Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy

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.

Get Personal

[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.

Structure: Part 3

I’ve been working this week on a view of structure 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 John Carlos Rowe 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 “structure” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.

Continue reading “Structure: Part 3”

Structure: Part 2

As I work toward providing biblical presuppositions for the term “structure,” I read through John Carlos Rowe’s really dense essay on the word from Critical Terms in Literary Study. What follows are nine observations about the essay (Rowe’s main points) with three observations about where Christianity might intervene.

  1. In its etymology, the word “structure” involves building or scattering elements in both space and time, and the relationship between these two things (primarily with time subordinated to space) has subsequently been important in the work structuralism has done.
  2. Structure is a self-conscious replacement for the word “form,” which has connotations of transcendence and the privileging of the human mind before anything else (including language).
  3. The key structuralist of the 20th Century is Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work in linguistics established the basic coordinates for other structuralist work. His primary insights are that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds in linguistic signs are arbitrary (i.e. not natural) and that language pre-exists human thought.
  4. The most significant scholarly contributions structuralists have made is to linguistics and anthropology. The “structures” they have created are less the fictional models (i.e. not natural or empirical) they use to look at the world than the observations those structures enabled through scientific-esque rigor and research.
  5. Structure has subsequently been used in a series of technological disciplines such as cybernetics, psycho-biology, systems analysis, and information theory. The way we understand the human mind is largely a product of structuralist assumptions.
  6. Structure is less about establishing the meaning of any given part of a cultural practice than about establishing the relationship among a cultural practice’s parts. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
  7. In this way, structure is a good index for the shift from a material to a post-modern economy where goods are valued less for their natural use than how they can be exchanged.
  8. Anglo-American critics tended to apply the term to literature more frequently, but with a different meaning than European scholarship. The New Critics saw a piece of literature as a structure but one that was trans-historical. Northrop Frye exploded this theory with his own myth criticism that essentially offered a multi-disciplinary science of man by insisting that every social science tapped into the same linguistic symbols that were present in literature. Roland Barthes is the European critic most identified with literary structuralism. Despite their differences, these critics share the assumption that structural analysis, of whatever variety, will help cultivate human freedom.
  9. Structuralism has been criticized for its inability to explain historical change (following Saussure, structuralists have done more SYNCHRONIC than DIACHRONIC work) and for its penchant for generalizing the fictional or arbitrary models it uses to make its investigations.

Here are some possible points of contact…

  1. The Christian, too, believes that language precedes the human mind via the Logos that created the world. The Bible gives us a God creating the world through language.
  2. The structuralists historicize the arbitrary models they create to understand the world, but there is a hint of Genesis’s dominion mandate in the near necessity such critics insist humans have to impose structure on an alien reality.
  3. Structure cannot account for grace.

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”

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.

Giving an A

This ‘A’ is not an expectation to live up to but a possibility to live into.

From The Art of Possibility

In their book The Art of Possibility, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander discuss the freeing practice of giving yourself and others an ‘A’ inside and outside the classroom.

Ben Zander gives students enrolled in his year-long musical performance course the promise that they will get an ‘A’ if they complete the following assignment: within the first two weeks of the class, they must write a letter dated at the end of the academic year that begins, “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my ‘A’ because…”

I will be giving this prompt to my students for their first weekly letter because I’m interested to see what kind of work they think writing-intensive literature courses demand. More than that, I want them to exercise their imagination. What will they have done to live into the possibility of getting a superior mark in the class?

I will share them with my own letter. This is its first sentence: “Dear students of ENGL 101, I got my ‘A’ because I coached you through the process of reading and writing about literature in a way that made you more confident as a reader of and writer about literature while convincing you that both practices are of practical and spiritual importance.”

Conflicting Interpretations

How do we discover that truth? We discover it by the slow and arduous task of weighing any interpretation against what we already hold to be the truth about the matter in question.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin outline a guide for discovering truth when we encounter conflicting interpretations.

The key words in their advice are “slow” and “arduous.”

It takes time to understand a poem, story, or novel before interpreting it. This is where we are first comparing what we’ve read against truth we already know, most likely from scripture or reason or experience or tradition. Then begins the long process of figuring out which interpretations of the work we’ve just read are complementary and which are mutually exclusive.

I can focus on the biographical interpretation of Hamlet (the death of Shakespeare’s child in 1596; the Catholic recusancy of Shakespeare’s father), and this does not necessarily stop me from also interpreting the play’s commentary on education.

As I begin to focus on specific scenes, lines, or characters, however, I will run into mutually exclusive interpretations (is Hamlet’s tragic flaw memory or pride; is the play ultimately Catholic or Protestant in its commitments).

I think it’s worthwhile for my students to see and know the difference between complementary and competing interpretations so I will need to work up examples of these for most of the works we read.

Finding a Balance

As I approach the New Year, here are five areas for which I pray that God will help me find a happy medium.

  1. My commitment to discipleship at home (with my family) and at work (with my colleagues and students)
  2. My input (the things I read, watch, consume) and output (the things I read, teach, and create)
  3. My view of literature as a means for social action and source of delight
  4. My commitment to orthodoxy and my commitment to orthopraxy
  5. My pursuit of glorifying God and my pursuit of enjoying Him forever

The balancing act required for the goals I want to achieve are less quantitative than qualitative. I pray for the emotional and rational discernment necessary to feel and know how to let God work in my life in these areas today and in the days to come.

Final Comments – ENGL 2703

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 today in my one upper division course, Non-Fiction and Its Process. 

I’d never taught this kind of course before. In fact, no one had taught this kind of course at SWU before. It had been on the books for multiple years before I showed up and hadn’t been taught once.

If you didn’t know that I’m not an expert in this field, then listening to our guest speaker Jeremy Jones on Tuesday surely clued you in to what a dude who’s an expert sounds like. I think he dropped more quotations and article references in an hour than I have all semester.

You probably didn’t know what you were getting yourselves into when you signed up for the course. I really didn’t either. And here we are.

So here’s some of what I’ve learned: Continue reading “Final Comments – ENGL 2703”