When’s the last time you picked up a book and finished it
the same day?
It had been awhile for me, but Saturday I started and stayed
up late to complete Ron Rash’s Saints at
the River.
Even better? I plan on teaching the book, so I’m thrilled
that it’s such a page-turner.
The hook for me was its setting: Tamassee, SC, which is only
a 45-minute drive from campus.
In the same way that I want books to occasionally confuse me so I can remember what it’s like when you don’t know what to do with a book, it’s great to have a book suck me in so that I don’t really care about the paper you would write because the story is so compelling. Too often, my head outweighs my heart. This novel won over my heart, and my head followed.
As I wade through a pile of papers during finals week, I’m constantly in search of good body paragraphs built around close, insightful readings of the novel or play or poem under consideration.
When the pickings are slim, I gain sustenance from what I imagine is a typical source of comfort for literature professors, this paragraph from Rob Sheffield’s wonderful book Dreaming the Beatles where he details what Paul McCartney gets wrong in the song, “My Love.”
“My Love” is a fascinating disaster, if you happen to love Paul, because it’s a string of very un-Paul-like mistakes. He forgets all the Paul tricks he knows better than anyone else ever has. In fact, he goes so wrong here breaking his own rules, it’s an index of everything he usually gets right. His lifelong attention to pronouns fails him—this is a love ballad where the word “you” does not appear, nor do “she” or “her,” not even “we.” It’s all “I,” “me,” “my.” You can’t call this a rookie mistake since rookies know better, mostly because rookies are imitating Paul. So he wrote a love song and left out the woman; he also invited an orchestra, without giving them anything to play. He adds a colossally terrible guitar solo, when the track’s already way too long (four minutes, practically a minute per word). Not his own guitar solo: he lets a sideman barge in to make this butt-ugly (and no doubt sincerely self-expressive) noise. A ghastly sax solo would have made a certain sense, but this is a bluesy guitar solo, with no place in a lounge ballad like this.”
It begins with a nice debatable claim (i.e. “This song is a clunker, albeit one that clunks for intriguing reasons”), and follows it up with a brilliant analysis of the song’s pronouns. Of all the evidence Sheffield could give, I think his observation that “you” or “she” never appears in the song is so smart. He then develops this observation in a witty sentence: “he wrote a love song and left out the woman.” Sheffield never leaves a song half-analyzed, and in the remaining half of the song, he articulates what’s wrong with the song’s orchestration and guitar solo. It’s a new kind of evidence, and it receives its own development.
If Sheffield can muster up this kind of insight about a song just to show how poor it is, how much more should we be able to articulate the beauty of God’s truth both in our explication of scripture and in the books we’ve read that demand further unpacking.
On the final day of class last week, I had students read Arthur Holmes’s classic statement on Christian education: “All truth is God’s truth.”
It forced me to try and articulate for my students the truth I felt we had discovered together in our literature and writing courses. I realized that if I began and ended the course with Holmes’s statement, I probably would have had a good litmus test for what to emphasize and omit over the course of the semester. I tend to be so fixated on tactics that I forget to reiterate the deeper reason for the tactics. In other words, I err on the side of teaching students efficiency rather than effectiveness.
If the goal is to discover and learn the truth about the world, we’ll have a different orientation to reading and writing.
The basic premises of a Christian orientation to literature and writing are that:
When we reading and interpret books, we exercise an aspect of God’s image in our lives and find a concrete place to see the gap between ourselves and our maker (i.e. our interpretations are limited and prone to error).
Thus, reading provides us a place to discover truth (facts) and meaning (interpretation) about God’s world. Literature allows us to access those facts and interpretations in a different, and potentially more powerful, way then descriptive prose.
When we write, we engage in a special form of communication that God used to reveal Himself to humanity.
Thus, writing provides a means to more truthfully and faithfully think God’s thoughts after Him.
If I kept coming back to these points and used literature to illustrate them, I would give students a more affective relationship to the idea that all truth is God’s truth. It’s not enough to know or repeat this. This idea should be formative. As I consider that statement’s effect on my life, I will be more able to convey its important to my students so that their own wisdom begins with a proper relationship to God and truth.
Our university’s ENGL 101 course focuses on writing about literature. After writing about assigned poems, short stories, plays, and a novel, students get to pick the novel they’ll write their final paper about.
In order to let each student share what they learned, I let them present their project to their peers and me on the final day of class. I did make a subtle change this semester. Rather than having the presentation include complex analysis, I insisted it only feature three things: the novel’s title, the project’s thesis, and whether or not the presenter would recommend the novel and why. The recommendation section was my new wrinkle. I wanted to see if students would ride hard for the books they wrote or insist that their classmates stay away.
One of my ENGL 101 sections reveling in their post-presentation freedom…
Do you know how many of my students recommended the novel they read? Every. Single. One. 100%.
From adult classics (Pride and Prejudice) to YA staples (The Fault in our Stars), from romances (Even Now) to dystopian morality tales (1984), from the allegorical (The Shack) to the horrifying (It), the students told their classmates to read whatever book they had. In some cases, students were already reading the book over again. This was their fourth or fifth time through the book.
This wasn’t my doing. I didn’t tell them they had to like the book the picked. I fully expected the ones who picked high school English staples like The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird to find the books boring or ineffective. On the contrary, they found the books more compelling and more insightful.
We’ll see if this necessarily translates into stronger papers, but for today, it didn’t matter. The biggest delight was seeing and hearing their delight.
In the opening chapter of his Self-Consuming Artifacts, Stanley Fish distinguishes between rhetoric and dialectic.
While rhetoric “satisfies” readers that “mirror[s] and present[s] for approval the opinions its readers already hold”, dialectic is unsettling for it “requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by.” Fish adds that a dialectical work does not simply proclaim the truth “but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves.”
This made me wonder what the dialectical books in my own reading history had been, works that had challenged the assumptions of my worldview and had motivated me to seek truth in a new way. I came up with short list that follows (note: I’m omitting the Bible, the book of books that stands as the primary lens through which I view the world).
They include:
Cornelius Van Til’s apologetical work, particularly as excerpted and commented on in Greg Bahnsen’s Van Til’s Apologetic
James K. A. Smith’s view of educational formation in Desiring the Kingdom
Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality in The Genealogy of Morals
Northrop Frye’s approach to literary criticism (it can be pursued with science rigor) and literary evaluation (it’s worthless) in Anatomy of Criticism
James Baldwin’s scathing look at the complicity of the Christian church in America’s troubled history with race in The Fire Next Time
C.S. Lewis’s representation of academic moral cowardice in That Hideous Strength
David Foster Wallace’s examination of addiction and depression in Infinite Jest
I picked up Austin Kleon’s book Keep Going over the weekend. It’s a manual for staying creative in the face of success and failure. His first recommendation is a daily practice, a set of habits that you can maintain no matter what.
Here are what my current daily practices look like:
At this time a year ago, I was finishing up my final year at Charleston Southern University. Because I had accepted my new gig at Southern Wesleyan in March, I had a month to say goodbye to everyone who had made my time at CSU so special. This included not only colleagues but students too. Before I left, I sent the students who had meant something to me an email asking for a conversation piece. It said this:
Before I hoof it up I-26 to the upstate (it’s happening this week!), I wanted to ask you for something to remember you by: a particular poem, song, novel, video game, graphic novel, tv show, movie, food type product—you get the idea—that you think I should check out but that I either don’t know exists or haven’t made time for. Some of you have already given me elaborate playlists, and now particular songs from Hamilton and Fall Out Boy’s Mania are inextricably connected with you forever and ever Amen. This is a good thing! I wouldn’t have listened to either of them without the two of you, tbh, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
You each will be in my prayers, and I will do my dead-level best to keep up with you. Commiserating over the too-good-to-pass-up deliciousness of Market Pantry Fiddle Faddle will be an excuse to say hey. (Note: I don’t know if Target makes good fiddle faddle. That’s just a made-up example, but you get the kind-of point, right?)
This week, I made my way back through some of the emails and listened to the song below that had been recommended from one of my fave non-English major students. It gave me an excuse to pray for the student, reach out and say hello, and give thanks that I get to do what I do for a living, where an ongoing personal connection can be made over books and writing and education and discipleship. I’m blessed.
This week, I graded my freshmen’s analyses of short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.
Making my way through them, I felt two things: disappointment in the students’ readings and deep respect for Lahiri’s stories to withstand those poor readings and actually become deeper and more well-constructed than I had thought. I kept going back to the stories to see if they had the evidence that I felt was lacking in the students’ papers. Not only was the evidence there, it was always aesthetically handled. The stories were so much richer than the students were giving them credit for.
I thought of Zadie Smith’s line about reading as a way of playing a piece of music. You want your playing to match the beauty of the piece that’s been written. Here, to borrow a David Foster Wallace line, it appeared my students were being handed a piece fit for a Stradivarius and were using their glorious instrument to hammer nails.
True, violins can make nails go deeper into the surface you want them to go into…but it’s not efficient and it permanently damages the violin so that when you want to actually play music with it, you’re lost.
But in the midst of those feelings, I wondered about my own reading of scriptures. I believe that it’s true that God’s word always accomplishes its work, whether it brings us closer to God through the work of the Holy Spirit or confirms in our cold response to it just how much we need God. If I was honest about the way I read and used scripture on a day to day basis, I think I would be hammering away at nails with something far more valuable than a Stradivarius.
I pray for the wisdom to read God’s words well even more than I pray for my students to gain the ability to read a short story well. More than that, I pray for the power to live it out after reading it well.
As I work toward providing biblical presuppositions for the term “writing,” I read through Barbara Johnson’s essay on the word from Critical Terms in Literary Study. What follows are ten observations about the essay (Johnson’s main points).
I have learned that teaching doctrine and teaching obedience are two very different things.
From Contagious Disciple Making
I read Paul and David Watson’s amazing book Contagious Disciple Making this week and left with this insight into teaching: I can say all the right things as a teacher, but if I don’t do them myself my students will not listen.
The doctrines in English lit are clarity and concision, a commitment to revision, and a desire to interpret the world in a way consistent with your faith.
This is so much easier to say than do.
God, help me to do all of this: not just in my reading and my reading but in my personal interactions with each of my students.
