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What I Learned From…Reading Infinite Jest

Last semester, I taught a Non-Fiction and Its Process course. Instead of filling the syllabus with a smorgasbord of authors, I assigned the one book of non-fiction I knew well: David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Much to my surprise, the students dug it.

In fact, they dug it so much that a group of them were at least interested in reading Infinite Jest, DFW’s mammoth novel that clocks in at just over a thousand pages. I decided to strike while the iron was hot and wrote a schedule to get through the book over break, set up a Facebook page for an online reading group discussion, and started plugging away.

When the dust settled, six people started the book, two of us actually finished it, and I had learned some important lessons. Here are five of them…

Continue reading “What I Learned From…Reading Infinite Jest”
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True For You

I listened to the recent conversation between Brian Koppelman and Seth Godin during my evening run, and I finally put my finger on the part of their pragmatic approach to getting work done that I can’t hang with.

Early in their discussion, they debate the relative merits of believing Bob Dylan is a genius.

Godin thinks Dylan is a high-level practitioner who got really lucky.

Koppelman thinks Dylan is an artist who operates on a higher-level: a generational talent.

Their conclusion? Believe the truth that works for you. Why?

Because you can hide from doing your own work by telling yourself you’ll never write a song as good as Dylan.

Or because you can hide from your work by getting indignant that Dylan got so lucky and you, who are just as talented, will never get all those breaks.

From their perspective it’s an existential dilemma. We’re confronted with what “is” (Dylan’s voluminous output and public acclaim) and then we have to imbue it with meaning. If that’s the case, the argument goes, why not make sure that the meaning we give it is something that helps us?

The reason I have listened to and read Godin so frequently is because there are elements of truth here: namely that our hearts tend to produce what St. Paul calls “vain imaginations” that further obscure the things we know to be true. We would do well to pay attention to the stories we tell ourselves about the world.

But that’s not the entire story…

Continue reading “True For You”
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Representation: Part 2

As I work toward providing biblical presuppositions for the concept of representation, I read through WJT Mitchell’s really dense essay on the word from Critical Terms in Literary Study. What follows are nine observations about the essay (Mitchell’s main points) followed by three things I think are missing from this model.

  1. The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis). That’s why Mitchell’s essay is the first in the collection.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth.
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication.
  6. Representation has always had its skeptics, from the philosophical (e.g. Plato) to the religious (e.g. any religion that prohibits idols) to the aesthetic (e.g. modernism and its rejection of representational art).
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone.
  8. You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent arbitrarily. Writing is the third of these.
  9. Our theory of representation plays a key role in how we interpret the identity of a work of art, that art’s meaning, the integrity of the author, and the validity of any interpretation of that art.

Here’s what I think Mitchell is missing.

  1. Christ is the representation of the Father. Representation is inscribed into the ontology of the trinity.
  2. Humans are made in the image of God. We are not just defined by the fact that we use representation. Rather, we are representations.
  3. Adam and then Christ represented all humanity. That is, representation is a fundamental part of God’s redemptive narrative.

We must take this into account. Over the next two days, I will work out how these biblical concepts help us make sense of literature.

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A Commitment

During my prayer and reading yesterday, I felt convicted about what I’ve let my writing for the blog become: brief, impressionistic notes on teaching with no really substantive reviews or expanded arguments.

I want that to change.

From here on out, I’ll be writing a single longer essay each week, typically posted on Saturday. My first project for these essays is to write about key terms for literary study from a Christian perspective.

On other days of the week, my writing will continue to summarize or expand something I’m trying to understand and apply in my own discipleship and teaching. My model here is Alan Jacobs’s Snakes and Ladders commonplace book which always points me towards something useful and contains enough of Jacobs’s wonderful ruminations, annotations, and commentary that it’s never just an article aggregator.

I feel God calling me to grow and contribute. I have seen growth in my personal commitment to post here as often as I can over the past month or so. That’s a good start. But I know I’m not growing as a scholar or as a teacher through these postings because I’m never pressing myself to think through an issue more thoroughly. And because I’m not growing, I’m not sure that I’m contributing to anyone sense of how to bring their pedagogy and discipleship together.

I want to be more consistent and coherent (i.e. less arbitrary) in my observations, and I want to work towards something larger rather than just haphazardly pile up a bunch of individual bricks. I feel invigorated by the authors I’ve already read this year on practical discipleship (Mark Dever and Robert Coleman) and pedagogy (Ken Bain) as well as the theologians I’ve picked up (Calvin and David Bentley Hart). God has been very good to me so far in 2019, and I want to make the most of the time and talent He’s given me.

This post is a commitment to making my writing here, through His grace, the most truthful and lively and helpful it can be: all for God’s glory and as a way of enjoying Him more.

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The Opposite

This paragraph appears in the preface of the Christian Worldview Integration Series.

By contrast, the Bible presents faith as a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true. Understood in this way, we see that faith is built on reason and knowledge. We should have good reasons for thinking that Christianity is true before we completely dedicate ourselves to it. We should have solid evidence that our understanding of a biblical passage is correct before
we go on to apply it. We bring knowledge claims from Scripture and
theology to the task of integration; we do not employ mere beliefs or
faith postulates.

Here, Francis Beckwith and J.P. Moreland argue that faith comes out of our knowledge, that because something is reasonable we will believe it.

In other circles I have seen people describe this process as one where faith makes up the gap between what we can know and the truth of the world. Our reason and knowledge may get us 65% there, but faith is able to fill that remaining 35% because it is built on that sure foundation.

The problem is that this is flies in the face of what scriptures teach about all wisdom beginning with the fear of God and our acceptance of facts (e.g. eyewitness accounts of Christ) being less important than revelation. As Augustine argues, faith provides the foundation for reason, not vice versa. We understand because we believe.

Beckwith and Moreland are right to distance themselves from a faith that is inimical to logic and evidence, but the only way we can have confidence in that logic and in the facts we find is because of our ultimate faith in God.

This is an easier point for me to make here than actually consistently live out, so I pray that as I read, talk, and learn I will discover how this crucial distinction has real consequences.

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Spelled Out

This paragraph from Ken Bain’s book on teaching spells out the questions that good teachers ask themselves.

That question breaks into four subquestions, all prominent in
the thinking of the teachers we studied, regardless of their discipline:
(1) Is the material worth learning (and, perhaps, appropriate
to the curriculum)? (2) Are my students learning what the course is
supposedly teaching? (3) Am I helping and encouraging the students
to learn (or do they learn despite me)? (4) Have I harmed my
students (perhaps fostering short-term learning with intimidation
tactics, discouraging rather than stimulating additional interest in
the field, fostering strategic or bulimic rather than deep learning,
neglecting the needs of a diverse student population, or failing to
evaluate students’ learning accurately)?

From What the Best College Teachers Do

I would like to ask these questions each Saturday during a scheduled planning period as I assess my week’s work and then use the questions to help me plan what I’ll be doing the next week.

This week, my Intro to Lit students are learning about poetry and my Brit Lit students are studying the epic.

Just from asking these questions about my lessons tomorrow, I changed my focus on how to address memorizing a poem. I want to make sure that students see the real point of the exercise: their living with a poem for a longer time than they would if they simply wrote a paper about it or read it from a book 10 times. In order to recite it well, they will have had to dwell with the poem for a week or so. Because this having dwelt with the work is the hallmark of any good interpretation, I’ve come up for a way to practice it without writing another paper about “Stopping By Woods…” My prayer is that they will learn something about meditating on God’s word as well, the way that constant thought and reflection on certain words can help them remain with you throughout the day.

I’m excited about continuing to think through these questions and to use them to better contribute to my students’ growth as readers, writers, and disciples.

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Poetry and God

“When St. Philip asked our Lord to ‘show us the Father’ (John 14:8), he was an example of what St. Anselm called ‘faith seeking understanding.’”

From Father George Rutler

Today, we start looking at poetry in my Intro to Lit course. I typically have students survey five or six poems about God and love respectively as they start to get a feel for how to read a poem.

Fresh off of a class about interpretation and paradigms, the poems we look at today concerning God should get some discussion started. Poetry intensifies our interpretations of and emotional reaction to the world. These poems are pitched high emotionally as they seek understanding about some aspect of God.

In “Batter My Heart,” John Donne feels trapped. The fact that he needs God means that he needs God to help him do what’s right. If he good choose God on his own, he wouldn’t need God in the first place. Donne is intensifying language from the Old and New testaments, from the laments of the Psalms and some of Paul’s most despairing cries in Romans.

In “Love (iii)” George Herbert offers an allegory for the gospel. Christ offers the speaker a chance to eat with him. While the speaker finds himself unworthy to either be a guest, the Lord offers grace and love in the form of food and fellowship.

In “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” William Blake reflects on how different creatures reflect their creator. If God is like the lamb, then we see Jesus. If God is like the tiger, then he is terrifying.

In “Battle Hymn of the Republic” Julia Ward Howe gives us a God who actively participates in human affairs and, with war-like proficiency, advances His cause on the earth.

Finally, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tries to not only represent but give us the experience of witnessing God’s beauty in nature.

I’m excited to see if one of these poems resonates with my students more than others. We’ll spend time on Donne and Blake, but I will call for them to re-examine Herbert and Hopkins in light of our discussion.

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Assessment

To make learning-based assessment work, the best teachers try to
find out as much as possible about their students…

From What the Best College Teachers Do

Early this semester, I’ve done two things to help me gain crucial information about my students. The first is that I’ve offered extra credit for filling out an information sheet. The sheet contained the following questions:

  • What are three things you believe are true?
  • If you were given an unplanned Saturday to do with as you please, how would you spend your time?
  • What is the high school or college course you’ve benefited the most from? Explain.
  • Who are three people in your life whose advice you listen to? What advice have they given you that you cherish?
  • What are the two most important ways you’ve grown as a person in the last year?
  • What’s your favorite story? Why?
  • How are you currently contributing to the lives of your family members, friends, or neighbors?
  • What do you hope to learn in this class?

In the future, this will simply be a quiz grade, rather than extra credit. These are the kinds of questions that I want from every student, not just the overachievers.

The next thing I’ve done is give every student I’m teaching this first-week writing assignment:

Write yourself a letter dated May 10, 2019 and address it to me. Begin “Dear Dr. Sircy, I got my ‘A’ because…’” then tell me what you will have done to earn your ‘A.’

I’ve only read a few of them, but it may be one of my favorite reading experiences ever. Students are telling me (with more or less detail) what they think they’ll need to do to succeed. With only two classes under our belts, they don’t really have a sense of me as a grader or the exact nature of the work they’ll be asked to perform. It’s cool to see what they’re thinking about their own emotional and intellectual abilities and how they can put them to work this semester.

I pray this will contribute to better assessment on my part. I certainly feel like I know these students better after just one week. Of course, assessment is just one part of the Christian teacher’s gig. I’m praying their souls as well and their growth as disciples. Through the information questions I ask as well as the “I got an ‘A'” assignment, I’m trying to suss out where they’re at in terms of their faith and how that faith interacts with their educational goals. I pray that I don’t forget this part of my task.

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Critical Thinking Applied: Part 3

Discriminating between observation and inference, between
established fact and subsequent conjecture.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

As I work through this checklist of critical thinking skills from Ken Bain’s book, I’m struck by how literature courses, through their focus on interpretation, can get at the thorny distinction between observation and inference.

For my quizzes this semester, I’ve been giving metaphors to identify and unpack. Yesterday, my metaphor came from the Sherlock Holmes short story: “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

“He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen…”

This is Watson describing his detective friend. Students wanted to make “machine” into “computer” or some kind of processing device, an interpretation of the metaphor that would clash with its 1891 publication date.

So we have two facts: the story came out in 1891 and Watson has called Holmes a machine.

The next part is inference: what does the word “machine” refer to?

Continue reading “Critical Thinking Applied: Part 3”
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Imagination

“I’m not imaginative,” says the diehard sports fan who just watched the Tigers of Clemson battle the Tide of Alabama (who have an elephant mascot) in a football game.

The rules of football are arbitrary. You can’t use empirical reasoning to explain why a field is 100 yards, each team can only have eleven men on the field on any play, or a touchdown is worth six points. It’s a game. Those are just the game’s rules.

This does not mean that the effects of the game aren’t real. People tear ligaments in their knee in the game’s middle, show themselves able to throw the ball measurable distances during regulation p;lay, and trade their success at this particular game for lots of money. The imaginative space of the football field reveals real things about the world: most importantly, mental and physical strength. Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco was a laboratory on Monday night where players from Clemson and Alabama worked out a debate about who was national champion, not “in nature” but through a controlled experiment. On this day and at this time, these two teams played and the result was final. In this particular experiment, Clemson was superior.

And oh the joy! There’s a lot of emotional and economic resources tied up in the success of both of these teams. I live about 20 minutes away from Clemson, and it’s a huge deal that they’ve just won their second national championship on Monday night. What strikes me is that the same person who is fanatically devoted to this team and will show up for the parade and wear the t-shirt and generally crow over any other college football team is the same one who will tell me, “I don’t like fiction because it’s made up.”

So is sports. Yet sports isn’t a lie. It’s an experiment in imagination. Literature isn’t a lie either. It’s a laboratory for the heart where we go to find experiments in ways of interpreting the world and how we feel about it. We can use our reason inside this lab, but the experiment begins with us exercising our imagination. Everyone can do that much.