As I read The Norton‘s sketch on plot, I read it as a writer. (Affirming the importance of knowing who and where our students are.) I appreciated the breakdown of the elements of plot because it made me think about the basics of how a story is constructed, created. I finished, and then thought, but let’s say I weren’t a writer interested in teaching writing. Let’s say I were teaching literature for the sake of literature. Why would I want to teach plot to readers? Do they really need to know terms like exposition and discriminated occasion? (Okay, okay, okay… I love to learn. I believe in science for science’s sake, exploration for discovery’s sake, and sometimes, yes, even memorization for knowledge’s sake. But in order to ask something of my would-be students, I need a better grasp of why I’m doing so.)

It’s blog one, paragraph two, and already I need to stop and backup. Before I can really consider my goals in teaching readers about the elements of plot, I need to think more about something much more basic: What am I doing here (in this scenario in which I am teaching literature)? Why do we teach literature? What are we trying to help our students accomplish?

(Blog one, paragraph three, and already I’m straying from the assigned reading.) The Norton tries to explain “Why Literature Matters,” but frankly, the idea that “by becoming familiar with the conventions of writing a sonnet in seventeenth-century England or of writing a short story in 1920s America you can come to appreciate and even love works that you might have disliked if you simply read them on your own” doesn’t really do it for me (3). I can hear the students now: “So your argument is that I should learn this stuff, just so I can appreciate what I might have disliked otherwise? Why not just stick to what I like to begin with and save myself the trouble?”

But literature–reading it, thinking about, talking about it–is one of those things that almost always gets me truly, deeply excited. So what’s The Norton missing here? I view the literature classes from my undergraduate degree as the most important of all the classes I took–not because they relate directly to my career, but because of how they shaped who I am and how I view and think about the world. The Norton touches this idea: “A realistic story, poem, or play can satisfy a desire for broader experiences, even unpleasant experience… We yearn for such knowledge in a very personal way, as though we can know our own identities and experiences only by leaping over the boundaries that usually separate us from other selves and worlds” (2). That is the power of literature, this leaping of boundaries.

At least one reason why we read is the same as why we write: to connect. And this, were I a teacher of literature, would be my goal: to help my students to connect with experiences beyond their own, to reach beyond themselves, to stretch their minds and better understand (themselves, others, life, politics… everything, any thing). (It’s an idealistic goal, but then so is Salvatori and Donahue’s “to make a difference in the world,” xxv).

The Norton explains why students should “bother with any piece of writing that requires … effort,” saying “as we challenge ourselves to read more difficult literature, we become able to extend ourselves further, much like athletes who train for heavier weights or longer jumps with repeated practice” (2). The Norton seems to mean it in terms of becoming intellectually capable of understanding more difficult works, but I want to read the sentence to mean that by reading things that challenge us, we move beyond our own skin, our own experiences–we extend ourselves by engaging in the experiences of the characters.

And simply recognizing and promoting this idea of the value of difficulty is perhaps what I appreciated most about The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. As Salvatory and Donahue discuss, as we extend, we are naturally hindered by what we don’t know as well as by what we know that doesn’t fit in with what we don’t know, and it is in tackling this “difficulty” that we often make the most rewarding discoveries.

And so, finally, back to the question of teaching the elements of plot. Developing a better understanding of how someone else has lent a “meaningful pattern to mere chronology” (58) in the life of their characters can help us leap those boundaries that The Norton talks about. Being able to see, to break down and analyze, the exposition and the discriminated occasion–all the pieces that reveal how an author has intentionally constructed her narrative–can help us not only to better understand the difficulties we have with the text but also to be more cognizant as we shape and lend meaning to the events in the world around us.