Quote of the Day: Joseph Kugelmass

Dr. Crazy writes that she inspires curiosity; I want to focus on the kind of curiosity specific to literature, namely social or empathetic curiosity. She writes that it disrupts the consumer model of education; that’s true, but not because it’s impractical. It actually disrupts the entrepreneurial model of education, because it privileges solicitousness over selling.
-- Teaching Literature

Two Medieval Items of Note

1. On Sunday, 27 January 2008, 21.30 GMT (16.30 east coast) BBC Radio 3 will broadcast "Malory: A Tale of Two Texts." The program will also be available on the web. Here's the press copy: "Written and presented by David Wallace, the program features interviews with A.S.G. Edwards, Helen Cooper, Richard Barber, Martin Biddle, Ann Sutton and others; locations include the Queen's Robing Room, House of Lords; Winchester School; Winchester College; Mercer's Hall; British Library; John Rylands Library, Manchester; and the battlefield of Towton. Sir Thomas Malory is voiced by Poet Laureate Andrew Motion."
2. Aaron Hostetter, a graduate student at Princeton University, has initiated The Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project. The site promises "to create a new, verse translation of the Anglo-Saxon narrative poems, ultimately with a view towards publication in an edition useful to teachers of medieval literature." Andreas is appearing first, to be followed by Elene, Juliana, Genesis A&B, and Guthlac A and B. Aaron is looking for feedback on the project, so please stop by.
   

Festive Friday: Best Dressed Medievalist

As the weary week comes to its enervated end, ITM jolts its readers back to vitality with yet another installment of our "At-last-this-won't-make-my brain-hurt" series called Festive Friday. Today we turn to the professorial sartorial.

A recent article by the pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton in the Chronicle of Higher Education explored the effect that dressing formally has upon pedagogy and relations with colleagues. The piece brought this blog to my attention as well. Although your four co-bloggers cannot be found in the pages of glossy fashion magazines, we'd like to think that none of us are frumps. Still, when it comes to combining splendid style with all things medieval, I am going to have to look beyond ITM to announce these nominations for Best Dressed Medievalist. And the nominees are:

• The dapper David Wallace. When I as a graduate student first met him -- just before a paper he was about to deliver -- he was slumped in a throne-like chair, clad in a leather jacket that exuded academic cool. Whenever I've seen him since, he has been dressed to announce his couture cognizance.
  
• The elegant Sarah Beckwith. Au courant eyewear, à la mode coiffure, and conference garb from Vogue: only Bonnie Wheeler plays in this league.
  

Medievalists, contrary to popular representations, are not a tweedy bunch. And your nominations for Best Dressed?

Happy birthday dear blog

How could we have let the momentous date of January 18 pass without mention? You see, dear readers, on that day in 2006 this blog came kicking and screaming into the world with a post on Postcolonial Theory. Spawned from the leisure of a sabbatical that followed closely on the heels of a year of leave funded by an ACLS fellowship -- spawned, that is, when I was free for a while from thinking about work that had to be done and could contemplate new kinds of academic endeavor that might be undertaken -- this blog was an experiment that took on life and became its own being. We now have four die-hard co-bloggers and occasional guest posts. We have features galore and essays profound and humorous. We have a vivacious solidarity that I never could have predicted two years ago.

Two years and 712 posts later, In The Middle also enjoys about 300 daily visits and 470 page views. Perhaps this list of our last twenty visitors says it all about how international this readership is: Bronx, New York; Dublin; Riyadh; Noblesville, Indiana; Quincy, Massachusetts; South Africa: Tembisa, Gauteng; Kitchener, Ontario; Warsaw; Brazil: Sao Paulo; Manila; Atlantic City, New Jersey; London; Finland: Rovaniemi, Lapland; College Station, Texas; Lake Mary, Florida; Charleston, South Carolina; Philippines: Benguet; Australia: Melbourne, Victoria; Weehawken, New Jersey; Grantham, Lincolnshire.

Our proudest moment was our recent Cliopatria award for Best Group Blog. We've also been heartened by the sheer number of other blogs and information sites that have linked to us. Over the longer durée, though, we have been especially pleased with the community we've been able to form here -- a community that could not exist without you. Thank you.

So, happy birthday In the Middle. Welcome to your terrible twos.

Pitched past pitch of grief / 2

My thanks again to the In the Middle community for allowing me this chance to think aloud.

***

After leaving Jason to die that Sunday morning, Rogers moved a mile or so south, where he shot Elizabeth Rumsey at Winchester Lagoon on Sunday evening. He then made his way, apparently on foot, a few blocks away, where he shot Tamas Deak and stole his Wagoneer the next morning, on Monday, after holing up for the night. Deak, a local architect who, like Jason the day before, had gone out early to warm up his car.

After the attack on Deak, Anchorage police knew the events were related, and they swarmed the Anchorage bowl for Rogers. When found Deak's Wagoneer and Rogers refused to stop, APD rammed it on Northern Lights Blvd. Rogers was taken into custody.

***

The UAA press release read, in part:

ANCHORAGE, AK – A memorial to honor the life and work of graduate student Jason Wenger is scheduled for the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 15, on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus. All are invited.

Jason’s life was taken on Dec. 2 in Anchorage by a gunman in an apparently random shooting.

Jason, who was 27 when he died, was a student in the Master of Fine Arts program in the UAA Dept. of Creative Writing and Literary Arts. His thesis was in fiction, and he was expected to graduate in May.

Jason’s parents, Mason and Debbie Staub of Brighton, Colorado, will attend. Also attending will be Mike Driscoll, Provost of Academic Affairs. The office of UAA Chancellor Fran Ulmer will be represented.

The Potluck and Celebration of Jason’s life will be held 6-10 p.m. in the Campus Den, on the ground floor of the Student Union. The potluck is scheduled for 6-7 p.m. The program will start at 7 p.m. with a prayer from Jason’s father.

Dr. Douglas Causey, vice provost for research at UAA and Dean of The Graduate School, will confer the MFA degree on Jason posthumously and give the diploma to his parents.

Anyone who wishes will be invited to speak in Jason’s remembrance.

Joann Mapson, Jason's academic advisor, included Jason's paper on Levenson as part of his thesis portfolio.

***

According to the Anchorage Daily News, "After his arrest, Rogers told police he was angry over his treatment by family members before the Palmer attack, but said the attacks in Anchorage were largely random, according to a police affidavit filed in court." The report continued, "After two killings Sunday, he kept hunting because he 'just wanted to kill a few more people,' he told police."

***

I attended the memorial last Tuesday night, with my youngest son, an eighth grader, who had to tag along. He didn't have much of a choice. I was his ride home.

***

"Who gave strength to Abraham’s arm? Who held his right hand up so that it did not fall limp at his side? He who gazes at this becomes paralyzed." (Johannes de Silentio via Kierkegaard, _Fear and Trembling_, trans. Lowrie, p. 36)

***

The memorial, or "Celebration of Life" as it was called, was well attended, with about 100 folks from around Anchorage, including Jason's coworkers at ASSETS, a social service agency. A memory book for personal messages, a handsome volume for signatures, photos of Jason, his nearly complete thesis, and other momento mori were arranged on a draped table in the entry to the UAA Den, a small venue in the lower level of the UAA Student Center where a local band might play next week.

I saw several students I knew, a few faculty, and several administrators. The lighting was muted, and small tea candles dotted the tables. Folks sat talking quietly in groups, munching at the goodies from the modest buffet. A small box of tissues rested at the center of each table. But there was cake, too, with Jason's name scrolled brightly in the icing. Every once in awhile I heard laughter. He was well loved by his friends, and even casual acquaintances spoke highly of his kindness.

***

At his arraignment after the murders and his capture, the ADN reported, "an animated, somewhat cocky Rogers cracked jokes and smirked as [Judge] Clark asked if he had money for a lawyer or if anyone else would put it up for him.

"Hell, no," Rogers said. "I talked to one, but I don't really think it's going to help."

***

"This attention and this action [to the suffering of the other] are so imperiously and directly incumbent on human beings (on their I's) that it makes awaiting them from an all-powerful God impossible without our lowering ourselves. The consciousness of this inescapable obligation brings us close to God in a more difficult, but also more spiritual, way than does confidence in any kind of theodicy." ("Useless Suffering," p. 94; emph. Levinas)

***

The evening began with a few introductions and thank-yous to those who had helped to organize the evening. The pastor of the Baptist church Jason attended in Anchorage opened with a brief prayer. Jason's parents had flown up to Anchorage from Colorado especially for the occasion. At their table, a young woman held her burbling baby who cooed for her attention. I did not know her, nor her child. A large man with grey hair and beard, Jason's father, rose to speak, carrying a bible and notes to the lectern, right about where the bass player would probably stand.

***

I resisted my natural impulse to take notes while Jason's father spoke. Just the academic in me, I suppose. When people talk, I write. It helps me think.

***

"Abraham's relation to Isaac, ethically speaking, is quite simply expressed by saying that a father shall love his son more than himself." (Fear and Trembling, p. 67)

***

After thanking everyone for their kindnesses, Jason's father said that he was certain of two things: One, that Jason's murderer would be brought to justice and, two, that Jason was in heaven, in the presence his savior, looking down upon us.

He would be remiss and unfaithful to Jason, said the father, if he did not tell us clearly and directly that Jason's greatest purpose in life was serve Jesus. Jason's greatest desire, he said, would be that we too know Jesus personally as Jason did. Jason's father told us the plan of salvation. I specifically remember him quoting Romans 6:23:

"But the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

My son looked at me, an eyebrow arched.

***

"Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior—yet in such a way, be it observed, that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to the universal, now through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, for the fact that the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated … " (Fear and Trembling, p. 66)

***

I remember very clearly the day I asked Jesus into my heart. I was at my grandma's house, where she had held a "backyard bible club" all week for the neighborhood kids. I remember a little booklet—no words, only colors—the size of a packet of matches. The first page was green, the second black, the third brown, the fourth red, and the fifth gold. The green was for when God created the world. It was perfect and it was good. The black was because Adam and Eve had sinned. The third was for the wood of Jesus' cross, and the red was for Jesus' shed blood. The gold was the color of heaven, where I would go when I died if I prayed the sinner's prayer.

I understood that I had made Jesus sad by my sins, like I made my mom sad when I did things I wasn't supposed to. This was all very clear to me.

I went into my grandma's bathroom and asked Jesus to come into my heart. I asked him to forgive my sins and to take me into heaven when I died. I came out and told my mom and grandma. I remember they were very happy. They had tears in their eyes.

I was five years old.

***

"Already within an isolated consciousness, the pain of suffering can take on the meaning of pain that wins merit and hopes of a reward, and so lose, it would appear, its modality of uselessness in various ways. Is it not meaningful as a means with an end in view, when it makes itself felt in the effort that goes into the preparation of a work, or in the fatigue resulting from it?" ("Useless Suffering," p. 95)

***

The murder spree began when Rogers killed his father with a machete and wounded his father's girlfriend after spending the night at their house. A few days later the Anchorage Daily News reported: "James Moren went to work Thursday cleaning up a crime scene that included his mother's dried blood—remains of a Dec. 2 machete attack that nearly killed her.

'If she could live through it, I could clean it,' Moren said."

***

Jason's father told us that he actually was not Jason's natural father, though you could have fooled me. He said that Jason's father died when he was very young. But he became Jason's father when he married Jason's mother, and Jason was the only son he'd ever had. He loved him as his own. Although Jason had been taught the scriptures growing up, as a teenager he began to go his own way and ignore the faith he had been taught. His parents prayed that he would be troubled by his sin, convicted of his errors by the Holy Spirit, and return to a life of faith. They provided copies of the book, "The Pundit's Folly," the one that showed Jason the error of his ways, for any of us to pick up and take home.

***

Jason wrote the following, as part of his personal manifesto as a creative writer:

"... it is my responsibility as a lover of fiction to be an active member in my community and world. In the case of many writers, this activity takes shape in politics and action. Here I must again admit my shortcomings. My heart is much more drawn to the individual, rather than the population. I suppose this is again representative of my world view. I believe in individual and personal civil service. I hope to remain humble, and to emulate the example of the servant, Jesus Christ."

Jason's advisor provided this snippet for the memorial's printed program.

***

The ADN reported, "At the [arraignment] hearing, Dana Murphy-Hoffman of the Office of Victim's Rights watched what she called an arrogant appearance by Rogers, whose family she said she has known for years. Rogers has had problems with drinking and drugs, but nothing that would have led her to believe he would be capable of the crimes he is charged with, Murphy-Hoffman said.

His upbeat attitude won't likely last long, she said.

'He's enjoying the attention for the moment, but I think at some point the reality is going to sink in that this is life from now on,' she said."

***

In class we debated the complexities of Hebrews 11:17-19, which reads:

"17 By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, 
18 Of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: 19 Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure" (KJV).

Isaac was not Abraham's only son, nor was Isaac killed, but only bound, as Rashi teachers. But how real is the near sacrifice of Isaac if he exists only to foreshadow Jesus, the perfect sacrifice who comes after? Why the horror of the raised blade at Isaac's throat if he is only a figure? What—or who, then—does Abraham receive back after this moment?

***

My mom wanted me to get baptized after I turned twelve. My dad said no, not until I understood better what I was doing and what it meant. I was baptized on my fourteenth birthday. I found out later that the pastor who baptized me eventually left the ministry.

***

In order, as printed in the program, representatives of different UAA offices offered their condolences and presented their memorials. John Roberson, President of Student Government, read a proclamation passed by the student representatives and sponsored a gift, a tree to be planted in Jason's name after the winter ended. Doug Causey, Dean of the Graduate School, presented Jason's degree posthumously to his parents. It was the first time, according to the Dean, that UAA had granted a degree posthumously. An evolutionary biologist by trade, Doug told the story of Alexander the Great meeting Diogenes who said, "Don't stand in the sun." Jason's mother and father accepted the diploma and took their seats again.

***

Jason's creative writing manifesto continued:

"… I do not believe I can earn such grace or mercy. But in striving to live my life like a servant, I pray that God will bless me with the wisdom to suffer the intolerance of my sin, and the ability to strengthen my love for Him and His creation. If in the act of service, I continue to gain ideas, experience conflicts, empathize with characters, benefit my fellow man, and take notes, I will consider myself worthy to be called a writer."

... To suffer the intolerance of my sin ...

***

After his murder, Jason's mother posted a message on the ADN website:

Yesterday someone took my son's life, but only his fragile human body. Today my son rejoices with his savior. My heart aches for my loss, but Jason knows no pain or sorrow any more. Those responsible will some day face the judge of all the earth, The Lord Jesus. Seek forgiveness while it may be found.

***

I was very active in church as a teenager. I went to church all day Sunday and again on Wednesday for prayer meeting. Tuesday night was bible study and Friday night was youth activity night. I loved singing in the choir. We sang special programs at Christmas and Easter. I wrote and acted in dramas and puppet shows. I went on mission trips. I did street witnessing and knocked on doors to tell people about Jesus.

I can still recite "The Four Spiritual Laws" tract pretty much by heart.

***

The Anchorage Daily News reported that when "Judge Brian Clark read the charges at the Anchorage jail court Tuesday: two counts of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder in the first degree. Christopher Erin Rogers Jr., the defendant, yawned."

***

In contrast to Levenson, Solomon Spiegel asserts unequivocally,

"The Akedah story repels once for all the primitive notion of the sanctity of the human first born and its derivative demand for the literal sacrifice of children. The Akedah story declared war on the remnants of idolatry in Israel and undertook to remove root and branch the whole long, terror-laden inheritance from idolatrous generations." (The Last Trial, p. 73; emph. Spiegel)

***

Jason loved to play softball, and he helped put together a team in one of the local co-ed summer leagues. At the memorial, the team's coach told a story about the time they played the league's leading team. You know the kind: arrogant, trash talking, loud mouthed, widely disliked, but really good. Jason's team was leading because of a technicality as they made the last out, and all they had to do was get off the field before the official scorer caught the error. The coach hurried everyone off the playing field, but Jason stood in right field and refused to budge. The coach screamed at him to get off the field, but Jason said, "No. We're not going to win like that. We're going to beat them fair and square." The teams returned to the diamond, and Jason's team lost by ten runs in the next inning.

Everyone at the memorial agreed that that was a good Jason story. Stick it out to the end, the right way, or it didn't count.

***

Sometimes I think I don't take my boys to church often enough. I don't take them at all anymore, really. Sometimes that puts a lump in my throat.

***

The only words Isaac speaks in the Akedah are simple and straightforward:

"And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" (Genesis 22:7, KJV).

Isaac calls his father's name, and that is what he wants: To be recognized by his father. To be recognized as his father's son. Not as one object among others in the sacrificial preparations: fire, wood, lamb.

Isaac's fear, his foreboding arises because he recognizes the accoutrements of sacrifice and understands that something is missing. But how can that be?

If the Akedah is the singular event that displaces child sacrifice with an animal substitute, how is it that Isaac knows that something is missing?

He's seen this before, or something like this.

***

"Is not the evil of suffering—extreme passivity, helplessness, abandonment, and solitude—also the unassumable, whence the possibility of a half opening, and, more precisely, the half opening that a moan, a cry, a groan of a sigh slips through—the original call for aid, for curative help, help from the other me whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation?" ("Useless Suffering," p. 93)

***

Could a son utter a more desperate cry of help than to say, "My father"?

***

Considered authoritative in several early lists of canonical works, 1 Clement 31.1-3 (c. 90-100 CE) states:

"Let us cleave then to His blessing, and consider what are the paths of blessing. Let us think over the things which have taken place from the beginning. 2 For what reason was our father Abraham blessed? Was it not because he wrought righteousness and truth through faith? 3 Isaac, confidently knowing what was going to happen, was gladly led as a sacrifice."

What did Isaac know? How could he know it?

And why does Abraham's blessing require Isaac's immolation?

***

At the memorial, I lived again a moment I have suffered dozens, maybe hundreds, of times before—being preached to by someone of the utmost sincerity and purest motive whose only concern was my earthly happiness and eternal salvation. Someone who is utterly confident in his command of these mysteries, of this suffering.

I've sat unaffected by these kinds of appeals in the past, but never in the penumbra of a student's murder. A kind of willing sacrifice, I was being told.

I was 15 years old again, at church camp, ashamed of my failings and looking for forgiveness.

***

"This is the kingdom of transcendent ends, willed by a benevolent wisdom, by the absolute goodness of a God who is in a sense defined by that supernatural goodness; or a goodness invisibly disseminated in Nature and History, whose paths, indeed painful but henceforth meaningful, subordinated in one way or another to the metaphysical finality glimpsed by faith or belief in progress. Beliefs presupposed by theodicy!"("Useless Suffering," p. 96)

***

Jason wrote me about falling behind in class, but it took me a couple of days to get back to him, and our emails crossed paths in the digital ether. In the manner of a 'reply' email, my later email is above his earlier message:

Subject: Re: Class tonight

I did get it, Jason (for which many thanks) but I was letting it simmer before I responded. I understand completely the problems of being overburdened, and so I'm glad that you have made a decision to keep yourself healthy and not sacrifice yourself to something that ultimately will not benefit you.

See you tonight, and I hope we'll have a chance to meet up again--

dkline

---

Subject: Class tonight.

Hello Dr. Kline,

I never received a response from you on my last email, so I hope you got it. Either way, I wanted to inform you that I'm withdrawing from the class. I'm coming tonight to say my goodbyes. Bring the knife and the wood.

Jason Wenger

***

I've taught many classes but never had a student stop by to say goodbye and how much he enjoyed the class, even though he had to drop. So the class members told me.

I was a couple minutes late though, and Jason had to leave. I didn't get to tell him goodbye.

***

"So Abraham returned unto his young men, and they rose up and went down together to Beersheba and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba." (Gen 22: 19)

There is no mention of Isaac, returning. Abraham never again speaks to God.

***

The last line of Jason's final email to me: "bring the knife and the wood."

What can I say?

What is there to say?

***

We had to leave before the memorial was over because we had a long commute. My son slept most of the way home, the half-light of the moon reflecting off the snow limned his face in shadow.

Repatriate the Lewis Chessmen! (???)

A thoughtful piece by Ian Jack appeared in the Guardian, examining the cultural brouhaha that has erupted over Alex Salmond's declaration that the Lewis Chessmen should be removed from the British Museum and repatriated to Scotland. Salmond made the statement in a speech about preserving Gaelic language, and implied that the game pieces are historically central to Scottish identity: "I find it utterly unacceptable that the Lewis Chessmen are scattered around Britain in a bizarre parody of the Barnett formula. And you can be assured that I will continue campaigning for a united set of Lewis Chessmen in an independent Scotland."

As Jack points out, the chessmen are not exactly scattered: the British Museum possesses 82, the National Museum of Scotland 11. It is difficult to fold these little guys into an easy narrative about enduring national identities. Chess originates in India and became a truly international game in the Middle Ages. These walrus bone pieces beautifully intermix the Christian and the secular, the transnational and the regional. The figures may have been carved in Norway in the twelfth century, and perhaps were headed for a princely purchaser in Ireland or the Isle of Man when they were buried in the Outer Hebrides, an archipelago that served as a medieval mixing bowl of peoples, bridging numerous lands. To enshrine the figures as emblems of Scottish identity is to request that they stay put in a way that their history resists. Can there be repatriation without an originary patria?

More soon from Daniel Kline

The second post will appear here soon, it's only slightly delayed.

Dispatch from the Lost Weekend of a Long Hiatus: Why Art Matters (Again and Again)

Figure 1. Mr. Sparkles, in repose, supine, laying low, keeping it mellow

The past month feels like a blur. A lot of things happened that were not so pleasant, some things happened that were fun, but none worth reporting. Time marched on and was measured by a variety of watches and wall clocks and cell phones. It got really, really cold. Pants still had to be put on one leg at a time, and absolutely nothing was accomplished on an intellectual or "academic" level. Blog posts not only weren't written, they couldn't even be conceptualized. Weight was gained and scruples continued to be shed in the wild hope that something interesting would result [but did not]. A new dog was adopted [see Figure 1], and requisite chew toys were acquired: this is what we call "news" around here, and it is "small" [literally]. The new semester has begun and I'm climbing a little set of stairs back to normalcy, and I thought I'd post here just a random "dispatch" culled from a brain that resolutely refuses to make any New Year's resolutions, other than to keep moving forward while reaching backwards into some of our weblog past.

I finally [and belatedly] read Dan Kline's post, "Pitched Past the Pitch of Grief," which I front-page here again just in case anyone missed it. It is a beautifully written and moving meditation on the recent violent death of one of the students recently enrolled in Dan's graduate course on Genesis 22:1-19, and my understanding is that there will be more installments on this soon. It is one of those pieces to which the appropriate response is probably a respectful silence, although it did get me thinking a LOT about a subject I have obsessed over in the past: how to interpret Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, especially in relation to, as Dan outlines, the traditional Jewish and Christian and other theological and scholarly responses--where, alternately, the story is seen as God's way of getting humans to replace human sacrifice with animal sacrifice, or as a prefiguration of Jesus's more "perfect" sacrifice [also a son sacrificed by a "father"], or as an example of perfect obedience to God, which is especially figured in Abraham's response to God's call, "Here I am," as opposed to, "what can I do for you?" [or some variation thereof]. The "here I am," of course, indicates a willingness to do whatever God wants, even before he poses the question, or command.

My favorite extended response to this story in Genesis, as I've actually mentioned in this blog before, is the film The Believer, about Daniel Balint [really: Daniel Burros], a Jew who became a neo-fascist [in reality: a clan leader of the KKK] and ultimately committed suicide when his Jewish identity was unmasked by a New York Times reporter. The rage that Daniel felt as a child in his yeshiva classes about the Abraham and Isaac story [which later is attached to his rage against Jews for, in his opinion, having been too passive in the face of their own holocaust during WWII] becomes the central motif of the film and the way it returns at the end, after Daniel has died and something like his ghost has returned to the school where he continues to argue with his teacher, is brilliant and also illustrates the ways in which, I really believe, the "teaching" and "interpretation" of this story always has to take on some of its monstrousness, which can never be fully shaken off. To believe in this story--to believe, more pointedly, that it has a valuable spiritual lesson to relay contained within its layers and layers--is to take within oneself a piece of monstrosity, of cruelty. God is a monster, as is Abraham, and as Dan K. beautifully points out, what are we to make of how Isaac is supposed to live [and *sit*] with all of this afterwards, regardless of all the positive spin theologians might put on it? I cannot believe in a God who would demand such a thing, nor who would--according to the theology that says "everything happens the way it does because God wills it that way"--enact the senseless and useless murder of Dan's student.

As regards, Dan's attempts to help his students come to grips with Levinas's very difficult ideas about the uselessness of suffering and the ethical necessity to not turn someone else's suffering into your own [to make it a "thing" for your own purposes], how are we to consider the proper way to suffer, or to take on, in the correct way, the suffering of Dan's student who, by virtue of the way in which he died [suddenly and without warning] did not, technically speaking, suffer in a long prolonged fashion. If anything, he had violently taken from him the opportunity to, let's say, suffer his own mortality, his own death, but this also raises the question of whether or not anyone ever has that opportunity. As Levinas himself puts it,

". . . death is the hole which undoes the system, the disturbance of every order, the dismantling of every totality. You go toward death, you 'learn to die,' you 'prepare' yourself for the final event; but in the last quarter of an hour--or the last second--death is there, travelling its part of the route alone and ready to surprise. . . . To be unassumable belongs to death's very quality. It is an event without a project insofar as the 'project' that one might have of death is undone in the last moment. It is death alone which travels the last part of the route. Not us. One does not, properly speaking, encounter it." [Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, p. 122]

But Levinas continues to say that the "mystery of death" also offers an opportunity, a very human one, for those of us, like Dan, who "attend to the death of the other." Levinas writes further,

"We shall never know what death signifies for the deceased himself. We do not even know what legitimacy there might be in saying, 'for the deceased himself.' But for the survivor, there is in the other's death both the disappearance of the deceased and the extreme solitude that results. I think that the human consists precisely in opening itself to the death of the other, in being preoccupied with his death . . . . [A]round the death of my neighbor is manifested what I call the humanity of man." [Is it Righteous to Be? pp. 123-24]

Is this not exactly the task Dan has set for himself in the meditations he has so lovingly crafted that intercut and bring into "touch" with each other the ideas of useless suffering, of sacrifice, of death, and of his student as a person? Therefore, through Dan's writing, the death of his student is both inscribed [it is recorded, made note of, witnessed] and also, as Levinas would say, it becomes "impossible." This is the power of a certain attention, or regard, of each person in his or her uniqueness, worked through writing, through art--the only medium capable of giving to a random chain of events, or even ideas, the weight of meaning, of sense. In his excellent essay [in seven parts], The Curtain, which is a kind of defense of the novel, Milan Kundera remarks on the ways in which the novel [and by extension, all narrative literature] rejects the time of clocks in favor of "an extreme density of action," and the resulting accumulation of events fills us with wonder at the "particular beauty" of "a sudden density of life." And only the novel, finally, can "reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless." Dan's writing here, I really believe, does both, and I thank him for these labors.

Old English, New Media: or, Friday Night Meta-Blogging

As everyone knows, blogging isn't really academic blogging unless somewhere along the line, you start "meta-blogging": indulging in that art of writing blog posts which theorize about blogging. Recently, I was asked to write an essay for the Old English Newsletter about blogging and Old English -- more specifically, perhaps, about what is to be gained through academic blogging. Although the essay itself has not yet been published, I wanted to post a bit of it on ITM and Old English in New York -- both to get some reactions, as well as to share what has kept me away from blogging so often in the past few weeks.

Of course, we all know that this particular issue has been done -- some might argue to near-death -- on the blogs. However, I do think I managed to get somewhere when it came to defining my blog-work in terms non-bloggers or those new to the blogosphere might understand. Of course, the usual suspects were among my early inspirations -- Scott Eric Kaufmann, Adam Kotsko, and Joseph Kugelmass are all cited in the portion I'm copying here...however, I also am indebted to posts by Doctor Virago, Bitch, PhD, and of course, the usual suspects here at ITM (Eileen, Jeffrey and Karl). I may still have time for revisions -- but even if I don't, I look forward to hearing from you, dear readers, on things I could nuance, clarify, change or get rid of entirely. Also: my apologies to DTK, who had not yet begun his series of guest posts here at ITM when I wrote this (and so doesn't yet appear in the litany of guest and co-bloggers on ITM that I list in footnote 8).

Excerpt from Old English, New Media: Blogging Beowulf
[The essay from which this excerpt comes begins with a consideration of my own beginnings in the blog world, along with questions of pseudo- and anonymity, before segueing into the conversation that took place, both at Inside Higher Ed and The Valve, between Kotsko, Kaufmann, and Kugelmass. I begin here with the consideration of Kaufmann's article on academic blogging.]

Scott Eric Kaufmann, on the other hand, sees a brighter future for the prospect of blogging in the academy. Maintaining a fairly high readership with his blog Acephalous has given Kaufmann a certain visibility within the scholarly community, but the real pay-off is in the experience he has had not only as an academic but as an academic author, because blogging has given him the experience of learning “what it’s like to write in a way most academics never have: namely, for an audience.” [1] Furthermore, he poses a particularly challenging question to specialists: “Why not write for people who don’t already [know] how you think about everything? Why not force yourself to articulate your points in such a way that strangers could come to know your thought as intimately as your friends from grad school do?” [2]

Kaufmann’s questions here are ones I routinely pose to my first year writing students, encouraging them away from what the Rhetoric and Composition specialists call “writer-based prose” and toward the far easier to engage “reader-based prose.” It is a fine line to walk; what academic blogs can do, however, is allow all of us an opportunity to write for the non-specialist, to attempt to make complex arguments without being obscure. In responding to both of these authors, Joseph Kugelmass makes the point (one I hope will be well taken) that blogs allow an interface between the academy and the “public” in a way more traditional scholarly outlets such as journals, edited collections and books seldom do. Moreover, he claims that “[h]umanistic blogs are one way of restoring the connection between scholarly tradition and the new plenitude of culture.” [3] In short, they allow the humanities to be accessed by their subject – humans.

Kugelmass concludes his meditation on the use of blogging in the formation of academic communities with a possibility many might be familiar with: the idea (though not explicitly stated) of the workshop. Conversations on a blog, he suggests, might function as “stepping-stones to mainstream work: ironing the kinks out of a journal article, gathering sources for a dissertation, drafting a keynote address or the chapter of a book.” [4] Blogging, then, allows a lower-stakes audience for a work-in-progress, and thus allows for the author to take risks he or she might not otherwise take, and benefit from readers’ comments and responses. In line with Kaufmann, he highlights the development of the author in the writing of a blog, arguing that “the opportunity exists to turn blogging into something more than an interstitial occupation, for the lonely times, and the idle times. It can be the practice, as vital in scholarship as in friendship among equals, of discovering a voice.” [5] The idea of a practice inherent in blogging – a practice which should be highlighted as a process rather than a product – is key, for Kugelmass and for many academic bloggers (myself included), in the formation of “voice.” [6]

I would argue that the idea of developing academic “voice” is what makes academic blogging so valuable in general. In May of 2007, after numerous conversations with colleagues at Kalamazoo about the possible ramifications (positive and negative) of letting go of my pseudonym, Old English in New York’s “Anhaga” was relieved of her duties of authorship, and I “claimed my voice.” [7] In the time since, I have used the blog as a forum for promoting the activities of the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium, as well as posting interesting calls for papers and descriptions of conferences in the New York area. After having been a frequent commenter on the medieval group blog In the Middle (founded by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in 2006), I was asked in August 2007 to join the collaborative project there as the resident graduate student blogger. [8] In the Middle, and the community that has formed around it, is a forum in which I share my own ideas and projects, to be certain. However, and perhaps more importantly to the development of my academic voice, it has allowed me to be an active commenter and interlocutor for the work of other academics.

Through Old English in New York and now In the Middle, I have found a community of scholars with similar interests, who want to provoke and participate in discussions about the work we do. I would suggest that a part of what is gained in the blogging community is not simply a chance to think aloud on one’s own topics, but to be affected by each others’ work. Even when topics range outside our own areas of expertise, we can still comment usefully and intelligently on each others’ ideas. Moreover, I have found that the ideas and questions raised on the blogs linger with me, and hold a purchase on my imagination which can only enlarge my breadth as a scholar. This kind of interaction often encourages imaginative juxtapositions in what I call a “Forsterian” scholarship, drawing on the epigraph to the E.M. Forster novel Howards End. Our work is to “only connect”: to connect ideas, people, cultures and texts in a network that might, in the end, be best described not only as human but also as humane:

[W]ithout conversation, especially among those who seek, not to tear down your ideas, but to help you make them better and more theoretically rigorous, I really don't believe there is much traction for really good work to develop its highest potential, or else whatever ‘victory’ you do achieve with your work is, again, kind of lonely, maybe even empty. [9]

Here, Eileen Joy picks up on my Forsterian theme, suggesting that scholarly work at its very best is always a process of collaboration. Blogs are becoming a fruitful way for us, as scholars seeking to create a community of thinkers, to reach out across the distances that separate us to form a kind of “global classroom” in which we can all benefit from each others’ expertise early on in projects that can be made more astute through the interaction.

In reaching out in a format that is readily accessible to a culture that is increasingly engaging the texts we study, we have a chance to let intellectuals and enthusiasts who are not “academics” see inside the “ivory tower” a bit more. Perhaps in the process, that tower might be dismantled, allowing the study of medieval cultures and texts a place in a society that often finds it inaccessibly remote. All we need do is connect.

Footnotes:

[1] Scott Eric Kaufman. “An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogging.” Inside Higher Ed. 1 November 2007.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Joseph Kugelmass. “Academic Blogging Revisited.” The Valve. 1 November 2007.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Here I would like to thank the director and assistant directors of the University Writing Program at Columbia – Joseph Bizup and Nicole Wallack – for introducing me to the theoretical aspects of writing, and in particular this focus on process, which is one of the key components of the course.
[7] “Claiming my Voice” Old English in New York. 16 May 2007.
[8] Although In the Middle began as a single-author blog, Cohen has hosted a number of guest bloggers during the two years of its existence, including Jon K. Williams and Michael O’Rourke. The first In the Middle “book club” event featured contributions from Susan Kim, Heather Blurton and Asa Mittman. Karl Steel and Eileen Joy, who are now co-bloggers with Cohen, also began their work on the blog as guest bloggers.
[9]Eileen Joy. Comment on “Scholarship and Blogs part 54656” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. In the Middle. 21 December 2007.

cross posted at OEinNY.

Festive Friday: The Road Not Taken, Thank Goodness

It may seem that Karl, Mary Kate, Eileen and I have been medievalists from the very womb, but I assure you that is not so. Contrary to the myth that has been circulating, I did not conjugate my first Latin verb until post partum. Attentive readers will have learned already that Karl coulda been a rock star and that Eileen had a career in gardening. I think each would have been excellent at each had they stayed with the job. In fact, in the category of vice versa, I'm certain Eileen would make a fabulous rock star, and Karl probably has a green thumb. Today's question, though, is what job have you held in the past for which you are now grateful that it did not quite work out as a career?

My most inglorious position was probably as a sales clerk at a shabby discount store, where I placed landscape supplies on rusty shelves. Later in life I realized that this store kept its prices so low by fencing items that had been stolen in bulk from delivery trucks. The workstudy job that got me through college was as sorter of slides with various diseases of the skin smeared across them -- a job that I assured myself was at least a little more fun than that of a friend, who harvested corneas from cadavers. Today, a little bit of me is still grateful not to be the person who separates the actinic keratosis from the scleroderma, or who places pilfered Weed-B-Gone on retail shelves. How about you?

Wikipedia regnant?

I'm always happy to receive my latest copy of Studies in the Age of Chaucer. I had been anticipating volume 29 ever since the NCS in NYC of 2006. I've wanted to spend some time with the written version of two lectures, David Wallace's Presidential Address ("New Chaucer Topographies") and Susan Crane's Biennial Chaucer Lecture ("For the Birds"). The thick volume arrived yesterday and I immediately flipped to Wallace's essay. Let me share with you today my surprise about its footnotes.

They are copious and authoritative, just as SAC demands. But these are not the footnotes of a SAC article c.2005, or 1995, or 1985: Wallace's footnotes ought to be hyperlinked. They contain what might be the first citation of a blog in the journal (footnote 5 reads simply "http://houseoffame.blogspot.com") -- though, I hasten to add, only as a way of not speaking about blogs. The footnoted sentence in the main text reads "In speaking of new Chaucer topographies, I bypass the Chaucer blogger (whoever you are: some say a Langlandian ABD)." This just after an observation about how the World Wide Web keeps us "continually connected." Alas, poor Chaucer blog [and your nonLanglandian nonABD author], you are discarded for a starting point at Peter Ackroyd.

The footnotes demonstrate just how plugged in David Wallace is ... not surprising, since David Wallace has impressed me since I met him as a graduate student in 1990 as someone who simply knows everything about everything and can express it in an inimitable fashion. The Guardian is cited by its URL, not via its print version (footnote 14). A definition of Gotham City is pulled from the Superman Homepage (footnote 12). The essay's first footnote even references the officially published responses to the NCS conference at which the lecture was delivered. The Canterbury Tales "Medieval Misadventures" attraction gets a literary nod via a Sylvia Plath reference ("feauturing grotesquely animated puppets, [it] opens (to amend Sylvia Plath) with horsepiss in darkness," 7) and a footnote sending readers to the attraction's webpage. Baba Brinkman's Rap Canterbury Tales likewise sees its website published in the footnotes, and even Jody Foster rapping Eminem at U Penn's commencement receives a dutiful link (footnote 22).

To which I say: yahoo. And also, bravo. Scholarly publishing ought to be forthright in acknowledging that information arrives from many venues, and that the internet has altered how we conduct much of our research. I am very happy to see those URLs proliferate, even as they make me wonder about the future of publishing hard copy journals.

What surprised me, though, was the presence of an entity which has until now been one I warn my students in dire terms to flee: Wikipedia. Wallace defines vogueing by quoting the Wikipedia entry in footnote 9. Wikipedia being Wikipedia, someone has already changed the entry, so it no longer quite coincides with his quotation (the substance remains the same, but the Madonna element has been downplayed by an anonymous redactor with some small animus against her). Wikipedia resurfaces in footnote 24, to source a biography of Darcus Howe given in the main text (footnote 24 is in fact the last reference to internet materials; footnotes 25-45 often invoke conferences and performances, however, stressing the vitality of the essay's subject).

Part of what spurred this post is that more scholarly, less ephemeral references -- e.g. to voguing -- can be found elsewhere. But am I simply worried about the erosion of my own scholarly authority? Is it possible that I need to rethink the Wikipedia warning I put on my research paper instructions? Is Wikipedia still what I thought it was: a plethora of vanity pages, lightly researched facts, and eccentric information sprinkled with some good entries that are nonetheless susceptible to constant mischief, all of it frosted with a deceptively bright layer of supposed fact checking, group correction, and peer review? How did Wikipedia bust into SAC? Or am I waaaay behind the times here? I am curious to hear from ITM readers: where do you stand on Wikipedia?

Myths of Britain

This semester I'm teaching a new course called "Myths of Britain," a slow read of six works that are animated by the transnationalism of the Middle Ages. The class is the largest I've ever had: eighty students, most of them freshmen and sophomores. Contrast this behemoth with my course for the past two semesters: "Chaucer," filled with twenty-five theory-savvy senior English majors. Although I always have butterflies before the first meeting of my classes, this time around it was more like cicadas -- or whatever other non-aesthetically pleasing insect comes to mind.

Mainly I was worried about how to speak to eighty people at once without mere lecturing. What's the use of offering a live version of a video recording? If no opportunity for conversation exists, if no space opens for a dialog that can alter our destination (or at least bring us to some unexpected stations along the way), the course is not a literature class.

The technology I hoped to utilize also caused me some anxiety. Although in the past I've been the recipient of all kinds of funds for bringing electronic media into the literature classroom, in the past five years I've become relatively low tech: me, a book, some handouts, real-time and embodied discussion. Typically my classes unfold in the shabby spaces that populate our campus, rooms that make our students wonder why our tuition is so high and where all the money goes. "Myths of Britain" answers that second question. Because the theater-style classroom I've been assigned belongs to GW's school of international affairs, it has technology up the wazoo: a document projector, a computer, a DVD player, a touchscreen master control, microphones, two descending screens, twin LCD projectors, lights that dim at various percentages of brightness, microphones, podcast enabling software ... a colleague predicted that I'd be acting out the Disney version of the "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," with screens rising and falling, lights flashing, special effects booming. Fortunately I did not play the "Mickey Mouse in a pointy hat" part after all -- mainly because obsessive moi went into the classroom twice last week and practiced using the machines.

So, on the first day of class I opened with the closing scene of Lerner and Loewe's Camelot, the hammy song where Richard Harris tells young Tom of Warwick that he must in future narratives memorialize the "one brief shining moment" that was England [!] at its best. We talked about how the film cites T. H. White citing Malory; how JFK may or may not have cited the film (and the publicity machine that aligned the dead president and the film's bittersweet ending); and how Monty Python then turned citing the musical into an industry. I think by the end they were fairly convinced of the life of the past, its utility to the present, and its destiny as forger of desired futures.

After going over the syllabus, we had a brief PowerPoint collage of maps, a reverse history of Britain, from the (dis)United Kingdom to neolithic migration. Despite these potentially distancing technologies, most of the class was actually just me and a poem, 'The Wanderer." I pretended that there weren't eighty students in front of me, just my usual twenty-five, and I spoke with them as I would to smaller group. Remarkably, they answered back. The acoustics of the room are good, we had an intriguing discussion about apocalypse, living in a time that would like to imagine itself as new, the relegation of living peoples to a distant history... and so we are off to a good start. It helps as well that I have two superb graduate students who will be leading the smaller discussion sections once a week.

Below, for anyone who is interested, is my syllabus. The course is for non-majors, is introductory level, and is writing intensive. Updates as the semester unwinds.

------------
ENGLISH 40W: MYTHS OF BRITAIN
Professor Jeffrey J. Cohen

Much great English literature turns out not to be so English after all: the action of the epic Beowulf unfolds in Scandinavia; King Arthur was a Welsh king before he was an English one; Shakespeare's Tempest takes place on an island in the Mediterranean, but the play is also about the colonization of the New World. "Myths of Britain" looks at early English literature within a transnational frame. Students will enjoy literary works like Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf; the Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Geoffrey of Monmouth's medieval Molotov cocktail of a text, the History of the Kings of Britain; and Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest. We will also read some lesser-known texts that beautifully stress the turbulent multiculturalism of medieval England: Marie de France’s lais, elegant narratives of transformation and desire; and Mandeville’s Travels, a journey through a world populated with strangely familiar monsters and marvels.

Our objectives are threefold:
(1) to give you the chance to hone your writing through the careful analysis of a rich body of literature within its historical context
(2) to introduce you to cutting edge approaches to the study of early England within a transnational frame
(3) to explore the relation between narrating the past and bringing about a desired future, paying close attention to who and what must be excluded from this emergent community

Course format: The course meets twice a week, on Mondays at 11:15 a.m. in 1957 E Street B12 for lecture, and on Wednesdays for discussion sections. Attendance at both lecture and discussion is mandatory.

Required books: (available from the GWU Bookstore)
Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney
Shakespeare, The Tempest (Bedford Case Study edition)
The Travels of John Mandeville
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Marie Borroff
Marie de France, Lais

Requirements:
1. Attend lectures and sections; participate in discussions; complete readings on time.
2. Reading quizzes: Monday lecture sessions will begin with a brief reading quiz. Lateness or absence from lecture is not an excuse for missing the quiz, and quizzes cannot be made up. The quizzes cumulatively take the place of a midterm and final exam.
3. Writing assignments: There are five short but intense writing assignments, culminating in a final paper that will be revised once. Detailed information about the assignments will be available in advance, and you will have opportunities to discuss the assignments in section.

Policy on lateness and extensions: Except for a documented medical reason, late work will not be graded. You may not take an incomplete for this course.

Academic dishonesty: Academic dishonesty of any kind will be treated as a serious offense. In most cases, you will fail the course. You can find more on the Code of Academic Integrity at http://www.gwu.edu/~ntegrity.

Disability statement: If you feel you need accommodations based on the impact of a disability, contact Prof. Cohen and your TA. Disability Support Services (Marvin Center 242, 994 8250, http://gwired.gwu.edu/dss) is available to assist you.

Grading rubric:
Participation and attendance at section 10%
Reading quizzes 15%
Five short but intense writing exercises 10% each, for a total of 50%
Final paper (including revision) 25%

Code of Courtesy
Arrive on time with your cell phone silenced. Bring the appropriate book to class. Give the professor and your TA your full attention. Remain in the room until the class ends. Never hesitate to ask a question or to request clarification.

Schedule of Readings and Assignments

January 14 Lecture: The Britain in England. Text: “The Wanderer” (handout; also on Blackboard)
January 16 Section: Introductions. “The Dream of the Rood” (please print out a copy via Blackboard and read before section meeting).
January 21 No lecture (MLK day)
January 23 Section: Comparison of opening lines of Beowulf in several translations. Short writing assignment #1 handed out: two passages of poetry to be rewritten without poetic language.
January 28 Lecture: Beowulf: A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney lines 1-1798. First assignment due in lecture.
January 30 Section: J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics” (Beowulf: A Verse Translation pp. 103-130).
February 4 Lecture: Beowulf: A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney, lines 1799-3182
February 6 Section: Seamus Heaney, “Translator’s Introduction” and Daniel Donoghue, “The Philologer Poet” (Beowulf: A Verse Translation pp. xxiii-xxxviii; 237-47). Short writing assignment #2 handed out (close reading of passage).
February 11 Lecture: Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain pp.1-169. Writing exercise 2 due.
February 13 Section. Discussion of Geoffrey of Monmouth and writing assignment 2.
February 18 No lecture (President’s Day)
February 20 Section: Paper writing workshop (How to Compose a Successful “Problem Paper”).
February 25 Lecture: Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain pp. 186-284.
February 27 Section. Writing assignment #3 (Problem Paper I) due.
March 3 Lecture: Marie de France’s Lais I (“Guigemar” to “Les Deus Amanz”)
March 5 Section.
March 10 Lecture: Marie de France’s Lais II (“Yonec” to “Eliduc”)
March 12 Section. Writing assignment #4 (Problem Paper II) due.
March 17-19 Spring Break
March 24 Lecture: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Fitts I & 2
March 26 Section. Critical paper assigned.
March 31 Lecture: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Fitts 3 & 4
April 2 Section. Writing assignment #5 due (first paragraph and prospectus of critical paper).
April 7 Lecture: Mandeville’s Travels.
April 9 Section.
April 14 No lecture. Work on critical paper. Extra office hours today.
April 16 Section. Draft of critical paper due.
April 21 Lecture: The Tempest Acts 1-3
April 23 Section: Aimé Césaire, A Tempest (The Tempest pp. 246-54). Draft of critical paper returned.
April 28 Lecture: The Tempest Acts 4-5
May 5 Revised critical paper due.

Two eye openers from the NYT

Scottish literature was not then was but is no longer English literature; Welsh and Irish literature, however, remain English.

You may be a disembodied brain drifting through the vastness of the cosmos, dreaming its own history.

Pitched past pitch of grief

My thanks to JJC for the invitation to post at In the Middle and to the co-bloggers for their consent.
***

In fall 2007, I was excited to prepare an entire graduate course on Genesis 22:1-19, what the Judaic tradition calls "the binding of Isaac" and what Christianity has termed "the sacrifice of Isaac." My academic work concerns children and violence in medieval texts, specifically the idea of sacrifice, and I had recently been reading the work of Emmanuel Levinas, whose "ethics as first philosophy" had challenged many thinking. I was especially taken with Levinas's critique of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, a text that had long been central to my thinking about God and faith. I'd also just recently been wrestling with (yet again) Derrida's Gift of Death, and like a series of Russian nested dolls (Derrida reading Levinas [via Patozca] reading Kierkegaard), a whole course suggested itself. I'd design ENGL 636, Studies in Contemporary Theory, as an examination of the Akedah, from its articulation in the book of Genesis, through its New Testament, Patristic, and Midrashic interpretations, and then finally to its contemporary transformations in Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Derrida. At the center, we'd look Rene Girard's theory of sacrifice and at some Middle English plays of the Akedah to see what they might tell us.

The reading list was challenging and the secondary material available was enormous, but I was jazzed—what a great luxury, to spend an entire semester on 19 verses from the Bible!—and the course filled up quickly with students from our small MA program and one guy from CWLA, Creative Writing and Literary Arts. He usually sat immediately to my right at our large conference table, his ball cap pulled tight over his forehead. I hadn't ever had him in class before, but at our opening class meeting he introduced himself as Jason Wenger, and he signed up for the class because he heard my classes were good and I was an interesting teacher. He didn't really need the course. He just wanted to take it.

***

The details were sketchy, at first. Sometime early Sunday morning, December 2, a 28 year old man in Palmer, 45 miles north of Anchorage, had hacked his father to death with a machete and wounded his father's girlfriend. He then stole his father's truck and went on the run. Police were hunting him down.

A little later in the morning came a report of a shooting, this time in town. Someone heard shots early in Spenard, another Anchorage neighborhood, and there was a reported fatality. No other details were given.

***

"Suffering is, of course, a datum in consciousness, a certain "psychological content," similar to the lived experience of color, sound, contact, or any other sensation. But in this very "content" it is an in-spite-of consciousness, the unassumable." (Levinas, "Useless Suffering," p. 91)

***

Except for a couple of them, the class members just couldn't quite get their heads around the idea that, according to Levinas, not only is suffering useless except for the one suffering, it must remain useless. To do otherwise—to put someone else's suffering to work, to make it useful to for some purpose, even a benign or positive purpose—is to turn suffering into an instrument and thus to commit a kind of violence. Several around the table insisted that when a loved one suffered, they too suffered. We feel their pain! Even more, we have to do something for them, on their behalf, because of this pain. We can't just sit there, they reasoned. We have to do something!

The logic is difficult and the personal challenges great, I countered, but do you not see a difference here, between the suffering of the other and what that suffering engenders in you yourself? What does that mean? They asked. The practical key, I said, was to be able to separate the two and ask "Whose suffering is it?" and to risk—in one of those formulations that either delight readers of continental philosophy or drive them crazy—and to suffer the suffering of the other. I heard a lot of grumbling after that class about how our readings were deliberately obscure and useless, the suggestions impractical and impossible to live up to.

***

That Sunday morning, the next thing I heard, as I periodically hit the Anchorage Daily News website, was that someone had been shot in his driveway. The neighbors dismissed it as a car backfiring. The people who later found him in his vehicle thought that he just needed medical attention. It was only after they opened the car door that they found he had been shot and was dead. That was three hours after neighbors heard gunshots. The vehicle was still idling.

***

… the suffering of suffering, the suffering for the useless suffering of the other, the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering in the other, opens suffering to the ethical perspective of the inter-human. In this perspective there is a radical difference between the suffering in the other, where it is unforgivable to me, solicits me and calls me, and the suffering in me, my own experience of suffering, whose constitutional or congenital uselessness can take on a meaning, the only one of which suffering is capable, in becoming a suffering for the suffering of the other that, through the cruelties of our century (despite these cruelties, because of these cruelties) can be affirmed as the very nexus of human subjectivity, to the point of being raised to the level of supreme ethical principle—the only one impossible to question…. ("Useless Suffering," p. 94, emph. Levinas).

***

Jason articulated well some of the class's frustrations in an October email to me:

I'm getting by when it comes to my CWLA classes/creative work. It's your class that is suffering. When I said that I'm being proud in this situation I think it's because I don't want to be "The Idiot MFA-er that can't cut it on the English side." But maybe I am that guy. There's a reason I chose the writing route. Most of this theory/philosophy crap frustrates the hell out of me….


Everything else is completely foreign and I'm seriously struggling just to get through it. I don't have the philosophical or literary background. Levinas in particular kills me. When I finally do understand what he's saying, I always want to ask: Why make it so difficult? How is the confusing language of philosophy and lit criticism helping the world? It's not. It just continues to separate the brilliant from the meek.


I don't belong to either of these charactegories. I'm surprisingly arrogant for a guy that's not that smart...

That's no typo. Charactegories. What a great word.

***

The class next looked carefully at the tradition history of Genesis 22:1-19 according Noth and Westermann, as an historical foundation of the course, and we read more recent scholars who question the viability of the documentary hypothesis (JEDP). The evangelicals in the class harrumphed about anatomizing the scriptures like that. Jason emailed me:

I had no idea what the class material would be, and at first I was pleasantly surprised to learn we were discussing a subject with which I am somewhat familiar. That is, the biblical text. But now I'm struggling to even think in the right terms about these texts. I don't know if I can ignore the biases that my faith and childhood allow.

Throughout the course, I tried carefully to tease out the differences between historical questions and theological conclusions, between literary interpretation and spiritual commitments. I struggled to balance respect for students' beliefs and the demands of critical thinking and understand. I have suffered that suffering in my own life and hope not to inflict it upon anyone else. Nonetheless, it is one thing to accept a received theology as truth and it is quite another to read a well-known text with new eyes. Neither is it easy and quite often it is painful.

***

Another student whom I had known for several years, back into her undergraduate days, a conservative Christian, had challenged me before the class began to beware the power I had over students because I might be guilty of causing them to lose their faith.

***

I didn't see another report until early Monday morning, December 3, but local news reported that a woman jogging around Anchorage's Winchester Lagoon had been shot in the back by an unknown assailant early Sunday evening. As she talked with a friend on the phone, "she crossed paths with a tall, thin mad who made her nervous." Her friend heard her over the phone tell someone the time. According to the charging documents, the friend said that the women, Elizabeth Rumsey, "All of a sudden screamed several times and the phone went dead." The friend tried to call Rumsey's phone again, and a woman who picked up reported that emergency units were on the way. Rumsey was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, but she has since been released. I initially wrote "has recovered" but I think that would be a lie.

***

Traditionally, the Akedah has been understood as a challenge to the Ancient Near Eastern practice of child sacrifice. The argument is that the God of Israel condemns child sacrifice in Genesis 22 by His command to Abraham, His intervention in the sacrificial act, and (ultimately) His provision of the substitutionary animal in place of the beloved son. One of our readings questioned that common idea:

… the substitution of the animal for the child was not a later stage in the evolution of the religion. There it seems to be the case at the any period, the lamb and the kid could take the place of the child, but that at no period was the parent obligated to make the substitution. This strikes me as essentially the situation in Genesis 22, where Abraham is allowed to sacrifice the ram instead of Isaac, but never commanded to do so. (Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, 1993, p. 21, emph. Levenson)

Levenson compiled an impressive amount of evidence from the biblical text itself, most obviously from Genesis 22 itself: God commands Abraham to offer his son and intervenes to prevent the sacrifice but never instructs Abraham to kill the substitutionary animal. Abraham makes that decision, according to the text: "And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram … and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered I up as a burnt offering instead of his son" (Gen 22: 13).

***

Jason took on Levenson, and I responded to his first paper of the semester via email:

Jason, I think I remember you saying you hadn't done a paper like this in awhile, but you don't have too much to worry about. Your style is fluid and appealing. The only change is that you'll need to get used to working in a more objective tone, a scholarly register, rather than just a responsive one. But this is a good start to the term.


As to your general concerns, I think what I'm seeing is your struggle with separating a confessional stance toward the text (what was I taught as a kid) from a more literary-critical stance (what do scholars say and how does that inflect what I'm trying to understand). So, for example, your question about the holiness of God is an important devotional point, but Lev[e]nson's critique takes for granted the idea that 'God' is a developing construct throughout Israelite history, as revealed in the Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP), and his assessment of the akedah is thus shaped by the idea that as the Israelite idea of God changes, so to does the assessment of the akedah.


So, the growing pains you may be experiencing are in line with changing your perspective on the biblical text from one that has viewed the bible through a doctrinal lens to one that tries to peel back the layers of interpretation and historico-cultural development to get at a nugget of 'truth'; that is, how did this text come to mean what it did in the different transformations of Hebrew scripture that scholars have laid bare, like layers of onion.

Jason never rewrote his paper, nor did he turn in the next one. He emailed me about dropping the course.

***

As we moved from Levenson's challenge to the traditional interpretation of the Akedah, we looked next at New Testament readings of the Akedah particularly in the Pauline corpus. In Galatians 3: 6-9ff., Paul argues that the Gentiles were the true inheritors of Abraham's faith because of Christ's death, yet the epistle of James reads the same text in a different way, "Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar?" (2:21). Was it what Abraham did or what he believed that made the difference?

***

My question was and is simply this: If Abraham is lauded as the perfect exemplar of faith, what are we to do with Isaac, who, though he is spared, knows that his father is perfectly willing to kill him?

***

We considered the variety of interpretations of the Akedah and the Abraham story in early Christian and Patristic thought, but what challenged the class most was a reformulation of the idea of prophecy: Is it the miraculous looking forward of inspired prophets who foretell the future? Or was it the work of early believers who looked back into their scriptures to understand the death of their inspired leader, of the one who announced the kingdom of God? What to make of this death? The traditional Christian answer is that God Himself demanded the sacrifice of his only Son. Isaac was thus understood to be a prototype of Christ, and while Abraham's sacrifice was incomplete and imperfect, Christ was the perfect sacrifice, whose atoning work leads to salvation.

I countered that such ideas emerge only teleologically, after the fact, when one is able to look back upon perhaps seemingly unrelated events in light of a single defining moment. Like a person who ignores a beloved partner's inconsistencies until an infidelity is discovered. Only then do those little hints add up to something more powerful, more devastating. Only then do the insignificant details acquire a kind of narrative and prophetic destiny. Didn't Levinas say as much in our reading from "Diachrony and Representation?"

***

On Monday morning, December 3, I saw a link on the Yahoo webpage that I'd set for local news: "Grad student found shot dead in Spenard." I was concerned but not alarmed until I read on:

A 27-year-old graduate student was found shot dead Sunday morning in his idling car outside his home in Spenard.

Jason Wenger, a man described by his friends and professors as big-hearted and driven, was found Sunday by neighbors who were walking their dog shortly after 10 a.m., according to Anchorage police spokesman Lt. Paul Honeman.

His body was slumped behind the wheel of his green Bronco on the 4300 block of Lois Drive near Spenard Builders Supply.

The people who found him first thought he needed medical attention, Honeman said. They called police when they realized he wasn't breathing.

People in the neighborhood said they heard gunshots about 7:30 a.m.

Jason had gone out early on Sunday morning to warm up his car, probably to go to church, and while he sat inside, Christopher Erin Rogers, Jr., who had macheted his father the morning before in Palmer, shot Jason. The Anchorage Daily News later reported that "He planned to steal the Bronco but the shots were louder than he expected and he worried the neighbors might see him if he took the time to get Wenger's slumped body out of the Bronco and get himself in. He 'did not want to take on the whole neighborhood,' he told police, so he ran away." Jason died in the front seat of his car, getting ready for church.

What I will be watching on TV tonight

With lines like “First we crossed a river and scaled the cliffs of doom / Then we took a little break and went to the bathroom," it's not Spamalot. But it does feature knights, dragons, anthropomorphic animals, and songs ("The trajectory isn’t toward Thomas Malory, but to Miley Cyrus.") [amazing fact: after a patient lecture from my son, I learned this Saturday that Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana are the same person!] [I also must wonder what Hannah Montana's parents would have named her had their last name been "California" or "Massachusetts"...]. Anyway, endless narrative brevitized: Nickelodeon is growing future medievalists by showing a movie called The Backyardigans: Tale of the Mighty Knights.