February 29, 2008

Why I Teach Literature" (with some thoughts about James Wood appended)

Not long ago there was a 'meme' going around on the question "Why Do I Teach Literature?" (Joseph Kugelmass's comments on this topic at The Valve include links to further contributors). Reading around in my files today (where I am in search of an organizing pattern for future research--but that's another post for another day) I came across this passage and it struck me as nicely encapsulating both the central problem of teaching literature (that it is, paradoxically, always about feeling as well as knowing) and its greatest lure:
Critics, before and after Northrop Frye, have distinguished between literature and experience and literature and knowledge. The distinction, though plausible in some theoretical contexts, blurs nearly every day, in nearly every classroom. I am content that it blurs. Unlike physicists, who teach not nature but physics, we teach both literature (how it feels, how it thinks, to have read a literary work) and the rules and facts about reading literature. As Gertrude Stein once said to an obtuse interviewer: "But after all you must enjoy my writing and if you enjoy it you understand it. If you did not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it?" That is why I finally became a teacher of literature, to live in the vicinity of that joy.
This is from Ihab Hassan's essay "Confessions of a Reluctant Critic or, The Resistance to Literature" (New Literary History 24, 1993). Other critics have also written eloquently about the experience of following that lure of joy into a professional life that does not--perhaps cannot--reinforce or reward it, and may even work actively against it. John McGowan, for instance, in his book Democracy's Children (2002), notes,
[T]here remains a tension between the experience of reading literature and the paths followed in studying. . . . To give one's allegiance to the academic forms through which literature is discussed and taught is to withdraw (at least partly) allegiance to literature itself" (65).
25 Years after Hassan's remarks, I think it remains true that it is in the classroom rather than in their scholarship that many academic literary critics feel and communicate their love of their subject. One of the reasons I shifted research directions altogether a few years ago (significantly, after achieving the professional security of tenure) was that I wanted my research activities to give me, or be driven by, the same kind of intellectual and affective immediacy I find in teaching, and I couldn't see how that would happen if, among other things, much of my work continued to be on second-rate material, no matter how historically revealing it was--or how useful for generating publishable, if niche, material of my own. To a large extent I succeeded, and as an unanticipated bonus, I think I became a better teacher because of the synergy that developed between my class preparation and my other work. It's interesting, actually, that it seems to be widely taken for granted (or is it?) that undergraduate teaching and scholarly research leading to publication are very different kinds of things, and overwhelmingly the professional priority is with the latter--even though (or, perhaps, because) its tendency is to drive all joy away!

Follow-Up (to be developed later): Also as part of sorting through my files, I've been re-reading some of the James Wood essays I've gathered up, and (aside from being overwhelmed with envy at his erudition, elegant style, and intelligent craftsmanship as an essayist), I'm struck by how much closer they are to the kind of criticism we--or at least I--do in the classroom than anything that ordinarily passes for academic or professional criticism (and here I think it's important to distinguish, as mainstream writers often don't, between criticism and reviewing). It's not that I think I'm as smart, articulate, or insightful as Wood,or as well-read either, though I hope I have my good moments! My point is really about the genre of criticism he works in, which seems to me to lie somewhere in between the poles of academic scholarship (which he clearly knows about, but relies on more implicitly than explicitly most of the time) and popular book reviews (which would rarely seek the kind of broad perspective or level of sophisticated analysis he deploys). I've ordered How Fiction works from The Book Depository, along with The Irresponsible Self, and I've got The Broken Estate from the library. I sense a Wood-fest coming on, perhaps as a way to draw together some of the scattered elements of my recent browsing and brooding about the function of criticism at the present time. Conveniently, as a motivator, there's a conference panel on Victorian criticism for which I'm hoping to submit an abstract. One of the questions in the CFP is about what the relationships envisaged by the Victorians between "different forms of cultural production and the work of the critic" might tell us "about how criticism was imagined during the Victorian era, and what they might tell us about the more professionalized forms of criticism practiced today." If this isn't an opportunity (and a challenge) for me to make something of my work on the Broadview anthology along with the 'work' I've been doing on this blog, I don't know what is! Whether anyone would want to hear it is, of course, another matter altogether.

5 comments:

Dave King said...

Having myself been tagged to write a six-word memoir, I am passing on the compliment, hoping you join the challenge.

The game is an interesting twist on a challenge Earnest Hemingway was once offered. He bet $10 that he could sum up his life story in six words. He wrote: For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Here are the rules:

* Write your own six word memoir
* Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
* Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
* Tag five more blogs with links
* And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

My apologies if you are in any way inconvenienced by this tag.

Details at World Class Poetry

Regards
Dave - Pics and Poems

Rohan Maitzen said...

Dave,

No inconvenience at all; I'm intrigued! Six words seems so few...it makes each one seem such a commitment. This may take me a while, but I'm game.

cheers,

Rohan

NigelBeale said...

Hi Rohan,

I've just read and reviewed both How Fiction Works and The Irresponsible Self,and agree with you...he comes across as a really good, patient, lucid teacher in both.

The thing I liked best about the former is the way he aggressively defends realism...or lifeness as he calls it, against William Gass, Rick Moody and others. He's a bit tough on poor old E.M. Forster though.

Have just read The Death of the Critic...have you had a chance to get to it? Excellent summary of the history of lit criticism...a bit weak I must say defending his central argument. suggests that Amazon reviewers and Cultural studies are to blame for the demise of the critic. Makes the point you do about academics being loath to express aesthetic judgment. Ends by saying lit crit should be taught in schools.

Rohan Maitzen said...

Hi, Nigel,

I'm just reading 'How Fiction Works' now and am mostly disappointed in it, more as a whole than in its bits and pieces--I hope to write something up on it in a few days once I'm through the whole thing. And I've just got my copy of 'The Death of the Critic,' so that too will be up soon, though things are busy with my 'real 'work right now so who knows just how soon!

Rohan Maitzen said...

Also, Dave, in case you've checked back: I haven't forgotten your 'tag' but I'm having an absurdly hard time committing to six words! Maybe there's a reason I'm a critic (such as I am) and not a creative writer?