That would be this one. An old essay of mine appears here.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
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.
New medieval blog: Caught in the Snide
Only a true Dr Seuss fan will know what a snidefield is (they are miles wide, and sometimes inhabited by pale green pants that move of their own volition). Any medievalist, however, will enjoy these thoughts by an anonymous Anglo-Saxonist at an unnamed community college: Caught in the Snide.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Bring Out Your Deadism
FIRST, read Mary Kate's generous response to Joseph Kugelmass's "why we teach literature" tag, then enjoy this lovely castle, which proves that the Cohens really do know how to do everything, and then, but only then, slide below to fold to learn what my students know about the Middle Ages.Yesterday, on the first day of my undergraduate Chaucer class, I distributed a questionnaire that asked students to "list three things you know or think you know about the Middle Ages." I had considered assigning Andrew Galloway's Medieval Literature and Culture, finally decided that it was too broad for a Chaucer course, and now wish I had assigned Regine Pernoud's Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths, because most of what my students know or think they know might be called the "Bring Out Your Dead!" school of medievalism.
Typical answers mention the black plague and disease ("it was very disease spread"), social stratification (including the student who wrote "women have no rights"), illiteracy ("ignorance was abundant"; "learning only happened in monasteries"), and the power of the church ("everything was run by the Catholic church or it played a major role in every aspect of daily life as well as running/ruling countries"; "the church was corrupt and greedy"). One or two broke with the pack by drawing on the other parts of The Holy Grail ("knights, armor, castles"). Several students said "feudalism." One mentioned the Cathars and the origins of the novel. Another wrote only that "the world was a terrible place." Some must have taken other medieval courses: they mention Chretien, Boethius, Marie de France, Wolfram von Eschenbach; one remembers, seemingly despite herself, the Wife of Bath ("by continuously marrying a woman could increase her own fortune. (?)"). And some students, bless them, referenced the previous fifteen minutes of class: "English was different from today's English"; "Chaucer was alive"; "Pilgrims were common."
Note that we had just gone over the first 18 lines of the General Prologue, and I had distinguished its opening from typical openings of Middle English poetry: as I told them, it doesn't invoke the Trinity or the BVM, nor does it situate the poem historically, and it delays mentioning England until late in the sentence; it looks to nature, and animal and vegetal reproduction in particular, and couples natural desire and instinct to the 'rational' human desires to go sightseeing and to reward Thomas for his blessings. (I should note that I made no reference to compulsory reproduction, penetration, or gender: I'm saving that for the Knight.) Religious desire is a version or even superstructure of the instinct to "get it on" (exact quote). It's clear, then, that the church hasn't penetrated these lines (at least not in any simply "oppressive" way), that there's writing going on outside the monasteries (since I told them that Chaucer was a career bureaucrat), and as for disease, iirc, it doesn't show its gooey white face until the cook's mormal plops in.
Given its persistence in the face of counterevidence, Bring Out Your Deadism will prove difficult to dislodge. At least, I'll have to point out that women didn't get the right to vote in the US until the twentieth century, that antiseptic surgery dates only to the nineteenth century, and so forth: I'll have to get them to know what is particular to the Middle Ages. The advantage here goes to Chaucer himself, since just about anything he does will astonish their sense of superiority. Then of course I'll have to keep them from claiming Chaucer as "before his time"!
We'll cross that pestilential theocratic bridge when we get to it.
The Why I Teach Literature Meme
We here at In the Middle have been tagged for the Why I Teach Literature meme, and I thought I’d take some time this morning/afternoon to respond to that tag. But first, an anecdote: For years, back in college, I thought that “meme” (used in the context of livejournal, facebook, etc) was a compound of “me-me” – i.e., the first person pronoun. As in, “this post is all about me! Me and my thoughts! Me! ME!” I’ve since learned it references Richard Dawkins and mimetic theory, and refers to a unit of cultural information that is passed on (like a virus! or a gene...) in the information-web that is the internet. But if it’s a selfish meme, maybe my first interpretation holds a bit. And speaking of selfish memes, I wouldn't want my meme to make you miss ITM's other post today, from JJC, in which the Middle Ages get ecologically sustainable (if only in model form).
I’ll admit, when it comes to speaking of the supposed “value” of the humanities, I have an instinctual urge to cringe. Even though I’ve only been in grad school for three and a half years, I’ve learned what inevitably comes next. It’s either a massive number of people yelling “of course what I do matters, how can this not matter, here’s how I matter!” or – to pick on someone who is no doubt steeled against the arguments and quibbles of mere graduate students to the point of not even noticing them – Stanley Fish’s recent NYTimes blog posts that began the Spring 2008 semester with a hearty “We are worthless.”
I quote Fish at length:
Will the Humanities Save Us? Stanley Fish says: No. They won’t. To which I respond – Of course the humanities can’t save us. I do interesting research, I hope, but it’s not life-saving. However, his more specific question – that of their use – is, I think, disingenuous. I find it disingenuous because it does not address the single thing academics in the humanities do that does influence the world around us: we teach. Teaching must have a use, surely, else why do it?
A number ofmy blogosphere colleagues have responded to this debate, and generated some debate of their own in doing so. I've not read all of them as yet (and have only linked to the ones I have read through) -- but you can get a full list of those who have responded at Free Exchange on Campus. What I'd like to outline here is teaching literature as teaching connections, and teaching tools for making connections. I'm also interested in hearing what the blogging population of scholars thinks about this question -- my co-bloggers, and readers of ITM, this means you! Eileen has responded at bit at the Kugelmass Episodes.
I teach because analysis matters. I wrote a paper my first year of graduate school – before I’d ever taught a class – on “The Future of Literary Studies”. Highly idealistic, I wrote the following:
Now, ignoring my endless optimism and belief in my field (which has been tempered, though only a little, by the passing years) I think I would stand by this statement as one of the reasons I teach literature: humans need to be able to analyze the stories they are told. In my University Writing class, I do not teach “literature” per se and I certainly don’t teach medieval literature – but if there is one thing I hope my students learn from my course it’s that the stories we tell are not confined to the “classics” they are taught in Lit Hum. Just as influential are the narratives told by scientists (Richard Dawkins, for example, in his Selfish Gene and historians (Adrian Hastings in The Construction of Nationhood, or even Herodotus and Orosius!). More importantly, there are the political narratives: the speeches, the political discourse which in our sound-bite culture trades meaning and thought for a witty turn of phrase or a catch all assumption. I teach, then, because I hope to help students realize that the facts don’t always speak for themselves – in fact, they are often spoken for, used in ways that are ethically charged and moreover contested. Those assumptions need to be tested, questioned – engaged.
I cite it often, but perhaps you, dear readers, will forgive me if I cite it one more time. Kathleen Davis’ article “Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now” (from The Postcolonial Middle Ages) is a perfect example of the stakes of literary studies. Her perceptive reading of public discourse about the Taliban’s restrictions on women in Afghanistan, and the western “reading” of that restriction as “medieval” (thereby allowing Diane Sawyer to travel “about an hour and a half back in to the mountains, and from what we’ve been reading, that’s several hundred years back in time”) matters to the continuation of that discourse. Moreover, it is a sensitive reading of the ways in which the media tells the story of a western world that must “save” the backwards, repressive Other by bringing the “East” forward in time to modernity. Using literary tools and techniques, Davis makes an argument that matters in modern society. Recognizing that these stories are not simply “what happened” (a list of facts and successive events that do not need interpretation) but rather a representation that can do very real things in the world. Stories have consequences, and those consequences are often wrought on people.
Finally, I teach because I do think literature can change lives, open horizons – all those things that seem so unrepentantly idealistic. Do I know this for fact? Not really. Stanley Fish says he never wanted to help his fellow man because of a poem. Further, he avers that one teaches the subject matter and any delayed effect of what happens in a classroom is contingent and cannot be aimed at . It’s a long road, and overly complicated, but literature did change my way of looking at the world – precisely because it taught me that I had to look at it. This wasn’t because “The Wanderer” is a poetic injunction to go out and change the world – rather, a professor who insisted on its complexity and nuance, the ways in which ideological forces are at war within it, taught me how to look closely at the text to parse the way it works in the society from which it came. And the ways in which it doesn’t, or doesn’t have to. Eileen, in her comment cited above, states that aesthetic study -- and moreover, I think, teaching literature -- is also about dreaming and being foolish, which is critically important, I think, for opening up avenues toward a creative and open-minded life which might be said to do some good in the world. It's a point of view with which I whole-heartedly agree -- I may have taken the ideas presented by my professor and done something with them, but I needed the tools she gave me to do so. That seems to me to be one very important function of teaching literature, one too often overlooked: teaching students not what to think, but how to think. Giving them the tools to pay attention.
I teach critical, close readings as a “refined way of paying attention.” In short – I ask that my students really look at our subject matter, whether it’s science or philosophy or politics. It’s surprising what you can notice if you’re paying attention – and if nothing else I do in the classroom sticks with my students, I hope they learn how to notice, how to engage, the discourses that the media and the world tries to feed them – and I hope it helps them to become more informed, and more aware, of the world we inhabit. I teach because I believe in connections. I teach because if we’re going to speak across languages and cultures, we need to do so carefully, generously – we need to pay attention to others, and we need to pay attention to ourselves – most importantly, I teach because I think literature and literary analysis (and yes, even freshman composition) gives students the tools they need not just in their lives, but the tools they need in our collective life on the singular multiplicity of habitations we call Earth.
cross posted to OEinNY.
I’ll admit, when it comes to speaking of the supposed “value” of the humanities, I have an instinctual urge to cringe. Even though I’ve only been in grad school for three and a half years, I’ve learned what inevitably comes next. It’s either a massive number of people yelling “of course what I do matters, how can this not matter, here’s how I matter!” or – to pick on someone who is no doubt steeled against the arguments and quibbles of mere graduate students to the point of not even noticing them – Stanley Fish’s recent NYTimes blog posts that began the Spring 2008 semester with a hearty “We are worthless.”
I quote Fish at length:
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.
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. 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.
Will the Humanities Save Us? Stanley Fish says: No. They won’t. To which I respond – Of course the humanities can’t save us. I do interesting research, I hope, but it’s not life-saving. However, his more specific question – that of their use – is, I think, disingenuous. I find it disingenuous because it does not address the single thing academics in the humanities do that does influence the world around us: we teach. Teaching must have a use, surely, else why do it?
A number of
I teach because analysis matters. I wrote a paper my first year of graduate school – before I’d ever taught a class – on “The Future of Literary Studies”. Highly idealistic, I wrote the following:
What is perhaps most striking, however, is that in literature, theory, science, religion, art and even history—the only thing humanity can consistently prove it is doing is telling stories.... [I also argue that we therefore should analyze all stories, not merely fictive ones.] Literary study is the critical reading and evaluation of literature. And what is literature, if it is not the (scientific, realistic, and even purely fantastic) stories we tell?
Now, ignoring my endless optimism and belief in my field (which has been tempered, though only a little, by the passing years) I think I would stand by this statement as one of the reasons I teach literature: humans need to be able to analyze the stories they are told. In my University Writing class, I do not teach “literature” per se and I certainly don’t teach medieval literature – but if there is one thing I hope my students learn from my course it’s that the stories we tell are not confined to the “classics” they are taught in Lit Hum. Just as influential are the narratives told by scientists (Richard Dawkins, for example, in his Selfish Gene and historians (Adrian Hastings in The Construction of Nationhood, or even Herodotus and Orosius!). More importantly, there are the political narratives: the speeches, the political discourse which in our sound-bite culture trades meaning and thought for a witty turn of phrase or a catch all assumption. I teach, then, because I hope to help students realize that the facts don’t always speak for themselves – in fact, they are often spoken for, used in ways that are ethically charged and moreover contested. Those assumptions need to be tested, questioned – engaged.
I cite it often, but perhaps you, dear readers, will forgive me if I cite it one more time. Kathleen Davis’ article “Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now” (from The Postcolonial Middle Ages) is a perfect example of the stakes of literary studies. Her perceptive reading of public discourse about the Taliban’s restrictions on women in Afghanistan, and the western “reading” of that restriction as “medieval” (thereby allowing Diane Sawyer to travel “about an hour and a half back in to the mountains, and from what we’ve been reading, that’s several hundred years back in time”) matters to the continuation of that discourse. Moreover, it is a sensitive reading of the ways in which the media tells the story of a western world that must “save” the backwards, repressive Other by bringing the “East” forward in time to modernity. Using literary tools and techniques, Davis makes an argument that matters in modern society. Recognizing that these stories are not simply “what happened” (a list of facts and successive events that do not need interpretation) but rather a representation that can do very real things in the world. Stories have consequences, and those consequences are often wrought on people.
Finally, I teach because I do think literature can change lives, open horizons – all those things that seem so unrepentantly idealistic. Do I know this for fact? Not really. Stanley Fish says he never wanted to help his fellow man because of a poem. Further, he avers that one teaches the subject matter and any delayed effect of what happens in a classroom is contingent and cannot be aimed at . It’s a long road, and overly complicated, but literature did change my way of looking at the world – precisely because it taught me that I had to look at it. This wasn’t because “The Wanderer” is a poetic injunction to go out and change the world – rather, a professor who insisted on its complexity and nuance, the ways in which ideological forces are at war within it, taught me how to look closely at the text to parse the way it works in the society from which it came. And the ways in which it doesn’t, or doesn’t have to. Eileen, in her comment cited above, states that aesthetic study -- and moreover, I think, teaching literature -- is also about dreaming and being foolish, which is critically important, I think, for opening up avenues toward a creative and open-minded life which might be said to do some good in the world. It's a point of view with which I whole-heartedly agree -- I may have taken the ideas presented by my professor and done something with them, but I needed the tools she gave me to do so. That seems to me to be one very important function of teaching literature, one too often overlooked: teaching students not what to think, but how to think. Giving them the tools to pay attention.
I teach critical, close readings as a “refined way of paying attention.” In short – I ask that my students really look at our subject matter, whether it’s science or philosophy or politics. It’s surprising what you can notice if you’re paying attention – and if nothing else I do in the classroom sticks with my students, I hope they learn how to notice, how to engage, the discourses that the media and the world tries to feed them – and I hope it helps them to become more informed, and more aware, of the world we inhabit. I teach because I believe in connections. I teach because if we’re going to speak across languages and cultures, we need to do so carefully, generously – we need to pay attention to others, and we need to pay attention to ourselves – most importantly, I teach because I think literature and literary analysis (and yes, even freshman composition) gives students the tools they need not just in their lives, but the tools they need in our collective life on the singular multiplicity of habitations we call Earth.
cross posted to OEinNY.
For Eileen: An Eco-Friendly Mock Medieval Castle
In the comments to this post on medieval robots, I offered to put up a photo of the castle built by my son six years ago, when he attended a "King Arthur's Court" summer camp.Gold glitter aside, the fortification is fashioned entirely from reused materials: crenelation of corrugated cardboard (salvaged packing material); pinnacles, moat, murder holes, drawbridge and portcullis of recycled construction paper; towers formed of discarded water bottles; vaguely menacing blocks of indeterminate purpose made from an old yellow sponge.
The castle has been sitting in my office for years. I never grow tired of looking at it.
If you are wondering what the odd visage atop a blue body in the foreground, that's a Groovy Guy (tm). My son invented them as one of his get rich quick schemes. The Groovy Guys (tm) are made from pipe cleaners and paper. They come in assorted colors, and were released in limited series (the one in the picture is a super rare "Groovy Guy [tm] blue Series 1: Ned"). Each folds into its own collector's envelope, or can be displayed upon a desk. They were sold in the small storefront he erected in my office during the summer of 2006 for $2 each. His notion was that they would become a mania, like Pokemon cards or UglyDolls. They didn't.
Monday, January 28, 2008
A negative book review that makes me want to read the book
Ken Kalfus, on Tod Wodicka's All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, in yesterday's NYT:
To that last line I can add only an inarticulate interjection (Ugh). It does seem to me that Kalfus has missed something important about Wodicka: his sense of humor. An electronic jazz band covering Hildegard? Temporal promiscuity at its finest.
Wodicka's verbose title is taken from Julian of Norwich -- what could be more rolicking than that? The book's protagonist is a man who believes he was born OOP (Out of Period: at the wrong time). A great line from the review reads: "Although Wodicka offers a cursory summary of Burt’s childhood in a religious orphanage, asking why Burt believes he was born in the wrong time is as unproductive as inquiring why a transgendered individual believes he was born in the wrong sex." Reminds me of a line in the introduction to Fradenburg and Freccero's Premodern Sexualities about temporal cross-dressing.
Although Wodicka turns up a provocative thought here and there, this musing, typical of Burt’s [the main character, a man who believes he should have been born in the Middle Ages and spends his life as a re-enactor] grief-laden vaporousness, serves also to illustrate the artless, wordy and underarticulated writing that makes “All Shall Be Well” such a Black Death of a chore to read [ouch!]. Wodicka has chosen a narrative voice too depressive and portentous to manifest his ingenuity. For all Burt’s colorful eccentricity, he’s a vague protagonist whose motives, actions and responses are only intermittently clear. In the basement of a Prague nightclub, after his son’s band noisily covers Hildegard’s “Columba aspexit — Sequentia de Sancto Maximino,” Burt is overwhelmed by emotion, but we’re unsure exactly which emotions are doing the overwhelming. Nor does Wodicka manage to explain why the Middle Ages, with their brutality, ignorance and poverty, were so much fun, as opposed, let’s say, to the Dark Ages.
To that last line I can add only an inarticulate interjection (Ugh). It does seem to me that Kalfus has missed something important about Wodicka: his sense of humor. An electronic jazz band covering Hildegard? Temporal promiscuity at its finest.
Wodicka's verbose title is taken from Julian of Norwich -- what could be more rolicking than that? The book's protagonist is a man who believes he was born OOP (Out of Period: at the wrong time). A great line from the review reads: "Although Wodicka offers a cursory summary of Burt’s childhood in a religious orphanage, asking why Burt believes he was born in the wrong time is as unproductive as inquiring why a transgendered individual believes he was born in the wrong sex." Reminds me of a line in the introduction to Fradenburg and Freccero's Premodern Sexualities about temporal cross-dressing.
Lindow Man is on the Move
What an active afterlife this preserved bog man has: Lindow Man will be on longterm loan to the Manchester Museum.
It's not a holiday by the seaside, but it must be a refreshing change of venue: no more tykes weeping over him at the British Museum.
(h/t Sylvia Huot)
It's not a holiday by the seaside, but it must be a refreshing change of venue: no more tykes weeping over him at the British Museum.
(h/t Sylvia Huot)
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Could Robots Have Survived the Middle Ages?
I recently found out, through a kind of email grapevine, that one of my colleagues here at Southern Illinois, Jerry Weinberg, who is an expert in robotics engineering and also in human-computer interactions, has devised a robotics mini-camp for middle school students, jointly organized by the Edwardsville High School Robotics team and SIUE's Computer Science department titled, "Could Robots Have Survived the Middle Ages?" Of course, my curiosity was piqued: what, exactly, did the question mean? And shouldn't they have a medievalist consultant? Although, as soon as I posed that second question to myself, I realized that I myself have literally no idea how I would begin to posture myself as an expert who could help design faux-historical medieval settings in which robots could "prove" whether or not they could "survive" the Middle Ages. Regardless, I contacted Jerry Weinberg, and said something to the effect of "please oh please let me play some part in this." What I soon discovered is that the question is a bit facetious and playful, and the idea is to stage certain medieval-themed competitions in which robots or robotic contraptions designed by the students would square off against each other. So far, they have designed three of these: a jousting tourney, a trebuchet competition, and a Save the Kidnapped Princess race. Jerry indicated to me that they would be happy to have me come by and observe when all of this happens in February, but they were also wondering if I could plan a "short activity" to "help put the students in a medieval frame of mind before they start to design their robots." I said I would throw that question out to the medievalist blogosphere. So, my friends, how could we collectively begin to design such an activity? And what other medieval-styled robotic competitions would be appropriate?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)