Literature Prep, Genres, Etc

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb
Of Houghton College
Teaching Doubt at a Christian College: Tennyson’s “Lame Hands of Faith”

BA Calvin College
MA U of Chicago
PhD U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Avid vegetable gardener

Less than 1100 students. Uniformity in faith. Evangelical subculture. Clear narrative, testimony after crisis.

College changes them.

Spring, interviews seniors who explain what they are best at and who they are.
Books they have read: Lewis and Tolkien are always on the list.

College changes them in ways they do not expect.

They learn that the process of forming the biblical canon was messy.
Intellectual history of Western culture shows Protestant Reformation as harbinger of breakdown between faith and reason.

Some leave the faith.
Some become Catholic.
Some change denominations.

4-year institution
Students from stable, affluent families. First life-time experiences change them.
The literature classroom is one of the places where students process these changes.

When a liberal arts college is functioning at its best, but lit class is particularly situated to help students understand the changes as narrative of transition rather than a narrative of crisis.

Teaching texts that wrestle with the themes of suffering and pain, and texts that raise questions about faith, is particularly helpful for the students.

In Memoriam
Teach in 200 level, Lit and Wisdom, core requirement for lit and philosophy
Read classics of lit and philosophy
Chronological march from Ecclesiastes to 1993 play Wit
Classroom becomes a community over the semester.
Other teacher is her husband.
Title for the week in which we teach Tennyson is “An Unquiet Faith.”
Read The Brothers Karamotzov, In Memoriam by Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

Characteristic ways that eras have examined faith.

“Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night..” –M. Arnold “Dover Beach”

“ The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.” –M. Arnold “Dover Beach”

Seriousness of loss of faith.
But narrator is also comic.
Dover Beach is a popular honeymoon site. Probably wrote it on his honeymoon.
How did his bride feel about that?
Not to mock the Victorian crisis of faith, but to see the affectation of the crisis of faith.

One discussion period on Dostovesky.
One on Tennyson.

Written over 17 years.
College friend, engaged to his sister, died in Italy of a brain aneurysm.
Each section can more or less stand alone.
We make very careful selections among the sections.

The early sections represent Tennyson in grief.
“Ah, sweeter to be drunk…
But all he was is overworn.” In Memoriam 1. 9-16

Section 7, stands outside the house and feels his absence.
“Dark house, by which once more I stand
…
A hand that can be clasp’d no more.”— VII

Versus another time when he is there CXIX, 1-4, 11-12.

“So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine.” XCV.33-36

Tennyson struggles with how to come to terms with the loss of friend but also with a world which biologically requires death.

Are God and Nature then at strife, LV.5-8

“red in tooth and claw”

Nature finding that of fifty seeds, only brings one to bear.

LVL.1-4

LV.16-20 “I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.”

T.S.Eliot, from Essays Ancient and Modern
“In Memoriam can, I think… a very intense experience.”

In its day, it was seen as a poem of strong faith.
“…a priceless but much neglected means of spiritual improvement, the efficacy of which not even the most sceptical [sic] can deny.”

“a priceless benefit to many an earnest seeker in this generation” –Charles Kingsley

Encounter with a poet who is hanging onto faith while wrestling with his doubts. They don’t care as much about his theology. It is enough that he is asking the same kind of questions they are asking.

“That God, which ever lives and loves…
To which the whole creation moves.” Epilogue, 141-144

Wrote the last before the rest? Really?

Students trust Tennyson. From his strong conclusion they are confident that he reaffirms his faith.

Read authors who are strong in their faith. (X, X)
Read authors who reject faith. (Eliot, Arnold)
Not as much thought about reading about a journey of faith.

Most poetry is the “luminous particular,” the one moment narrative.
But Tennyson opens up a lifetime of doubt.
One continuous process of reflection and even questioning.

Students come to college understanding about their faith.
In teaching In Memoriam I also hope to teach them about doubt.

Questions:
How did the students do with the nontraditional ending of Tennyson, where he says his friend is mixed with God and nature?

Curious… with Brothers Karamatzov “greatest attack on Christianity ever”… Overwhelming. Caused depression. Prof said, “Keep reading. It’s not the end of the story.” Do you let them know “The Grand Inquisitor” is not the end of the book?

Crisis of Modernity.
Nietsche taught the next week.
Week 15 present Flannery O’Conner, at people who are putting together with faith post-modern answers.

Was there a bit of Hebrews’ “though he is dead, continues to speak”?
Is there a sense in which the friend is actively speaking these?
Yeah. There’s a kind of a resurrection. It’s mystical. But it is a strong statement of faith and the students see it that way.

*SWCCL = Southwest Conference of Christianity and Literature

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Bill Carroll
of Abilene Christian University

“Victorian Knowledge, Faith, and Assent: Responses to Doubt by John Henry Newman and Robert Browning”

Issues of faith and doubt are ubiquitous.

Nature as the book of God.
Looking at Newman’s “An Essay in Aid of Grammar to Assent” (guide to reading the world)
Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

Victorian understanding of the role of nature in science.

Newman is conservative religiously.
Not going to offer an answer for reading Browning.

How can any reading of experience be reliable?

The challenge of the skepticism… other ways of knowing.

Together the two works make a reading for faith and understanding the impulses in the Victorian culture.

“all knowledge outside of science are nonsense” –

Experience is ringed round through our personality…

This awareness means all reading, all nature, all data will be hard to figure out without recognizing our thoughts.

Victorians attempt to accumulate empirical data to prove their faith beyond a “shadow of a doubt.”

Dissimilar responses. Strongest responses from the Victorians.

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

Christians have struggled to interpret God from his nature.
12th C the conversation on this topic changed.
Altered the metaphor of “book of nature.”
Increased the experience, importance of reading the book of nature.
If nature is to be conceived as a text, the reader needs to be fluent in the language in which it is written.

The added importance of “reading the world/book of nature” grew in the university.

Galileo, “Both scripture and the divine text of nature…” leads to God.
Heresy is only a failure of understanding science.
By the 19th C, though, stronger challenges to reading nature and the Bible harmoniously.

Most of the poetry of Taylor and Coleridge was written to help readers read nature.

In Blake’s Song of Innocence “The Lamb” is the shortest presentation of this.
Compared with “The Tyger” from Song of Experience.
Blake acknowledges that our reading of the book of nature depends on what we are looking at.
56-57 In Memoriam
“Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.”

Newman’s friend Froude says he is drifting from his Catholic belief.
The central concern of “A Grammar” is …
1839: The grounds of belief and faith do not rest on evidence.

Newman sees two modes of rationality.
Under firestorm of intellectual attack…
Notional belief v. X belief
True vocabulary of science is symbol.

Assent, though a mental act, is not an act of logic.
Arbitrary, but not incompatible with an appeal to logic.
Science makes claims beyond its reference…

When vocab of science moves out of its purviews, it is problematic.

Assent rarely relies on types of proof science requires.

Newman says you can read the natural world by observation. Can arrive at assent to metaphysical claims.

Browning
From “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

The basis for accepting directions from someone who lied all the time is weird.
Thinks the guide is only there to lead travelers to their death.
His quest is leading him to his death.

What constitutes truth and the use of language?
For Roland he is a good guy because he is the one who ends Roland’s endless journey.

Browning’s Roland rarely sees his experience as…
Browning’s character demonstrates how personality limits the understanding of experience.

Dark Tower appears at last moment.
It is hard to see what shows up in our experience. Often we don’t see what is right before our eyes.

Though he is standing directly in front of the Dark Tower, he doesn’t see it till he remembers how he was told to find it.

What role memory and values play is important?

Wise critics hesitate to offer a final reading.

Poem itself says…. XXX

Danger of reading the world… We read ourselves as the moral center of the universe. He does not solve this problem, but presents it so that we can see it.

Our attempts to read the book of nature can always be compromised.

Richard Dawkins says he is “not a fundamentalist” because he would “change his mind in the face of evidence.”
But Browning shoes us that we never read only the evidence.

Browning’s answer is that though reading the book of nature is fraught with problems,
How is it read?
Pushes reader to recognize our subjective, contextualized reading of the text…
That means every text will be subjective and contextualized.
We need to recognize this.

Question:
Breaking down of natural theology…
Decreased interest “Faith and Reason” 1998 John Paul, first time of Book of Nature as divine presentation.
Think about Darwin, Origin of Species, disappointed.
Tennyson writing before Darwin but both reading the geologist.

*SWCCL = Southwest Conference of Christianity and Literature

The Guardian offered an article that caught my attention with this:

Just like Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence, many members of academia marvel (or react with rejection) at the rapid changes in the production and dissemination of scholarly work and interaction between academics and those “outside” academic institutions. Thousands of scholars and higher education institutions are participating in social media (such as Twitter), as an important aspect of their research and teaching work.

Now, I’m all about the technology, because I do believe that, to some extent, that is where we are going.

But the part of this that really got to me was Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence…

Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence…

Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence…

And that is where we are with technology, except that tech is different. Yet, we are, in fact, involved with marveling at the sight of students doing/using tech in different/new/odd/unique/unfamiliar ways. Like Denise Horn’s comment:

they can text with one hand, under a desk, without looking.

Back to the original article:
As we all know, tech is “new” to us, though not new to our students who never grew up without it.

New technologies have slow adoption cycles, and often the learning curve is steep. Those already using these tools within academic contexts should not be considered a priori as “the converted”; perception and usage of social media varies wildly, and due to the inherently fluid and malleable nature of the platforms themselves we are still in the process of assessing all their possibilities.

The most hopeful sentence in the article, for me, was this:

the 21st century scholar has the tools not only to publish and disseminate, but also to facilitate the development of specialised audiences, and therefore of what is called “impact”: people read, and in turn write about your work, which is in turn read by others.

Then there is this:

For higher education, social media is part of a process of democratisation. Its effective use can lead to an ethical shift towards active efforts for engaging new audiences and widening participation beyond the Ivory Tower’s walls.

What do you think of that?

We talked about the plague in class on Wednesday. Then I saw these two posts online:

Rats not involved with plagues, because there weren’t any dead rat infestations.

Yersinia Pestis WAS present with plague victims, not before that. So, while the rats did not deliver, what we thought was the Black Death apparently was.

So how was it spread? Perhaps through the air or by fleas, which do not need to have rats.

Hrothgar’s Playlist is an assignment one of my colleagues has come up with for Brit Lit I. I like it and will be adopting/adapting it for my class. I haven’t actually seen his assignment, just heard someone else talk about it, so I may change it up, but here is what I have so far.

Hrothgar’s Playlist
Choose a character whom we have read about this semester. Find ten appropriate songs for this particular character. Attach the MP3 files or links to the songs online. Attach the lyrics. Write an essay explaining why you picked the songs you did and/or how those songs apply to the character.

Extra credit, minor: Find ten images which express something about the character and explain in a paragraph each how the images are related to the character.
Extra credit, major: Create a digital story (audio and visual) using lines from the songs to tell about this character. (There you will have the original playlist plus the images, plus a title, introduction, discussion, reflection, etc.)

Apparently this is a very popular assignment and I think it could be a great final assignment.

Introduction
I am going to introduce Hrothgar’s playlist with this commercial: Stethoscope.

Poetryfoundation.org has this article, which is a reconsideration of The Bell Jar. I loved this book as a moody high school student, though I usually disliked literature because of its sad endings and this book also had a sad ending.

When I went off to college, I left the book behind emotionally and just this year gave away my copy of it and other Plath writings I had collected.

But the article was interesting and, even though I know it ends badly, it makes me want to go back and read the book to see if I can suss out what it was that made me so enamored with it.

Minding the Campus has an article on “Literature Professors Discover Animals”. While I haven’t read all of it yet, since I am incredibly busy moving, I did want to bookmark it.

The topic is relevant to my most recent review (due 8/1) and I may plumb the depths of the article before I do my final submission of that article.

Hemingway Document Preservation Project.

In June 2008 the SSRC’s Working Group on Cuba completed a collaborative project between the United States and Cuba to preserve and reformat the papers of Ernest Hemingway housed at the Hemingway Museum at Finca Vigía, the Nobel Prize winning author’s former residence outside of Havana. The collection contains some 2,000 letters as well as draft fragments of Hemingway’s novels and stories–including the beginning of a rejected epilogue to For Whom the Bell Tolls and handwritten pages of earlier versions of the novel. A digitized version of the papers is now available in Cuba and at the JFK Library in Boston, Massachusetts.

While I will probably not be teaching humanities for a while now, topics related to it still catch my attention. Partially that’s because I was already interested in all those things, which is why I graciously (one might even say graspingly) accepted a second start Humanities class this spring. I’m going to keep posting them here because, if I ever want them again, I’ll know where to find them!

I expect to want them, too; my present chair said he is sure I will be “breaking into” humanities at my new college much more swiftly than they would expect. He’s sure I’ll be in the middle of everything anywhere I go. (Does that mean I’ve been in the middle of everything here? Why, yes, it probably does. )

Jordan Wants to Regain Christian Relics:

A group of 70 or so “books”, each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007.
…
“They will really match, and perhaps be more significant than, the Dead Sea Scrolls,” says Mr Saad.

“Maybe it will lead to further interpretation and authenticity checks of the material, but the initial information is very encouraging, and it seems that we are looking at a very important and significant discovery, maybe the most important discovery in the history of archaeology.”

Significant Medieval Treasure Found in Austria:

Austria’s BDA, in charge of national antiquities, said the treasure trove, found in the vicinity of Wiener Neustadt, consists of more than 200 rings, brooches, ornate belt buckles, gold-plated silver dishes and other pieces or fragments, many encrusted with pearls, fossilized coral and other ornaments. It says the objects are about 650 years old and are being evaluated for their provenance and worth.

According to to the BDA, the man was digging to enlarge a small pond in his back garden when he found the buried treasure in 2007 consisting of 153 pieces of jewellery and 75 other precious objects and fragments.

Infanticide Common in the Roman Empire:

Infanticide, the killing of unwanted babies, was common throughout the Roman Empire and other parts of the ancient world, according to a new study.

The study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science, explains that “until recently, (infanticide) was a practice that was widely tolerated in human societies around the world. Prior to modern methods of contraception, it was one of the few ways of limiting family size that was both safe for the mother and effective.”

Based on archaeological finds, the practice appears to have been particularly widespread in the Roman Empire.

Titas Wuz Here is a great article in the Boston Globe about ancient graffiti.

It seems less likely that you’ll recall the anonymous Athenian who, some 1,500 years ago, snuck out in the middle of the night to inform the world that a certain Sydromachos had a backside “as big as a cistern.” Likewise, the fact that someone named Titas was “a lewd fellow” will almost certainly have passed you by.

As for the pictures in the clomping textbooks of old, these would have consisted of grainy busts and urns, not boomerang-shaped penises or disembodied testicles. But times have changed, and there they are, on page 94 of “Ancient Graffiti in Context”: the free-floating genitalia of Hymettos, carved into the rocks there by someone with time on his hands and a loose grasp of human anatomy.