Hey,
I may not have been fully flamed, but I'm feeling a bit singed around the
edges. I'm not going to attempt to provide anything like a full answer to
the flood of anti-theoretical sentiment, because I'm not the expert to do
it, but I will say that students never leave my classes thinking that
"Elizabethans were just like them." I tell them that although in many
ways, Elizabethans were indeed just like us, those analogies come too
easily for students to need a college course in that technique. Instead, I
design my courses to help them to learn how to find strangeness in the
sixteenth century--and how to use that experience to help them look back at
their own cultures and personal assumptions to make at least bits of those
cultures and personal assumptions newly strange to themselves (and thereby
ripe for analysis). I know this works, because they tell me it does. I do
require even my undergraduates do original research into primary historical
texts--diaries, medical manuals, and so on--and as a result, they don't see
me as particularly alpine, because their experience with these historical
texts always enables them to teach me new ways to read Spenser, and they're
proud of that. These are Arkansas undergraduates, mind you; most of them
are products of one of the lousiest primary school systems in the
country. But they're smart and eager, and they don't find the discourse of
gender and history off-putting, because I don't inundate them with
terminology and because I ground the theory both in the text and in the
sorts of questions that all of us ask daily about our lives. I also make
them read many early critics as well as many of the more recent ones, and I
don't insult those earlier critical methods.
It's not clear to me why I should feel ashamed of any of this. I'm
certain my classes don't make students quit reading Spenser; quite the
reverse.
I stand by my analogy between literary criticism and
physics. Practically everyone enjoys seriously puzzling over the effects
and nature of time and over the relationship between time and space, but
this doesn't mean everyone wants to become a physicist. Instead, there's a
continuum from those who simply puzzle to those who apply some mathematical
or philosophical principles to those who take a few courses in undergrad
physics to those who decide to specialize in the field. Similarly,
although Literature is for Everyone, that doesn't mean each work of
literature should speak to everyone of every educational and cultural
background in order to justify its existence--and still less does it mean
that the formal *study* of literature and the published results of that
study must be understandable to most everyone in order to justify the
existence of literary scholarship. Some of this discussion over Tolkien
has been conflating literature with its study, going on to conflate its
study with publication. Unless we believe there's a reason for the study
of literature and the discipline of literary criticism to differ
from--while generously overlapping--the experience of reading, we should
get out of the profession. So long as I can mediate a great deal of that
formal criticism to my Arkansas undergraduates and use it to inspire them
to *start* to read Spenser with pleasure and understanding--given that most
of them grew up reading no poetry at all--I refuse to think I'm being a
nasty elitist to write and publish essays that target other scholars as my
audience.
The issue of poetry--or shall we say, very long poetry--is the big one, by
the way. That's the dividing line between the romances that usually get
read outside the classroom these days and those that don't. The issue of
what brand of literary criticism a teacher uses or publishes pales in
comparison. Shall we solve the problem by getting rid of poetry? Shall
we, like the lawyer George Smith Green, re-write Milton into prose to get
rid of the "remorseless geometry of blank verse"? Or shall we accept that
our teaching mission is to get students invested in what's difficult rather
than in dumbing it down or dismissing it as obfuscation for the sake of
obfuscation?
Dorothy Stephens
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