The Truth Told Slant

For those who follow the Summer Reading Programs that populate American higher education, an essay provocatively entitled "Tolstoy in the Slaughterhouse" offers some intriguing thoughts. The author, Brendan Boyle, is an assistant professor of the classics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. At UNC, Boyle has been a longstanding advocate for selecting Tolstoy (and, conceivably, great novels, in general) for UNC’s summer reading selection—but, to no avail.

The overwhelming selection of non-fiction for these summer readings gives Boyle pause, as he considers the value of having an incoming class encounter the work of a great novelist. Boyle notices a national trend, similar to some of the findings published by the National Association of Scholars (NAS): many of these books address politically-correct topics that are far too narrow. Boyle believes that such myopic selections are evidence of “something defective…precisely because it ignores the way an education must be about the disinterested pursuit of the permanently untimely. And that is what these books, and these first-year reading programs, miss so egregiously. College becomes a kind of intensified continuation of blog- or opinion-page reading. Worse, it becomes training for a life in thrall to the market.”

Up to that point in the essay (half-way through his musings), Boyle seems to side with the Great Tradition—though he is quick to criticize the traditional emphasis of NAS for having “no interest, so far as I can tell, in fiction as such.” (And, with that, we can assume he’s not a regular reader of NAS publications.)

But, then he agrees to lead a UNC reading group, in spite of his scruples, just to try out some of the politically-charged non-fiction. Apparently this experience worked its magic on Boyle, for the second half of his essay praises Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals and suggests that Foer deserves a seat at the table of great writers. Except that Foer’s work “seems not to have made much of an impact on the students”—at least not as much “impact” as it did on Boyle, who was prepared to give up his carnivorous ways.

This prompts Boyle to ask what went wrong. Why were student not transformed by compelling arguments that Boyle felt were worthy of serious consideration? His conclusion: “students simply aren’t very good readers.”

Finally, Boyle returns to his original claim that Tolstoy--that “famous Russian vegetarian”--might have been a better book selection than Jonathan Foer’s screed against meat-eaters. In fact, Boyle thinks Tolstoy would have given his students a chance to truly read for themselves.

Unfortunately, Russian vegetarians are not in season, this year...