Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9501040026
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: F-3 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
You teach English literature (or French, or Russian)? So what? You write about generic distinctions in the 17th century? About the history of the language? About relations between workers' revolts and formal innovations in prose? Why should anyone conceivably care?
The attacks call attention to the deteriorating status of the professoriate as repository of wisdom and value. Moreover, the widespread doubts have real-life consequences: economic consequences, especially for those of us teaching in state institutions, and spiritual ones as well, for just about everyone.
Even those observers who acknowledge that we work hard often believe we too often devote our efforts to enterprises mattering only to ourselves.
Why does it matter that we struggle to understand other people's words and to shape our own language to convey meaning and feeling?
It matters because our activity implies ways to assume power over ourselves and over the chaos of the world outside ourselves. We offer students, and by continuing study acquire for ourselves, means of grasping reality.
The written word preserves imaginings and re-imaginings of experience and of substance. Recording in transmuted form the experience of its writers, it thus provides experience for its readers. As we ponder, teach and investigate it, we enlarge our own and others' awareness of how hard and how rewarding it is to understand happenings and accounts of happenings, how intricate experience is in itself and how unimaginably intricate its verbal renditions.
Everyone yearns for simple truths. When we discover and rediscover that even simple and self-evident truths require qualification or elaboration, we may feel baffled and distressed. Beyond that initial confusion, our way of responding to complexity and ambiguity will depend on temperament.
And on education. Education in reading and writing may insist on uncertainty and ambiguity of meaning as central to experience. As teachers, we do not consider one-liners ultimate statements about reality.
We teachers of literature urgently need to make ourselves comprehended. It's not easy, precisely because we often want to convey a kind of truth that does not lend itself to single distinct impressions. We implicitly teach the value of carefulness and complication when we show students how to respond adequately to the writing that records others' reactions to the world. The works commonly taught in literature classrooms embody the intricacy of nuance. They demand acceptance, repudiation, or both, on many levels.
My contention that we help our students assume the power of realism provides one way to respond. We show our students multiple perspectives on, and larger views of, the real. We expand their ways of seeing. As we teach them to enjoy and at different levels to comprehend the written word, to hear multiple voices from past and present, we enable them - and constantly enable ourselves - to accept the omnipresence of contradiction and confusion, to endure the truth that contradictions tend to breed further contradictions, and to acknowledge that not all contradictions are reconcilable.
Students of literature learn multiple possibilities of clear expression. They are likely to become less afraid of the unending need to make difficult choices, as well as better-equipped to make them.
They can, like everyone else, make wrong choices. They can even be bad people.
But they have available to them abundant resources for confronting moral complexity, and they must know, however they try to evade the knowledge, the urgency of moral decision. They won't be automatically scared of having to untangle intricacy, in their immediate experience or, for instance, in the conflicting appeals and promises of politicians.
Recognition of the commitment to reality also provides a way to position ourselves in relation to the technological revolution. I inhabit a state where pressure has developed to replace at least some teachers with TV monitors and computers. This, those in state government appear to believe, will save money.
A more covert goal of the imagined turn to technology may be to make education more predictable, more controllable, perhaps less abundantly characterized by ambiguity and complexity.
Both the possibility of videotaped lectures by brilliant teachers and the rich resources of the computer enlarge possibility for the language and literature classroom. Rightly used, however, they will not save money or time, and they are likely to intensify the student's perception of complexity by enabling more searching investigation of complicated reality.
Tempting though nostalgia for a simpler past may be, it helps little in dealing with the actualities of the turbulent present.
I don't believe things were much better back in the old days, and they may not really have been simpler, but they appeared clearer. Faculties at least pretended to agree with one another, life seemed comfortable. Students kept their turmoil more to themselves, adopting a classroom posture of repression. Thus they made things easier for their teachers in some respects. But it was hard to reach them, to arouse their energy for the hard work of learning.
Today's students no doubt know approximately as much as their counterparts knew in the '50s but the nature of their knowledge is no longer readily predictable or comprehensible to those who do not share it. As teachers and citizens, we now need to imagine our circumstances in new ways.
When students appear by traditional standards poorly prepared, when parents feel heightened urgency about their children's need to make a living, when society no longer accepts the necessary wisdom of the professor, when the body of students attending universities manifests no obvious homogeneity, when our profession itself lacks homogeneity - in such a situation, one cannot simply reaffirm the value of teaching language and literature just as they used to be taught.
The right kind of teaching in our current situation is hard work. To read a George Eliot novel attentively requires coming to terms with a whole range of vocabularies. It involves encountering a different culture in all its complexity - its commerce, its courtships and marriages, its arts and politics - and therefore thinking indirectly about the peculiarities of our own culture. It implies views about the nature of the self, and about the ways that people relate to one another. It imposes discipline on 20th-century readers. It's not hard to show that studying literature implies kinds of intellectual effort that develop the skills of a thoughtful and mature human being.
Yet the troubling alienation that seems increasingly to divide academics from the public they serve marks at the very least a profound failure of communication. Critics probably share with educators a belief, for instance, in the desirability of students' learning to write lucid prose. The disagreement perhaps concerns means more than ends.
The fact remains, however, that students often graduate from American institutions of higher learning without reading or writing or speaking in any language with the clarity and force one might wish - and we must take their failure to be largely our fault. I believe that faculties of language and literature on the whole work hard and honorably to convey to students the urgency of their disciplines, but hard honorable work does not necessarily suffice.
To study and teach literature is to engage in and to encourage demanding modes of action. By reading and by writing, learners learn the urgency, the difficulty and the exhilaration of expressing accurately, persuasively and perhaps even passionately what they think, what they believe and what they feel. Thus they participate in the large conversation that constitutes the humanities.
We need to remind ourselves, our students and the public of what everyone perhaps remembered more consistently in the past: The skills we teach and the texts we analyze bear directly on perplexities of common experience. Men and women who talk and listen, watch and vote in a democracy can arguably perform all these functions better by virtue of a literary education. They can operate better in today's democracy as a result of today's education.
We must answer "so what?" Our answers can evoke the urgency, the power and the complexity of what teaching literature at century's end entails. We can claim reality, with all its contradictions, as our subject and our discipline.
Patricia Meyer Spacks is professor of English at the University of Virginia and president of the Modern Language Association. This is excerpted from her address Wednesday night at the MLA's annual meeting in San Diego.
by CNB