December 28, 2007
A Pause for Self-Reflection
It’s no surprise that the crowd for a panel titled “Why Teach Literature Anyway?” overflowed into the hallway. After all, literature scholars are at pains to defend the profession, on one front, from traditionally minded colleagues who still bemoan the theoretical turn in the field, and, on another front, from fiscally minded administrators and state legislators.What might have surprised those critics, however, was the panelists’ answers to the question. All of them suggested that by teaching literature, scholars were performing an essential educational function: changing the way students see the world.
Bruce W. Robbins, a professor at Columbia University, made the case that teaching literature teaches students to “live with ethical and emotional contradictions.”
“I seem to be channeling Matthew Arnold,” he said ruefully. “Haven’t we learned to say that what’s true about literature is its resistance to meaning?”
But “yes, oh yes, literature represents.”
Yale’s David Bromwich sonorously quoted The Rape of the Locke, Macbeth, and The Great Gatsby at length, offering close readings of “recognition scenes” that cause a change of consciousness among readers.
“Such knowledge can pass from literature to life, and back,” he argued.
And the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s Jane Gallop, who observed that she does not teach literature but theory, said the value of studying literature is to learn close reading: “a practice that can teach us how to learn and keep on learning.”
When she first began teaching, she said, she taught students to apply the close reading they had learned in their literature classes to theoretical texts. “But for more than a decade,” she said, “students have come into class not having learned close reading at all.”
How odd that it would fall to her to teach the habit of literary reading, she said. “I’m wondering, if they’re not getting that training, why study literature anyway?”
After the panel one member of the audience asked why none of the speakers had said anything about pleasure.
“We’re all for pleasure,” Mr. Bromwich assured him. “We just took it for granted.”
Jennifer Ruark | Posted on Friday December 28, 2007 | Permalink
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