Two Handed Warriors

Erick Sierra

The ‘Story Behind the Story’: Making Lit Matter, by Erick Sierra

The ‘Story Behind the Story’: Making Lit Matter, by Erick Sierra

As American society increasingly questions the importance of what we in the humanities do, in the classroom I’ve been able to depend less and less on the grand narratives that long ago motivated my own passion for literature and instead imagined an importance for literature—a story behind the story—sourced not in grand abstract metanarratives, but in what students themselves find viscerally and deeply important.