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Teaching Millennials: The Challenge Of Ambiguity, Sheila M. Fisher

Teaching Millennials in the New Millennium, April 2011

Andre Maurois wrote in relation to Voltaire: "It is certain that a system imbued with perfect clarity has few chances of being a truthful image of an obscure and mysterious world." This could be a motto for literary studies. Words are multivalent, and their very capacity for ambiguity is the stuff of which literature and literary criticism are made. Students love literature and are drawn to it because it involves interpretation and seldom yields "perfect clarity"; they love it because of, not despite its ambiguity. This paper argues that millennial students are no more averse than their predecessors to wrestling …