For the first time in my teaching career, I’m typing up something like final remarks for my courses. I’ll be sharing them over the next few days. I gave a slightly modified version of the following remarks yesterday in my Intro to Lit course.
It has been difficult for me to see many of you struggle with this course. When I taught a version of this course at Charleston Southern University in the spring, I had 24 students, and while I had students who struggled, I also didn’t have the luxury to look at multiple drafts or give wholesale revision opportunities. It was tough to tell whether or not it was the students, the material, my teaching or some combination of all them. The answer is all three, and I’ve had the chance to see that play itself out this semester.
I care deeply about you and about this class because I do believe that all truth is God’s truth and that we are able to access truths about how to feel and interpret the world through our imaginations in a way that we can’t through logic. Of course, that means there’s a balance, and your assignments in this course asked you to be more logical and analytical about the imaginative truths you found in poetry, short stories, drama, and novels.
The insight Joya gave during her presentation on Tuesday—the fact that you should not love someone just for themselves but as a way of honoring God—can be preached in a sermon, encapsulated in a motivational quotation you encounter on Facebook or Twitter, or discovered through the trial and error of your real life experience. But Joya got there through a story: a novel. Not because someone had laid out a logical case for it and she, after twenty hours of deliberation and hearing both sides, finally assented, but because in some key way the novel helped her feel it.
Logic and emotion are not mutually exclusive. The reason we know what Joya found is true is because it’s supported by the Bible and experience and the logical coherence of loving what is best first and the scientific insights of psychology. Literature does not give access to truth in defiance of other disciplines. It just gets there a different way and because it taps into our emotions and gives us a story to remember and mull over, it does so more powerfully.
We’ve got one English major in here, but you need the insights that the course provides, just as surely as English majors can benefit from an accounting or biology course. I pray you keep reading. I pray you keep writing. If you found something that moves you, that you felt gave you access to truth, please let me know. If you write something where you feel like you were able to articulate for yourself something true, please send it on. Literature provides a difficult pleasure, but it is a deep one. I hope that if you have not felt it this semester, that you will.
I look forward to reading your papers and final exams and seeing what you learned.
Be well and do good work.