Educating Imaginations. What good is the study of literature? Northrop Frye’s question in his 1962 Massey Lectures occurs to every student in an English course, whether they’re a major who intuitively loves the subject or a non-major driven by requirements or curiosity. My goal is to turn both into literary critics — to give students the ability to read between the lines of every text they encounter, whether it’s a literary prizewinner or an advertorial by a TikTok influencer. Frye’s answer to this question was what he called an educated imagination: an electric current connecting humans to one another, and mediating between our minds and hearts. I define it as an imagination that can both critique and deploy linguistic techniques for representing stories and ideas.
Expository Writing. Forgive the obvious, but teaching students to write well is an English professor’s core mission. My discipline makes arguments in prose, and that means a lot of essay writing. The form is as old as Montaigne and Bacon, because its model of attempting (‘essaying’) ideas in provisional arguments citing textual evidence is worth preserving. We free ourselves from its conventions only after we’ve embraced them. Essays train students for future expository arguments, teaching a clarity of thought and expression that underpins all effective non-fictional writing — among other realms of experience requiring attention to detail and critical thinking (that old, much-loved hobbyhorse). So I stage assignments to give students experience in and feedback on attentive reading, on gathering evidence, on writing theses and outlining arguments, before they write an essay. To mitigate any uncertainty I’m clear about my expectations with rubrics.
Rhetoric for Good. I also aim to empower students to use language to their own ends, to use the right words at the right time to the right effect, namely to influence others. Rhetoric has a debased reputation in our time, but it boils down to persuasion, a power always envied by those who lack it. It is a morally agnostic skill of argument (logos), emotion (pathos), and credibility (ethos). Literature encourages readers to use their rhetorical power for good. Philip Sidney argued in his Defence of Poetry (1579) that poets’ compelling and beautiful stories inform readers’ moral foundations: they “doth not only show the way [to virtue], but giveth so sweet a prospect to the way, as will entice any man to enter into it.” Their examples of virtue rewarded and vice punished are superior to history’s random happenstance, or philosophy’s abstract notions.
Avowing Ignorance. Quotations like Sidney’s betray that I often teach old texts whose language and ideas can be thorny and unwelcoming. They disorient — ideally in a positive sense to provoke interpretations (as Roland Barthes argued in S/Z, 1970), but too often simply to alienate readers. I freely confess that there are ‘classic’ authors whose style I find overly difficult (no names, please); they just don’t repay my efforts (ok fine: James Joyce). So I sympathize with the feeling that Shakespeare’s kernels of wisdom are encrusted by an impenetrable shell of difficulty. I give students a taste of a text’s meaning and beauty, just enough to provoke curiosity about what they can uncover for themselves. I tell students how baffled I was by Macbeth when I read it for the first time. I bring out my dog-eared copy from Grade 9 and show them (on the document camera) my increasingly desperate plot-summaries in the margins: “clever witches mislead Macbeth again,” and so on. I invoke Socrates’ dictum about ignorance as the beginning of wisdom, and use the analogy of a foreign tongue: the more you’re immersed in it, the more familiar it feels.
Skills and Knowledge. At the start of my teaching career I had a mortal fear of running out of things to say. I packed my lectures with detailed analyses of every character, every theme, every iota of biographical and historical contexts. Over time I came to see the value of skills over knowledge, to recognize the necessity of teaching students how to read and write critically rather than what to know about particular texts. It began by confessing the essential arbitrariness of any reading list, contingent on my training, experiences, tastes, values, whims, and biases. (Shall it be Richard II or Richard III this year? Such titanic struggles roil Shakespeareans.) To say nothing of the injustices of history: we read William Shakespeare rather than his unpublished fictional sister Judith, said Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). So now I try to read fewer texts better, more methodically, rather than packing in multiple texts. I still assess whether students have paid attention to their major themes and to other knowledge contents of my lectures — because arbitrary as they may be, they are the kinds of texts worth knowing.
Mindful Attention. To read a print book in the 21st century is an act of defiant resistance, of focusing on something amid a swirl of more appealing tugs on our attention. So David Mikics writes in Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (2013), echoing the 4th earl of Chesterfield’s advice to his son in 1747: “this steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.” I adore technology for its capabilities (see next entry), but I reject its raising its interests over mine — like notifications disrupting my flow state. I cite James Williams’ argument in Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (2018): that mindful deliberation and intention-setting is better than a life on autopilot, subject to the whims of others and the profit-driven algorithms of tech companies. So I urge students to read physical books, to annotate their margins (my mantra: “books aren’t sacred; ideas are”), to build mental models of their contents, and to make use of those models and annotations (and not searchable e-texts) in open-book assessments.
Leveraging Student-to-Student Technologies. Students have an elemental need to share knowledge, whether it’s about courses and assignments or about the reputations of professors. We in the university tend to resist platforms like Discord or RateMyProfessor (have you read your reviews lately? I advise against it), but they reflect an innate need to share, to see if others feel as I feel, think what I think. So I use platforms for publishing and exchanging ideas in a dedicated community with shared standards of respect: Slack for threaded discussions (vastly better than D2L’s); WordPress blogs for expositions and explorations (like this one!); and in the past, Twitter for posing questions and comments about Shakespeare’s texts. (Though I urged students to finish reading them first, comparing tweeting while reading to texting while driving.) This last idea earned me 15 minutes of media fame, but it just used communication tools to communicate ideas; the novelty was that they were about Elizabethans rather than Kardashians.
Leveraging Professor-to-Student Technologies. I have used three technologies for delivering lecture content to students, on the premise that face-to-face meetings are best spent creating knowledge through interactive conversations. Since 2010 I have recorded YouTube videos: first as voice-over slideshows on the Elizabethan stage and then as a series of how-to guides on writing (avoiding common grammatical errors, citing your sources, and moving from annotations to arguments). I have made liberal reuse of these how-to guides, integrating them into later courses and designing D2L quizzes on their contents. When the COVID pandemic sent us online in March 2020 I launched a YouTube series on individual sonnets, and over the next academic year I recorded a series of 60 podcast lectures with a similar ‘how-to’ ethos: the upshot being that if you listen to this broad introduction you are in a solid position to interpret the play, poem, or novel on your own. Finally, throughout my career I have regularly posted professional materials to my blog; the most recent version dates from 2014 and includes general teaching entries such as “Ten Ways to Teach without Lecture Notes”; more specific tutorials like how to work with Early English Books Online; and a series I wrote in 2013-14 on technology and the future of higher education. The summative effect of these observations, guides, and other resources is to give students approachable, readily available resources they can consult at their leisure.
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