Two good posts by Stephanie Trigg on the recent apologies to the Indigenous people of Australia: here and here.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Honor, reflection, communal futures
Two good posts by Stephanie Trigg on the recent apologies to the Indigenous people of Australia: here and here.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Semiotics of the Department Chair's Office
Close scrutiny of the image at left reveals the following:- A skeleton, which for a while we had sitting outside the chair's door clutching a sign saying 'Please have a seat. We will be with you soon.'
- A tiny shriner.
- A memento mori.
- A laminated emergency procedures card. (Little known fact: the original emergency plan submitted by the department read "(1) Exit office and scream 'We are going to die, we are going to die! (2) Die." It was returned as insufficient, and this query was appended: 'What if faculty do not in fact die? Will bats be handed out to staff to finish them off?')
- An ornate tea box from India and a hand carved gazelle from Kenya, both gifts from faculty whose travel requests I approved.
- A very ugly mug that was given in lieu of a holiday bonus.
- A Mike Wazowski figurine.
- A package of dry erase markers that I take with me to my technology up the wazoo super deluxe classroom. They are in fact the only technology that works predictably there.
- Two children dragged to their dad's office because the presidential primaries had closed their schools. Each took turns sitting at our office's front desk impersonating a work-study student. One told visitors to "Vote for Hilary because she has golden hair!" The other told visitors that Obama was the only candidate for real change.
"Better to just jump into a crack in Mount Doom and be done with it."
That provocative statement is made and a host of Middle Earthian puns deployed in this blog post on the legal troubles besetting the Lord of the Rings films. Composed, of course, by my punny bro.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Chaucerian Chromophobia? Beige Hengwrts and Bawdy Ellesmeres
I thank Michael Moon's "Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex?" in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory (SAQ Summer 2007) for its reference to David Batchelor's Chromophobia, a work that argues that:The love of bright hues is an affliction as well as an alleged moral failing that has been routinely ascribed throughout the modern period to “orientals,” sensuous women, children, and “primitives” of “all stripes”...(Moon, 540)I haven't (yet?) read Chromophobia, but I like what I know about it (e.g., his observations on the privilege of drawing over coloring in), and in my gleanings from here and there, I've been happy to turn up gemlike prejudices from our foundational thinkers. Aristotle called color a "pharmakon" (31), Isaiah 1:18 aligns color with sin and whiteness with purity, and Goethe observed
that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence (qtd 112).I now have that feeling that I contract from some of my favorites works, suspicion coalesced into a master thesis. Call it paranoid desublimation. With Batchelor lodged in my brain, I compare the dangerous passion of the Big Orange Splot to the rational, calm, beige futurity of Swedish design (see the interiors in Scenes from a Marriage, or, if you're an Ikeatiste, just look around).
I also consider the preference for the Hengwrt manuscript over the Ellesmere. At this point, and perhaps at all future points, I've only a hunch, a hunch, moreover, that's not been validated by sprints through (only) three articles (the Linne Mooney Adam Pinkhurst piece in the Jan 2007 Speculum, Michael C. Seymour's “Hypothesis, Hyperbole, and the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales,” English Studies 68 (1987): 214-19, and Ralph Hanna's "The Hengwrt Manuscript and the Canon of the Canterbury Tales"), a hunch that has been validated, if we can call it that, only by a highly suspicious reading of Peter G. Beidler's characterization of the differences between Hengwrt and Ellesmere ("...the Hengwrt manuscript, the oldest and most authentic" vs. "the lovely Ellesmere manuscript" (29)), by the predilection for the adjective "lavish" when describing Ellesmere, and by ill-remembered, misconstrued, or invented conversations and gestures from conferences, seminars, and, probably, clambakes.
Nevertheless: is it possible that the preference for Hengwrt over Ellesmere, even when expressed with hierophantic jargon of the codicologist, is fundamentally a preference for cool reason over vivid pleasures, pure judgment of the Aesopian body of one manuscript over the all too obvious lavish enticements of another? Are leading questions a valid substitute for research into critical discourse? By all means, no, but if I can't offer my suspicions on a blog, how can I get them out of my head?
Thanks for the image, from here.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Two posts for your weekend reading
(1) Dr Virago, on the work of being a professor
(2) Phil Paine, on dictators and the vanished of history (via Steve Muhlberger)
(2) Phil Paine, on dictators and the vanished of history (via Steve Muhlberger)
Friday, February 08, 2008
Quote of the Early AM, or, Friday Night was Theoretical...
The Spring Semester of 2008 is officially in full swing here in New York, and nothing says "It has begun" as clearly as the opening events of the The Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium. My week's end brought a trip to Rutgers University for a fascinating lecture and extremely helpful manuscript workshop by Andy Orchard of the University of Toronto -- however, as with all events with the ASSC, the "official" event formed only a part of the scholarly experience while there.
I met and spoke with Mark Amodio (Vassar) -- the great scholar of oral formulaic theory (the theory which accounts for and studies the markers of oral composition in Old English) -- for the first time. A conversation with Richard Abels (a historian from the US Naval Academy, currently at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton) helped me to formulate more coherently the reason Beowulf belongs in my dissertation -- without having to deal too deeply with that pesky "when was it written" question. And yet another blogging connection was made when I made the acquaintance of Rachel K, a commenter on ITM.
The community of Anglo-Saxonists around NYC and New Jersey has been very fruitful for me as a graduate student -- and not always in the ways I've imagined. The opportunity to really speak in depth with other scholars in my field, who've done studies of the same works I'm hoping to write about -- and to feel as though I was actually participating constructively in those conversations -- proves to me part of what I think is most useful about being an active participant in something like the ASSC. I wonder if part of "professionalization" (that long, unwieldy, and frightening term!) is precisely that -- helping students learn to become scholars in a community of other scholars, less than simply attending conferences and writing articles...
And of course, the train ride home this afternoon offered ample time for reading, and that's the inspiration for this "quote of the day" post. However, before I give the blog post over to Bruno Latour, I would like to say a word about an event coming up soon: the fourth annual ASSC grad conference, taking place this Saturday, February 16th, at Yale University! Of course, there's an element of pride involved -- this is my fourth year participating in the conference, and my first year functioning as a respondent. My interlocutor? Princeton University Grad Student Aaron Hostetter, whose blog on Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry is providing a really interesting look at a scholar who's currently grappling with the Andreas. I'll be responding to Aaron's paper, "A Tasty Turn of Phrase: Cannibal Poetics in Andreas". (Paging Dr. Steel! Paging Dr. Steel!) We're hoping to get the conversation going a bit early (and to open it out to a wider audience) -- I will almost certainly post some of my thoughts and notes here before I try them out at the conference. Something tells me Heather Blurton's book (of which we have spoken often) will be very, very important.
As a side note: I was assigned to the paper rather than choosing it, and though I'm thrilled to get to be a part of this conversation, I've never actually read the Andreas. Clearly that will be changing soon. Also: I realized yesterday evening that, when I agreed to be a respondent for the event, I was in essence agreeing to read in front of not one but two very eminent Anglo-Saxonists, a paper I will have had one week to write. On a poem I will have known for about a week. Fools rush in...
So, finally, on to the quote of the Friday Evening: From Bruno Latour (who will be speaking at Columbia in about two weeks!), Pandora's Hope (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), p. 96-97. Latour is speaking about the relationships between humans, language, and "the world" -- the relationship, in essence, between discourse and "things in themselves". I thought this passage was particularly resonant for me, what with the theme of translation and connection that runs throughout. Appropriately, I find it quite hopeful...
cross posted to Old English in New York
I met and spoke with Mark Amodio (Vassar) -- the great scholar of oral formulaic theory (the theory which accounts for and studies the markers of oral composition in Old English) -- for the first time. A conversation with Richard Abels (a historian from the US Naval Academy, currently at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton) helped me to formulate more coherently the reason Beowulf belongs in my dissertation -- without having to deal too deeply with that pesky "when was it written" question. And yet another blogging connection was made when I made the acquaintance of Rachel K, a commenter on ITM.
The community of Anglo-Saxonists around NYC and New Jersey has been very fruitful for me as a graduate student -- and not always in the ways I've imagined. The opportunity to really speak in depth with other scholars in my field, who've done studies of the same works I'm hoping to write about -- and to feel as though I was actually participating constructively in those conversations -- proves to me part of what I think is most useful about being an active participant in something like the ASSC. I wonder if part of "professionalization" (that long, unwieldy, and frightening term!) is precisely that -- helping students learn to become scholars in a community of other scholars, less than simply attending conferences and writing articles...
And of course, the train ride home this afternoon offered ample time for reading, and that's the inspiration for this "quote of the day" post. However, before I give the blog post over to Bruno Latour, I would like to say a word about an event coming up soon: the fourth annual ASSC grad conference, taking place this Saturday, February 16th, at Yale University! Of course, there's an element of pride involved -- this is my fourth year participating in the conference, and my first year functioning as a respondent. My interlocutor? Princeton University Grad Student Aaron Hostetter, whose blog on Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry is providing a really interesting look at a scholar who's currently grappling with the Andreas. I'll be responding to Aaron's paper, "A Tasty Turn of Phrase: Cannibal Poetics in Andreas". (Paging Dr. Steel! Paging Dr. Steel!) We're hoping to get the conversation going a bit early (and to open it out to a wider audience) -- I will almost certainly post some of my thoughts and notes here before I try them out at the conference. Something tells me Heather Blurton's book (of which we have spoken often) will be very, very important.
As a side note: I was assigned to the paper rather than choosing it, and though I'm thrilled to get to be a part of this conversation, I've never actually read the Andreas. Clearly that will be changing soon. Also: I realized yesterday evening that, when I agreed to be a respondent for the event, I was in essence agreeing to read in front of not one but two very eminent Anglo-Saxonists, a paper I will have had one week to write. On a poem I will have known for about a week. Fools rush in...
So, finally, on to the quote of the Friday Evening: From Bruno Latour (who will be speaking at Columbia in about two weeks!), Pandora's Hope (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), p. 96-97. Latour is speaking about the relationships between humans, language, and "the world" -- the relationship, in essence, between discourse and "things in themselves". I thought this passage was particularly resonant for me, what with the theme of translation and connection that runs throughout. Appropriately, I find it quite hopeful...
What seemed shocking at first in this new paradigm was that it did not rely on the myth of a heroic break away from society, convention, and discourse, a mythical break that would let the solitary scientist discover the world as it is. To be sure, we no longer portray scientists as those who abandon the realm of signs, politics, passions and feelings in order to discover the world of cold ad inhuman things in themselves, "out there." But that does not mean we portray them as talking to humans only, because those they address in their research are not exactly humans but strange hybrids with long tails, trails, tentacles, filaments tying words to things which are, so to speak, behind them, accessible only through highly indirect and immensely complex mediations of different series of instruments. The truth of what scientists say no longer comes from their breaking away from society, convention, mediations, connections, but from the safety provided by the circulating references that cascade thought a great number of transformations and translations, modifying and constraining the speech acts of many humans over which no one has nay durable control. Instead of abandoning the base world of rhetoric, argumentation, calculation--much like the religious hermits of the past--scientists began to speak in truth because they plunge even more deeply into the secular world of words, signs, passions, materials, and mediations, and extend themselves even further in the intimate connections with the nonhumans they have learned to bring to bear on their discussions.
cross posted to Old English in New York
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Utter solitude
First, the admission of a guilty pleasure: the Cohen family watches that parade of histrionics known as American Idol. Think of it as part of our program of studying human culture in order to better blend among this planet's indigenous population. Last night's episode ended with a young man who had left school and family a year earlier and was living in a car. I was surprised how touched my son was by this fact ("Do you think it's possible that his mom and dad didn't love him?" he asked us), and how it saddened him to realize that there could be someone like him living so alone: no friends, no family, just an automobile that serves as bed, kitchen and transportation. That kind of solitude struck him as unbearable.
As, in a way, it does me. There were lonely times during graduate school when I vanished into books and writing. I once went nearly twenty-four hours without speaking ... then again, that is the longest I've ever gone with mouth shut. A well known medievalist with whom I've collaborated has just emerged from three months of silent seclusion in a Buddhist monastery. That kind of unbroken quiet is not something I could ever want ... yet I do sometimes dream of such removal from the world and from social relations, probably because it is the exact opposite of anything I can actually endure.
Why do I bring all this up? Well, not just due to viewing melodramatic reality shows on the Fox network. A conversation that unfolded yesterday in my office has stuck with me. GW is fortunate in currently having as writer in residence Nadeem Aslam, a novelist whose work I have praised here before. His book Maps for Lost Lovers is so good that I stayed awake deep into every night in our London flat last summer devouring its pages. Nadeem stopped by yesterday to say a quick hello. I announced that I blamed him for two weeks of English insomnia. He sat down, and more than an hour later we emerged from the office after having had a conversation that ranged from nuclear warning devices to Obamamania to texts and memory to the place of artists in contemporary society. Aslam is exactly the kind of quirky person for whom I always feel an immediate affection: someone who continually surprises you with insight and originality, but who also does not seem to be of this earth in the way as, say, people who watch or participate in American Idol.
Maps for Lost Lovers is gorgeously written and emotionally wrenching, eliciting a combination of affects that we've seen here at ITM in Dan's recent posts. The main characters of the book, a Pakistani family living in a version of London, evidently love each other ... but are incapable of expressing this warmth without utterly shattering the person to whom they wish to connect. This propensity to wound through miscalculated gestures especially haunts Kaukab, a mother who adores her children but who destroys them all the same. The scene that broke me is the following, in which Kaukab -- having worked for days on a feast that she hopes will unite her grieving family in the sharing of food, a repast which might make them for once forget the sins they have practiced against each other -- instead presides over a fraught and taciturn dinner table. As December coldness wraps itself around the house, the tension in the quiet room becomes unbearable: "The house, as it floated through time, has arrived at an iceberg, and no one is sure it will ever move away from it, leaving it behind." Kaukab excuses herself from this cold tableau that again defeats her inexpressible yearning for a family in which her love doesn't ruin lives:
Except, there isn't. The very best for which Kaukab can ever hope is that small spot of warmth lingering on the linoleum in the absence of its bearer, a connection invisible to the person in whose "touch" she exults. Kaukab has already ensured that her children will never know that she has a heart capable of affection, or fingers that can tremble with joy. Charag, especially, is filled with vitriol for a mother he believes has hurt him beyond remedy.
I told Nadeem that it was the small detail of human heat imprinted on cold flooring that made the scene for me, and broke me emotionally: it so well condenses the unsolvable predicament of Kaukab. He looked at me very seriously, and then said, "You have made me realize that I was writing about my own chosen loneliness. As I finished the book -- a book that took eleven years to compose! -- I isolated myself from the world. For six months I had no phone, no email, I didn't really even speak. At some point in this intense period my little brother came to visit me. I remember that I went to the loo after he did, and when I stood on the floor where he had just been standing to pee, I realized from the heat what it is like to have someone in your house, and in your life, and yet not to have them at all."
I asked Nadeem if he ever regretted the sacrifices he had made to compose Maps For Lost Lovers. He told me that the minute I labeled them sacrifices I showed that I misunderstood: art demanded his time and his life, and it was his honor (he used that word) to be able to give both. That's not nearly as vainglorious as statement as it seems: Nadeem is quite modest, and very much aware that he would not have been able to compose the work without a strong social system behind him (friends willing to buy him dinners or lend a coach to crash on, the dole, small arts grants). Still, he has at times embraced a solitude beyond anything I can imagine.
I would have made a terrible anchorite.
[PS For one of my student's experience of Nadeem Aslam, see this]
As, in a way, it does me. There were lonely times during graduate school when I vanished into books and writing. I once went nearly twenty-four hours without speaking ... then again, that is the longest I've ever gone with mouth shut. A well known medievalist with whom I've collaborated has just emerged from three months of silent seclusion in a Buddhist monastery. That kind of unbroken quiet is not something I could ever want ... yet I do sometimes dream of such removal from the world and from social relations, probably because it is the exact opposite of anything I can actually endure.
Why do I bring all this up? Well, not just due to viewing melodramatic reality shows on the Fox network. A conversation that unfolded yesterday in my office has stuck with me. GW is fortunate in currently having as writer in residence Nadeem Aslam, a novelist whose work I have praised here before. His book Maps for Lost Lovers is so good that I stayed awake deep into every night in our London flat last summer devouring its pages. Nadeem stopped by yesterday to say a quick hello. I announced that I blamed him for two weeks of English insomnia. He sat down, and more than an hour later we emerged from the office after having had a conversation that ranged from nuclear warning devices to Obamamania to texts and memory to the place of artists in contemporary society. Aslam is exactly the kind of quirky person for whom I always feel an immediate affection: someone who continually surprises you with insight and originality, but who also does not seem to be of this earth in the way as, say, people who watch or participate in American Idol.
Maps for Lost Lovers is gorgeously written and emotionally wrenching, eliciting a combination of affects that we've seen here at ITM in Dan's recent posts. The main characters of the book, a Pakistani family living in a version of London, evidently love each other ... but are incapable of expressing this warmth without utterly shattering the person to whom they wish to connect. This propensity to wound through miscalculated gestures especially haunts Kaukab, a mother who adores her children but who destroys them all the same. The scene that broke me is the following, in which Kaukab -- having worked for days on a feast that she hopes will unite her grieving family in the sharing of food, a repast which might make them for once forget the sins they have practiced against each other -- instead presides over a fraught and taciturn dinner table. As December coldness wraps itself around the house, the tension in the quiet room becomes unbearable: "The house, as it floated through time, has arrived at an iceberg, and no one is sure it will ever move away from it, leaving it behind." Kaukab excuses herself from this cold tableau that again defeats her inexpressible yearning for a family in which her love doesn't ruin lives:
When she goes upstairs to the bathroom immediately after Charag [her son] has been there to wash his face, she notices that the linoleum is warm where he had been standing just now, and she has to steady her heart with joyful fingers -- her cold house is full of her children again. There's warmth in unexpected places.
Except, there isn't. The very best for which Kaukab can ever hope is that small spot of warmth lingering on the linoleum in the absence of its bearer, a connection invisible to the person in whose "touch" she exults. Kaukab has already ensured that her children will never know that she has a heart capable of affection, or fingers that can tremble with joy. Charag, especially, is filled with vitriol for a mother he believes has hurt him beyond remedy.
I told Nadeem that it was the small detail of human heat imprinted on cold flooring that made the scene for me, and broke me emotionally: it so well condenses the unsolvable predicament of Kaukab. He looked at me very seriously, and then said, "You have made me realize that I was writing about my own chosen loneliness. As I finished the book -- a book that took eleven years to compose! -- I isolated myself from the world. For six months I had no phone, no email, I didn't really even speak. At some point in this intense period my little brother came to visit me. I remember that I went to the loo after he did, and when I stood on the floor where he had just been standing to pee, I realized from the heat what it is like to have someone in your house, and in your life, and yet not to have them at all."
I asked Nadeem if he ever regretted the sacrifices he had made to compose Maps For Lost Lovers. He told me that the minute I labeled them sacrifices I showed that I misunderstood: art demanded his time and his life, and it was his honor (he used that word) to be able to give both. That's not nearly as vainglorious as statement as it seems: Nadeem is quite modest, and very much aware that he would not have been able to compose the work without a strong social system behind him (friends willing to buy him dinners or lend a coach to crash on, the dole, small arts grants). Still, he has at times embraced a solitude beyond anything I can imagine.
I would have made a terrible anchorite.
[PS For one of my student's experience of Nadeem Aslam, see this]
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Beowulf, Postmodern and Blazing Hot
Yesterday I walked into my super deluxe technology up the wazoo classroom, armed with a DVD, a CD, and a memory stick with some kick ass PowerPoint ... only to discover that (1) the thermostat had been ripped from the wall and the temperature was somewhere between spa-like and hellish; and (2) the sophisticated lighting system was broken, so that classroom illumination was stuck at its highest level, irradiating the room with brilliant white. Somehow I was supposed to teach Beowulf Part II in this desert.So I did what any formerly low tech professor would do. I held my book in my hand and I talked about what the text offered: meditations on history, loss, parents and children, the limits of an identity you never chose, constriction, freedom, oblivion, the unraveling of every human bond, apocalypse, hope. I sweated. I drank copious amounts of water. I considered putting my sunglasses on so that I could see my eighty students better. And you know what? Despite it being so blazingly uncomfortable in the room, it was one of the best classes I've ever had.
No one nodded off. The eighty three of us had an invigorating conversation. We lost ourselves in the question of what we can possibly do that can endure beyond our demise, what actions or objects we can send to a future that seems intent on forgetting everything -- intent on swallowing it into some nameless barrow to rust and rot, or to be guarded by a dragon whose other name is Forgetting. Classes like that -- where both the students and I work up an intellectual sweat -- that's why I teach literature.
I come naked and alone.
Well, I wasn't quite naked in the class, but I was stripped of my technology. That's metaphorically undressed, right? And it did feel vulnerable, to be wondering with my students about survival and remembrance, about questions for which I have no compelling answers.
The line above is from this song, the one piece of media that did function in my classroom yesterday. What did not work, however, was the PowerPoint I had planned, a brief presentation that would have included Tolkien on ruined towers and the transcendent sea; a disintegrating page from the Beowulf manuscript; and the cover of Eileen Joy and Mary K. Ramsey's Postmodern Beowulf. The cover shows a dessicated arm with a ring visible on one finger, a photograph of the corpse of a Kuwaiti soldier from the first Gulf War. I had placed this quotation from "Liquid Beowulf" (the volume's introduction) next to it:
Like the photograph, the poem of Beowulf ‘is a cultural response that, as testimony, overcomes a historical gap, its lostness and its pastness, with a power to reconfigure our understanding of the present world and our present selves.’ And it overcomes that gap, of course, through language, in the same way that the photograph crosses the space that separates the middle Eastern desert from our Western shores.I wonder what my students would have made of its transtemporal reach.
By the way, I'd also like to put in a good word for The Postmodern Beowulf. I've been reading the thick volume through in its entirety, and though I've pored over many of its collected essays before, to read them back to back and to follow the conversation that Joy and Ramsey have staged has been enlightening. This is a great, fun, erudite book.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Pitched Past Pitch of Grief / 3
The question here for me, tonight, is one of response: to the murder of a student in my class, to my own processes of understanding, to those who responded to me and what I've written.
I find myself at an impossible impasse, where I cannot write anymore but where I must continue to write.
The first Anchorage Daily News article (December 3, 2007), "Police chase ends 26 hours of violence," detailing Christopher Rogers' killing rampage, yielded 105 online responses. Many condemned the killing and the killer, some thanked the police. Some wanted Rogers' blood, others pitied him and prayed for him. Some blamed the police for taking so long, others praised the police for acting so decisively. Others blamed Alaska or the Lower 48, bad education or poor parenting, and still others just insulted what other people wrote. A few posts were deleted for violating the ADN user agreement.
Genesis 22: 12a says, "And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him." The rabbis asked, Why did the Lord say 'lay not thine hand' and a second time, 'neither do any thing unto him'? Because Abraham tried to kill Isaac a different way—perhaps strangle him or extract just one drop of blood—to remain obedient to the Lord. So the Lord had to tell him both not to put his hand upon Isaac or do any other thing to him, out of Abraham's desire to be obedient.
indiefaith asked exactly the right question, the one I've been sneaking up to for weeks now and can no longer avoid: "The only thought that I have floating around is the relationship between Levinas' "uselessness of suffering" and your process of meaning-making. Do these in any way conflict or create tension?"
This is exactly my question: Is nonviolent meaning making possible?
"'He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,' says Ecclesiastes (1:18), where suffering appears at the very least as the price of reason and spiritual refinement. It is also thought to temper the individual's character. It is said to be necessary to the teleology of community life, when social discontent awakens a useful attention to the health of the collective body. Perhaps there is a social utility in the suffering necessary to the pedagogic function of power in education, discipline, and repression." (Levinas, "Useless Suffering," p. 95)
Perhaps there is a social utility in the suffering necessary to the pedagogic function, but who suffers in an ethical pedagogy, and in what way?
Responding to Kronman's high modernist sense of the sovereign self challenged and enlarged by art, Fish states:
Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us?
The answer in both cases, I think, is no.
[snip]
It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. The texts Kronman recommends are, as he says, concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.
This connection is irresistible, though, isn't it?
Does Fish say that the Humanities must remain useless in the same way Levinas says suffering must remain useless?
Fish continues, as Mary Kate has described:
"It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by 'do' is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.
Elizabeth Rumsey, who was shot by Christopher Rogers shot near Winchester Lagoon, responded to a blog devoted to Jason at the UAA Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts:
It is haunting to read these posts knowing that it is by the skin of my own teeth that I am here to read them at all, and not instead by Jason's side in another dimension, perhaps looking down at my own community gathering to mourn me the way you all have come together to mourn --and to celebrate -- Jason. I was also shot by the man who killed Jason, but I survived. In the moments between being shot and being put out for surgery, I felt exquisitely close to that fine line that ultimately separates life from death, and I thought, "so this is how the story ends." I don't know if Jason had a moment to experience this space the way I did, but if he did, I strongly believe -- from reading about Jason and the kind fo person that he was -- that he felt a strange sense of peace that comes of knowing that he had lived his life with tremendous integrity, and that those he loved KNEW he loved them. I had wanted to tell my mom and dad on the phone, before I went into surgery, that if I didn't make it, it was OK. That all I was feeling at that moment was a profound gratitude for the life I did lead, the people I had known and loved... I don't remember feeling fearful or distraught or sad. It is selfish of me to write about my own experience here, but if I were to have died the way Jason did, and to have lived the life the way he did, this is the message I would so want to send to all of you from above.
Peace,
Liz
Fish writes as if there is no outside, no other who calls to us, no third disrupts the amorous and exclusive dyad. There is only the I and the pleasure I derive from what I do. Or as Levinas says about Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham and Isaac. There is nothing but the I tensed upon itself, and this allows Abraham to transcend the ethical through the immolation of his son, who has no voice and who does not figure in the divine calculus except as a figure, the null set, a placeholder so that the sacrificial equation may be balanced once again.
Levinas writes that "the justification of the neighbor's pain is certainly the source of all immorality" ("Useless Suffering," p. 99), but is this the same kind of "justification" that Fish is talking about?
This is exactly my question: Is a nonviolent pedagogy possible?
Or must we settle for a "less violent" pedagogy and be thankful for that?
There is no doubt that I am part of a disciplinary mechanism that subjects students as I teach. After all, I have a discipline (I am a medievalist and literary critic) and I teach specific subjects--in all the Foucauldian valences one might see fit to layer onto that vocabulary.
And is it not our function to discipline students into our disciplines? To subject them to our subjects?
So that the undecided first year student leaves our colleges and universities four years later not only thinking but behaving differently than when they came in? So that as individuals they say, "I am a nursing major!" or "I am a history major!" or "I am …" and the list continues.
Is this not what is at stake in what we do? Are these not, contra Fish, real effects in the real world?
Is this not the starting point for an ethical pedagogy?
To embrace the violence of our practice?
Not to excuse it but to reveal it?
And to offer our students the opportunity to understand and negotiate it?
I teach because it *does* save lives. It has saved my own.
The ADN article that detailed Jason's death, "Grad student found shot dead in Spenard" (December 3, 2007), yielded 45 comments. Many of these comments were specifically about Jason from people who knew him, including his family members, but many others used the comments to opine about the failures of current city leaders or to promote the death penalty.
My scholarship is the desperate attempt to make sense out of what's going on in my own head.
Leaving aside for a moment Fish's tautology that (1) although there is no evidence we should (2) take his word that there is no evidence because (3) his word is backed by 45 years of non-evidence (as well as other specious reasoning in this paragraph), maybe some Ph.D. type folks learned what Fish says they learned "to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge," but that seems an impoverished account of (at least) my experience.
I teach literature because I live in a culture whose economic engine is powered by deliberately manipulating and confusing people about the distinction between what they want versus what they need. I teach because I live in a culture that chooses its elected leaders on the basis of carefully contrived appearances and stage-managed messages that have little to do with real issues and everything to do with manipulating public opinion and maintaining power in the hands of a few.
Fish writes, "There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise."
This final word, this telos, this theodicy, is violence.
Even after Fish concludes by saying "There is nothing more to say," his column has rung up "484 comments so far …" according to the NYT webpage.
Justification is a word that I think Justin's family, if not Justin himself, would understand very differently.
Here are two faces, of whom I have been writing:
Christopher Rogers & Jason Wenger
Each semester, when we stand in front of our classes, how many new faces do we see? How many faces are there before us? Some we recognize, some we know well, and others are brand new. Some, we know too, will disappear before the next class, or in the third week, or after the first major assignment, or at the add/drop date. Some will disappear, and we will never see them again, ever.
I teach because people live and die based upon how they (and others) read and interpret texts.
Sometimes I have to be reminded what the stakes are, so that I may proceed with fear and trembling.
I find myself at an impossible impasse, where I cannot write anymore but where I must continue to write.
***
The first Anchorage Daily News article (December 3, 2007), "Police chase ends 26 hours of violence," detailing Christopher Rogers' killing rampage, yielded 105 online responses. Many condemned the killing and the killer, some thanked the police. Some wanted Rogers' blood, others pitied him and prayed for him. Some blamed the police for taking so long, others praised the police for acting so decisively. Others blamed Alaska or the Lower 48, bad education or poor parenting, and still others just insulted what other people wrote. A few posts were deleted for violating the ADN user agreement.
***
Genesis 22: 12a says, "And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him." The rabbis asked, Why did the Lord say 'lay not thine hand' and a second time, 'neither do any thing unto him'? Because Abraham tried to kill Isaac a different way—perhaps strangle him or extract just one drop of blood—to remain obedient to the Lord. So the Lord had to tell him both not to put his hand upon Isaac or do any other thing to him, out of Abraham's desire to be obedient.
***
indiefaith asked exactly the right question, the one I've been sneaking up to for weeks now and can no longer avoid: "The only thought that I have floating around is the relationship between Levinas' "uselessness of suffering" and your process of meaning-making. Do these in any way conflict or create tension?"
This is exactly my question: Is nonviolent meaning making possible?
***
"'He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,' says Ecclesiastes (1:18), where suffering appears at the very least as the price of reason and spiritual refinement. It is also thought to temper the individual's character. It is said to be necessary to the teleology of community life, when social discontent awakens a useful attention to the health of the collective body. Perhaps there is a social utility in the suffering necessary to the pedagogic function of power in education, discipline, and repression." (Levinas, "Useless Suffering," p. 95)
Perhaps there is a social utility in the suffering necessary to the pedagogic function, but who suffers in an ethical pedagogy, and in what way?
***
Responding to Kronman's high modernist sense of the sovereign self challenged and enlarged by art, Fish states:
Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us?
The answer in both cases, I think, is no.
[snip]
It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. The texts Kronman recommends are, as he says, concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.
***
This connection is irresistible, though, isn't it?
Does Fish say that the Humanities must remain useless in the same way Levinas says suffering must remain useless?
***
Fish continues, as Mary Kate has described:
"It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by 'do' is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.
***
Elizabeth Rumsey, who was shot by Christopher Rogers shot near Winchester Lagoon, responded to a blog devoted to Jason at the UAA Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts:
It is haunting to read these posts knowing that it is by the skin of my own teeth that I am here to read them at all, and not instead by Jason's side in another dimension, perhaps looking down at my own community gathering to mourn me the way you all have come together to mourn --and to celebrate -- Jason. I was also shot by the man who killed Jason, but I survived. In the moments between being shot and being put out for surgery, I felt exquisitely close to that fine line that ultimately separates life from death, and I thought, "so this is how the story ends." I don't know if Jason had a moment to experience this space the way I did, but if he did, I strongly believe -- from reading about Jason and the kind fo person that he was -- that he felt a strange sense of peace that comes of knowing that he had lived his life with tremendous integrity, and that those he loved KNEW he loved them. I had wanted to tell my mom and dad on the phone, before I went into surgery, that if I didn't make it, it was OK. That all I was feeling at that moment was a profound gratitude for the life I did lead, the people I had known and loved... I don't remember feeling fearful or distraught or sad. It is selfish of me to write about my own experience here, but if I were to have died the way Jason did, and to have lived the life the way he did, this is the message I would so want to send to all of you from above.
Peace,
Liz
***
Fish writes as if there is no outside, no other who calls to us, no third disrupts the amorous and exclusive dyad. There is only the I and the pleasure I derive from what I do. Or as Levinas says about Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham and Isaac. There is nothing but the I tensed upon itself, and this allows Abraham to transcend the ethical through the immolation of his son, who has no voice and who does not figure in the divine calculus except as a figure, the null set, a placeholder so that the sacrificial equation may be balanced once again.
***
Levinas writes that "the justification of the neighbor's pain is certainly the source of all immorality" ("Useless Suffering," p. 99), but is this the same kind of "justification" that Fish is talking about?
***
This is exactly my question: Is a nonviolent pedagogy possible?
Or must we settle for a "less violent" pedagogy and be thankful for that?
There is no doubt that I am part of a disciplinary mechanism that subjects students as I teach. After all, I have a discipline (I am a medievalist and literary critic) and I teach specific subjects--in all the Foucauldian valences one might see fit to layer onto that vocabulary.
And is it not our function to discipline students into our disciplines? To subject them to our subjects?
So that the undecided first year student leaves our colleges and universities four years later not only thinking but behaving differently than when they came in? So that as individuals they say, "I am a nursing major!" or "I am a history major!" or "I am …" and the list continues.
Is this not what is at stake in what we do? Are these not, contra Fish, real effects in the real world?
Is this not the starting point for an ethical pedagogy?
To embrace the violence of our practice?
Not to excuse it but to reveal it?
And to offer our students the opportunity to understand and negotiate it?
***
I teach because it *does* save lives. It has saved my own.
***
The ADN article that detailed Jason's death, "Grad student found shot dead in Spenard" (December 3, 2007), yielded 45 comments. Many of these comments were specifically about Jason from people who knew him, including his family members, but many others used the comments to opine about the failures of current city leaders or to promote the death penalty.
***
My scholarship is the desperate attempt to make sense out of what's going on in my own head.
***
Leaving aside for a moment Fish's tautology that (1) although there is no evidence we should (2) take his word that there is no evidence because (3) his word is backed by 45 years of non-evidence (as well as other specious reasoning in this paragraph), maybe some Ph.D. type folks learned what Fish says they learned "to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge," but that seems an impoverished account of (at least) my experience.
***
I teach literature because I live in a culture whose economic engine is powered by deliberately manipulating and confusing people about the distinction between what they want versus what they need. I teach because I live in a culture that chooses its elected leaders on the basis of carefully contrived appearances and stage-managed messages that have little to do with real issues and everything to do with manipulating public opinion and maintaining power in the hands of a few.
***
Fish writes, "There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise."
This final word, this telos, this theodicy, is violence.
***
Even after Fish concludes by saying "There is nothing more to say," his column has rung up "484 comments so far …" according to the NYT webpage.
***
Justification is a word that I think Justin's family, if not Justin himself, would understand very differently.
***
Here are two faces, of whom I have been writing:
Christopher Rogers & Jason Wenger
***
Each semester, when we stand in front of our classes, how many new faces do we see? How many faces are there before us? Some we recognize, some we know well, and others are brand new. Some, we know too, will disappear before the next class, or in the third week, or after the first major assignment, or at the add/drop date. Some will disappear, and we will never see them again, ever.
***
I teach because people live and die based upon how they (and others) read and interpret texts.
***
Sometimes I have to be reminded what the stakes are, so that I may proceed with fear and trembling.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Digging into Groton Digging into Me
Today, a brief genealogical foray slid into an hours-long expedition culminating in Groton, Suffolk, a minor town once lorded over by Bury St. Edmunds, and currently the site of the remains of a twelfth-century fortification. Why should this matter? Because without Groton, there'd be no me. Thanks to the discovery of my mother's name on the Doggett Family genealogical site, I traced my ancestry back, at least in one line, to my great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Richard Doggett (d. c. 1540), whose wealth from the cloth trade and land made him the richest member of the village of Groton in the early sixteenth century. Would that some of his money had made its way to me!To my horror, I learned that my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Benjamin Doggett (d. 1723 in Lancaster County, Virginia) owned slaves, a woman named Criss, and two men, Mingo and Tom. I also learned that my self-trumpeting over being the first member of my family to graduate college now needs modification, because I've just trapdoored myself by several centuries. Benjamin Doggett, father to the above Benjamin, entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1654/5, and his cousin Thomas matriculated from Queen's College in 1640. If the statute of limitations are still good, perhaps I can recommend my nephews for legacy admissions?
The point of all this? I don't know yet. I just found it an amusing coincidence that in a week in which I'm teaching the Wife of Bath I discover not just another enormously wealthy dealer in cloths, but the clothmaker as a version of myself. To be sure, Richard Doggett lived a century and some change after the Wife, and on the other side of the country...and he wasn't fictional: still, I felt some connection, as if my time, my memory, had been brushed by the inhabitants of an England that I had thought had been safely just an object of study, present only in the pleasures of playing with texts and the occasional, and perhaps feigned, horror at past catastrophes. Does the genetic path from late medieval Groton to this Brooklyn medievalist materialize these pleasures and griefs, render them something more than professional play? I don't know. I can say, however, that I'm another clerk distracted by a master of "clooth makyng." Let's hope I don't need a Griselda to set my head aright!
(photo from here. thank you!)
Saturday, February 02, 2008
The Prioress's Tale, Musical Version
Can the Prioress's Tale bring Jews and Christians together? Exactly that counterintuitive goal belongs to Delvyn Case, creator of "The Prioress's Tale: A Chamber Opera in One Act":My librettist and I, writer Christopher Hood, have transformed this potentially divisive tale into a parable whose primary message is that peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness are possible when each of us validates the our common humanity with others. Our opera is a musical and dramatic portrait of two characters – one Jewish, one Christian – who overcome their fear and hatred of each other by rediscovering their own capacity for forgiveness. By humanizing characters who in Chaucer’s tale are mere stereotypes, we hope to encourage the audience to consider the cost of bias and misunderstanding on the personal level.Further information -- and further utopian thoughts on the unifying power of melody -- here.
h/t Jonathan Hsy
Friday, February 01, 2008
Festive Friday: Pedagogy Gone Wrong!
Prof. de Breeze recently had a post about making a Pedagogical Hail Mary Pass: seeing that the instructional ship is listing like an iceberg-impaled Titanic, yet nonetheless rescuing the classroom from its looming demise (often through this thing called "innovation"). But what about those days when, despite your best intentions, the ship sinks to its chilly grave all the same? What if you are the iceberg?Early in my teaching career at GW, I was assigned to teach "Survey of British Literature I" at an ungodly hour, so early I could only imagine that my students would be going to bed after the class. At the time the university required all students to take a literature course before they graduated, so many of those spending 75 minutes twice a week in my classroom had no particular interest in being seated there. I knew that, so I decided to be creative: they would be mine! They would all become English majors! I dreamed up all kinds of song and dance routines to engage my captive audience. Because this story unfolds in the days before multimedia classrooms -- I'm not even sure the internet had been invented, and I'm fairly certain I was riding an elderly donkey to class each morning -- I did not have the option of DVDs and PowerPoint and YouTube.
Inventive Me came up with a GREAT idea for teaching Beowulf. I began the class by turning off the lights and inviting the students to gather at the front of the room. I lit a tall red candle, and we formed a circle around the dancing flame. I then opened my Klaeber and read in Old English the incursion of Grendel into Heorot -- those amazing lines in which the god-cursed demon stalks with the rising mist from the moors, not knowing that Beowulf awaits within the gleaming hall. I somehow thought that all of us, huddled around the fire in the dark and listening to a narrative that implants itself as much in your body as it does your soul, would be transported back in time to a dangerous and small world, to a circle of light bounded by fears of death and engulfment.
As it turns out, my dramatic reading was interrupted every thirty seconds or so by students arriving late. As each new opening of the door and bewildered look on a young face broke what little mood I had established -- as each visage registered What the hell is going on here? Why is the room so dark? Who is that crazy professor with the anemic candle, and why is he chanting gibberish? -- well, as each intrusion ensured that no time travel would in fact take place, I realized that I was the perpetrator of pedagogy gone wrong.
My class never recovered from the day of the candle. Oh, don't get me wrong: according to my evaluations my students liked me and the class well enough. But they would never really talk to me from that day onwards, and always sat as far back in the classroom as possible.
What about you? Have you ever tried something innovative in the classroom, only to find that your pedagogy had gone horribly wrong?
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Tracks Leading to Various Aspects of Existence That are Inaccessible by Any Other Means: Why I Teach Literature
"Aesthetic concepts only began to interest me when I first perceived their existential roots, when I came to understand them as existential concepts: people simple or refined, intelligent or stupid, are regularly faced in life with the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comical, the tragic, the lyrical, the dramatic, with action, peripeteia, catharsis, or, to speak of less philosophical concepts, with agelasty or kitsch or vulgarity; all these concepts are tracks leading to various aspects of existence that are inaccessible by any other means." —Milan Kundera, from The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
"Whatever the art object does, it does not do it to us, actively, like a headmaster with his cane. . . . The art object does not teach, exhort, arouse, aid, and so forth. It does not ‘help us to see’ like an optometrist; it does not ‘make us realize’ like a therapist; it does not ‘open doors for us’ like a butler. . . . The art object does not do to us; rather, it presents to us." —Annie Dillard, Living By Fiction
[this post is a response to MKH’s “The Why I Teach Literature Meme”]
Like Mary Kate, I am also beginning to develop an “instinctual urge to cringe” when it comes to the subject of the so-called “value” or “use value” of the humanities, although, unlike Stanley Fish, I have not arrived at the conclusion that the use of the humanities is “none whatsoever.” At the same time, I can almost see the possibly admirable intentions behind Fish’s argument, for if every defense we’re likely to formulate [and God knows more than thousands have been formulated at this point, including by me] can ultimately be shown to ring philosophically hollow, or to be historically bankrupt, or to not be able to stand up to any kind of social-scientific test or analyzable “outcomes,” then why give critics of the humanities more ammunition to prove that we can’t “prove” our hypotheses? It really is, on one level, a zero-sum game, and so, there is a part of me that would love to embrace, as Fish does, the non-instrumentality of literary studies, and to claim the humanities as a sort of “beautiful” end in themselves, a haven for lovers of the pleasures of art for its own sake. After all, even in the pure sciences, there are practitioners who have a difficult time securing grants for work that is purely experimental, purely for its own sake [work in experimental physics often falls into this trap].
Nevertheless, the pursuit of seeking something novel that cannot be fully hypothesized in advance nor connected to a practical, real-world end, but which, nevertheless, counts as knowledge, counts as an addition to the storehouse of what humans know versus what they don’t know—this has, historically, been valued, if not always funded. At the end of the day, no one really wants to argue that a society can do without, or outright dispense, knowing certain things it is capable of reaching after [whether those “things” are the rate of acceleration of a particle hurtling through an underground tunnel or a satellite defense system or a cure for AIDS or the mind of God or the architecture of an anemone or Beethoven]. But that is also the rub, for when funding is not adequate to the end of each singular or collective desire to know something, and to practice a study of developing a particular knowledge or set of knowledges, then something has to give, and what is viewed as practical will always win out over what is seen as esoteric, and those given to a fatal love of the esoteric, the artistic, and the literary will find themselves working overtime to reframe what they do in pragmatic terms, and two things will happen: 1) some will start to really believe their own arguments, as a matter of self-protection [and this calls to mind a great line from a story by Amy Hempel: “Who cares whether or not it’s true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through.”]; and 2) some will choose, as a matter of survival, to navigate the cognitive dissonance between the non-utilitarian pleasures of what they do and how they explain their work in their tenure and promotion evaluations and in opinion essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
However, it is not really the uselessness of the humanities [or, the fine and literary arts] that I want to argue for. Rather, I want to say that I teach literature because I simply believe that it has meaning, and I do not think it is wise to argue for either the usefulness or uselessness of literature, when instead, we could simply argue for the meaningfulness of literature, or, following the thinking of Annie Dillard, for the ways in which the art object “presents to us, in a stilled and enduring context, a model of previously unarticulated or unavailable relationships among ideas and materials,” and “[i]nsofar as we attend to these art objects, these epistemologically absurd and mysterious hot-air balloons, we deepen our understanding” of the world [Living By Fiction, p. 184]. In this sense, paraphrasing Dillard, literature holds up the universe while also remaking it. While science will reduce the universe to a formula or a principle, literature will multiply the world into an infinite number of possible worlds—none of them real, but all of them, somehow, sustainable and sustaining in different ways. The study and teaching of literature has something to do with imaginative world-making, and committing a certain amount of one’s time and resources to consorting with fictional persons and traveling to imaginary places whose resemblance to real persons and real places is only ever tenuously tangential, but which nevertheless have real meaning, and real worth, all their own. To articulate what this meaning might be is the real work of the humanities, and its relation to reality—or what I prefer to call history—is that art has its own history, its own telos, and professors of literature are watching over that history, helping it to endure, and they should be very careful about giving up on the idea that the value of that endeavor cannot be articulated. But what we should likely aim for in our articulations is something like Stephen White’s “weak [or felicitous] ontology,” where our deepest commitments can be seen to be both “fundamentally important and contestable.” The idea, too, would not be to argue for the kinds of positive effects the study of literature might have on particular persons’ lives [which is not to say it has none; it does, but it’s never guaranteed], but rather to keep affirming that literature possesses ontological weight—it takes up real space in the world, has existence—and the job of literary interpretation is important because, again following Dillard, it helps us “to extend the boundaries of sense and meaning” [Living By Fiction, p. 132]. You see, it’s possible that the universe has no meaning whatsoever, or perhaps has too much of it, and literature professors are part of a diminishing tribe who are foolishly clinging to the ideas that: 1) meaning must be imparted; 2) some meanings are better than others and worth arguing over, endlessly even; and 3) the reservoir of any meaning or sense in a culture is in its arts.
I do not teach literature to make students better persons, or even to help them be better critical adjudicators of the various discourses that flow over and by them every day—of the world, which is all text, which is all around them—although I used to think this was a big part of what I was doing and I often make endless arguments to that effect. It may be that, in some ways, these things happen in direct proportion to something I do in a classroom, but I am no longer pinning my hopes there. I am also no longer certain that the study of literature aids students in developing certain capabilities of empathy and compassion [see Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life for the most succinct and impassioned defense of this viewpoint]; if anything, empathy and compassion are prerequisites for the successful study of literature and no amount of reading “great” books will “fix” a student’s lack of feeling for others [I think this has more to do with brain circuitry and lived experience, affective contact with others in childhood, general well-being and happiness, etc.]. It may be that so many professors of literature want to argue that the study of literature helps us to develop a capacity for deep feeling because we were born with deep feelings! And we were drawn to literature out of a need to give those feelings a wider purchase and more expansive field of imaginative play, and our sensibilities—both aesthetic and more practical—were hopefully strengthened, in positive fashion, as a result [and in the worse-case scenarios, some of us became those sorts of persons who weep more over books and operas than other persons]. I teach literature because, for reasons I will never fully be able [or want] to explain to myself, it means something to me: it enlarges my sense of hope for what might be possible in any given world, and somehow it thickens the real world I walk and sleep through every day by adding to my life, paraphrasing Milan Kundera, the beauty of sudden densities. As a teacher [and I’ve had many years to think about this], I can only see that my job is to model for my students my wonder at this beauty and to hope that it’s infectious. It has something to do with happiness.
"Whatever the art object does, it does not do it to us, actively, like a headmaster with his cane. . . . The art object does not teach, exhort, arouse, aid, and so forth. It does not ‘help us to see’ like an optometrist; it does not ‘make us realize’ like a therapist; it does not ‘open doors for us’ like a butler. . . . The art object does not do to us; rather, it presents to us." —Annie Dillard, Living By Fiction
[this post is a response to MKH’s “The Why I Teach Literature Meme”]
Like Mary Kate, I am also beginning to develop an “instinctual urge to cringe” when it comes to the subject of the so-called “value” or “use value” of the humanities, although, unlike Stanley Fish, I have not arrived at the conclusion that the use of the humanities is “none whatsoever.” At the same time, I can almost see the possibly admirable intentions behind Fish’s argument, for if every defense we’re likely to formulate [and God knows more than thousands have been formulated at this point, including by me] can ultimately be shown to ring philosophically hollow, or to be historically bankrupt, or to not be able to stand up to any kind of social-scientific test or analyzable “outcomes,” then why give critics of the humanities more ammunition to prove that we can’t “prove” our hypotheses? It really is, on one level, a zero-sum game, and so, there is a part of me that would love to embrace, as Fish does, the non-instrumentality of literary studies, and to claim the humanities as a sort of “beautiful” end in themselves, a haven for lovers of the pleasures of art for its own sake. After all, even in the pure sciences, there are practitioners who have a difficult time securing grants for work that is purely experimental, purely for its own sake [work in experimental physics often falls into this trap].
Nevertheless, the pursuit of seeking something novel that cannot be fully hypothesized in advance nor connected to a practical, real-world end, but which, nevertheless, counts as knowledge, counts as an addition to the storehouse of what humans know versus what they don’t know—this has, historically, been valued, if not always funded. At the end of the day, no one really wants to argue that a society can do without, or outright dispense, knowing certain things it is capable of reaching after [whether those “things” are the rate of acceleration of a particle hurtling through an underground tunnel or a satellite defense system or a cure for AIDS or the mind of God or the architecture of an anemone or Beethoven]. But that is also the rub, for when funding is not adequate to the end of each singular or collective desire to know something, and to practice a study of developing a particular knowledge or set of knowledges, then something has to give, and what is viewed as practical will always win out over what is seen as esoteric, and those given to a fatal love of the esoteric, the artistic, and the literary will find themselves working overtime to reframe what they do in pragmatic terms, and two things will happen: 1) some will start to really believe their own arguments, as a matter of self-protection [and this calls to mind a great line from a story by Amy Hempel: “Who cares whether or not it’s true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through.”]; and 2) some will choose, as a matter of survival, to navigate the cognitive dissonance between the non-utilitarian pleasures of what they do and how they explain their work in their tenure and promotion evaluations and in opinion essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
However, it is not really the uselessness of the humanities [or, the fine and literary arts] that I want to argue for. Rather, I want to say that I teach literature because I simply believe that it has meaning, and I do not think it is wise to argue for either the usefulness or uselessness of literature, when instead, we could simply argue for the meaningfulness of literature, or, following the thinking of Annie Dillard, for the ways in which the art object “presents to us, in a stilled and enduring context, a model of previously unarticulated or unavailable relationships among ideas and materials,” and “[i]nsofar as we attend to these art objects, these epistemologically absurd and mysterious hot-air balloons, we deepen our understanding” of the world [Living By Fiction, p. 184]. In this sense, paraphrasing Dillard, literature holds up the universe while also remaking it. While science will reduce the universe to a formula or a principle, literature will multiply the world into an infinite number of possible worlds—none of them real, but all of them, somehow, sustainable and sustaining in different ways. The study and teaching of literature has something to do with imaginative world-making, and committing a certain amount of one’s time and resources to consorting with fictional persons and traveling to imaginary places whose resemblance to real persons and real places is only ever tenuously tangential, but which nevertheless have real meaning, and real worth, all their own. To articulate what this meaning might be is the real work of the humanities, and its relation to reality—or what I prefer to call history—is that art has its own history, its own telos, and professors of literature are watching over that history, helping it to endure, and they should be very careful about giving up on the idea that the value of that endeavor cannot be articulated. But what we should likely aim for in our articulations is something like Stephen White’s “weak [or felicitous] ontology,” where our deepest commitments can be seen to be both “fundamentally important and contestable.” The idea, too, would not be to argue for the kinds of positive effects the study of literature might have on particular persons’ lives [which is not to say it has none; it does, but it’s never guaranteed], but rather to keep affirming that literature possesses ontological weight—it takes up real space in the world, has existence—and the job of literary interpretation is important because, again following Dillard, it helps us “to extend the boundaries of sense and meaning” [Living By Fiction, p. 132]. You see, it’s possible that the universe has no meaning whatsoever, or perhaps has too much of it, and literature professors are part of a diminishing tribe who are foolishly clinging to the ideas that: 1) meaning must be imparted; 2) some meanings are better than others and worth arguing over, endlessly even; and 3) the reservoir of any meaning or sense in a culture is in its arts.
I do not teach literature to make students better persons, or even to help them be better critical adjudicators of the various discourses that flow over and by them every day—of the world, which is all text, which is all around them—although I used to think this was a big part of what I was doing and I often make endless arguments to that effect. It may be that, in some ways, these things happen in direct proportion to something I do in a classroom, but I am no longer pinning my hopes there. I am also no longer certain that the study of literature aids students in developing certain capabilities of empathy and compassion [see Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life for the most succinct and impassioned defense of this viewpoint]; if anything, empathy and compassion are prerequisites for the successful study of literature and no amount of reading “great” books will “fix” a student’s lack of feeling for others [I think this has more to do with brain circuitry and lived experience, affective contact with others in childhood, general well-being and happiness, etc.]. It may be that so many professors of literature want to argue that the study of literature helps us to develop a capacity for deep feeling because we were born with deep feelings! And we were drawn to literature out of a need to give those feelings a wider purchase and more expansive field of imaginative play, and our sensibilities—both aesthetic and more practical—were hopefully strengthened, in positive fashion, as a result [and in the worse-case scenarios, some of us became those sorts of persons who weep more over books and operas than other persons]. I teach literature because, for reasons I will never fully be able [or want] to explain to myself, it means something to me: it enlarges my sense of hope for what might be possible in any given world, and somehow it thickens the real world I walk and sleep through every day by adding to my life, paraphrasing Milan Kundera, the beauty of sudden densities. As a teacher [and I’ve had many years to think about this], I can only see that my job is to model for my students my wonder at this beauty and to hope that it’s infectious. It has something to do with happiness.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)