By Laura Lisabeth
In the Graduate English Department of St. Johns University in Queens, NY, we are fortunate to have a required “Introduction to the Profession” seminar, designed to initiate students into the cultures of English Studies and the academy. Professor Steven Mentz presents the class as a combination how-to manual and big theoretical picture; this dynamic is mirrored by the two central texts we read: Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities, by Greg Semenza and How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard. Semenza’s book is concrete and filled with advice about logistics such as how to organize both a wealth of research and a dearth of personal time; Bayard’s is an ironic labyrinth of a love letter to books and reading. The sensation of moving between these two texts is one of “intellectual whiplash,” according to Dr. Mentz, a condition he feels is common to scholars who must constantly negotiate between these two modes of thinking: one that is detailed and practical, and one large and theoretical. The class is further punctuated by Dr. Mentz’s “literary interludes” that provide a third mode of thinking: literary analysis. The interludes remind us of the importance of this disciplinary activity, not just because it is the substance of our teaching and scholarly work, but because the texts themselves are what we love and why we are here, stillnesses at the center of our whiplashed professional lives. To this already layered course experience, Dr. Mentz adds the sharing of students’ emerging research ideas, creating altogether what he terms an “intellectually crowded” seminar table. It is interesting to consider the physical discomfort in Dr. Mentz’ apt images of what we are engaged in as graduate English students. Crowded and whiplashed, however, is exactly how we want to feel: so surrounded by ideas, texts, and language that our intellectual condition blurs into the physical. So this is the life of the mind, the “pleasure” of the text described by Roland Barthes as “a kind of Franciscanism (that) invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again…” (8).
The Anglo-Saxon poems “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” were our first literary interlude, and perhaps because their origin in bloody Anglo-Saxon history brings to my mind the image of marauders, they seem a perfect impetus for the discussion on the blissful experience of plundering a text: how we in higher education take this authority for granted, and why we should find more ways to enable undergraduates to be swashbucklers of language. These two ancient poems swim up to us through history as though from the bottom of a swampy East Anglian fen. Their original textual home is The Exeter Book, a tenth century work typifying a time before movable type that contains many different pieces of literature bound into a single-volume library. These community books containing stories of the culture were placed between birch wood covers and kept in cathedrals. I imagine their heft and splintery texture, parchment pages crackling loudly as they are turned, revealing enlarged illuminated capitals signaling the start of another tale. The Exeter Book’s poems provide a glimpse of what life was like for Anglo-Saxon people in the years before William the Conqueror brought their culture to a close. There was a great deal of frost. And a great deal of time was spent on frigid and solitary sea journeys, subject to waves and to thoughts of death and existence. In the anglo-saxons.net translation, just as the sorrow seems too much to bear, the wanderer says:
Care is renewed
for the one who must send
very often
over the binding of the waves
a weary heart.
Indeed I cannot think
why my spirit
does not darken
when I ponder on the whole
life of men
throughout the world,
How they suddenly left the floor (hall)
the proud thanes (55a-62a)
One way to read this is to imagine that the poet, far from seeing his work as simply part of a collection of thoughts put down for his contemporaries, visualized a missal to carry his thoughts into the future. Knowing his mortality, but seeing his words as part of a “world book” somehow lifts him above the earthly “binding of the waves” (57a.).
It’s hard to conceptualize in our age of infinite access to words that something like The Exeter Book once held such value. One source, one communal collection of cultural products to speak for our values as a group is quite alien to us now. In Pierre Bayard’s terms, the Anglo-Saxons living near Exeter might have had very similar “inner books,” having all shared the same cultural narratives that make up “the grid through which we see the world” (82-3). Were these Anglo-Saxons all on the same page, so to speak? What would the poet who wrote “The Wanderer” think of its continuing life in our fragmented postmodern world, of all the translations and reworkings of his language, of his mind? The boarded book has been broken open and the leaves taken out and plundered.
Lately I seem to often run across this theme of the authority of the text and how that authority gets challenged. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “Uncreative Writing”_ discusses the constructing of literature in acts reminiscent of collage, a post-modern approach to authorship that challenges our Romantic notion of the individual genius. As text has multiplied infinitely in our world, so has our access to material for our own work. Some of my favorite creative endeavors have long been those resulting in the surprise of the whole that can be magically conjured from disparate parts– from cut and paste collages as a child to composing a poem from bits and pieces of newspaper headlines. Writer Jonathan Lethem, in his influential essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism,” gives a history of artistic appropriation that includes Shakespeare and Bob Dylan, two famous borrowers of the ideas of others. Through his own appropriation of cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, Lethem describes reading as “poaching,”_ the act of taking the author’s thoughts into one’s own imagination, a kind of theft over which the author has not control, and is central to the way all new knowledge is built. Our thoughts, our identities are constantly in dialogue with culture and with society: “the word in language is always half someone else’s,” says Mikhail Bakhtin(293): “Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment,” says Lethem.
The group of writers known as Oulipo famously invade the sonnets of Shakespeare and Mallarme, changing words, enacting a clash of cultures and values; their acts of creative co-authorship release new potential in closed discourses. I have used the rewriting of Shakespeare’s sonnets in my own classroom. Students, who are familiar with sampling in music, are always surprised by the exhilarating feeling of interacting with text in this way. The Chronicle article suggests that we recognize a new paradigm for creative genius: a “programmer…brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine” (n.p). These creative acts of sourcing stand to open important and timely discussions about new ways to teach citation practices as knowledge construction, and the awareness of the discourses of power in verbal culture.
A closed essential verbal ideology can be a source of disjuncture for any student not situated in American academic discourse, but it is often most deeply felt as unethical in the experience of translingual speakers in English Only classrooms. Research by such scholars as Min Zhan Lu teaches us that an English Only orientation ignores the way that “Living English” users freely appropriate and transform English to bear “the burden of experiences de-legitimized by English Only usages” (46). Lu proposes questions that ask for writing pedagogy to look to the transnational uses of English by subaltern groups in a “globalization from below” that unseats the hegemony of English in a potential move toward addressing asymmetrical power structures with “accounts of the ways in which English has been…broken and invaded…” (46). In short, new theories of composition must be generated in that space where the word is not simply a “trap in which the writer capture(s) the universe in order to hand it over to society,” according to French writer and critic Robbe-Grillet in his discussion of the postmodern novel. Quite the opposite: the word needs to be reconfigured less as this kind of “private property,” and more as a collective tool of the craft of writing open to all practicing artisans (qtd. in McKeon 814).
As a teacher of writing I am excited by ideas such as the approach to creativity showcased in The Chronicle and In Lethem’s essay. Mary Minock, in an article published in the Journal of Advanced Composition proposes, by way of David Bartholomae, the benefits of a pedagogy of imitation whereby student writers are given explicit freedom to appropriate and imitate the styles and language of published writers. Minock quotes Bartholomae: “A fundamental social and psychological reality about discourse—oral or written—is that human beings continually appropriate each other’s language to establish group membership, to grow, and to define themselves in new ways” (490). Minock points out that academics use “pastiche,” “simulacrum,” “intertextuality,” etc. “to interpret our cultural and textual condition” (490). In the classroom, this idea might take the shape of a text-sharing economy like the online Creative Commons_ in which students freely appropriate each other’s work, making explicit these acts of disciplinary discourse membership and collaborative knowledge-building which are foundations of scholarly life.
Given that language imitation and appropriation is a useful pedagogical tool, we might challenge the sense that texts are somehow apart and untouchable, grave authorities that possess knowledge and represent ways of knowing that exclude the participation of the uninitiated. We are no longer a monolithic Anglo-Saxon band of folks who recognize our own selves in the wood-bound book in the cathedral. Perhaps we are moving toward written discourse as a new kind of community book, reflecting not one value, but the crowded contact zone of many, assembled from all our plunderings. Jonathan Lethem begins his essay on our culture of appropriation with a quote from poet John Donne: “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…” (n.p.). I believe that the seafarer and the wanderer, and the poets of the community who looked out over the “whale-road” with restless questioning spirits would be glad to know how passionate readers of their work tear at it like marauders, drawing and quartering another’s language in their quest for its surrender to their own written discourse. In short, to design new ways for undergraduates to feel this power over written discourse is a noble undertaking.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2011. Print.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Print.
Bayard, Pierre. How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. USA: Bloomsbury, 2007. Print.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Uncreative Writing.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 11 Sept. 2011. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.
Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s. Harper’s Mag., Feb. 2007. Web. 24 Oct. 2012.
Lu, Min-Zhan. “Living-English Work.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Ed. Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda,. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2007. 42-56. Print.
McKeon, Michael. The Theory of the Novel: A Historical Perspective. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Print.
Minock, Mary. “Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy of Imitation.” Journal of Advanced Composition 15.3 (1995): 489- 509. Print.
Semenza, Gregory Colón. Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.
“The Seafarer.” Anglo-Saxons.net. Sean Miller. n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.
“The Wanderer.” Anglo-Saxons.net. Sean Miller. n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.