Context
Context
The Modern Language Associate has a series Approaches to Teaching World Literature that collects short piece by participants giving practical advice. I edited one of the early volumes on Moby-Dick, and more recently I was invited to contributed to the volume on Emerson. I got carried away in the piece I wrote, which ended up being twice as long as the standard length, which the editors, Mark Long and Sean Ross Meehan wisely edited down to half its size. But I’m taking the opportunity with my own blog to put out the original article in its entirety, since it accords with the general goals of this Newletter. I’d love to know your thoughts.
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—Emerson’s American Scholar is “man thinking,” but so too are good scholars everywhere. In controversies about language since Plato the argument has always been made that it is incumbent upon us to release words from the posturing embrace of Thought so that they may enter the turbulent embrace of Thinking. —Richard Poirier
John Holt said that a conservative is someone who worships a dead radical. This conservative and monumentalizing thinking has pervaded the ways in which we teach Emerson, much as the ways we teach everyone else. When I took my educational philosophy course at Emerson Hall at Harvard, I imagined his bronze statue in the foyer lamenting: “Love of the statue has turned into worship of the hero.” The hero, a living actor in the world, becomes frozen into a statue, a stasis; “love,” potentially a relation between equals, degenerates into the self-abasing attitude of “worship.” We canonize, we reify, we fetishize, but we do not breathe in the words themselves to transmute them into our lives. Emerson also said “The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies in his aspiration some rite or covenant and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration.” and he wisely included the reformer himself in the group that cleaves, that must transcend even—or especially—one’s own formulations and precepts.
But the challenge for us as teachers is not so much to de-monumentalize Emerson—years of derision of him as a Dead White Male have helped with this— but to unformulate him for our students and ourselves, to embody his work in our very activities of mind. This is difficult because his radicalism is often masked by a mellifluousness and stylistic grace that led Oliver Wendell Holmes to remark: “He was an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly it seemed like an act of worship.” We need to substitute for the Emerson of statement and wisdom the Emerson of continual process and discovery through the very act of writing; we must show him—or catch him—in the creation of meanings through our own active, dynamic constructions, in the making of it happen.
I try to in engage my students, then, in reading Emerson through their own and their classmate’s writing, an approach inflected through the lenses of reader response theory and practice and constructivism. Even more relevantly, the approach is deeply rooted in what I have delineated as an American tradition, or anti-tradition of a strain in Amirian intellectual and literary life that has flowed as an underground stream in our educational history, rarely noticed and never enacted on a large scale. Although its central philosopher is John Dewey, the tradition has its roots in the practice of Bronson Alcott and the two assistants in his Temple School, Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller as well as Henry and John Thoreau in their Concord Academy and its great keynote address is Emerson’s “American Scholar.” This tradition views knowledge as provisionally constructed by the mind in perpetual interact ion with the world. The outcomes of this process are generally cultural artifacts such as ideas, classifications, formulae—basically a body of knowledge that has been organized and divided as the curriculum. The mistake of conventional education is to overvalue only these end products, handing them over ready-made instead of involving students in the process of reconstructing the world for themselves, of engaging in dialectical movements between experiencing and conceptualizing, acting and thinking, practice and theory.
In line with this tradition I avoid teacher-centered formats such as lecture or even discussions not prepared for by the student’s own writing. I have found a huge disparity—in cognitive process, in depth of ideas, in student engagement between classes where students have just “done the reading” and those where they have prepared by constructing their own thoughts through writing. For writing is not merely the setting down of thoughts we already had, but itself our main method of discovery. As we push our vague, fuzzy thoughts to clarity, we discover along with Emerson, that the very act of writing makes us articulate things we didn’t know we knew. Before it is written, our knowledge remains locked in our own subjectivity, shadowy and inert.
The mechanics of having my students participate in this process has changed with changing technology; I began decades ago using Ann E. Berthoff’s method of the Dialectical Notebook where students write down their initial thoughts and then at regular intervals reread their entries, write back to them in wide margins, and eventually hammer these fragmentary ideas into coherence in more formal “Essays,” in the sense of attempts, used by Montaigne and Emerson. Now I use electronic bulletin boards so the students can read not only their own but their peers’ writing before class itself and continue the dialogue both in and after class. In doing so the students are reenacting Emerson’s own procedures in hewing their finished papers from jottings and short passages. As Emerson said of his own journal, which he then went on to construct and reassemble into lectures and essay collections: “This book is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition. Emerson returned, categorized and indexed his journals in ways that our students can now do more easily, if not as brilliantly, using word processors. Thoreau discovered the power of this approach early in his own writing under Emerson’s mentorship: “Thoughts, accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think.” Without making these processes explicit, except through studying actual examples following Emerson’s inchoate thoughts from notes to sentences to essays, the students’ learn from their own experiences how writing generates more writing, how it becomes a cognitive process and a window into Emerson’s mind and their own.
Having said this, it may come as a surprise that I generally do not give my students the open field suggested by Thoreau for the students to ramble in. I usually focus their journal entries through prompts that ask them to relate a specific act of close textual analysis to more general ideas. I coax them toward the zone where the best learning is in the dialogue between the concrete with the conceptual, and I try to formulate structures to help them do so, as in the following.
Tony Tanner, a British critic of American literature has written:
It is my contention that many recent American writers are unusually aware of this quite fundamental and inescapable paradox: that to exist, a book, a vision, a system, like a person, has to have an outline—there can be no identity without contour. But contours signify arrest, they involve restraint and the acceptance of limits. . . . Between the nonidentity of pure fluidity and the fixity involved in all definitions—in words or in life—the American writer moves, and knows he moves.
Do a close analysis of these sentences from Emerson’s “Circles” to suggest how they not only explore the same themes but embody them in the very texture and movement of its language, in the syntax, rhythms, diction, sound patterns. How does Emerson bring the tensions Tanner articulates into the act of writing and you into the acts of reading, analyzing, and doing your own writing?
For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,—as, for instance, an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit, on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.
When, I read through the responses to prompts like these I often note with some humility that virtually anything I would have said in a lecture has already been suggested by at least one student and that taken as a whole their writings suggest a fuller and richer analysis than anything I could have done alone. The following composite response puts these insights into sequential form, but all comes from the student journals:
Each of these sentences, but especially the second, seems to run on beyond the point at which our syntactic ear expects it to stop, piling phrase upon clause upon phrase, until we finally reach some kind of closure, both semantic and grammatical, such as “to stop and bind,” a wonderfully appropriate way for the sentence to end. These four monosyllabic words reinforce the sense of closure implied by their meaning. Further, the initial sound of “bind” alliterates effectively with the powerfully verb “burst,” and with what is being burst, “boundary.” The accretion of words in the passage like “and,” “also,” again,” along with the anomaly of two consecutive sentences beginning with “But,” signal and foreground the mind’s reflecting and turning upon itself. The sentence beginning with the second “but” returns to the sense of an outward push with a vengeance, with “vast,” “immense,” and “innumerable,” each adjective stretching out with more syllable. True to the title of the essay and its themes, it solves some of the problems it articulates by using its language to draw a wider circle around statements that seem initially definitive and authoritative.
Three of the students used terms specifically about the mind’s “turning” upon itself, and in doing so unknowingly echoed a sentence of Emerson crucial to this entire enterprise: “If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turns of his sentences, the build, I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it.” I pair this sentence with a passage from William Gass to emphasize that any general statement about Emerson’s “philosophy” or his place in literary history must be anchored in a discussion of his language itself: the language is the philosophy and vice-versa:
The meaning of a sentence may make a unity, comprise some whole, but inevitably its concepts are loosed one by one like the release of pigeons. We must apprehend them, then, like backward readers: here’s a this, now a that, now a this. The sentence must be sounded, too; it has a rhythm, speed, a tone, a flow, a pattern, shape, length, pitch conceptual direction. The sentence confers reality upon certain relations, but it also controls our estimation, apprehension, and response to them. Every sentence, in short, takes metaphysical dictation, and it is the sum of these dictations, involving the whole range of the work in which the sentences appear, which accounts for its philosophical quality, and the form of the life in the thing that has been made.
I also return to Emerson’s use of the word “turn” in the quotation above to move into a discussion of his longer forms like the essay as the term is inflected by Richard Poirier and J. Hillis Miller. The former writes: “The word suggests an active, not merely reflective, response to the given, and it is synonymous with ‘trope.’ . . . The turning or troping of words is in itself an act of power over meanings already in place. . . . It promises after all to save us from being caught or fixed in a meaning or in that state of conformity which Emerson famously loathed.” The turns do not so much deconstruct or self-consume the text as allow it to stand while permitting further writing and reading in new and often opposed directions. They prevent the hardening of imaginative play into creed, doctrine, fixed belief, allowing the text to create a structure, but one with enough spaces for breath and for escape. J. Hillis Miller in his The Linguistic Moment gives us a term and an analysis that make the concept particularly useful for teaching, by focusing on “moments of suspension within the texts of poems, not usually at their beginnings or ends, moments when they reflect or comment on their own medium. . . It is a form of parabasis, breaking the illusion that language is a transparent medium ” At such a point a text “turns back on itself and puts his own medium into question, so that there is a momentum in the poem toward interrogating signs as such.” In Emerson specifically, such turns can occur in every sentence and paragraph, but they appear most explicitly in short paragraphs about three fourths through each essay. They often begin “yet” or “but” and call attention to the act of expression with the verbs like “to speak” or “to write.” I frequently ask the students to find such turns themselves, but sometimes I point the students towards them and ask them to explain their relation to the entire essay:
Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
I should mention that I present this notion of Emerson’s turns not as a proven truth but as a hypothesis that they have to measure against their own reading of the texts. If the course is at the graduate level, I sometimes assign the entire volume of Essays, First Series and then have them try to nominate their own choices for this turn in each essay. I then have the students defend their choices in class as a way of fostering a discussion at once rooted in the text but related to theory, and then towards in a metacognitive turn I ask them whether the theory is of any use to them.
But—and here comes the turn in my own essay—as a former Director of Service Learning at my university I take to heart Thoreau’s definition of a good book: “I must lay it down and commence living on its truth. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.” Just as a I ask my students to read and write in the zone where the specific meets the general I also ask them to make their course of study the place where the academic meets the realm of personal experience and inner life, to embrace Emerson’s notion that life consists of what a person is thinking all day. I return to Tony Tanner’s observation and note that our education has not negotiated the tension with the honesty or success or our best literary artists; in the former the contest between fluidity and stasis, between vitality and formalism has been repeatedly and heartbreakingly been decided by an overemphasis on the latter. I ask my students to become more reflective and transformative about our class activities: What is the function of grading, and how should we handle it in our own situation? What kinds of reading and writing will help us best get us where we want to go? How do we move what we say and write into the larger academic community and then the community beyond the university? These questions cannot be answered with abstract formulae but must be negotiated every day, in every class. We must face this challenge by bringing our students in as collaborators and co-conspirators, to help them become radicals in their own right.