By studying Literary Inquiry and Analysis, we can engage with and answer questions associated with diverse literary texts in relation to historical periods, themes, genres, and/or critical theories using literary analysis, critical evaluation, and theoretical interpretations.

Perspectives

Built around the 3rd century BCE, one of the most famous libraries that lives in world memory is the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Legend has it that the library was catastrophically burned down; however, the truth is more that it suffered major setbacks over several years, including a potentially accidental fire (by Julius Caesar’s armies), changes in economic support, and exile of the main librarians. Libraries are repositories of books and knowledge, but they have many vulnerabilities. Indeed, during its lifespan, the Library of Alexandria, which is believed to have held over half a million documents in its time, represents many of these that libraries face: fire, floods, other natural disasters, political and economic upheaval, loss of patronage and staff, and violent conflict. (See List of Destroyed Libraries.)

Tragically, there are many who seek to damage books and the knowledge they can communicate, and libraries are at times deliberately vandalized to prevent that knowledge from being accessible. Richard Ovenden in Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (2020) remarks that the “significance of books and archival material is recognised not only by those who wish to protect knowledge, but also by those who wish to destroy it. Throughout history, libraries and archives have been subject to attack. At times librarians and archivists have risked and lost their lives for the preservation of knowledge” (p. 8). An example of individuals protecting libraries takes us back to the library of Alexandria – the modern one built to replace and commemorate the ancient one. In 2011, there was a great deal of civil unrest in Egypt. To protect the library, students, librarians, and others formed a human chain holding hands around the building. Karen Leggett Abouraya and Susan L. Roth wrote a children’s book Hands Around ​the Library: Protecting Egypt’s​ Treasured Books about this event.

View: “Hands Around The Library”

In the fourteenth through the sixteenth century, the city of Timbuktu in modern Mali, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988, was a renowned center of learning where books were a sign of wealth and social standing: “In Timbuktu, literacy and books transcended scholarly value and symbolized wealth, power, and baraka (blessings) as well as an efficient means of transmitting information” (Singleton, 2004, p. 3). Even though we do not have an accurate count of exactly how many libraries and books existed in Timbuktu, there were many. Timbuktu scholars traveled all over the Muslim world to copy books in other libraries to bring back, and they hosted many scholars themselves in their own city: “The majority of Muslim libraries maintained a tradition of open access to scholars from around the world” (p. 7). Timbuktu remained a center of scholarship until several of its libraries were looted with many manuscripts dispersed across Africa, although many  more – perhaps even more than 350,000 – managed to remain in the city. In 2012, Islamist extremists took over Timbuktu, and, along with destroying religious sites, they targeted these manuscripts as they “portrayed Islam as practiced in this corner of the world as a blend of the secular and the religious — or they showed that the two could coexist beautifully […] So it was tremendously important […] to protect and preserve these manuscripts as evidence of both Mali’s former greatness and the tolerance that that form of Islam encouraged” (NPR Staff, 2016). Timbuktu Librarian Abdel Kader Haidara resolved not to let anything happen to these books, so he and others began collecting and smuggling as many of the manuscripts as possible out of the city. They used mule carts, boats, and anything else they could find to transport their precious cargo secretly to Bamako where they raised funding to keep them in climate-controlled storage and begin the process of digitization. (See the book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer for more of this story.)

View: “Badass Librarians of Timbuktu”

Text Attributions

The section contains material adapted from Heritages of Change by the same author.

Concepts to Consider

What the stories above reveal is the value humans have placed on literary knowledge and creativity in various geographies across the world and across vast amounts of time. We have built great repositories to house such documents, sacrificed to preserve them, and mourned their loss. In chapter 2.3, we encountered Irina Dumitrescu’s article “‘Frivolous’ humanities helped prisoners survive in Communist Romania” (2016) and how essential the liberal arts have been for political prisoners. In her example, literature was particularly mentioned in their memoirs: “Each one testified to the power of the liberal arts—especially literature and foreign languages – to help individuals maintain sanity and a sense of self in conditions designed to destroy them.” She tells us that prisoners “formed study groups, recalling the plots of novels and teaching each other history from memory. Forced into a program of ‘re-education,’ they created their own university instead.” People turn to books and literature in times of stress and difficulty; they look to find themselves in the stories of others and construct ways to call upon their own reserves of strength and resilience.

Literary Inquiry and Analysis, while containing elements of reading skills (see Reading in chapter 4.3), allows us to go deeper than comprehension into exploring and questioning human experience. We move beyond the words on the page to their implications, contexts, and applications. Sometimes big emotions and big ideas can only be communicated or processed in literary form, in fiction or non-fiction, in allegory or satire, in poetry or prose. The human mind is so complex that it at times has to express itself through creativity and imagination, inviting fellow human beings insight into worlds that are not limited by the bounds of reality. If other general education skills teach us what and how the world is, Literary Inquiry and Analysis teaches us what we are capable of – positive, negative, and everything in between.

More practically, practicing Literacy Inquiry and Analysis combines creative and critical thinking (see Creative and Critical Thinking in chapter 5.10). While we have to think creatively to derive our own meaning from literary works, we also must think critically about the contexts in which they were written and the multiple contexts in which they are received. We learn to interrogate thoughts and ideas, asking more questions than finding answers, which develops comfort living with abstracts and ambiguities, perhaps even with conflicting ideas simultaneously.

Nadyja Von Ebers (2017) from the Chicago Academy for the Arts explores literature as an art form and claims that analyzing it emphasizes that “art may involve self-expression, but to a greater purpose beyond the creator, whether to inform, to invoke empathy, to inspire, or simply to entertain.” Literary Inquiry and Analysis is a pathway to developing compassion and an understanding of diverse perspectives (see Diverse Perspectives in chapter 5.2). Truong Thi My Van, in “The Relevance of Literary  Analysis to Teaching Literature  in the EFL [English as a Foreign Language] Classroom,” argues, “Meaning is the result of the two-way relationship between texts and readers, depending on readers’ experience, the reading context, and the difficulty, style, and form of literary language. Meaning is also influenced by how students relate to the authors’ portrayal of identity, culture, gender, and social class” (2009, p. 8). Through literature, we encounter others with different life experiences and backgrounds and get to know them intimately, perhaps more intimately than we at times get to know many people in real life. We learn how to empathize and celebrate both difference and connection.

At the same time that we consider all of these benefits of Literary Inquiry and Analysis, we do need to remember that reading can simply be fun!

View: “What Is Literature For?”

Literary Inquiry and Analysis and Good, Necessary Trouble

Censorship is nothing new. We have authors as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century and John Milton in the seventeenth century writing against the banning of books. More recently, Salman Rushdie, Ibram X. Kendi, Ellen Hopkins, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Neil Gaiman, and many others have spoken out on the problems with censorship.

And, yet, the number of books bans or attempted book bans in the United States is on the rise:

• According to PEN America’s report “Banned in the USA: State Laws Supercharge Book Suppression in Schools,” “[d]uring the first half of the 2022-2023 school year, PEN America recorded 1,477 instances of individual books banned, an increase of 28 percent compared to the prior six months, January – June 2022. That is more instances of book banning than recorded in either the first or second half of the 2021-22 school year. Over this six-month timeline, the total instances of book bans affected is over 800 titles; this equates to over 100 titles removed from student access each month. The 1,477 instances of book bans PEN America tracked this school year affected 874 unique titles. Book bans continue to target books featuring LGBTQ+ themes or LGBTQ+ characters, characters of color, and books on race and racism” (Meehan & Friedman, 2023).
• The American Library Association (ALA) reported in March 2023 “1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since […] more than 20 years ago. The unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022 nearly doubles the 729 challenges reported in 2021. A record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021. Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.”

The sheer number of book challenges, the calls to remove books from public and/or school libraries due to content and themes, is alarming enough, but the fact that books by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color are the majority of these challenges is even more concerning, particularly as the former are being challenged under the guise that they contain more “explicit sexual material” than other books. Of the top most banned books in the period of PEN America’s report, “ten of eleven authors and illustrators are women or non-binary individuals” and “[f]our of the books are written by authors of color and four by LGBTQ+ individuals.” The “prize” for most banned title goes to Gender Queer: A Memoir, a 2019 graphic memoir by Maia Kobabe. PEN America also notes that 74% of book bans “are connected to organized efforts, mainly of advocacy groups; elected officials; or enacted legislation” with 20% of those “connected to organized advocacy groups.” These organized efforts have prompted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to argue that these book bans are an act of policy violence that  “systematically and disproportionately impact Black youth who would benefit from the literary work’s interrogation of society as they shape their understanding of their people’s history” (Moss, 2023). These numbers also explain why in the past year there has been an increase in book challenges that include a list of multiple books instead of only challenging one title at a time.

Book challenges have been met with local community individuals and groups getting into “good, necessary trouble” by opposing the bans in public school or library board meetings, many of which have been reported to include very tense, even violent debate (see Speaking and Listening in chapter 4.4 and Civic Learning in chapter 5.1). Other methods of resistance have come from campaigns led by the leaders of and members of organizations. This Story Matters: Standing Up for Students’ Right to Read in the Face of Censorship is a database created by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) that collects rationales written by experts to provide justification and resources to support teachers continuing to teach controversial books (see Writing in chapter 4.5). The American Library Association provided training at their 2023 meeting on book bans, how to confront them, and how to protect librarians against professional and personal attacks. In June 2023, the ALA also renewed the Freedom to Read Statement, which was originally adopted in 1953; the statement begins, “The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack.”

Discussion 5.6

• If you have already taken a course with a primary focus on Literary Inquiry and Analysis, think about what you were asked to do and what you learned. If you have not already taken a Literacy Inquiry and Analysis course, think about the types of courses you could take.
• In what ways did or might the idea(s) or example(s) discussed above apply in such a course?
• What other ideas or examples would you add to the discussion?