The Limitations of Cerebral Teaching

The new semester begins today.  Margaret Edson’s play W;t is a useful reminder of where I should put my priorities as I begin teaching.

When my career started out, I had a number of things in common with Vivian Bearing, the English professor and Donne scholar in W;t. I too reveled in the complexity of texts, how they both invited and resisted interpretation, how they slid away from attempts to arrive at definite meanings. Sometimes I valued this over the guidance they provide for living in the world.

But after getting too many cold and analytical essays from my students (who were just doing what I told them to do), I knew that something had to change. During my first sabbatical I determined to figure out what I wanted teaching literature to accomplish. I concluded that I wanted literature to make a difference in my students’ lives. I have spent the rest of my career exploring how I can help make this happen.

I now ask my students what is “at stake,” in the works they are reading and in the essays they are writing. Why, I make them tell me, should somebody care? If they can’t answer that question, I work with them until they can.

Of course, one thing at stake is passing the course. But if that’s all learning were to them, then life would be a pretty barren affair. In point of fact, deep down all of them want learning to be more than hoops they jump through. Most of them, after all, are at a stage in life (18-22) where they are trying to figure the universe out. They know they are on the cusp of adulthood and they want answers. I help them link the literature and their essays to their personal needs.

One way I do this is by allowing them to tell personal stories that relate to or are triggered by the literary works. Now, I am careful to insist that they enter into a dialogue with the work, not a monologue. That is to say, they are not to subordinate the work to their lives (that would be narcissistic) but must step outside of themselves. The work is both like and unlike their lives, and they are to figure out what that means. When the process is working at its best, seeing the work in terms of their lives opens up new insights into the work and delving into the work opens up new insights into their lives.

In my website posts to this point I have told a number of stories (and will tell many more) about the rich student conversations about literature that emerge from this approach. But I sometimes wonder what I lose by not being more of a Vivian Bearing, who dismisses the significance of her students’ lives and puts the rigorous demands of literary interpretation above all. (She regrets having taught this way when she is dying.)

I have a colleague who is like Vivian, and students who take her courses wear them as a badge of honor. They feel that they are tested to the max and feel proud of the B or C they receive. There is no mushy sentimentality in these courses, no asking the students how they feel about a work (always my first question). The work has its own artistic and intellectual integrity, and either they climb that mountain and acknowledge it or they fall short. As Vivian says about Donne,

To the common reader—that is to say, the undergraduate with a B+ or better average—wit provides an invaluable exercise for sharpening the mental faculties, for stimulating the flash of comprehension that can only follow hours of exacting and seemingly pointless scrutiny.

To the scholar, to the mind comprehensively trained in the subtleties of seventeenth-century vocabulary, versification, and theological, historical, geographical, political and mythological allusions, Donne’s wit is . . . a way to see how good you really are.

After twenty years, I can say with confidence, no one is quite as good as I.

I admire students willing to take up the challenge thrown out by such a teacher, like monks undertaking an austere discipline. In the play, Vivian’s doctor Jason has enrolled in her seventeenth-century poetry class out of such a motivation. “I made a bet with myself that I could get an A in the three hardest courses on campus,” he says.

But I’ve learned from my own experience to be suspicious of this urge. I remember taking a class from a historian at Carleton College who had the reputation of being hard-ass and demanding. If I took him, I was convinced that I would root out my indolence and my penchant for procrastination (which seemed to me to be bigger problems than they actually were, I now realize).  I would be forced to be good. And yet, now that I look back, there was something pathological about the whole situation. It was as though I wanted to deny feeling and submerge myself in a world of pure intellect. I was almost Ayn Randian in my quest. What transpired was the most traumatic academic experience of my life.

No sooner had I enrolled in the course than I went into resistance. I was sullen in classes (I am not normally a sullen person) and I began sleeping incessantly, like Jack Burden in All the King’s Men. (I would take four-hour naps and awake exhausted.) Finally the teacher, who would be fired the following year (I wasn’t the only student he had problems with), kicked me out of the class and gave me an F. The ostensible reason was because I had quoted a class comment in a student newspaper article (an unethical thing to have done, I now admit, although the quotation was harmless enough). The real reason, I think, was that we both realized we had reached an impasse.

I took the class because I wanted to prove that I was a pure intellectual. Then a deep part of me, the emotional side that insists that there be balance, struck back with a series of symptoms. As I look back, I am struck by how I was able to orchestrate my victimization so that everyone saw my teacher as the villain. Instinctively I knew what it would take to set him off and I pushed his button. I’m not proud of myself, but I learned a lot from the experience. (One thing I learned was perspective: the earth did not open up and swallow me when I received the only failing grade of my life.) I draw on the incident a lot when I see my own students and advisees experiencing academic pressure. My own advisor and dean of students were at a loss, and I don’t want to be as ineffective.

When Vivian says, “I know all about life and death. I am, after all, a scholar of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which explore mortality in greater depth than any other body of work in the English language,” I see (and eventually so does she) the arrogance and the blindness in the statement. Donne is indeed wise—wiser in some poems than in others—but for readers to tap into this wisdom takes more than cognitive intelligence. That’s my quarrel with Vivian’s teaching approach: she makes it seem  as if interpretation is only a matter of intellect.

In fact, if there’s one thing that I fault Edson’s play for, it’s that it doesn’t give Donne enough credit for operating in the emotional realm.  His poetry involves more than just dazzling wit. The author has Vivian abandon Donne and resort to The Runaway Bunny at the end of the play. But as I wrote last week, Donne’s Meditation 17 (“Ask not for whom the bell tolls”) could have provided her powerful consolation of the sort that a passage from Hamlet provides for her mentor  as she watches Vivian die (“Flights of angels guide thee to thy rest”). If we combine our emotional life, our experiences, and our intellect in the reading of literature, it will reveal its glories.