My American literature courses went well, I think. The students are in the third year, which may be why they were a bit more vocal. As it turns out, my lecture on American modernism (a subject I have never lectured on before, and I think I did a pretty creditable job, all things considered) was a recap of the end of their last course which ended with modernism. I gave it an specifically American slant, discussing the Great Migration north, the suffrage movement, the lost generation, and so on. So some of the material was new. And it's fun to talk about innovative forms in theater; Thornton Wilder's Our Town is a play that they were not familiar with, and perhaps they should be. It's a heck of a lot more accessible than Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, which is on their reading list . . .
My other colleague, Jeļena Semeneca, is teaching the early British literature course, which was not originally on the schedule, and all of a sudden is. It's unclear to me how courses get scheduled here; I understood that this course would not be taught this term, and I brought my notes that I have when I teach our equivalent. Now it is scheduled, and it seems to me that for an institution that seems to have a fairly regimented curriculum, there's more flexibility than one might think. Part of this might be due to the fact that chairperson Sandra Meškova, is on sabbatical this term, so things are in a bit of a flux. As my colleagues Ellen and Lisa, both of whom have had Fulbright fellowships, said, roll with the punches. So OK.
Jeļena's first class was instructive. As she is not a specialist in early British literature (she works more in the nineteenth century), I will be doing a fair amount of lecturing, starting with Beowulf next week. She spoke more about the functions of literature, asking students why we read literature. It's both an easy and difficult question; we assume that it's a good thing to do to the extent that we don't really consider why we do it (or, more accurately, why it might be a good thing). The discussion was instructive in that it really underlined some of the differences between an Eastern European orientation and an American one about what a literature program is all about. First, she emphasized that the goal of their papers was to present "scientific objective reality" about a text. I've not heard this kind of language in a literature course before and certainly have never used it myself. I am guessing that it reflects a (maybe Soviet) attitude that literature must be "scientific" in order to be on par with the other sciences, both theoretical and applied. To translate this into the terms that I use in my class, the goal of a student essay isn't simply to personally respond to a text, but to analyze it; that is, step outside of one's personal response to explore what formed that response. I think that Jeļena and I emphasize the same things, but we extremely different language to do so.
The rest of the discussion was equally instructive. The students struggled with the many ideas as to why one reads literature. Some of them are easy: one reads for pleasure, for information. But some of them were much more subtle: one reads for linguistic knowledge, for example. (This is perfectly true, though it's certainly more true when you're reading outside your mother language. I learn a lot of French grammar when I struggle through a French text, for example. I'm certainly not reading for pleasure, or very much pleasure.) One reads for ideology: texts reflect a world frame that one adopts and/or resists, at least for the duration of reading the text. Students really struggled with the idea that one reads for moral instruction, perhaps because we don't necessarily read for that much in contemporary literature. It's central to medieval and Renaissance literature, of course, as Renaissance writers are always telling you, so that I will be able to leverage Jeļena's opening lecture in very interesting ways.
I have not thought of literary study as particularly scientific, as that's not the premise from which we work -- exactly the opposite, in fact, which is why so many in the West look at our discipline as kind of mushy in that it's so value laden. It's going to be very interesting to continue this conversation over the course of the spring and see in what other ways the very premises that undergird how I think about my discipline will be challenged -- and, I expect, how I will challenge my Latvian colleagues and students in return.
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