I had a high school social studies teacher who said, "We understand the world to the extent that we look lovingly at it." So by taking this progressive political and deconstructionist approach to sacred texts, we destroy the love and therefore the understanding.
I really appreciate your writing in general. Chag sameach!
There's so much here. I could write back in chapters. But mostly this: the letter isn't histrionic. It's sincere. It's motivated by the love the young have for what moves them, for the way they are touched by the sacred and the tragic. Dover Beach: most people of a certain age read it as teenagers and quickly forgot it, but for some of us, no better or worse than our peers, just receptive somehow, it gets embedded in us... "so various, so beautiful, so new"... if you can hear the notes then you will never unhear them. Only in an age like ours do we feel the need to apologize for loving something so beautiful and rich without the obligatory disclaimers of condescending, ironic detachment. What the hell is wrong with us?
I didn't know "Sohrab and Rustum", so I went and read it, and now that sentence about your professor ties it all together. There's certainly no ironic detachment in 'You told us you cried when you read Sorab and Rustrum.' That's a professor you could trust with your heart, which is how I read this letter. Thank you for posting it here. A young graduate student should be in love with his subject, and you clearly were.
I often think, and often thought, that learning the background, the history, the ins and outs of a poet's life, or a writer's life, or an artist's life, was intrusive. I didn't want to know. I wanted to hold the object, the words, and admire them just as they were--the doors of a cathedral, the wings of a woman wrought in marble, a fairytale made up by a madman. And to share in that admiration with myself, as though I created a world with that artist where only I and the work existed. You know, I don't think it would have occurred to me, maybe ever, that Aslan was actually Jesus, that the Chronicles of Narnia were Christian allegories. (I am myopic, to say the least). When I was taking undergrad courses at UTC, I took a Southern Lit class with Arlie Heron (before your time). He was a marvelous teacher. He would read a passage and then sigh. Almost swooning sometimes. And then just sink up in the sound of the words themselves. He was the very essence of a New Critic and I adored it. And even though I have come to see the use and need of knowing the ins and outs and histories, etc., etc., or artists and writers, I still prefer not knowing. As much as Star Trek has shaped my life, I have seen few interviews with the stars, watched no blooper reels, read almost no criticism. I do not want to break the spell, to undermine the influence that the shows had/has on me. Would I say the same of Plath or Van Gogh? That I'd rather not know? Too late to say now, but I would maybe have preferred it all in a vacuum, just me and images and words. But I wouldn't understand many things either, like Andrew Wythe's Christina's World, wouldn't know that she was dragging herself up that hill because she couldn't walk. But, come to think of it, that knowledge rather spoiled that painting for me.....there it is. And this is not exactly to your point about the layering on of formal criticism, which is often just a bunch of noise meant to tear down and/or make over meaningful things in new, and too-often artificial, light.
Sigh. In grad school, I actually enjoyed close-reading, especially the psychoanalytic approach Bill Veeder used. But, like you, I found that constantly tearing books down got tiresome. I chose to write my (unfinished) dissertation on Defoe in part because I didn’t like his books very much, and so I didn’t mind picking them apart. (Another reason was that he wrote so quickly that he was kind of sloppy, so somehow it didn’t feel like he would mind as much.)
For the reasons you cite, I am so grateful that my son, who loves history, chose not to do a history PhD, and my daughter, who loves literature, will be starting a job this summer instead of going to grad school.
Btw, was the professor Lisa Ruddick? I always thought she was not just brilliant but also humane, and it’s easy for me to imagine that she could have helped you find an approach that both you and the department would find acceptable.
I am wondering if looking at literature through this lens wasn’t projection- that’s what Marxists would do if they were literature tastemakers. (Like they are now)
Great share! I did Lit in the early 1980s when it was still possible to write about and enjoy literature on its own terms, though the rumblings of politicized theoretical frameworks were clearly there. I just did an undergraduate degree, but could see what I might have to subject myself to if I continued. And it made me queasy.
Great letter ! Politicizing literature is not a way to install love of the subject, in my view.
I always loved “On Dover Beach” and agree that it is love poem though one that cries for the loss of faith and for holding close those one loves. I don’t see this as ignoring his wife or objectifying her.
Deconstructing always seems to me an exercise in a “better than though “ approach , and am glad that in my university days in the late 40’s it was not yet known..
Thanks for posting this! It is a fascinating historical artifact, if you don't mind my putting it that way. The bit about not being allowed a Blakean reading of Blake reminds me of the joke that Shakespeare would fail a course in his own plays (Isaac Asimov wrote a science fiction story about this).
I've been pondering this lately: I was at Oxford in the early years of this century, studying a humanities subject (history). Yet, I was not aware of much in the way of politicised readings of the subject. There were a few (I remember being amused and bewildered by the explicitly Marxist History Workshop Journal, which published articles condemning all sorts of cultural artifacts as capitalist and imperialist), but most of the examples I can recall now were ones I actively sought out for my dissertation on objectivity in historical study. They weren't presented to me as "the right approach." So I wonder, was Oxford or was historical study (or were my tutors) less political then than now? Was I naive? Was the undergraduate curriculum less politicised than postgraduate study? All of these may be true.
My son studied (or I guess, in their parlance, “read”) history at Oxford from 2018-2021, and in his experience it wasn’t especially politicized. It was possible to take courses in approaches like Marxist theory, but also to avoid them. I think Oxford is old-fashioned, which is why it was a good place for a true lover of history like my son. But even so, he still found it frustrating that there were almost no courses in military history—his special interest—that the overwhelming preference was for “history from below,” and that the Great Men theory of history was just presumed to have no merits whatsoever. This bias against the kind of history he wanted to study is why he chose not to go to grad school in history.
It’s possible that when you were at Oxford, there was a firewall between the politics of the graduate and undergraduate history studies. There used to be an idea of saving the theoretical approaches for graduate school. That’s largely been abandoned, however, at least in American schools.
Thanks for sharing this, Thomas! Very interesting to see young-you wrestling with these oh-so-familiar themes in contemporary academia.
I'm grateful, however, that I do not have my equivalent angst-letter from the astrophysics degree I started on before jumping ship for greener pastures. 🤣
Thomas, yes! I experienced the same thing at the University of Chicago, in my case with respect to religious texts and teachings. I wrote a Substack esssay about this not too long ago: https://analevylyons.substack.com/p/my-most-embarrassing-belief?r=241ys3
I had a high school social studies teacher who said, "We understand the world to the extent that we look lovingly at it." So by taking this progressive political and deconstructionist approach to sacred texts, we destroy the love and therefore the understanding.
I really appreciate your writing in general. Chag sameach!
There's so much here. I could write back in chapters. But mostly this: the letter isn't histrionic. It's sincere. It's motivated by the love the young have for what moves them, for the way they are touched by the sacred and the tragic. Dover Beach: most people of a certain age read it as teenagers and quickly forgot it, but for some of us, no better or worse than our peers, just receptive somehow, it gets embedded in us... "so various, so beautiful, so new"... if you can hear the notes then you will never unhear them. Only in an age like ours do we feel the need to apologize for loving something so beautiful and rich without the obligatory disclaimers of condescending, ironic detachment. What the hell is wrong with us?
I didn't know "Sohrab and Rustum", so I went and read it, and now that sentence about your professor ties it all together. There's certainly no ironic detachment in 'You told us you cried when you read Sorab and Rustrum.' That's a professor you could trust with your heart, which is how I read this letter. Thank you for posting it here. A young graduate student should be in love with his subject, and you clearly were.
I often think, and often thought, that learning the background, the history, the ins and outs of a poet's life, or a writer's life, or an artist's life, was intrusive. I didn't want to know. I wanted to hold the object, the words, and admire them just as they were--the doors of a cathedral, the wings of a woman wrought in marble, a fairytale made up by a madman. And to share in that admiration with myself, as though I created a world with that artist where only I and the work existed. You know, I don't think it would have occurred to me, maybe ever, that Aslan was actually Jesus, that the Chronicles of Narnia were Christian allegories. (I am myopic, to say the least). When I was taking undergrad courses at UTC, I took a Southern Lit class with Arlie Heron (before your time). He was a marvelous teacher. He would read a passage and then sigh. Almost swooning sometimes. And then just sink up in the sound of the words themselves. He was the very essence of a New Critic and I adored it. And even though I have come to see the use and need of knowing the ins and outs and histories, etc., etc., or artists and writers, I still prefer not knowing. As much as Star Trek has shaped my life, I have seen few interviews with the stars, watched no blooper reels, read almost no criticism. I do not want to break the spell, to undermine the influence that the shows had/has on me. Would I say the same of Plath or Van Gogh? That I'd rather not know? Too late to say now, but I would maybe have preferred it all in a vacuum, just me and images and words. But I wouldn't understand many things either, like Andrew Wythe's Christina's World, wouldn't know that she was dragging herself up that hill because she couldn't walk. But, come to think of it, that knowledge rather spoiled that painting for me.....there it is. And this is not exactly to your point about the layering on of formal criticism, which is often just a bunch of noise meant to tear down and/or make over meaningful things in new, and too-often artificial, light.
Sigh. In grad school, I actually enjoyed close-reading, especially the psychoanalytic approach Bill Veeder used. But, like you, I found that constantly tearing books down got tiresome. I chose to write my (unfinished) dissertation on Defoe in part because I didn’t like his books very much, and so I didn’t mind picking them apart. (Another reason was that he wrote so quickly that he was kind of sloppy, so somehow it didn’t feel like he would mind as much.)
For the reasons you cite, I am so grateful that my son, who loves history, chose not to do a history PhD, and my daughter, who loves literature, will be starting a job this summer instead of going to grad school.
Btw, was the professor Lisa Ruddick? I always thought she was not just brilliant but also humane, and it’s easy for me to imagine that she could have helped you find an approach that both you and the department would find acceptable.
Yes, it was Lisa. She was great and helped me in so many ways!
I’m still in touch with her on Facebook. She is such a lovely person!
I am wondering if looking at literature through this lens wasn’t projection- that’s what Marxists would do if they were literature tastemakers. (Like they are now)
Great share! I did Lit in the early 1980s when it was still possible to write about and enjoy literature on its own terms, though the rumblings of politicized theoretical frameworks were clearly there. I just did an undergraduate degree, but could see what I might have to subject myself to if I continued. And it made me queasy.
Thanks, Thomas. This letter captures the tectonic shift that took place in the teaching of literature from the 70s and 80s to the 90s and beyond.
Great letter ! Politicizing literature is not a way to install love of the subject, in my view.
I always loved “On Dover Beach” and agree that it is love poem though one that cries for the loss of faith and for holding close those one loves. I don’t see this as ignoring his wife or objectifying her.
Deconstructing always seems to me an exercise in a “better than though “ approach , and am glad that in my university days in the late 40’s it was not yet known..
Thanks for posting this! It is a fascinating historical artifact, if you don't mind my putting it that way. The bit about not being allowed a Blakean reading of Blake reminds me of the joke that Shakespeare would fail a course in his own plays (Isaac Asimov wrote a science fiction story about this).
I've been pondering this lately: I was at Oxford in the early years of this century, studying a humanities subject (history). Yet, I was not aware of much in the way of politicised readings of the subject. There were a few (I remember being amused and bewildered by the explicitly Marxist History Workshop Journal, which published articles condemning all sorts of cultural artifacts as capitalist and imperialist), but most of the examples I can recall now were ones I actively sought out for my dissertation on objectivity in historical study. They weren't presented to me as "the right approach." So I wonder, was Oxford or was historical study (or were my tutors) less political then than now? Was I naive? Was the undergraduate curriculum less politicised than postgraduate study? All of these may be true.
My son studied (or I guess, in their parlance, “read”) history at Oxford from 2018-2021, and in his experience it wasn’t especially politicized. It was possible to take courses in approaches like Marxist theory, but also to avoid them. I think Oxford is old-fashioned, which is why it was a good place for a true lover of history like my son. But even so, he still found it frustrating that there were almost no courses in military history—his special interest—that the overwhelming preference was for “history from below,” and that the Great Men theory of history was just presumed to have no merits whatsoever. This bias against the kind of history he wanted to study is why he chose not to go to grad school in history.
It’s possible that when you were at Oxford, there was a firewall between the politics of the graduate and undergraduate history studies. There used to be an idea of saving the theoretical approaches for graduate school. That’s largely been abandoned, however, at least in American schools.
What a fascinating time-capsule your 30 year old letter is....
And how much MORE that letter might have contained if writing it today.....
a pity she didn't reply....
Thanks for sharing this, Thomas! Very interesting to see young-you wrestling with these oh-so-familiar themes in contemporary academia.
I'm grateful, however, that I do not have my equivalent angst-letter from the astrophysics degree I started on before jumping ship for greener pastures. 🤣
Chris.