Wednesday
My friend Rebecca Adams, in reading over a draft of the book I’m currently writing on “Does Literature Makes Us Better People?”, suggested that I include my own intellectual journey. Otherwise, she noted, the intro (which I shared with readers two weeks ago) looks too much like a book prospectus. I agreed and have enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Here’s what I came up with.
I was born in 1951 to two parents who read voraciously. My father was a French professor at the University of the South at Sewanee (in Tennessee) and my mother ran Sewanee’s weekly town newsletter. We were one of the only families in town without a television because (so my parents reasoned) who needs television when one has books?
Every evening, my father would read novels and poems to me and my brothers, a chapter and a poem for each of us. We also read on our own, of course, making no distinction between good and bad. At the same time that I was immersed in Alice in Wonderland, the Narnia series, Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings, I was also reading the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins.
I realized that higher stakes were involved in reading, however, when my father read us Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird at age eleven. At the time, my brothers and I were amongst the plaintiffs in a landmark civil rights case, brought by four black families and four white. The NAACP supported our suit against the Franklin County Board of Education for denying us our right to attend integrated schools, as mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling.
Because the other kids knew who the plaintiffs were, I was called an “n-word lover” numerous times, but Atticus’s discussion of the phrase with Scout helped me see it for what it was. In Huckleberry Finn, meanwhile, the famous scene where Huck says he will “go to hell” rather than betray Jim inspired me to stand up for what I thought was right, even as classmates and much of Tennessee thought otherwise. When Ronnie Staten became the first Black student in our seventh-grade class, I made a point of reaching out to him.
Reading-intensive literature classes helped offset my unhappiness at attending a military high school (Sewanee Military Academy), and I devoured everything put before me. Meanwhile, history continued to swirl around me, with the 1968 assassinations, the urban race riots, the escalating Vietnam War, and the protest movement. Yet when I entered Carleton College in the fall of 1969, I was startled when none of my English classes acknowledged the momentous developments. My composition instructor was even contemptuous of the anti-war marches and only begrudgingly allowed us to miss class to attend the October moratorium.
I was later to learn that English departments at the time were in the grip of formalism, known as the New Criticism. The close examination of a work’s formal attributes predominated, with historical context, the life of the author, and the responses of the reader deemed largely irrelevant. Political science, however, seemed too dry so I chose history for my major. History, after all, had stories.
Fortunately, I could work literature into my history major, with Phil Niles’s medieval history class helping me make the connection. We were studying Beowulf, not as an aesthetic text, but as resource material for figuring out the workings of Anglo-Saxon warrior society. A long-time fan of fantasy literature, I decided to focus on the monsters and wrote an essay entitled “The Social Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society.” (At the time, I didn’t know that Tolkien was a Beowulf expert and the scholar most responsible for elevating its reputation.)
I still remember where I was when I had my conceptual breakthrough. It was two in the morning and I was diagramming my essay on the blackboard in one of the library’s all-night study rooms. Suddenly I realized, at a deep level, that the monsters represented the historical forces that threatened social stability. The Grendels represented warrior dissatisfaction and the prospect of blood feuds, the dragon greedy kings and the destructive consequences of hoarding. When warriors were loyal and kings were generous, all was well. When they were not, the fragile societies disintegrated.
That literature is inextricably intertwined with history I found to be exhilarating. Suddenly I saw literary study as something more than the examination of disembodied texts.
Yet even this wasn’t enough. I wanted to know whether literature could not only reflect history but change history. If it could, then maybe a book lover like me could find his place in transforming the world, which was the dream of many young people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We wanted a more just and equitable society, and we wanted to end the Vietnam War. Could literature help us get there?
I found some of the guidance I wanted in Karl Wiener’s “Marxist Intellectual History” class, which introduced me to Italian activist Antonio Gramsci, who died in a Mussolini prison. Gramsci argued that battles about power are often conducted in the realm of ideas and art, with each side striving for “hegemonic control.” Wiener also introduced me to the Marxist Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse, who had come to the United States fleeing Hitler and who argued that works like Madame Bovary voiced a “great refusal” of capitalist oppression. And then there was Marx’s own thinking about economic base and ideological superstructure, which saw art and ideas not only reflecting class relations but influencing how we see them. With all this swirling around in my head, I wrote my senior project on whether French Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Rousseau had caused the French Revolution.
In the course of writing this overly ambitious essay, I wondered at one point whether aesthetics, not only ideas, entered into causation. Were works of art more powerful than political pamphlets because of their artistry? While I didn’t explore the question, it seemed so important that I started investigating graduate literature programs.
After spending two years as a reporter on county newspapers—I felt I needed at least some exposure to the real world after having spent my entire life in academic settings—I enrolled in Emory University’s PhD program and was fortunate to encounter two mentors who put me in touch with the ideas I needed. My dissertation advisor, J. Paul Hunter, was researching the conditions that led to the emergence of the 18th century novel. His article “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader” argued that the novel was ushering in a new kind of solitude. Meanwhile, his book Before Novels talked of the many ways that novels spoke to the real-life needs and interests of young people. In short, this new literary form was having real world effects.
Victorianist Jerome Beaty, meanwhile, introduced me to the emerging field of reader response theory (also reception theory), especially the work of University of Konstanz scholar Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss believed that great literature could actually shift an audience’s “horizon of expectations.” Suddenly I was finding kindred souls. In my dissertation, completed in 1981, I looked at how the 18th century Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett helped audiences negotiate the confusing shift from a landed to a mercantile society.
I wasn’t the only young scholar interested in literature that could provide insight and perhaps inspiration to the pressing issues of our age. Others were interested in works by historically excluded voices, as well as how even revered works of literature sometimes offered up derogatory or sentimentalized depictions of women, people of color, the working class, members of the LBGTQ community, and formerly colonized populations. Literature was seen as having a role to play in the struggle for equality and civil rights, either positively (through opening up new human possibilities) or negatively (by perpetuating old stereotypes).
As a full-time English professor, for a year at Morehouse College and then for the rest of my career at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I gradually began to expand the range of works I taught. I also engaged in the culture war battles of the late 1980s, taking a middle road. While I pushed against those figures on the right who denigrated multiculturalism, I also defended classical works against leftwing purists who wished to jettison authors who employed racist, sexist, classist, homophobic and other demeaning tropes.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s distinction between “the temporary dress” in which an author clothes his or her creations and “the eternal proportions of their beauty” proved useful. One could still admire Dickens, even while critiquing his one-dimensional female characters and his outsized fear of organized labor. Marxist Terry Eagleton’s defense of conservative writers like Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot was also a help, as was “ethical critic” Wayne Booth’s balanced reassessment of classical works in light of the new insights offered up by feminism, race theory, queer theory, post-colonial studies, and other emerging schools of thought.
Not all my thinking was political, however. I quickly learned that the generation following mine did not have the same grand vision of transforming the world and that this was okay. In my teaching practice, my vision changed from how literature could impact history to how it could impact the lives of my students. I became more psychologically oriented, focusing on how literature could help students cope with their challenges, which I learned were considerable.
Providing me with a useful framework was the Freudian psychologist and literary scholar Norman Holland, who helped me understand why different students responded to literary texts in different ways. I also drew on what I had learned about Freud in a college philosophy class and about Carl Jung in a graduate school class. I began offering my students the opportunity to write about their own lives in their literature essays—always with the caveat that they grant the work its own autonomy—and started receiving insightful essays written with commitment.
I’ll stop my intellectual history here, not because I’ve stopped thinking and growing, but because this pretty much sums up my intellectual framework, how it developed and where it is now. What has occurred since is more along the lines of refining and elaborating.
Please feel free to send me your own intellectual breakthroughs. Just as I am fascinated by people’s favorite literary works, I love hearing how their thinking has evolved.
