It's a significant fact that upon arriving to Ellis Island, the first thing supposedly immigrants or future immigrants see is that sonnet engraved in… - Ilan Stavans

we are currently in the midst of reimagining the classics, making the canon more expansive, less white and Eurocentric. Some titles fall off the shelf as others arrive. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, is, it appears to me, less current than it was a few decades ago. I taught it a couple of years ago, and students found plenty to fault and that is difficult to justify these days. At the same time, the work of immigrant writers—I love the novels by Viet Thanh Nguyen, for instance—is opening new vistas. This is as it should be. Literature, at first sight, might feel static, but it is just the opposite: an organic expression of a particular time and place.

Isn’t that the dream of democracy, to allow its dwellers to have a voice? The only way to achieve that is to allow them to appreciate the voices of the past.

I tell my students that education isn’t about facts. It isn’t about theories, either. It is about tracking your thoughts, about witnessing how stories are formed in your mind. It is about allowing the mind not to be clogged, about letting it see not what it does but how it does it. The rules of criticism are the same as the rules of other types of literature. These rules boil down to one: finding the right words to tell the right narrative at the right time. Nothing else matters.