The Function of Literature

One difficulty of teaching literature that quickly becomes evident at the High School level, and, I suspect, at any level, is that the world depends of resistance. Allow me to elaborate. To make a sound, air passes over vocal chords that resist. Instruments operate on the same basic principal. Movement, writing, pretty much anything requires something to provide resistance in order to facilitate its motion, some standard to move against. Most literature enacts some kind of social criticism. An author writes a story and points out elements of a society that are unjust, absurd, or otherwise distasteful, pointing out human foibles, the human condition of struggle, what have you. To understand the message of a given text, however, requires a standard to measure the meaning of the story. Most school age readers are using stimuli from the outside world, movies, tv, stories, music, to build, formulate, and fine tune their understanding of "the way the world ought to be" or "how I ought to live." But literature assumes either some internalized moral compass, or at least an understanding of some moral standard in existence out in the world, whether it's a simple truth like "life is precious" or something more complex. The problem is that so many of us, especially at a younger age, lack that sense of an established standard. For some it's a hurdle just to decode a text and arrive at basic comprehension. Even as much contemporary literature criticizes oppressive social standards, decries the stifled individual conscience over against group norms (as I tend to myself), the creation and interpretation of literature depends on some kind of awareness of a deeper standard or law that society is violating. The democratization of information makes some coherent moral seem all the more difficult. This would seem to suggest an increasing moral morass, a decay at society's core, some kind of collective moral disorientation. And yet, it is fascinating that, in general, many educators and others who work with youth today seem to think that, by and large our youth are more respectful, more generous, and kinder than their own generation. In the broader populace, as ever, people tend to idealize their own generation or the previous generation, and criticize the youth and culture in general for their moral shortcomings. If in fact, the younger generation is kinder, somehow, by nature, even as the ability to evaluate the actions of others in, say, literature, I'm wondering how to account for this.