Poetry in Life

The first lines of poetry I spoke to my new son were from William Wordsworth: "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky."

How you know you are an English teacher nearing the end of a term

When you stop grading papers in order to prep for class, and it feels like "taking a break."

downpour: blogging helps improve my teaching.

If this blog is a  journal of what I'm reading and thinking about, then that helps my teaching.  With my comp students, I promote the value of informal prewriting exercises: forcing ourselves to work out our thoughts in writing certainly allows us to articulate our thoughts, but also allows us sharper clarity of thought.  By making an effort to write about literature and ideas, I'm clarifying and articulating my own thoughts.  Since a lot of my reading is for class, writing my thoughts certainly sharpens my teaching.  Furthermore, in the past year I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Namesake for pleasure, not directly for academic work.  I also blogged about some of my thoughts about reading these works.  Now I'm planning on teaching them in a lit course next fall--suddenly the extended time not just reading these books, but thinking about them and writing about them, perhaps contributed to my decision to include them, and certainly helps me prepare to teach them.

But it's not just the writing on this blog that helps me, but the reading.  I regularly check most of the links on the side.  That means I'm constantly learning about what books people are reading, what people think about particular books, how people are experiencing reading, current issues in literature, current issues in academia, how other teachers are approaching their work, contemporary theoretical issues, contemporary academic topics, etc. etc. etc.  Using these links as my regular reading list keeps me informed on subjects relevant to my teaching, as well as ideas that can be incorporated into my teaching.

Or is this what I try tell myself?

Marxist Reading

In "Going Boom" at bookforum, Walter Benn Michaels has, I believe, some strong insights.  My main problem with the essay is the assumption that it is the duty of literature (or literary criticism, or literary study, or simply reading) to explore and expose the problems of the free market.  First, aren't there better areas of inquiry more suited to this project?  Economics, Journalism, Political Science--it seems there are fields that would do a much better job with that project than writers of literature.  Second, I'm skeptical that more novels like American Psycho or more television shows like The Wire are really going to foster anything like a revolution or reform of the free market system.

But it seems Michaels also views the primary concern of human beings as our material conditions, and thus what we read should reflect that concern.  I think, given that much of our lives is devoted to those material conditions, that when we read we perhaps should devote our attention to "something else," whether that be pleasure, or spiritual fulfillment, or self-knowledge, or personal growth, or intellectual curiosity, or any of many, many human concerns that are not about the economic system. I might agree with Harold Bloom when he writes, "Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read. Self-improvement is a large enough project for your mind and spirit." 

(via Dissent)

downpour: some things I'm teaching

Avoiding Staleness

I'm very excited that next fall, I'll be including John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake in my gen ed lit syllabus. I feel like including these novels makes the course my own. I'm also not assigning any books that feature poetry; instead, I'll be creating my own poetry reading list through digital attachments and online links. And I'm also changing texts for my comp class, again simply because I feel the old text was getting stale and dated. This certainly adds work to the summer, but I think it is well worth it. I want to be energized by what I teach, and think I'll do a better job teaching it if I am.

Milgram/Zimbardo

In "Obedience," Ian Parker writes "It's hard not to think of Stanley Milgram in another set of circumstances--to imagine the careers he did not have in films or in the theatre," and quotes from Milgram from a letter: "I should not be here, but in Greece shooting films under a Mediterranean sun, hopping about in a small boat from one Aegean isle to the next."

I find this remarkably unsurprising, and think the same thought could apply to Philip Zimbardo and his Stanford Prison Experiment (for some reason, in my imagination Zimbardo appears like the "impresario" artist at the end of The French Lieutenant's Woman). Parker and Zimbardo are psychologists that appear to view themselves as something like artists. And perhaps, from Freud on forward, it is psychology with an artistic bent that most frequently forces its way into the popular imagination.

On the Commodification of Peace

At We Have Mixed Feelings About Sven Sundgaard, a mostly silly blog where I sometimes examine consumer life, I discuss the consumer fashion appeal of the Peace Symbol.

Torture

Using "the end justifies the means" logic leads to an obvious problem. If you believe nefarious means can be justified by a desired end, then you would be willing to use nearly any means to achieve ends you deem very important, and you will use absolutely any means to achieve ends you deem absolutely necessary. But if you do so, the only thing that separates you (whom you consider good) from your enemy (whom you consider evil) is the desirability, nobility, morality, goodness of the ends. Horrible atrocities have been perpetrated by those that believed so strongly their ends were just/right/desirable that they were willing to kill to achieve those ends.

In history there have been those (such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi) who believed their moral superiority to their enemies must exist in the means, not just the ends. John Howard Yoder's understanding of Christ in The Politics of Jesus also suggests a leader (with social/political ends) who insisted on using a moral means.

Religion does not provide a clear direction. Too often religious motivations have led humans to murderous means to achieve the ends they view their religion demands. And sometimes it is religion that leads humans to recognize a moral demand, a "higher law," which extends beyond the desirability of the end that humans have in view. So religion can lead humans to treat other humans as "means" to be used for transcendent purposes, but religion can also insist on transcendent purposes which forbid certain evil means to achieve human ends.

There is little doubt that torture denies the dignity of the one being tortured. Torture insists that the tortured person is simply a means, a means to be used to achieve the torturer's end. The tortured person does not have inherent value; the value of the tortured person is only his/her value to the torturer. Humans distort, limit, and deny each others' inherent dignity all the time, but violence is perhaps the most intentional, outright, egregious denial.

"Trifles" as a metaphor for canon formation

Those in power get to determine what matters, what is important, what is worth time and exploration, as well as what is less significant, not important, "trifling."

The Ethical Decisions of Imaginary Characters

I'm not afraid to ask students whether the fictional characters we encounter do "the right thing."  I do think sometimes this question can help us better understand the particular text.  But I also don't think a literature class is an inappropriate setting to challenge students about ethics and values.

In Susan Glaspell's play "Trifles," two women cover up evidence that would help convict a murderer.   I will ask: did the women do the right thing?  At the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Chief Bromden kills (the lobotomized) McMurphy.  Again I will ask: was Chief Bromden's action ethical?  Certainly the contexts of both these works push a read toward a particular answer, but I still find the discussion engaging and fruitful.  I think these may be the sort of questions students want to engage with; perhaps young adulthood is a time when people find themselves both open to exploring such questions and deeply invested in these questions.

Gratuitous Link

Matt Richtel's "If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone" in The New York Times.

I've thought the same thing while watching Seinfeld (just a decade later, some of their plots and situations would be wrapped up with a cell phone) and horror movies (since the essence of many horror scenes is isolation, writers may need to find a way to get rid of a character's cell phone: dying batteries, broken phones, locations without connection, etc.).

2,400 year old dirty jokes

Here is my pattern for teaching Lysistrata:

1. Before the semester, make a syllabus including Lysistrata.  It seems like a good idea at the time.

2. A few weeks before Lysistrata is scheduled, look at the syllabus and think "How are we supposed to talk about that?"

3. During the time that Lysistrata is scheduled, spend my free moments fretting up ways to get through class.

4. After we're finished with Lysistrata, and our coverage of it in class goes reasonably well (it usually does), think "Well, that went well: we actually raised some good, important issues that are extremely relevant to this class."

5. Lose all notes taken for this preparation, and forget everything that I did that seemed to work well.*

6. Prepare a lit syllabus for the next semester including Lysistrata: it seems like a good idea at the time.

*I'm working on eliminating this step.

Gratuitous Link

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food reviewed at The New York Times.