TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 95
Kathryn: Education is a process of whole person formation. You need to have a critical mindset. This is a formational experience, which you should either lean into because you agree with its goals, or you should have suspicion of, you should hold yourself back from and say, “Do I really want to be formed in this way?”
What I'm doing in this class, I'm trying to form you in virtue. I'm trying to help you gain the courage to question your received ideas or your assumptions. I'm trying to give you the quality of attention that is indistinguishable from love – to really pay attention to something.
Weston: Hi y'all, I'm Weston Simms, sitting in for Ryan McDermott. It's my pleasure to be running a new feature of the Genealogies of Modernity thread of this podcast.
In this episode, we feature an article from the Genealogies of Modernity journal, read aloud by the author, followed by a brief interview. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Kathryn Wagner, reading her article, “Relearning How to Read.” Kathryn is Director of Academic Programming at the Center for Christianity and Scholarship at Duke.
Welcome to the Beatrice Institute podcast, Kathryn.
Kathryn: Thanks so much for having me on.
Weston: Now I'm going to turn it over to Kathryn to read her article, “Relearning How to Read.”
Kathryn: “Relearning how to read,” Written by Kathryn Mogk Wagner.
“So with Augustine’s responses to Virgil and Cicero in mind, how would you compare his relationship with classical literature to his relationship with scripture?” My discussion section, already hesitant, fell silent. “Can anybody characterize Augustine’s hermeneutics in this passage for me?” Crickets. Our week on Augustine’s Confessions for the gen-ed English course “Transforming Society” was wrapping up poorly. I’d focused our conversation on intertextuality, analyzing how Augustine reads and rereads a variety of texts. I’d hoped Augustine’s sophisticated interpretation of Old Testament details that seemed morally objectionable, like the patriarchs’ multiple wives, would illuminate how he thought about social change, but the students seemed confused not only by the word “hermeneutics” but why we were talking about interpretation of texts at all. I left the class unsure whether they understood my point—that Christianity characteristically recuperates elements of pre-Christian cultures, Roman and Hebrew alike, honoring the good to be found in the works of strangers—or if they just thought Augustine takes and leaves the Bible as he pleases.
It’s funny how the same text can generate such different experiences, depending on how we read. Almost a decade before, when I’d encountered the Confessions as a freshman in a Great Books course, I’d been deeply impressed by the very passage I’d struggled to help my students appreciate. I came into college an adherent of Absolute Truth, ready to resist the evils of “relativism.” I was shocked to find Augustine, one of the heroes of my faith, arguing that polygamy was morally relative—appropriate in some contexts, forbidden in others. By acknowledging the real weight of context without wavering in his commitment to truth, Augustine collapsed my simplistic binary and gave me permission to see God at work in particularity and contingency, expressing his unchanging nature within diverse cultures and languages. To my freshman self, this text was challenging, revelatory, transformative, not an exercise in abstruse analysis.
What was I doing wrong as a teacher? My students were no less smart or engaged than I’d been. Instead, the disconnect was between different modes of reading. As an undergraduate, I cared about Confessions because I wanted to understand the problem of evil, the nature of God, my own earnest search for truth. Yet years of graduate education in English have disciplined me, shaping my habits and perceptions, so that when I looked at the Confessions again, its most interesting features seemed to be its innovative narrative technique and deft manipulation of a dense intertextual network. Invested in literature as an end in itself, I was drawn to Augustine’s acts of interpretation, relationships with texts, and expressive literary form, rather than his longing to know and love what is good. Those without my training are unlikely to share this interest in textuality—unless they can be convinced that literary analysis can help them answer the questions that matter to them, not just the ones posed by the TA. If I wanted my students to care about our books, I had to employ an older, more universal way of reading, one focused less on the text itself than the realities it attempts to describe.
My disciplinary development—falling in love with literature for its expressions of profound truths, only to realize that professional study of artistic expression has made it harder to talk about truth at all—recapitulates in miniature the story of my discipline as a whole. Like grad students honing heartfelt love of books into razor-sharp performance in a cutthroat job market, literary studies have lost their sense of purpose, and forgotten how to edify outsiders, in the struggle to shed the stigma of amateurism.
In medieval education, the study of literature belonged to grammatica, the most foundational of the seven liberal arts. Grammatica encompasses reading, from the ability to sound out letters to interpretation of poetry. The texts of elementary instruction were unapologetically didactic, drilling moral maxims into students’ memories. More advanced texts grounded readers in a shared cultural tradition and were understood to transmit indirect moral instruction, since the accessus ad auctores commentaries used to introduce them typically treated poetry as a branch of ethics. Twelfth-century theologian Hugh of St. Victor sums up medieval views on education when he says that all arts and disciplines are directed toward philosophy, which is the love of “that Wisdom which, wanting in nothing, is a living Mind and the sole primordial Idea or Pattern of things.” For medieval students, all education—even the reading of secular poetry—invites us to restore our likeness to God by participating in divine Wisdom.
While specifically religious interest in literature declined in modernity, literary reading retained its strong associations with philosophy and moral instruction. As the eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson expounds in Rasselas, poetic images and allusions are “useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth,” and great poetry rises above its historical origin to express “general and transcendental truths. For Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet and critic, criticism serves “to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,” and poetry effectively replaces religion as a source of “high seriousness,” meaning, and consolation.
In the twentieth century, though, as English came of age as an academic field, it suffered an identity crisis: did it really take trained experts to understand books in our native language? Inculcating moral and aesthetic sensibilities in the young hardly seemed like a scholarly research program. Rejecting belletristic appreciations and historicist gossip about authors, early twentieth-century scholars of English aspired to the rigor and precision of the sciences. The history of literary theory is a series of bids to distinguish professional scholarship from ordinary literacy, whether through finely honed techniques of close reading, exhaustive study of original historical contexts, or the ability to see through the alluring surfaces of plot, character, and image to uncover unconscious psychological or ideological forces secretly animating a text. These endeavors have produced fascinating and illuminating insights, but they are sometimes remote from lay reasons for reading.
In the last twenty years, there have been stirrings of dissatisfaction with what Rita Felski, borrowing a phrase from Paul Ricoeur, calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—the tendency to uncover hidden, usually sinister, meanings within texts that dominate academic English. Scholars unhappy with the status quo have proposed numerous alternatives: “surface reading,” “thick description,” “reparative reading,” “postcritique.” In proposing exciting new modes of analysis, however, these theorists rarely seem to recognize that what they are calling for is a return to ancient attitudes toward literature—a course correction of a recent and anomalous error, not an innovation.
The professionalization we literary critics have undergone to win departments and professorships, funding and prestige, involves two changes: the acquisition of specialized skills, theories, and habits of mind, and disidentification with amateur reading, a detachment frequently achieved by suspiciously interrogating the text or reading against its grain. While these may seem like two sides of one coin, the skills of literary analysis are only valuable to those who already love books or the truths they express. Our profession, in short, relies on the love of amateurs. Ultimately, nobody is interested in hermeneutics and intertextuality for their own sake except a few freakish English professors—and even for them, the perpetual play of texts divorced from truths becomes wearisome. But everyone wants to know what is real and how we should live, and if books can help us there, interpretation becomes intensely interesting.
To balance earnest love and academic analysis rightly, we should learn from readers like Augustine, a critical scholar and passionate lover of the texts that shaped his life. In his study of scripture, Augustine historicizes, just as literary critics do, placing Old Testament actions within a specific context that changes their significance. He looks through the surfaces of texts to find hidden allegorical meanings, but he does so trusting that the depths of the text hold treasures, not suspicious that they conceal structures of oppression. Even when he despises non-Christian literary works for teaching falsehood, he seeks to recuperate the glimmers of truth found in them. All texts and all readings are profitable insofar as they lead us to love what is good.
By chance—or grace—the theology reading group at my church was discussing Confessions over beers while my students were reading it in the classroom. When the theology group reached that passage about Old Testament polygamy, we felt that Augustine had set himself a relatively easy problem. Could the principles he outlined account for more horrifying changes in moral codes, like God’s command to sacrifice Isaac? My background knowledge about medieval hermeneutics came in handy during the conversation, but I was no final authority, since we wanted to know not just how people in the past had interpreted scripture, but how we ought to do so today. In the end, our discussion wasn’t about Augustine at all—but reading Augustine together made it possible. Instead of dissecting the Confessions under the microscope, we stood shoulder to shoulder with its author, looking together at the same subtle and intricate scriptures, the same ethical and epistemic quandaries, the same God who, absolute and unchanging, condescends to the limits of human language and history.
I hope that this lively, earnest search for truth has its place within the university—that I can unlearn the bad habits that distance me from my students, that post-critical ways of reading will win a permanent place among the methodologies of literary studies. But if the university does not foster this kind of reading, it will find a home in other institutions—study centers, book clubs, churches. Wherever books are means to know reality, the study of literature will flourish; wherever they are ends in themselves, it will, eventually, decay.
Weston: Kathryn, in your article, you describe Augustine as being an exemplary reader of texts who balances earnest love of the text with right analysis. How would you say Augustine's method of reading and interpreting texts differs from or resembles modern literary critical techniques?
Kathryn: I think one thing to bear in mind is how surprisingly similar Augustine's situation is to our own. He was basically an English professor. He was teaching rhetoric to young people in their late teens, early twenties. He was in part, in a cutthroat academic environment, he was trying to climb the career ladder. He was thinking about moving to a different city in order to advance his career. He was obsessed with prestige. He had all the same complaints about lazy, unengaged, entitled students that professors might have today: “They didn't do the reading! They are just trying to get ahead in their profession! They don't really care about the humanities!” He was struggling with many of the same things, and I feel a real identification with Augustine. When I reread the Confessions, and I consider him as a professor.
And so when Augustine… he too has to relearn how to read, to break away from his formal rhetorical training in grammatica and rhetorica, to relearn a purpose for reading that goes beyond advancing his own career. That's something that I think among professional literary critics today, there is this enormous career pressure. You're writing this article in order to get a job, you're writing this monograph in order to achieve tenure. And you're always thinking about how it's going to be received by this critical audience of fellow scholars who are the primary targets of your work which can become really rarefied, really isolated from why ordinary people are reading books. So, Augustine, like us, has to go against his professional training as he comes to Christ and learns a new way of reading, not only the scriptures, but also the secular text. One which he was raised with and which he deeply loved, which also led him astray.
We are engaged in that same kind of process when we question how to read as Christians. Some of the ways that he relearns reading is thinking of it as primarily ethical, thinking of it as having a deeply moral component, that what you read shapes who you are. You have to be careful about what you read, because it can form you morally, spiritually, intellectually, and it can deform you. It can pander to your base passions. So, turning that critical eye on, say, the plays of Terrence and say: “there's no reason that we need to have this spectacle of adultery and seduction, in order to learn grammar. There are better ways to handle this.” Turning a critical eye on Dido, and saying, “what is the deep motivation? why we are indulging in this excess of passion?” Turning a critical eye on Cicero, and saying, “how is he leading me towards the truth?” Not just the study of rhetoric, not just the surface level of the beautiful words in which he closed his ideas, but the love of wisdom that he's expressing and so turning to the deeper moral purpose of the text and turning to a wider audience. Not just his fellow scholars who can advance his career, but the very ordinary people in his congregation, when he has to explain the difficult texts of scripture to people who have very little education and they're maybe not literate. To bring his incredibly brilliant, impressive mind, and not only be achieving these feats of literary interpretation but also translating them and making them accessible to a larger audience.
He also has to humble himself. When he reads the Bible initially, it really turns him off. It's rough, it's not stylish, it's not Ciceronian Latin, it does not impress him with its literary beauty in the same way as the text that he's been studying up to that point. He has to reframe: what is valuable in a book? Is it just the style? How can I gain value? How can I learn a way of reading that will unlock these hidden depths, this secret treasure that's hidden under this, sometimes unappealing, surface of scripture?
Weston: You mentioned that Augustine himself needed to relearn how to read and that he needed to relearn how to read his classical interlocutors as he was becoming Christian. How would you say Augustine's approach to reading non-Christian authors like Virgil or Cicero…How can Augustine's approach to reading them inform contemporary Christian engagement with secular culture today?
Kathryn: Augustine sees that there is much to attract us to secular culture. That there… and that includes both genuine goods, which are scattered throughout the world… that there's genuine gold to be taken from the Egyptians. And it also includes things that are attractive or desirable in a meretricious way.
When we look at culture today, it's easy to see with the rise of mass culture, pop culture, the accessibility, the cheapness of the production of content, the incredible freedom of the internet, or the streaming service; we see this kind of optimization of culture to pander to our, most obvious desires. When you look at the internet, when you look at TV, you're frequently seeing, naked appeals to lust, to greed, or envy of those with better lifestyles. You're seeing anger, violence, hatred of the out-group. You're seeing our instinct towards gossip, our desire to hear…have our ears tickled with scandal. And it's easy to look at and say “there's something deeply wrong in the modern age, that has produced, this culture, which is often not worth engaging with.”
Then you think back to Augustine, and he's living in the world of the Coliseum. He is absolutely engaging with mass entertainment, popular entertainment that is inherently exploitative of the people who are producing it. Which is evil, which there is no reason, no excuse to engage with. You have to cover your eyes, cover your ears, if your friends drag you into that stadium to watch something that is going to deform your character. So, Augustine is he's able to deeply appreciate what it is that is so attractive in culture. So, he's able to empathize, why would someone want to consume this kind of content and then he's able to discerningly sift through and see what is truly of value. What should I take and what should I leave? And then he has a theological framework, taking gold from the Egyptians, that all truth is God's truth and he's scattered it widely through the world in the Reformed tradition.You're going to talk about common grace, which is available for everyone. So you have to have a firm grounding in the Christian faith, for Augustine, Catholic Christianity, the Christianity of the Nicene Creed, and being part of that community and the Orthodox church, and being formed in that community will guide you in that sifting or discerning process. To take those things, which are good, even if they're found in a disreputable place, but also to use judgment and self-control in rejecting those things which are not valuable.
Weston: One reason I really enjoyed reading your article was because it put into clear language, several experiences that I've had in university, where a professor was engaging a text or a thinker in seemingly just ignoring all of, or at least most of the claims that the text was making about reality and giving attention only to the technical qualities of the text.
Like you say in your article, It's important and even necessary to have this technical understanding of a text that we engage, this allows us to unlock its claims about reality in the first place But I'm wondering what advice would you give a teacher who's trying to balance teaching this kind of technical understanding of the text with giving due attention to its normative claims about reality. So, in other words, how does one escape the temptation to teach English in the manner of a so-called hard science?
Kathryn: I think that paying attention to this question, the balance of technical competence, understanding what the text is saying and how it's saying it, with asking the big questions: is what it's saying true? does it build us up? Is it useful for us? How should we respond to it? When you pay attention to that question, it makes you a better teacher.
You think of the average undergraduate has no idea why they are in an English classroom. They think of it as a gen-ed requirement – to tick the box and get it over with, right? They consult with each other, “which classes are the easiest and require the least reading?” I think that you have to start there. You have to start at this place of total naivete, you have to ratchet your expectations way down, in terms of cultural literacy -- the background of the text, and in the same way, you have to start at square zero, in terms of what we're doing in this classroom together. So you explain to them, we are reading these texts in order to gain a cultural literacy, gain knowledge of the tradition that, whether we know it or not, deeply shapes and informs all of our common, our popular culture today. We're orienting ourselves in time. We're overcoming chronological snobbery. We're reading this text in order to practice certain skills. As in Simone Weil's essay on the right use of school studies, we're cultivating in ourselves this capacity for attention, which even if you never read another poem again after you leave this class, the capacity for deep, sustained attention that you're developing is one that's going to serve you well in your relationships with other people. It's going to serve you well in your pursuit of truth, in your relationship with God.
Tell them that there's a connection between the exercises that we're doing in class and your moral character. That education is a process of whole person formation. You need to have a critical mindset. That this class is not just something I do for two hours a week, it's not just a requirement I'm checking off. This is a formational experience, which you should either lean into because you agree with its goals, or you should have suspicion of. You should hold yourself back from and say, do I really want to be formed in this way?
What I'm doing in this class, I'm trying to form you in virtue. I'm trying to help you gain the courage to question your ideas, your received ideas or your assumptions. I'm trying to give you this quality of attention that is indistinguishable from love, to really pay attention to something. I'm trying to develop anew the art of conversation. The civility, the courtesy, the give and take, the manners that smooth along our social interactions make it possible to live together, even when we disagree.
All of these things - this is what we're doing. Typically the whole first session, the whole first week of the class, say specific texts that we're reading are not as important as these skills, these capacities, these character qualities, that we're after. I'm trying to get you on board with that. I'm trying to persuade you that this is a beautiful vision and that you should desire these outcomes for yourself. You don't have to agree with me, but you should know, you should have a clear understanding of what I'm trying to do in this class so that you can judge for yourself whether it's good or not. Then when you come into a specific text, making that same connection, say, let's connect this text which is often so alien, foreign, and difficult for the student. Connect it with something that they care about, something that matters for them.
I taught, this past spring, a class on the Christian story and I taught an excerpt, Confessions Eight, in that class under the rubric conversion. I did something fun where each class session I was pairing texts from two very different contexts. So, I paired the story of Augustine's conversion in Confessions Eight with Nabil Qureshi, seeking Allah, finding Jesus, an excerpt about his conversion experience. That all already breaks them out of the historicist view of, I'm reading this in order to learn about a distant time and place in an anthropological way. No, I'm learning this to learn about this concept, which is, transhistorical. I framed the class discussion around conversion. What is conversion? What is it like to change your worldview in a radical way? To adopt a new religion, to adopt a new ideology? Why do people do that? That's a relevant question for you, oh students! Maybe you come from a particular religious background, and your parents raised you a certain way, and now in college you're questioning whether you want to adopt that for yourself, or if you want to do something new. And you have this radical freedom to choose how you're going to think, what you're going to value in the rest of your life. Maybe there's a political conversion, which can be something that also orients your whole life. So, this is a question that matters for you in your situation as a young person who's trying to figure out what you're doing with your life.
Then we dive into the text. All right. And in order to address that big question, this question that matters, that's relevant to students' lives, you have to do some of that close reading textual work. You have to do some of the historicizing work. I was asking my students, “How did the intellectual factors and the heart factors, the desire or the will, interact in Augustine's conversion?” It's really interesting! Let's look at these details. What is he really struggling with? It's not the intellectual doubts. He's dealt with that in Confessions one through seven. At this point, he's intellectually totally convinced the Catholic Christianity is true, and he can't take the final step, which is a step of the will, and why? Because of his concupiscence, and they have no idea what that is, and so we have to look through the text. Let's pick up on these cues. What is it? What's the specific thing that's holding him back? It's sexuality. He does not want to break up with his girlfriend. He cannot imagine being celibate for the rest of his life. Why does he think that that's important? Why does he think that that is necessary in order to convert? Whoa, that's a big question. That gets us into some context questions about his historical situation. We need to fill in some history about monasticism. Let's look at then what is it that actually gets him to take that leap? It's this personification of chastity. So, let's look at the literary techniques here. The personification, the poetic, the appeal to the imagination. Let's fill in some history that this goes back to Proverbs, and the adulterous woman and wisdom who are both trying to seduce the young man. They're competing with each other. Who is more desirable? And that connects us to this theme throughout all of Augustine's thought that who we really are is what we desire, and the desire motivates us far more than our intellect. And the question is, what do we desire? How do we develop a right desire?
And you can bring it back to the students and say, do you think that sexuality, that sexual desire plays a role in young people like yourself choosing what worldview they're going to accept? What religion or non-religion they're going to adopt for themselves? Wow, that hits home for students! All of these technical questions, there's the historicist questions, the formalist questions about the rhetoric of the text, they have to be subordinated to the purpose, the big question, which matters, and they have to tie back into it, so that students understand why I'm asking them to do this exercise that we're engaging in together. They see that it's oriented towards a purpose. That can be really difficult, actually. It requires the teacher to take a step back and say, I'm not going to teach this text the way that my advisor taught it and just repeat their materials. I'm not going to teach this text the way that I read this text in my graduate seminar. I need to put a check on my reflexes and the questions that are most interesting to me, and I need to put myself in my students’ shoes. Maybe ten, fifteen years in my past when I was a naive nineteen year old, what questions matter to me? How can I empathize with the students’ situation? How can I take a step back from my professional expertise and appeal to the common man? That's a very long answer, so you'll have to cut it…
Weston: That was brilliant. Thank you. So speaking of professional expertise. In your article, you describe this process of professionalization in which scholars like yourself are trained to disidentify with what you describe as amateur readings of the text. So first, can you share more about what an amateur reading of a text is? I know that word amateur has a negative connotation today that might occlude what you mean by it in this article. If you could explain what you mean by that, that would be helpful.
Kathryn: Amateur has this double meaning. The etymology is amo, “I love.” So properly speaking, an amateur reading is one that is connecting with the real purposes for which we read, with that love or desire that draws us towards something because of this beauty. It's connected to the liberality of the liberal arts. In the ancient world you have this distinction – liberal arts are those which a free person pursues for their own sake, as an exercise of our being human. And then there's other mechanical arts which are pursued for the sake of something else, like earning a living. The liberal arts are amateur in their true etymological sense: I love, I pursue it for its own sake because of its beauty.
Now, the common meaning of amateur is poorly done. We have to say that amateur reading is typically a pretty bad reading. Amateur reading is often going to involve a very naive approach to the text, which is really about how I feel about it, whether or not I like it, whether or not I identify with the characters. If you’re reading in this sort of amateur way, where it's all about, is it pleasurable on the surface to engage in this? That type of reading is going to not reach anything that's written before 1950. Because if you are going back historically, or if you're going to a different cultural context, then there's going to be difficulty involved. You're not going to have that immediate identification, “that's so me,” I'm seeing myself represented on the page. You're going to be challenged to put yourself outside of yourself to empathize with someone who is different, who poses a challenge to you intellectually, and also in terms of your assumptions.
So, amateur readers are often not going to be able to grapple with texts that are outside of their own experience. They're going to be seeking out mirrors that reflect themselves back to themselves and don't stretch them, challenge them to grow. Or they are going to project onto the texts themselves. They're going to understand them in a superficial way or a distorted way, drawing out of them only that which is already relevant to them. So, there are absolutely bad ways to be an amateur reader, when you're just following your own inclinations and you don't have the training or the discipline to read in a way that challenges you to grow. The challenge for us who are trying to relearn how to read, is to reconnect with love, but direct that love towards higher things.
Weston: In your article, you wrote “for medieval students, all education, even the reading of secular poetry invites us to restore our likeness to God by participating in divine wisdom.” This is a beautiful description. Can you share more about what it means to participate in divine wisdom and how students today can practically retrieve this understanding of education?
Kathryn: I'll go to Augustine again and his Christianization, his baptism of Plato's teaching about anamnesis. Plato says that whenever we learn something, we're not really learning it for the first time, we're remembering what we already knew in our sort of pre-incarnate, pre-birth spiritual state. We were pre-incarnate Intellectual substances. We were more in touch with the forms themselves, before we have this veil of matter and a sensuous experience-like place between us and reality. So, a teacher can say something to you and get you to parrot it back, but if you actually understand it, if you grasp it in that kind of flash of insight, that's connecting with something spiritual.
Augustine rewrites this idea, and says what is active there in that moment of true understanding of grasping the intellectual form is the logos, is the word, the second person of the Trinity. It is Jesus who is the true teacher. He is present in every act of real learning. It might be calculating the value of the hypotenuse. but you can't get the Pythagorean theorem…which is not sensuous it is intellectual, it exists in this spiritual realm it is represented by the material world, but it does not belong to the material world…We can't actually ascend to that intellectual or spiritual plane without the action of Jesus. Because Jesus, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, is the connection between heaven and earth. In the original creation, God creates by his word, and we say Jesus is the one by whom everything has been made that has been made. The Father's, creative intention becomes material reality through the agency of the word. This connection, this bridge between heaven and earth, is just deepened and brought to a whole nother level by the incarnation in which Jesus himself connects heaven and earth by participating in both of them. Augustine is going to say, and I'll say with him, that any act of genuine knowing already involves God. It is already a participation in divine wisdom, the word, the Logos, the Trinity. Jesus is there, but we have to become aware of him.
When we ask, how students can do this in practice? It's a very difficult thing. This is one of those things that the teacher cannot make the student do it. We can force a student to parrot the words back to us. We can't make it happen. The best we can do is to invite the student to engage in this. I think that teachers should more explicitly invite students to engage in this. We should do that scaffolding, that preparation work, and say, if you're a Christian in this class, here's what Christian tradition says is going on. I want you to contemplate that. Is that desirable to you? How could you reflect on what you're doing? Take your homework exercise and stop at the end and say, what have I been doing? What mental skills have I been exercising here? Have I been doing it well or poorly? Engage in that metacognition, to learn what you are learning, to say this has a higher purpose, than just maintaining my GPA by doing all the assignments.
I think assigning Simone Weil on the right use of school studies, and talking to students about Education as character formation, these are ways to invite students to see a higher purpose in the mundane or apparently trivial exercises that they're engaging in on a daily and weekly basis for a given class.
Weston: I'm so happy that Simone Weil keeps coming up. She's one of my favorite writers. I was fascinated to learn in your article that the medieval commentaries used to introduce students to ancient authors typically treated poetry as a branch of ethics. Can you tell me what it means to treat poetry as ethics, and second, whether you think we should retrieve this understanding of poetry?
Kathryn: The reference there is to this genre that scholars call the Aquesas a doctores. There's a couple of closely related standard formats that you would use as an introduction to a work and I'll have lists of six or seven, questions that are essential to orient you to the work; the name of the author, the title of the work, structure or the divisions of the work… But then you have questions: what branch of philosophy does this text belong to? The typical answer for a poem is ethics. You'll also have, very often, questions: what is the utility of this text or what is, what is the purpose of this text? Why was this text written? How should we use it?
That's the same kind of framing work I was talking about in the classroom. At the threshold of the text, before we enter into it, we need to have a sense of what we're doing here. What it means for poetry to be a branch of ethics, and of philosophy, I think we can find no better exponent of this view than Sir Philip Sidney and his “Defense of Posey.” It's post-medieval, but he's thinking along the same lines. He says intellect… knowing that something is right doesn't make us do it. In order to actually make people good, in order to develop us ethically, in order to grow in the virtues, you need to combine the intellect and the will, and then what moves the will is desire.
We have to present to people… if you really want to make people good and not just make them think the right things… you have to present to them that which is good under appearances that will move our desire. We have to present to people the things that we want them to avoid under appearances of ugliness. When we engage the imagination, then we are forming the habits of our mind to be attracted towards things that are admirable and to be disgusted by those things which are immoral.
Sydney goes on to compare the three major branches of the humanities: philosophy, history, and literature, or poetics, and say that philosophy does not engage enough in concrete particulars, in sensuous specifics. It's too abstract to connect with the vast majority of people. It's too abstract to connect with how we really live in specific concrete situations. History gives us this great advantage. It gets into the concretes, but it doesn't give the author who desires to, form the character of the reader enough freedom. You are restricted to only those things which have really happened, which are often instructive, but they often participate in contingencies to such a great extent that you can't always find good examples for the lessons that you're trying to teach. So, poetry is this perfect balance between the two. It's a kind of incarnate philosophy. That is the best tool for forming our character by appealing to our desire.
Weston: I love the description of poetry as incarnate philosophy. That's brilliant. I've been recently getting more and more into, I guess you would say, theological poetry, like Saint John of the Cross, or…I can never pronounce his name correctly, Charles Piguet? Piguay? he wrote a beautiful book on the virtue of hope, and it's entirely a long poem. Anyway, how do you envision literary criticism evolving in the future, especially in balancing textual analysis with moral and philosophical inquiry?
Kathryn: I have to say that I am very pessimistic about the future of the study of literature in the professional university context. We see the decline of English majors, the decline of funding to English departments, we see the scholarship that's being done in the field of English or literary studies more broadly, more and more abstruse and removed from really any possibility that an average person will pick it up and read it, siloed off in an ivory tower, alienated from the reasons why ordinary people read. We see that primary population students who, in my view, the primary population of students who are natural English majors, the people who come in wanting to read great books because they think that, oh, I want to read the classics! I want to connect with Western civilization… those people are specifically discouraged from engaging in English classes. They're going to find in those classes, a moral atmosphere that's hostile to their loves. Unless there's a change in the way that we train graduate students, in the types of courses that we offer, in the way that the courses are taught, I foresee a continued decline. So that English department is rolled into the communications, or the Writing 101. It becomes business writing, technical writing, how to write a professional email, which are all important skills, but they belong to the mechanical arts, not the liberal arts. The real study of literature, remaining as a vestige only at highly prestigious universities that have money to spend on maintaining professors who have a very low teaching load.
Now, I think that the bright side is that the desire to read great books, to talk about big ideas, springs up perennially in the human soul. There is a hunger out there, and if it's not being satisfied in the university in the English department, people will look for an outlet somewhere else. I actually think that the hopeful future of the liberal arts, is outside the university in a kind of lifelong learning, that is not attached to, classes, gen-ed requirements, degrees, certifications, those things, which can be so helpful in sustaining a… I teach extracurricular reading groups and we have atrocious retention. There's such a falloff because we are competing with so many other activities that students could engage in. It's really helpful to have some grades to provide the stick to help people get through those difficulties when they want to stop reading and scroll through TikTok – they have an assignment that's due tomorrow. It's so helpful to have that external institutional structure to support people's learning, but it's also easy for that external structure to calcify to become, in students’ eyes, an end in itself. For the intrinsic value of the practice to be lost in the external motivations that are intended to support it.
I see a hopeful future in reconnecting with that intrinsic motivation. And it will be a smaller number of people who take those classes. It will be more difficult for them to complete those classes. It will require more self-discipline, more intrinsic motivation.
Weston: In your article you mentioned a few methodologies that are gaining steam in the last 20 years that might getting you past the amateur level of reading and yet still having that center of love in reading. You mentioned various alternatives to this hermeneutics of suspicion, such as surface reading and thick description. Could you tell me which of these approaches you think is the most promising and why?
Kathryn: I'll say initially to clarify that the methodology of critique in which you go beyond the surface of the text to unveil a deeper meaning that lies within, is an indispensable tool for careful reading. What I object to there is, is not technique in itself, but rather the habitual posture, which assumes that what we find under the surface of the text will be in some way unsavory or sinister. The hermeneutics of suspicion, whether it's Freud finding under the surface of every story there are these base desires that are sexual drives, are the fundamental truth of who we are. Or Marxist forms of reading (maybe vulgar Marxist) in which what every story is really saying is class conflict. We can look underneath these sort of genteel surfaces, and see, structure of oppression and exploitation…
These hermeneutics of suspicion, what I object to is the suspicion. But there's a level at which those masters of suspicion are taking up and reinventing or secularizing a really old form of reading that Christians perfected, both in their reading of classical, pagan texts from antiquity and in their reading of the Old Testament. That when they engage in allegory, or in the activity of allegoresis, they are recuperating meaning that is useful for them and their readers out of a text whose surface cannot be accepted at face value. This longer history of critique in the mode of allegorical reading reverses the values of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Instead of finding what is sinister or ugly hidden beneath the pleasing surfaces of literature, we can look at a text that maybe on the face of it is repulsive, and we can see that there is something hidden in it, that we can dig out. We can look beneath the veil and find something that's of great value. Critique is an indispensable tool. We should not throw it away.
Then when we look at some of the… I mentioned surface reading or thick description advocated by people Helen Love, Sharon Marcus… I think that this is also an indispensable tool. Instead of seeing through the surface and discarding it on the way to this hidden meaning. To stop and spend time paying careful attention to the surface. The problem with critique or with allegorical reading, is that it's so easy to just zoom to…once you've figured out, once you have a theory that dictates, that all literature really means X, you're so tempted to just take the shortcut and get there right away without actually paying attention to the specifics of this particular text.
This is what medieval critics hated about what was sometimes called Robertsonianism. D. W. Robertson, who put forth a way of engaging in literary criticism of medieval texts based on Augustine, saying that we should apply to secular poems the same kinds of standards of reading scripture that Augustine advocated. The true purpose of all of these texts is to increase charity, love of God and neighbor, and to turn away from cupidity. The critics of Robertsonianism said, you're reducing this abundance of possible readings to this boring drone: charity good, cupidity bad. You already know what every text says before you start to read it. You can do the same thing with other forms of reading as well. Every scholarly hermeneutic when it goes into the classroom will devolve into self-caricature in the minds of undergraduates. You can see some of the critical forms of reading devolve into takes of cultural criticism in popular media. X is problematic. Fill in any X, and all of them are telling the same story – that oppression is bad, that the past was terrible and that courageous people are fighting to change the status quo in the direction of liberty and individuality.
That's boring. It's so boring to say that all stories are ultimately are telling this single story. The way that you stop that kind of criticism, whether it's the Christian who wants to find a simple moral lesson, or the progressive who thinks that everything reduces down to power and oppression, is stop at the surface and say, let's pay close attention, loving attention, to the text itself. An indispensable tool in the toolkit of criticism.
The new ways of reading, the post-critical ways of reading that I'm most excited about, is in the work of Rita Felski, who's been thinking about the uses of literature. What does it do for us? Why do people read these books? She draws on the work of Bruno Latour, she and many others, in this post-critical reading movement. Latour is a major influencer in his actor-network theory, saying that we can expand our understanding of agency and say that it's not just human beings who have agency, but texts also have something that we can describe this agency in that their form orients them towards certain use. The characteristics embedded in the text itself make it easier to use them in certain ways and more difficult to use them in other ways, and thus they make a difference, by influencing the human beings who come into contact with them. So, when we think within actor-network theory, we can think of this complicated web of relationships that includes the text, includes the author, includes the scribe, editor, translators; includes previous and later texts that have influenced or that take influence from the text, extending this trans-historical community or network of relationships. We think about the readers, all of the different readers and their interactions with each other. You think about fan culture and material objects, the movie adaptations. We see this wide network of influence and all of these connections are made and these relationships are, in part, human relationships that are driven by attraction, by love. Let's take seriously what readers love about Jane Austen, for example. These amateur readers, they're part of that network. They make a difference. What are they doing to the text? How do they change it? How can we understand this whole network of connections. We understand it largely in terms of its utility. What uses are people making of these objects and how are these objects, these texts acting on them, changing their thinking, their love, their behavior?
Weston: Well, Kathryn, thank you so much for your time and conversation. It's been a real pleasure.
Kathryn: Thank you.