Why Do I Teach?

A short answer:  I don't.  (Not currently.)

A slightly longer answer:  I'm good at it.  (When I do.)

And another:  I'm not good at anything else.

The tenor of the debate elsewhere leads me to believe people will find these answers inadequate.  There is truth in satisfaction, however, and when I teach, I feel intensely satisfied with myself as a human being.  I could've gone into real estate appraisal—not kidding in the least—but I doubt helping people inflate or deflate the value of their current or future property would satisfy me the way teaching has.  (Esp. considering what would have been my complicity in the sub-prime mortgage debacle.  Better not to think about the attendant guilt that would've haunted me day and night had I had a part in that.)  What do I find satisfying? 

The burgeoning awareness of theretofore unthinkable possibilities.  In this respect, I side with Dr. Crazy against Kugelmass concerning statements like this:

Expanding your world, or changing your view of the world, is not something I associate with becoming more likably bourgeois. One cannot expand into narrowness.

Some have attributed this attitude to teaching at UCI, but I think the disagreement more intellectual, inasmuch as I think the path to financial independence in the United States still flows soundly through the middle class, and that the ability to appreciate the works Joe reads and teaches requires an amount of leisure time difficult to secure outside of the middle class.  Not to say impossible—as Joe writes, students can cram thirty-eight hours a day into their weekendless weeks, but I don't think that situation ideal. 

Consider this in terms of scholarships and grants: the appearance of culture and strong writing skills can provide a student a quarter reprieve from what becomes a cycle of inevitable failure.  Those devoted students who work full-time through college drop-out at a higher rate than those with scholarships; and those who slave through five rough years never experience the life-of-mind the same way their wealthier or financed classmates can.  (Not that either of the latter group necessarily take advantage of this, only that they have an opportunity denied to those fully employed throughout their undergraduate career.)  So if I can teach a student how to appear more culture, score a scholarship, and embrace the life-of-mind in a way they couldn't before, I might be making them more bourgeois, but I'm also (and more importantly) affording them the opportunity to become much more than that.

Am I romanticizing the upper classes here?  Certainly not.  I'm speaking neither to nor of them.  I'm talking about providing students with the tools required to reach the fringes of financial independence—not by aping the pretensions of imaginary middle class ideals, but (as Dr. Crazy wrote) to allow them to pass among its citizens and fool its gatekeepers.  It is in this sense that I find teaching literature most subversive: all the supposedly indelible markers of class can be wiped from our souls with a little learning. 

Such are the straits through which one must pass in order to appreciate the more radical appeal of literature.  One can expand into narrowness, as when you sail through the Drake Passage.  Behind you the Atlantic Ocean, before you the Pacific.  South America is to your right, Antarctica to your left, but the water beneath you is so turbulent sailors consider the Strait of Magellan the saner route.  You may be boxed in, but only momentarily—the Pacific will open ahead shortly, and when it does, the efficient cause will matter less than the final.

I realize I haven't addressed literature per se except to compare it to inhospitable seas.  That isn't altogether true.  (Esp. as it invalidates all else I've written tonight.)  But there's an element of truth to it I'll need another night or three to identify.  In the meantime, please critique what I've written tonight.  (And feel free to be harsh, as I'm going to have to write my Teaching Philosophy out someday soon.)

UPDATED (ALREADY, TWO MINUTES PAST POSTING, FOR I AM INDECISIVE):  I'm unsatisfied with this in the extreme, but incapable of doing better this evening.  I should've talk more about literature but didn't because I'm a half-wit.  More later.

Comments

[SEK]

Rich:

You write that your friends are now on the cusp of the middle class, and in fact have more time for free reading than you do. You write that you want to give people like your friends a shot at success. That presumes that you've succeeded, and they have only after a long struggle, or anyways that people like them might not. Is that true?

Not to be pessimistic or anything -- but what if you turn out to be one of the people who only gets an adjunct job? Did your friends fall into traps, or did you? If you look at it purely as a matter of income, I'd guess that the average lit-grad-student-type makes less than the average equally smart, equally ambitious never-finished-college type.

Long quotation, short answer: they're miserable, I'm not. I gauge success in terms with wanting to wake up in the morning. Despite all that's happened to me, I still want to do that. They don't. I'm not sure whether that's the best measure of success, but it's at least as accurate as the GDP.

(Still working on the rest of the responses. Be back shortly.)

[Anastasia]

"Some have attributed this attitude to teaching at UCI, but I think the disagreement more intellectual"

Maybe this is a quibble and I'll preface this by saying I like the tenor of your post and I like that you've called the activity subversive.....I'm just not sure why you're opposing reference to context and "intellectual" in the sentence I've quoted above. What is anti-intellectual about acknowledging that the location in which one teaches has some effect on how one views the teaching of literature? Just as much as one's own educational background would? Not that such things are the sum but they do mean something.

I appreciated your comment outlining your own experience because I think it clarifies your position.

[metaleptic]

Rose's argument, as summarized, reminds me of Marx & Engels (where, exactly?): their amazement/delight at the sturdy English craftsmen making their way through Milton and other national classics.....oh, &, since Bourdieu's been invoked several times already, I'll just say that the overall terms of the debate here and at the Valve (and elsewhere?) seems to me to revolve around the question of autonomy: the autonomy of literary studies within the university, and the autonomy of the literary field in general....

[scrumptious]

My story may be an example of Scott's reasoning, if I am understanding it correctly. I confess I may not be doing so.

I was a product of the '60s, where I learned a whole lot from first hand experience plus hanging around (and reading books by) really smart, creative people. College was, well, just more bad information as far as I was concerned. Factor in the fact that - like many of my communard friends - I grew up with the advantages of an upper-middle class lifestyle, including, yes, a good education.

Fast forward: after several years in a "traditional" marriage, I found myself a 30-year-old single mother with no marketable job skills to speak of.

Then I took a trip to Europe with my mom. Boy, did my perspective change.

With the encouragement of my family, I entered the university as a full-time student, with the vague notion of maybe getting a teaching credential at the end. But really? I saw it as an entry into the larger world, where if nothing else, I could become a literate member of society.

Yes, having a family that valued education for the sake of knowledge made the difference. Is it a class/cultural thing? I don't know. I do know that I probably wouldn't have had the courage to choose school at that stage of my life if I'd only listened to my practical and well-meaning friends.

But what a thrill it was to sit in a classroom at that age, with that life experience behind you, and discuss literature and history and political theory and art criticism and .... oh my gosh, what a luxury it felt like, every day.

Did I work? You bet - no one supported me. Cleaned houses, cashiered at the campus bookstore, took every oddball summer job I could find.

Anyway, I ended up going to law school. Yes, I saw it as vocational training, a way to give my son and myself a better lifestyle. And it was a real grind...nothing like the stimulation and adventure of my undergraduate years.

So I don't know whose theories might be proven by my choices. I will say that I ended up with a career in an area that allowed me to explore and translate novel ideas into practical forms on a regular basis (no litigating or administrative stuff, thank goodness). And I got to hang around extremely smart, interesting people.

And now I've retired while still in my '50s. I feel like I still have a "shot at success" on a few different levels.

I hope this was not too personal, Scott.

[Andrew]

Re: Jonathan Rose. Be wary. He is, without exaggeration, a right-wing ideologue. Let's take two examples:

1) In a book review for Victorian Studies he notes: "That is why these new literary scholars are so refreshing. They treat capitalism like sex: as a fact of life. The profit motive may be express itself differently in different cultures, but it is a universal human appetite."

2)He publishes in City Journal, a Manhattan Institute organ. In doing research on Rose I encountered an article called something like "Shakespeare in the Slums," in which he argued, like some sort of Oxbridge Bill Cosby, that what inner-city African Americans really need is to develop a love of Shakespeare (as a mechanism of self-empowerment rather than, say, in tandem with the fruits of robust public education).

These two examples are mere context for a range of problematic and dubious methodological practices and argumentative assumptions he makes throughout his work. These include his taking of select autodidacts (generally memoirists) as exemplary of "working class" readers, while strategically eliding contrary facts. For example, he uses the writings of Samuel Bamford, a Lancashire weaver, to demonstrate how a common reader was lead through Milton to other texts. Yet what Rose’s argument precludes him from discussing is that Bamford became a figure reviled by the radical working class, and died “a lonely and bitter conservative” (as one reviewer of Rose's work notes).

I could go on. I had a grad seminar with a conservative, anti-theory professor who adored Rose. I did some research and ended up writing a critique of Rose (the prof gave me a crappy mark, for a grad paper, which I appealed and won). The mere fact that Rose accepts the published autobiographies and memoirs of so-called "common readers" as exemplary of some reifed "working class" is problematic in itself; this not withstanding that Rose doesn't take any of these "common" readers seriously as readers, as such. He merely marshals their existence to demonstrate, contra Eagleton at his most polemical, that canonical works were not instruments of class oppression.

Rose is a very dubious source.