students were not interested in literature. Though the author, Graff, holds a PhD in English and is a former president of the Modern Language Association, he too had struggles doming to enjoy literature. Graff uses a sort of “Split Ethos” to attract his audience, young struggling students. He logically organizes his thoughts about disliking books at an early age, coupled with emotions that would connect young people to his struggle to build rapport with the audience.
To connect to the audience, Graff began by recalling his childhood. He said that he refused “to read anything besides comic books, sports magazines, and the John R. Tunis and Claire Bee sports novels” (Page 112, Paragraph 4). Growing up as a young Jew in a rough part of Chicago, he was already at risk of being bullied. When it came to gaining knowledge, “any boy who had cultivated them-I cannot recall one who did-would have marked himself as a sissy. However, when Graff went to college, he was stuck as a liberal arts major who disliked reading until his sophomore year. In his sophomore year, the controversy regarding the merits of the ending of Huckleberry Finn and the arguments that can be made about it opened up reading to him.
Like most stories, Disliking books at an Early Age can be broken down into three parts; the beginning or introduction, the climax, and the eventual resolution or ending. The introduction contained a blend of ethos and pathos. Graff logically laid out reasons for why he would not read as a kid. He said how when he grew up, “Reading and studying was more permissible for girls, but they, too, had to be careful not to become too intellectual, lest they acquire the stigma of being “stuck up”” (Page 112, Paragraph 2). Kids being how kids are, all they want to do is to fit in. if intelligence in considered a negative trait, of course kids will place no emphasis on learning. Graff himself believed that “Becoming a bookworm would have only given the (other kids) a decisive reason for beating me up” (Page 112, Paragraph 2). Even going beyond connecting to readers with logic, emotions were also a driving force in making Disliking Books at an Early Age more appealing. Everyone in some way has faced struggle or hardship in their life, and is able to relate that to someone else’s. Most people have been made fun of in school, most people have been afraid to disappoint their parents, and most people had problems making that transition from being in high school to being in college. Graff’s Father at one point grounded him until he would finish reading a book by Magellan. However, “I could do no better than stare bleakly at the pages” (Page 112, Paragraph 4). That feeling of being lost in a book is something many young people have felt. Whether the book be confusing or impossible to connect with, the frustration is all the same. Even in in college, “…Though I dutifully did my homework and made good grades, I continued to find “serious” reading difficult and alien” (Page 112-113, Paragraph 6). For most college kids, anything longer that a tweet is painful, a book would be the end of the world.
“Even when I had done the assigned reading, I was often tongue tied and embarrassed when called on” (Page 113, Paragraph 2). That is a common feeling that students know about reading. A feeling everyone also know is the spark that ignites a new found passion. Something that is just right. For Graff, “one of the first sparks I remember was a controversy over Huckleberry Finn” (Page 113, Paragraph 3). I remember when I was little, my dad tried to get me to golf. I hated watching it on the television, but then I went to the range one day. Fast forward a few years and I have competed in Junior PGA tournaments. That spark of Graff’s ignited into a burning passion about literature, not the books themselves, but the way people can argue over elements within them. It is his niche, much like how people may focus on specifics things within their passions.
After Graff finishes talking about how he came to love literature, Disliking books at an Early Age changes. It goes from appealing to students struggling with reading to a section titled The Standard Story targeting the teacher audience. All of his ethos built up is lost. His “split ethos” containing both logos and pathos strictly becomes logos. The emotional side of his argument used to make a balance is gone. Students simply do not connect with teachers. Saying, “To those who have never reconciled themselves to the academicization of literature, the seeming overdevelopment of academic criticism with its obtrusive methodology and its endless disputes among interpretations and theories seems a betrayal not just of literature and the common reader but of the professor’s own original passion for literature” (Page 115, Paragraph 3) may make sense to someone in the profession of literature, no student would connect with a thought such as that. The conclusion is saturated with logical thought that would appeal to those who think that way, but without an emotional balance it falls flat.
Disliking Books at an Early Age is an essay contained in the teaching book Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education by Gerald Graff. Graff blends both logos and pathos together to appeal towards students that struggle with literature. By combining childhood stories that everyone has a connection to with logical thought in a structure that resembles a story, his “split ethos” enables him to grasp his audience. Once the end of the paper arrives, all is lost when Graff makes an abrupt shift from appealing towards students to speaking to teachers. The “split ethos” is gone, leaving behind only logos. While it would appeal to certain people, the original audience becomes lost.
Work Cited:
Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Print.
“Home – GeraldGraff.com.” GeraldGraffcom RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.