Books for the fall: With reflections on the academic vocation

This fall, I’m scheduled to teach one course, Social Sciences I (and audit a course for training purposes). The books I have on my desk for course prep are as follows:

• Benedict, Patterns of Culture
• Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis and New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
• Durkheim, On Suicide
• Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
• The Marx-Engels Reader
• James, Psychology: The Briefer Course
• Gilligan, In a Different Voice

It will be great to get to read a lot of the texts and authors that I “should’ve” read, and also to teach the ones I already know. I imagine that I’ll be continuing to focus on new courses next year so that Shimer can ensure that I’m adequately flexible, and so I will continue to get a chance to expand and deepen my knowledge of what one might call “great books.”

To me, this highlights one reason people want to go into academia, a reason that can often get buried among many other legitimate concerns — we want to know stuff. By no means is an academic career the only or even necessarily the best way to know stuff, but it is certainly a really good way to attain that goal. Anyone can be an avid reader, but there are relatively few people who are paid to read books and talk about them with people.

When we’re in grad school, there’s this pressure to somehow know everything already or at least appear to — but there’s no substitute for just steadily reading over the course of your life, adding new books to your repertoire and returning to old ones. It seems so obvious when I say it, but it’s only in the last couple years that I was able to step outside the grad student “panic mode” and reflect on the magnitude of having an entire life to study this stuff.

Practical politics, the classroom, and the “academic left”: Some scattered thoughts

My post on Obama was obviously unpopular, as I knew it would be. Brad pointed out to me that one galling aspect of it was the idea that realism about political constraints should result in “sympathy.” While my use of that word was determined by my desire to pun on “Sympathy for the Devil,” I have honestly felt some genuine sympathy for political leaders in general as a result of my experience in the classroom.

What I’ve increasingly learned is that I do not completely control the outcomes in the classroom, even though I am ultimately held responsible for them. This has been particularly vivid at Shimer, where two sections of the same class can be vastly, vastly different — starting from the very first day. My classes are undoubtedly different than they would have been had one of my other colleagues taught them, and probably different in fairly consistent ways, but the way the class actually turns out depends on the complex interactions of all the personalities and expectations of the the people in each particular section.

Inside Higher Ed articles

This morning, Inside Higher Ed published pieces by me and Virgil Brower on the importance of the Great Books approach to education.

Fantasy Electives

It is slowly dawning on me that I could, in theory, teach an elective on virtually any topic I want at Shimer College. I’ll be teaching in the core curriculum across the humanities and social sciences, so presumably my elective offerings (though less frequent) would only be bound by student interest and my ability to convince my colleagues I’m capable of doing it. This has provided a lot of fodder for reflection while walking the dog, and I would like to share some results with you.

Grading as performative speech act

In my feminist theology class last year, I had occasion to explain the notion of performative speech acts to them. I used the standard examples: an oath exists simply by virtue of someone swearing an oath, the act of getting married consists of saying “I do” (under the appropriate circumstaces), etc.

And then it occurred to me — their grades are performative speech acts as well. They get the grades they get by virtue of me, the recognized instructor of the course, saying that’s what they get.

Brainstorming for an elective on Being and Time

Yesterday in my Humanities 4 class, we went over Hegel’s analysis of Antigone from the Phenomenology. The students had not all had Hegel before (though he shows up elsewhere in the core curriculum), and though I tried to prepare them beforehand by giving them a sense of what he was doing in the section, it was obviously still rough going. We ultimately wound up diagramming the first page, which summarizes his whole analysis, in order to provide a skeleton on which we could hang the Antigone-related material, and then dipping into selected passages of the text and reading them closely.

To me, it was a close approximation of my ideal — we didn’t “cover” all the material (though the students hopefully could all relate “what Hegel thinks about Antigone” in a schematic way by the end), but we did work on how to read the thing. And that in turn made me excited for an elective that I’m planning on offering in the next couple years, over Heidegger’s Being and Time, in which we are just going to read it — and read it hard.

Against ideas: On Crime and Punishment

I just finished teaching Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in my literature class, surely an endurance marathon for student and teacher alike. Perhaps this is what made the epilogue, which depicts Raskolnikov’s first step toward redemption (as mediated by the love of a good woman), such a let-down — after spending so much time in Raskolnikov’s twisted head, surely we deserved something more.

Yet the argument could also be made that the epilogue is totally superfluous, that everything has been decided by the time Raskolnikov finds himself compelled (in part by the “peer pressure” of Sonya) to confess his crime. We can already see Sonya’s dedication to him and her role in his redemption. We have verified Porfiry’s claim that the confession would take the police by surprise, leading us to trust his claim that the sentence will be merciful. And we also know that Raskolnikov is going to continue to be a total jerk about the whole thing for as long as humanly possible. What does the epilogue add, other than the sentimental satisfaction of learning that Dunya and Razumikhin get married?

Even more important, to me, is what the epilogue takes away, insofar as it attempts to narrate what is not narratable.

Teaching “theory”: On not being prepared

We have come to that segment of the humanities capstone course that treats of “theory” — that body of dense, allusive work that has dominated the intellectual culture of the academic humanities for the last several decades. This body of work is, famously, “difficult.” It is written in a style that is uncommon in the English-speaking world, and the fact that it is translated can often represent a special obstacle. It also has a tendency to refer to a lot of things that an undergraduate has not yet had a chance to read in any detail.

It seems that there are a couple strategies that students use to try to cope with this body of work, or rather fantasies they have about what would make it easier.

To-do list

This week I’ve been on spring break. Though one might think that would be especially propitious for blogging, my production levels this week tell a different story, as I’ve spent much of my break either “spring cleaning” at home or getting a bit ahead of the curve on grading and class prep. Both those tasks are necessary and satisfying in their own way, but they aren’t particularly inspiring.

Yet it has inspired me to daydream about summer vacation and all the amazing things I will accomplish.

Resistence to Interpretation

One difficulty I’ve faced this semester teaching literature is the tendency for students to be skeptical of interpretation as such. It seems that for some students, there comes a point where analysis crosses an uncanny threshold, straining credulity even though every individual step seemed plausible at the time. I’m not talking about outlandish speculative claims about allegorical significance, but claims “internal” to texts — the parallels, the repeated imagery, the layers of internal self-reference.

What is going on with this dismissiveness? It may be related to the tendency, particularly when discussing poems, to claim that we should “just enjoy” them without weighing them down with analysis — a claim that shows itself to be incoherent when you realize that it’s perfectly natural, not a foreign imposition, to ask, “Okay, well why did you enjoy it?” — but not entirely identical.