The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Background readings

Introduction

In doing the research for this book, I was buoyed by the discovery of a few fellow spirits who have also looked to literature and film for insights into teaching writing. Although she is more interested than I am in the personal (and sometimes erotic) relationships between teachers and students, Jo Keroes’s 1999 Tales Out of School stands out as a book-length study that takes what non-academics have to say about teaching seriously. Similarly, in “Fear of Narrative” (2007), Brian Schwartz looks at how two short stories hint at the personal reasons that lead two very different composition teachers to focus on matters of either correctness or expression. Such fiction, Schwartz suggests, can tell us something about how lived experience shapes and informs our approaches to teaching. More recently, in his 2018 “Whether Wit or Wisdom,” Paul T. Corrigan makes the case for approaching literary texts as “parables of teaching: rich, rough, perceptive accounts of what it means to teach and how to teach more effectively.”

However, most writing by academics on how popular texts have represented teachers has been far more negative and critical. The more openly political critiques follow the lead of the Frankfurt School in viewing most forms of education as indoctrination. Cultural critics like William Ayers (1994) and Henry Giroux (2002) argue that heroic depictions of teachers in film reinforce an ethic of individualism by glossing over the systemic injustices that deny many students a chance at a good education. Teacher-heroes on film and TV, they argue, are far more often shown as helping kids make it within the system than urging them to resist its inequalities. Rebecca Brittenham (2005) offers a pithy synopsis of this line of thought in “Goodbye, Mr. Hip,” an essay on how television has presented sanitized versions of “radical” teachers.

Feminist scholars like Dale M. Bauer (1998) and Mary M. Dalton (1999) have extended this critique by showing how Hollywood depictions of women teachers tend to eroticize and trivialize them as either nurturers or sexpots. Dalton has twice updated her comprehensive study of teachers in film, The Hollywood Curriculum (1999, 2010, 2017), and has also coauthored, with Laura R. Linder, another similarly exhaustive study of Teacher TV (2008). Both volumes document how media depictions of teachers continually recycle stereotypes about race and gender. In his 2011 Dead from the Waist Down, A. D. Nuttall adds support to this critique by showing how intellectuals of both sexes are commonly shown as brittle and sexless creatures.

The tone of writing about the academic or college novel, however, has been more varied. The baseline study here is John Lyons’s 1962 The College Novel in America, updated in 1974. It’s a peculiar book, with no real argument of its own. Rather, Lyons offers a series of pocket reviews, one after the other, of 216 American novels set on college campuses, beginning with Hawthorne’s Fanshawe and ending with works by Malamud and Roth. He offers a number of useful insights into particular novels. What’s odd, though, is his tone, which is dismissive throughout. He begins by noting the “general lack of excellence” (xiii) of the works he is considering and concludes by noting that “it may seem unfair to carp at the lack of distinction in the novels about academic life” (186). And yet included on his list are several of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, including Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952), Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957).

More fun than Lyons, if perhaps even more eccentric, is John Kramer’s The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography. The 648 items in the second edition of this volume (2003), which is divided into Student-Centered and Staff-Centered novels, are given pointed and lively annotations. I was particularly taken by Kramer’s tongue-in-cheek observation, explaining the structure of his book: “Of course, as sometimes happens in the real world of higher education as well, fictional faculty members and administrators occasionally intrude into the lives of fictional students, and fictional students sometimes appear in the worlds of fictional faculty and administrators” (ix). My own concern here has been with those occasional intrusions and appearances.

Elaine Showalter offers an appreciative and cosmopolitan take on “novels about professors” (7) in her 2005 Faculty Towers. Her book is essentially a fan’s guide to the academic novel as an escapist genre. In a perceptive 2012 essay titled “The Rise of the Academic Novel,” Jeffrey J. Williams offers yet another update. Williams distinguishes between what he calls “campus novels” (which focus on students) and “academic” ones (which center on professors). He then argues that in recent years the academic novel—which he views as offering midlife “anxiety narratives”—has largely superseded the campus one. However, like Lyons and Showalter, he does not point to many novels in which teachers and students actually interact. That topic, to borrow a phrase from perhaps the most famous of all campus novels, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), remains “strangely neglected.”

Chapter 1: Dead poets and wonder boys

Academic critics of Dead Poets Society begin again with Ayers (1994) and Giroux (2002). The basic argument is that the romantic individualism advocated by the film tends to prop up more than subvert the social status quo. Similar criticisms of the movie have been leveled by Keith Barton (2006), Mark Collins (1989), Kenneth Dettmar (2014), Robert Heilman (1991), and Sally Robinson (2000). Steve Benton joins this chorus of criticism in his fine 2008 dissertation, “Ichabod’s Children: Anti-Intellectualism and the American Pedagogical Imagination,” but also notes that the critics of Dead Poets Society tend, ironically, to take on Keating-like roles themselves as intellectual crusaders.

In Tales Out of School, Jo Keroes offers an appreciative reading of Educating Rita as a teacher-student romance that ends in a meeting of minds rather than bodies. Richard E. Miller is less impressed, arguing instead in his 2005 Writing at the End of the World that the film condescends toward Rita as it frets over whether she will lose her authentic voice through the process of education (165—66). Similarly, Deanne Bogdan, in a perceptive essay on “Pygmalion as Pedagogue” (1984), suggests that Frank “perceives Rita through a dark glass of his own insecurities and a sentimentalized view of literary education” (68).

Chapter 2: Beginnings

When David Mamet’s Oleanna was first performed in 1992, it was widely understood as his response to the debates over sexual harassment brought to light by the Clarence Thomas—Anita Hill hearings—an interpretation Mamet himself encouraged (see Weber 1992). The exact aim of this response, however, was less clear—as can be seen in a New York Times roundtable in which six viewers offer highly divergent readings of the sexual politics of the play (Brownmuller et al. 1992). Reviewers in the mainstream press also disagreed: Frank Rich (1992) praised Mamet’s unwillingness to “pander” in the New York Times, while in the Times Literary Supplement Elaine Showalter (1992) accused him of stacking the deck against Carol.

But by 1998, critics like Richard Badenhausen were arguing that “the message of Oleanna appears to have much less to do with political correctness and sexual harassment and more to do with the difficulties of acquiring and controlling language” (1—2). For Badenhausen, this means that the play is more concerned with power than sex, and he goes on to offer a trenchant criticism of John’s failures as a teacher, most of which have to do with his unwillingness to actually listen and respond to Carol. Stanton Garner (2000) and Christine Macleod (1995) also offer similar takes on the play, although without Badenhausen’s fine-tuned attention to the micro-politics of teaching.

In his introduction to the 2006 print version of The History Boys, Alan Bennett writes that the play is about the “two sorts of teaching” exemplified by Hector and Irwin. But he offers a more nuanced understanding of teaching in a 2004 interview with Nicholas Hytner, in which he grants that if his play offers any sort of model of good teaching, it also involves Lintott’s emphasis on getting the facts straight. John Stinson endorses this tripartite view of teaching in his 2006 analysis of the play while also noting what remains the case more than a decade later, which is that while The History Boys has received popular acclaim as both a play and a film, its subtle take on teaching has not received much notice from academic critics. The few exceptions are cranky and defensive: a 2006 piece by Warren Goldstein lamenting Bennett’s treatment of the discipline of history and a 2006 essay by Martin Jacobi criticizing his view of classical education.

A similar pattern of popular acclaim and critical indifference holds for Push and Up the Down Staircase. Most scholars who have written about Push have been drawn, reasonably, to its accounts of racial injustice and sexual abuse, as well as to Precious’s heroic attempts to resist them. Sika Dagbovie-Mullins summarizes what research has been done on the novel in her 2011 article “From Living to Eat to Writing to Live,” in which she analyzes Precious’s uses of writing to form a sense of self and agency. Laurie Stapleton (2004) also focuses on the ways Sapphire highlights and honors the writing and voice of Precious, as does Gayle Pemberton in her admiring 1996 review of the novel. Both Stapleton and Pemberton also briefly note Blue Rain’s imaginative and radical work as a teacher, but the classroom scenes and student writings that make up so much of the novel are not offered close analysis by any critic I’ve come across. Still, though, the attention given to Push exceeds that which academics have paid to the popular, wise, and formally experimental Up the Down Staircase—which has been none at all.

Chapter 3: Work in progress

Mustang Sally, Blue Angel, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost were all reviewed warmly in the mainstream press (see, for instance, Slade 1992; Sage 2000; Wineapple 2010), but none of them has received much attention from academic critics. With the novels of William Coles, this pattern of popular approval and academic indifference is turned upside down. I’ve been unable to find a review of Coles’s work in the popular press. But he was for many years a prominent figure in the teaching of academic writing, and both The Plural I and Seeing through Writing have been closely analyzed by other composition teachers. Indeed, the first academic article I published, in 1987, was on The Plural I. My view of the book at the time was more admiring. Kim Flachman (1989), Bruce Horner (1994), and Peter Wayne Moe (2018) have also written perceptive analyses of The Plural I and Seeing through Writing. And in Fencing with Words (1996), Robin Varnum offers a detailed study of the manly, push-and-shove tradition of teaching writing at Amherst College, the backdrop for Alison Lurie’s Love and Friendship and the place where Coles forged his approach as a teacher.

Pat Barker’s Regeneration is one of the towering British novels of the twentieth century and as such has been the focus of much analysis. But while critics have often commented on the scenes involving Sassoon and Owen, they have seldom read their relationship as that of teacher and student. And so, for example, in a perceptive piece titled “Regenerating Wilfred Owen” (2009), Kaley Joyes shows how the experience of watching Sassoon help Owen develop and revise “Anthem for Doomed Youth” changes our view of the poem, helping us to see it as a crafted response to war rather than an immediate outburst. But she does not comment on how Sassoon contributes as a teacher to that process of crafting. Responses to Skármeta’s The Postman have been similar—Mario and Neruda tend to be viewed as unlikely friends and collaborators rather than as teacher and student. Ethan Bumas (1993), however, does recognize The Postman as in some ways about teaching and writes a sensitive, detailed appreciation of the relationship between Neruda and Mario, arguing that in Skármeta’s novel, “writing . . . is a group project” (17). Indeed, this may point to the key insight into teaching offered by both novels—that at its best, teaching is a form not of seduction but of friendship and collaboration.

Chapter 4: Forging a self

In his 2008 dissertation, “Mentor-Teaching in the English Classroom,” Timothy Blue discusses several of the texts I look at in this book. He offers a much less sympathetic reading of Ms. Moray in Prep than I do, viewing her missteps with Lee as signs of authoritarian overreaching more than anxiety. His view of Frank in Educating Rita is similarly unforgiving. In her 2014 “Between Meritocracy and the Old Boy Network,” Sophie Spieler reads Prep as a kind of parable of cultural capital, with Lee Fiora struggling to acquire a social standing that all of her classmates already possess.

Francine Prose’s Blue Angel was well received by academic critics as a nuanced updating of the campus novel. William G. Tierney (2002), for instance, lauds Prose for presenting Ted Swenson as someone who makes many of the predictable mistakes of middle age but who also learns, painfully, from doing so. Jesse Kavadlo discusses both Mustang Sally and Blue Angel in his 2004 “Blue Angels Meet Dying Animals,” but his interest lies entirely in the two novels as critiques of political correctness—which actually strikes me as the salient weakness of both books. In contrast, in her brief 2000 review of the novel, Gail Pool singles out its classroom scenes, noting sympathetically that “as the students critique each hopeless story, suggesting an alternation here, a new ending there, trying to perform ’the weekly miracle of healing the terminally ill with cosmetic surgery,’ their comments bring them and the novel’s issues—of gender, political correctness, education, ambition, and talent—to life” (32). Here Pool emphasizes what Proses’s character Ted Swanson has forgotten—that the goal of a writing class can go beyond the simple nurturing of talent.

I was surprised to discover that May Sarton’s The Small Room was published to tepid or hostile reviews from academic critics, who tend to dismiss it for pretty much the same reasons I value it. Anne Halley (1961) suggested that the novel was too full of what are “at best matters for a teachers’ seminar” (192—93), while Kenneth E. Eble (1962) and Frederick S. Kiley (1962) criticized the smallness not only of Sarton’s setting but of her ambitions as a writer. Eble faults her “brisk, prim, and stock handling of a small situation” (115); Kiley disdainfully claims that “the book hardly enlists sympathies from the inhabitants of the enormous room some men [sic] call life” (508). Later readers of the novel have been less masculinist and more sympathetic. In her 1983 “Faculty Images in Recent Fiction,” Frances K. Barasch dismissed the usual protagonists of the academic novel as “white, male neurotics, oversexed, underappreciated and probably Jewish” (28), arguing that women novelists like Sarton, Alison Lurie, and Mary McCarthy have offered more fine-grained portraits of academic life. Writing at much the same time, Linda Robertson (1982) pointed to Lucy Winter as an example of the sort of college teacher who might profit from a faculty workshop on designing writing assignments! And in 1997, Michael Katz invoked The Small Room as an example of the usefulness of looking to fiction for insights into the situational and emotional undercurrents of teaching that more conventional research often fails to offer. Nancy Porter anticipated this view in her lovely 1994 appreciation of Sarton’s novel as offering an unusual (and much-needed) image of a happy and successful woman teacher. And in 2004, William G. Tierney singled out the seriousness of Sarton’s approach as a valuable contrast to what he sees as the ironic nihilism of most recent academic novels.

Tobias Wolff’s Old School, in contrast, was published to glowing reviews in the popular press (see, for examples, Ciarruru 2003; Morrisson 2004; Scott 2003) but has so far received scant notice from academics. To date, the scholars who’ve written about the novel have largely focused on the relationships between it and Wolff’s better-known autobiographical writings. See, for example, David Gooblar’s “Tobias Wolff’s Old School: Truth, Lies, Fiction, and the American Boarding School” (2014).

Chapter 5: The limits of rhetoric

Two books provide a powerful context for reading Marilyn Sternglass’s Time to Know Them. The first is Errors and Expectations (1979) by Mina P. Shaughnessy, who served as the director of basic writing at City College during the first years of open admissions in the 1970s. Her book is a powerful testament to the potential of students who have been disserved by their previous schooling. The other book is City on a Hill (1994), a tendentious argument by the journalist James Traub for dismantling the basic writing program Shaughnessy created. His aim is to defend academic standards and cut expenses at the possible (if not probable) cost of limiting the hopes of many adult and working students to gain access to the four-year college system. Sternglass is interviewed several times by Traub.

Jacques Derrida offers a famous (and famously difficult) analysis of the shifting relationships between speech and writing in the Phaedrus, in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” published in Disseminations (1983). Jasper Neel offers a lucid account of these arguments in his 1988 Plato, Derrida, and Writing. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, which Jarlath compulsively rewrites in A Short Rhetoric, remains as arcane and unreadable as ever. But if you must, there is the classic 1954 Loeb edition translated by Harry Caplan.

Peter Dimock’s A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family has been overlooked by both popular and academic critics. I have found only a small handful of trade notices and an unperceptive 1999 review by David Beard in Rhetoric Review. Beard is disappointed that Jarlath is not a better rhetorical theorist—which seems to me to miss the point of the novel. Dimock’s book should be better known, both as an innovative fiction and for what it suggests about teaching.

Postscript: On the job

Jeanne Marie Rose also reads Straight Man and The Lecturer’s Tale as comments on working conditions in English departments in her perceptive piece “Managing Writing: Composition in the Academic Novel” (2009). Her view of the two novels is less approving than mine, largely because of her annoyance with how both Russo and Hynes routinely disparage composition as an intellectual field even as they express sympathy for individual writing teachers. She’s right—although I’d also argue that neither novel offers much respect for scholars or teachers of literature either. Other academic critics have read Straight Man as offering lessons in collegiality, if only through negative example. See Dennis Baron’s “Avoiding the Role of Straight Man” (2004) and Lynn Z. Bloom’s “Collegiality, the Game” (2005). Most academic readers of The Lecturer’s Tale have focused on Hynes’s comic and accurate send-up of literary theory and celebrity. See, for instance, Sanford Pinsker (2003) and Dale Bailey and Jack Slay Jr. (2003). Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members garnered brief and enthusiastic reviews from the New Yorker (Waldman 2018), NPR (Corrigan 2014), and the New York Times (Clark 2014) but has not yet received much academic commentary.

In his 2004 essay “Academic Freedom and Tenure: Between Fiction and Reality,” William G. Tierney offers a comprehensive and stinging review of the way tenure has been depicted in academic novels. He argues that novelists have shifted from presenting tenure as a guarantee of intellectual freedom to satirizing it as a cover for “academic politics and sexual hijinks” (175). A result is that “in virtually all novels, teaching is not only unimportant, it is irrelevant. Students are treated as objects, if they are discussed at all, and faculty receive little, if any, delight in teaching” (172). While I’m sure it’s clear by now that I agree on the whole with this gloomy assessment, my aim in this book has also been to point to some hopeful exceptions to Tierney’s rule.