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I LIKE the way William Stafford began poetry readings by saying, "Let's say some good things." To talk about the direction of our curricula raises this question: Why is the study of literature and language an essential part of our culture? Most of us who are teachers and professors of English, given a few lines of poetry, can feel our way toward an answer. Here is your assignment: take first these lines from Robert Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno, "Midway on our life's journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell / about those woods is hard--so tangled and rough . . ." (3). Take these lines from Joy Harjo's poem "I Give You Back": "I release you, my beautiful and terrible / fear. I release you" (73). Use either or both quotations to explain to the board of trustees of your institution, who are probably primarily successful white businessmen sharing certain assumptions from the business world, what is essential about the study of English. It should make it easier that I have chosen lines of poetry first from one of the greatest writers of Western literature and second from a contemporary Native American woman. Most of us should be able to do this, right? But almost always, when I am called on to speak about the large purposes of the English curriculum, I feel that describing our discipline is something like describing the Tao. "The Tao that can be told / is not the eternal Tao" (Mitchell 1). I begin to feel that, like the Tao, if what I do can be named, it is not what I do. We cannot easily point to what we do, as if we could see it in the corner of the room. (It is revealing of our culture that one person listening to this talk told me that he at first thought I was referring to the Dow. Perhaps it is also true that "The Dow that can be told / is not the eternal Dow.")
Several of us were invited to be on a panel at the ADE Summer Seminar East to describe where English curricula are going in the twenty-first century: a daunting task. We were thankful that David Laurence suggested that we need not have all the answers. I am most interested in the assumption, to quote David's guidance to us, that our "faculty members have great conviction about the worthwhileness of the courses they teach but manifest considerable uncertainty not to say anxiety about how to describe or explain the worthwhileness of these studies more generally, at the level of the curriculum." I struggle to explain the curriculum's educational value and intellectual purposes to those who allocate resources. I want to suggest something of the dialogue that is occurring in our English department at Roanoke College, and I want to raise fundamental questions about the political and spiritual aspects of teaching literature. Among our various discussions of what the teaching of literature is about, we rarely raise the issue of what reading literature does to our students and to us. To put it another way, how do I balance the huge professional demands placed on me with what I sense to be the transcendent quality of what I do as a teacher of literature?
I have observed, for example, in my twenty-two years of teaching that the reading of literature increasingly feels as if it is becoming a transcendent experience. By that I mean that reading becomes a kind of spiritual experience that transcends the boundaries and doctrine of any particular faith. I begin to wonder about what all this means. For starters, I wonder where aesthetic and mystical experiences merge. We don't have much discussion about the relation of the spiritual to the aesthetic in our discipline. Most of us are suspicious, and properly so, of pious hopes and false claims concerning the cause-and-effect relations here: between reading literature and changes in human behavior. The brief discussion that follows of my recent experience in our profession might lead to further questions: Is there something overarching and transcendent about what we are about in the teaching of literature, and can we articulate how we value the experience of reading? Can we accept the reading of literature as "an experience"? What are the limits of approaches to teaching that we can accept among our colleagues? As we think about our curricula and classroom practices, what kinds of political and spiritual agendas must we guard against? What kinds of experiences do we really want our students to have?
Curricular pressures pull us in divergent, if not impossible, directions. At Roanoke College, our department is responsible for first-year writing instruction, a large portion of the general studies civilization sequence, and the capstone senior symposium courses (fifty-four percent of the sections we offer are in general studies). With no graduate students, our goal is to have all full-time faculty members teach at least one first-year writing section each year, so that freshmen writing does not become a course taught only by new tenure-track and part-time faculty members. Our English major has traditionally focused on British and American literature, although we continue to work at making our offerings sensitive to current trends in the profession. We are building programs in creative writing and communications, but, as in many other institutions, resources are extremely limited. Our number of faculty positions has not increased in nearly a decade, and our budget has not increased in at least five years. We simply have very little flexibility in our teaching assignments. In numbers of students, English is the fourth largest major in the college. With our faculty teaching nearly all the first-year writing sections, our perception of English is that we give the college a great deal, compared with the sciences, for what we cost. We see ourselves as a bargain for our administration. Setting aside issues of the communications and creative writing curricula, we must make hard choices in our literature offerings (which account for only thirty percent of our total class sections). We have tried to address issues of feminism, new historicism, and postcolonialism in existing courses in the major, and we are adding courses in the African diaspora and multiculturalism. Books like Evan Carton and Alan Friedman's Situating College English convince us that we just can't do it all, but, of course, divergent commitments are not impossible. We continue to serve in many capacities.
Despite the strong pressures of the curriculum and the busy-ness we must attend to, we feel that we are teaching something larger than all that. In the face of large forces beyond our control or even our understanding, we need to keep our sense of what we are about. English curricula, as we know them, will likely undergo tremendous changes in the next century. As university disciplines go, we are a young discipline, which already has undergone dramatic changes in this past century. American literature became a respected field of study only in mid-century. Now theories proliferate. Now our departments are responsible for staffing tens or hundreds of sections of freshmen writing, a service commitment that often seems crushing, a commitment that is a kind of indentured-servant industry, manned, or usually womaned, by graduate students and part-time faculty members (at Roanoke part-time faculty members teach twenty-five percent of our course offerings). We can list the changes that confront us: changes in content of the curriculum, changes in the theories of our discipline, changes in our service commitment, and changes in technology and information literacy. Like the old geometry problems I was assigned in high school, this context is merely the given. It is our starting point.
I informally polled my department colleagues, asking what is essential to our curriculum. The most striking replies were the simplest. Bob Denham said that the essence of our work is this: we teach people to read, to write, and to think. Katherine Hoffman said that we help our students survive in this materialistic, soul-destroying world. As soon as I hear these words, I know it is not simple. The difficulty in articulating what we are about is itself a sign that we are on the right track. Important things in life are difficult to say.
We can argue that there is perhaps no more powerful education than learning to read, write, and think well. Bob Denham later expanded on his statement, saying that we might ask toward what end we want students to learn to write, read, and think. His answer is that we want them to grow individually and socially. The study of literature can and should lead to the discovery of an identity, the making of a self. It should also lead to the construction of a social vision of what life can become. We teach knowledge about and knowledge of. Knowledge about is the data, more or less, of our discipline, and knowledge of is something like our spiritual vision, leading in the direction of wisdom.
How do we characterize the reading we teach? Is it a certain body of knowledge? Is it a knowledge of the issues and works of literature in English? I don't need to go into why that is a problematic description. The boundaries of literature in English are being contested, as are the essential issues of literature. Should a student read in Asian Indian literature, American Indian literature, queer theory, feminist theory, or Elizabethan drama? I think that I am arguing that our debates over the content of our curriculum are not the core issue for us. We are not merely teaching a body of knowledge, yet as I say that, I know too that what we teach is what makes things happen. The reading and the writing are vehicles for making something happen between our students and us. Katherine Hoffman argues well that reading literature critically is a complex skill or an art as much as writing is. And writing is not merely a process or a skill but it too requires a body of knowledge. Writing is a self-conscious process in which a student learns how to discover "what matters here." He or she learns what can be done in writing, how writing can make things happen, and what works within a given social and political context.
The strange thing is that our discipline, as we call it, is ubiquitous. What is remarkable is that our institutions do think that the study of English is important. Can we imagine our institutions thriving without English departments? Can we be done without or done away with? Our society is conflicted about our discipline in ways that mirror our own struggles to articulate what we are about. On the one hand, I think it is easy to imagine great universities and colleges without English departments; on the other hand, I tell my students we are the center of the institution because we are about what all the disciplines actually do--reading and writing. On the one hand, people want their children to read and write well; on the other hand, they want them to major in business, premed, or computer science--not English. People recognize that the English curriculum is important, but they often don't know why it is important.
I have the nagging feeling that too often our students choose to study English because they have eliminated everything else. Perhaps this is a compliment to us. Maybe it is not just because the study of language and literature is tolerable but also because there is heart in this discipline. Our task is to articulate what we are about. We want to believe the remarks from corporate executives who tell us that very often the graduates they really value are not business majors but English majors. Should we be doing those things in English that will help students become corporate executives? I like to think that learning to read and talk about the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, "Midway on our life's journey . . . ," suggests what students need. Here is what I believe physicists call potential energy. Can we educate students to become a Sister Helen Prejean or a Mother Teresa? It does feel to me that our goal is to somehow bring people along in that direction. It does feel to me that at our best we try to come along that road ourselves.
Another one of my colleagues, Bobbye Au, responded to my informal question by saying that our job is really about helping individual students--one student at a time. In the liberal arts colleges, perhaps defensively, we argue that this individual help is what makes us distinctive. We take considerable pride, and I think we should, in the fact that we try to offer our students individual attention, which we like to think they cannot get at a large university. Whether it is an illusion or not, we defend vehemently the time that we need to give our students the help that they need. In the liberal arts college, we survive or fall in how we meet students' needs. We tell ourselves that if we try to be a university English department, we will fail. Our task is to be sure that through the teaching of literature and language we are meeting our students' needs.
Where else in the college or university does anyone do what we do or the range of what we do? Like monks we contemplate sacred manuscripts. Or we become spiritual advisers guiding our followers to understand the wellspring of their own language. Our name for this poring over sacred texts is close reading; and this introspection of our inward springs of language we call composition. What we do is a kind of priesthood. We have our Jesuits, our Benedictines, and our Sisters of Charity. Here is where I venture into dangerous territory. One of my colleagues warned me that if I brought up the spirituality of teaching English, I had better define what I mean. I don't mean a fundamentalist, dogmatic, or literalist religion; nor do I mean a New Age, anything and everything, touchy-feely grooviness. Spirit is a more appropriate word in this context than religion. I want to use the word in the most tentative way. It does seem to point toward what I feel, in the broad sense of its being a reality communicated to us by our intuitions or our feelings for what matters in this world and in our relationships. Despite the impulse to model our scholarship after the sciences, I wonder if for many people our discipline is becoming a spiritual enterprise. We all have colleagues who are exploring where their spiritual lives and academic lives intersect. Is it possible that our discipline is both secular and spiritual? I believe it is, and I believe this is partly why we have difficulty talking about what we do.
I could describe our teaching along a spectrum, from what I will call the hard-edged to the soft-edged. Those at the soft-edged edge of the discipline, at the edge where we are in danger of falling off (as Holden Caulfield says in The Catcher in the Rye, "I am standing on the edge of some crazy cliff" [Salinger 173]), place much emphasis in the value of the inward life. Teaching is connected to or parallel to the contemplative tradition, the tradition of the great Christian mystics and Zen Buddhism, of silence and the language of the mind. Courses involve an awakening to our essential humanity. Our business becomes laughter and tears--an involvement in students' lives. Like Atticus sitting up with Jem at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, the teacher "would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning" (Lee 283-84).
Those at the hard-edged edge of the discipline see this work as a rigorous study of the politics of language. They are involved in making this a discipline. There is more important business than laughter or tears, or at least that is not our business. As Katherine Hoffman said to me, our task is to teach language and literature in such a way that we stretch minds. It is not that we want our students to adopt for themselves Milton's cosmology (or, I'll add, Homer's cosmology, Herman Melville's, Northrop Frye's, Wole Soyinka's, Jacques Derrida's, Martin Buber's, Leslie Marmon Silko's, Salman Rushdie's, or Adrienne Rich's) but that we want students to read and think about Milton as if they were meeting a very important person (which they are). We want our students to think and read critically, to write effectively, to be rhetorically self-conscious, and to know enough about history, not only to be interested, not only to situate themselves, but also to stand up in the world and speak out against injustice and unfairness.
As I drafted this piece, I wanted to identify myself on the soft-edged edge of the cliff, but now I see that I really try to be both soft-edged and hard-edged. Our struggle is to be both. Both ends of the spectrum are valid; both represent who we are becoming. We are teaching our students language as a force for standing up to injustice and language as a force for healing. It is valid for us to be judging our students' work because we are teaching them something about quality and effectiveness; and it is valid for us to be discerning our students' gifts and helping them understand their inward reservoirs of strength. In fact, the teaching of reading and writing is essential to our definition of helping students.
At our best, or maybe I should just say at my best, I think I am helping young and not-so-young people to do . . . what? To learn to do what I am myself continually trying to learn to do: to read and write and talk about language and literature, to do all this to help me thrive in my life as well as to help me find my way when "the dark woods" are "tangled and rough." So our task, our struggle, is to talk about what we do so that we legitimize what we are really about. Our students cannot do this discipline sitting alone in a computer lab or in a distance-learning lab. They need us to be present, partly because they need good role models, partly because we need to touch one another's lives through language. I am reminded of the Ibo expression, which I learned from Chinua Achebe: "A human being is a human being because of other human beings." Where we are headed is also where we are already. I use these metaphors self-consciously. It feels as if this discipline is taking me down a spiritual path. I am thankful for this profession, which seems so much to be about that path. The path is who we are.
How we help our students has huge implications for how we see ourselves and for the kind of preparation our PhD students need. The road from graduate school to a full-time teaching position is long and difficult enough to be seen as a kind of priesthood. We try mightily to bring in the right people. As Katherine Hoffman said to me, "Everybody is trained at the Big U but not everybody will teach at the Big U." New PhDs need to know that teaching in the liberal arts college is not only about teaching a body of knowledge. We are involved in so much more than that. Every text we teach leads us into considerations of the human condition. I want to practice and model disinterested inquiry, but I want to be alive and sensitive and very interested in my students' lives.
The spiritual presence, the spiritual experience, of literature feels as if it is larger and goes beyond any particular faith. As Bob Denham has said, if it is the human spirit that we find in literature, then literature is about how we breathe in and breathe out; it is about how we yearn for ultimate meaning. Chaucer knew what he was doing when he had Harry Bailly, in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, ask the pilgrims to "telleth in this cas / Tales of best sentence and most solas" (23). Literature is about feeling and wisdom, comfort in sorrow, and healing. Many of us feel something of this in our work. For me it happens when I teach The Catcher in the Rye. At the end Holden Caulfield says, "God, I wish you could have been there" (213), and if we have done it well in our course, the students and I have been there. The reading, the writing, and the class discussion have made something happen that is beyond the content of the curriculum.
The author is Associate Professor of American Literature and Chair, Department of English, at Roanoke College. This paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar East, hosted by Purchase College, State University of New York, in Rye, New York.
Special thanks to Bobbye Au, Bob Denham, and Katherine Hoffman for their ideas for this essay.
Achebe, Chinua. Personal interview. Bard College, New York. 6 Nov. 1992.
Carton, Evan, and Alan W. Friedman. Situating College English: Lessons from an American University. Westport: Bergin, 1996.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Norton, 1989.
Dante. The Inferno of Dante. Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, 1994.
Harjo, Joy. She Had Some Horses. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1983.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Fawcett, 1960.
Mitchell, Stephen, ed. Tao te Ching. New York: Harper, 1988.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Bantam, 1951.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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