Hasty Reading and Literary Values: A Pilot Study of University Student Reading Experience in Relation to Critical and Empathetic Engagement

Recently, in an introduction to literature course, I began a class by asking my students what they thought about Gregor’s sister, Grete, in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Describe her character? I met silence. Retrenching, I asked them about the story’s protagonist, Gregor, the traveling salesman who turns into a giant insect. Describe his character? More silence. Had they read it? Or enough of it? Or carefully enough? They all looked tired, like they wanted to crawl away into a dusty corner of the room, perhaps under a sofa like Gregor, and be left alone.1 I could only speculate as to what they had read or how they had read. I was vulnerable, like many of us, to grim theories of the decline of books and the Twitterization of attention spans, but were they true? I have often felt in the dark about the most basic activity I ask my students to undertake—not literary analysis, but the experience of reading literature. How do students today read? What do they get out of it?