There's more to study than politics

Literature and politics are hand in glove. If we still remember the Aeneid it's probably for the love affair between driven Aeneas and abandoned Dido, but it was as a story about the founding of Rome that the epic secured Virgil his emperor's good graces and a head start on posterity's.

Antony and Cleopatra is about empires and power struggles involving that same emperor, though of course it's also about, well, Antony and Cleopatra.

Othello is the story of the African general of a European army who is tricked into murdering his supposedly adulterous upper-class European wife (it's her story, too!).

The political dimensions are inescapable. Not only are the stories partly about politics, of both the big-picture and domestic varieties, but the political circumstances and climates of opinion surrounding and influencing the poets as they wrote are important, too.

Scholars have always regarded as vital the task of telling readers what they can, and finding out more, about this latter issue: and in the past 15 years or so there has been a resurgence of valuable historical and reconstructive scholarship of this kind.

But as any teacher knows, in our efforts to convey masses of information or to correct what we see as misinformation, we can sometimes cause new misunderstandings, including by our omissions, or in the very cast of our own thought.

Many historical scholars have been keen to counterbalance the theoretical excesses of the 1970s and '80s (the "deconstruction" era), when academics in literature departments were so interested in exposing the internal contradictions in texts and showing that literature was an undifferentiated stream of "thinking about language" that many of their students must have decided it had nothing to do with men and women.

But this very counterbalancing has tended to leave the impression that what was left out was not men and women but their politics alone.

Poststructuralist reports of the death of the author were exaggerations; she was reborn as a radical, or a reactionary, or black, or white, or abused. That was what we needed to think about. Maybe (most damagingly) that was all we needed to think about.

Were we radicals or reactionaries ourselves? How did our politics (race, gender, class) affect our reading of her politics?

Good questions in themselves, but, insidiously, what happened then was that literature courses and curricula, first at universities but now apparently at the school level too, started to take shape around the politics.

Of the 1790s, the 1640s, the Roman Empire: but above all of the past 100 years. Modern political doctrines and attitudes (Marxist and post-Marxist variants often featuring strongly) inevitably infiltrated the study, even of pre-modern authors.

The combined effect of excess and over-correction, both sides prone to dogmatic extremes or misunderstandings, may have been a loss of bearings for many university students, many of whom, over that long period, have now become school teachers and curriculum setters themselves.

Of course loss of bearings may have an exciting postmodernist flavour; every dogma has its strands of sense, and no one's questioning the enthusiasm or intelligence of teachers. But even the most committed must sometimes wonder where the rest of the literature went.

Does the politics go all the way down? Can't we ever make contact with a character or another human being, in literature or life, without seeing their gender, race, class or party affiliation as the most important thing about them?

I recently spent a morning with a group of highly competent and professional Year 11 and 12 teachers, who were concerned about the small number of boys enrolling in English classes. They felt that politicised approaches to the relations between and characteristic qualities of the two sexes in literature were utterly alienating boys while not particularly appealing to girls, either.

What mustn't get forgotten in all of this is that literature often thinks as intensely and deeply about politics as it does about every other aspect of the human condition (the more intensely and deeply it thinks the better it is and the longer it endures, generally).

In Dido, the first true feminist, Antony, Cleopatra or Othello, or any of their literary companions, past and present, it works at the level we all have to work at: of living and making sense of our lives in all their constituent parts among other people.

Politics is an extremely important aspect of how we get on together (in polities, strictly), and we properly study and teach the science of it in all its complexity, as well as practising it in our lives.

But even when we are acting politically we are also acting emotionally, ethically (or not), and rationally (or not): and literature thinks about all that too. It asks questions of its readers; it reads them.

Too often literature is read as anything else but. Yet it isn't history, it isn't philosophy, it isn't social science.

It's difficult in its own way; in the way whole people, whole minds, hearts and lives, are difficult, not least in their connections (including political connections) with other minds, hearts and lives.

And that's where young men and women in school literature classes need to begin.

If literature is politicised too early and too exclusively (I only say "if"), then it may never reveal its true power as political thought.