Robert Donat in “Goodbye Mr. Chips”
I have been asked to contribute to a collection of essays designed to tell the public what a public liberal arts college is. The collection will be entitled Roads Taken: The Professorial Life, Scholarship in Place and the Public Good.
There are 29 such colleges in the United States including my own St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Currently I am attending a conference at the University of North Carolina at Asheville with the other contributors so that we can share ideas and refine our drafts. The conference is sponsored by the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges or COPLAC.
My chapter is an attempt to understand whether the very nature of public liberal arts colleges, with their heavy emphasis on service, influences how we approach our disciplines. The excerpt that I include here will not come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog since you’ve read many of the posts that I reference. But it will give you a context out of which my thinking comes.
Teaching Lit in a Public Liberal Arts College (excerpt)
Looking back, I can see that the public liberal arts environment has shaped my view of literature. I sensed early on that it wasn’t enough to teach students how to identify literature’s formal elements, chart image patterns, and uncover structural unities. I felt that literature also had to be shown to be doing something in the world. This feeling coincided with my interest in Reader Response theory, and I set out to discover how literature could be shown to impact lives and change history.
My research path, which has taken many twists and turns, is currently taking the form of a daily blog where I examine “how great literature can change your life.” The title of the blog, Better Living through Beowulf, is meant to be both playful and serious. After all, despite the apparent flippancy, I really do think that one will live better if one reads classics like Beowulf. But I don’t only focus on Beowulf. At a small college one must teach more than one’s specialty. I have taught British and American literature from every century, and my blog ranges freely across the world’s literary canon. If I encounter a certain work, sooner or later it will probably make it into the blog.
In literary studies, if one talks about literature performing a practical function one is sure to hear charges of Gradgrindism. Thomas Gradgrind is the utilitarian Member of Parliament in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times who insists that education is valuable only to the extent that it can be shown to make money. Given that there are people who use the same rationale to attack the liberal arts, I am aware that I enter dangerous waters with my emphasis on changing lives. Indeed, literary scholar Stanley Fish occasionally fulminates in his New York Times blog against people who try to figure out what literature “is good for.”
But it is this very tension between the pragmatic and the aesthetic/contemplative that gives the blog its energy, just as that tension marks public liberal arts colleges. Can’t literature straddle the divide, being both useful and aesthetic? At any rate, readers use literary texts for their own purposes all the time, whether or not we feel that they should. We can’t always tell how an individual reader will use a work, and different readers can use the same text in different ways. But rather than see this as a concern, I view it as part of what makes literature marvelous. My blog posts are just ways of getting readers to become aware of the possibilities.
To get specific, here are subjects of some of the blog essays I have posted over the past four years. Note that they range from the personal to the political and from the past to the present. I have written on
–how socially mobile young people in the 18th century used novels like Clarissa and Tom Jones to negotiate the challenges of a rapidly changing society;
–how To Kill a Mockingbird was a white liberal fantasy that had the virtue of enrolling whites in the civil rights struggle but proved less useful when blacks started standing up for themselves;
–how the murder of the innocent poet Cinna in Julius Caesar provides a warning against hysterical responses to terrorist attacks;
–how Pope’s Dunciad gives us a model for challenging the Right Wing’s attack upon science;
–how Oliver Goldsmith provides comic comfort in She Stoops to Conquer for adolescents experiencing dating problems;
–how novels in general provide powerful training grounds for citizenship;
–how Joseph Heller in Catch 22 calls out those who complain about government while benefitting from its services;
–how Aphra Behn in The Rover captures the challenges confronting women in rape culture;
–how a World War veteran (my father) carried an anthology of contemporary poetry through the European theater and drew on it when times got tough;
–how The Grapes of Wrath anticipates current voter suppression efforts;
–how my new grandson entered our lives trailing Wordsworthian clouds of glory;
–how Jane Austen’s Emma provides a moral lesson in the ethics of care;
–how Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart refutes Ayn Rand’s formulation of takers vs. makers;
–how John Wilmot identifies the kinds of fears that underlie America’s gun obsession;
–how Barack Obama has had to learn some of the lessons provided by Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man when dealing with a Republican Congress;
–how one of my college athletes sees himself as both the wedding guest and the pre-albatross mariner in Rime of the Ancient Mariner;
–how Shakespeare bolstered the anti-apartheid activists in South Africa’s prisons;
–how William Blake gives us a language for talking about the desecration of innocence at the Sandy Hook shootings;
–how Dickens in Hard Times might respond to the Common Core Standards.
I have come to see my blog, which attracts roughly 10,000 readers every month, as an extension of my teaching mission. Just as, at St. Mary’s, I encounter many students who have not grown up around books, so a number of my blog readers are people who have had bad experiences with English teachers and are looking for ways back into literature. Then there are those readers who are high school English teachers who want support for their own efforts at reaching out to students. There are also my own students, who read the blog to find out what I think and who are reassured that I seem to be prepared to take their concerns seriously. Perhaps the major takeaway from the blog is that literature can enter every facet of our lives if we let it. I am reminding people of the liberal arts’ public mission.
The blog has also taught me how to break with my academic prose style and begin writing more accessibly. This has been useful for a self-published book that grew out of the blog. As I wrote How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage, I drew on the many times that I looked to Beowulf when scrutinizing America’s political battles. My goal was to make Beowulf as timely today as it was in Anglo-Saxon Britain.
How Beowulf Can Save America argues that the monsters in the poem are brought about by the violence unleashed by people who perceive economic wealth to be distributed unfairly. I claim that the poem’s monstrous trolls and dragons are fictional versions of jealous warriors and hoarding kings, and I note that America today is torn by comparable tensions—which is to say, a stagnant and angry middle class and a wealthy and fearful one percent. Furthermore, I argue that the poem works as a primer for addressing the rage generated by the perceived unfairness. The book, I assert, provides salutary lessons for today’s leaders and citizens.
If I have gone on as long as I have about my own publishing projects, it is to give a sense of the opportunities that show up when one looks to share one’s expertise with audiences beyond the academic. Of course, throughout the country, in private as well as public colleges, there are academics who seek to address public audiences. But at St. Mary’s, it is a defining ideal, so much so that public writing is taken seriously in tenure and promotion cases. Here’s a list of what some of my English Department colleagues have done or are doing:
–spent years giving poetry workshops in local schools and then, after he became Maryland’s poet laureate, did that for the state as a whole;
–embarked on an extensive oral history project, with interviews conducted by students, that led to a series of publications about local history;
–explores the positive effects of prison inmates staging Shakespeare;
–has transitioned from writing about Puritan poetry to writing creative non-fiction (his essay “Milton at the Bat” won a Pushcart award);
–explores and leads workshops on the philosophic and aesthetic underpinnings of ikebana or Japanese flower arranging;
–after publishing a comprehensive anthology of Civil Rights poetry, travels around the state for the Maryland Humanities Council;
–fills our gym each year with stand-up comics (Peter Sagal, Larry Wilmore, David Rakoff, John Hodgman) who talk about the importance of Mark Twain.
The common denominator to this wide range of activities is reaching out to the taxpayers who make this education available to our students.
