The CEA Forum
Summer/Fall 2006: 35.2
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WHY WE KEEP UP
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Early in the summer, when a neighbor and I were both out cutting our lawns, we stopped to get caught up. After the usual pleasantries, he asked what I was going to do now that my teaching was over for the year. When I told him about my research plans, he asked why I was continuing to read and write in my discipline—other than for “personal pride,” he remarked. Educated in engineering and science, he could understand why professors in technical fields needed to keep current, but he was genuinely puzzled about why English teachers needed to do research, especially since money for our efforts was particularly scarce. Though I gave him some usual answers, I came away from that conversation unsatisfied. My neighbor was asking a question that so many people, I've discovered over the years, have on their mind but are usually uncomfortable broaching, so I decided to try to answer his query more thoughtfully in an e-mail message I sent to his office the next day. I'm sure that others would want to add to or modify what I said, but perhaps the letter below might be of use to other colleagues who regularly get the question I was asked. Here it is.
Dear *****,
I wanted to follow up on our brief conversation the other day about why people like me—professors in the humanities—do research. I don't think that I was very clear about why we do what we do.
I believe that I mentioned the basic analogy of professors to medical doctors. Those of us who teach in an undergraduate college are really both general practioners (or what are now known as family doctors) and specialists. Just as the people who practice family medicine need to keep abreast of the latest on a multitude of diseases and pharmaceuticals so that they can recognize and treat a variety of ills, so we too need to continue to stay up with general developments in literature, writing, and teaching. Nobody wants to go to a doctor whose knowledge is dated because of the dire effects that can occur, and no student wants to be educated by someone whose understanding of his or her field has similarly stultified. But we are also specialists in the sense that we continue to grow as, say, Renaissance scholars or Romanticists or Modernists or as Shakespeareans or Faulkner scholars or whatever. Although it may appear that once literature professors have mastered central texts they can rest on their knowledge, quite the contrary is true. New discoveries of manuscripts or letters or other documents, new biographies, new critical theories—all of these open up those central texts in surprising ways and sometimes call into question what we thought those texts meant and how they worked. While it's true, of course, that our failure to keep up won't lead to a student's death in the way it might if a doctor missed an illness because of being out of date, it's also true that students will miss the complexity of the works they are reading and of the way literature works, and—to some degree—of life itself if we don't stay engaged in our discipline. And what I'm saying here is not true just about literature. The same holds for composition and for pedagogy.
Maybe I can ground some of the above by talking about my own research. As you may know, I'm a Hemingway specialist. Although Hemingway became famous with the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, it wasn't until the 1950s that he was fully canonical—i.e., part of what we take to be the central figures in literary history—when two scholars (Philip Young and Carlos Baker) published seminal studies of Hemingway's body of work. Both had enormous influence on the direction that Hemingway studies would take in the next decades, but it was Philip Young who found a way of reading Hemingway that unified his oeuvre. Young made clear that many of the main characters in the short stories and novels all had the same psychological history and early childhood, and that all were wounded men, both psychologically and often physically, left to confront the modern world without the props (e.g., religion, family, government) of those available to previous generations. These isolated and frequently alienated characters struggled to find a way of living in a world that had gone to smash, suffering their fate stoically. Because of the way in which the Hemingway protagonists faced their individual situations, they became heroic—hence generically they came to be called the Hemingway hero. Young's reading of the Hemingway canon was really dominant until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the women's movement and then later issues of sexual preference became prominent in our society. At that point, Hemingway scholars began to examine the novels and stories from these perspectives with the salutary result that we began to overturn received opinion about Hemingway's treatment of his women characters and about his gay and lesbian figures. Later still, with the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden (1986), our whole understanding of Hemingway's views of gender and sexuality was recast. There had been a paradigm shift, and though Young's way of reading Hemingway is still a useful one, we see Hemingway from a much different and much broader perspective now. Teaching his work today is much more complex than it was earlier on.
The point is that had I not been reading and writing about Hemingway's artistry, I would have oversimplified his novels and stories in my teaching. And keeping abreast of things is no easy task: the most recent issue of the MLA International Bibliography lists 88 books and articles about Hemingway published in 2004 alone. Of course, that's just one of the writers I regularly teach. Though I can't be an expert in all of them, I have to know in a general way what's going on in my field (including literary theory too), and the best way of accomplishing that task is to be involved myself in research and writing. The same is true about teaching writing. I've been going to and participating in the Conference on College Composition and Communication—the main gathering for those involved in composition—since 1965, and there has been a dramatic change over the years in the way that we teach writing because of the research that has been done. We have learned that the process method of helping students improve their writing—one that involves pre-writing exercises, multiple drafts, collaboration, and continuous revision—is superior to the old product orientation in which we concentrated solely on the end product. Over the years, the field of composition studies has become professionalized, and new methodologies have affected both high school and college teaching of writing. The old ways, we've discovered, are not the most productive ones, but without the explosion of research we would still be teaching the five-paragraph theme, and our students would be deprived of the best way of going about things.
No self-respecting institution wants teachers who are dead from the neck up, and no self-respecting professor wants to stop growing professionally. We want to contribute to the body of knowledge in our fields and to bring that knowledge to the classroom so that our students go out into the world with subtle intellects and finely honed skills. Society should ask no less of us.
Best wishes for the summer,
Charlie
Works Cited
Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952.
---. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Rinehart, 1952.
---. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. University Park: Penn State UP, 1966.
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Charles J. Nolan, Jr. (nolan@usna.edu), a professor of English at the U. S. Naval Academy, is the author of Aaron Burr and the American Literary Imagination (1980), as well as of a number of articles in such journals as The Hemingway Review, Studies in Short Fiction, The Mark Twain Journal, Resources in American Literary Study, The Chaucer Review, and College Literature. He has served at different times as department chair and as president of the Faculty Senate.
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