The Record of a Lifelong Learner and Disciple
I continue to deliberate on fascinating problems to present my students with rather than a series of facts with which to stuff them.
My next series of questions come from the first real chapter of Literature Through the Eyes of Faith. I’ve put together question with examples from scripture, everyday life, and literature as possible test case answers. You can find the questions and answers after the jump.
Continue reading “Introduction to Literature: More Fascinating Questions”I’ve been thinking a lot this week about this Ken Bain tweet.
So what are some fascinating problems I can bring my students before I try to stuff them with facts?
After reading the introduction to Literature Through the Eyes of Faith today, I think I have found one for my introduction to literature course.
[S]tories can bring things to your attention in such a way that you might begin to think differently about something and then go on to act on these new thoughts in a very concrete way. Reading texts enables us to participate in life, not to escape it…
From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith
I brought this quotation from Gallagher and Lundin into class to urge my students to think through something important to them as they wrote their first papers about Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories. My example of how they might do this, however, was not personal. It came from a place of judgment. Many of them were writing about the sexual infidelity in Lahiri’s story “Sexy,” and I urged them to think about how that story might cause them to examine their own romantic commitments.
While this was not entirely unfounded, it missed the larger point. It was pedantic. It was tone-deaf. Most of all, it didn’t model for them the type of introspection I pray that they would have.
The irony is that I had a personal example sitting right in front of me.
For this first unit, I’ve revised a paper on Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House,” which concerns a newly married couple. As I’ve read and written about the story, I’ve realized it’s really about the part of us that wishes our significant other were just like us. The story’s protagonist Sanjeev cannot see the world from his wife’s point of view. It’s only at the end of the story that he realizes what she brings to his life, that it’s actually a good thing that she’s not a copy of him because he’s able to be strong where she’s weak and she’s able to be strong where he’s weak.
My worst times as a husband have been where I wished that Britt would simply be like me. When I’m loving her well, I’m letting her be who God made her and rejoicing in that. It’s a good thing she’s not like me! I have strengths, and so does she. Writing about Lahiri’s story is a great reminder of that.
This is what Gallagher and Lundin are gesturing towards. Literature does not take us out of life. It puts us in contact with life if we’re willing to be vulnerable enough to look in the mirror. I pray that I will keep looking and modeling for my students what that looking entails.
I’ve been working this week on a view of representation that takes into account Christian presuppositions. You can find my earlier posts here and here.
In what follows I respond to the nine points made by WJT Mitchell in his essay on the topic for the Critical Terms in Literary Study volume. I put his points in italics and mine in bold. The point is to sketch out ways in which the Christian description and deployment of the term “representation” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.
The core of Christian theological aesthetics is the religious experience of reestablished communion with God, mediated in this case by aesthetic structures which create, facilitate or sometimes even require a triune meeting between the work of literary art, the spiritually awakened human person, and the divine life of God revealed by faith and reason.
From Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice
In their book on Christianity and literature, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet argue that Christians experience the communion above through literature when they apprehend the true, good, and beautiful in what they read.
At the core of this experience is mimesis, literature’s imitation or representation of human life.
Jeffrey and Maillet spend an entire chapter arguing for a correspondence view of truth over and against coherence and pragmatic views. The correspondence view holds that a verbal statement is true insofar as it corresponds with external reality. The way that literature’s “fiction” can claim truth is through aesthetics, its participation in the expression of the beautiful.
Beauty is an important theological concept, one that is not ultimately subjective but, as they argue, “is intrinsically linked, inseparably interdependent, with the intellectual truth and moral beauty existent within the life and presence of the Christian God.”
All this is crucial to explaining to my students what literature is and how it fits into God’s work in the world.
My next two questions are this: what are the biblical presuppositions undergirding literature’s use of representation (conceptual), and what are some concrete ways I could teach these abstract ideas (pedagogical)?
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.
Here’s what I think Mitchell is missing.
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.
Consciously raising the questions “What do we know . . . ? How do we know…? Why do we accept or believe . . . ? What is the evidence for . . . ?” when studying some body of material or approaching a problem.
From What the Best College Teachers Do
In his chapter on what the best college teachers expect from their students, Ken Bain gives a list of ten things the best professors use to assess critical thinking.
In my introduction to literature courses this week, I will be asking them why we turn to fiction to help us understand the truth. Part of my case to them will be the fact that Christ’s parables were certainly not standard features of Judaic rabbi training. Christ made a point of telling stories that were not literally true in order to convey deeper truths about the coming kingdom of God. If we figure out why, then we will be on our way to establishing why the work we do in the literature course is important.
I might fill in the ellipses in Bain’s questions this way:
What do we know about fiction?
How do we know that fiction isn’t simply lying?
Why do we accept or believe fictional stories as a valid means of communicating truth?
What is the evidence for using fictional stories this way from scripture?
A responsible reader will 1) grant that values always inform the act of reading, 2) attempt to put Christian values to work in his or her reading, 3) consider the purpose and point of view of the text, and 4) realize that texts may be immoral in other ways than by using profanity and sexual explicitness.
From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith
These are Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin’s guidelines for evaluating work in a Christian way that neither discourages reading something just because it has an immoral act in it nor dismisses ethical perspectives in favor of a work’s aesthetic achievement.
Two cases in point…
In my Intro to Lit course, I teach Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The former is an example of a work filled with explicit violence that never gives us a sense that the text supports what’s being represented. Macbeth is not completely irredeemable, though he tries to act like he is, and it would be a perverse reading indeed that says he’s supposed to be praised for killing Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff’s wife and children. John Cox’s article “Religion and Suffering in Macbeth” works out a pretty convincing Christian interpretation of the play.
Mother Night, on the other hand, wants to make a moral statement, but I don’t think it’s central insights can be completely reconciled with Christianity. Vonnegut wants to make the point that everyone can hate and that the worst kind of hate is to believe that God supports your hate. We get all of this filtered through the novel’s conflicted and unreliable Howard Campbell, however. By the novel’s end, he believes that evil is a more ultimate force in the world than good. It’s a grim view that Vonnegut’s authorial comments–“We are what we pretend to be”–cannot wholly ironize. The novel criticizes adroitly, but I don’t think it’s positive view matches anything like Christianity. Vonnegut was a virulent atheist who thought religion encouraged evil rather than stemming it.
Gallagher and Lundin call for me to make these evaluations much more overt as I teach and to model the four steps above that avoid simplistic aesthetic approval or dismissive moral disapproval.
Literature helps us recognize and get a fuller grasp of the great cosmic story: God’s creation, our fall, and His redemption.
I’ve been cribbing exercises from The Pocket Instructor: Literature for awhile now, but spurred by a friend’s idea I introduced a new exercise from the book’s bag of 101 tricks today: the Sixty Second game.
