The Laws of Gravity Are Very Strict

Continuing yesterday's ramble....

I had an enormously bratty student once, whose thesis I was advising. She was very difficult--she wouldn't show up for meetings or would show up late. She badmouthed the administrative staff of our department (which is a great staff and includes a few personal friends). She badmouthed Americans.* The night before her thesis was due to her external readers, she emailed it to me at midnight and asked me to proofread it. In short, she was a nightmare.

But the biggest sticking point in our relationship was about what a literary essay entailed. She wanted to write about how good the books were and what they made her think of. It was like a parody of some horrible New Age-y class where everyone talks about their feelings.

"I just don't understand why everyone in this department insists that an essay should have an 'argument,'" she would say. And then the capper: "I don't see how this prepares me for later life."

She wanted to be a journalist, and she didn't see how thinking critically about language would be helpful in later life! Sheesh.

This dispute finally had to be resolved by the old standby: "because I said so" (which is both an alarming and a deeply satisfying thing to say). But before it reached that point, I brought out all the heavy artillery in my war to defend the study of literature. It's a question I get asked a lot: "what is the point?"

I don't mind the question, really. In fact, I think it's important to remain institutionally self-critical, to avoid complaceny and to be prepared to defend the relevance of a discipline that is not "useful" in a strictly market-driven sense. It's also important to defend against this corporate-type notion of utility that's creeping into discussions of the function of the university, but that's a post for another day.

So here were my answers:

Studying literature patiently and critically makes us more attuned to the ways in which language is used and the ways in which our perceptions of reality are linguistically or discursively shaped. We are surrounded by language: in advertising, political speeches, newspapers, textbooks. Very little of this language is rhetorically neutral, even if it pretends or strives to be. It's an important--a "useful," if you will--skill to be able to analyze and sort out what the rhetorical posture of a piece of writing is.

Even more broadly, it permits us to see the metaphoricity of concepts that we've naturalized, metaphors that we mistake for immutable truths. When we speak of the "body politic" or the "head of state," we are speaking metaphorically. It's important, "useful," to be able to see this as a metaphor, so that we don't take it as a given. The government-as-body is an old and pervasive metaphor (but this doesn't make it a truth, just a persistent trope). Aesop told the fable of the belly (retold by Shakespeare in Coriolanus), which legitimizes the subordination of the people to centralized power.

In the 14th century, Nicolas d'Oresme wrote a work, De Moneta, about the function of money. He likened coins to the then-current theory of bodily humors, arguing that coins should circulate throughout the realm the way the humors circulate throughout the body.

The frontispice to Hobbes' Leviathan shows a king made up of tiny people, literalizing the connection between the body and the body politic.

And while anatomy gets used as a metaphor for government, government gets used as a metaphor for anatomy. In the 17th century, William Harvey's treatises on the circulation of the blood were rife with political metaphors. In his 1628 treatise, De Motu Cordis, he describes the heart as the “prince” who governs the “oeconomy of the body,” dispensing its resources to its
“dependents.” The heart is to the body what the king is to his kingdom.

In 1649, published shortly after the beheading of King Charles I of England, Harvey wrote another tract on the circulation of the blood, the catchily titled De Circulatione Sanguinis. In this work, Harvey focuses attention away from the activity of the heart to a more republican emphasis on the importance of the blood itself in supplying nourishment to the body. The heart in this new work is no longer prince, but a first among equals (at the same time as England was
replacing the monarchy with a republic—coincidence??).

In The Federalist Papers, James Madison writes that "the states which lie at the greatest distance from the 'heart' of the union may partake least of the 'circulation' of its benefits."

Now, this might not be a very good metaphor, but it's still important to note how overlapping the figurative language of science and power are.

Science is full of metaphors, tropes, and analogies, and like all figurative language, there are certain implicit values and certain rhetorical postures. Medical science is perhaps where the metaphors are the most obvious, especially when we are a generation or two removed. "Hysteria," for instance shows how the discursive construction of femininity shaped the ways in which women were diagnosed, even after the uterus was no longer believed to be involved in "hysterical" behavior.

But metaphors exist in less polemical ways, as well. Why, for instance, do we call it the "Law of Gravity" rather than the "Rule of Attraction"? What is the difference between saying that something is "innate" versus saying that it's "hard wired." Gaston Bachelard wrote about how the symbolism of fire, along with its phenomenological properties, shaped scientific discourse. Theodore Brown's terrific Making Truth discusses how even the most rigidly empirical scientific language is filled with metaphor--his chapter on the shifting metaphor of the atom is especially great, I think.

This is not to say that science or government or any of the other institutions that regulate and formulate our ideas about reality are nothing more than poetry, but understanding the poetry of everyday life makes us better able to understand the way these institutions are constructed. It makes us better able to live thoughtfully and critically in the world.

That was my answer. Tune in next time to hear about why I think this is radically incomplete! And then I'll get off the boring pedagogy posts.

*Now, I'm not opposed to badmouthing American policies. In fact, I quite favor it. And among friends, it's ok to poke fun at one another's country more generally, but this girl was NOT my friend. And she just went on and on about how stupid Americans are and, get this, how bad American education is. The why in the world did you come to school here???

That Stoichiometry Problem Was Just Beautiful

Matthew Arnold says something about how the history of culture alternates between epochs of expansion and contraction. Great periods of creativity are enabled, Arnold argues, by periods of reflection and criticism.

Now, the things that Matthew Arnold and I agree on can probably be counted on one hand. One hand with a couple of amputated fingers. But lately I've found something attractive in this notion, in part because it legitimizes the work of literary criticism and in part because lately I can't get any work done.

So I'm telling myself that I am in an epoch of contraction. Hm.

One of the things I've been reflecting on in this epoch of contraction is what it means to teach literature. I'll save the "why bother" question for tomorrow's post (I feel an epoch of productivity coming on), but today I'll take it as a given that we do, in fact, bother with literature and I'll take up the question of what it is, precisely, that gets taught.

I had some friends over the other night, including a very nice gentleman whom I'd just met. He was browsing through the bookshelves and pulled out a copy of Milton. "Do you like this," he asked me. His tone wasn't belligerent or derisive, but bewildered.

"Yeah," I said, a little embarrassed.

"I had to read that my freshman year in college," he said, "and I hated it."

"Oh." I was at a bit of a loss. "Maybe you didn't have a very good teacher."

I said that just as a filler, just as something to say so that I wouldn't have to defend Milton or my literary taste or to reassure my guest that it's ok to hate Milton (which, of course, it is, but it sounds patronizing to tell someone so).

So I just said it as a reflex, as something to say. But as soon as I said it, I realized both what utter bullshit it is and how pervasive a notion it is, on both sides of the pedagogical relationship. Both teachers and students seem to have it engrained in them that teaching literature in large part means teaching the appreciation of literature.

For students, this notion manifests itself in pretty transparent ways. If they didn't like the books, the class must've sucked. Or, more common where I teach, the students fall all over themselves in their essays to prove how much they enjoyed the texts. These essays are excruciating. I call them the "Shakespeare is an important theme in the plays of William Shakespeare." These essays evince no original thought and resort to such critical ciphers or tautologies as "the human" or, for the very dim or very young students, "the relatable."

It would chill you to the bone to hear how often a student's thesis is something like: "the work of Sophocles is important and good because it is still so relatable. It remains relevant to our lives even 2500 years later." Swap in whoever for "Sophocles" and an appropriate time value for "2500" and you've got about 50% of the essays I read. And then the student proceeds to warp the work in order to make it fit with contemporary values. Antigone was a feminist. Hamlet is an everyman. The Wife of Bath is Hilary Clinton.

You get the idea.

As much as I caution my students against this, I realize that I may be complicit in this ethos of "appreciation." Because, of course, I do appreciate literature and I want my students to, as well. But I think it's important to remember that this is a mushy and ultimately secondary pedagogical aim. Writing about literature involves analysis and patient argumentation, it is, as Nietzsche reminds us, the slow, fine work of the goldsmith applied to language:

it teaches how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.

One of the results of this slow attention, this training of the inner thought and the delicate fingers and eyes, is appreciation. But appreciation is something that happens (or maybe doesn't happen) alongside the activity of criticism. One need not enjoy Milton in order to attend to him, to exfoliate the densities and ellipticalities of his verse. I think perhaps we would do ourselves a great service in literature classes if we were more aware of how much we let the idea of "appreciation" creep in. People tend to really appreciate (rather than just cyncially perform their appreciation in an assignment) what challenges them, what expands their understanding.

I somehow don't imagine that chemistry teachers, as much as they want their students to enjoy their subject, have "appreciation" at the top of their pedagogical priorities. Neither, I think, should we.

Any thoughts? Any memories of what made a great literature class? I've been thinking a lot about the role of literature in education during my epoch of reflection, and I would love to hear other thoughts. My own shift so frequently and my students are of surprisingly little help (comments on course evaluations range from: "you are nice and funny" to "I hate that sweater you always wear" to "you didn't let us write about 'themes'--what the fuck was I supposed to write about? I hope you get fired" to "you're so funny it hardly felt like going to class" (now there's a dubious compliment!) to "you say 'interesting' too much. God, can't you think of another adjective?")--I am curious what other people think.