tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post1572204342608830419..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: The Why I Teach Literature MemeCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-46664892211020210662008-01-30T23:14:00.000-05:002008-01-30T23:14:00.000-05:00Craig> Thanks!LJS> Good points yourself. Particul...Craig> Thanks!<BR/><BR/>LJS> Good points yourself. Particularly on the recognition of stories. I think that idea of narrative is often unrecognized, even when it can be most useful...<BR/><BR/>JJC> I think it's telling that you phrase your engagement with the meme as a kind of poetic response (or at least, one which adheres to a more poetic style of presentation, using line breaks and blank space on the virtual page to structure the "argument," if you will). It allows for the contradictions in a way I quite admire -- by simply allowing them space to exist. Interesting too that those contradictions <I>as they exist in literature</I> are sometimes precisely what is flattened by later interpretation of those same works. The same way some of those works might flatten a far more complex world. And so on. Ad infinitum, perhaps.<BR/><BR/>Letty> Very good point about preservation.Mary Kate Hurleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14892991966276345782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-65746206292664475782008-01-30T09:43:00.000-05:002008-01-30T09:43:00.000-05:00An interesting post.It ties in with some of the th...An interesting post.<BR/>It ties in with some of the things you've been saying, but I think another important aspect of teaching medieval languages and literatures is the preservation of heritage. A bit like a museum, but a museum which is concerned with education. The questions I get most often from 'outsiders' when I tell them I teach Old English have to do with the history of the language: what the etymology of certain words is, how English became what it is, how language changes, etc. I think it's important knowledge that should be preserved, deepened, and disseminated.LJNhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04003522787987545206noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-55187993456688763792008-01-30T06:46:00.000-05:002008-01-30T06:46:00.000-05:00Thanks, Mary Kate, for your compelling thoughts on...Thanks, Mary Kate, for your compelling thoughts on a subject that seems simple only at a very swift glance, but is in fact a mise en abîme! And Karl, thanks for finding the affirmative in Edelman, a critic who does have positives that haven't featured enough here at ITM.<BR/><BR/>I can't answer the question of why I teach literature any more easily than I can of why beyond bare survival I eat. I'm not sure we've ever been able to adequately define <EM>literature</EM>, despite the critical enthusiasm to do so that erupted in the canon wars of the 1980s. <BR/><BR/>I've never been good at formulating an Apologia that is persuasive by being pointed and reductive. Yesterday as I sat through meetings and did the thousand tiny chores that structure my Tuesdays I scribbled down the following. It is rife with contradiction. Then again, so are both pedagogy and literature.<BR/><BR/>Literature allows us to form affective bonds with lives we could not otherwise know or touch.<BR/><BR/>Literature teaches us how little our humanity has changed.<BR/><BR/>Literature teaches us how vastly our humanity has changed.<BR/><BR/>A teacher of literature can model a passionate mode of reading in the hope of being surpassed by her auditors, her community.<BR/><BR/>Literature heals.<BR/><BR/>Literature wounds.<BR/><BR/>Literature is superfluous.<BR/><BR/>Literature is lifeblood.<BR/><BR/>Humans live and die by narrative. Narrative is our structure of knowing; narrative structures the world.<BR/><BR/>Literature makes the present and past familiar and strange. It opens up the future and leaves it unpredetermined.<BR/><BR/>Literature is navel-gazing in its most aesthetic form.<BR/><BR/>Literature is community building in the most utopian way.<BR/><BR/>Literature liberates.<BR/><BR/>Literature ruins lives.<BR/><BR/>Literature opens us to worlds unthought.<BR/><BR/>Teaching literature allows one to lose oneself in texts that are inexhaustible to meditation, and to invite others to follow.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-69023029428610640092008-01-30T05:26:00.000-05:002008-01-30T05:26:00.000-05:00The humanities are what make us human. That's all ...The humanities are what make us human. That's all the justification they've ever needed for me. Teach on, Ms. Kate. You're my kind of prof!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-30926717764989841062008-01-29T17:58:00.001-05:002008-01-29T17:58:00.001-05:00Lovely post, MK. I wish Fish would notice such pos...Lovely post, MK. I wish Fish would notice such posts. Some idealism, supported as yours is by cogent argument, might do Stanley some good. He would, one might say, be less of a cold fish about things (sorry...).<BR/><BR/>One semester I asked my students on Day One whether they thought analysis mattered. Not a one of them spoke up to say it does, or to disagree with those who felt it didn't. Perhaps they misunderstood the terms of the question, or perhaps they had simply had very cynical winter breaks. Perhaps, though, they at that stage believed - having read their Fish or those in his school (sorry...) - that what they were up to didn't, couldn't matter. (They changed their tune, I'm glad to say.)<BR/><BR/>I'd say the fact that a group of Ivy League students could, at least by silence, refuse analysis, is precisely why we need to teach literature, poetry, the humanities (and other disciplines, though I can only speak directly for mine). <BR/><BR/>I'll stand by your optimism and idealism from that early paper. We have to recognize these stories in order to analyze them, and to discern the useful methods of analysis (one of which karl's comment points out). We also sometimes gain pleasure from the recognition of stories, the recognition that certain things are stories. Were I to see Stanley Fish around, I'd want to tell him that the humanities can exist for their own sake, not for a greater good, and that's fine, but more importantly they do often exist for a greater good. "This is not a story to pass on," Toni Morrison closes BELOVED with, its meanings multiple, uncertain, and essential. Too often that phrase can be true, and thankfully the study of the humanities is there often enough to explore the story, and its passing on. (Stanley, if you're reading, I first encountered that novel in, yes, a literature classroom. Sorry.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-86748194552456622502008-01-29T17:58:00.000-05:002008-01-29T17:58:00.000-05:00Great post Mary Kate. We added it to the inventor...Great post Mary Kate. We added it to the <A HREF="http://www.freeexchangeoncampus.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=863&Itemid=80" REL="nofollow">inventory of posts</A> over at Free Exchange.<BR/><BR/>cps @ Free ExchangeCraig @ AFThttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01619162376916883142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-80546619522331084322008-01-29T15:27:00.000-05:002008-01-29T15:27:00.000-05:00*"it seems he does do pleasure better than Fish"I ...*"it seems he does do pleasure better than Fish"<BR/><BR/>I clearly can't type today.Mary Kate Hurleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14892991966276345782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-64342830616404983692008-01-29T15:26:00.000-05:002008-01-29T15:26:00.000-05:00I've not read Edelman, Karl, but I'll try to pick ...I've not read Edelman, Karl, but I'll try to pick it up when I get in to campus later today. It seems he does do pleasure than Fish -- though I should say that I didn't mean to come down as harshly on Fish as it might seem. He has some fantastic points in his posts, I just stole a few threads to begin weaving my own thoughts. I only just realize that I don't think I managed to express any sense of the aspect of aesthetic pleasure gained from reading literature (and teaching it). I don't quite know what to do with that -- but it's an interesting omission on my part.Mary Kate Hurleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14892991966276345782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-48586117965112690262008-01-29T15:11:00.000-05:002008-01-29T15:11:00.000-05:00Thanks for this lovely post, Mary Kate. No time to...Thanks for this lovely post, Mary Kate. No time to respond to it as it deserves (I used up my blog time selfishly on my own (silly) post) except to recommend some reading! Sorry!<BR/><BR/>I know he's often been kicked around here, but I want to suggest (one of?) Lee Edelman's loving discussion of Barbara Johnson,"The Student of Metaphor" <I>Differences</I> 17 (2006): 195-204, where he considers Johnson's difficult relations with her own enjoyment of literature, how her initial love of metaphor shattered upon her discovery of Paul de Man's wartime journalism. With that, she had to be political or it was all for nothing.<BR/><BR/>But, as Edelman observes--and here is as gentle a version of his opposition to reproductive futurity as we might ever find--that the Nazis were also opposed to art for art's sake. He writes, "Isn’t her own repudiation of jouissance in favor of a practice of reading inflected by politics, and history, and referential responsibility, what Johnson, looking back as a teacher on her earlier experiences as a student, evokes in one of the most moving and resonant sentences she has written to date: 'All the responsible coverage or political correctness in the world cannot recover for me the intensity of that enjoyment.'" He then wonders whether she can actually renounce her pleasure in metaphor, or whether she can only cover that pleasure in guilt.<BR/><BR/>There's more to the argument than I can justice to here, now, but I cite him only because Edelman, regardless of how crazily negative ITM has often found him, does pleasure much better than Fish.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.com