Studying literature is more than just a matter of identifying rhyme schemes or genres, it means considering the time and place of the work’s production and the history of the work’s reception over time. To nineteenth-century readers, Wordsworth’s commitment to the language of “man speaking to men” was new and controversial. To today’s readers, Wordsworth’s poetry seems highly wrought and not at all the language of the common man or woman. So historical context is often as important as formal analysis. By seeing literature as part of a living and dynamic culture, students are better able to see the work’s value for themselves.
In film studies, the transformation of a written text to a visual representation requires attention to the material reality of the celluloid, the cameras, projectors, editing, and conditions of film production. Distribution and reception are also part of the discussion of individual films and filmmakers. Because filmmaking is a global industry as well as a coordinated act of artistic expression, film studies offers me a great opportunity to see the world my students are most at home in. With digital cinema, filmmaking has become as easy and accessible to my students as Kodak cameras were to my generation. In film studies we become aware of how this new medium affects our understanding of art, history and contemporary social relations. For instance, how many film enthusiasts consider that Fritz Lang’s Metropolis not only represents the dangers of industrialization, but also required the high unemployment rate at the time in Germany in order to produce the film. The extras — men, women and children — worked for very little money in an unheated studio for hours until Lang was able to achieve the composition and mood we see in the comfort of our theatres.
take two
What has given me most pleasure as a teacher over the last 15 years is the opportunity to keep learning new things myself. The syllabus for each of my courses constantly changes. If I know a poet or novelist will be coming to read next semester, I include a work of his or hers in my intro course, even if the writer is unfamiliar to me. In fact, students sometimes learn more from watching how a teacher copes with new material herself than they do from taking notes or writing papers in response to already acknowledged works of literature.
Working with honors students on a thesis and supervising independent study has also allowed me to explore new areas and new ways of interpreting literary works. In fact, because of one student’s enthusiasm for Olive Schriener’s The Story of an African Farm, I submitted a proposal to Broadview press to do the first annotated edition of the work.
At a progressive liberal arts college like Hamilton, I have had many opportunities to team-teach, invent new courses, and cross disciplinary boundaries. In the past few years I have team-taught a course on “Cultures of Empire”, once with a faculty member and students from Colgate, once with a colleague from comparative literature and more recently with a colleague in our history department. Each time the course has revealed new perspectives on how the idea of “culture” shapes social attitudes and political events, while the actual works of literature or art reflect and resist such attitudes and events. In Spring 2000, we took our students to London over spring break where they were able to pursue their individual topics by visiting archives and heritage sites. One of our students wrote an essay on music halls at the turn of the century. Her essay, “Putting the Empire to Music” received the much coveted Kirkland prize for interdisciplinary work at Hamilton.
Teaching with colleagues from other disciplines has been so invigorating that I have signed on to teach in the sophomore seminar program. The topic is globalization and my focus will be film. I think our students will benefit tremendously from working on a problem of such complexity from a variety of perspectives.
take three
As important to me as the teaching literature or film, is the teaching of writing. From my own undergraduate reading of George Orwell’s “The Politics of the English Language” and Paulo Friere’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” to my later reading of bell hooks, Mary Louise Pratt, and other scholars interested in the politics of education, I have learned the radical potential of teaching students to read critically and write clearly. To this end, I have not discarded formalist techniques of close reading or the even more disdained attention to grammar. Instead, I have tried to think conceptually about why and how grammar and syntax, figures of speech and conventions of genre create meaning. In elementary school, perhaps, children can learn grammar and memorize terms by rote, but in college, students demand practical reasons for becoming self-conscious of their habits of expression and their routines of consumerism. As Donald Barthelme wrote in a different context, “the safety of the bourgeois is everywhere menaced by form.” In the summer I teach a pre-college course in writing to students who have been accepted to Hamilton but whose high schools have not prepared them adequately for the demands of college. Most of these students are like me, the first person in their families to go to college. By giving these students the skills necessary to evaluate, respond, and articulate their own views and ideas, I believe I make my best contribution to society and to my profession.
The summer course is the only time I focus exclusively on the teaching of writing, but in all my courses I emphasize the importance of good writing. Some of the writing exercises I use in the summer, I repeat with my first year students. Often writing problems are the focus of one-on-one meetings with students, even in upper level courses. Helping students become good editors and allowing them to revise their papers creates the necessary conditions for them to see writing as a process and an opportunity to think new thoughts or to think differently. By the end of their college careers, I hope they have become impatient themselves with jargon-ridden writing and the obfuscation implied by bad syntax. This seems to me one of the best values of the liberal arts curriculum and the best guarantee of a new generation of creative and intellectually sophisticated citizens.
