I’m working on my teaching statement and it is shockingly, how to put this, messianic? I’m not even trying to be obnoxious as I craft this strange document—a mini-manifesto that is supposed to sum up both everything that I do and believe about my field (literature) and how I teach—but as I pause to look over my sentences, I spot something that may be nauseating to future hiring committees: optimism.
Am I naive to put down in words how I truly feel about this vocation? I could signal a little knowningness to the jaded tenure-trackers on the hiring committees by couching a few “can you believe the current state of the world?” platitudes between my thoughts. Doing so might clarify that my hope isn’t a naiveté, but a nicely polished, well-rounded callousness. Yet I’m not sure that would really fit who I am. These thoughts and observations come from experience in the classroom and genuine reflection; my hope is that the powers that be will recognize that.
So my first thought after looking over my draft was this: Is this idealism, and is that a bad thing? After some quick googling, I found an encouraging little note from the folks at Cornell: “Don’t give idyllic but empty concepts.”1 Awesome, so as long as I provide a little emphasis or oomph, I should be good. But wait, do they mean evidence?Do I need to include a mathematical proof signifying the validity of my idealism? What makes an ideal not empty? Perhaps a short classroom anecdote will do.
Nevertheless the question still haunts me a bit. I have some time until I really need to start applying for academic positions, but it’s good to keep these job documents flowing, draft-ready, perpetually in progress, for when the iron is hot and the moment strikes. And I need to strike pretty soon.
I’ve warned that this Substack may be a hodgepodge of contemplations, working documents, and brief half-thoughts rather than beautiful tracts. So I hope you find this interesting.
Below, you’ll find four paragraphs—an extract from about the middle of my teaching philosophy—where I talk about my large-scale theoretical approach to classroom learning / the purpose of humanistic education. (Yes, this is too long, yes, I cite Cleanth Brooks twice. Let me have this for now. I’ll cut one out, okay?) This is the bold version in its very rough stages.
Am I an obnoxious idealist? Enjoy.
As Rita Felski has written, rather than approaching course materials (whether literary or theoretical) from a place of undue suspicion or condescension, we ought to ask, “What is this work forcing me to notice?” By asking this in the classroom, students come closer to understanding how literature (and art at large) creates aesthetic meaning and why such meaning matters in our lives. My conviction is that students are able, if only by degrees, to discover that literature is both surprising and in a sense self-justifying. It is always-already outside the realm of reason, pragmatics, or scientism, in a way that is perhaps (and hopefully) slightly jarring in comparison to their usual university coursework. Indeed, far from being simply “useful” or a means to some larger end (e.g., “critical thinking”), my students might learn that, as Cleanth Brooks affirms, the knowledge that literature and the humanities offers is “of the human heart.”
The common call to “critical thinking” in the humanities is, I believe, too easily cited as a rationalization for why we ought to exist. What we do and the knowledge we make (or rather, rediscover) through books and poems and films is much more than a building block for more “important” work being done by our students in their chemistry labs or practice courtrooms. Literature attunes and prepares us to receive nothing less than wisdom itself, which however abstract, must fundamentally be what grounds our studies of the humanities and the world. There is something valuable to be learned about ourselves, our communities, and the human spirit, made possible only by looking to the beauty of our artistic and cultural production.
Students recognize this. Once they encounter a well-taught and engaging class on Melville, Jane Austin, Intro to Film, or when they are enchanted by a poem or a short story for the first time in their life, they intuitively understand that the humanities matter. Not because they have been magically “produced” into better citizens or made better thinkers (though those may be byproducts), but because art and imaginative worlds offer them wisdom, hope, aesthetic experiences of value, and insight into who they and their neighbors really are.
As Cleanth Brooks has written, “Literature is so often badly taught. It is the easiest subject to make a stab at teaching and one of the hardest to teach well.”
The key here—“well-taught”—signals how important it is that we take seriously our pedagogy and these brief classroom encounters (the required gen-ed courses, the intros to writing, the freshman surveys on world lit). We hold a lot of responsibility as teachers of the humanities, with much more at stake than our careers. Cleanth Brooks has written that “Literature is so often badly taught. It is the easiest subject to make a stab at teaching and one of the hardest to teach well.” This is why I believe that teaching with enthusiasm, with love for the work, and with care and attention for our students must be a priority over and above personal research and advancement in the rat race of academia. The “uses of the humanities” has begun to ring hollow, and instead of trying to convince others that we matter or pinning up posters about what a great salary an English degree could get you, we should lean into the message that the humanities are self-justifying. Students see this—why can’t we?2
In a world of AI bloat and internet garbage (the enshittification of the internet), it is beautiful to see a trusted, credible source appear first in a search result. It’s the small things. :)
In short: We can’t because English departments exist in “non-profit” institutions that are run like banks, led by presidents who receive ugly incomes and chairpersons with financial rather than purely educational motivations. Also, Modernity (see Adorno).