When I introduce myself as an English professor, two reactions usually ensue:
1) “I better watch my grammar around you, huh?”
Now it’s true I’ve always aspired to playing the part of the bullying pedant, but so far I’ve far I seem to keep falling short, inspiring little in the way of fear and groveling.
2) the preferred but more daunting response: what should I read?
Preferred because this response reflects a more accurate understanding of what I’m all about but daunting because of what’s at stake. The wrong answer would impeach my credibility, tarnish my
my professional honor. Worst yet, an inept answer might damage the love of reading that prompted the question, ruling out some of my supersized favorites: Robert Musil’s Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, Henry Adams’ Education, Middlemarch, and Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate.
In the 1990s I set out to articulate criteria I might use in answering such questions, in a book called The Literary Bent.
Since then, I’ve changed and amplified the position that The Literary Bent took.
The recent stress in academia on “learning outcomes” and the concomitant demand for clear course goals has obliged me to begin articulating explicit objectives on the syllabi in all my classes that meet my college’s current general-education lit. requirement: a list that specifies some explicit criteria of literariness*.
While many of the works I teach, enjoy, and have written about meet these criteria, one long story, by Willa Cather, stands out as exemplarily literary.
An added bonus is that this 1920 story surprises even the well-read, who think they know Cather, since in it you’ll find neither your academic grandfather’s frontier Cather nor your feminist mother’s “queer studies” Cather. Look instead for a critique of modernism embedded in a deceptively conventional star-crossed lovers comedy.
More on “Coming, Aphrodite!” Hollywood Intellect pp. 30, 32, 33, 36-42, 46-49
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Hollywood-Intellect/424406680088?ref=ts
* CONCEPTUAL GOALS FOR ALL LIT. CLASSES
Why lit.?
__Can explain what distinguishes literary writing from other writing, most written words we encounter from day to day.
__Can identify the cognitive demands literary texts make on readers that non-literary texts don’t make
__Can point out notable traits that make literary writing literary, especially the way literature stages contests or conflicts and raises questions and the way literary writing, whatever the plot or so-called theme, is always also about the ways in which we use words, tell stories, construct explanations.
__Conversant with such concepts as genre, rhetorical agenda, narrative point of view, irony, figurative language (metaphor and simile)
__Can respond to language analytically by treating words as things—marks on a page, sounds in the ear, part of our every environment—that writers work and play with to affect readers and that speakers work and play with to affect listeners.
James D. Bloom
Professor of English & American Studies
