How much Influnce Should a Book Have?
February is too cold and too dark to be reading anything as potentially depressing as The Picture of Dorian Grey but that’s what we’re doing in AP Literature. It’s interesting how many of my students really like this book. They seem to respond to the ideas that are expressed by Lord Henry-mostly the ones concerning hedonism and, youth. It’s a little scary to see them respond to literature like this. I know I’m supposed to want them to but, at the same time I’m worried that they’ll take the ideas too far or miss the irony.
I remember going through my own phases along with the books I was reading. I was an Objectivist after reading Atlas Shrugged and, I still feel vaguely guilty whenever I betray the ideals I was so committed to after reading Walden. But I don’t remember getting these books from any of my teachers-they just seemed to wander in, connected to each other by the threads of what I was doing. (I remember reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice because it was mentioned in Annie Hall. Now that I think about it I read a number of things because of Woody Allen movies, Marshall Mcluhan, Portnoy’s Complaint, Sentimental Education. Does that make me a Woody Allen disciple?)
I don’t want to turn these kids into disciples of Lord Henry or Oscar Wilde or Woody Allen.
