Philosophy of Teaching

 

       In any of my courses—writing or literature--I see myself as teaching skills.  In a writing course I suspect this might seem obvious, for a student will take a set of rhetorical principles to any venue throughout his or her future, whether academic, professional, or vocational.  In these writing courses, the traditional grammatical “rules” do apply, but these rules constantly change as writing styles evolve and as the Internet occasions new modes of expression.  I suspect, for instance, that the apostrophe will gradually become extinct.  As quite possibly will the use of capital letters.  I approach grammar, then, from a rhetorical perspective, for grammar must serve the intent of the writer; and the semi-colon, for example, does not just indicate the joining together of two independent clauses without the use of a coordinating conjunctions but also may create emphasis in a sentence.  Hence, grammatical rules must subordinate themselves to rhetoric, which in turn must serve the goal of communication.  Why else write?  In my expository writing courses, then, I try to give the students a sense of power by giving them a sense of rhetorical principles—not rules—that the student may use to craft (and I use this word quite deliberately) an argument.  Never will I question a student’s right to a topic or thesis, and never will I evaluate an essay based on my personal attitude towards the student’s topic; rather I evaluate the quality of the argument and the rhetoric used to make it. 

 

       In a course in literature I similarly focus on teaching a set of skills.  In literary studies I combine an emphasis on the dynamics of the text we find in the New Criticism (not so “new” anymore) with an equal emphasis on the social and political context of the work being explored.  Art does not emerge full grown out of the head of any god, and thus a student must try to understand the cultural milieu, the dynamical relationship of art and music, landscape and architecture, history and politics that constitute a context for illumination.  My literary mentors would be Matthew Arnold, who in so many ways prefigures the close reading of a text that engaged the New Critics, and A. K. Coomaraswamy, the premier twentieth-century scholar of traditional metaphysics and symbolism.  A google to his name will bring up an impressive list of achievements and publications. 

 

       To the question “Why teach and read literature” I have a simple answer:  It has an evolutionary function.  Briefly put, at the core of literature we have the storytelling—and this includes all types of literature—, which engages the psyche by penetrating into that metaphysical entity “the mind” and thus “consciousness” and generates a dialog with what we call the “self.”  These three—mind, consciousness, self—constitute the very reason for the evolutionary development of storytelling.  As soon as the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons reached a level of development that enabled them to create stories--using symbols, the evidence for which we find in numerous sites largely in Europe--we have the beginning of consciousness, of consciousness of one as both self and other. Anthropologists call an evolutionary development that allows a physical change to meet environmental conditions an exaptation.  The large brains—especially the development of the prefrontal associative cortex in the frontal lobe--allowed for the development of ”human” capacities, especially that related to imagination and creativity, and the phonetic apparatus of our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon skulls did just this (though the Cro-Magnons probably could make more sounds than their Neanderthal cousins, who could not pronounce the vowels i, u, and, a , and the consonants k and g ), becoming the first humans, our ancestors.  With this development they had the capacity to separate self from other, past from present and future, and hence could tell stories and pass down essential survival skills to their offspring.  These ancestors of ours achieved this about 100,00 years ago, relatively late in evolution. [1]  

      

       The evolution of this physical capacity to use language and symbols to craft stories and the effect of this on what we call “mind” and the enhancement of consciousness propelled the evolutionary children of the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons into a rare space:  the only animals to be able to tell stories.  The physical change was physiological; the effect, however, was spiritual.  I must, though, unhook “spiritual” from its common use today denoting something “religious” or “otherworldly,” for  these early humans created a dimension of their  consciousness that hard-wired the human to believe in a God or, as I would prefer, the gods.  This too becomes an enhancement to survival.  Such a belief provided the means by which the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons could survive the terrors of the physical world because they had a “faith” in a future or in some force greater than themselves.  That they had no evidence for this is beside the point.  In their burial rites, picture making, and other forms of communal activity, they  created stories that gave them power to believe.  Power to believe in themselves in spite of their obvious physical deficiencies  compared to the other mammals they faced.

 

       We read literature, then, because it engages us in a hard-wired survival need. 

Coleridge had it right in Kubla Khan , for

 

. . . all should cry, Beware ! Beware !

His flashing eyes, his floating hair !

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

We need to believe in order to live, and literature brings us to the holy and the dreadful, heaven and hell, purely as part of an evolutionary adaptation.