Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies 9781474490023

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Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies

Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies

Edited by Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham, 2022 © the chapters their several authors, 2022 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 9000 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 9002 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 9003 0 (epub)

The right of Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgementsviii Contributor Biographies xi Introduction Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

1

Part I: Forms   1. Disciplinary Form: Introduction to Literary Studies Sheila Bauer-Gatsos

25

  2. Novels, Vocation and the Call of the Unfinished Story Erin VanLaningham

45

  3. Poetry’s Lyric Call Stephanie L. Johnson

67

  4. The Drama of Vocation Jason Stevens

89

Part II: Voices   5. Queer Callings: LGBTQ Literature and Vocation Geoffrey W. Bateman

111

  6. Seeing Gender: A Vocation of One’s Own Allison Wee

134

  7. Anti-Racism as Vocational Practice: Reading with Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Edwidge Danticat Kerry Hasler-Brooks   8. The Possibility of Intervention: Vocational Exploration in Non-Fiction Immigrant Narratives Esteban E. Loustaunau

153

173

vi  Contents

  9. Translating Vocation Jeremy Paden

193

Part III: Praxis 10. Encountering the Archive Joanne E. Myers

215

11. Narrating Our Wounds: Trauma, Literature and Vocation John Peterson

233

12. Creative Criticism and the Vital Friction of Otherness Giffen Mare Maupin

255

13. Community-Engaged Pedagogy, Literary Studies and Vocation Deirdre Egan-Ryan

274



294

Epilogue: The Professoriate as Vocation Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

Index303

To our parents Curtiss and Patricia Johnson Dennis and Dianne VanLaningham for their cultivation of us

Acknowledgements

This project was born from our participation in the inaugural NetVUE (Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education) Teaching Vocational Exploration Seminar. Without the efforts of Paul Wadell and Darby Ray, co-leaders of the seminar, as well as the support of David Cunningham, director of NetVUE, and Lynne Spoelhof, NetVUE program manager, we would not have encountered the rich dialogue and collaborative inspiration from which all scholarship emerges. We thank them for their encouragement, expertise and friendship. We also thank our cohort members from that seminar who provided deep reflection on and engagement around vocation scholarship, and we appreciate the opportunity to have tried out ideas for this volume in the NetVUE blog, Vocation Matters, expertly edited by Hannah Schell. For offering important feedback on earlier portions of the manuscript, our thanks go to Geoffrey Bateman, Sheila Bauer-Gatsos, David Cunningham, Scott Huelin and Darby Ray. And we thank the wider circle of colleagues within vocation studies and literary studies for continued inspiration and for their commitment to our shared efforts in cultivating vocation in our discipline. Our editor at Edinburgh University Press, Michelle Houston, has been a supporter of the project since we first met with her at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in Seattle. Her guidance and professionalism have been incredibly helpful. We also thank our copy editor Camilla Rockwood, as well as Susannah Butler, Caitlin Murphy and everyone at EUP for bringing the manuscript to its final form. We thank all of the contributors to this volume for their commitment to thinking in critical and creative ways about literature and vocation. We wrote and revised the book during a time in higher education marked by a global pandemic, a pivot to virtual teaching, economic pressures, and racial and political unrest. The contributors balanced professional and personal vocations with extraordinary fortitude and grace, and we are grateful.



Acknowledgements  ix

From Stephanie: I cannot pinpoint when I first understood my work and commitments as vocations, but no doubt that understanding was shaped by the wise and generous faculty members at St Olaf College who helped me find a voice. During graduate school at the University of Washington, Gary Handwerk, Sydney Kaplan and Richard Dunn offered important affirmation that guided me to this work of teacher-scholar. My thanks go as well to the staff and mentors of the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University and to my cohort of postdoctoral fellows for the gifts of time, challenging conversation around vocation scholarship, and professional support. I owe much to The College of St Scholastica, not least of which is my nomination to the NetVUE Teaching Vocation Seminar, which provided the ground for this project’s germination. I am incredibly grateful to have colleagues who believe in educating students for responsible living and meaningful work and who have become dear friends. And to Erin VanLaningham, who has also become dear, I could not have co-edited this volume with anyone else. For the modelling of faithfulness and service that began long before these influences, I thank my parents, Curtiss and Patricia Johnson, who never cease giving. Thank you to my husband, David Norland, for his wellspring of selflessness and joy. And to my children, Asher, Grace and Zoe, who are the light, always and ever. From Erin: My work on this volume was sustained by many, to whom I owe more than these words. Beginning with my nomination to the NetVUE Teaching Vocational Exploration seminar and later through a sabbatical, I have been supported by Loras College; specifically, I thank the Offices of the Provost and President as well as the college’s library staff, who provided space, resources and administrative help. Midway through the project, I joined the NetVUE and CIC (Council of Independent Colleges) team, who enriched my work through conversation about vocation scholarship as well as friendship and collegiality. Thanks go to the many teachers-scholarsfriends throughout my life who have mentored me, especially those in the English Department at Luther College, in particular my advisor for life, Martin Klammer, and Mary Hull Mohr, for whom I wrote my first college essay as well as my senior thesis. I also thank Nick Gomersall and Deb Edwards for first bringing me to England. My graduate work at Northeastern University and Saint Louis University was shaped largely by Toby Benis, Herb Sussman and Caroline Reitz, who encouraged my scholarly pursuits from the beginning. I was fortunate to work with gifted colleagues and friends at Concordia

x  Acknowledgements

College – New York, in particular Kathryn Galchutt and Kate Behr. At Concordia and Loras, my students have been extraordinarily insightful, bold and generous in exploring literature and vocation. To my colleagues in the Department of Language and Literature and in various circles at Loras College – thank you for your laughter, wisdom, support and goodwill. I am grateful for our daily work together. I am rich with friends who have walked through many seasons with me; I am always looking for the next chance to share a bottle of Barolo, Silver Oak or Saddler’s Creek with you. Thanks beyond measure to Beth, Liz, Eva, Amy, Kathy, Suzanne, Kristin, Kathleen, Lisa, Amanda and Kate. And to Stephanie Johnson, best of professional friends. I cannot imagine working with anyone else on such an endeavour. I am lucky to have a family who help me flourish in life. Our time at the lake and around the table sustains me. Much love and thanks to my brother and sister-in-law, Erik and Katie, who are always ready to raise a celebratory glass. To my husband, Shane Hoeper, my forever front porch partner, who built me an office with a window. To my parents, Dennis and Dianne VanLaningham, my first teachers in school and life, whose professional achievements and personal character make them my greatest inspiration. And to my sons, Aidan and Soren, who taught me about vocation as we grew together in our great adventures as a family of three. The story of our life is my favourite.

Contributors

Geoffrey W. Bateman, PhD is Associate Dean for Student Support and Experiential Learning in Regis College at Regis University, where he is also Associate Professor of Peace and Justice Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of queer theory, LGBTQ social movements and nonviolence; gender and homelessness; and sexuality and vocation. Sheila Bauer-Gatsos, PhD is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Core Curriculum at Dominican University (IL). Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s fiction, the scholarship of teaching and learning in the writing classroom, and cognitive literary studies. Deirdre Egan-Ryan, PhD is Professor of English and Director of Academic Service-Learning at St Norbert College. Her work on the intersections between vocation, service-learning pedagogy and citizenship discourses has been published in The Journal of College and Character. Her research on gender, race and literary modernism is published in various journals and she is co-editor of and contributor to Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement. Kerry Hasler-Brooks, PhD is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Messiah University. Her research fields include American women’s literature, borderlands writing and feminist pedagogy. Her work has appeared in both academic and popular publications, such as Twentieth Century Literature and Christian Century. Stephanie L. Johnson, PhD is Associate Professor and Chair of English and Director of the Honors Program at The College of St Scholastica. She specializes in British literature of the long nineteenth century, Victorian devotional poetry and narrative ethics, and has published articles in Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry and Literature and Theology.

xii  Contributors

Esteban E. Loustaunau, PhD is Professor of Spanish at Assumption University, where he is also Director of the Center for Purpose and Vocation and the SOPHIA Program. His research focuses on contemporary Latin American and Latinx film, narrative and music, as these intersect with migration, dispossession and human rights issues. He is co-editor of Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film. Giffen Mare Maupin, PhD is an essayist, poet and literary critic. Her research, writing and teaching are propelled by questions about embodiment, intimacy and listening. Recent publications appear in Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons. She formerly served as an Assistant Professor of English at Hendrix College. Joanne E. Myers, PhD is Associate Professor of English at Gettysburg College. Her research focuses on intersections between literature and philosophy and the representation of religious experience in eighteenth-century British literature. Her work has appeared in Hypatia, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and elsewhere. Jeremy Paden, PhD is Professor of Spanish at Transylvania University. He is a Colonial Latin American scholar whose essays have appeared in Colonial Latin American Review, Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry and Romance Quarterly. He is also a literary translator who has translated and published Argentine, Chilean, Colombian, Mexican and Spanish poets. John Peterson, PhD is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University. His research focuses on vocation and calling, American poetry and the intersection of religion and environmental literature. His work has appeared in Western American Literature, Christianity & Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Jason Stevens, PhD is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Cornerstone University. His research interests include lyric poetry, poetics, spatiality and cognitive literary studies. His work has appeared in The Saul Bellow Journal, The Wallace Stevens Journal.



Contributors  xiii

Erin VanLaningham, PhD is Professor of English at Loras College. Her research fields include the British novel, Irish literature and culture, and aesthetics and gender studies. Her work has appeared in Women’s Writing, Early Theatre, JNCHC and Legacy. She is the Director of the NetVUE (Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education) Scholarly Resources Project. Allison L. E. Wee, PhD is Associate Professor of English at California Lutheran University. She teaches undergraduate courses in the College and in the University Honors Program; her teaching and research areas include British literature, Classical literature, gender studies and literary censorship.

Introduction Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

The value of higher education in the United States has always been measured in multiple ways. Recently, much of the public discourse surrounding higher education has debated its economic value for undergraduates, including a continued scrutiny of the humanities that began decades earlier. Yet this attention to the economics of pursuing an undergraduate degree has been countered with a renewed attention to higher education’s role in the formation of character and the preparation of students for meaningful lives – concepts that cannot be quantified solely by tracking salary data after graduation. In 1997, Martha C. Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education was one early, assertive voice, arguing for a renewed commitment to Socratic education as the foundation of liberal education, defined as ‘a cultivation of the whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life generally’, and shoring up the humanities as the locus of such work.1 Since then, not only has the need to reform liberal education for the cultivation of ‘the whole human being’ not lessened, but the need to justify such cultivation as within the purview of higher education has increased. The concept of vocation in particular has gained traction within this conversation about liberal education both in the scholarship on higher education and also occasionally in the popular

  1. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9. Nussbaum’s argument for a Socratic education, filtered through the Stoics, attends to what she describes as the ‘moral imagination’ as much as to logical reasoning (14).

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press.2 While the word ‘vocation’ may be used to describe a specifically religious calling if derived from the Latin vocatio, when derived instead from the Latin vocare, meaning ‘to call’, it has a long history of signifying both one’s work and one’s socio-political responsibilities in multiple contexts – civic society, the workplace, the family. Over time, its scope has broadened from callings that come from God to callings that come from multiple sources. Increasingly the concept has come to mean purposeful living, which has current appeal for many in higher education for its philosophical and political resonances in addition to the theological, and which converges with the broader tenets and goals of liberal education. Asking undergraduates to consider their multiple ‘callings’ as students and as future college graduates can contribute to useful conversations in advising offices, classrooms and career services alike. Not surprisingly, even with the broadening of the term vocation to mean ‘callings’ from multiple sources, theology has been represented most heavily within the scholarship on vocation and higher education. In 1997, the same year in which Nussbaum’s call for the reform of liberal education was published, a group of theologians met to discuss the vocation of teaching theology, a gathering that resulted in the 2002 publication of The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher.3 While that book creates an opportunity for all readers, not just theologians, to consider the concept of vocation, certain of its essays identify the acts of reading, writing and teaching as themselves spiritual practices, as though the fundamental work performed by all academics – at least within the traditional liberal arts – is, or should be, religious work. In anthologies that are intended for teaching vocational exploration or discernment in the undergraduate classroom, the emphasis has also often been on texts

  2. For recent examples of scholarship, see Tim Clydesdale, The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students About Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), and the three volumes edited by David S. Cunningham: At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). For a recent news article, see Tom Perrin, ‘One Way to Make College Meaningful’, New York Times (2 February 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021).   3. L. Gregory Jones and Stephanie Paulsell (eds), The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002).



Introduction  3

by religious writers, usually from the Christian tradition.4 Even as the concept of vocation has come to mean ‘calling’ in the sense of purposeful living, then, the trace of the religious has shaped much of the scholarly discourse. More surprising than the continued presence of theologians has been the absence of literary scholars in this dialogue despite recurring interest in the subjects of literary studies, especially in narrative and the act of storytelling. This interest has most often been expressed by those outside the discipline, who have used narratives in particular for utilitarian ends, often as case studies and almost always without consideration of the genre’s history, structure or theory. As literary studies encompasses far more than the study of narrative, the potential within the discipline for engaging students in reflection about ‘calling’ and meaningful work has been largely untapped.5 Its multiple genres, voices, ways of meaning and theories of interpretation have much to offer, and literary scholars are best equipped to suggest means for harnessing that potential. This collection of essays argues for the value and richness of literary studies for the teaching of vocational exploration and discernment from the perspective of scholars within the discipline. It examines the particular contributions that literary scholars can make to the study of vocation and higher education, to the vocabulary and theory of vocation, and to the teaching of vocational discernment and reflection in the undergraduate classroom. It pursues several inquiries: How might the varied fields within literary studies provide means for students to consider purposeful living? How might the pedagogical commitments and innovations of this discipline encourage

  4. See William C. Placher (ed.), Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005) for a collection of texts from the history of Christianity that concern vocation.   5. See Mark R. Schwehn and Dorothy C. Bass (eds), Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020) for a collection of texts from philosophy and literature in addition to theology. As an anthology, however, the readings appear without an analytical or theoretical framework from a literary studies perspective. See also Kaethe Schwehn and L. DeAne Lagerquist (eds), Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), which collects essays from faculty at St Olaf College on the subject of vocation in the liberal arts. The English faculty contributors write about the place of vocation in the academy and pedagogical practices rather than about literary studies as means for vocational exploration.

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students to respond to the world beyond the text? How might our theories of interpretation inform new understandings of meaning in lived experience? Ultimately, this volume seeks to position literary studies as vital to the conversation about value, civic engagement and purpose not only as it shapes the lives of students but also as it shapes the future of higher education. Through that repositioning of the discipline, it also seeks to reinvigorate literary scholars in their professional vocations of cultivating students as reflective individuals responding to their surroundings. Emily Dickinson’s words offer encouragement in this task: I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose – More numerous of Windows – Superior – for Doors – 6

Our classrooms can and should become houses of possibility, moving students and their professors beyond the prosaic and providing multiple openings to the broader world.

Why Literary Studies? Among disciplines, literary studies is singular in sharing its subject matter – texts – and its process – interpretation – not only with the innumerable consumers of popular culture but also with almost all other disciplines, which rely on texts and the work of interpretation to produce and convey ideas. Although disciplinary boundaries are always permeable, the boundaries of literary studies seem especially porous as scholars and students of other disciplines look to stories and other forms of literary expression both for pleasure and for their representational power. The expertise of the literary scholar can seem superfluous to the casual reader. Trends within the discipline have exacerbated this challenge. With the rise of post-structuralism during the second half of the twentieth century and its rejection of stable meanings and value judgements, most literary scholars did not participate in the conversations about purposeful living that continued in departments of philosophy and theology across campuses.   6. Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in Possibility – ’, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1960), 327. See the third chapter of this volume for a brief close reading of the full poem.



Introduction  5

This volume of essays appears at a cultural and political moment when many in higher education feel an urgent need to articulate the value of liberal education at the same time as many literary scholars seek a renewed disciplinary attention to questions of value and meaning. Yet it does not speak solely to this cultural and political moment. We might characterise the history of the discipline of English since the rise of New Criticism in the 1930s in the United States (and the corresponding Cambridge revolution of the 1920s in England) as a history of the relationship between text and context, which is also to say that it has been a history of questioning the role of history itself in literary interpretation.7 Those radical shifts in the discipline focused the study of literature on the text itself, sidelining any consideration of socio-political context, philosophical import or generic developments. Since the 1980s, socio-political and historical contexts have regained importance for interpretation, although tempered and shaped by the destabilising theory wars of the two decades prior. With the ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies at the millennium, and the later ‘religious turn’, noted by various scholars, the discipline is revisiting the value of literature for the world beyond the text and the ways in which literature reflects and shapes values within that world.8 To pose the question of what literary studies can offer the teaching of vocational discernment to undergraduates raises an even more fundamental question: What distinguishes literary studies from other humanities disciplines? If context is important in the interpretation of texts to some degree, then what distinguishes the study of literature from, say, the study of history or philosophy or theology? Peter Barry’s answer to this question provides a simple yet useful starting point: ‘the intensity of the reading’.9 While Barry’s answer may seem inadequate at first, since many people read with intensity, he uses ‘the reading’ here as both an act of comprehending a text and as a synonym for

  7. Peter Barry describes the question of the relationship between text and context as ‘one of the most momentous issues facing the discipline of English Studies today’ in his brief history of the discipline: English in Practice: In Pursuit of English Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 62.  8. Lawrence Buell examines the genealogy of ethical criticism and its currency at the end of the twentieth century in his Introduction to the PMLA special issue on Ethics and Literary Study (‘In Pursuit of Ethics’, PMLA 114.1 (January 1999), 7–19).  9. Barry, English in Practice, 9.

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‘interpretation’. Literary studies is different from other humanities disciplines in its commitment to the concentrated interpretations of texts. Literary scholars bring an intensity to their examinations of the structures, patterns, figures and language of a text, and, although all texts can be read with such intensity, authors and poets typically attempt to craft works that can bear such attention and that warrant our rereading. The essays in this collection model such an intensity of interpretation while also representing some of the varied fields, methodologies and theories afforded by the discipline. We understand this volume as working against the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that Paul Ricoeur identified in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and their followers, and that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick saw also as characterising much of recent literary theory.10 In Rita Felski’s important examination of the value of reading in Uses of Literature, she addresses this controlling hermeneutics head-on and begins to form instead ‘the shape of a positive aesthetics’.11 She argues for a new aesthetic theory that accounts for reader response and that understands reading as an ‘emphatic experience’ encompassing a wide range of responses, judgements and impacts.12 One of Felski’s elements of aesthetic experience, recognition, sounds very much like the grounds for vocational discernment when ‘vocation’ is used in its broad sense: Literary texts offer us new ways of seeing, moments of heightened selfapprehension, alternate ways of what Proust calls reading the self. Knowing again can be a means of knowing afresh, and recognition is far from synonymous with repetition, complacency, and the dead weight of the familiar. Such moments of heightened insight are not just personal revelations in a private communion between reader and text; they are also embedded in circuits of acknowledgement and affiliation between selves and others that draw on and cut across the demographics of social life.13

As we connect the intensity of our reading and the acts of interpretation in which we engage with students to the concept of vocation,

10. See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You’, in Sedgwick (ed.), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 3. 11. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 22. 12. Ibid. 20. Felski adapts this phrase from J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 13. Felski, Uses of Literature, 48.

Introduction  7



we participate in and further Felski’s new aesthetic theory, not dissociated from lived experience but rather informing and affecting it in concrete ways. We affirm with her that questions of value are inescapable and that the need for judgement permeates all aspects of our lives. The language of vocation can clarify for students – and for us – how the ‘heightened insight’ of a reader participates in connections that ‘cut across the demographics of social life’, while bringing the discourse of value to bear on both. Such an intensity of reading is a kind of listening – to texts, to others and to self. Parker J. Palmer connects vocational discernment to listening through a Quaker saying, ‘Let your life speak,’ while also pointing to its ambiguity: it commands us to allow our lives to speak to us at the same time as it commands us to live lives that speak to the world.14 Literary studies cultivates the ability to listen carefully and to negotiate ambiguity. In its commitment to concentrated interpretation, literary studies can provide undergraduates with the skills and focus necessary to examine their own lives with intensity – to interpret the convergence of the text and context of lived experience skilfully, to consider its multiple meanings for past, present and future, and to evaluate its worth for the self and for the common good.

Close Reading The act of reading requires both readers and texts, yet the relationship between reader and text has been understood and theorised in countless ways since Aristotle began the conversation in his Poetics. For the past ninety years, since the explosive rise of New Criticism, the skill of close reading has been fundamental to literary studies in the US and has affected multiple theories of the reader–text relationship.15 We may go so far as to say that close reading was the

14. Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 2. 15. For the seminal publications of this school, see Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1947); John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk: New Directions, 1941); and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954). The movement derived considerably from the work of I. A. Richards in England, including Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929).

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innovation that created literary studies as an academic discipline because it distinguished more clearly the work of literary critics from that of historians. The New Critics had a narrow definition of close reading: an attention to the details of the text itself as independent of all else, including the historical context, the biography and psychology of the author, and the effect on the reader. Despite the broad rejection of New Critical formalism in the 1970s and the corresponding dominance of theory within English departments through the end of the twentieth century, close reading remained vital both to scholarship and teaching during that period. It served the quest for unity of synthesis within the work of art for the New Critics and then served the deconstruction of the text for the poststructuralists. Now, in what some have identified as the post-theory period, close reading remains important as we continue to negotiate the relationship between text and context and again ask questions about value. Even as literary studies has recuperated historicism and has navigated both ethical and religious turns into the twenty-first century, it has continued to perform and teach the close reading of texts. Close reading in today’s classrooms involves identifying and interpreting subtleties of speech, figurative language, differences in rhetorical situation and the ways that all of these details affect specific audiences. We have retained the core of the original definition in our attention to the details of the text, but we have come to admit the ways that textual details shape and are shaped by context, which is one key means to teaching vocational exploration in the literary studies classroom. Close reading can prepare students to interpret the nuances of social, professional and familial communication. In Jane Gallop’s 2000 essay on ‘The Ethics of Reading’, she argues for its importance for education because it will make a student ‘sharper and more adaptable, prepare her better for the surprises thrown in her path’, but she says that an even more important reason for close reading is that it teaches a student to pay attention to what the other is actually saying, to be a better listener; close reading ‘can school us for all our close encounters. And then maybe, just maybe, we could learn not only to read better but to fight and love more fairly.’ That, she concludes, would be ‘close reading as a means to a more just treatment of others’.16 In both 2006 and 2009, Gallop revisited this topic because of her concern that attention to close reading within

16. Jane Gallop, ‘The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (Fall 2000), 11–12, 17.

Introduction  9



literary studies had waned. In the latter essay, she argues for distinguishing clearly between close reading and critical reading, since only the former is particular to literary studies; close reading derives from the study of language and rhetoric, and far from being a hermetic activity, it opens us to the world.17 As a way of reading, close reading, or what we might call ‘literary reading’, will prepare students for lifelong learning. Recently, some scholars have begun to emphasise the significance of reading as ‘not just a cognitive activity but an embodied mode of attentiveness that involves us in acts of sensing, perceiving, feeling, registering, and engaging’.18 The language of attentiveness and engagement is a language that is helpful not only for the teaching of literature in general but also for bridging the discipline with vocational exploration. As a way of paying attention or listening, literary reading will prepare students for navigating their various callings by challenging them to attend to the expressed needs of others in addition to considering their own desires and capabilities.

Form Vocational exploration and discernment practices have long drawn from the language of literature without often probing the nuances and particular knowledge that emerge from a rich and focused study of artistic form. Literature presents experience through an aesthetic ordering of language, which develops emotional capacities, cultural identities and, more broadly, literary affect. Through a sustained engagement with and study of form, we can better understand our own identities as we register experiences and emotions. We can come to see ourselves as ‘formed’. Form invites us to immerse ourselves in the language and meanings of a text and to see its possibilities. As Caroline Levine argues, there is much to be gained if we ask ‘what potentialities lie latent – though not always obvious – in aesthetic and social arrangements’.19 Forms certainly have constraints – by genre as well as by historical

17. See Jane Gallop, ‘The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading’, Profession (2007), 181–6, and ‘Close Reading in 2009’, ADFL Bulletin 41.3, 14–18. 18. Rita Felski, Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 176. Felski employs the term ‘postcritical reading’. 19. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6–7.

10   Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

or cultural context – yet they reveal new and innovative meanings and patterns. They can seemingly transcend time and space while simultaneously being changed by other forms within a particular moment. Levine suggests that ‘[l]iterary forms and social formations are equally real in their capacity to organize materials, and equally unreal in being artificial, contingent constraints.’20 Our awareness of patterns and shapes in literature and society gives us a wide lens through which to examine the order (or disorder) of our own lives. While historically the study of form rested on a separation of aesthetic and socio-cultural concerns, the discipline now attends to the importance of form as artistic choice informed by history and culture. Typically, literary studies approaches form first through the lens of genre or type; texts are classified according to formal elements that suggest narrative, poetic, dramatic or other qualities. Genre allows us to see how language that is ordered and structured within particular conventions causes particular effects – such as a panoramic development of setting in a novel or epic poem, a meditation and gloss on an emotion in a sonnet, or an introspective evaluation in a monologue. Just as emotions and introspection are shaped by lived experience, they are also shaped by the generic conventions of literary texts. Attention to the relationship between text and context helps us understand our own contextualised formation as individuals and the formation of social relationships. Thus, the study of form cultivates particular dispositions, asking us to see the refractions of ourselves and the world through literary language and structure. Here, ‘by its use of unaccustomed language, art makes the world strange again, so that we can see it with the freshness of a child’.21 Forms defamiliarise the world so that we can see it in new ways, perhaps clearer ways. They offer us the distance to begin to question our acceptance of ideas enforced by the dominant culture.22 When we feel both an affinity for the world of the text and a distance from its particularities, we may begin to evaluate our own decisions and modes of thinking; we may begin to imagine new and different trajectories for our future selves. Focusing on the formal elements of a text allows us to see ‘our sense of the whole as a pattern [which] is what governs the perceived meaning of the parts’.23 The

20. Ibid. 14. 21. David H. Richter, ‘Formalism’, in Richter (ed.), The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s Press, 1989), 723. 22. Ibid. 723. 23. Ibid. 731–2.



Introduction  11

pattern of our lives, too, can govern meaning, and a study of literary forms can model the formation of such patterns. As an art form, literature cultivates our abilities to appreciate and respond to beauty – to the aesthetic breadth and depth of language and its effects. Our enjoyment of a beautiful image or phrase derives in part from formal aspects of the text, so form’s influence on the emotional, spiritual and psychological experience of literature is significant even as scholars disagree about how it can be measured. How much can we connect our emotional responses to linguistic and stylistic choices? Why do the particulars of language – tone, imagery, metaphor and diction – have such capacity to touch us? What is the psychological process of responding to structures and forms, and how does this cultivate our minds and hearts? While formalists tend to see literature as a ‘mode of construction’24, others see form as an invitation to bring forward feelings and attitudes. Still others, most famously T.S. Eliot, read literature as an ‘ideal order’ and argue that it gains meaning not from an individual reader’s experience but by a more collective, public response.25 Most agree, however, that form shapes and elicits emotion. To consider the aesthetic can ‘[bridge] the gap between material and spiritual, a world of forces and magnitudes’, thus fostering a sense of awe and wonder and bringing us into contact with the sublime as well as the beautiful.26 Literary studies invites students to consider aesthetic judgements and to articulate the place of beauty in their lives. An analysis of form and of the value of the aesthetic can inform, deepen and broaden the scholarship of vocation. Introducing students to the paradoxically liberating constraints of form, we can provide them with what Martha C. Nussbaum describes as both a close encounter and confrontation. Literature, Nussbaum writes, ‘[requires] us to see and to respond to many things that may be difficult to confront – and [it makes] this process palatable by giving us pleasure in the very act of confrontation’.27 Literature calls us to a clearer vision and careful reading of lived experience made pleasurable through its formal qualities.

24. Ibid. 724. 25. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Richter, The Critical Tradition, 467. 26. ‘Aesthetics’, in William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman (eds), A Handbook to Literature, 7th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 7. 27. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 6.

12   Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

Theory Rather than an esoteric field apart from these formal and aesthetic questions, literary theory opens up complex narratives of its own. Theory provides us with varied ways to interpret the world around us. As Jonathan Culler notes, Literature has been given diametrically opposed functions. Is literature an ideological instrument: a set of stories that seduce readers into accepting the hierarchical arrangements of society? . . . Or is literature the place where ideology is exposed, revealed as something that can be questioned? . . . Both claims are thoroughly plausible: that literature is the vehicle of ideology and that literature is an instrument for its undoing.28

Literature’s seductive quality enables its own powers and purposes to be turned on itself. Students of literature learn this early on: the captivating power of language, story and character also reveals the disempowerment inherent in flawed individuals and systems. Here, we find, begins theory. Theory gives us tools for understanding identity formation and self in society. Seeing our work in literary studies as the practice of theory, of interpretation as social action, is to enter what bell hooks describes as ‘education for critical consciousness’.29 Our role as readers, writers and interpreters invites a process of transformation, but such transformation is most fully possible when understood as such. While a traditional cultural narrative prefers to position literature as a civilising force with the literary subject in free association apart from context, theory challenges literary subjects and reading subjects by emphasising our choices and our conscious – and unconscious – actions.30 Theory seeks to disrupt our belief that our positions as readers are apolitical; what we read and how we read should help us examine our identities with greater urgency and clarity, even as we tear down former versions of ourselves. As we encourage students to explore their meaning and purpose as individuals who contribute to the common good, the study of 28. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 38. 29. bell hooks, ‘Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy’, in David H. Richter (ed.), Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd edn (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s Press, 2000), 80. 30. For example, see Culler, Literary Theory, 37.



Introduction  13

literary theory can prompt significant engagement with the world. From a theoretical perspective, literature is at once the name for the ‘utterly conventional’ and the ‘utterly disruptive;’ to use Culler’s terms, literature is an ‘institution that lives by exposing and criticizing its own limits’.31 An introduction to literary theory helps students see that intellectual reflection and engagement can and should move to the questioning of lived experience. This kind of approach has much in common with vocational discernment as we look inward and outward to assess purpose. The social or public implications of theory also suggest that, while the act of reading may at first seem private, we are all implicitly part of ‘a critical community of readers’.32 This community is both real and imagined, as it invites us into an intellectual pruning in which ideas, ethical frameworks and arguments emerge in response to a dominant narrative.33 As Henry Louis Gates Jr and others have pointed out, ‘we must analyze the language of contemporary criticism itself, recognizing especially that hermeneutic systems are not universal, color-blind, apolitical, or neutral’.34 Thus, our work involves the reflexive act of theorising our theory, continually engaging in a self-analysis that authorises the marginalised to speak with authority. Such work is expected, encouraged and necessary for us to interrogate the relationship between text and context. As we gain language to describe our cultural conflicts and struggles, we also benefit from multiple heuristics and interdisciplinary approaches. Theory provides a rich web of resources from various points in history and in intellectual thought through which we can understand the world. Similarly, vocational conversations draw from diverse disciplines and approaches. Cynthia A. Wells claims that vocation is a ‘matter of identity’ and that vocational identity emerges in large part through social context.35 How we come to be who we are and where we live out that identity are both crucial to vocational exploration. Such exploration can be a means of theorising our lives;

31. Culler, Literary Theory, 40. 32. Gerald Graff, ‘Disliking Books at an Early Age’, in Richter, Falling into Theory, 47. 33. See for example Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the idea of a communal national identity in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2016). 34. Henry Louis Gates Jr, ‘Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition’, in Richter, Falling into Theory, 176. 35. Cynthia A. Wells, ‘Finding the Center as Things Fly Apart: Vocation and the Common Good’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 48.

14   Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

it can generate rich readings of human experience that help us understand ourselves and the world. We ought not to be afraid, therefore, of literary theory as destructive or impersonal but rather regard it as an invitation to understand the power of language and literature more deeply. We can then leverage literature’s creative force with our eyes wide open to the pitfalls and liabilities of particular modes of thinking and being. As we discern meaning from texts through theory, our ‘critical consciousness’ awakens and we gain the tools to explore our life’s meanings and purposes in what Caryn Riswold describes as a ‘process [that] takes place at the intersection of the personal and the political, the social and the theological; it happens in virtual spaces and in face-to-face encounters’.36 Literary studies allows us to examine these multiple systems and institutions at work in the world and what our relationship to them ought to be. The language of vocation can expand a discipline into an enriched major for the undergraduate student, creating a space in which disciplinary knowledge accounts for the ethical responsibilities of social and cultural context.37 Vocation thus allows any discipline to expand its relationship to historical and contemporary issues and concerns. So also does literary theory expand our experience of literature so that we can read broadly and holistically. Thus, the discipline of literary studies provides students means to explore social and cultural concerns while they examine their own identities, gifts and limitations. Vocational exploration is expanded through the study of literary theory and its call to read a text as richly textured, complex and dynamic.

Beyond the Text and Classroom As the humanities seek to demonstrate their important influence on and relevance to contemporary life, vocational exploration through literary studies offers a vital contribution. Not only do the practice of close reading, attention to form, recognition of emotional response and challenge of theoretical approaches show us rich subjectivities and worlds, but the ways that literary studies extends into the world

36. Caryn Riswold, ‘Vocational Discernment: A Pedagogy of Humanization’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 74. 37. Wells, ‘Finding the Center’, 61.



Introduction  15

with lasting and profound effects also show us its significance to human experience and development. The discipline invites reflection about and hones relevant skills in understanding our personal purpose and the needs of our communities. Cultivating vocation in literary studies bears on the larger conversation regarding the role of the humanities in higher education and workplace success and the means to its sustainable future. Indeed, a cluster of recent publications that purport to help readers find their life’s path demonstrate a cultural impulse towards the topic of ‘purpose’.38 Literary studies has long traversed the roads of understanding what it means to pursue meaning and purpose in the world – through narratives of struggle and achievement, explorations of the sublime and responsible living, images of playful imagination and pursuit of passion and emotional authenticity. Literary scholars and scholars of composition and rhetoric have been fundamental partners with scholars of other disciplines and departments in higher education, building a rich history of collaborative programmes across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. The ways that literature and psychology, for example, help us better understand life stories and human development, or the ways eco-criticism allows for a writer’s representation of the natural world to be in dialogue with scientific knowledge of the same place, model how differentiated experiences and world views can be integrated into new modes of knowledge, professional paths and community roles. The study of literature, writing and interpretation provides avenues for the consideration of what creates or hinders community wellbeing and assists students to identify ethical behaviour and personal responsibility. A critical consciousness is built largely through the power of language and argument. Exposure to historical and cultural movements, the narrative structures that hinder or engender change, and the imagination of different realities and worlds provide skills to engage with local and global problems. Certainly, students who study literature cultivate modes of analysis that transfer to problemsolving and the development of ideas in the workplace. They also

38. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans have applied design theory to questions of purpose in Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well Lived, Joyful Life (New York: Knopf, 2016), and NPR Storycorps founder Dave Isay recently published Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work (New York: Penguin, 2017). Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2018) explores the relationship between character traits and purpose; see also the multiple titles on vulnerability and courage by social scientist Brené Brown.

16   Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

cultivate empathy, precision in oral and written communication, and appreciation for racial and cultural diversity. Thus, when students move from college into professional lives, their backgrounds in literature and writing give them a true edge. LinkedIn’s recent study on skills sought after by employers in 2019 ranked ‘creativity, persuasion and collaboration’ as the three most-desired ‘soft skills’ – the very skills emphasised in literary studies.39 Yet literary studies also cultivates civic-minded individuals who act with a sense of social responsibility beyond the workplace. Darby Kathleen Ray emphasises the transformation of learning and the shifts of power dynamics through vocational and civic-engagement processes that many educators have begun to connect to the discipline. She claims that discussions about vocation are ‘likely to be most productive when a range of voices is included; in programmes of community engagement, this means that the college and the community need to share power and strive for co-created knowledge and collaborative problem-solving’.40 Ultimately, such collaboration contributes to preparing individuals who can ‘hear and respond’ to the call of community, to a life lived not only for individual purpose but for the world’s needs.41 It is not surprising that literary studies is a foundation for many professions and roles within the field of civic engagement, ranging from politics and law to non-profit leadership and communication. According to the Association of American Colleges and Universities, civic engagement requires ‘developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation’ that will effect change in a community, and ‘encompasses actions wherein individuals participate in activities of personal and public concern that are both individually life enriching and socially beneficial to the community’.42 Literary studies offers particular strengths for vocational exploration and community engagement because our approaches to emotional and intellectual experiences recognise the relationship between the individual and society, patterns of thought and lived experience, modes of resistance and revision.

39. Amanda Riggeri, ‘Why “Worthless” Humanities Degrees May Set You Up For Life’, (last modified 1 April 2019). 40. Darby Kathleen Ray, ‘Self, World, and the Space Between: Community Engagement as Vocational Discernment’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 308. 41. Ibid. 312. 42. Association of American Colleges and Universities, ‘Civic Engagement VALUE Rubric’, 2009, (last accessed 24 June 2021).

Introduction  17



Exploring purpose and meaning through the context of literary studies positions scholars to consider the public face of their work. As Martha C. Nussbaum argues, we need a framework that situates ‘literary imagination as a public imagination, an imagination that will steer judges in their judging, legislators in their legislating, policy makers in measuring the quality of life of people near and far’.43 Nussbaum’s configuration leads us to consider how vocational exploration through literary studies aligns with the efforts of the public humanities. Indeed, as Devoney Looser suggests, ‘[p]ublic-facing work carries a greater imperative to talk across, rather than down. It prompts thinking inside and outside at once.’44 Looser describes this work as ‘transformative’ and states that it has ‘fostered risk-taking’.45 By cultivating vocational exploration through literary studies, we can prepare students for such transformative work; by introducing them to diverse texts, communities and pedagogies, we can prepare them for risk-taking. Through critique and reflection, students learn how to negotiate conflicts of meaning and purpose and how to embrace the revision of self and society.

Transformations We have structured this volume around three concepts that are fundamental to literary studies: forms, voices and praxis. While all of the essays in the volume address these three concepts to varying degrees, each of the volume’s sections foregrounds one of the concepts as means to approach literary studies and vocational exploration. Through our examination of these fundamental ideas in relation to vocation, we seek to transform how we think about our discipline. The first part of the book, ‘Forms’, emphasises the institutional structure of literary studies and the structures of the genres commonly taught within it. In the opening chapter, Sheila Bauer-Gatsos imagines literary studies and the English major as forms and arrangements that provide the space for reflective and careful readings of texts, contexts and ourselves. Using as its case study a ‘gateway’ introductory course that teaches literature, writing and vocational exploration,

43. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 3. 44. Devoney Looser, ‘The Hows and Whys of Public Humanities’, MLA Profession (Spring 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021). 45. Ibid.

18   Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

this chapter moves through the ways literary studies as a disciplinary form – and specific classroom texts and strategies in particular – can help students shape their college pathways and future decisions. After this consideration of the discipline as form, three chapters address hallmark genres of the discipline: narrative, poetry and drama. In Chapter 2, Erin VanLaningham posits novels as offering a platform from which to examine the limits and possibilities of narrative form for vocational exploration. The study of novels emphasises a doubled-reading experience, following the plots of single characters while also seeing the complete narrative arc. This tension between the parts and the whole, examined through a study of narrative structure, allows us to be better readers and critics of our own narratives. Then, Stephanie L. Johnson turns to poetry in Chapter 3 to suggest that the polysemy of poetic language invites students to consider more broadly how multiplicity and even indeterminacy shape meaning in positive ways. By resisting the use of poetic aphorisms – a few lines of a poem removed from their context to function as a moral lesson, for example – we can affirm instead the creative capacity of language and the possibilities for our own lives. This part of the volume closes with Jason Stevens’s discussion of drama in Chapter 4, which emphasises how mimesis and tragedy provide significant tools for vocational reflection. Addressing the concepts of imitation, action and catharsis, this chapter attends to the ways drama can represent suffering and failure as important to vocational awakening. Drama has the capacity to teach us about tragic wisdom and provide us with means to engage with the demands of civic life. The second part, ‘Voices’, highlights particular groups of writers who have historically been silenced or marginalised within the discipline as well as various modes and pedagogies for listening to their texts. In Chapter 5, Geoffrey W. Bateman argues for ‘queering vocation’ through the reading of literary texts that offer significant alternative spaces for restoring and expanding queer subjectivity. The study of queer literature can re-envision the notion of vocation to be inclusive of sexual experience and resistant to those that ascribe vocational identity to heteronormative concepts. Such readings imagine an expanding and restructuring of communities to become more hospitable and nourishing to queer personhood, and, by extension, to create a more just world. Next, Allison Wee considers the place of gender in conversations about literature and its effect on our understanding of vocation in Chapter 6. This chapter addresses how we might talk with students about gendered responses to literary characters, the evaluation of textual representations of gender,



Introduction  19

and canon formation. As the literary tradition bears responsibility for perpetuating structural sexism over centuries, the exposure and disruption of that tradition can support students as they navigate an unjust world and create meaningful vocations. In Chapter 7, Kerry Hasler-Brooks uses literary reading as vocation-building, both individually and collectively, to enact anti-racism. Focusing on significant voices within Black women’s writing, the chapter contends that reading can cultivate anti-racist thinking and action, both through an examination of the writer’s personal experience and through textual analysis. Reading calls us to reimagine a world held captive by racism. Then, in Chapter 8, Esteban E. Loustaunau presents the language of testimonio in immigrant narratives as means to develop vocation through social engagement with marginalised people and texts. This chapter contends that immigrant narratives speak about intervention as a vocational encounter that can extend beyond the texts to students’ lives and build solidarity with others. Such encounters can prompt courageous actions that respond to the call to live in community. This section concludes with Jeremy Paden’s discussion of translation in Chapter 9, which suggests that for students of literature in translation, the linguistic and cultural nuances that are lost may also be generative places for discovery and transformation. As translators, we emphasise the importance of cultural difference and literary study to broader audiences, expanding the ways we read literature, language and the concept of vocation itself. The third part of the book, ‘Praxis’, emphasises classroom experiences and pedagogical frameworks that demonstrate the purpose and value of literary studies for the world beyond the classroom. Its various chapters offer models of student engagement and suggest applied approaches for exploring vocation. Focused on Special Collections and book history, Joanne E. Myers argues in Chapter 10 that an encounter with rare books can be a decentring experience for students, one that ultimately yields a new sense of self. This chapter uses the example of a methods course in which students analyse books and their contexts through tactile examination and theories of authorship, cultural production and technology. By recognising the labour involved in bringing literary works to print, students cultivate humility and a responsiveness to difference as vocational tools. In Chapter 11, John Peterson turns to the subject of trauma and literature, positing that literary texts’ facility in communicating trauma, capacity to reveal its transgenerational and structural dimensions, and ability to stimulate post-traumatic growth can help us explore the role that trauma and suffering play in shaping

20   Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

vocational journeys. Students’ own woundedness, through personal and communal tragedy, can find voice through the study of literature and the composition of their own vocational narratives. Next, in Chapter 12, Giffen Mare Maupin uses a course on creative criticism as a case study and discusses how student writers situate themselves in relationship to texts and consider how choices about language and form allow a text to act on the world. Through their writing of dialogic essays, students begin to understand selfhood as both disrupted and dynamic, made and reimagined by attending to others. Creative criticism suggests how our selves are sustained by relational life and how we might respond to others more justly. Finally, this section concludes with Chapter 13, in which Deirdre Egan-Ryan examines the impact of community-engaged pedagogy in literary studies through a ‘Literature of Service’ course. Students explore vocation through engaged conversations about social justice and community, both in field placements and in texts. This chapter identifies the habits cultivated by literary studies and shared by community engagement – mutuality, attentiveness and intentional action – and suggests that they lead to greater empathy and capacity for understanding that benefit the common good. The volume closes with an epilogue on the vocation of the professoriate and the impacts that our calls to teach and our calls to scholarship have on communities, institutions and the public good. We return to the questions posed at the beginning of this volume and consider anew why literary studies is particularly suited to cultivating vocation and purpose. As teachers and scholars, our commitments to all aspects of the discipline, including its forms, theories and practices, means that we must also regularly examine our own commitments to the profession. In so doing, we discover, renew and expand our vocations. Recent events have only heightened what professors of literary studies have known to be true in our vocations: that literature is always relevant to and transformative of conversations about purposeful living. The essays that follow illustrate how we are called to emphasise the voices outside of the traditional canon (Chapters 6, 7, 8); to investigate the forms and structures that order language and our world (Chapters 2, 3, 4); to bring students into conversations that help them understand their responsibility to themselves and to their communities (Chapters 1, 13). As teachers, we are responsible for extending textual boundaries so that students are delighted by their very discomfort and awe (Chapters 9, 10, 12) and find healing in reimagining themselves and others (Chapter 5, 11). As this collection demonstrates, the interpretative skills cultivated in literature

Introduction  21



and writing classrooms are the interpretative skills that the world needs within professional, spiritual, familial and community conversations. Professing, in this case, means affirming the return to text and context so that we may, together with students, be attentive in our reading and purposeful in our responses and actions. It means, too, avowing our commitment to a literary reading that has the power to transform lives.

Imagining the Future As we immerse ourselves in the study of language and literature, we see the world both as it is and as it can be. The last line of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry offers both a creative vision and a powerful claim about its impact: ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.’46 In Shelley’s framework, the poetic vision shapes and expands social structures, probes questions of existence and experience, prompts consideration of new modes of being. More directly, Shelley’s defence is a response to the Enlightenment’s emboldening of the powers of science and logic, eroding the position of imaginative, creative thought and the authenticity of emotion. For Shelley, poets are a type of prophet, ‘the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’.47 This looking ‘beyond’ to the unknown future is not within science’s purview but is rather a particular domain of the imagination and soul that only poets can provide, he claims. Over the past two hundred years, the effects and relevance of creative thought have been much contested, especially within the post-postmodern present; today, we ask what role literature and theory can bring to a contemporary, multimedia society in which fragmented identities and polarising debates frame our notions of future existence. How does literary studies help us navigate the past and the present into the imaginative future? Part of the answer lies in returning to literature’s hallmark – the imagination. Literature gives us worlds that reflect our own but that also transport us elsewhere. Our minds expand as we consider Shelley’s celebration of the prophetic, sublime and inspirational work of literature. We imagine future realities so that we can better extend our hearts, minds and souls in the present. Cultivating

46. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 508. 47. Ibid. 508.

22   Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

the imagination is significant vocational exploration; indeed, John Neafsey, building on Sharon Daloz Parks’s ideas, argues that we help students ‘grapple with the big questions of personal purpose, meaning, and social concern so that they may “discern a vision of the potential of life: the world as it ought to be and the self as it might become”’.48 This focus on the potential of the self and the world depends upon the growth of the imagination, and literary studies as a discipline provides multiple avenues for such deep and reflective work. All aspects of literary studies contribute to identifying purpose, to understanding how lives and aspirations are built and how humankind thrives or falls. David S. Cunningham’s formulation of vocation as ‘individual and universal, sacred and profane, specific to a time yet relevant throughout life’ emphasises the expansive definition of vocation and the evolving nature of vocational exploration, but it could describe equally well the discipline of literary studies.49 As Dickinson shows us, ‘dwell[ing] in Possibility’ means to exist without confinement, to live expansively and openly. It means to have the ‘Occupation’ of ‘spreading wide [one’s] narrow Hands/To gather Paradise – ’. Bringing literary studies into conversation with vocation studies acknowledges the cultural call for an education that delves into our deepest questions about personal fulfilment and the common good. Most importantly, it offers students and educators alike a vision of the possible.

48. John Neafsey, A Sacred Voice is Calling: Personal Vocation and Social Conscience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006), 17. 49. David S. Cunningham, ‘Epilogue’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 321.

Chapter 1

Disciplinary Form: Introduction to Literary Studies Sheila Bauer-Gatsos

Literary Studies, Vocational Exploration and the Liberal Arts On college and university campuses today, we see an increased need for helping students navigate their way through what David S. Cunningham describes as the ‘panoply of opportunities and obstacles that will, to some extent, shape the entire course of their lives’.1 Anxiety among college students is increasing, with demand for mental health services on campus often exceeding capacity. Students need institutional structures to help them navigate their educational experiences, but Cunningham also points to a need for both time and space to engage in questions of meaning and purpose. He writes, ‘Students need time: relatively unfettered time, time that does not put a person under immediate pressure to make a final and unrevisable decision,’ as well as free and ordered space: a place where one can range widely, but that is also equipped with certain limits and safeguards, such that it can serve as a relatively safe space within which to undertake the experiments that are necessary to any thoroughgoing process of vocational exploration and discernment.2

  1. David S. Cunningham, ‘Time and Place: Why Vocation is Crucial to Undergraduate Education Today’, in Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.   2. Ibid. 5.

26  Sheila Bauer-Gatsos

To provide this time and space, many colleges have developed programmes centred on vocational exploration. In his comprehensive review of such programmes at twenty-six colleges and universities, Tim Clydesdale offers this good news for higher education: ‘when colleges and universities meaningfully engage their . . . cultures to launch sustained conversations . . . about questions of purpose, the result is a rise in overall campus engagement and recalibration of post college trajectories that set graduates on journeys of significance and impact’.3 The key, he points out, is intentional and systematic implementation. Cunningham agrees, arguing that universities with successful vocational exploration programmes have ‘thought carefully about questions of vocation and calling, created opportunities for students to undertake a process of exploration and discernment, and institutionalized these structures as key elements of [their] programming and ethos’.4 This has been true at Dominican University, where I teach, which for years has invited faculty and staff to a series of ‘Contemplating Life’s Callings’ retreats, engaging us in our own vocational exploration so that we can bring these principles and practices back to campus for our students. The results of these practices for students, according to Clydesdale, include more intentionality, resilience and life satisfaction, in addition to more purposeful post-graduation planning.5 When Clydesdale came to Dominican University to discuss vocational exploration with our faculty in August 2015, we had already begun implementing a vocational exploration programme through our core curriculum, with the strongest focus in our first-year liberal arts and sciences seminar. We were seeing positive results for students around increased attention to contemplation and calling, but Clydesdale suggested that evidence showed that the sophomore year was actually a more appropriate starting place for real work in vocational exploration. Students in their second year, he said, were more ready to open up to the bigger questions of life . . . [So] if you draw those students creatively into a conversation to think about these questions, give them some stimulating resources and give them some conversation

  3. Tim Clydesdale, The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students About Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), xvii.   4. Cunningham, ‘Time and Place’, 6.  5. Clydesdale, The Purposeful Graduate, 90.



Disciplinary Form   27 partners – both mentors and peers – the lasting effects are powerful on those young people. There’s an immediate effect – they become much more plugged in to studies, and also to their campus community and the surrounding community.6

This encouragement and redirection led us to think about how we might incorporate vocational exploration into major curricula in addition to the core curriculum. In the English department, we recognised that the nature of the discipline – the content knowledge, intellectual skills and dispositional attitudes promoted within literary studies – would provide a rich framework for that vocational exploration.

The Framework of Form in Literary Studies Literary studies as a field is uniquely situated to do this kind of vocational work, at least in part because literary studies requires and creates the kind of time and space that Cunningham describes. Literary studies teaches students habits of mind that promote analysis and interpretation, asking them to become comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, to examine and sometimes accept contradictions, and to resist quick interpretations or easy answers. Furthermore, literary studies demands a close attention to language, to what Peter Barry asserts is our intense focus on words themselves. Barry explains that ‘the interpretation and evaluation of literature can be learned by guided experience’, as readers both casually scan and carefully scrutinise language on their way towards comprehension and interpretation. Barry explains the many steps involved in reading, including looking for overall structural patterns, examining similarity and dissimilarity, and distinguishing between meaning and significance.7 This focus on close reading and attention to the formal elements of a text are still important in the discipline today.

 6. Tim Clydesdale, ‘How Can Colleges Help Students Grapple with Vocation?’, interview in Faith and Leadership (28 July 2015), (last accessed 24 June 2021).   7. Peter Barry, English in Practice: In Pursuit of English Studies (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 9.

28  Sheila Bauer-Gatsos

But what if we built upon and expanded our understanding of form? Pure formalism is divorced from social, historical and cultural contexts in its focus on the text itself, but close reading depends upon a careful study of form, and, as Caroline Levine points out, ‘Forms are at work everywhere.’8 This expansive definition of forms helps us imagine how the study of form might help us better understand the social, political and cultural forces around us. Levine argues for considering ‘both the specificity and the generality of forms – both the particular constraints and possibilities that different forms afford, and the fact that those patterns and arrangements carry their affordances with them as they move across time and space’.9 In fact, for Levine, one of the organising principles of form is its portability: the fact that it can be picked up and moved to new contexts.10 In this way, formalism as a primary method of reading and analysing texts – as the act of close reading, of paying attention to the formal arrangement of characters, themes and words – helps students gain insight into how texts work to produce meaning in the world. But expanding the framework of form can also help us think about the vocation of the discipline as we consider how English and literary studies has been used, and the ends to which it has worked throughout different points in history. The discipline, too, has a shape (or rather, various shapes), and formalist analysis of its patterns will help us consider these variations over time as well as the choices that led to any particular constructions. Finally, the study of form helps us to engage in our own vocational exploration as well. Part of the process of discernment is understanding the shape(s) of our own possibilities, our own choices about where we are and where we want to go. In using this expanded framework of form, we can recognise not only the formal features of literary texts but also ‘the many different shapes and patterns that constitute political, cultural and social experience . . . [and] the ways that different arrangements can collide to strange effect, with minor forms sometimes disrupting or rerouting major ones’.11 Thinking about form beyond the traditional understandings of formalism helps us to recognise the complex intersections of text, context and socio-political structures that shape our students’ experiences in the major and beyond it.

 8. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 2.   9. Ibid. 6. 10. Ibid. 7. 11. Ibid. 17.



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This chapter will examine Dominican University’s gateway course for English majors to illustrate the benefits of embedding discussions of vocational exploration within an introduction to literary studies course that is framed by questions of form. Faculty in English departments across the country recognise the need for innovation in the face of public pressures that drive students away from studying the humanities. The numbers suggest that English majors have decreased nationally by 20 per cent since 2012, alongside decreasing numbers in other humanities disciplines.12 Dominican’s numbers have been more stable, but we feel the same pressures many humanities departments feel when recruiting majors and minors whose pressing concerns about career pathways sometimes pull them away from studying literature and the arts. Several years ago, the English department directly addressed questions about how to help students see the value in studying English, how to intentionally embed principles of identity and justice, and how to connect the English major to job opportunities beyond the academy. That process led the department to redesign its learning goals and outcomes to articulate more precisely what we wanted students to do: Reading, Writing, Promoting Justice, and Preparing for Profession. Our new emphasis marked a shift from the skills and content knowledge that we had always emphasised in the major to include purpose-driven goals as well. The structure of the major still includes traditional elements of literary study, of course, with requirements in historical periods, genres and major authors, but it also now includes requirements for justice and global citizenship as means to prioritise the needs and interests of our students in today’s interconnected world. This seems particularly important at Dominican, as we celebrate our identity as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI),13 where over 60 per cent of our students identify as Latinx and over 50 per cent are low-income. Promoting equity and clear pathways to social mobility is an important part of our mission as an institution, and the deliberate structure of our major helps us focus

12. Colleen Flaherty, ‘The Evolving English Major’, Inside Higher Ed (18 July 2018), (last accessed 24 June 2021). 13. Institutions are eligible to apply for the US Department of Education’s HSI designation if 50 per cent or more of their students have significant financial need by qualification for Pell grants and other financial aid and if their total enrolment includes at least 25 per cent Hispanic students. In Fall 2020, Dominican’s full-time undergraduate enrolment was 61 per cent Hispanic.

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on those priorities. In addition to teaching literature, then, we use the major to facilitate the development of skills that will allow ‘students to think, read, analyze, and write like literary scholars, to approach literary problems as trained specialists in the field do, to learn a literary methodology’, which can also be applied to other texts, problems and situations.14 We begin preparing students for this work with two required gateway courses: ‘Introduction to Literature and English Studies’ and ‘Research and Critical Methods in English Studies’. Gateway courses are nothing new, of course, but the innovation built into this sequence rests on three main principles. First, in rethinking the goals and outcomes within the programme, we identified a need for a stronger emphasis on close reading, critical thinking and analysis. While we always expected students to demonstrate these skills, we weren’t deliberately scaffolding the teaching and learning of them in ways that effectively served the needs of our student body. We determined that students would benefit from a semester dedicated to the work of close reading and direct engagement with primary texts, so the new gateway sequence delayed the critical, literary theory aspects of a traditional gateway course to the second semester. We intended that students would then expand their thinking about literature by exposure in the second semester to critical theory and disciplinary methods, returning to some of those same primary texts to apply critical literary theories.15 The focus in the first course on close reading, careful analytical writing and examinations of form within and across various literary genres provides a strong foundation upon which students will build the rest of their disciplinary knowledge and skills. Further, we recognised that these core activities of the discipline – reading, analysis, interpretation, evaluation and writing – are processes of critical, creative and reflective thinking, which are also necessary in vocational exploration. The new gateway course created a space for students to examine critically the discipline itself, deepening their understanding of the ways literary studies functions in the context of other disciplines and ways of knowing. The discipline demands

14. Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 24–5. 15. In the second course in the gateway sequence, students return to the work of four authors in particular, including Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Edgar Allen Poe and Lorraine Hansberry. Students practise applying critical theories and methods to work they’ve previously analysed through formalist analyses.



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ongoing interaction with a variety of texts, authors, ideas and cultures, and this interaction invites regular reimagining of the field within which we study. This, too, is an essential part of vocational exploration. As Shirley Hershey Showalter argues, one of the narratives that teachers owe to their students is the story of the discipline itself (at least in overview), as well as an account of the professors, authors, and other mentors who have influenced this particular teacher. The purpose of telling these stories is not to create clones of the professor, but rather to make invisible influences more visible – and therefore to make one’s theoretical grounding more transparent.16

The discipline’s focus on storytelling, both in analysing stories and in crafting them, makes us uniquely situated to share our own stories with students as we also help them learn to shape and comprehend their stories. Directly addressing the values and challenges within the discipline empowers students to study and work within it. Finally, the new gateway course was designed to help students explore their own vocations in terms of what led them to the major, what they wanted to accomplish during their years of study and what they might want to do upon graduation. When this kind of vocational discernment for students is embedded in college programmes, it can help students evaluate the possibilities and the limitations that will shape their lives. The examination of students’ calling to English further empowers them with a sense of purpose and a path to achieving that purpose. Literary studies thus provides a site for negotiating important questions about vocation within literary texts, about vocational exploration within the discipline itself and about the personal vocation or callings for individual students. In ‘Introduction to Literature and English Studies’, a course students typically take in the fall of their sophomore or junior year, students engage in all three parts of this process of vocational exploration while also developing the necessary skills of the discipline. Students learn to read carefully and critically across various genres, discerning main ideas from supporting ideas, assessing evidence, looking for patterns and themes as well as contradictions. They also, of course,

16. Shirley Hershey Showalter, ‘Called to Tell Our Stories: The Narrative Structure of Vocation’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 73.

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practise analysis of primary texts, through discussions, exercises and written essays. The structure (form) of the class is essential to students’ vocational exploration alongside the development of their skills within the discipline. First, students consider questions of vocational exploration through assigned texts. They begin the semester reading essays by Gerald Graff and Julia Alvarez that illustrate different paths into the discipline of English. As students move through units on poetry, fiction and drama, they encounter other questions of calling and vocation through poems like Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ or Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Writer’; through short stories by Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat and Ralph Ellison; and through Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. When students examine the discipline itself, considering the history of English as a scholarly field, they learn the disciplinary traditions and conventions, interrogate canon formation and disruption, and investigate current debates. This examination of our discipline helps students see that ‘“the scope of the possible” in the discipline may extend beyond currently approved or prescribed modes’, as Peter Barry suggests.17 As students think more broadly about texts in their examinations of canon formation and expansion, they begin to understand how the discipline has changed in response to new theories, new demands and new ways of seeing the world. As they develop familiarity with the terms, concepts and skills necessary for literary study, they also begin to think about their own experiences in the field and their plans for the future. Students are invited to consider what brought them to the study of English; to map out specific courses, experiences and knowledge that they hope to acquire as undergraduates; and to begin exploring possible avenues for work or further study beyond college. Thus, the role of vocational pedagogy in a course focused on the study of English as a discipline can help students position themselves to understand their callings within and beyond it. The habits of mind developed in such a gateway course will help students navigate not only the English major but also their future callings, wherever those might lead.

Vocation in Literary Texts Questions of vocation are central within literary texts, as explored in many of the essays in this collection. In ‘Introduction to Literature and

17. Barry, English in Practice, 8.



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English Studies’, students learn the practices of close reading, explication and analysis across four genres: non-fiction narratives, poetry, fiction and drama. The course begins with several narrative essays that deliberately engage in questions of vocation within the discipline of English. Gerald Graff’s essay ‘Hidden Meaning, Or Disliking Books at an Early Age’ confronts questions of how one enters into the field of literary study. Graff describes his early disdain for reading, especially reading literature or history, which he believes would have opened him up to ridicule in his neighbourhood.18 He writes about his eventual path into literary study through his awareness of and participation in debates around literature. His recognition of his call into literary studies, then, was not the ‘standard story’ of discovering the beauties and joys of reading primary works but instead an invitation into the field by way of the critical conversation.19 Students in the gateway course see through Graff’s essay that the paths by which they enter the discipline are not always straight and are often formed by race, class and gender; the fact that Graff sometimes felt discomfort or displacement within the field helps them think critically about their own position in the major and their responses to the various works they are learning to read. Students read Graff’s text alongside Julia Alvarez’s ‘First Muse’, an essay that talks about her fierce love for the stories in The Thousand and One Nights, which helped her to escape the deadly dullness of school.20 Alvarez describes learning ‘early on that stories could save you’;21 her act of reading Scheherazade’s stories and engaging in the storytelling traditions of her culture invited her to find her own voice, first as a student and later as an author. The juxtaposition of these two scholars’ paths into the discipline of English helps students begin to see that there is not one clear path but rather many opportunities for critical reflection, both of primary texts and of personal positions in relation to those texts. Further exploration of vocation and calling occurs when students read Alvarez’s essays ‘My English’ and ‘La Gringuita: On Losing a Native Language’, which examine the consequences (both positive and negative) of multilingual learning. Alvarez describes the great teacher who began to ‘nurture in [her] a

18. Gerald Graff, ‘Hidden Meaning, Or Disliking Books at an Early Age’, in Beyond the Culture Wars (New York: Norton, 1992), 64–5. 19. Ibid. 69–71. 20. Julia Alvarez, ‘First Muse’, in Something to Declare (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1998), 134. 21. Ibid. 138.

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love of language, a love that had been there since [her] childhood of listening closely to words’.22 She also explains the growing distance she felt from her family’s Spanish language and the occasional yearning she felt for who she might have been if that linguistic connection had been preserved.23 These essays show students a different side of calling and discernment, one which embodies both struggle and empowerment, as Alvarez describes her call into a new language and its accompanying new conception of self. Alvarez’s work captures the vocational conflict described by Jason A. Mahn, when he suggests that we must ‘lean into and endure our multiple and sometimes conflicting callings [and] resist the temptation to size up and resolve every dilemma’.24 Rather than avoiding these conflicts, Graff and Alvarez teach us to confront and even embrace them. The class discussions of these narratives focus on the content of callings but also on the form of narrative expression as a way to give power and voice to writers and speakers. This seems especially important given Dominican’s status as an HSI, where we recognise the need to help students gain what Caryn D. Riswold calls ‘a clearer perspective on the dehumanizing forces that shape both our material world and our perceptions of it’.25 When faced with forces of inequity, injustice and ignorance, what role does education play to counteract the narratives students might otherwise internalise? Riswold claims that our role can be significant: ‘Educators, both inside the classroom and outside it, are in a unique position to help students examine – and sometimes interrupt – the systems and institutions’ that might otherwise dehumanise them.26 Students exploring an English major often do so despite external and internal pressures driving them away from this field of study, pushing back against voices that suggest they won’t succeed or won’t find fulfilling and sustaining work after graduation. Through the study of narrative, students become authors of their own stories, and they recognise the many ways those stories may change over time. They learn to understand the balance between socio-cultural forces that might directly shape and sometimes limit their experiences and

22. Julia Alvarez, ‘My English’, in Something to Declare, 27. 23. Julia Alverez, ‘La Gringuita’, in Something to Declare, 61–74. 24. Jason A. Mahn, ‘The Conflicts in Our Callings: The Anguish (and Joy) of Willing Several Things’, in Cunningham, Vocation Across the Academy, 61. 25. Caryn D. Riswold, ‘Vocational Discernment: A Pedagogy of Humanization’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 73. 26. Ibid. 74.

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their own sense of agency within the world. Their awareness of the complexity and power of narratives can help them find their own voices and better navigate their own trajectories. When the course turns to poetry, students shift to a form that is often somewhat unfamiliar and even frustrating. Again, students begin with close reading to analyse poems like Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Writer’ and Alice Walker’s ‘I Said to Poetry’. Keats’s poem introduces students to the sonnet, while also encouraging their examination of the ways that art, exploration and translation can all derive from callings and invite new ones. Wilbur’s ‘The Writer’ opens discussions of carefully structured free verse poems, and students respond to the ways that vocations (like writing) might be shared within families, as well as the forms of support that are passed from parent to child. Walker’s poem is a constant favourite for students, many of whom are pursuing the writing track within the major; the dialogic form of Walker’s poem opens discussions of the challenges of vocations. Walker’s poem begins, ‘I said to Poetry, “I’m finished/ with you,”’ expressing the frustrations and refusals that occur as she responds to what is imagined here as a literal call from poetry itself. Poetry coaxes her back to writing: Poetry said: ‘You remember the desert, and how glad you were that you have an eye to see it with? You remember that, if ever so slightly?’27

Poetry’s call in this poem must be answered, despite the speaker’s resistance. Walker’s poem, and to a lesser degree Wilbur’s, helps illuminate the problems of self-doubt, which often complicate one’s response to a calling. Walker’s ultimate, if somewhat reluctant, return to writing at the end of the poem shows her commitment in the face of self-doubt. Her poem serves as an example of what William T. Cavanaugh urges us to do in discussions of calling when we must ‘[tell] the story of our choices rightly’, which is even more important than making ‘the right choice’. 28 Cavanaugh argues for the need to

27. Alice Walker, ‘I said to Poetry’, in Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1984), 34. 28. William T. Cavanaugh, ‘Actually, You Can’t Be Anything You Want (And It’s a Good Thing, Too)’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 45.

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help students confront the self-doubt that often coincides with a proliferation of choice and to help them recognise the unfinished nature of their stories. Poems like Walker’s capture the sense of commitment and re-evaluation that callings require. The third genre the course explores is fiction, where students expand their thinking about the ways that form shapes meaning and message. Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Wall of Fire Rising’ and Junot Diaz’s ‘Wildwood’ open difficult discussions into calling. The narrative structures of both stories reveal the tensions when a call towards freedom or independence appears to contradict one’s call to a spouse, child or parent. Danticat’s story presents Guy, the main character, as someone longing for more than his circumstances can provide. When he tells his wife Lily that he wants to fly a hot air balloon, she tells him that God would have given people wings had he wanted them to fly. Guy counters by saying, ‘But look what he gave us instead. He gave us reasons to want to fly. He gave us the air, the birds, our son.’29 Guy’s call to leave a legacy for his son greater than his father’s legacy for him leads him to his violent death. Students examine the ways that Danticat and Diaz use their short stories to build tension around those contradictions and create complex characters whose choices students discuss and debate. An examination of fiction within which several texts explore questions of calling gives students an opportunity to examine vocation from a critical distance that enriches their ability to engage in an analysis of their own callings. Literary characters thus serve as ‘unexpected role models and mentors’30 for students’ own vocational exploration. Our final unit on drama includes Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, both of which have obvious connections to calling, to discernment and to justice.

29. Edwidge Danticat, ‘A Wall of Fire Rising’, in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, 1991). Danticat’s story situates individual callings within a larger cultural context of calling through the play for which Lily and Guy’s son is learning his lines to portray the leader of a 1791 slave rebellion. The lines Little Guy learns include: ‘There is so much sadness in the faces of my people. . . I call on everyone and anyone so that we shall all let out one piercing cry that we may either live freely or we should die’, 59–60. 30. Darby Kathleen Ray, ‘Self, World, and the Space Between: Community Engagement as Vocational Discernment’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 320. Ray’s work points to the ‘unexpected role models and mentors’ found through community engagement, but we might stretch her idea of mentoring to literary texts as well.

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These plays in particular help students think about callings in terms of issues of equity and social action. Students consider the call Lena and her husband followed to move north in hopes of a better life for their family; they analyse Beneatha’s call to pursue medicine, despite obstacles she faces by way of her race and gender; and they struggle with Walter’s complicated responses to callings, in which the consequences of a lack of discernment become real. Of course, A Raisin in the Sun also raises questions about the vocation of a city and its people and opens discussions about the ways that Chicago’s housing practices and racist policies thwarted the vocational dreams of many of its residents, in ways that are still felt today. Students watch the 1961 film version of Hansberry’s play as well, and examine how adaptations require choices related to form and content. As gateway courses provide students with an introduction to literary genres, devices and analyses, vocational exploration can become part of the content of the conversation on multiple levels. Many literary texts like the ones I’ve mentioned explore themes of purpose, meaning and vocation and can help students better understand callings in their own lives. The examination of texts across genres allows us also to explore the ways form serves particular purposes or answers certain calls. Form offers both possibilities and constraints, and, as Levine argues, they differ and overlap and intersect.31 Why do authors make the choices they do? How do the choices they make serve the demands of their narratives, their characters, their meaning? How would other choices, other forms, change what their texts accomplish? Thinking carefully about form across different genres welcomes students into the discipline, empowers them with the skills they need to analyse texts, and encourages them to think and act like literary scholars.

Vocation of the Discipline In the middle of the semester, as we transition from poetry to fiction, the course moves to a second level of engagement with questions of vocation, as students examine the discipline itself and consider the history of English as a scholarly field. Shirley Hershey Showalter explains that ‘stories often reinforce dominant power structures, sometimes without the conscious knowledge of either speaker or listener’, which

31. Levine, Forms, 4.

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points to our need to develop a ‘critical perspective on all stories’.32 This is particularly true when considering the story of the discipline. Who has been invited in? Who has been shut out? How has the discipline of English changed over time? In what ways might further change be necessary? To examine the various purposes for which the study of literature has been used, students consider some of the disciplinary changes from the late nineteenth century to today. Peter Barry explains that it is a ‘distinct liability to be completely unaware of [the history of the discipline]’, and his explanation of the form the discipline took both in the United States and the United Kingdom helps students better understand the traditions and ongoing debates within the field.33 Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature similarly helps us contextualise the historical sense of the discipline, in considering the ways literature was seen as ‘a way of making people better human beings and better citizens . . . [Its] purpose was to moralize, civilize, and humanize . . . [L]iterature was viewed as a “repository of moral and spiritual values”, bestowing a sense too of a national culture and heritage.’34 Literature has been seen as a means of personal improvement, but it has also served social and political ends in ways that advance the needs and interests of a school, community or nation. Literature can be used as a means of exerting power as well as a means of promoting equity. A brief historical contextualisation can provide a clearer sense of why aspects of literary study such as language and history matter within the field and help students to imagine some of the possible directions the discipline might move in the future. As students examine the history of the discipline in a broad sense, I also invite all faculty from the department to come to the class to share their own particular stories of how they were called to study English and the various turns that call has taken. Throughout the semester, faculty members share their career trajectories, which helps to illustrate the necessarily tentative nature of this kind of vocational discernment, when paths often lead us in directions we cannot anticipate. Their stories include their ongoing scholarly investigations and engaged teaching and learning, thus expanding students’ understanding of the discipline and its possibilities. These stories help build a sense of community for faculty and students, which can be an antidote to what Parker J. Palmer calls the pain of disconnection.35

32. Showalter, ‘Called to Tell’, 75. 33. Barry, English in Practice, 92. 34. Showalter, Teaching Literature, 22. 35. Parker J. Palmer, To Know as We Are Known (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), x–xvi.

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While students begin to understand the historical framework of the discipline and the roles of teachers within it, they also examine canon formation and expansion to understand how the discipline has changed in response to new theories, new demands and new ways of seeing the world. Students begin to discover parallels between their own experiences with literature and the ways that the discipline has sometimes excluded particular voices and texts. These aspects of the course address issues of representation, which is essential within all programmes of literary studies, but especially important for underrepresented students in our institutional context as an HSI. Riswold points out that as educators today, we must ‘read the world anew; we need to engage in critical analysis of the landscape we inhabit’.36 Students learn to question the status quo and imagine new possibilities in the field, including opening new avenues in publishing and education. Studying the vocation of the discipline helps students to better understand their place within it and can give them the time and space Cunningham calls for to understand how that place might change. It further empowers them to understand the ways the field develops over time and the role departments, movements and individual students can have on transformations within the discipline. Students see potential for engagement and action within their selected field of study.

Personal Vocation The final level of vocational exploration occurs at the level of the student, and this is perhaps students’ favourite aspect of the course. The course asks students to consider what brought them to the study of English; to map out specific courses, experiences and knowledge they hope to acquire throughout their years in college; and to begin exploring possible avenues for work or further study beyond their undergraduate degree. On the first day of the semester, students engage in icebreakers that ask them to share their favourite stories as children, as well as their experiences with reading and writing. Reading can be a site of both comfort and anxiety. In his work The Reading Mind, Daniel T. Willingham explains that one’s self-concept as a reader ‘is rooted in reading experiences good or bad, but it’s not quite that simple. What really matters is the child’s interpretation of

36. Riswold, ‘Vocational Discernment’, 79.

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those experiences, and parents, teachers, and peers contribute to those interpretations.’37 Applying this metacognitive lens to early reading experiences allows students to work together to interpret and reinterpret those experiences. In the process, students begin to perceive similarities and differences within the community of the class. After reading the first non-fiction narratives that introduce varying paths into the major, students consider their own paths into the English major or minor. Like Graff and Alvarez, whose narratives help shape this assignment, students report widely varied experiences. Many of our multilingual students describe complicated relationships to language and literature, with at least as many telling stories of being discouraged and cut off from reading and writing as those who tell stories of encouragement. In a stepping stones exercise, students draw pictures of five significant people, places, texts or experiences that led them to Dominican and to literary studies.38 They present these visual steps to their classmates, telling their story into the major for the first time. While students’ stories sometimes describe a childhood spent reading as much as they could, parents and teachers who encouraged their development in reading and writing, and discoveries of significant texts, their stories just as often describe frustration with language, teachers or librarians who acted as gatekeepers to direct them away from particular texts or genres, and a sense of doubt they had to overcome along the way. After hearing the stories of classmates, students write their stepping stones essays, again considering the steps they took and beginning to understand their own paths in the context of their classmates. The stepping stones assignment, which reveals patterns across individual stories of calling, provides what Shirley Hershey Showalter describes as an ‘opportunity for self-discovery and clarifying purpose . . . [The assignment] demands thorough interior and exterior exploration, followed by careful word choice, structure, and judicious use of metaphor and illustration.’39 These essays are my favourite assignment to read; they reveal the many ways that literary studies cultivates vocation across a variety of early encounters with reading and writing, whether those stories are positive or negative.

37. Daniel T. Willingham, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017), 147. 38. The stepping stones assignment was inspired by an assignment created by Jodie Kocur, Associate Professor of Psychology at California Lutheran University. Dr Kocur shared the assignment, which she used in a first-year seminar course, at a NetVUE Faculty Seminar on Teaching Vocational Exploration in June 2017. 39. Showalter, ‘Called to Tell’, 79.



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Some students describe summers spent checking out as many library books as they could carry; others report limited access to books. Some students encountered teachers who discouraged their early efforts at reading and writing, but others had teachers (including some of my own colleagues) who encouraged students’ talents and interests, thus adding substance to their call into the major. The stepping stones essays enrich our understanding of our students and the calls that led them to our programme. Later in the semester, the exploration of personal vocation takes a more practical turn to the immediate future, when students study the goals and requirements of the major to reflect on the courses they will choose over their remaining years in the programme. This kind of planning exercise also asks students to consider which experiential, high-impact practices they might engage in as students: study abroad, research, internships, editing the literary journal and so on. While students plan the duration of their four years as a student, their reflections on what they would like to be able to study but do not find in our catalogue have allowed the department to think more carefully about course development for the future and prompted our discussion of classes in young adult literature, screenwriting and LGBTQ literature. This exercise is both practical and imaginative, benefiting the students and programme through vocational planning. The final aspect of this personal vocational exploration occurs as the department offers opportunities to consider plans after graduation with an English major. Colleagues from graduate programmes in the School of Education and School of Information Studies describe opportunities for continued study at Dominican. Faculty in English share career outcomes and opportunities in the field. Alumni return to talk about their experiences since graduation, providing networking and mentoring for our undergraduates. This aspect of the gateway course gives students the framework that Clydesdale argues vocational exploration programmes can provide to assist students with achieving their goals by ‘inviting faculty, staff, and students into conversations about life purpose, infusing institutionally organic exploration languages and methods of meaning-making storytelling to facilitate those conversations’.40 Late in the semester, students write a reflective essay to tell their stories again, this time considering what led them to the major, what they hope to accomplish through their studies, and what they might like to pursue upon

40. Clydesdale, The Purposeful Graduate, 103.

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graduation. While these plans frequently change, the process of reflection and planning helps to form their understanding of their experiences and their goals. In constructing a plan, students create a form for their college experience, recognising the constraints within the major and giving shape to the possibilities available to them. The practice of reflection and planning is one that benefits them throughout their college years and beyond. As Cunningham reminds us, ‘vocational discernment is a lifelong process; human beings change over the course of their lives, so they need to be aware that their callings, too, may change’.41 Introducing vocational exploration early in the programme through the gateway course allows us to establish a variety of structures (forms) of support. First, students begin to see how to navigate their paths through the major (or minor) in English; the planning tools and reflective habits of mind help students learn how to make tentative plans, reflect on those plans and adjust them as necessary. Further, students begin to understand how one functions in the world with a degree in literary studies as they learn from alumni who came before them and see the variety of work in which they’ve engaged. Finally, students receive direct mentorship from people and texts that help them better understand their own lives. This work is internal and external, about the self and about the world. Darby Kathleen Ray defines these two aspects of vocation as ‘“self-work”: efforts to discover and cultivate one’s authentic self, as well as everything that brings it alive [. . .] and “world-work”: efforts to understand and transform . . . systems of thought and practice that contest and undermine the world’s goodness and integrity’.42 It is our role as educators to prepare students for both kinds of work.

Conclusion Practices within literary studies lend themselves to the kinds of thinking and learning essential for students to find purpose and make meaning in their lives. Literary studies teaches students to examine language and form closely, to embrace ambiguity and contradiction, and to begin the higher-level work of analysis, examination through

41. David S. Cunningham, ‘Language that Works: Vocation and the Complexity of Higher Education’, in Cunningham, Vocation Across the Academy, 8. 42. Ray, ‘Self, World, and the Space Between’, 301.

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various critical lenses, and synthesis. Further, students of English value the importance of intertextuality, of understanding and reflecting on the relationships between and among texts, authors and readers. These are also the skills necessary for vocational exploration; careful and critical reading, reflection, evaluation and analysis are similarly necessary for reading one’s own life. More than that, though, the study of form aligned with vocational exploration arms students with the necessary skills they need to analyse texts and constructs in the world around them. This work is both personal and public; students construct their own learning but also situate their individual learning within a complex, frequently unjust world. This is essential in universities today, where, as Riswold reminds us, the work of educating is practical, pressured, and involves messy work with young people navigating a damaged, fractured, digitized, and often dehumanizing culture. We can’t pretend that they, or we, are immune to systemic pressure, interpersonal bias, and the influence of corporate capitalism. These challenges are not just facing our students; they face us as well.43

Riswold is not the only scholar to point to the necessity of this work at this time. Elaine Showalter closes her book Teaching Literature by talking about teaching in dark times, considering the various responses that teachers might make when faced with an immediate or ongoing crisis. Showalter claims that in these moments of crises, literature professors have to think about the abstractions of professional ethics in a much more urgent and existential way. At these moments, the clichés of our field suddenly take on startling life, and the platitudes of the humanities become credos that confront us with real choices and decisions on how to act.44

Teaching the practices of vocational exploration and form within literary study enables us (as literary scholars and teachers) to help our students prepare to confront those dark times, those crises. The skills of close reading, analysis, reflection and purpose-finding are essential to helping us discover, craft and reshape our paths forward, even through darkness or despair. Today, that seems more essential

43. Riswold, ‘Vocational Discernment’, 74. 44. Showalter, Teaching Literature, 131.

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than ever.45 We must consistently analyse the forms and structures that surround us; we must respond to the calls we hear to transform those forms and structures. The addition of these elements of vocational exploration into the traditional gateway course has been transformative for the English major at Dominican University and for me as a teacher. Within the major curriculum, we pick up the theme of calling and vocation in preparing for professions in our capstone experience, thus providing continuity and expansion of these ideas. This work has helped me better understand my students’ experiences, goals and challenges in significant ways. I deeply appreciate that the role of vocational pedagogy in a course focused on the study of English as a discipline can help students position themselves within the field to understand their callings within and beyond it. The habits of mind developed in this gateway course – critical thinking, analysis, reflection, planning – seem essential for all students, of course, but I find it particularly important for first-generation and low-income students. I believe this work, which empowers students to analyse critically the texts, forms and structures around them and to engage their own voices in response, promotes equity and agency, which will help students navigate not only the English major but also their future paths. Clydesdale’s research suggests that the effects of these programmes are not simply limited to the students’ college experiences. He writes that students who have experienced intentionally designed programmes devoted to vocational exploration ‘track out of college, and into life thereafter, with a much clearer direction and purpose, which is resilient. It can survive the inevitable bumps and bangs that come . . . and still keep them on a path that they find meaningful and fulfilling.’46 I wish for that – and more – for all of our students and all of us.

45. While Showalter focuses on teaching following the attacks of September 11, we can certainly see parallels to the teaching we are doing now, in the midst of crises of racial injustice, economic uncertainty and widespread death from the COVID-19 pandemic. 46. Clydesdale, ‘How Can Colleges Help Students Grapple with Vocation?’

Chapter 2

Novels, Vocation and the Call of the Unfinished Story Erin VanLaningham

Andrew Miller, in his book On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, explains that an individual’s ‘need to be in a story’ triumphs over happiness and is ‘what makes . . . life meaningful’.1 Narrative provides an imaginative place for readers and characters to live fully and purposefully, or at least try. Narrative also provides a structure, a set of questions, and extensive possibilities which can inform our world views and life trajectories. For anyone who teaches the study of the novel, it is the moment students shift from seeing themselves inside the narrative to a position outside of it that seems to bring meaningful awareness. Embracing the need to be in a story while cultivating the ability to stand outside of it yields significant vocational reflection. The novel emphasises individual interiority and heightened imagination on the one hand, and a broad representation of everyday life on the other. Marthe Robert claims, perhaps cavalierly, in Origins of the Novel that the novel ‘can do what it wants with literature’ by exploiting other genres, choosing any subject matter and freely modifying or preserving reality.2 Thus, while the novel does not occupy the prophetic role of an oral story or an epic poem, it does put forward the idea that the world it represents, and the methods it uses, are limitless. The novel represents individuals in the world in ways that prompt our

 1. Andrew H. Miller, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 55. In particular, Miller is discussing Sergeant Troy in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.   2. Marthe Robert, ‘From Origins of the Novel’, in Michael McKeon (ed.) Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 58.

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own imaginings of the new and the possible. This is where the novel engages us in vocational reflection. Novels afford us the place to consider the potential of life, to see the world and the self in transformed and different ways. Thus, narrative is not only a vocational heuristic, but also a place for hermeneutic discovery. The novel’s expanse in both form and function, and the critical interpretive approaches offered by the field of literary studies, provide important ways to conceive of vocation as a narrative act, mainly through the flexibility and constraints that narrative provides. Gary Saul Morson, in Narrative and Freedom, notes that ‘very frequently, narratives and lives are therefore anisomorphic (not similar in shape to each other)’, citing the ‘extraneous details’ of life that are altered in the ‘finished product’ of a novel.3 He explains that for a story ‘each moment can be understood in terms of the finished pattern of the whole. But we are always in the process of living.’4 Morson’s argument challenges the ways we desire to think of our lives and callings as a sequence of scenes in a coherent form.5 Narrative structure reflects, in Peter Barry’s terms, ‘events as they are edited, ordered, packaged, and presented’, but our lives cannot and do not reflect the same shape.6 Within the text, a character’s desire to transform – the pursuit of openness and change – implies a sense of the possible that can challenge the narrative’s closed form. The study of the novel showcases this nudge against formal constraint (linguistic, ideological or vocational) and prompts a reading that accounts for the finished and unfinished story. It is not difficult to see why novels are a wonderland for exploring life’s pressing concerns. The bildungsroman, the story of a person’s formation from childhood to adulthood, regularly emphasises questions of vocational reflection and discernment. Novels about work and professional identity, or narratives that embed ethical dilemma, reveal the connectivity between individuals and their communities. Novels explore systems of domestic and social order, such as marriage

  3. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 20.   4. Ibid. 20.   5. For example, see Paul J. Wadell’s and Charles R. Pinches’s claim: ‘This is why it is also fitting to envision our callings as stories. Good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, are held together by a plot, and are full of interesting characters’, in Living Vocationally: The Journey of a Called Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2020), 3.   6. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 215.



Novels, Vocation and the Unfinished Story   47

and religion, and probe the various constructions of race, gender and class identities. While stories are often built through the assumption of a universal or shared experience,7 literary studies compels us to recognise narratives that have not historically included certain groups or individuals. Many scholars remind us of the importance of rewriting dominant narratives to reveal the dissonance within contemporary life.8 The study of story necessitates the study of absence, of revision, of self-critique, of alternative plots, of ideological systems as part of narrative structure. In addition to learning to read for the absences and alternatives, we often point students to read for the implied multi-voiced nature of a novel’s language. Mikhail Bahktin, Russian literary theorist of the novel, emphasises the social dimension of language, reflecting a network of the speaker’s appropriation and inflections within others’ meanings. Bahktin describes it this way, as each word having ‘the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour’ and the ‘contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’.9 The many dimensions of a novel’s language – its ‘living impulse’ – lead us to attend more closely to reading narrative parts within the whole.10 In other words, the study of the novel invites us to consider the expanse and the constraints of language and narrative, through which we can enrich the practice of narrating vocation. Vocation scholarship has largely used the language of narrative as a means to explore the ‘contours’ of vocation, or what David S. Cunningham calls ‘story-shaped reality’.11 The question ‘How do I

  7. See Aristotle, ‘Poetics’, in David H. Richter (ed.), The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s Press), 48–9. Aristotle argues that poetry is ‘more concerned with the universal, and history more with the individual’ and the poet narrates events that ‘might occur’ or are probable, contributing to a framing of life through universal experiences or episodes.   8. See for example Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: Norton, 1993), 166–77; and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992).   9. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293. 10. Ibid. 293. 11. David S. Cunningham, ‘Epilogue: In Various Times and Sundry Places: Pedagogies of Vocation/Vocation as Pedagogy’, in Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 324.

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tell the story of my life?’ frames the concluding section of the popular anthology Leading Lives that Matter.12 Narrative and novels are discussed within the contexts of philosophy, theology and social science to analyse human experience.13 Many employ literary terms and concepts such as plot, character development, interiorisation, dialogue and narration to describe vocation, often invoking the language of story as a structural frame.14 For example, theologian Paul J. Wadell writes, ‘Stories give unity, intelligibility, and coherence to our lives. They give purpose and direction to our lives.’15 Wadell contends that without the structure stories provide, our lives become ‘fragmented and scattered’ and ‘without a story to guide us, our lives become little more than a series of disconnected events’.16 Robert Coles in The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination describes the ‘characters in novels as persisting voices – friendly and reassuring or sternly critical, depending on the occasion’.17 These approaches value stories as an accessible and fruitful way to order and inform our lives. What I want to emphasise here is the importance of interpreting narrative and vocation from the discipline of literary studies, where we apply theoretical lenses and methods of reading which contextualise and question why we are so drawn to story. As Rita Felski writes in her book Hooked: Art and Attachment, ‘Critique and interpretation are not opposed to attachment; they are built upon it.’18 We don’t discourage students from constructing a meaningful life narrative

12. Mark R. Schwehn and Dorothy C. Bass (eds), Leading Lives that Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020). 13. See for example Douglas V. Henry, ‘Vocation and Story: Narrating Self and World’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 165–88; John Neafsey, A Sacred Voice is Calling: Personal Vocation and Social Conscience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006); Wadell and Pinches, Living Vocationally; Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). 14. See for example Paul J. Wadell’s chapter ‘Finding a Story Worth Handing On: Narrative and the Moral Life’, in Wadell, Happiness and the Christian Moral Life: An Introduction to Christian Ethics, 3rd edn (Lanham, MD: The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2016). See also Henry, ‘Narrating Self and World’, in which the author uses the language of a ‘framing narrative’ to show how novels and films provide examples of thematic ‘educational visions’ (172). 15. Wadell, ‘Finding a Story’, 31. 16. Ibid. 31–2. 17. Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 162. 18. Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 127.



Novels, Vocation and the Unfinished Story   49

or seeing themselves and others within the literary characters they encounter – we instead emphasise that there are necessary and vital steps of reading beyond and within that attachment. The study of narrative does not promise relatability or connection; it instead prompts us to see the value of the tensions, alternative narratives and multiple, conflicting meanings. Shirley Hershey Showalter offers a note of caution regarding the ‘dangers of storytelling’ in vocational terms without the accompanying (and necessary) criticism of narratives that ‘contain no ambiguity or shadow’.19 This necessary critique of opaque vocational narrative frames becomes all the more relevant when we consider Cunningham’s claim ‘that our vocations are our narratives’.20 Within a literary studies context, narrating our vocations means acknowledging that we are not the sole authors of our stories and that our protagonist’s viewpoint is at best limited. Neither are we trustworthy editors, as wilful editing may tend towards a myopic vision that keeps us from seeing the wider, messier, more complex world. In these roles, we ask questions about the reliability and control of the narrative arc and content. We see the nuance within each point of view. As we move from author to character, narrator to reader, we explore the past, present and future from all vantage points, affording us a greater sense of reality and possibility. This kind of reading fosters an expansive approach to vocation and narrative. Thus, through a study of the novel we can equip students to tell and interpret vocational narratives with a dexterity that moves beyond the reliance on chronological sequence, beyond the vocabulary of a ‘good story’, beyond the notion of connecting characters to our own lives. We instead shift our focus to points of view and interpreting the layered narratives. We read for the ‘taste’ of other voices within our own, and evaluate what narratives seem to be closed, truncated or circumscribed. Part of our work as educators, Felski contends, is ‘to teach [students] to interpret but also . . . to make them care about what they interpret, to become affected and invested’.21 Interpretation

19. Shirley Hershey Showalter, ‘Called to Tell Our Stories: The Narrative Structure of Vocation’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 75. 20. David S. Cunningham, ‘Epilogue: In Various Times and Sundry Places: Pedagogies of Vocation/Vocation as Pedagogy’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 324. 21. Felski, Hooked, 128.

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of literary narratives and our vocations means evaluating them from inside and outside their forms and contours. That process of interpretation enables reflective questioning of and investment in our own stories and literary narratives alike. This chapter contends that the novel’s capacity for vocational exploration rests in holding the multiple parts and the whole of narrative in tension. Such tension brings meaning and purpose and allows us to see new, alternative narratives. The study of the novel can serve as a source of significant reshaping of vocation; for students, this is an invitation to understand their lives as stories that are unfamiliar, panoramic and resistant to resolution. Importantly, the sustained practice of reading novels hones not our ability to relate to the role of hero, narrator or author, but cultivates our identities as interpreters and critics. Through the study of narrative, we encounter the limits of reality and the expanse of the possible, within the novels and our vocational calls.

Vocation and Reading Realism The history and theory of the novel is bound up in the ways narrative reflects or construes everyday experience. Therefore, we can examine our lived experience through an examination of the novel’s relationship to formal realism. Ian Watt characterises the novel as exuding an ‘air of total authenticity’ and claims that the genre draws strength from its privileging of the ‘development of its characters in the course of time’ and the ‘concerns of everyday life’.22 Formal realism, however, is only one aspect of the novel, as Michael McKeon reminds us in his rebuff of Watt’s analysis: the novel’s ‘naïve empiricism’ presents dangers to the reader if it remains unchecked or unrecognised. Instead, we ought to frame the novel in terms of its inherent ‘volatility’ as the narrative internalises ideologies of class and history.23 Its realities, in other words, are not simplistic reflections of the everyday, because the everyday experience is politicised, ideological and varied. The claim of authenticity is at times problematic – in narrative and in life.

22. Ian Watt, ‘From The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding’, in Michael McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 378, 372. 23. Michael McKeon, ‘Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel’, in McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel, 396.



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Thus, the novel becomes a rich source for vocational exploration when we examine the challenges to the narrative of ‘reality’. Helpful here is George Levine’s characterisation of realism in the novel as a ‘highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality. Its massive self-confidence implied a radical doubt, its strategies of truth telling, a profound self-consciousness.’24 Realism seeks to question reality, not simply mirror it.25 This is what I would argue is the best vocational experience of reading novels since it implies an awareness of construction within the narrative form, dismantling the notion of an inspired, fully informed author or narrator. We come to see the novel as an experiment in reality, trying out a story with the full awareness that it might be offering a refraction of truth. Addressing narrative reality as openly ‘self-conscious’ prompts internal reckoning (within the reader and within the narrative). It emphasises agency and action on the part of the author and reader but also emphasises these aspects in the text itself. It treats the representation of reality as flawed; ironically, this makes it a more authentic source. The dependence on a narrative representation as faithful to a mostly linear, largely chronological plot results in a tendency to internalise stories as predictable and stable. Yet, as modernist writers like Virginia Woolf suggest, the more authentic representation of human experience actually emerges in ways that are antithetical to linear modes of thought. Woolf claims that fiction writers ‘must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition’.26 Woolf’s defence of literary modernism’s controlled and constructed representation of chaos is an important reminder that the way we understand reality is sometimes best represented by modes that reflect dissonance and disorder. Narrative structures that defy time and place reflect realities – especially psychological realities – that better capture human experience. Chaos doesn’t mean that life does not have meaning; chaos is actually a form of meaning that is authentic. Throughout this essay, I will use George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2) as a case study for cultivating vocation through a study of

24. George Levine, ‘From The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley’, in McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel, 627. 25. Ibid. 628. 26. Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel, 757.

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narrative form.27 The novel presents a reality that accounts for gaps, absences and stories that remain unfinished or unresolved. When I teach the novel, we read it in the eight original instalments over the course of a few months, so to experience the evolution of characters’ lives and the community’s transformation, allowing the novel to work its way into our minds, hearts and daily life.28 Our common reading over a semester is not the full twelve months of Eliot’s original readership, but it does provide time and space for students to observe vocational awareness unfolding through narrative. It also allows us to empathise with the choices of the characters while critiquing their limited perspectives. We have a chance, in other words, to interpret individual experience within the context of the whole narrative, hoping for possible outcomes and evaluating particular systems and paths. The narrator situates competing versions of purposeful living in the opening ‘Prelude’ in a juxtaposition of the ‘blundering’ life with the ‘epic’ life.29 Beginning a novel with a resistance to the dominant narratives of history, national tales, epics and tragedy (all mentioned in the prelude), which tend to focus on acts of heroism and influence, is thematically bold. The text’s closing passage includes language of struggle, imperfection and error. Yet, it emphasises the effects of individual agency, suggesting that ‘the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts’, attributed in part to ‘the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’.30 The language of the ‘unhistoric’ and ‘unvisited’ suggests a dismantling of traditional signposts of vocational recognition or significance. A called life can be a life that is ‘hidden’ and ‘diffusive’, certainly an alternative way of conceiving of vocational purpose. Morson describes the process of reading narrative as a ‘double experience’, one in which readers identify with characters and contemplate structure. Alternating between internal and external views, they not only project themselves into the

27. I formulated initial ideas about Middlemarch and vocational exploration in a post for the NetVUE blog Vocation Matters, some of which are reprised or revised in this essay. All are reprinted with permission. See ‘“Learning to do it well”: Life, Love and Work in Middlemarch’ (18 December 2018), (last accessed 24 June 2021). 28. Eliot published the novel in eight parts from December 1871 to December 1872 for Blackwoods; subsequent serial publication followed in a weekly format for Harpers Weekly in the US. 29. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2000), 3. 30. Ibid. 514–15.



Novels, Vocation and the Unfinished Story   53 character’s horizon but also view the character’s entire world as a completed aesthetic artifact. One perspective gives them process, the other product; one an open future, the other a future that has long since been determined.31

Readers have the benefits of the knowledge of hindsight or anticipation of the future, depending on which position in the narrative readers occupy. In Middlemarch, we connect the hidden details of the main characters’ lives with the narrator’s emphasis on unrealised hopes yielding purpose. We see the realities of loss, love and missed opportunity within the novel, and we know, from hindsight and multiple character perspectives, that a single character’s actions result in setbacks for many. The novel shows the losses and gaps, both thematically as well as structurally. Attention to parts and whole of narrative allows us to see reality in its widest expanse and intersections between alternative and dominant narratives. Reading the beginning and ending of Middlemarch with students often reveals an insistence on seeking a coherent narrative – we want marriages, careers and communal conflicts to resolve in ways that promise satisfaction. Morson warns that when readers have a ‘tendency to trace straight lines of causality . . . [it] oversimplifies events’, and thus, our reading of novels must instead seek to account for living that is meaningful but not necessarily happy.32 Novels invite a critical consideration of reality in the effort to better understand it and, if necessary, transform it. When we look at vocational narratives in turn, we can bring a similar critical stance to our interpretive roles. For students, this means an honest assessment of individual interests alongside existing barriers and responsibilities to others. Margaret E. Mohrmann describes vocational assessment as working towards ‘consonance’ between inner and outer calls, in an effort to find a ‘truer fit . . . to pursue a responsible vocation that is both possible and satisfying’.33 Within this discernment process, William T. Cavanaugh aptly notes that ‘the idea is to recognize that our story is unfinished’.34 Such vocational exploration suggests that a life of meaning and purpose may not appear or emerge as triumphant or polished and to expect otherwise is to oversimplify the narrative. 31. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 43. 32. Ibid. 119. 33. Margaret E. Mohrmann, ‘“Vocation Is Responsibility”: Broader Scope, Deeper Discernment’, in Cunningham, Vocation Across the Academy, 30. 34. William T. Cavanaugh, ‘Actually, You Can’t Be Anything You Want (And It’s a Good Thing, Too)’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 45.

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Through our literary reading, however, we can challenge the notions of being the single authors or heroes of our vocational stories, opening up the narrative to other possibilities and turns. This reckoning with reality and realist narratives may ultimately result in a story that is necessary, and hopefully, purposeful.

Narrating Vocation In the third Neapolitan novel by Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the protagonist says to her close friend, ‘Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.’35 The statement refers to a prominent theme within the novel: we narrate a story that may or may not acknowledge lived reality, holding close our power to edit. We consider audience, shaping our stories for ourselves differently than those we offer for others to read. Linda Hutcheon suggests that interpretation enters with narrativisation, dislocating ‘facts’ from their position of power.36 The interpretive and narrative act can edit reality (‘facts’) and such dislocation prompts reflection on how we see ourselves within a story and outside of it depending on our role. In the classroom, reading novels often involves tracing the development of multiple explicit and implicit narratives. This study of form ‘typically traces not a straight line to a goal but a series of false leads, missed opportunities, new possibilities, improvisations, visions, and revisions’.37 We see a text for its plot and characterisation, but also for the ‘taste’ of the other narratives and nuances that inform it. The structure of the text – the boundaries of chapters, characters, dialogue, settings, plots – emphasises a form as well as the ‘possibilities’ and ‘improvisations’. The alternative narratives, as well as the story on the page, inform our literary reading and vocational exploration as we hold the parts and the whole in tension. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is perhaps the most significant of British novels in terms of its representation of vocational discernment. Famously labelled by Virginia Woolf as ‘one of the few English

35. Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2014), 237. 36. Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic Metafiction’, in McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel, 845. 37. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 24.



Novels, Vocation and the Unfinished Story   55

novels written for grown-up people’,38 it is a novel which provides undergraduates with a model of how young adults, and adults in their middle and late life stages, continue to shape a vocational narrative. It reveals the ways individuals relate to their professional and relational roles, and uncovers the motives for continuous pursuit of success and the subsequent acceptance of the limits and failure. The novel has elicited extensive attention in terms of both its theoretical and ethical representation of vocation as well as its genuine aesthetic achievement and its effect on readers.39 Individual vocational narratives are edited through a variety of lenses: immaturity, rebellion, pragmatism, ambition, sacrifice. Students experience the narrative as vocationally revealing through the identification with each character’s vocational path. At the same time, the wider story of ‘the study of provincial life’ – the novel’s subtitle – illustrates how community influences our calls. Throughout the novel, characters demonstrate specific iterations of vocational discernment, beginning with the heroine Dorothea when she exclaims, ‘People may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.’40 Eliot positions this directive early in the novel, thereby highlighting an unrealised vocational identity. People may actually be idle while also developing; others may actually misread our pursuit of purpose. The text foregrounds the necessity of individual exploration of meaning, a process wholly different than the external labelling of social roles and positions. Mary Garth similarly challenges this notion of a preordained path in her opposition to the familial expectation that Fred Vincy prepare for a position in the church. The subtle difference between Mary’s viewpoint, ‘He is not fit to be a clergyman,’ and Rosamond’s viewpoint, ‘but he ought to be fit’, offers a clear distinction between

38. See Woolf’s 1919 article ‘The Life and Work of George Eliot’, in The Times Literary Supplement, (last accessed 24 June 2021). 39. See for example Alan Mintz, George Eliot and The Novel of Vocation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (New York: Crown, 2014); Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 40. Eliot, Middlemarch, 53.

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vocation and the unexamined life.41 That Fred has been given the advantages of education and a secure role in society is not in question; whether the role is appropriate for him and vice versa is in question. Mary also notes that the parish would suffer if he was called to lead it, describing such action as a ‘caricature’.42 Thus, it is not only Fred’s happiness and purpose at stake, but also that of the community. The notion of ‘fit’ is a recurrent theme throughout the novel, as Eliot presents various individuals who are unfit for their marriages and professions and are in the process of evaluating their own agency in responding to these roles. While characters’ viewpoints are limited and partial, our position as readers means we see the connections between vocational paths and processes more globally. Lydgate’s assessment of his own professional identity emerges as flawed against the backdrop already formed by the narrator. Eliot introduces Lydgate’s exploration in the context of ‘the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats’, many of whom ‘once meant to shape their own deed and alter the world a little’.43 The past-tense narration of those who ‘meant’ to exercise free will in their sphere of influence is juxtaposed with the predetermined path of conformity, another mention of the significance of one’s fit for an expected role. Eliot describes their ‘earlier self’ as resembling a ‘ghost’, an image of incongruity between hopes and reality.44 Thus, Lydgate’s aspiration to lift his professional life to ‘[offer] the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good’ is problematic, not for lack of ambition or enthusiasm but rather lack of acceptance by the social order.45 Each character confronts a vocational narrative in which they seek to change the world but fall short. It is the network of narratives, the parts and the whole, which thematically develops the difficulties of vocational exploration. For students, seeing multiple stories collide and coalesce in a novel can be an avenue for them to consider their own lives as parts and whole, emphasising the interpretive position of reader as particularly significant in discerning ‘fit’ within particular positions and places.

41. Ibid. 74. 42. Ibid. 321. 43. Ibid. 93. 44. Ibid. 93. 45. Ibid. 93.



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For Eliot, vocation involves a distillation of one’s intellectual, as well as one’s emotional, approach to work. It also involves a sense of responsibility to family and one’s self. This is most aptly realised in Mr Garth’s support of Fred’s choice to follow an agricultural path, admitting early that he doesn’t ‘like divinity, and preaching, and feeling obliged to look serious. I like riding across country, and doing as other men do.’46 Mr Garth proposes a new trajectory for Fred by explaining: ‘You must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well.’47 Indeed, pride, commitment and honour are all important selfactualisation traits, emphasising the novel’s keen focus on individual growth and interiority. Garth’s advice highlights the approach and attachment to work as much as it relates to the work itself. Eliot leans heavily on the notion of authentic relationship and loyalty, to fellow labourer, family, self and society. An individual’s flourishing should extend to others. While we may appreciate Garth’s viewpoint, we experience it both in its limitations and its overall contribution to the narrative whole. Within Garth’s limited perspective, we empathise with the pressures of his professional and family life. Yet, from a wider view that accounts for Mrs Garth, Mary and others, we see his capacity for generosity as well as forgiveness to be dangerous to his family’s livelihood and happiness in ways that he himself might not fully acknowledge. Reading invites empathy towards and critique of each character’s decisions and reflections; our interpretive work leads us to care about both the individual and the collective. Within the vocational exploration compass of the novel, Fred’s breaking free of the predetermined role of clergyman is notable because we see the effects on family and community. So too does Will Ladislaw’s resistance to fulfilling a professional role challenge the forms of vocational expectation. Ladislaw’s roaming nature is metaphorical for his approach to vocation: ‘to love what is good and beautiful when I see it . . . I am a rebel: I don’t feel bound . . . to submit to what I don’t like.’48 While appealing in the context of narratives of duty and restriction to social status, Ladislaw’s philosophy also seems a bit reckless towards others, and indeed, triggers

46. Ibid. 318. 47. Ibid. 347. 48. Ibid. 244.

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Casaubon’s amendment to the will because he senses Ladislaw’s disregard for the conventions of marriage. This approach to life is regularly disrupted by the other narratives of vocation circulating in the novel, not least of which is emphasised by Dorothea when she insists that poems are necessary to complete the poet, that the contribution and product of one’s vocation signifies subjectivity in fuller form. Eliot’s multitude of vocational narratives does not embolden Ladislaw’s approach but rather tempers it by demonstrating its shortcomings. Instead, Ladislaw’s evolution to being a writer for the Pioneer who ultimately becomes ‘an ardent public man’, working on reform and in Parliament on his constituents’ behalf, is a response, in part, to what he can do to contribute to a community with measurable impact. As readers, we see the reckless tempered by conscience, in terms of working within the boundaries of professional possibilities and family responsibilities. The novel situates many opposing individual narratives about discovering purpose in work and life. Even though this is a painful process for the most part – as Dorothea says, ‘There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that – to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail’ – we read this impulse towards a flourishing life as thematically significant.49 In Middlemarch, every vocational narrative presents failure as a counternarrative to dominant narratives of social expectations. The novel’s expansive probing of vocation highlights a path towards authentic self-assessment which may not be unified or even happy, but yields meaning and purpose.

Alternative Narratives The novel prompts readers to think about what it means to be a person, a unique individual with strengths and flaws in a specific time and place. An important piece of that individuality is the limit of perspective – characters cannot possibly see what the narrator or reader can. Furthermore, ideological narratives of gender, race, class, ability and sexual identity coalesce to frame an individual’s experience in ways that influence agency and development, both on the page and in lived experience. Any consideration of individual freedom in the novel means we have to ask how a character’s formation is shaped

49. Ibid. 47.



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by social demands and constructs. So too, do we seek a robust sense of possibility within a narrative’s unfolding. Middlemarch is helpful in discussions of vocation with undergraduates because it so widely presents the misguided, failed and even blind vision of characters as they embark on adulthood. Eliot creates scenarios in which the characters blunder or flail in their grasp of reality as well as their own self-knowledge. The novel features characters in the process of pursuing purpose, making one’s neighbour more comfortable, finding suitable work, acknowledging the need for selflessness. Yet, as the characters seek vocational identities, an imaginative ‘what if’ emerges. Essentially, throughout the narrative, characters confront the possibilities of alternative life paths. Morson describes this quality in narrative as sideshadowing, where ‘the actual and possible, are made simultaneously visible’.50 In other words, there are other narratives imagined through the ‘might-have-beens or might-bes’ (118). Considering the actual and the possible provides us with generative approaches to vocational exploration through which individual subjectivity develops as a result of the characters resisting the confines of current narrative forms. For example, during her honeymoon in Rome, Dorothea’s feelings of estrangement from cultural icons, the vast master narrative of aesthetic excellence, is significant for understanding the ways one relates to narratives that exclude or frustrate (here, the master narrative is both cultural competence as well as marriage). Dorothea experiences Rome as a ‘monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual’.51 Indeed, the art objects start to seem like fragments and pieces of a history that are irrelevant to her present reality, a marriage that is non-sensical amid her husband’s work that is equally irrelevant. She moves towards selfactualisation when she articulates her opinion of his project: ‘will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world?’ She worries his efforts might be ‘void’, which in her assessment is a large vocational failure, akin to the dissociative meanings of art in a world that needs a different kind of beauty.52 Yet, he prefers to remain in a different void – of his own mind – a place which denies a

50. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 118. 51. Eliot, Middlemarch, 124. 52. Ibid. 133.

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more fully realised subjectivity. In response, Dorothea says, ‘I should like to make life beautiful – I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one.’53 The actual events – Dorothea’s dislike for art and Causabon’s work which does not serve others – are positioned alongside the possibility of Dorothea’s desire to ‘make life beautiful’. Reading the novel through the categories of the actual and the possible expands our own vocational narration. We can start to see beyond current realities to other possibilities. It is the alternative narrative, the implied other path or way of thinking, that expands vocation. Dorothea’s subjectivity is imagined time and again within the limits and potential of narrative. Her pursuit of beauty as a vision for contributing to community becomes a narrative in which she is sole author and protagonist. Unsurprisingly, it fails. She moves closer to self-actualisation through her interactions with others, first finding that her life is ‘bound up with another woman’s life’ as she discovers more about her own emotions when she helps Rosamond Vincy, and later becoming aware that ‘Will Ladislaw always seemed to see more in what she said than she herself saw . . . Will occasionally was like a lunette opened in the wall of her prison, giving her a glimpse of the sunny air.’54 Ultimately, her decision to marry Will and give up Causabon’s estate rests on her confession to Celia that despite all of her earnest aspirations, ‘I have never carried out any plan yet.’55 Her grasping of a different vocational path – forfeiting fortune and comfort – risks public critique. Eliot’s text again lays out the actual events – marriage without grand purpose and social status – alongside the possibilities of life alone or never marrying Causabon in the first place. The tension between the actual events and implied possibilities challenge our hopes for coherence or stability, but provide a more informed way of conceiving of a purposeful path forward. The definition of vocation matters here, because to limit it to a professional or work identity constrains not only the contemporary reader’s experience of vocational exploration through literary study, but also limits the ways we see vocational representation within the novel. Alan Mentz posits that for Dorothea, ‘as a woman, no effectual calling is available to her’, while Patrick Fessenbecker claims

53. Ibid. 140. 54. Ibid. 485, 425. 55. Ibid. 505.



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that Dorothea’s pursuit of purpose is actually ‘the empty frame of a vocation’ because ‘her plan of life lacks any of the substantive content that would offer guidance toward specific actions’.56 Fessenbecker links vocation with work that fosters ‘autonomous self-constitution’ and ‘self-exploration’ with the process of understanding which roles might best suit us.57 I would posit, however, that Dorothea’s vocational identity relies in part on this early blindness and that Eliot includes vocational counternarratives that provide content for this empty frame. Additionally, the silence or lack of content can be read as an ideological narrative that informs Dorothea’s viewpoint of purpose: she is a woman for whom one way to experience ‘content’ or moral guidance is to marry a man who can offer it. This failed narrative complicates the idea of a vocational frame because it shows that the possibilities offered to Dorothea are wholly different than those offered to the men in the novel. The actual (her marriage) and the possible (marriage to another partner) means vocational identity and choices are informed by the structures, and challenges to those structures, of gendered experience. For ourselves and for our students, considering narrative absences, barriers and revisions as we consider our own vocational paths becomes paramount for imagining alternative paths. Reading Middlemarch through the prism of the actual and the possible means we can see the limits of available vocational narratives. When Lydgate explores Farebrother’s scientific collection, he ‘was more surprised at the openness of this talk than at its implied meaning – that the Vicar felt himself not altogether in the right vocation’.58 Farebrother embraces emptiness directly: ‘And I am not a model clergyman – only a decent makeshift.’59 Lydgate, despite a life that many would have called ‘successful’, at the end of his life ‘regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do’.60 Bulstrode, a figure who exuded focused plans which were rooted in dishonesty, realises that he must shift to a position of humility. As the novel’s ‘Prologue’ makes clear, the epic life that is unrealised for St Theresa

56. Mentz, Novel of Vocation, 103; Patrick Fessenbecker, ‘Sympathy, Vocation, and Moral Deliberation in George Eliot’, English Literary History, 85 (2018), 520. 57. Fessenbecker, ‘Sympathy’, 504, 507. Alan Mentz defines vocation along these lines for Eliot’s novels, explaining that ‘work has been transformed into an impassioned struggle to change the world’ (57). 58. Eliot, Middlemarch, 110. 59. Ibid. 113. 60. Ibid. 512.

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might be unfolded in ‘far-resonant action’ in a ‘life of mistakes’.61 Experiences of failure, egoism and hubris are part of vocational actualisation. So too does the expansion of the way we read vocation in novels help us extend a sense of personal possibility, freeing ourselves to see blunder as an occasion for purpose.

Vocational and Narrative Networks Novels illustrate the ordering of community life through institutions and systems, relationships and identities. Ironically, these structures, and narrative structure by extension, are at times experienced as disordering to an individual’s pursuit of meaning and purpose, especially if the communal needs constrict or even contradict vocational identity or pursuits. Characters struggle to reconcile the demands of family, workplace, and social concerns and expectations, and as readers we can empathise with this chaotic and disordering experience. Reading narrative involves attending to a community’s influence on vocational exploration, as characters resist, adapt or capitulate to these ideological and institutional structures. Eliot represents the town of Middlemarch as ‘provincial’ both in its limited life perspectives and location. At the same time, the novel shows how the community can transform and call individuals to new and different ways of life. Caroline Levine views ‘fictional narratives as productive thought experiments that allow us to imagine the subtle unfolding activity of multiple social forms’.62 She describes the ways that forms might ‘collide’ and subsequently reroute dominant modes of thought. She continues: ‘What if we understood literary texts not as unified but as inevitably plural in their forms – bringing together multiple ordering principles, both social and literary, in ways that do not and cannot repress their differences?’63 Reading novels can show not just an individual embedded within the varied landscape of competing cultural and social systems but the constant negotiation of the individual in relationship to their communities. In a section entitled ‘Network, Whole, Narrative’, Levine suggests we view texts ‘as sites, like social situations, where multiple forms cross and collide, inviting

61. Ibid. 3. 62. Levine, Forms, 19. 63. Ibid. 40.



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us to think in new ways about power . . . narratives are among the very best forms for identifying and tracking the unfolding of relations among different forms’.64 Levine’s formulation is generative to the way we think about vocation because it suggests that narrative unfolds power relations so that we can best assess the possibilities, realities and limitations they provide. When we read via networks, we see them as simultaneously ‘separate and overlapping . . . capable of connecting the same groups of characters as the others’ while also displaying ‘the potential to derail and subvert one another’.65 Narratives can hold multiple stories at once, layering and juxtaposing them. When we practise this way of reading a textual world, we start to ask reflective questions about our lives: How do networks confine or expand individual experience? What tools are available for resisting a network path or for joining a new one? Returning to the question of subject formation and agency, we see the limits on personal choice that networks bring. Levine writes that reading for networks ‘[casts] narrative persons less as powerful or symbolic agents in their own right than as moments in which complex and invisible social forces cross’.66 I would suggest that an erosion of personal agency (in narrative or vocational exploration) is not necessarily debilitating for our individual stories but offers a measure of sober truth: we are figures in a larger context who, by realising our own positionality and relation to others, see ourselves not as sole authors but as one force among many in narrating an individual vocational identity. Novels often fall short of representing community concerns, romanticising communal experiences or inaccurately depicting others. Eliot’s work is no exception. Susan Graver characterises the treatment of community in Eliot’s fiction as a ‘prolonged, troubled, and conflicted confrontation between community as fact and community as consciousness’.67 In our effort to study, teach and read

64. Ibid. 122. 65. In a helpful model, Levine analyses Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to make her argument about novels as the sites for networks. The networks include various iterations of connectedness within the plot, inclusive of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit, disease, aristocratic relationships, philanthropies, transportation, urban and rural neighbourhoods and many more. 125. 66. Levine, Forms, 126. 67. Susan Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 25.

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narrative vocationally, we might turn to Forest Pyle’s point that while Eliot’s novels at times underdevelop community in realistic terms, the texts show a ‘capacity to teach’ community by cultivating sympathy in individual characters and by extension, readers.68 Eliot’s ‘pedagogy of the novel’ creates a sort of locus point where ‘connections are made that would weave the (reading) self into the collective unfolding of the narrative community’.69 In vocational terms, our collective unfolding through the reading of narrative juxtaposes our ideas about communities with lived realities. The study of narrative teaches us to see the novel and its communities as networks which order communal life according to marriage, politics, class and religion. These same ordering institutions have the capacity to disorder vocational identities, which makes the engagement with community – as readers and characters alike – vital. Eliot’s vocational project in Middlemarch rests as much on her attention to the relationships and communities that form her vision of provincial life as on the individual. The novel layers various narratives to reveal certain ‘hubs’ or ‘nodes’ (to use Levine’s terms) that afford significant interconnectedness. This means that Dorothea’s grand ‘plans’ coalesce with Fred’s search for meaningful work, Lydgate’s ambitious medical goals, and obviously, Will Ladislaw’s pursuit of a vocation. Each character’s story is deepened by understanding it as an intersection with others, and at times, derailed or stalled as a result. Eliot, through the first-person narrator’s voice, remarks: ‘I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web.’70 Through this web, the narrator analyses the way communal identity influences, limits or encourages vocational exploration. The web – different from a node or hub in that it is tenuous, natural, porous, created – does suggest a measure of interdependent humanity. Speaking through the narrator’s voice, Eliot invites the reader to focus on how an individual’s ‘lot’ emerges and how it necessitates focus and attention from all levels of narrative engagement: narrator, character and reader.

68. Forest Pyle, ‘A Novel Sympathy: The Imagination of Community in George Eliot’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 27.1 (Autumn 1993), 18. 69. Ibid. 29. 70. Eliot, Middlemarch, 91.



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For example, Lydgate, Eliot notes, ‘was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity’ because ‘this petty medium of Middlemarch had been too strong for him’.71 The narrative reveals the ‘frustrating complexity’ of relationships as a piece of vocation that we often ignore. In a parallel example, Mentz points to the notion of compromise through the character of Farebrother, whose guidance of many in the novel serves as an example which asks ‘is it not possible . . . that by living a life in community, a life informed by the habits of exchange and compromise, one paradoxically can be most free of dependence and most capable of creativity?’72 Yet, Mentz maintains, Middlemarch remains a novel that reveals ‘irreconcilable conflict between vocation and the social life’.73 I would argue, however, when viewed as a narrative of networks, we see the novel’s idea of community as an unyielding – if at times unwelcome or surprising – call to individuals in their vocational trajectories. Individuals transform in response to such communal expectations, reconciling their hopes with the realities of lived experience. Middlemarch closes with a nod to this tension between part and whole, individual and communal voice: ‘there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it’.74 The text emphasises the ways individuals are limited by context and perspective. Yet, Eliot uses this not as a way to defeat individual pursuit of purpose and meaning but to imagine vocational exploration as contributing to ‘the growing good of the world’.75 One does not gather vocational insight by assuming one is the hero of an epic tale, but instead, gathers insight through the intentionality of a responsible, even sacrificial choice which may not yield greatness but certainly yields goodness for self and others. As William T. Cavanaugh rightly posits, ‘Vocational discernment, then, not only involves others; these others need to help us limit our choices.’76 This is the kind of editing that we ought to employ when we narrate vocation: the reflection, resistance and responsiveness to the complex networks of our life.

71. Ibid. 115, 119. 72. Mentz, Novel of Vocation, 91. 73. Ibid. 91. 74. Eliot, Middlemarch, 514. 75. Ibid. 515. 76. Cavanaugh, ‘Can’t Be’, 44.

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Endings and Beginnings Close, critical, literary reading of novels with students can expand our sense of how we interpret and tell our vocational narratives. We read with an eye towards the possible while being acutely aware of the actual. We reconcile partial viewpoints with the whole of a narrative, feeling the tension of conflicting desires and experiences. We see moments of resistance towards the traditional plot line, explicit and implicit, and embrace the dissonance and incoherence. We see that stories of call are perhaps best experienced from the vantage of a reader, rather than as the hero, author or narrator, because we can understand the competing story lines and ideologies. In the final chapter of Middlemarch, George Eliot writes of both possibility and finality: ‘every limit is a beginning as well as an ending’.77 Indeed, narrative gives us a glimpse of expansive and narrowed vision all at once, as we move from empathising with individual characters while linking their singular experiences to the larger, multilayered story. Eliot also emphasises that writing the story of a life involves more than narrating historical triumphs and utopic ideals; for Dorothea, ‘those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful’.78 As readers of narrative, we imagine new worlds and lives, even those that replace the conventionally beautiful with the realities of human experience. Novels cultivate vocation through an understanding that narrative is a process of moving between part and whole, from author and narrator to reader and character, to hearing the multiplicity of voices within our own and seeing our lives as inextricable from the lives of others. In this way, we interpret our literary and vocational narratives from the vantage point of critics and readers, embracing the contradictions and alternatives as the place where in Andrew Miller’s terms, ‘[we] might find out what matters and how it matters, find it once or find it again.’79

77. Eliot, 510. 78. Ibid. 514. 79. Miller, On Not Being Someone Else, 79.

Chapter 3

Poetry’s Lyric Call Stephanie L. Johnson

Heather McHugh, participating in a Harper’s Magazine roundtable of five poets in 1999, offered as her opening statement, ‘I think one of poetry’s functions is not to give us what we want.’1 Indirectly yet concisely, McHugh identifies the source of much student anxiety about and dislike of poetry: its purpose opposes the desires and expectations of its readers. Rather than confirm our existing ideas or affirm our precious hopes, she suggests, poetry should defy them. Speaking as a poet, she implies that the poet’s function – or, we might say, vocation – is to create in defiance. And while she probably did not mean that we all want an easy read whenever we approach a written text, ease is often what our students seem to want, and poetry can thwart that as well. Not only does poetry stymie readers’ desires and expectations, but it also seems to stymie their reading altogether, at least in the undergraduate classroom. Poetry’s defiance of our desires and expectations may seem like a counterintuitive idea with which to begin an essay on poetry and vocational discernment, yet it is apt. In that same roundtable exchange, McHugh nods to the long tradition of understanding the poet as prophet: rather than being of ‘use’ to the tribe, by which she seems to mean defending it from the latest calamity, she says that ‘the poet is sitting by himself in the graveyard talking to a skull’. Here we have a seeming paradox. On the one hand, poetry has a ‘function’, which implies that the poet also has a function; on the other hand, the poet has no ‘use’ to the community, which implies that poetry also has no use. As we consider how to help students define purposeful living, this paradox can suggest multiple directions. It can

  1. ‘How to Peel a Poem: Five Poets Dine Out on Verse (Forum)’, Harper’s Magazine (1 September 1999), 46.

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prompt us to consider the similarities and differences between the concept of vocation and that of function or use. It can also push us to interrogate what we mean by ‘use’ and why we adhere to the language of utility when speaking about meaning. And it can suggest a specific reason for teaching poetry as we raise such questions in the classroom.2 In conversations about teaching vocation, including those within scholarly circles, poetry has not been attended to significantly. That does not mean that poetry never appears in the scholarship on vocation; rather, it means that certain lines or stanzas of poems appear, but their appearances have a utility dependent on their decontextualisation and on the reduction of meaning. Poetic fragments become inspirational aphorisms. This utilitarian use of poetry extends beyond published works on vocation as well; poetic fragments have had a visible pedagogical function and marketing role within many programmes and projects focused on teaching vocation, especially at liberal arts colleges. A fragment from Mary Oliver may be the most well-known example, as the final two lines of her lovely poem ‘The Summer Day’ have been embraced by many – those lines in which the speaker poses the question, ‘what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?’3 Countless students have most certainly been asked to consider the preciousness of their lives and their choices by reading this poem. Visitors to the office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs at my own institution are asked to do so by these two framed lines, which hang on the wall of the outer office. This kind of fragmentation and extraction of a line or two of poetry for cultural consumption is certainly not unusual, as we all know from any bookstore’s gift section, but it does a particular disservice

  2. While I do not have the space here to examine the long tradition of self-reflexive poetry that addresses the poetic function, such poems can help us raise these questions about vocation with students. For just a few examples that bridge poetry and poetics, see Marge Piercy’s ‘To be of use’, Billy Collins’s ‘Introduction to Poetry’ and Brenda Shaughnessy’s ‘The Poets are Dying’.   3. Mary Oliver, ‘The Summer Day’, in New and Selected Poems, vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 94. These lines are also quoted repeatedly in the scholarship on teaching vocation, such as in the epigraph to the Preface of John Neafsey’s A Sacred Voice Is Calling: Personal Vocation and Social Conscience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006), ix, and they have an extensive reach in popular culture and on social media (see ‘Mary Oliver’s Poetry Found a Second Life as a Meme’, , last accessed 24 June 2021).

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to undergraduates when it takes the place of our thoughtful teaching of poems. The extraction of an aphorism from a poem for utilitarian ends prevents the possibility of poetic discourse broadening students’ world views. It disallows poetry from ‘not giv[ing] us what we want’. Instead, if we attend to the polysemy of poetic language – the multiple meanings for a single word, deepened and expanded by its context – then we can invite students to consider more broadly how multiplicity and even indeterminacy shape meaning in rich, fulfilling ways. Poetry’s display of polysemy and its resistance to the instrumentalisation of language open up unexpected possibilities for the self and the world. By embracing poetic language in the classroom, we can resist the aphoristic use of poetic fragments to serve easy moral lessons or neatly packaged vocational itineraries that would limit students’ scope of vision. Instead, we can introduce students to the creative capacity of language, to its signalling of a ‘reality in the making’ and to the value of considering their own lives as ‘potentiality’, to use Paul Ricoeur’s terms.4 We can help them navigate ambiguity and identify the value in struggling with paradox, both in their encounters with literary texts and within the texts of their own lives.

No Dearth of Stories Within the scholarship on teaching vocation published in the past twenty-five years, an emphasis on narrative and storytelling is clear. We can trace the emphasis back to the seminal works published at the turn of the century, when a national movement to use the concept of vocation in pedagogy gained momentum. Because this movement began in theological circles, as described in the Introduction to this volume, many of those works conceptualise vocation by drawing connections between education and faith, and their emphasis on narrative arises from the importance of stories to biblical exegesis and homiletics. Two early anthologies that are designed for the undergraduate classroom, for example, include readings from multiple humanities disciplines with a heavy emphasis on narrative. Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation (2005), edited by William C. Placher, assembles mostly non-literary texts and thus

  4. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Poetry and Possibility’, in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflections and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 462.

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includes only three literary contributions: two excerpts from novels and one poem. Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be (2006), edited by Mark R. Schwehn and Dorothy C. Bass, takes a more liberal approach in its assemblage, gathering texts beyond the Christian theological tradition as well as from literature, and is a notable exception in its inclusion of eleven poems. In their brief introductions to the poems that include questions for the reader, however, Schwehn and Bass most often approach poems as narratives, questioning character and plot and asking what they ‘teach us’.5 More recently, in the three volumes of essays on vocation and higher education edited by David S. Cunningham since 2016, the importance of narrative and storytelling is discussed by multiple contributors, all of whom are theologians or philosophers, but poetry rarely appears. Five essays concern narrative, story, or drama, while only one essay engages poetic excerpts – not full poems – in any significant way.6 Poetry’s presence in the scholarship on vocation has been ephemeral – never central, never substantive – yet never effaced. Perhaps a line or a partial stanza will appear as an epigraph to an essay,

  5. The second edition, published in 2020, includes fifteen poems, seven of which replace poems from the first edition and expand the diversity of authors included. More questions about imagery and metaphor are posed in the introductions to each, as well. See Mark R. Schwehn and Dorothy C. Bass (eds), Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).   6. See ‘Stories of Call: From Dramatic Phenomena to Changed Lives’ by Charles Pinches; ‘“Who’s There?”: The Dramatic Role of the “Caller” in Vocational Discernment’ by David S. Cunningham; and ‘Vocation and Story: Narrating Self and World’ by Douglas V. Henry, all in David S. Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); ‘Called to Tell Our Stories: The Narrative Structure of Vocation’ by Shirley Hershey Showalter, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and ‘The Story of Me: A Myth-understanding of Vocation’ by Matthew R. Sayers and ‘The Call of Death and the Depth of Our Callings: The Quality of Vocational Discernment’ by Rahuldeep Gill, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). In the second volume, Jason A. Mahn also quotes the last two lines of Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’ in ‘The Conflicts in Our Callings: The Anguish (and Joy) of Willing Several Things’, 44.

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as in John Neafsey’s A Sacred Voice is Calling: Personal Vocation and Social Conscience (2006), or perhaps a few lines will be quoted within a paragraph without close reading or explication. One early exception to the narrative-centric scholarship is Parker J. Palmer’s influential Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (2000), which opens with the full text of William Stafford’s ‘Ask Me’. Sown throughout this small volume are also brief excerpts from May Sarton, Rumi and Dante, yet Palmer offers their meanings as self-apparent and uniformly singular. Interestingly, he includes his own poem ‘Harrowing’ in full but without commentary, offered as poet and not as critic. In service of the volume’s argument, the poem seems to take on the function of its surrounding text, and its language becomes the language of utility. The ephemeral presence of poetry, at once too light to have substance yet pervasive enough to indicate its value, suggests that poetry deserves our attention in the teaching of vocation. That attention, I argue, should be a literary attention – the intense and careful close reading that defines our discipline. Allison Wee has described the value of poetry in part as its expression of ‘the depths and heights of feeling and ideas that often expand beyond the rational dimension of language’, and such expression marks a generic difference from narrative expression.7 In Matthew Zapruder’s recent argument for the necessity of poetry, he claims that poems are distinct from all other forms because they ‘allow language its inherent provisionality, uncertainty, and slippages’.8 Poetic language reaches for the irrational, the encounter with death, the meaning that extends beyond ourselves, and it can speak differently to us and for us.

Thinking Poetically Drawing distinctions between genres has risks even within post-poststructuralism, but poetry’s forms have distinct characteristics despite the porousness of their boundaries. Paul Fussell argues for the primacy of meter in poetic performance – a ‘regular linguistic rhythm’ – that

  7. Allison Wee, ‘Valuing Poetry’, Intersections, 37 (2013), 10.   8. Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry? (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 12.

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orders language into patterns of pleasure.9 Yet even in his study of meter, Fussell indicates the insufficiency of prosodic conventions to define poetry; he concludes that ‘the conventions have permitted the poet to see what it is that he [sic] means, to hear what his [sic] own voice is saying, and to realize what is in the materials he [sic] has before him’ and that the conventions themselves ‘enable him [sic] to see, and to hear, and to think poetically’.10 So conventions such as meter, rhyme, stanza, and rhetorical organisation, present more or less in any particular poem, do not define poetry because something more intangible is in play – a poetic seeing, hearing and thinking – which can only arise through the ordering of language into a ‘regular linguistic rhythm’. Fussell’s definition of poetry is fundamentally Romantic and echoes John Keats’s formulation of the ‘camelion poet’, whose poetical character ‘is not itself – it has no self – it is everything and nothing’.11 The poet seems to cultivate a double consciousness, to stand outside the self to attend to the poetic – to Beauty, in Keats’s language – which is heard as a call from both within and without. Consider Emily Dickinson’s poetic seeing, hearing and thinking about the difference between poetry and prose in ‘I dwell in Possibility’, part of which was quoted in the Introduction to this volume. As with many of her poems, this one seems to invite aphoristic fragmentation because of its punctuation, so readers may be familiar with its opening lines from either popular culture or literary scholarship. If we attend to this poem in its formal entirety, however, then we can begin to think poetically along with the poet. As Fussell puts it, ‘without an almost equal understanding of [the conventions], the audience, for all its intelligence and good will, hears nothing’.12 A kind of expression and communication occurs without that equal understanding, he goes on to say, but not a ‘poetic expression and

  9. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. edn (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 4. 10. Ibid. 180. 11. John Keats, ‘Letter to Richard Woodhouse’ (27 October 1818), in The Letters of John Keats, vol. 1, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 387. Keats’s discussion of the camelion poet follows from his concept of Negative Capability as the poet’s capability of ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’, or of being ‘overcome’ by ‘the sense of Beauty’ (‘Letter to George and Tom Keats’, 21, 27 (?) December 1817, in Rollins, The Letters of John Keats, 193. 12. Fussell, Poetic Meter, 176.

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communication’.13 To hear Dickinson, we must examine the poetic conventions as they allow meaning, and that requires examining the fullness of form as she created it: I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose – More numerous of Windows – Superior – for Doors – Of Chambers as the Cedars – Impregnable of Eye – And for an Everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky – Of Visitors – the fairest – For Occupation –This – The spreading wide my narrow Hands – To gather Paradise – 14

Although the speaker does not say that her dwelling is Poetry, she implies it through an alliterative substitution in line one of the word ‘Possibility’ for the comparative with ‘Prose’. The first two lines suggest, then, that poetry is a structure, a dwelling within which to live, but also a form within which to make meaning; they suggest that the defining characteristic of poetry is its possibility, so much so that possibility subsumes its form and even its name. In line one, the alternative meaning of ‘dwell’ (to spend time on) also implies that the speaker lingers in ‘Possibility’, luxuriating in the moment before creation or before choosing her next move. To ‘dwell’ is not only to reside within but also to be on the cusp of movement into the possible.

13. Ibid. 177. In John Marsh’s recent how-to guide to reading poetry, he introduces certain poetic conventions to the lay reader while undermining specialised knowledge at the same time, thus implicitly rejecting Fussell’s argument for formal, conventional knowledge as means to ‘hear’ a poem. Marsh’s book takes as its premise that poems are like crossword puzzles in need of solving, yet he also asserts that every good poem will necessarily require the reader to ‘connect one thing to another, to make an intuitive leap. Every poem, that is, calls for a bit of interpretive magic.’ See The Puzzle of Poetry (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2020), 39. 14. Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in Possibility – ’, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1960), 327.

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Lines three through eight explore this paradox of the ‘House’ as at once an enclosure in which to dwell and at the same time as no enclosure at all. The movement of these lines is upward and outward from a seemingly small dwelling to the expansiveness of the world, from a House of Possibility with many openings to the natural world’s ‘Chambers’ that are ‘as the Cedars’ in their multitude and density. After that already overwhelming vision, the enjambment of lines seven and eight increases the sublimity of this dwelling: ‘And for an Everlasting Room/The Gambrels of the Sky – ’. Poetry’s possibilities are almost infinite. The word ‘fairer’ in line two contributes surprisingly to this movement as well, as it first seems to mean only more beautiful but then by the end of the poem also means unimpeded, unobstructed, open and clear like the sky. Modelling for students how two meanings of this word shape the meaning of the poem teaches them to interpret texts of all kinds differently and, indeed, to consider how meaning is not singular. As a poem about poetry, ‘I dwell in Possibility’ exposes the paradox of a form (a ‘House’) that does not limit or contain (the slope of its ‘Roof’ is the formless ‘Sky’). Even as the speaker seems to describe poetry’s possibilities with language from the domestic sphere and from the natural world, thereby seeming to inscribe the position of the poetess within an appropriately gendered space, alternative meanings subvert that inscription. Dickinson’s use of ‘House’ and ‘Chambers’ simultaneously suggests a judiciary or legislative body as well as the domestic, positioning her speaker as politically powerful. So this is a poem about the female poet who re-forms her constraints as much as it is a poem about poetry. As Caroline Levine suggests, poetic meter can, like other social rhythms, exert a power that resists homologies.15 Dickinson’s use of the hymn stanza, the dash and parataxis resisted the conventions of nineteenth-century American poetry, yet she established them as conventional within her oeuvre as the fitting expression of the unconventional. Poetic forms enable possibility. Dickinson thinks poetically about poetry, but readers do not have to be poets to see their own experiences within and through the poem. The speaker’s act of ‘dwell[ing]’, with which the poem opens, invites a conversation about the poetic vocation that can lead to broader

15. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 74.



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discussions of vocation as a concept, one with mutable boundaries and transformative potential. This poem not only exemplifies the polysemy of poetic language and the richness of such indeterminacy for understanding our lives, but it also addresses the concept of vocation. The word ‘Occupation’ in line ten may offer the most obvious means to engage students in a discussion of the daily tasks and commitments that occupy their own time but also of their professional aspirations. What might it mean to ‘gather Paradise’ in one’s hands? Certainly for Dickinson’s speaker, to ‘dwell’ in poetry is to find an abundance of beauty and pleasure available to her when she extends herself outward – when she ‘spread[s] wide [her] narrow Hands’. Her work is not constrained even by a weak or small body because her hands are able to ‘gather’ regardless of their size; the availability of ‘Paradise’ is not limited by any ‘narrow[ness]’ that she brings to it. In terms that resonate with Dickinson’s here, philosopher Paul Ricoeur draws on Martin Heidegger’s concepts of ‘constructing the house, and dwelling, and thinking’ and from Hans-Georg Gadamer to articulate an idea of the world as a ‘horizon of possibilities’ so that in ‘each experience there is something there but also something which is only potential’.16 Ricoeur connects this potentiality of human existence to the work of art: the poem ‘projects a world’, which we attempt to reach in our encounter with it.17 Dickinson’s poem has projected a world whose horizon is Paradise, and she, like Ricoeur, gives that word ‘Occupation’ and her poem ontological import. The seeming indeterminacy of her language and of the speaker’s work shapes vocation to be a way of dwelling in the world rather than a particular occupation.

Against the Aphoristic Use of Poetry Within the scholarship on vocation, the predominance of poetic fragments suggests a desire to de-form poems into tools with specific utilities: the moral lesson, the unambiguous truth or the inspirational

16. Ricoeur, ‘Poetry and Possibility’, 453. 17. Ricoeur uses ‘poetry’ to include both verse and narrative fiction, opposing poetic language to practical or scientific language in a broadly Aristotelian sense, yet he also seems to use it specifically to speak of verse, as when he speaks of a ‘trend of poetry to forget experience and to cultivate language for its own sake . . . [or] for the connection between pattern and sound’, 450–1.

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aphorism. This is not to say that these different forms do not have their value; certainly we need lessons and truth in our lives, and the aphorism as a literary form offers meaning and undeniable pleasure, especially at the hands of an artist as skilled as Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker. Like poetry, the aphorism also often does not ‘give us what we want’, but when it is decontextualised from a longer work, the poetic seeing, hearing and thinking that arise from the poet’s ordering of language into a rhythmic whole will not be heard. In A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter, Andrew Hui offers a sustained examination of the aphorism across centuries and cultures while at the same time displaying the difficulty in defining one. An aphorism, he states, is ‘a short saying that requires interpretation’, which seems not to get us anywhere.18 But as he presents the many terms for such short sayings along a spectrum from the ‘banal’ on one end (proverbs, platitudes), to the witty and literary in the middle (epigrams, maxims), to the philosophical and theological on the other end (aphorisms), we see that his interpretive and disciplinary lens will be philosophical.19 He asserts that the interpretation of an aphorism must ‘translate the figural, witty, and intuitive into the logical, explicable, and demonstrable’ and that we must ‘unfold its multidimensional complexes into the flat plane of clarity, render its fulgurating blot (or rather bolt!) into lucid insight’.20 So while Hui begins his fascinating study of the aphorism by discussing how its exegesis produces an ‘explosion of meaning’ and a ‘plurality of worlds’, he ultimately describes the interpretation of an aphorism as a flattening of all recesses and depths, a collapsing of multiplicity into singularity.21 His particular philosophical approach sidelines the literary. In a discussion of Hui’s work for The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says, somewhat aphoristically, that the ‘ability to elide the extraneous is what makes the aphorism bite, but the possibility of inferring backward to a missing text is what makes the aphorism poetic’.22 When the aphorism is extracted from a longer literary text,

18. Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 5. 19. Ibid. 4. 20. Ibid. 6. 21. Ibid. 4, 3. 22. Adam Gopnik, ‘Brevity, Soul, Wit: The Art of the Aphorism’, The New Yorker (22 July 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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such elision becomes problematic as inference replaces art. How much better not to elide but to understand the extraneous as necessary, not to infer the poetic but to read the poem. The world that is projected by the work of art offers us possibilities for our lived experience; it is not constrained by the reader’s or artist’s subjectivity. In Ricoeur’s objections to the Romantic hermeneutic tradition, which understands interpretation as a meeting of subjectivities, he posits the following hermeneutic: the reader understands himself [sic] in front of the text, in front of the world of the work. To understand oneself in front of a text is quite the contrary of projecting oneself and one’s own beliefs and prejudices; it is to let the work and its world enlarge the horizon of the understanding which I have of myself.23

To encounter a poem in its fullness is to consider one’s vocation in the world of the possible; it is to dwell in a broadened understanding of self and world.

Reading ‘The Summer Day’ A rendering into ‘lucid insight’ is what happens to Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’ when its final two lines are extracted from the whole to serve conversations about purposeful living: their meaning is flattened and clarified. The two lines pose a question, whose warrant has to do with the brevity yet potentiality of a human life: ‘what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?’ Certainly the question can prompt valuable self-reflection and goal-setting, but its extraction does a disservice both to the poem and to the reader.24

23. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics’, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 178. 24. Perhaps the best example of an aphoristic use of these lines for goal-setting is Harvard Business School’s Portrait Project, which uses them as an essay prompt for students, as reported in Vanity Fair’s obituary for Mary Oliver. See Kenzie Bryant, ‘How Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” Became an American Sensation’, Vanity Fair (17 January 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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A close reading of the full poem will lead students to unexpected answers to that final question, answers that have less to do with ends and more to do with means. The question has a speaker, who shapes it through her own particular observations and rhetorical figures: Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean – the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down – who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Whereas the opening questions at first seem to invoke the mythological through an allusion to the Book of Job, by line four, we understand that they concern a particular ‘world’ and a particular ‘grasshopper’, which the speaker encounters intimately and intentionally. The speaker asks ‘who’, not ‘how’, which resonates with the statement in line eleven, ‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.’ There is a ‘who’, the speaker stresses, and that ‘who’ may warrant a prayer, whatever that may be. The encounter with the grasshopper traces a progression from the speaker’s opening query about a creator to her focus on the human practice of ‘prayer’. If we do not attend to the linguistic rhythms of this poem – to see, hear and think poetically along with the poet – then we will not understand how lines five through ten are themselves a prayer. In these lines, the speaker anthropomorphises the grasshopper and underscores its vulnerability: she has ‘flung herself out of the grass’ to land on the speaker’s hand, risking death for sweetness. The anaphora in this section creates an incantation that



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sounds almost liturgical: ‘the one who’, ‘the one who’, ‘who is’, ‘who is’. And after the speaker has specified the grasshopper by these various characteristics – through this liturgy – Oliver brings us into the present moment with the anaphoric ‘Now’ as the prayer’s culmination, the multifaceted vision of the grasshopper’s power and delicacy as reflective of her own. To whom is this incantatory prayer directed? Perhaps to the unknown creator, perhaps to the grasshopper, perhaps to the world. Oliver does not provide the ‘lucid insight’ that Hui says is the function of aphorism; she rather suggests through her poem the possible – and possibly contradictory – means to encounter the sacred without defining it. Although the speaker admits ignorance about prayer in line eleven, she offers a kind of recompense in line twelve: ‘I do know how to pay attention.’ The implication is that the previous lines five through ten have been a paying attention, that prayer is a paying attention, so that even though she does not know what prayer is ‘exactly’, her examples show us what it is inexactly. The following lines offer equivalencies for such a ‘paying attention’: to ‘fall down/into the grass’, ‘to kneel down in the grass’, ‘to be idle and blessed’ and ‘to stroll through the fields’. As a poem so often referenced in conversations about vocation, this strolling and especially this idling like the grasshopper seem counterintuitive. Yet in her not doing, the speaker is ‘blessed’. The rhythmic, beautiful, poetic encounter that Oliver’s poem facilitates in the reader is itself a reflective ritual, through which Oliver seems to extend that blessing. The final question of the poem, then, is posed by this particular speaker, who has encountered a particular grasshopper and has offered us her knowledge about paying attention. It is also the third of three questions that conclude the poem. In line sixteen, the first of these questions functions rhetorically since Oliver has shown us that the speaker’s ‘pay[ing] attention’ leads to blessing. In line seventeen, the second question also seems to function rhetorically since everything certainly dies, and, when we love – the world, the grasshopper, life – death will be ‘too soon’. This unexpected mention of death stops us short, however, and the speaker now seems defensive, as though she hears recrimination for her idleness, her poetic attention and perhaps even her prayer. This question has built on the previous question to suggest that the only thing worth doing – the only thing we can do in the face of death – is to pay attention, to pray, to be idle in the world and witness its beauty. The impact and the meaning of the final two lines of ‘The Summer Day’ are dependent on all that has come before. This third

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question addressed to the reader does not function rhetorically because it is the only question that uses ‘you’ explicitly: ‘what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?’ The preceding two questions have already suggested that paying attention to the world in all its particularity – a paying attention that is itself a prayer and a blessed idleness – has no alternative, no ‘should’. And if the reader’s own life is ‘wild and precious’, then it has become conflated with the grasshopper’s and the speaker’s lives as well; thus, perhaps the only plan worth making for our lives is such a paying attention, a sacred idleness. By interpreting the final question of the poem within its context, we understand that it not only calls us to see our ‘wild’ lives as intertwined with the natural world but also suggests that such wildness needs, paradoxically, a kind of control or cultivation to be able to pay attention. The polysemy of Oliver’s final question could not matter more to this poem’s profound importance for vocation. Interpretation of ‘The Summer Day’ through close reading is far removed from the kind of career planning that seems to be invited by Oliver’s final question when those lines are decontextualised. Returning to its opening questions after reading the poem in full, we can see that another possible answer to them is that the poet ‘made’ the grasshopper and thus made the world. Seeing, hearing and thinking poetically are acts of creation that order the wildness of the world, that bring the sacred into being, the speaker suggests. Ricoeur suggests this as well when he writes that poetic discourse ‘refers to our many ways of belonging to the world’ and that this ‘referential function’ frees us to see a different idea of truth: ‘the proposing of a world, a world wherein I can project my ownmost possibilities’.25 So while the poetic vocation may be a particular one, and one that seems either inaccessible or undesirable to many of our students, Oliver’s poem invites all readers to share her poetic vision and to cultivate attention as means to see a different idea of truth. If we could ask students to do so alongside us in the classroom, as a space for the sacred idleness of a poetic encounter, then we might begin to define purpose differently and perhaps have more meaningful conversations about vocation.

25. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer and ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 222, 223.

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Lyric’s Call The lyric seems the most compelling poetic form for considering vocational callings and commitments because of its individual voice and emphasis on meditative reflection, like that of ‘I dwell in Possibility’ or ‘The Summer Day’. Defined by a single speaker who expresses thoughts, feelings or a state of mind, the lyric has been dominant in English poetry since the Romantic period. This dominance, paired with modern poetry’s exploitation of polysemy, positions lyric poems from the past two centuries as the go-to reading list for exploring purposeful living. One danger in teaching lyric poems as meditations on vocation, however, is that the lyric ‘I’ can seem to be – and has been taken to be by so much of literary scholarship – a hermetic, self-sufficient voice. If lyric poems are read as reinforcing an individualistic understanding of the meaningful life because of their interiority, then important considerations of civic engagement, responsibility to the common good, or interpersonal commitments are lost. Instead of jettisoning the lyric, however, I would argue that the lyric ‘I’ is not that solipsistic voice so often assumed but is rather always a self-in-relationship, which, if acknowledged, means that those important considerations of others in the world are not lost when teaching the lyric. Lyric self-expression always has an implied audience, always an interlocutor, even if its audience seems to be only the past or future self. In Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler calls this ‘triangulated address’, in which the speaker addresses the reader by addressing something or someone else, and he claims that it is the ‘root-form of presentation for lyric’.26 In conversations about vocation with students, then, the lyric can model a way of being in the world that is never autonomous or denying community, but we do need to foreground questions of audience so that its relational form is apparent.27

26. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 186. Later, he has an interesting discussion of the apostrophe as ‘a mark of poetic vocation’ because it is ‘a ritual action, whereby voice calls in order to be calling, and seeks to manifest its calling, to establish its identity as poetical voice’, 216. 27. Some of my ideas in this paragraph and the following paragraph first appeared in a blog post for NetVUE and are reprinted with permission. See ‘Form and Formation IV: The Call of Lyric Poems’, (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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A second danger can arise from this attention to audience if we do not examine the politics of the triangulated address and acknowledge that historically, the lyric ‘I’ has most often expressed the perspective and values of a white, male poet and, just as perniciously, assumed the whiteness and maleness of his audience. Acknowledgement of such assumptions and critique of the ways in which lyric expression has furthered oppressive ideologies, neither of which Culler does sufficiently, will contribute to their dismantling. Because the lyric has often been a form expressive of complaint or resistance – albeit from the perspective of a white, male poet – it offers means for new voices to challenge dominant ideologies. As we teach vocation in the classroom, the multiple voices speaking through the lyric form can offer various perspectives for conversation and will certainly be heard differently by different students. Consider the opening four stanzas of Reginald Dwayne Betts’s ‘Temptation of the Rope’ as a triangulated address that resists racist and homophobic constructions of the imprisoned, male body: The link between us all is tragedy, & these so many years later, I am thinking of him, all of twenty & gay &, maybe, more free than any of us might ever be, & this is one way of telling the story, another one is aphorism, or threat: blood on my knife or blood on my dick; which is to confess: surviving that young & beautiful & willing to walk every day as if wearing sequins meant believing, always, there is a thing worth risking doom.28

Initially, the speaker seems to address a universal audience – the ‘us all’ that could be ‘link[ed]’ by a common mortality. All readers are pulled into a shared perspective with the ‘I’, but by lines four and five, the ‘us’ begins to splinter as it now seems to signify only

28. Reginald Dwayne Betts, ‘Temptation of the Rope’, in Felon: Poems (New York: Norton, 2019), 63–4.

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those who are not wholly ‘free’. Yet even there, because ‘free’ is used to describe the twenty-year-old gay man, we can interpret the freedom as psychological, perhaps a freedom from inhibitions or fear of judgement. By the third stanza, however, the violent possibility of the ‘story’ and the risk of mere survival for the gay man as well as for the speaker indicate that this ‘us all’ refers to a specific group, one that only becomes concretised in a later stanza as the incarcerated. The ‘us’ has become triangulated both to include and exclude certain readers simultaneously. Betts does not mention race in this poem, but its publication in a collection that addresses the racial injustices of the prison system creates a subtext here of the racialised male body. To tell this ‘story’ in a poem, the speaker claims, is not to choose ‘aphorism, or threat’, which may be one and the same, given Betts’s punctuation; poetry enables instead something more than violence – more than the violence of the phallic knife and the violence of the aphorism that strips a human life to the sensationalistic, single idea: ‘blood on my knife or blood on my dick’. Poetry enables a different vision, and here, the vision is one that may disconcert many readers of privilege. Freedom is not release from prison; freedom is putting on a confidence and a ‘willing[ness]’ to move through the world ‘as if wearing sequins meant believing, always’ – a belief twice displaced – that ‘there is a thing worth risking doom’. Betts’s ambiguous sentence structure assigns the ‘confess[ion]’ of this belief, this faith, both to the speaker and to the young gay man of his memory. As the poem continues to its end, the memory of the ‘young &// beautiful’ is also proof of their common survival, and it is triggered by the sight of another male body, hanging within a prison cell: There is no reason for me to think of him now, especially with the football player’s hanging body eclipsing another prison cell, except, maybe the kid whose name I can’t remember but walk I can, had mastered something the dead man’s singing legs could never, how not to abandon the body’s weight, & how to make the body expand, to balloon, to keep becoming, until even the danger could not swallow you. One day I watched him, full of fear for my own fragility & wondered how he dared

84   Stephanie L. Johnson own so much of himself, openly. For all I know every minute in those cells was safe for the kid whose name I cannot recall. But how can a man ever be safe like that, when you are so beautiful the straight ones believe it & want to talk to you as if they love you & want you to dare them to believe that some things in this world must be too lovely to ever be broken.

The dead man’s legs may be ‘singing’ as his body hangs from the rope, but the young man’s walk as if he believed in the ‘worth’ of something beyond ‘doom’ showed a courage and a more powerful expressiveness. The dead body may signify a kind of freedom and a kind of tragic artistry, but the young man’s living body – sequinned and beautiful – becomes itself his art: he had learned how to embrace ‘the body’s/weight’ and ‘make the body expand,/to balloon, to keep becoming’ beyond ‘danger’, to draw in all those around him. Betts’s poem offers readers a vision of a perpetual ‘becoming’ as vocation, a becoming that is embodied, dangerous and potentially beautiful. One of the risks in teaching this poem is that students will paraphrase stanza nine and extract the easy, moral lesson to ‘own yourself’. Without considering the lyric speaker of the poem and the triangulated address, we might miss the polyphonic use of the word ‘own’ in lines twenty-four and twenty-five and thus its political edge. The young man does not ‘own’ all of himself as a prisoner or as a Black man, yet he does own his body’s ‘becoming’ and his belief in its power. The speaker positions himself over and against the young man’s ownership when he says that he ‘watched him, full of fear for/my own fragility’. Here, the word ‘own’ indicates his personal ‘fragility’, one that is distinct, the protection – or risk – of which can belong to no one else. The speaker owns fragility, while the young man owns ‘so much of himself, openly’, yet the polysemy creates an interchangeability between the two usages and between the two men. The young man has not given up his fragility even as he dares to keep becoming, and we understand that the speaker, too, can expand beyond his fear even though he sounds wistful in the final seven lines. Because the ‘us’ of the poem both includes and excludes certain readers simultaneously, however, the ownership addressed in this poem cannot be depoliticised as though it means the same for all

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readers. His wistfulness in not quite believing that something lovely can remain unbroken is the wistfulness of a Black speaker with generations of dispossession, imprisonment and lynching behind him. And the affirmation of that loveliness created by the final line of the poem, set apart as its own truncated stanza, is the affirmation of that same speaker. To discount the racialised bodies in this poem and Betts’s poetic seeing and hearing of them would be just another form of not seeing race and thus not seeing racial injustice. Readers of ‘Temptation of the Rope’ are called to see ‘this world’ of line thirty-three through the speaker’s perspective and also to examine their own relationships to the Black bodies called into the discursive present of the poem. Vocation as perpetual ‘becoming’ for Betts, as for Ricoeur, positions the reader ‘to let the work and its world enlarge the horizon of the understanding’ of the self, which has political as well as ontological import for the self-in-relationship.29 When we consider the lyric ‘I’ as a call to both self and other, then we open ourselves to a world of possibility – the world of the text, the world within and around us – to which we are responsible.

Meaning Beyond Ourselves The lyric call that we hear when attending to poems in their fullness is a call to relational selfhood. Thinking poetically can help students reframe ambiguity and polysemy as positive aspects of meaningmaking, but it can also expand their horizon of responsibility as they conceive of self and other anew. Lyrics that use the second person address may be especially gratifying to teach because they more directly engage the reader in the discursive present and impart a sense of responsibility, which we have already glimpsed in Oliver’s poem. They can raise important questions for students about when and how to respond to the needs and desires of others. Lucille Clifton’s ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is one such poem that, like the three others already discussed, concerns the creation of both art and life: won’t you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon

29. Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor’, 178.

86   Stephanie L. Johnson both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? I made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.30

Clifton seems to reinscribe the humility of her lyric ‘i’ and characteristic use of lower-case letters with a restrained but warm opening invitation from the speaker. Not ‘celebrate’ or ‘come celebrate’, but rather ‘won’t you celebrate?’ The speaker underscores her natural ability by stating that she ‘had no model’ for her creation, but her description of it as having been ‘shaped into/a kind of life’ seems to indicate, cautiously again, a lack of artistic skill. Her creation seems to be something only resembling life, like a bad sculpture, and thus is not really a life. Yet ‘kind’ has multiple meanings; it also signifies here a category, one way of living or being among many. For the speaker, her life’s ‘kind’ is determined by her being ‘both nonwhite and woman’, a double form of exile into the babylon of the white patriarchy. Her only model was herself so that the questions within the opening six lines now appear as musing rather than as unassuming. After the opening six lines, the speaker changes her tone to offer an assertive recounting of her skilled and subversive creation of a life. In line seven, she claims almost defiantly, ‘i made it up’ while on the ‘bridge between/starshine and clay’ with only her own hand for support or comfort. Those lovely lines eight and nine form an image of the Black woman joining the heavens to the earth through a nocturnal creation illumined by the stars, isolated but also singular in her power. Her use of ‘here’ and ‘this bridge’ tells us that she is still working her craft, still bridging the material and the spiritual. Clifton’s use of a semi-colon to join that image to a repetition of the invitation prepares us for its difference: now, the speaker says, ‘come celebrate’. More powerfully, she tells us what has been at stake for her in the creation of her life – a ‘kind of life’ that, when seen and shaped, brings significant risk; she has faced and overcome

30. Lucille Clifton, ‘won’t you celebrate with me’, in The Book of Light (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1993), 25.

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regular attempts to destroy her, which have ‘failed’ rather than been thwarted. Clifton’s use of ‘everyday’ as a modifier in line twelve suggests that an attempt to kill her, either literally or figuratively, was a daily occurrence; however, by choosing not to use the grammatical ‘every day’, an additional, implied meaning is that the murderous ‘something’ was a banal and commonplace violence, more insidious, perhaps, than an uncommon one. In her use of second-person address, Clifton calls us to reconsider our own ‘kind of life’ with a new understanding that must take into account racial and gender-based violence. The intimate address implies that we are participants in the speaker’s experience and emphasises a relationship of responsibility formed by the call from the other even more strongly than Betts’s poem. The implied reader of this poem collapses into the real reader, and the speaker invites us – almost commands us in its second iteration – to ‘celebrate’ with her the survival of her self, her creation; she extends a radical hospitality to all readers that both exposes systems of oppression and subverts them. Because she yet stands on that ‘bridge between/starshine and clay’, her invitation to ‘come’ is an invitation to participate in her power and spiritual creation. Clifton’s poem prompts us to consider how callings may come from outside ourselves with a force that cannot be denied even if they suggest truths that are simultaneously beautiful and painful. It also challenges us to position ourselves as survivors of the same systems of oppression as the speaker. By attending to this poem, we see what Ricoeur calls our ‘ownmost possibilities’ while also seeing that ‘our many ways of belonging to the world’ impose a responsibility on us. With Clifton, we celebrate the poetic creation of a beauty that rises from the violence of the world to meet the heavens.

The Function of Poetry In this historical moment when the humanities are being devalued, when civic responsibility and civil discourse are waning, we can prepare students to belong to the world through the teaching of poetry in all its varied, lyrical forms. We can facilitate literary encounters for our students that help them see potentiality in their multiple vocations, value in complexity, and beauty in their lived experiences. We will no doubt find ourselves teaching many of the same poems that provide aphorisms for others, but neither our attention nor our questions will be the same. We read poems differently than we read aphorisms because we have been taught to read them differently, as

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Stanley Fish argued decades ago;31 because poems are characterised by a polysemy that often resists logic or explication; and because their rhythmic form engages our entire bodies in the reading. To claim a function for poetry, as Heather McHugh does, implies that it has a role or purpose to perform, which is not the same as claiming its usefulness as though it were a tool; one of poetry’s functions – or purposes – in the classroom, then, might be to prompt students to become more open to new functions or purposes for their lives and to move them past ‘use’ as a category of value. To see, hear and think poetically with the poet in a literary encounter may finally mean not ‘using’ a poem or a human life at all.32 The poet who does not give readers what they want is perhaps also the poet who gives readers more than they need. Poetic form and poetic language defy our expectations while at the same time offering us more than we expected – an excess of meaning, of possibility, of beauty – both for ourselves and beyond ourselves.33 In poetry, as Ricoeur says, we receive ‘the potentiality to see things in terms of potentialities’, as a dimension of reality that is ‘unfinished and in the making’.34 The world that poetry projects is an ontological, not cosmological, world, but one that bears on real, lived encounters with others: ‘the world is where we dwell’, Ricoeur continues, and within this ‘notion of a world’, there is also the ‘notion of horizon’, or ‘something which recedes when we approach it and, therefore, which has always an inexhaustible capacity’.35 To cultivate in students the capacity for reaching for the world in front of the poem, for dwelling in possibility, requires our attention to all that poems mean and all that their lives can mean. Such cultivation – that difficult, recurring, joyful work – is part of our calling as educators.

31. See Stanley Fish, ‘How to Recognize a Poem When You See One’, in Is There a Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 322–37. 32. While this idea may seem to resist Rita Felski’s argument in Uses of Literature, I see alignment in its examination of literature’s value and significance. She identifies the ‘uses’ of literature as both aesthetic and political, which corresponds with my argument for reading poetically. See Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). 33. Zapruder also describes a kind of excess available to us when we stop assuming that a poem has merely one meaning because then ‘the mind can move in a dreamlike, associative way’. He calls this ‘the purpose and promise of poetry’. Ultimately, he sees poetry as means to preserve imagination, following Wallace Stevens, but such preservation readies us to act, even resist. See Zapruder, Why Poetry, 82, 221–2. 34. Ricoeur, ‘Poetry and Possibility’, 462. 35. Ibid. 453.

Chapter 4

The Drama of Vocation Jason Stevens

Zeus, who guided men to think, who has laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering1

Simon Critchley observes of Greek tragedy that ‘the overwhelming experience of tragedy is a disorientation expressed in one bewildered and repeated question: “What shall I do? What shall I do?”’2 Critchley’s description of the experience of tragedy seems to me also not a bad description of the undergraduate experience. ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’ is a question asked repeatedly and urgently by students. They ask it not just in the classroom or in advising sessions, but to friends, family and themselves. It is the overall claim of this essay that the study of tragedy can help students begin and sustain the journey of answering this vocational question. Tragedy offers a twofold vocational wisdom. It shows the aspirations and aims of great figures, and, simultaneously, shows how such actions can be brought to calamity through a complex interaction of circumstances beyond our control and our own blindness. Tragedy makes us spectators of profoundly affective enactments of the mechanics of the good life – imitations of action rooted in deliberative choice and aimed at a worthy end – while simultaneously complicating our

 1. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 40.  2. Simon Critchley, ‘Tragedy’s Philosophy’, lecture, BYU Humanities Lecture Series, Provo, UT (21 February 2014), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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understanding of purposeful action by guiding us to the seat of tragic wisdom: suffering.3 Dramatic action arranged into a whole, unified plot imitates the mechanics of the good life, which is why Aristotle, tragedy’s most influential theorist, links tragedy to ethics. As Joe Sachs observes, the mechanics of dramatic action are, for Aristotle, the same mechanics that drive our actions in life: ‘When Aristotle says that tragedy sets before us an action that is serious and complete (1449b 24–25), he points us to the conditions of responsible human action that he discusses in the Nicomachean Ethics.’4 Thus, the actions in tragedies invite questions about character, virtue and vice; about what happiness is and what kind of character might or might not achieve it; and about how happiness is a way of being in the world as well as an end.5 By inviting us to think deeply about ‘the conditions of responsible human action’, tragedy makes us students of vocation. Indeed, many descriptions of vocation and of the result of successfully teaching vocation are similar to the language of dramatic action. For example, in The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation, Tim Clydesdale articulates an inclusive conception of vocation as teaching that prepares students for ‘postcollege trajectories that set graduates on journeys of significance and impact’.6

  3. Aristotle’s theory of tragedy assumes a teleology. The discussion of the nature or, indeed, the existence, of any kind of teleology – philosophical, religious or natural – is an essential and fruitful part of the conversation of vocational discernment, especially in regard to the language of ‘vocation’ and ‘calling’ and, therefore, the implication of a caller. For an excellent discussion of this topic with attention to drama, see David S. Cunningham, ‘“Who’s There?”: The Dramatic Role of the “Caller”’, in Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 143.   4. Joe Sachs, ‘Introduction’, in Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 2006), 2.   5. Though I will talk much about actions, aims and ends, Aristotelian teleology is, ethically speaking, about happiness and flourishing as a state of being and way of life. It should not be understood merely as achieving a goal in the usual sense of that term. In the Nicomachean Ethics, happiness is the result more of an inward than outward state, as Sachs suggests in his interpretation of eudaimonia in that text: ‘The condition at which any human being aims . . . argued by Aristotle to be some being-at-work of the soul in accordance with all the virtues . . . that fulfills our characteristic capacity as thinking beings’ (206). For an excellent discussion of virtue, vocation and flourishing see Paul J. Wadell, ‘An Itinerary of Hope: Called to a Magnanimous Way of Life’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 193.   6. Tim Clydesdale, The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), xviii.



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Like a plot arc built of repeated dramatic actions, such a ‘trajectory’ must be chosen, sustained and worthy in aim to be one of ‘significance and impact’. Later, Clydesdale describes a student who was able to navigate life’s setbacks as a result of an undergraduate programme of purpose-exploration in terms even more similar to dramatic action, this time including reversals of fortune: ‘she . . . recalibrated her life trajectory, enacted decisions to effect that trajectory, and anticipated both setbacks and a slow path’.7 Insights and concepts derived from the study of tragic drama’s imitation of a character’s deliberative choices aimed at serious and noble ends can equip students to pursue their own trajectories of responsible and purposeful action more deliberately as leading characters in their vocational dramas. Yet tragedy calls us not only to be spectators of embodied ethics and the mechanics of responsible action. Its deeper vocational wisdom lies in its staging of shattered vocations. Pathei mathos or ‘learning through suffering’, a phrase from Aeschylus that serves as my epigraph, is at the heart of tragic wisdom; it afflicts not only tragic heroes and heroines but also their communities. Tragedy imitates actions that are subject to reversals of fortune, and these reversals induce devastating recognitions of our blindness to ourselves, our circumstances and ‘the snares and booby-traps of the past that we blindly trip over in our relentless, stumbling, forward movement’.8 Indeed, as many commentators have pointed out, tragic reversals and recognitions call into question the very limits of human agency. Tragedy teaches us to proceed with caution and humility and to nurture a healthy fear lest we, too, bring past and present crashing down upon ourselves and those we love and serve, but it also teaches us greater pity for those who fall. Tragedy, we might say, shows us that vocation is always in peril. As tragedy brings us to the intersection of aspiration and calamity, we may gain the full wisdom needed to make ourselves and our students able to sustain ‘trajectories . . . of significance and impact’. As Critchley observes, tragedy ‘challenges the authority of philosophy by giving voice to something contradictory about us . . . to what suffers in us and in others and how we might . . . work with that suffering, where suffering is . . . a passion . . . that we undergo’.9 Thus, tragedy challenges the authority of any vocational teaching that encourages students to plunge blindly ahead in pursuit of their

7. Ibid. 7. 8. Critchley, ‘Tragedy’s Philosophy.’ 9. Ibid.

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passions, to reach for the highest and loftiest goals, while all the while dangerously underemphasising the difficulty, ambiguity, blindness and suffering that we ourselves introduce into the dramas of our lives. Students are often surprised to learn that ‘passion’, which they tend to think of as what they ‘love to do’, refers etymologically to suffering, to enduring and undergoing. This semantic connection allows them to reflect on how pursuing their passions might lead them into suffering. But the pathos presented by and evoked through tragedy exists, ultimately, to guide us from tragedy to comedy, where comedy, broadly conceived, is a counter-movement to tragedy, a happy reversal of fortune from bad to good. We study tragedy so that our lives might end as comedies. The title of this essay nods to the usefulness of dramatic literature in equipping students to explore questions of action, purpose and meaning as well as what will imperil their vocational journeys, yet it also nods to the mimetic nature of vocation. We first learn and first learn to act by imitation. We imitate role models, whose parts in life we aspire to play. When we step onto any vocational stage – family, work, community – we step into a role, which shapes our character and, at the same time, reveals something deeply true about us that could not be revealed otherwise. But the pun on ‘drama’ in the title of this chapter also acknowledges the turbulence and pressure that students feel as they try to figure out who they are and what they should do with their lives, and the fear and frustration they experience as a result of being so poorly equipped with strategies for vocational discernment. Tragedy can assuage vocational fears and anxieties by providing a vocabulary, set of concepts and array of case studies for understanding the aspirations and failures of great characters. Thus, tragedy converts our own drama into a guide to our chosen aims, whether those aims are tangible goals like satisfying jobs or satisfying marriages, or states of character like happiness and contentment, or both.

The Poetics and King Lear It is difficult to speak monolithically of tragedy. The study of it as a genre, and perhaps of literary genre itself, begins with Aristotle’s brief and incomplete set of lecture notes on the origin, nature, construction and uses of Greek tragedy, known to us as the Poetics. In the millennia since the Poetics, tragedy has been perhaps less a continuous tradition than a fruitful dialectic of reactions against and



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(sometimes reductive) returns to Aristotle’s formulations. In chapter six, Aristotle defines tragedy as ‘an imitation of an action of serious stature and complete, having magnitude . . . imitating people acting and not using narration, accomplishing by means of pity and fear the cleansing of these states of feeling’.10 Several parts of Aristotle’s definition are useful in helping students gain vocational wisdom from tragedy. Foundational concepts of tragedy – mimesis, praxis, anagnorisis, peripeteia and catharsis – have stood for millennia as serviceable equipment for discerning and understanding purpose, motive and meaning in human character and actions. Tragedy as interpreted through these Aristotelian concepts provides a study of dramatic action that is applicable to students’ lives. It also teaches them the wisdom found in failure. Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis as foundational to how we learn and act also helps students understand more clearly the extent to which vocation is mimetic. If the Poetics is one of the most influential studies of tragedy as well one of the most useful compendiums of concepts for equipping our students to glean vocational wisdom from tragedy, then William Shakespeare’s King Lear is the most profound case study and embodiment of the wisdom of tragedy. The play invites us to be students of the ways in which we mimetically self-fashion, to ponder how vocation, like the play’s recurrent imagery of clothing, is something that we ‘put on’ and change for different roles. The play explores the ways in which we can be drawn into suffering, even unjust suffering, both by our own tragic errors and by striving to honour our overlapping, at times conflicting, obligations and duties – ‘bonds’, in the language of the play – that bind us to others, even to those who do not deserve it.11 Indeed, Lear can be profitably read as a drama

10. Aristotle, Poetics, 26. 11. My thinking on the dialectic of nature and custom in Shakespeare has been deeply influenced by Paul Cantor’s lecture series ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, available on the website Great Thinkers: Shakespeare and Politics, (last accessed 24 June 2021). Cantor’s four lectures on King Lear are helpful for thinking through the play as a tragedy stemming from conflicting vocations of family and kingship, and how and why certain characters do or don’t honour these overlapping ‘bonds’. His lecture on Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a tragedy and a comedy written in the same year on the same subject – love – is illuminating on the subject of Shakespearean tragedy in general.

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of vocations, or the drama of vocation itself as Shakespeare strips life to its naked and most wretched condition to see what, if any, meaning, purpose or binding ties endure between us. King Lear ends with a recognition that tragedy’s wisdom – the ability, in the play’s language, to ‘see better’ because we’ve learned through suffering to ‘see feelingly’ – is the ground for the loyalty, love and truth-speaking that makes community possible.

Imitation In ‘The Soldier of Baltimore’, the French novelist Stendhal recounts an incident of a soldier guarding a theatre during a performance of Othello. In the closing moments, as Othello begins to strangle Desdemona, the soldier cries out, grabs his musket, and, to prevent the murder taking place before his eyes, shoots the actor playing Othello in the arm. This story conveys just how naturally we accept mimetic representations of action by showing the soldier’s inability to discriminate between reality and fiction. For Aristotle, the reason behind our acceptance of and delight in mimetic representations of our experience is that we first learn and act mimetically. Hence, he sees that mimesis, often translated as ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’, is essential to drama because it is essential to human nature: ‘what happens in the way we act is a sign of this . . . Since to imitate is natural for us . . . those most naturally inclined toward [imitations] . . . generated poiesis from their improvisations.’12 We derive wisdom and delight from the contemplation of dramatic imitations of action because they are rooted in the way we learn and form our character as we copy, mimic, imitate and pretend at any number of imagined roles and actions. Seen in this light, mimesis is the soil of vocation because mimetically learned desires, feelings and actions constitute the earliest formation of our character and motivations.13 The roles we play and the actions we take are the means by which we both shape and reveal our

12. Aristotle, On Poetics, trans. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis (South Bend: St Augustine’s Press, 2002), 8–9. 13. The work of Rene Girard is a brilliant and extensive exploration of what he calls ‘mimetic desire’. See Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).

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character. As Joe Sachs observes, the imitation of dramatic action presents to our imaginations ‘the invisible motions of the soul, as choices are made for reasons and consequences are faced’.14 As in drama, so in life; only by making choices and taking actions can we manifest the ‘invisible motions of our soul’, that unique, inward configuration of reason, desire and will that forms our character and the character of our actions. Of course, we play our roles in particular historical and cultural circumstances, which in turn also shape our characters and provide or limit our vocational opportunities. This points to an important tension between the self as genetically predetermined and the self as product of social and cultural conventions and institutions. Mimesis provides a way to address what David S. Cunningham calls the ‘two networks of concern’ in vocational studies: ‘the specific network of characteristics that each student brings as well as the specific context in which each student will live’.15 To help students understand mimesis, then, is to help them understand more than an important literary concept; it is to help them understand how they first learned and how they continue to conceive of and execute actions in the world. As Michael Davis asserts, ‘It is . . . distinctive . . . of human action, that whenever we choose what we do, we imagine an action for ourselves as though we were inspecting it from the outside . . . All action is therefore imitative of action; it is poetic.’16

Action In his introduction to his translation of the Poetics, Joe Sachs roots Aristotle’s interest in and theory of tragedy in its ability to turn the mere happenings or doings of life into meaningful human experience: ‘Just as we must make our own contribution to . . . things that happen to us to take them into our experience, we must make the decisive contribution to the things we do to lift them to the level of action.’17 For Aristotle, then, tragedy invites us to reflect on the

14. Sachs, ‘Introduction’, 3. 15. David S. Cunningham, ‘Introduction: Time and Place: Why Vocation is Crucial to Undergraduate Education Today’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 12. 16. Davis, Michael, ‘Introduction’, in On Poetics, xvii. 17. Sachs, ‘Introduction’, 1–2.

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nature of ‘responsible human action . . . dependent on choice and aimed at an end’.18 Understanding how such action differs from things we merely do or things that merely happen to us is crucial because, for Aristotle, our actions determine the quality of our lives: ‘Both happiness and wretchedness depend on action . . . human beings are of a certain sort according to their characters but happy or the opposite according to their actions.’19 To flourish vocationally, students must learn from tragedy to raise what they do to the level of decisive, responsible action, while simultaneously learning to navigate the reversals and recognitions that are part of those actions and that introduce the suffering and stumbling that tragedy also presents as part of our experience. Especially important to teaching vocation is that tragedy helps us study its lessons about action and suffering by representing a single, unified action that begins in deliberation and choice and is aimed at an end; thus, dramatic action can be seen as the staging of a kind of completed or distilled vocation. A character interacts with circumstances, is motivated to make deliberative choices about the best course of a serious action to obtaining a desired and chosen end, and then undertakes a course of action to achieve that end.20 The tragic dramatist scissors out the messy complexity of lived life, the unresolved parts and the wrong turns. This distillation of action makes the choices, aims and errors in judgement that constitute the plot arc of a tragedy much easier to study than an actual life. We can help students zero in on the exact motives, choices, words, dialogue, judgements and errors that lead to the outcome of a play. This makes the interpretation of a drama also a study in the mechanics of vocation. Whole dramatic actions can be beautiful and noble as well as cautionary models as we contemplate our own as-yet-incomplete trajectories. Tragedy’s exhortation to lifelong cautionary vigilance based on the recognition that even the best fortune can suddenly be reversed is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the closing lines of the Chorus of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King: Behold this Oedipus . . . him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful;

18. Ibid. 2. 19. Aristotle, On Poetics, 20–1. 20. See chapters 7 to 9 of Poetics for a detailed discussion of the nature of a single, unified dramatic action and the way in which dramatic actions differ from historical actions.

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not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot – see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him! Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the limit of his life secure from pain.21

Catharsis Tragedy is valuable as a study not just of what characters do and what happens to them but also of what it does to us as readers and viewers. If the action is delivered in a well-organised, internally coherent and complex way that includes ‘reversals and recognitions’, then, according to Aristotle, it ‘draws the soul’.22 Such dramatic actions enthral us because reversals and recognitions, especially when occurring simultaneously, evoke pity and fear: A discovery is most beautiful when it happens at the same time as a reversal . . . For that sort of discovery and reversal will have in it either fear or pity (which are the sorts of actions that tragedy was set down as being an imitation of) since being unfortunate and being fortunate will stand side-by-side at such occasions.23

Fear and pity arise from beholding reversals of fortune from good to bad, or prosperity to affliction. The juxtaposition of these opposite states strikes us with fear and pity because we see what is lost; we see the aspiration that is suddenly, yet inevitably transformed into calamity. The opportunity to reflect on the fear and pity evoked by tragedies is especially important, I think, in light of vocational discernment. First, a powerful experience of tragedy allows us to undergo a catharsis, not in the psychoanalytic sense of being purged completely, but in the sense that Sachs suggests tragedies may enable: ‘Is it possible to see this result as washing our pity clean of sentimentality and our fear clean of self-righteousness?’24 Washing away sentimentality

21. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Greene, The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 2, ed. David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 76. 22. Aristotle, Poetics, 28. 23. Ibid. 35. 24. Sachs, ‘Introduction’, 13.

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and self-righteousness may help to make students more compassionate and humble as they interact with others and as they navigate their vocational trajectories knowing that tragedy can afflict them as easily as another. Secondly, the evocation and catharsis of fear and pity through the experience of tragedy presents the opportunity for a kind of study of vocational failure. This is because, as Sachs observes, ‘In taking the side of the victim for whom our fear and pity are aroused, we are compelled by a tragedy to accept from the start the choice that is his undoing.’25 Thinking through the motives and deliberative process behind that original choice allows us to see with greater pity and fear the error in judgement and its consequences that allow ‘the tragic figure [to be] both pitiable victim and the source of his own ruin’.26 Helping students understand the concept of hamartia, of missing the mark, is to help educate them in how and why vocational failures often occur. Witnessing a basically good character with a worthy aim come to ruin should indeed strike fear into us and draw pity from us. As we apprehensively envision a character’s undoing, we may begin to think more carefully about our own habitual errors in judgement, disordered passions or overreaching tendencies, especially those that might ensnare us as we strive for our worthy or lofty vocational goals. As we connect our frailties and suffering to those of characters in a tragedy or of real people, we begin to take actions and view others in the spirit of tragic wisdom. This wisdom merges fear and pity in the humble awareness that we, too, can fall. Tragedy, conceived this way, gives students the opportunity for affective enrichment and the cultivation of emotional intelligence as they bring the passions evoked by tragedy into alignment with judgements. And it also allows them to examine what goes wrong and why and to apply the same methods of examination to their own lives. The good news of tragedy is that we learn from what occurs on stage precisely to avoid those outcomes ourselves. Our own smaller failings do not often lead to the dramatic catastrophes of more elevated tragic heroes, but we nonetheless learn in our small ways the tragic lessons played out before us. Helping students ask ‘what about myself am I most blind to?’ or ‘why am I so afraid of ending up like that character?’ equips them to think about motives, deliberation, choices, aims and judgements, and gives them the opportunity to

25. Ibid. 6–7. 26. Ibid. 7.



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have their eyes opened to an error before it’s too late to be undone. Which is perhaps to say that we allow their lives and loves to be comic in trajectory rather than tragic.

See Better, See Feelingly: King Lear Having explored the significance of Aristotle’s formulation of tragedy for teaching vocation, I want to turn now to King Lear as a case study and explore the several ways the play gives us to think about vocation and its connection to tragedy and tragic wisdom. King Lear presents a mimetic vision of vocation as a willingness to undergo suffering, even unjust suffering, on behalf of others because of the love and virtues that we ‘put on’ as a habitual disposition and mode of interaction that binds us, families and communities alike, in ‘a bond of perfectness’, to use the words of St Paul from the Geneva translation of the Bible that Shakespeare would probably have known.27 ‘Perfection’, in its etymological sense of per-facere, being done or made all the way through, is the kind of ripeness that Edgar speaks of as a fruit of endurance: ‘Men must endure/Their going hence even as their coming hither./Ripeness is all.’28 Such ripeness is the lived wisdom of tragedy, the fruit of pathei mathos. It is the wisdom by which we might become a bit more like Edgar when he describes himself as ‘A man . . . Who, by the art of knowing and feeling sorrows,/Am pregnant to good pity.’29 To turn against this vision of vocation, to exchange love for lust and loyalty for treachery, as Edmund, Goneril and Regan do, or to seek power, wealth and status at all costs and exclusively for self-gain, as they also do, is to pursue an anti-vocation; it is a trajectory that destroys bonds and reduces humanity, finally, in Albany’s words, to vicious, selfdevouring monsters: ‘Humanity must perforce prey upon itself,/Like monsters of the deep.’30 The pattern of imagery and motifs related to clothing and nakedness that run throughout King Lear help us to consider how the play strips away meaning and purpose to see what remains as well as how

27. Col. 3:14, GNV. 28. William Shakespeare, King Lear, 5.2.9–11, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Thomas Learning, 2001), 1.1.1. References are to act, scene and line. 29. Ibid. 4.6.217–19. 30. Ibid. 4.2.50–1.

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characters accommodate themselves in their various roles. For our present purposes, we might say that King Lear suggests that vocation is like clothing. We put on a role like we put on clothes. We grow into clothes, and we grow out of them. We change clothes for the various contexts and occasions of our lives. Indeed, for Shakespeare, costumes were the means to distinguish various dramatic roles from one another. Clothing and vocation coincide nicely in the meanings of ‘habit’: habitual behaviour that creates dispositions, and clothing.31 The imagery and themes of clothing, roles and purpose and meaning are foregrounded in the centre of the play, which presents an ironic juxtaposition of nakedness and mimetic accommodation. Standing before the hovel during the storm in 3.4, Lear looks at Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, the ragged, filthy, nearly naked Bedlamite, and utters some of the bleakest lines in the play: Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume . . . thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.32

These lines can be read as the moment when Lear, the once powerful king, sees that when the accommodations of civilisation are stripped away, nakedness and frailty are revealed as the true human condition. Yet even as we feel the power or the truth of these lines, Shakespeare ironises them. What Lear is looking at isn’t a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’, but a clever, loyal, loving man playing the first of his several parts, each of which pushes back against the downward, destructive direction of the tragedy. Edgar, though physically almost naked, is still ‘accommodated’ by the role he plays. These mimetic endeavours allow him to save his life, cure his father’s despair and, perhaps, begin to rebuild the shattered kingdom. And Lear, though bereft of the pomp of kingship, is still richly ‘accommodated’ by the love and loyalty and service of Kent, the Fool and, later in the scene, Gloucester. The world of the play is sent crashing towards the dark moment of the storm scene by the love contest in the opening scene and by

31. In 5.3.180–98, Edgar uses ‘habit’ in the sense of clothing while summing up the various parts he played over the course of the play. He links these various parts with the types of clothing he wore for them. 32. Ibid. 3.4.101–6.



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Edmund’s evil plot to destroy his brother in 1.2. In the love contest, Lear’s errors in judgement and erratic affections, as well as the play’s theme of conflicting vocations, or bonds duty, take centre stage. Lear’s choice to renounce his vocation as king and divide up his kingdom takes a tragic turn because of his mistaken judgement of his three daughters and his demand that they speak as both daughters and political heiresses. Beneath the office of king is a man and a father short on self-knowledge and quick to rash judgement and anger. Lear’s two tragic recognitions correspond to his failures in his two conflicting vocations of king and father. In 3.4, he recognises his failure in kingship through his bodily suffering within the storm: ‘O, I have ta’en/Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,/Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.’ Lear sees that he has not cared sufficiently for the ‘Poor naked wretches’ of his kingdom, who lack accommodations of food, shelter and clothing, and so habitually experience such suffering. This recognition of his lack of empathy is tragic because he sees his failure only after he has divested himself of kingship. Lear’s second and more devastating recognition concerns his vocation as a father. In the play’s final scene, beholding the dead Cordelia, Lear says, ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life/And thou no breath at all . . . /Never, never, never, never, never./Pray you undo this button. Thank you sir.’33 In Cordelia’s death, Lear sees his failure as her father to protect her and to recognise her love for him. The undoing of the final button here is a poignant image of the death not of the king, for he has already shed the ‘pomp’ of kingship, but of the ‘foolish, fond old man’.34 Lear dies uttering ‘Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips,/Look there, look there.’35 Whether there is any redemption for Lear depends on the reading of these final lines as either a last moment of joy at seeing Cordelia alive, ‘a chance which does redeem all sorrows’, or a moment of nihilistic delusion. Because Lear conflates the roles of king and father, he must suffer into recognition that they are discrete offices and that he has failed at both. There is no escaping the difficulty of overlapping, even conflicting, discrete vocations. The idea of the bond – an important word in the play for thinking about vocation – as well as the meta-theatrical theme of playing roles, are also introduced in the love contest. The scene addresses

33. Ibid. 5.3.305–8. 34. Ibid. 4.7.60. 35. Ibid. 5.3.309–10.

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the question of conflicting bonds of obligation when Cordelia says to her father, ‘I love your majesty/According to my bond, no more nor less.’36 R. A. Foakes writes that ‘bond’ ‘is a complex word that suggests filial obligation, or bond of natural affection between child and parent [as well as a] shackle, as in the term bondage . . . and a legally binding agreement’.37 Cordelia’s plain response to her father’s request for public flattery makes it seem to Lear that she doesn’t love him as a daughter should. Lear, of course, is the only one who can’t see that she loves him most. This proves true as she is the only one of his daughters to honour her bond to the man who is both her father and her king. Cordelia is unwilling to merge the roles of flattering political heiress and loving daughter. As a result, she is banished and disowned by her father and king. To think through the nature of Cordelia’s tragic error here, if indeed she commits one, is to begin to think about the conflicting claims even a single person can make upon us and the sometimes intractable dilemma of honouring both claims. The tragedy and suffering of Lear stem from this vocational dilemma. Immediately after the love contest, the idea of a bond and of roleplaying is taken up again by Edmund and connected to his treacherous plot of seizing his brother’s inheritance: ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law/My services are bound.’38 Believing custom is ‘a plague’, Edmund appeals instead only to nature. Unlike Cordelia, the only bond he honours is to himself. Freely disregarding bonds and obligations of any legal, conventional or customary sort, Edmund fashions himself as he sees fit to achieve his chosen end – the ruin of his father and brother for the sake of their property – by elaborately deceptive means. Edmund’s Machiavellian pursuit of self-profit ultimately destroys him and shatters the community. Edmund’s fate, as well as those of Goneril and Reagan, serve as warnings, albeit histrionic ones, against hyper-individualistic attempts to reduce culture and custom to mere social constructs. The actions of the best characters – Cordelia, Kent, the Fool, Edgar – suggest that they are bound to multiple people, circumstances and claims outside the self and beyond self-interest. Each of these characters adopts roles, creates characters and assumes

36. Ibid. 1.1.92–3. 37. R. A. Foakes, ‘Commentary’, in Shakespeare, King Lear, 164. 38. Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.2.1–2.



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disguises out of love, loyalty and a sense of duty to both familial and political dimensions of their bonds. The turn towards metatheatre and the foregrounding of the playing of roles begins with Kent. Having been banished by Lear for speaking truth to power, Kent inhabits the character of Caius, a dramatic invention that provides the freedom for Kent to continue his vocation as loyal servant to Lear. His loyalty is underscored by Edgar in the play’s final act: ‘banished Kent, who in disguise,/Followed his enemy king and did him service/Improper for a slave.’39 Like Kent, the Fool is only free to speak truth to Lear from the space provided by his role of jester. Like Kent, the Fool serves Lear out of love as well as grief over the king’s rashness. They each show themselves willing to suffer to serve an underserving other to whom they believe they are bound. Because they serve the king, their aim is also for the greater good of the kingdom. The self-fashioning in King Lear suggests that our ability to ‘accommodate’ ourselves with purposeful roles aimed at worthy ends endures even in the darkest moments. It is an accommodation that cannot be stripped away. It is natural to us. We retain agency in our self-fashioned roles even as these roles are deeply shaped by culture, convention, circumstances and people outside our control. Shakespeare sees that in many ways the world is a stage and life imitates literature as much as literature imitates life. Yet life is not, for Shakespeare, entirely reducible to role-playing. The most heinous characters in King Lear, in fact, are the ones who see law, custom and bonds of obligation as nothing but social constructs, to be used or disregarded at will in pursuit of self-serving schemes to reinvent themselves by attaining power, wealth, status and the gratification of lust. To characters pursuing these anti-vocations, no ‘bonds’ are sacred or binding beyond the extent to which they are useful means to attain one’s desired ends. The result is a bloody and brutal wake of destruction and death. These characters stand in sharp contrast to the best characters, each of whom feels bound by nature as well as custom to persist in the service to others out of love, loyalty and a sense of duty and justice. In his multiple roles, Edgar most embodies the play’s vision of mimetic vocation and serves as a foil to Edmund’s Machiavellian selffashioning. Edgar first assumes the role of Poor Tom, a bedlamite

39. Ibid. 5.3.18–20.

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beggar, to escape notice after he is proclaimed a traitor and unable to leave the country. He does such a good job at making himself ‘the most poorest shape/that ever penury in contempt of man/brought near to beast’ that Lear mistakes him for the image of humanity’s true wretchedness.40 Next, he assumes the role of guide to his newly blinded father, and then the role of improvised dramatist, anonymous challenger to Edmund. In the final act, he presents as himself again, though changed through the experience of suffering. The role of Edgar’s that most embodies the play’s wisdom about mimetic vocation comes in 4.6, when, to cure his father’s despair, Edgar stages the mini-tragedy-turned-comedy, wherein Gloucester acts out and survives a suicide. This just might be the boldest and strangest scene in all of Shakespeare. To convince his blind father that he has arrived at the cliff to which he has asked to be led, Edgar creates a linguistic ‘cliff’ of such vividness that it almost induces vertigo. Gloucester steps to the edge of the imaginary cliff, vents his despair at the gods, and flings himself from what he believes to be a great height. Edgar has to keep up his work to make his fiction believable, so he assumes the role of a passerby and describes to the sceptical Gloucester – who asks ‘have I fallen or no?’ – the ‘height’ from which Gloucester fell and that there was a ‘fiend’ on the cliff top with him. In doing this, Edgar not only wraps up the character of Poor Tom, who often said ‘the fiend’, but also speaks the deeper truth that it was the ‘fiend’ Edmund, as well as Gloucester’s own lust, pride and blindness, that led him to the edge of the cliff. Edgar’s mini-drama reframes the experience for Gloucester. As a result of a new perspective, Gloucester accepts his ‘survived’ suicide attempt as a miracle. Because of his suffering and the recognition of his errors, and because he believes that he was miraculously spared from death, Gloucester can respond to Lear’s later question about how he sees the world by saying, ‘I see it feelingly.’ Earlier, in an apostrophe to the heavens, he had said: ‘Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man . . . that will not see/Because he cannot feel, feel your power quickly.’41 Gloucester could say this and understand it conceptually as a result of his suffering, but it is not until his experience has been imaginatively reframed at the cliff through his embodied plunge into the language of Edgar’s mini-drama that he can at last ‘see feelingly’ and begin to persist in doing so.

40. Ibid. 2.2.178–80. 41. Ibid. 4.1.70–2.

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To ‘see feelingly’ as a result of having one’s experience reframed is the wisdom gained from undergoing powerful, affective experiences of tragedy. Such experiences have the potential to teach us to see others with empathetic vision and humility as we move through the world as slowly and carefully as the blind must. If the path to tragedy is one of hubris, then the path from tragedy must be one of slow, tentative judgement of self, others and circumstances. To ‘see feelingly’ requires the healthy fear and intelligent pity gained from cathartic experiences of tragedy. This is the disposition tragedy can instil in us after we make the same plunge of embodied imagination as readers or spectators that Gloucester makes at the cliff scene in 4.6. That Gloucester relapses later in the play into despair – ‘What, in ill thoughts again?’ – helps us understand that the affective formations caused by powerful experiences of imaginative literature do not create a permanent transformation, but, instead, begin a process requiring persistence.42 The cliff scene also suggests something of what I hope to accomplish with students. It is a brilliant image of a transformative reading experience. Gloucester’s imaginative plunge into language results in a new perspective and a choice to persevere in the face of afflictions rather than remain in despair: ‘Henceforth I’ll bear/Affliction til it do cry out itself/“Enough,” “enough” and die.’43 The final scene of King Lear is perhaps the bleakest in all of Shakespeare. The Fool has vanished. Cordelia, Cornwall, Gloucester, Goneril, Regan and Edmund are dead. Kent claims he will soon follow. Yet in the final lines of the play, Edgar introduces a possibility for moving forward, namely by learning from the sufferings he has witnessed. Albany has just given Kent and Edgar new roles: ‘Friends of my/soul, you twain,/Rule in this realm and the gored state sustain.’44 Kent declines rule, claiming he must follow his master, Lear, presumably in death. Edgar closes the play by urging them to the wisdom of tragedy: The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.45

42. Ibid. 5.2.9. 43. Ibid. 4.6.75–7. 44. Ibid. 5.3.318–20. 45. Ibid. 5.3.322–5.

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As R. A. Foakes observes, these lines echo all the way back through the play and its tragic wisdom of learning empathy and feeling through suffering: It would seem that for Edgar and Albany the overwhelming events of the play have freed them to speak feelingly . . . and have given them insight while young, so they will not need to suffer in order to see properly; they can perhaps already say what Gloucester learned only through physical blindness, ‘I see it feelingly.’46

Edgar has suffered enough to learn the lessons that Lear learned too late about feeling and kingship. If Edgar can ‘see better’ than Lear did and speak with feeling that has been purged and recalibrated through the suffering that he has witnessed as well as experienced, then there is the possibility that a better future for the realm can be born of its tragic past. It seems that whatever one takes to be the governing structure of the play’s cosmos – the gods, human agency, chance, nothing – the play suggests that the mimetic ‘putting on’ of virtue, inhabiting the tension of conflicting claims being made upon us, and the healing powers of language and the imagination are to be chosen over self-serving schemes, plots and the deceiving power of language and the imagination. King Lear ends on a bleak note. Yet, in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, he moves on from the grief of his great tragedies and, in the close of his career, enters the world of his late romances. The wisdom of late plays like The Tempest is often to avert a tragedy with a stroke of unforeseen forgiveness or mercy. Perhaps such unlooked for gestures of grace are the comic outcomes of following tragedy’s wisdom. Another essay could be written on the usefulness of Shakespearean comedy to vocation. Comedy, after all, has a humble wisdom that grounds us in a love of the ordinary. Yet understanding tragedy makes it more likely that our lives end as comedy. Tragedy equips us to make the final act of our lives one of laughter rather than tears.

The Drama of Civic Life Although I have focused on tragedy in terms of its usefulness to individual vocations, the wisdom of tragedy has always been a civic

46. Foakes, ‘Commentary’, 392.

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experience. Tragedy calls us beyond ourselves to a collective endeavour of reflection on our shared life and social passions and the trajectories upon which those passions will carry us. For the Greeks, tragedy played an important role in creating, shaping and reshaping a civic imagination. Like the Greeks, our collective perceptions of civic, social and political purpose-seeking and meaning-making are shaped, for good or ill, by prominent cultural products of the imagination. In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters to Justice, Martha C. Nussbaum evokes Greek tragic and comic festivals and argues that the spirit of tragedy and the spirit of comedy aid us in important political work. Tragedy does this by fostering compassion and calling us to acts of imaginative empathy, comedy by calling us to surmount through laughter the bodily disgust that is at the root of much racism and discrimination.47 Drama gives us opportunities to reflect on both helpful and harmful political and social emotions and to clarify their roles in our collective life and our collective calling to justice. In this way, tragedy helps begin to ask and answer Critchley’s question as though it were posed in the plural: ‘“What shall we do? What shall we do?”’ Perhaps the most recent, well-known use of tragedy as a collective calling to justice is found in lines from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, his version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. These lines have been endlessly quoted by world leaders, politicians and prominent writers, and they stand as a millennia-old calling to extend the wisdom of tragedy out into a collective endeavour to seek justice and peace, the social conditions without which many of our individual vocations would be imperilled. They are a fitting and eloquent last word on the value of tragic wisdom to our shared vocation as global citizens: Human beings suffer. They torture one another. They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured. History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave,

47. Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters to Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 2013), 257–313.

108  Jason Stevens But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.48

48. Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy, in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998), 305–6.

Chapter 5

Queer Callings: LGBTQ Literature and Vocation Geoffrey W. Bateman

‘What to become?’ wonders Horace Cross, the sixteen-year-old gay Black protagonist in Randall Kenan’s 1989 novel A Visitation of Spirits.1 Contemplating an escape from the embodiment of his queer Black subjectivity in the rural spaces of Tims Creek, North Carolina, Horace’s question marks a moment of vocational crisis and initiates a literary encounter with faith, purpose and meaning that raises an important queer critique of vocational discourse. Despite his precocious intelligence and many talents, Horace – like many LGBTQ teenagers – believes there is something fundamentally wrong with him and cannot discern how to continue living as he is. Horace’s question represents a distinctly queer vocational struggle, one that grapples with the fundamental conditions of what makes living a queer life possible and, perhaps more profoundly, desirable at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, religion and place.2 Kenan’s story resonates with many other LGBTQ writers’ struggles to articulate the meaning and purpose of queer lives, an especially salient issue in the 1980s and early 1990s, but one that remains significant today.3 Read in relation to works by Audre Lorde and Tony Kushner, two other major queer writers of this period, A Visitation of Spirits dramatises a distinctly queer calling, one that lays bare the

  1. Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits (New York: Vintage, 1989), 11.   2. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009).   3. See Robert McGruer, Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (New York: New York University Press, 1997), who identifies this period as marking a queer renaissance.

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sometimes impossible challenges that LGBTQ people face as they discern and live out their vocations in homophobic contexts that remain indifferent, resistant and at times, hostile to their desires and inner callings. This essay contends that queer literature in its varied forms serves as a primary imaginary space in which queer subjects can dream and nourish themselves into subjectivity, and in these literary spaces, they can also envision new communities and social realities, allowing them to survive and thrive. As Lorde writes, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.4

What is true of feminist poetry is also true for forms of queer literature: Kenan’s novel and Kushner’s 1992 play Angels in America dramatise the limits that gay men face in their vocational journeys as they attempt to anchor themselves in those deeply felt embodiments of erotic satisfaction, joy, connection and sexual experience. In distinctly literary ways, these texts personify their protagonist’s calling, which takes the form of a demon in Kenan’s text and an angel in Kushner’s. This externalisation shifts the vocational focus away from privileging the inner call and towards a reconstituted embrace of the outer call of a transformed communal world. Importantly, these texts insist that the supposed objectivity of the world and the community’s need must be scrutinised and reformulated so that it makes possible queer flourishing. The real work in helping queer subjects realise their vocations lies in a much larger embrace of the inherent and intrinsic goodness of queerness, which can in turn allow the queer subject to trust his inner call much more fully. Reading the texts within the context of queer theory and the scholarship of vocation, this essay not only expands our sense of who can be legitimately called, but also builds on David S. Cunningham’s rethinking of the role of the caller and his claim that ‘we should recognize that a call is an action (and not just a thing), that it comes from beyond ourselves, and it involves others’.5 Collectively, the readings that follow

  4. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 37.   5. David S. Cunningham, ‘“Who’s There?”: The Dramatic Role of the “Caller” in Vocational Discernment’, in Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 152.



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pay attention to the distinct ways that such calling manifests itself in the particular embodiments of queer existence. To queer vocation not only integrates the erotic body grounded in its most sensual and joyful capacities, including sex, but also relaxes, deconstructs and at times, rejects the norms that demonise same-sex desire and gender nonconformity. Ultimately, this essay reveals how the literary reconstruction of community into a hospitable space for queer subjects makes possible their vocational flourishing, laying the foundation for a much more just and humane world. As the editors of this volume suggest, the scholarly discourse on vocation emerges largely from the Christian tradition, reflecting the norms of both religious texts and religious studies.6 This essay contends that one of the normative values of vocational scholarship is the ‘trace of the religious’ that still maintains an indifferent, if not problematic and even hostile, relationship to homosexuality and gender variance or nonconformity. Despite the affirmation of LGBTQ identities by some Christian theologies (and their corresponding denominations and churches), others still doubt or deny the intrinsic goodness or rightness of same-sex desire or gender difference. The term ‘desire’, regularly used within vocational discourse, is often sanitised and disconnected from many queer people’s lived experience and its relation to LGBTQ embodiment, and the more carnal and sexual facets of these identities and of the many messy, disruptive and non-conforming parts of who we are and what we do, especially with our bodies. Lastly, although this tendency is shifting in recent scholarship, vocational discourse has often presumed a sort of teleological, and at times simplistic, arc of meaning-making. This arc in its most uncomplicated form relies on both a stable, divine ‘Caller’ that we can identify precisely and respond to, as well as some means through which we can render our own subjectivities transparently onto ourselves. The inherent ‘should’ that underlies purposeful living re-inscribes norms that presume we can discover or create stable, coherent narratives about ourselves and discern a calling that reflects something essentially good about these selves, and that we should even do so in the first place. The close readings of the queer literary texts that follow should help vocation scholars rethink and transform these norms, thereby creating a more hospitable space to understand better the distinct possibilities of queer callings. Audre Lorde’s poetic theorising in

  6. Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham, ‘Introduction’, this volume, 2–3.

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Sister Outsider highlights the vocational significance of erotic embodiment as grounded in the queer, racialised body and its desires. As a novel, A Visitation of Spirits figures such embodiment through Horace and renders visible the complex workings of his interior life, narrating his self-destructive encounter with the demon, who preys on his own alienation from his body, his desires and his community and poisons his sense of self-worth, clouding his sense of future and purpose. Ultimately, Horace’s tragic suicide illustrates the consequences of a community’s heteronormative assumptions and its failure to nourish a young, queer, Black man’s vocational imagination. Horace internalises their lack of hospitality and his suffering deconstructs the norms that foster his demise, insisting on the value and cultural necessity of his Black, queer embodiment. Kushner translates this interest in queer vocation into a ‘fantasia on national themes’ in the drama Angels in America and endows Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS in New York City at the height of the early years of the epidemic, with prophetic sight and purpose. Despite Prior’s struggles to accept his role as the next ‘Great Prophet’, he finds the strength to overcome both the disease and the cosmological crisis of his time and embraces ‘The Great Work’ that the angels call him to do, even as his encounters with unlikely allies who become friends turn this work into something different than the angels initially imagine. In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, this moment of revelation makes explicit the radical notion that a gay man suffering from AIDS could be divinely called to heal our broken, modern world. More importantly, Prior’s rejection of the Angel’s demand that humans quell their desires and his embrace of a call originating in a transformed community, suggests that hearing one’s queer calling involves listening in different ways and to different people than we might imagine. Together, Kenan and Kushner reimagine and dramatise Lorde’s call to acknowledge the transformative power of the queer erotic as the embodied touchstone of living joyful and meaningful lives that can transform LGBTQ people into politically viable subjects and foster more hospitable communities for those oppressed by forms of racialised, patriarchal heteronormativity. Collectively, all three writers imagine a vocational encounter in which the callings and desires of our queer bodies challenge the heteronormative world to lay down its hostility to queer desires, sexual subjectivities and gender identities and expressions that defy heteronormative expectations and, instead, nourish the dreams of queer people and foster their callings.



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Situating Queerness within Vocational Discourse To queer vocation is to acknowledge and affirm the ways in which LGBTQ thinkers, writers, people of faith and activists have already contributed meaningfully to this field. For example, coming out to either oneself or others is a distinctly queer facet of vocational discernment in its affirming of a non-normative sexual orientation or gender identity – or eschewing these binaries altogether – as a part of one’s deepest desires and sense of self, purpose and meaning. Beyond this dynamic, the term ‘queer’ offers up exciting ways to reimagine vocational discourse. On the one hand, ‘queer’ has served and continues to serve as an umbrella term, a larger, more generalisable category that represents the diverse range of identities that comprise lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Two-Spirit, intersex, asexual or pansexual communities. On the other hand, it signifies a much more pointed resistance to the binary system of sexuality and gender that insists on only heterosexuality and homosexuality, male and female, or man and woman, as the singular categories of sexual and gender identity available to us, signalling a much more fluid embrace of incongruity. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, such incongruity or even incoherence is ‘one of the things that “queer” can refer to’: ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’.7 For many queer scholars, this multiplicity of meaning and the potential for instability represents queerness as a critical category. In her genealogical analysis of queer’s historical evolution, Anamarie Jagose emphasises those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender, and sexual desire. Resisting that model of stability – which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect – queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender, and desire.8

In this way, both Sedgwick’s and Jagose’s thinking centres the queer facets of sexuality and gender that reveal the fissures inherent in how we understand this system.

 7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.  8. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 3.

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As central as the embodied experience and the discourse of sexuality and gender are to understanding what queer can and does represent, its capacity expands beyond these concepts into a much more pointed and political critique of the normative itself. Michael Warner writes, ‘The preference for “queer” represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse, of generalization: it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to the regimes of the normal.’9 Although this resistance might be most visible within particular LGBT identities, desires and communities, it has sharpened a deconstruction of normative structures beyond the regime of sexuality and gender. ‘For both academics and activists’, Warner writes, ‘“queer” gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual,’ setting up a much more profound transformation of the normative worlds in which we live.10 Donald Hall elaborates on this opposition, explaining more fully what it might mean to shift queer’s grammar from the nominative to the transitive. For him, to queer signifies ‘putting pressure on simplistic notions of identity and in disturbing the value systems that underlie designations of normal and abnormal identity, sexual identity in particular’.11 Ultimately, to queer something means ‘to “mess up” notions of normality’ and reveals ‘disruptive desires, iconoclastic impulses, uncomfortable questionings of normality, and investigations of the gaily . . . ab-normal’.12 Thus, the queering of vocation disrupts – or messes up – its normative tendencies, especially in relation to sexuality, gender and desire. As important as such queering is for LGBTQ people, it also intersects with other categories of identity and oppression, re-engaging other forms of marginalisation within the scholarship on vocation that widen and reconstitute individuals and communities. In recent critical discussions on vocation, a few scholars have focused on sexuality, recognising the barriers that LGBTQ students face as they engage in vocational discernment. But vocation’s rootedness in religious, primarily Christian, discourse remains potentially alienating for queer individuals who wish to use the framework of vocation in their own search for meaning, purpose and action in

 9. Michael Warner, ‘Introduction’, in Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi. 10. Ibid. xxvi, xxvii. 11. Donald E. Hall, Queer Theories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 14. 12. Ibid. 16.



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their lives.13 Vocation’s historic foundation in Christianity sets up both explicit and implicit barriers to LGBTQ people’s ability to identify with and participate in it.14 As Mark U. Edwards, Jr notes, the history and practice of vocational reflection and discernment in the West is significantly intertwined with matters of religious faith. This is apparent in its theological reflections on the source of one’s calling . . . and its regular use of the language of faith when considering what counts as a flourishing life.15

Such intertwining creates tensions for queer notions of vocation, especially those that seek to render visible the sexual desires and embodiments of LGBTQ individuals, as we grapple with religious traditions that have largely been antithetical to or silent on our sense of calling in the world. Even as many faiths and the academy’s renewed critical interest in vocation have begun to imagine ways of being not merely inclusive of LGBTQ people but transformed by an embrace of queer identities and gender expressions, it remains transgressive if not radical that one called into a higher purpose by God could in fact be queer and that queer callings explicitly based in sexuality and gender difference have a fully legitimate place across all of our social, cultural and religious institutions. Caryn D. Riswold reminds us, ‘Socially, politically, and even theologically, issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity are among the fastest changing in our culture. In the meantime, dehumanizing limits continue to be imposed on those whose identities do not conform to the norm.’16

13. For an important exploration of other faith traditions’ sense of vocation, see David S. Cunningham (ed.), Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multifaith Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 14. See David S. Cunningham, ‘Why Vocation Is Crucial to Undergraduate Education Today’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 1–19; Kathryn A. Kleinhans, ‘Places of Responsibility: Educating for Multiple Callings in Multiple Communities’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 99–121; Darby Kathleen Ray, Working (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011); James Martin, SJ, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2012); and James Martin, SJ, Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). 15. Mark U. Edwards, Jr, ‘Religion, Reluctance, and Conversations about Vocation’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 272. 16. Caryn D. Riswold, ‘Vocational Discernment: A Pedagogy of Humanization’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 93.

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Recent legal achievements for LGBTQ rights at the US Supreme Court resonate powerfully with key facets of vocational exploration, including the decisions in favour of marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 and most recently in the 2020 decision in the Bostock v. Clayton County case that protects LGBTQ Americans from discrimination in employment. Yet, LGBTQ people continue to experience forms of violence that reflect the dehumanising limits imposed upon them.17 For some time, researchers have shown that queer youth are at greater risk for self-harm, harassment and suicide. According to The Trevor Project, 40 per cent of the LGBTQ youth and more than half of the transgender and non-binary youth surveyed in a recent study have ‘seriously considered attempting suicide in the past twelve months’. One in three of these youth ‘reported that they had been physically threatened or harmed in their lifetime due to their LGBTQ identity’.18 Geoffrey L. Ream confirms that these risks translate into a higher suicide rate, concluding that this group of youth are more likely to die by suicide than their heterosexual peers. The Center for Disease Control reports that 24 per cent of twelve- to fourteen-yearolds who died by suicide were LGBTQ+.19 This disparity lessens as LGBTQ+ youth age into young adulthood, but the risk remains. Ream notes that ‘although LGBTQ+ adolescents’ suicides more often involve LGBTQ+-specific risk factors, LGBTQ+ young adults are more likely to die by suicide overall’.20 Despite the many causes of LGBTQ+ youth suicide, one key factor is ‘how the world reacts

17. See Adam Liptak, ‘Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide’, New York Times (26 June 2015), (last accessed 24 June 2021), and Adam Liptak, ‘Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules’, New York Times (15 June 2020), (last accessed 24 June 2021). 18. The Trevor Project, ‘2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health’, (last accessed 1 August 2020). 19. Geoffrey L. Ream, ‘An Investigation of the LGBTQ+ Youth Suicide Disparity Using National Violent Death Reporting System Narrative Data’, Journal of Adolescent Health, 66.4 (2020), 602, (last accessed 24 June 2021). 20. Ibid. 607.



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to their identity’.21 When a state sanctions their identity by granting them access to a civil right like marriage, it might not be surprising that we see an ‘association between same-sex marriage policies and mental health outcomes’ for this group.22 These legal shifts have opened up new horizons of possibility for LGBTQ youth as they imagine lives they might live and thrive into. But making federal law more inclusive around issues of work and marriage is just one step towards a transformed sense of queer vocation. To render this discourse and practice radically hospitable to queer subjectivities, Riswold argues that we ‘need to examine those structures of privilege and inequality that may unjustly impinge on our flourishing, and to do what we can to prevent them from obstructing the process of humanization’ that, at its best, vocational discernment cultivates.23 To ensure that this process is open and accessible to LGBTQ people, vocational scholars should embrace Audre Lorde’s insistence that we transform our understanding of the body – especially the racialised, sexualised and queer body – and its desires. In ‘Uses of the Erotic’, she roots her capacity for identity formation and meaningful action in the sensual experience of deep satisfaction and joy at the core of her being, what she conceives of as the ‘erotic’: ‘those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meaning’.24 As one who has been dehumanised in multiple ways, Lorde seeks joy in what her marginality makes possible, forging a connection to and cultivating a deep satisfaction in a self that the world deems disposable. She finds joy and meaning through a community of women who affirm her embodied sense of struggle and purpose, queering this process: ‘[M]y capacity for joy’, she writes, ‘comes to demand from all of

21. Reuters, ‘One in Four Pre-Teen Suicides May Be LGBTQ Youth’, NBC News (22 February 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021). 22. Julia Raifman, Ellen Moscoe, S. Bryn Austin and Margaret McConnell, ‘Difference-in-Difference Analysis of the Association Between State Same-Sex Marriage Policies and Adolescent Suicide Attempts’, JAMA Pediatrics, 171.4 (2017), 350, (last accessed 24 June 2021). 23. Riswold, ‘Vocational Discernment’, 74. 24. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 56.

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my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.’25 Ultimately, Lorde’s courageous embrace of her differences cultivates a much larger sense of social obligation in this world that opens up a radical space for the role that embodied experiences, sexualities and intersectional identities might play in the discernment of meaning and purpose. When we embrace and live in, with and from the power of the erotic, ‘then we begin to be responsible’, Lorde writes, ‘to ourselves in the deepest sense’: ‘In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.’26

Thwarted Queer Callings in A Visitation of Spirits ‘You are worthless, the demon said to Horace.’27

Queer literary scholars have long been invested in the well-being of queer youth. As Horace’s experience in A Visitation of Spirits shows, it’s ‘always open season’, in Sedgwick’s words, ‘on gay kids’.28 As she writes, ‘I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicide of adolescents.’29 Preserving queer adolescent life is one thing, but desiring LGBTQ children in the first place is even more radical. In either case, ‘the theoretical space for supporting gay development’ – and queer vocational discernment, I would add – is ‘narrow’.30 If we cannot imagine queer lives as fully desirable and virtuous as heterosexual or cisgender ones, then these narrow conditions threaten not only young queer people’s survival but also their thriving. For Paul J. Wadell, ‘A vocation is a call to shape one’s life in a way that is fully commensurate with human flourishing and excellence,’ which he understands as a ‘summons to a magnanimous way of life. It is a call to respond to, embody, and witness goodness in all the exquisite ways that can be done.’31

25. Ibid. 57. 26. Ibid. 58. 27. Kenan, Visitation, 81. 28. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 155. 29. Ibid. 1. 30. Ibid. 163. 31. Paul J. Wadell, ‘An Itinerary of Hope: Called to a Magnanimous Way of Life’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 193, 194.



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For Horace, his community’s heteronormativity precludes the possibility that his homosexuality could become an exquisite embodiment of goodness and excellence. Without a queer reimagining of the very conditions of moral excellence and magnanimous living – something queer literary texts are especially well situated to do – LGBTQ youth will continue to encounter barriers to their flourishing. A Visitation of Spirits illustrates what happens when a community relies too heavily on homophobic notions of moral excellence and does not nourish its queer children, and highlights the impossibly narrow conditions in which a young person like Horace might flourish and be called into a magnanimous life. In a narrative reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Kenan uses Horace’s conjuring of a demon to revisit key scenes from his young life, revealing the conflicts in his upbringing that make embracing his own queer racialised subjectivity impossible in the confines of his rural, religious environment. Rather than set him free, the demon possesses him and guides him through a fantastical series of visions, reanimating the larger forces of homophobia, both external and internal, that he has faced. As the epigraph to this section of my essay suggests, the demon personifies this homophobic hostility, further eroding Horace’s sense of self-worth and restricting the narrow conditions of queer livability within Tims Creek. Horace kills himself because he cannot integrate his sexuality into his Black, Christian identities. In key moments, the text emphasises the damage that Horace’s family and church does to him as a young Black man struggling to accept his homosexuality. Further, it reveals the consequence of such intolerant and homophobic discourse on the inner working of a young person’s evolving conscience; insofar as the demon leads Horace astray, it manifests a warped version of Horace’s own inner voice, which the call of community has turned into a nihilistic instrument of destruction. Rather than leading him to what is good and true in the discernment of his identity and purpose in the world, Horace’s demon reflects the destructive inhospitality of homophobia, masquerading as an authentic inner voice that leads to suicide and self-annihilation. Ultimately, this text serves as a critique of communal calling, dramatising the limitations of the supposed objectivity of the world’s needs and expectations; it calls out the homophobic norms that impede Horace’s queer calling, norms that the community must interrogate and change if they wish to support the flourishing of young queer subjects in all facets of their intersecting identities. Horace’s calling is striking for its rootedness in a particular place. Swept up in his own comic-book fantasies and religiosity, Horace

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seeks to conjure a demon that will change him into a hawk, for he ‘could not see transforming himself into anything that would not fit the swampy woodlands of Southeastern North Carolina. He had to stay here.’32 As Robert McRuer argues, ‘Like other communities in which black gay men find themselves, Tims Creek, North Carolina, is a site of struggle and possible transformation,’ and ‘Horace’s own queer sense of self emerges both from within and against the community around him.’33 Despite the hostility that he faces, his determination to remain in his hometown deconstructs the ‘“regimes of sameness” embodied by the people of Tims Creek’, opening up a space of difference within his calling.34 After Horace casts the spell, he hears a ‘voice’: ‘Where? In his head? In his mind? In his soul?’ It’s a voice he associates with the ‘host that welcomed Jesus’ but also a voice of ‘lust and hate’ and ‘wisdom’, one that undermines simple moral binaries. The voice says ‘Come.’35 Horace follows the voice even as he remains uncertain about its origins or what it calls him to become. According to James Martin, ‘We all have an image of the person we want to become – more loving, more open, more free. That’s a call.’36 In his inclusive sense that everyone can be called, Martin generously, but perhaps naively, assumes everyone has equal opportunity and agency in this process and can in fact conjure such an image of a loving and free self, which overlooks the very real barriers queer youth face. Horace simply can’t do so. As a young, gay, Black man, misunderstood and judged by his family and rural community, he cannot imagine the person he most deeply desires to become. Instead, he manifests a demonic voice that leads him away from an open and loving embrace of himself freed from the violence of homophobia and towards a much more destructive calling. In this way, the community’s indifference and hostility to Horace’s queer calling retains a powerful hold on him, rooted as it is in his family’s allegiance to the Black church and the politics of (sexual) respectability. The year prior to his suicide, Horace turns to his older cousin Jimmy after church one Sunday and confesses, ‘I think I’m a

32. Kenan, Visitation, 11. 33. McGruer, Queer Renaissance, 115, 76. 34. Ibid. 70. 35. Kenan, Visitation, 27. 36. James Martin, ‘Who We’re Called to Become’, On Being (3 June 2019),

(last accessed 24 June 2021).



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homosexual.’37 Jimmy tries to normalise Horace’s experience, reassuring him that ‘we’ve all done a little . . . experimenting. It’s a part of growing up.’38 But when Horace insists that he might really be gay and looks to Jimmy for affirmation that it might be okay ‘[t]o go on . . . being . . . like this?’ Jimmy does not approve, citing the Bible and affirming Horace’s sense that ‘It’s wrong.’39 In this exchange, Jimmy’s sympathy and limited tolerance are insufficient, reflecting a subtler form of homophobia than Horace experienced and internalised growing up in the First Baptist Church of Tims Creek, one of the first places the demon takes Horace as he revisits moments from his childhood. This ‘sanctuary . . . was grafted to Horace’s memory as strongly as his home or the look of his face in the mirror’.40 Central to Horace’s identity, the church also links his family to its history and the traumatic legacy of slavery, for Horace’s grandfather, a deacon, was ‘the center, the source of the church’s memory, the link to the terrible past they all had to remember’.41 It also represents a beacon of sexual morality that condemns homosexuality. As Horace steps into the church, he relives a sermon that fixates on the sexual depravity of men who, ‘leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly’.42 The reverend’s racialisation of same-sex desire as white intensifies this homophobia and layers on another alienating factor to Horace’s embodiment as Black and gay. Condemning contemporary manifestation of such sexual ‘liberation’ as ‘Unclean’, Horace’s reverend also associates such freedom with white people and characterises it as something that his Black congregation should not even imagine as possible or desirable.43 For Horace, this injunction makes it impossible to identify with his own grandfather, limiting his vision of what he might become. As he remembers his grandfather, the phantoms of the congregation return to harass Horace, chanting ‘Wicked. Wicked.’ ‘Abomination.’ ‘Man lover!’ ‘Child molester!’ ‘Sissy!’ ‘Greyboy!’ ‘Unclean bastard!’ ‘Be ashamed of yourself!’ ‘Filthy knob

37. Kenan, Visitation, 112. 38. Ibid. 113. 39. Ibid. 113. 40. Ibid. 70. 41. Ibid. 71–2. 42. Ibid. 77. 43. Ibid. 78–9.

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polisher!’ ‘Cocksucker.’ ‘Oreo.’ ‘Homo-suck-shual!’ ‘Ashamed. Be ashamed.’ ‘Faggot!’44 This difficult scene highlights the conundrum that Horace faces as he tries to identify with his grandfather and imagine a way into his becoming that would allow him to be both Black and gay in this context, a challenge that Black theologians have acknowledged more generally for LGBTQ Black folks.45 As homophobic as it is, Horace remains drawn to and shaped by his family’s religious tradition; he is ‘a believer in an unseen world full of archangels and prophets and folk rising from the dead, a world preached to him from the cradle on, and a world he was powerless not to believe in’.46 Horace desires to be a part of his family’s church, and to see himself in his grandfather, even as he desperately yearns for that vision of becoming to somehow have space for his homosexual desires. In this way, Horace reflects Essex Hemphill’s acknowledgement of the painful position that many gay Black men find themselves in with regard to their families and communities of origin. ‘We cannot afford to be disconnected from them,’ he writes, ‘yet it would seem that we are willing to create and accept dysfunctional roles in them, roles of caricature, silence, and illusion.’47 In this way, Horace’s intersecting identities reveal the legacy of slavery and racism in his experience of homophobia, and the novel dramatises empirical findings that the ‘negative effects of religion may be amplified for Black non-heterosexual individuals due to the greater importance of religion among Black US Americans, stemming from the historical role of the Church in the Black community’.48 As much as the church has played an important role in sustaining Black lives, the fervent adherence of Horace’s congregation to heterosexual norms poses a dehumanising challenge to him as he attempts to reconcile his loyalty to his family and community’s legacy of racialised struggle with his need to reimagine his own Black

44. Ibid. 86–7. 45. Darnell L. Moore, ‘Guilty of Sin: African American Denominational Churches and Their Exclusion of SGL Sisters and Brothers’, Black Theology: An International Journal, 6.1 (2008), 83–97, (last accessed 24 June 2021). 46. Kenan, Visitation, 16. 47. Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (New York: Plume, 1992), 38. 48. Katherine Quinn, Julia Dickson-Gomez and Jeffrey A. Kelly, ‘The Role of the Black Church in the Lives of Young Black Men Who Have Sex with Men’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 18.5 (2016), 525, (last accessed 24 June 2021).



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manhood. As the demon makes clear moments before his suicide, Horace falters in this reconciliation, because ‘life the way Horace wants it ain’t condoned’ by them.49 Insisting on a more respectable, heteronormative vision of Black manhood, Horace’s family sacrifices him to their sense of racial uplift and religiosity, both of which largely depend on the family’s long history of owning land in Tims Creek. Thus, these deeply engrained scenes of homophobic hostility reflect in racialised and religious terms the impossibility Horace faces in becoming someone or something that the Church and his family would welcome and celebrate. This impossibility translates into both literal and figurative displacement. Moments before Horace shoots himself, the demon says to Jimmy, ‘Horace ain’t home.’50 Without a home, Horace can’t hear the loving and liberating call of living a magnanimous life that would allow him to flourish in the communal context that he values, much less respond to it. His inability to heed this call is rendered even more tragic by one of his last visions. In this scene, he follows not the ‘demon’s order’ but rather his own decision to enter the costume shop of the theatre at which he worked the summer prior to his senior year.51 Inside, he encounters a version of himself, ‘a black man, dressed in a sun-bright costume, orange and green and blue and red, like a harlequin’s’, his face ‘obscured by milky white greasepaint’.52 Freed momentarily from the demon, Horace’s doppelgänger guides him to the cemetery, where he ‘fully expected to see his own grave’.53 Instead, Horace sees something more promising: ‘the reason, the logic, the point’, a vision from within his own self that challenges his essentialised understanding of race and sexuality, religion and place, and holds out for a meaningful life of struggle that would situate his life in the larger history of African Americans. The point ‘was round and square. It was hard and soft, black and white, cold and hot, smooth and rough, young and old . . . Holy and profane. Ignorant and wise.’54 This vision opens up the possibility that Horace could resist the false dichotomies of binary thinking that his community presents to him as forms of truth and moral excellence. Through

49. Kenan, Visitation, 253. 50. Ibid. 41. 51. Ibid. 218. 52. Ibid. 219. 53. Ibid. 231. 54. Ibid. 232.

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this both/and construction, his phantom self suggests that Horace could integrate his sexuality into his family’s legacy. But Horace’s self-loathing proves too strong, and he says ‘no’ to this vision.55 He gives in to the demon’s calling and shoots himself. Horace’s suicide is an unspeakable tragedy, revealing the disastrous consequences of a calling gone awry, of listening to the false demons that would convince queer youth to end their lives rather than embrace the support that might allow them to flourish. The demon personifies the shame that Horace feels for his desires and has internalised from the norms his community upholds. The novel presents Horace’s tortured interior life, specifically how Horace mistakes the demon for his inner call, even as it also suggests a more loving and authentic vision of a different path, a magnanimous life of moral excellence and flourishing on Horace’s terms. Tragically, the call of the world as it is currently constituted overwhelms the emerging possibility of Horace’s inner call, one that tries to show him how he might integrate the disparate facets of his self. As a literary text, the novel reveals this inner struggle through its personification of the call – i.e., the community vis-à-vis the demon – and narrates the interior process that a young, queer, Black person like Horace experiences as he distinguishes between inner and outer callings. Through the personification of the false call, it provides a sombre account of the thwarting of queer vocation, challenging readers to imagine a different kind of context in which we might interrogate norms of shame around sex and the body and the false binaries that we sometimes confront when seeking answers to what we might become.

Prior Walter’s Great Gay Work in Angels in America Just as A Visitation of Spirits personifies Horace’s thwarted inner calling through its destructive demon, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America uses the character of the Angel to embody the queer calling of Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS in New York City in the early years of the epidemic. Through Prior’s conflict with the Angel, the play enacts the kind of community transformation that Visitation can only diagnose. Near the end of the play’s first part, ‘Millennium Approaches’, Prior lies alone in his bed in his apartment and hears

55. Ibid. 234.



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‘a sound of beating wings’.56 Overcome by what he thinks is another fever-induced hallucination, he fears he is going mad but draws on his inner resiliency as a gay man to face what is about to come: ‘That sound’, he says, ‘I’m frightened . . . no fear, find the anger . . . my blood is clean, my brain is fine, I can handle pressure, I am a gay man and I am used to pressure, to trouble, I am tough and strong.’57 Unexpectedly, he becomes sexually aroused, and, as the stage directions describe, ‘we hear a terrifying CRASH’, and ‘in a shower of unearthly white light, spreading great opalescent gray-silver wings, the Angel descends into the room and floats above the bed’.58 ‘Greetings, Prophet’, the Angel says, ‘The Great Work begins: The Messenger has Arrived.’59 This fantastical climax to the first part of Kushner’s play shifts this essay’s focus away from the novelistic treatment of an internal struggle to embrace sexual identity and towards the staging of a vocational crisis of gay adulthood that seeks meaning through the calling of the world of work. Angels similarly situates Prior’s queer calling within the call to live a magnanimous life, one that literally secures his flourishing in the midst of an epidemic and depends much more on the external world and the influence of others. His experience also grounds queer vocation in the power of the erotic and the positive role that queer sex can play in the discernment of purposeful work in community with others. Prior’s sensual and sexual encounters with the Angel centre queer sexual desire in the play’s treatment of how those on the margin can be called. According to Ranen Omer-Sherman, Prior’s role as a prophet reflects the legacy of ancient Judaism’s belief that the ‘prophet is not so much a “seer” (understood as one who merely predicts the future) but rather an often marginalized outsider who critiques society, sometimes anticipating the disastrous consequences if society does not abandon its pursuit of certain practices’.60 Ultimately, Angels draws upon this tradition to imagine queer vocation as originating in and surviving a marginalised, sick, suffering, queer body and thriving

56. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 121. 57. Ibid. 123. 58. Ibid. 124. 59. Ibid. 125. 60. Ranen Omer-Sherman, ‘The Fate of the Other in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”’, MELUS, 32.2 (2007), 9.

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into a reconfigured sense of purpose that embraces unexpected friendship and the development of community in the pursuit of a just world. Prior’s flourishing depends not only on resolving his conflictual relationship with the divine realm and an absent God, but also on transforming his relationships on Earth, forging friendships with unlikely allies and enacting new forms of community to undo the legacy of homophobia. Angels is full of characters who lack, but are seeking, an honest self-understanding and sense of authentic purpose, and unlikely friendships flourish to facilitate such growth. For example, in a ‘Mutual dream scene’, Prior encounters Harper, the young, valiumaddicted Mormon wife of closeted lawyer Joe Pitt.61 As he sits in partial drag at a ‘fantastic makeup table . . . applying the face’, Prior confronts the dehumanising limitations AIDS has imposed on his desires.62 Harper appears, having her own ‘pill-induced hallucination’.63 She, too, is mired in her own vocational crisis, unable to fulfil her proper role as Mormon wife, caused in part by her husband’s denial of his homosexuality and the secrecy with which he has begun to explore it. Despite her confusion at Prior’s gender-bending presentation, Harper has a flash of sympathetic insight and sees how sick Prior is. In return, Prior observes that Harper’s husband is a ‘homo’, something she suspects but had not yet put into words.64 As they both confront the sadness of these truths, Harper also sees something more hopeful about Prior: ‘Deep inside you, there’s a part of you, the most inner part, entirely free of disease.’65 Despite their differences, Prior and Harper’s encounter ‘allow[s] the recipients of the revelation to learn something new about themselves’.66 These two characters need each other as they, in Anthony Lioi’s terms, ‘create a communal visionary space in which each is lucid, far more lucid than they are in their quotidian consciousness . . . Prior and Harper tell the truth.’67 In Kushner’s imagination, honest self-discovery occurs in unexpected spaces in relation to others with whom we might not usually affiliate, in moments outside of the material worlds that sometimes constrain us.

61. Kushner, Angels, 36. 62. Ibid. 36–7. 63. Ibid. 36. 64. Ibid. 39. 65. Ibid. 40. 66. Cunningham, ‘Who’s There?’, 158. 67. Anthony Lioi, ‘The Great Work Begins: Theater as Theurgy in Angels in America’, Cross Currents, 54.3 (2004), 101.



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This kind of personal transformation becomes visible through the very genre and structure of the play itself. Unlike Visitation’s novelistic exploration of Horace’s interiority, as a play, Angels provides an external view of characters interacting with and influencing each other. According to David S. Cunningham, within a drama, ‘one’s interior state is exposed to the agency and action of others, rather than simply being a private act of the will’.68 For Prior, such exposure results most clearly from his relationship with Hannah Pitt, Harper’s mother-in-law, who travels to New York City after her son, Joe, tells her he thinks he’s gay. After she accompanies him to the hospital, leaving her position at the Mormon Visitor Center, they form an unlikely friendship, he helping her challenge her own assumptions about gay men as she struggles to accept her son, and she providing comfort and advice as Prior attempts to make sense of his calling by the Angel. ‘I’m a homosexual,’ he says, ‘With AIDS. I can just imagine what you’, but she interrupts, ‘No you can’t. Imagine. The things in my head. You don’t make assumptions about me, mister; I won’t make them about you.’69 As a dramatic text that foregrounds the power of friendship to shape one’s calling, Angels illustrates Paul J. Wadell’s insight that ‘friendships can be the centers of liberation and new life, even acts of hopeful defiance and rebellion . . . [they] give us space to rethink our lives’.70 Through Prior’s evolving friendships, the play resists the normative narrative of calling as hearing a distinct, divine voice – whether demon or angel – and instead, it externalises calling and locates it in the most unexpected of people. Unlike Horace, whose community isn’t open to affirming his queerness, the religious characters in Angels provide authentic opportunities for Prior to connect, connections that help him survive and thrive by virtue of the work of friendship. As central as these friendships are to understanding Prior’s discernment of his queer calling, the embodiment of desire and sexual encounter also influence this process. Prior’s first encounter with the Angel culminates in queer sex, highlighting the play’s insistence that callings do not exclude the more carnal embodiment of desire. Kushner’s text emphasises this part of human experience as central to vocational discernment, unsettling any easy separation between our spirituality and our sexuality. When the Angel arrives, she commands,

68. Cunningham, ‘Who’s There?’, 148. 69. Kushner, Angels, 235. 70. Paul J. Wadell, Becoming Friends: Worship, Justice, and the Practice of Christian Friendship (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2002), 74.

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‘SUBMIT TO THE WILL OF HEAVEN!’71 Although she presents as a woman, the Angel is actually intersex and plays the dominant sexual role with Prior, or as he later tells Belize, ‘She fucked me.’ Possessing ‘eight vaginas’, the Angel proclaims that she is also ‘Hermaphroditically Equipped as well with a Bouquet of Phalli.’72 Acknowledging that ‘[t]he sexual politics of this are very confusing,’ Prior reflects exactly the text’s point, for the confusion resonates with a queer embrace of sexual incongruity and incoherence, of mixing and crossing of categories.73 As Lioi notes, ‘the gay prophet’s copulation with a divine woman is meant to strategically disrupt received sexual categories and, indeed, the category of the “normal”’.74 Not only does the sex disorder the normative sense of who should be having sex with whom, of how they might do it, and of how we sanitise angelic sexuality, but it also becomes integral to the scene of calling itself, suggesting that as Prior attempts to understand his role in the cosmos, he must integrate his erotic and sexual capacities as a human into this process, even as it might defy his own homonormative expectations. Although AIDS has diminished these capacities as his disease has progressed, this scene posits that they are essential in his discerning of his calling and ultimately, in his very survival. Prior’s sexual encounter with the Angel situates carnal desire at the centre of Prior’s coming to terms with what his Great Work will be. In this way, sex is not separate from or extraneous to the world of his work; rather, it is the very thing that initiates and grounds it, unleashing the dynamic desire that serves to thwart the Angel’s insistence that humans must stop moving. In the end, Prior refuses the Angel’s call, insisting instead on pursuing his own purpose of living fully into his future and embracing human progress towards a more inclusive and just world. When the Angel reveals the plan that she and the other angels have imagined for Prior and the human race, he rejects their desire for cosmological stasis. Prior’s journey to heaven to return the book of his revelation suggests a rethinking of God’s role in ordering our lives, providing a critical space in which to resist this kind of divine authority and embrace of a certain kind of embodied human agency in vocational discernment. The Great Work that that the angels call Prior to do to stop progress is, in fact, misguided; instead, as he tells them, ‘We

71. Kushner, Angels, 171. 72. Ibid. 174–5. 73. Ibid. 175. 74. Lioi, ‘The Great Work Begins’, 106.



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can’t just stop. We’re not rocks – progress, migration, motion is . . . modernity. It’s animate, it’s what living things do. We desire.’75 Rather than passively accept his calling, he channels his queer embodiment as a gay man living with AIDS, and, through his sexual encounter with the Angel, coupled with his unlikely friendship with two Mormon women, gains clarity about what he can do to foster a more just world on Earth. He rejects God and the angelic committee that seeks to administer stasis in the cosmos in His absence, urging them to ‘[s]ue the bastard for walking out.’76 His disillusionment thus prompts him to discern an entirely different Great Work, which is to continue to live and desire, to seek a transformed community that promotes justice. ‘Bless me’, as he asks the angels, ‘I want more life.’77 They grant his request, and he returns to Earth, regaining his health and moving forward into his newly found sense of purpose and community as a survivor of the epidemic. As Prior says to the audience, in the presence of Louis, Belize and Hannah in front of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come . . . And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.78

In this moment, in which community ‘exist[s] on the politically excluded margins’,79 the play looks forward with Prior and his ‘queer family’ – a ‘utopian . . . union by dissensus’ – and imagines them living in solidarity with each other, taking their place as proper citizens in a transformed America.80 As literary texts, Angels in America and A Visitation of Spirits reveal thematically and structurally important insights into the barriers queer subjects face and how they might overcome them in their

75. Kushner, Angels, 263–4. 76. Ibid. 264. 77. Ibid. 267. 78. Ibid. 280. 79. David Kornhaber, ‘Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship’, PLMA, 129.4 (2014), 727–41. 80. Jonathan Freedman, ‘Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kusher’s Angels in America’, Ethnicity, ed. Sander L. Gilman, Special Issue of PMLA, 113.1 (1998), 99.

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quests to imagine their callings and live magnanimous lives, lives of queer excellence and queer flourishing. As Prior embraces the great work of living in community with others who have come to value and recognise his agency as a gay man, the play confirms the significant role that friendship and the search for justice play in his queer calling. As Wadell writes, ‘Justice is the virtue of community, the virtue that makes life together possible.’81 For Wadell, the practice of friendship plays an essential role in the cultivation of justice and this communal virtue. ‘Friendships’, he writes, are morally important because in them we learn how to honor consistently the claims another person has on us. If the heart of justice consists in respecting the dignity of persons and giving them their due, these are precisely the dispositions and skills that are honed in friendship.82

Structuring many of its scenes as dialogues between two characters, Angels very much hones these sorts of dispositions and skills, and as Prior practises relational habits, and others practise them in turn, his vocation of pursuing a virtuous community emerges. In contrast, it is exactly the lack of friendship within Horace’s community that sabotages his ability to grow into such a space and nourish his own vision of becoming, culminating in the tragic injustice of Horace’s suicide. Both point to the significance of the community’s role in the discernment of vocation and justice, and the importance of the affirming, external voice in understanding a queer calling. As literary texts, they also demand a certain kind of sensitivity to the nuances of language, identity, culture and community, the analysis of which expands and transforms the discourse and practice of vocation. Visitation’s focus on the individual protagonist’s internal journey, and Angels’ externalisation of this process in its dramatic structure, both illustrate important ways that queer literature constructs and reveals a distinct vocational experience rooted in sexuality, desire and the body. As the study and practice of vocation continues to take on increasing importance within higher education, this kind of reading of LGBTQ literature enriches our work as scholars, but perhaps more importantly, it impacts the lives of the emerging adults we teach,

81. Wadell, Becoming Friends, 152. 82. Ibid. 153.



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mentor and advise. In this way, the queering of vocation opens up and transforms the practice of discernment for all students, but especially those who have been historically marginalised because of their sexualities, gender identities or non-conforming bodies. More universally, it expands the scope of vocation’s humanising impulses for everyone, no matter how they identify; in more particular ways, it values the lived experiences of those LGBTQ students with whom we work, and can potentially empower them and save their lives. As Audre Lorde insists, ‘Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished.’83 Read through the lens of vocation, queer literature not only nourishes the content of such dreams but also the dispositions and habits necessary to realise them, forging the kinds of communities, both real and imaginary, in which justice becomes possible and achievable. May the Great Work begin.

83. Lorde, ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’, 38.

Chapter 6

Seeing Gender: A Vocation of One’s Own Allison Wee

The only true voyage of discovery . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.1

Teaching Gender as a Vocation In a short piece called ‘Purpose’, Black feminist scholar, writer and cultural critic bell hooks recounts a life-altering educational experience as an undergraduate at Stanford in the early 1970s. Having recently come of age empowered by the national Civil Rights movement, hooks writes that she was more surprised by many of her professors’ covert sexism than by their overt racism. Some had even questioned whether she did her own work, creating self-doubt and clouding her view of herself and her talents. But one professor, in order to disrupt sexist assumptions about women’s writing abilities, distributed in class a poem hooks had written from which her name had been removed, and asked the students to identify the author’s gender. They found they couldn’t. hooks explains, By showing us the falseness of sexist thinking, common at the time, which insisted that females could never write work that was as good as the work of male writers, she tore down prison walls that had colonized our imaginations and held our minds captive. This was a life-changing, transforming moment for me.2

  1. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 2, trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff (New York: Random House, 1932), 559.   2. bell hooks, ‘Purpose’, in Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (New York: Routledge, 2007), 34.



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Here hooks frames the project of education, as she often does, in terms of seeing and freeing. Inviting students to scrutinise an assumption about male superiority in relation to a literary text led them to see, or apprehend, the presence of their prejudice. Seeing sexist ideology within themselves freed hooks and her classmates from its dehumanising power, enabling them to see with new eyes one another’s full humanity and potential, as well as their own. hooks’s anecdote highlights two abilities necessary for effective vocational discernment: to see ourselves and others clearly, and to see the imperfect nature of the world that calls us into our works and relationships. In ‘Vocational Discernment: A Pedagogy of Humanization’, Caryn D. Riswold draws on hooks, as well as Malcolm X, Paolo Freire and others, to argue that the consideration of human flourishing ‘requires a recognition that human life is enmeshed in myriad systems and institutions that have bearing on who we understand ourselves to be, what we imagine we can do, and how we respond to the multiple callings we hear’.3 Recognising our callings in terms of our position within larger social systems and structures extends back to Martin Luther, for whom vocation ‘refers above all to the whole theater of personal, communal, and historical relationships in which one lives’ and not just to one’s occupation.4 Importantly, within the ‘whole theater’ of social relations, oppressive ideologies have long distributed power unevenly to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others; though the US aspires to equality, we are not yet equally valued, nor are we equally free agents in the world or in our own lives. Successful pursuit of our vocations depends on our ability to see our place within a complex web of social relations, past as well as present. Unjust systems and structures of power protect themselves by teaching us two persistent lies: first, that some people are inherently more valuable, capable, deserving and fully human than others; and second, that there are only individual people, not systems or structures. Unjust systems conceal themselves by encouraging us to misunderstand our own eyes and experiences. In a classroom, teachers can help open students’ eyes to their vocational possibilities with assignments and activities that reveal the lie that some people are inherently more valuable. Importantly, Riswold reminds us that

 3. Caryn D. Riswold, ‘Vocational Discernment: A Pedagogy of Humanization’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 74.   4. Marc Kolden, ‘Luther on Vocation’, in Word and World, 3/4 (1983), 383, 386.

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instructors are enmeshed within the same power structures as are our students; observing that we ‘can’t pretend that they, or we, are immune to systemic pressure, interpersonal bias, and the influence of corporate capitalism’, she suggests that ‘understanding our own biases and situatedness is also key’ to working with students in ways that support their full humanity and encourage them to live lives that lift up the full humanity of all.5 hooks’s Stanford professor need not have fashioned an activity to disrupt sexist thinking in her classroom that memorable day half a century ago, and, had she not, hooks’s mind might have remained imprisoned indefinitely by the lie that her intellectual and creative abilities could not equal those of men. Instead, the professor made visible that the limiting factor was not hooks’s identity as a woman but sexist ideology that encourages people to assume women’s inferiority. hooks’s professor must have encountered sexism on her own vocational path; she would have earned her English PhD at a time when fewer than a quarter each year were granted to women,6 and her colleagues at Stanford included the same individuals who had met hooks’s abilities with scepticism. It seems probable that her own ‘biases and situatedness’ as a woman in academia motivated her to create an opportunity in the classroom to free students’ minds from the prison of an ideology that threatened her own vocational path and full humanity. hooks, in turn, became a fierce advocate for ‘education as the practice of freedom’. In a trilogy of texts aimed at an audience of fellow teachers in particular, hooks promotes the value of ‘teaching to transgress’, which includes designing courses and pedagogies that encourage students to see their full humanity and achieve greater wholeness by challenging and stepping beyond boundaries that sexism, racism and other oppressive and dehumanising ideologies have circumscribed for them.7 Like hooks and her Stanford professor before her, my ‘biases and situatedness’ in the ‘whole theater’ of social relations have impacted my vocational path and sense of purpose, from leading me to university

  5. Riswold, ‘Vocational Discernment’, 94.   6. ‘Gender Distribution of Degrees in English Language and Literature’, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators: Higher Education, (last accessed 24 June 2021).  7. The trilogy includes Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994); Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (New York: Routledge, 2007).



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instruction, to shaping my research and teaching interests, to informing the texts and pedagogies I use in the classroom. I benefit from significant unearned privileges, having been born into a white, middle-class family of educators, writers, farmers and Lutheran pastors; I also experience significant unearned disadvantages, having been born female and queer.8 Although sexism and heterosexism have at times diminished my sense of self and limited my material and vocational possibilities, learning to see and name my biases and situatedness connects me with the rest of humanity in deeper and more honest ways than if I remained blind to our true relations. Being able to see myself in the context of multiple systems of power in the world and understanding that I am privileged by some and disadvantaged by others has helped me discern where and how to use my gifts to work for a more just and humane world. In my literature courses, I invite students to examine the gendered nature of the literary canon, to evaluate representations of gender in literary texts and to consider how their gender shapes their responses to literary characters. Making sexism and heterosexism more visible, including where and how they intersect with racism and other dehumanising ideologies, can sharpen students’ abilities to navigate an unjust world and find their way to meaningful roles and relationships in which their unique gifts might meet the world’s need for greater wholeness.

Teaching, Literature and a Gendered Institution Literature classrooms are an especially fruitful place in which to expose and disrupt sexism because the literary tradition bears significant responsibility for perpetuating society’s narrow and unhealthy gender roles. However, gender deserves more attention from all university faculty. Not only is sexism alive and well fifty years after hooks’s undergraduate years, but, as she pointed out then, sexism continues to be more covert than racism in the academy. Few of my students would openly argue that we have attained racial equality in our country, but many seem to believe that men and women are finally equal. Faculty in higher education would do well to point out

  8. Of course these are only the most immediately salient aspects of my identity in the context of this essay. We can’t help but bring everything with us into our classrooms, and in my experience, the more of myself that I am willing and able to name and share with my students, the richer and more meaningful our work together has become.

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that such a claim, easily shown to be false in society at large,9 isn’t even true about the institution in which our conversations take place. At the curricular level, ‘women’s studies’ courses and programmes were not introduced to the academy until the late 1960s and ’70s, and by the mid-1990s, the language shifted to ‘gender and sexuality studies’, seemingly de-centring once again the lives and specific concerns of women that early feminist-identified scholars had fought hard to bring into view.10 At the institutional level, anti-racist training, even when inadequate, receives a modicum of time, money and energy that does not have an anti-sexist equivalent.11 And although women now make up the majority of undergraduates – by the 1980s

  9. Most people are aware of gender inequality in three contexts: political representation, the wage gap, and sexual and domestic violence. Women currently constitute more than 26 per cent of the 2021 US Congress (‘Women in the U.S. Congress 2021’, from the Center of Women and American Politics, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, accessed 29 January 2021, ). According to a 2020 report, US women are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to men, a gap that widens significantly when comparing women of colour with white men (‘America’s Women and the Wage Gap’, National Partnership for Women & Families Fact Sheet, September 2020, , last accessed 24 June 2021). According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, over 20 per cent of women in 2015 reported completed or attempted rape in their lifetime, and the 2019 ‘Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct’ found sexual assault and misconduct to affect almost one in four undergraduate women, a statistic that has held steady since first reported in 1987 (‘Sexual Assault Statistics’, , last accessed 24 June 2021). 10. Addressing this issue requires a far more complex discussion than I have time and space to address here. To refer to ‘women’s studies’ suggests that the experiences of women are uniform when they clearly are not, and erases gender diversity; furthermore, the field has regularly excluded voices of queer women and Black, Indigenous and other women of colour. Yet ‘gender and sexuality studies’ is an academic space that white and cis-gendered men, already privileged within the academy, quickly occupied, re-marginalising the voices and experiences of women across all identity categories. 11. To be clear: the academy needs to work much harder than it currently does to resist the forces of institutionalised racism within our curricula and communities and develop systems and cultures that can support the personal, professional and intellectual well-being of BIPOC faculty, students and staff. I wish to point out only that recent efforts within higher education to fight racial injustice and support anti-racist work have not always been explicitly intersectional, which can make it seem that the fight against gender injustice and male supremacy is done, that the need for explicit efforts toward gender equity has passed, that sexism is less important than racism or that the many ways in which racism intersects with sexism aren’t important.



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earning more bachelor’s and master’s degrees annually than men,12 and by 2007 earning more PhDs than men each year – women still hold fewer full-time faculty positions than men in higher education overall, and the percent of women in various faculty ranks shrinks the higher up we look.13 Bridget Turner Kelly, co-author of a ten-year longitudinal study of women in the academy, sums it up this way: Gender inequalities persist in the academy, preventing both white women and women of color faculty from making the scholarly and curricular contributions that only they can make. As smart as we academics are, we have not figured out a way to rid systemic sexism and gender inequities from faculty life. Even more, when sexism intertwines with other marginalized identities like race, we do even worse at rooting out inequities.14

As Kelly observes, the combination of sexism with racism and other dehumanising ideologies keeps higher education from becoming an institution in which all are valued and all are able to contribute their unique gifts. Inequalities in today’s academy are the direct result of its historical foundations centuries ago. Because the university was historically shaped by and for a highly exclusive group of wealthy white men,

12. Katharin Peter and Laura Horn, ‘Gender Differences in Participation and Completion of Undergraduate Education and How They Have Changed Over Time’, Institute of Education Sciences’ National Center for Education Statistics, . 13. See, for example, Colleen Flaherty, ‘More Faculty Diversity, Not On Tenure Track’, Inside Higher Ed, (last accessed 24 June 2021); and ‘Fast Facts: Race/Ethnicity of College Faculty’, from the Institute for Education Sciences: National Center for Education Statistics, (last accessed 24 June 2021). Not only are faculty numbers unevenly divided by gender, but women shoulder greater amounts of institutional service as well as a larger burden of invisible labour, such as the time and energy spent providing informal mentoring and emotional support to students. See, for example, Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, ‘The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments’, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 39 (2017), 228–45, (last accessed 24 June 2021). 14. .Bridget Turner Kelly, ‘Though More Women Are On Campus, Climbing the Professor Ladder Remains a Challenge’, Brown Center Chalkboard, Brookings Institute (29 March 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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the accumulated body of knowledge produced has been partial at best and unjust at worst, presenting others in a disadvantaged light under the guise of objectivity. Women have been the objects, not subjects, of study, and have been represented in the scholarly record as powerful men have seen them; little information about gendernonconforming or non-binary people can be found in the record at all.15 Using literature to explore gender and vocation can reveal the deeply lopsided history of writing and knowledge production responsible for persistent sexism and gender injustice in the world our students must navigate. Virginia Woolf, in her essay A Room of One’s Own, memorably illustrates the widespread impact of women’s historical exclusion from authorship, from its effect on individual women writers and women in general to humanity’s shared knowledge and understanding of the world.16 Asked to give a talk on the subject of women and fiction, Woolf uses a fictional persona to explain her thinking and research process. Her narrator, undertaking preparatory research, discovers that all the books about women in the British Library seem to be written by men.17 As she reads one called The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex, she concludes that most information about women available in the library is worthless, having been ‘written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth’.18 She finds little information about women in the historical record, except for a few laws allowing husbands to beat their wives, and puzzles over why so many men depicted women as brilliant, beautiful, inspiring and heroic in literature through the ages while women were treated so poorly in real life. This question gives rise to

15. .Black, Indigenous and other men of colour, as well as poor to middle-class men, were also absent from formal knowledge production in English-speaking universities until relatively recently. Women and BIPOC gained entrance to these institutions in roughly the same time frame in the late nineteenth century. 16. A Room of One’s Own was first published in 1929, just over a decade after women had earned the vote in the UK and just under a decade after they were granted undergraduate degrees from Oxford. In 1981, Barnard professor Mary Gordon wrote, ‘Woolf’s sense of the vocation of the writer is religious in its intensity’; Mary Gordon, ‘Foreword’, in Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York, London: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1981), viii. In my view, the essay can be understood to apply more broadly to any and all creative and intellectual vocations of women in a world that remains antagonistic to women’s gifts that do not provide a direct service to men. 17. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 5. 18. Ibid. 32–3.

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a famous passage in which the narrator, seeking to fill in the blanks in the historical record where gifted women might have been, imagines that a woman with Shakespeare’s gift in Shakespeare’s time would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at . . . That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain.19

Dramatising a gifted Elizabethan woman’s experience, Woolf helps us understand the degree of pain any woman might experience in a world antagonistic to her pursuit of any vocation other than wife and mother. If we can imagine that Shakespeare’s sister, unable to pursue her calling, might have killed herself from unbearable grief and suffering, then we should be prepared to advise carefully and support women discerning their vocations today, for the idea persists that women’s ‘best’, ‘right’ or ‘natural’ roles are as wives and mothers. Men called into roles and relationships considered socially inappropriate for their gender are also likely to experience a degree of inner strife in doing so; LGBTQ-identified, gender-nonconforming, or non-binary students may be especially vulnerable to such strife, seeking a flourishing life and vocational path in a world generally hostile to departures from the gender binary. Importantly, Woolf addresses how the rise of women writers fundamentally changed not only how we see and understand the world, but also the lived experiences of everyone in it. Her speaker feigns shock when opening a contemporary novel and encountering the sentence, ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ because ‘all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex’.20 Woolf compares literature written by women to a torch being lit ‘in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been’.21 The male literary tradition has depicted a narrow slice of women’s lives and has represented that slice in extremes of goodness or wickedness. Women have produced literature for a relatively short period by comparison; we are just beginning to see gender, people and

19. Ibid. 49–51. 20. Ibid. 82. 21. Ibid. 84.

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the world from women’s points of view, although still largely those of white women. Just as imaginative literature saw immense change as women began to write and publish, so too has the field of literary study seen immense change as more women entered the academy and began to write dissertations, publish research, earn PhDs and instruct and mentor students of all genders. The number of women earning English PhDs went from a quarter of the degrees granted in 1970 to half by the mid-1980s, and since the mid-2000s women have annually earned more PhDs than men, a trend that seems unlikely to change in the near future.22 Scholarship by women has lit torches in vast chambers of the academy, as women have viewed the literary canon and the scholarly tradition with new eyes, asking new questions and developing new fields of enquiry. Scholarly projects undertaken in the 1970s–90s have included recovering forgotten works by women;23 recuperating the reputations of female writers that male scholars once dismissed or harshly critiqued;24 reconsidering the literary canon with a specific focus on representations of gender25 and sexuality26 within classic

22. The pace of white women entering the academy has far outstripped the pace of Black, Indigenous and other women of colour, however. According to the American Association of University Professors, in the academic year 2018–19 only slightly more than 5 per cent of all full-time faculty members inclusive of all genders self-identified as Hispanic or Latino, and only 6 per cent self-identified as Black or African American. 23. Lady Mary Wroth, for example, was a real female contemporary, or genius ‘sister’, of Shakespeare’s. Wroth is believed to be the first female author of a prose romance in English, writing The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania in the early seventeenth century. The first of two volumes was published in 1621, but the second was not published during her lifetime. The text was not in print again until a 1995 edition published by Josephine Roberts, who received her PhD in 1975. 24. For example, the Romantic poet and novelist Charlotte Smith was admired and looked up to by her far more famous contemporaries William Wordsworth and John Keats, but she died in poverty and was forgotten by the academy until the early 1990s, when Stuart Curran published her collected poems as part of an Oxford University Press series, Women Writers in English 1350–1850. Judith Pascoe also published an article on Smith’s work in a 1994 collection edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner whose title, Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, perfectly exemplifies the project of recovery of women writers. 25. See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 26. See Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Sexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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texts; reconsidering the reputations of male writers;27 and reconsidering the act of reading itself28 and the production of literary criticism.29 As a graduate student in English in the late 1990s, my ideas were shaped by the richness and diversity of intellectual projects regarding gender and sexuality within my field. As a result, I entered into my work as a scholar and educator invested in understanding the effects of gender on the contents and trajectory of the literary tradition, as well as the effects of the literary tradition on both historical and contemporary understandings of gender; attuned to gaps in the history of literature and scholarship where questions about gender and sexuality might be informative; and interested in the ways in which our gendered experiences as readers shape our understandings and judgements of literary texts. Being situated as a white educator in a white institution, and as a queer woman in the academy, I bring my perspective as both insider and outsider to my classrooms; I encourage students of all genders, races and backgrounds to bring their whole selves to our work together, to value themselves and their own experiences, and to grow their awareness that they cannot see, know or understand everything from their perspective alone. I want students to value one another because we need the knowledge and insights of those who experience the world differently than we do. If we want, as educators, to help students discern their vocations, we must find ways to help them navigate their own identities and their relationships with others within the ‘whole theater’ of a world shaped by many kinds of systemic injustice.

Gender and Reading My students often say they prefer texts that are ‘relatable’, an assertion corroborated at least in part by research on gender differences

27. I’m thinking here, as one general example, of Ernest Hemingway, whose life, death and literary texts have come under new and interesting scrutiny with the advent of masculinity studies. 28. Judith Fetterley was among the first to consider the act of reading from a feminist lens in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) applied the strategy of resistant reading to depictions of race in American literature. 29. For example, see Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984) and Adrienne Rich’s What Is Found There: Notes on Poetry and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993).

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and reading preferences that tells us men consistently show a strong preference for books with male protagonists.30 While it is enjoyable to experience recognition and familiarity in a text, a significant and unique value of reading literature is getting to see the world through other people’s eyes, not our own. Encountering ‘unrelatable’ perspectives in a text may be challenging, but gaining insights about people, events and ideas with which we are unfamiliar is crucial if we hope to see with greater clarity the ‘whole theater’ of our relationships within a rich and diverse human community. Greater self-awareness about how their gender informs their responses to fictional people and situations can empower students to take more responsibility for their actions and choices, as readers and in real life. Seeking to deepen students’ self-awareness about how their assumptions regarding gender inform their interactions with others, I designed a reading exercise inspired by Elizabeth Flynn’s essay ‘Gender and Reading’. To study her students’ interpretive reading skills, Flynn asked members of a large first-year writing class to write short responses to three well-known short stories: James Joyce’s ‘Araby’, Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens.’ The open prompt invited them to summarise the story, analyse it or connect it to their own lives. Analysing their responses led Flynn to identify three reading styles, which she explains in the essay and supports with extensive examples drawn directly from her students’ work. On one end of a spectrum, ‘dominant’ reading is characterised by detachment, resistance and even boredom; unable or unwilling to engage, dominant readers reject and effectively silence texts by imposing their own assumptions on them, refusing to learn anything new. On the other end, ‘submissive’ readers become too involved in the story, getting entangled in details and events; anxious and overwhelmed, they are unable to step back and observe the story with enough critical distance to see a consistent pattern of meaning.31 Productive engagement lies between these two poles: readers who can engage with a text with empathy without losing critical distance can both learn

30. For example, see Kate Summers, ‘Adult Reading Habits and Preferences in Relation to Gender Differences’, Reference & User Services Quarterly, 52.3 (2013), 243–9, (last accessed 24 June 2021). 31. Elizabeth A. Flynn, ‘Gender and Reading’, in Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart (eds), Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 267–88.



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from the experience of reading and successfully construct meanings from the text as a whole. We might assume, based on the language of gender stereotypes, that men would be dominant readers and women submissive readers, but that isn’t what Flynn observed. In her small sample set, there were women who dominated texts and men who read submissively, and many students showed evidence of dominating one story while being submissive to another. The most distinctly gendered pattern was that, overall, men were more likely to respond from an unproductive extreme, whereas women could more consistently find the middle ground and achieve productive engagement. Acknowledging that her small-scale exercise was not conclusive but only preliminary, Flynn speculates that reading styles are likely informed by gendered patterns in verbal communication styles: our culture tends to grant men greater authority to speak, and to socialise women to be listeners. Flynn suggests this could explain her male students’ generally weaker abilities to encounter the textual ‘other’ openly and to see a larger meaning in the whole. In my version of Flynn’s exercise, students begin with the same short stories, write a short response to what they think of the main characters, especially the young boy in ‘Araby’ (who many think is a girl for several pages, simply because he is feeling so strongly!) and the couple talking in the train station in ‘Hills’ (views differ as to whether or not they are fighting, or in love, and whether or not the man is controlling, or means what he says). Then, they read Flynn’s article and write a formal reflection, in which they identify the reading styles they saw themselves using with each story, show examples from their own work and from Flynn’s essay in their discussion, and articulate what adjustments they plan to make to become more productive readers. Students find this exercise both illuminating and empowering. Decoupling gender from a power binary, it enables them to shed anxieties about reading literature and to grow as students and human beings. Relieved to see they aren’t the only ones who feel confused or frustrated when faced with difficult course material, students become more comfortable with sharing their vulnerabilities. This exercise disrupts their assumptions about themselves as readers, paving the way for other assumptions about themselves to be disrupted. Realising that reading is a skill that can be practised and sharpened, and that they can learn to recognise and take responsibility for their habits of mind, students are empowered to make future choices aimed towards personal growth. How we interpret and respond to fictional characters is a reflection of how we engage with human dignity and identity.

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Approaching new people with a practised ability of balancing empathetic engagement with critical judgement positions students well to find healthy, productive and purposeful places within the various roles and relationships they will be called to occupy in the course of their lives.

Teaching Gender in/and Sacred Stories Examining representations of gender and gender relations in sacred myths from different cultural and theological traditions is particularly valuable to vocational exploration because they still colonise our minds with ideas about men’s and women’s abilities, value and proper social roles that are in some cases thousands of years old. In particular, creation myths prescribe, with the weight of religious authority, what we ought to be like and how the social order should be arranged. Considering an array of origin stories helps students to see that social laws are not laws of nature, and cultural values are not universal but rather contingent on time and place. While any selection of creation myths would illustrate this contingency, I select short excerpts from texts that generate a productive comparative analysis of gender roles: Hesiod’s Theogony and Plato’s Symposium from Ancient Greece; the Hindu Rig-Vedas from India; the Kojiki from Japan; the book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible; and the story of Copper Woman from the Indigenous people of Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest. In considering myths as a story genre, we acknowledge that they originated in times, places and cultures about which none of us is expert, and in languages none of us speaks, freeing us to focus instead on their literary elements and to evaluate the messages they seem to convey about men, women and others, and about our various roles and relationships. In three traditions, women are clearly positioned as socially secondary to men. In a myth from Ancient Greece,32 Hesiod writes that women are an ‘infestation’ created by the gods to bring grief to men; the Japanese Kojiki33 states that it is against the ‘law of nature’ for a woman to speak first to a man; in one of two versions of creation in Genesis,34 God creates a man first, and later creates a woman out of

32. Theogony was probably written down around 700 bce. See Paul Cartledge (ed.), Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 33. Written down in about the eighth century ce, but dating back much further. 34. Scholars think probably sixth or fifth century bce.



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the man’s body to be his ‘helper’. In versions of the Hindu Rig-Vedas, women are nearly erased. There is no original heterosexual couple; instead, a ‘first man’ is born from an egg, impregnates himself and gives birth to everything in the universe.35 It doesn’t surprise students to see so many stories in which men are primary and women secondary and subservient, but they sometimes express dismay that negative representations of women were so widespread, and began so long ago. Two myths from the group offer surprising and unexpectedly positive representations of gender. First, in Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes recounts a myth about the origin of love, in which there were originally three genders: male, female and androgynous. It surprises students to see a creation myth depicting a third gender, a combination of male and female, introduced as an equal alongside men and women, and to see same-sex love, not just present in the story, but valued, respected and normalised alongside heterosexuality. Reading it has the power to free students from prison walls constructed in their minds that suggest LGBTQ+ people are less valuable than others. This myth holds particular value for queer students, who may suffer from beliefs that they might not find love, or that, if they do, their love is not sacred. Indeed, releasing students from internalised homophobia would enable them to engage more freely, as their fullest and deepest self, in any role or relationship into which they might choose to enter, whether professional or personal. Second, in the creation myth from an Indigenous community in the Pacific Northwest, the sacred figure is female, women existed first, and the first woman is powerful, knowledgeable, capable and resilient. The goddess Copper Woman finds the first woman so desirable that she transforms herself into a man and comes to earth to partner with her. The first man is born from the first woman’s snot and creatures from the sea; men as a group are not seen as fully competent and trustworthy humans, though they do become more competent and reliable with each passing generation. Reading this sacred story frees women from the prison of thinking that they must accept roles only as men’s ‘helpers’; it opens up possibilities that they could pursue ambitions of their own. It frees men from sexist assumptions about what roles women ought to have in relation to

35. Barbara Sproul, Primal Myths: Creation Myths from around the World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).

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them, and, though men are clearly depicted as the secondary sex, the story does not limit them to a static subordinate role; the fact that each generation of men improves offers everyone the chance to imagine the possibility of growth. Considering origin myths comparatively raises the question, what if it simply doesn’t make sense anymore, given the rich diversity of the world’s cultures and our ever-growing understanding of the complexity of the human experience, to grant any of these ancient stories prescriptive power over our roles and relations today? If humans have had the creative capacities to construct so many different cultures and societies in the past, perhaps it is possible to participate in envisioning and constructing a world with room for all to flourish.

Seeing Intersections of Gender, Race and Class in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand To help open students’ eyes to the impact of the world’s unjust and dehumanising forces on some people’s abilities to pursue their vocational callings, and to encourage them to respond to characters and one another with empathic engagement, I teach a novel from the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, published in 1929. Helga Crane, the feisty and capable protagonist, fails to find a place to thrive in the world because there is no role or relationship in which she is valued for herself; even in an era of racial uplift, a racist and sexist society offers few opportunities for a Black woman to live a flourishing and meaningful life on her own terms. Reading the novel, students can see how oppressive structures prevent individuals from finding their vocational path, which prompts them to consider their own vocational paths and the world that awaits them in new ways. Like Larsen, Helga is a biracial woman. Orphaned young and educated at a Black boarding school in Alabama, Helga decides to leave her first teaching position when a white preacher visits her school and praises the Black students and teachers there because ‘they knew enough to stay in their places’.36 Reflecting later on the speaker’s words, Helga ‘felt a surge of hot anger and seething resentment . . . The South. Naxos. Negro education. Suddenly she hated them all. Strange, too, for this was the thing which she had ardently desired to share in.’37 Although Helga tries to pursue a call to improve the lives 36. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2011), 3. 37. Ibid. 3.



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of others through education, the structures and assumptions of racism cause her to leave it: staying would mean conscious capitulation to white supremacy itself, a tacit agreement to participate in her own dehumanisation, and to teach young Black children to do the same. The novel narrates Helga’s inner thoughts and feelings as she reflects on interactions with others, trying to discern her next best steps, in search of a place and a relationship within which she can be and become fully herself. Yet her options are foreclosed at every turn – in Chicago, in Harlem, in Europe. In Copenhagen, a wealthy artist woos Helga because he wants to paint her and become famous; Larsen uses the painting as a clever conceit to reveal the man’s inability to see Helga as herself, on her own terms. Reflecting on the completed portrait, Helga thinks, ‘It wasn’t, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features . . . Yes, anyone with half an eye could see it wasn’t she.’38 Helga returns to New York and eventually lands back where she began in Alabama, trapped in a loveless marriage to a charismatic preacher. ‘How, then, was she to escape from the oppression, the degradation, that her life had become?’ The novel offers no answers; not even religion, it suggests, can protect a Black woman against the intersecting forces of racism and sexism, both of which objectify her as a body for others’ use. Helga can’t find a place that fits; none of the communities, professional roles or personal relationships available to her as a young educated Black woman allow her to grow and flourish. Even her education works against her in a racist society that can’t imagine a Black woman in any role other than a maid or prostitute. Frustrated, and trained to believe that anyone can succeed if they just try hard enough, students blame Helga for her inability to settle down, saying she ‘runs from her problems’, ‘makes bad decisions’ and ‘doesn’t try hard enough and/or stay long enough to see if things might work out later’. Students respond sympathetically to the most overt scenes of racist and sexist treatment, but their curiosity seldom extends to why various characters treat Helga in such problematic ways; they consider each of her romantic partners as individuals, able to notice particular failures but seldom identifying patterns in men’s attitudes and behaviours. To disrupt students’ unproductive judgement of Helga and push them to see both her and her situation with fresh eyes, I developed an in-class writing exercise. Whenever a student comment seems blind to the nuances of Helga’s context and situation, I interrupt and tell them 38. Ibid. 83–4.

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it’s time for a one-minute quick-write. Should a student remark, for example, ‘Helga was so foolish to spend so much money in Chicago when she had so little,’ I say, ‘Time to write! Have you ever spent a chunk of money on something completely frivolous when you had very little, and you knew you shouldn’t? Describe the first example that comes to mind. If you haven’t, write about the circumstances in your life that have enabled you to avoid such a situation.’ Students’ eyes and faces usually mark recognition, and pens start moving. If a student says, ‘Helga should have stayed in Denmark because her family was rich and there wasn’t really racism there,’ I might offer this prompt: ‘Have you ever been stared at in a way that made you feel uncomfortable, or made you feel like a thing instead of a person? Describe the situation and what it felt like. If you haven’t, start writing about why.’ If students cannot see that it’s degrading and dehumanising for white people to exoticise dark-skinned women, such questions can tug them in the direction of greater empathy. As discussion unfolds, I ask questions seeking to reflect back the assumptions they are making and to reveal the fundamental problem of judging someone else’s actions from the outside: ‘Have you ever been in a job, a relationship, a neighbourhood, or some other situation that wasn’t fulfilling to you, so you decided to make a change? What did you lack, and what did you need?’ Or, ‘Have you ever been treated badly by someone – a boss, coworker, roommate, date, romantic partner – who was well liked by other people, but when you confided in someone your negative experience, they didn’t understand, or didn’t believe you, or minimised your feelings, or said you were being ridiculous? Describe the situation. How did that feel? Were those people right, or were you right? How did you know?’ In essence, I am asking, how does vocational discernment work? How do we find our way? What support do we need – and by extension, how might we support others? This exercise can lead to powerful spontaneous insights among and between students. Female students are often willing to explain to men, via Helga, what is awful about being sexually objectified, and men are able to listen without feeling defensive because it is not in response to their own actions but to events in a novel. Female students of colour might be willing to explain to white students the differences between being sexually objectified and sexually exoticised. Male students can acknowledge that it is possible to be reckless with money, or to make a poor relationship decision. Making our way through the novel with these types of interruptions quickly develops in students the habit to pause and ask themselves, even before I do, whether they have experienced any version, small or large, of what



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Helga is going through. This exercise hones their abilities to interrogate their initial judgements of Helga, enabling their instinctive, often unconscious and unreflective criticisms to fall away. As they engage more empathetically with her, seeing her as a young adult with fairly normal hopes and desires, more like themselves than they initially thought, they can begin to see the intolerable, dehumanising situations she is up against in a world whose very structures are stacked against her. Exploring Helga Crane’s story chips away at students’ unreflective adoption of the ‘personal responsibility’ narrative and encourages them to see more clearly the presence and impact of structural oppression. Not only is Helga pulled down by the powerful conjoined historical forces of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism that objectify her and limit her possibilities at every turn, but those same forces continue to pull people under today, colonising our minds with the ideas that some people are naturally less valuable than others, and that everyone’s struggles and successes are individual and circumstantial, not systemic and ideological. Using gender and its intersections with race and class as lenses to study this novel, I seek to disrupt students’ tendency to lay Helga’s problems at her own feet, and to broaden their view, humanising her and problematising the damaging assumptions of the world in which she lives. If they can engage productively with the novel, empathising with Helga while retaining a position of critical judgement from which they can see and consider the complexities of her context, they may be more free to see the full humanity of real people in the real world struggling in similar circumstances. Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand invites readers to reflect on Helga’s world – which is our world, for the most part, despite the passage of time – and her distressing fate. As we feel for her, we are invited to imagine what we might be called to do to re-envision, re-form or recreate a world in which she would have the freedom and opportunity to be herself more fully, and could make choices to use her gifts to contribute to the common good. Seeing early twentieth-century systems and institutions through the eyes of a young biracial woman, the world seems more likely to thwart human possibilities than be the source of a meaningful call. If the ‘whole theater’ of human relations is structurally unjust, demeaning and dehumanising, perhaps the world is not the source of our vocational callings after all. Perhaps it is not so much that the world calls us towards humanisation and wholeness, but that wholeness itself calls us into the broken world, calling on each of us to find those places where our gifts can further the work of healing it.

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Conclusion I have taught a course called ‘Gender and Literature’ every year for the past ten years at California Lutheran University. The experience is never the same twice because the direction of our discussions depends on the students; each enters the classroom with a unique identity and set of experiences that shape their individual learning and our work together. At the end of each semester, students will often say, ‘I think everyone should have to take this class!’ because they had no idea how much work yet remains to achieve equality. I am gratified when women report gaining confidence in their ability to talk with others about topics related to gender, or to make choices without worrying (as much) about the judgements of others. But I am often especially struck by what men will share. Years ago, an earnest young man shook my hand after the final and said, ‘Thank you so much for everything! I especially value how this course has helped me to think about parenting.’ He paused, slowly shook his head, looked at me with wide eyes and said, ‘I was going to do that so wrong!’ Another student who had been fairly unreadable beneath his baseball cap all semester shared, ‘If there is so much about women’s experiences in the world I don’t know because I can’t see it, how much else is out there that I don’t know?’ A devout Christian who began the class with a general disposition that ‘we all just need to love each other more’ concluded the class by expressing deep concern and humility. In a paper, he wrote, ‘Quicksand was so impactful, sad, and breathtakingly helpful. I was able to finally cleanse the white privilege mud from my eyes and see that our society today isn’t much better than it was. We live in a world in today’s society where Black Americans are crying out for help. A world where white supremacy is evident. A world where stubbornness and pride are more important than love.’39 Year after year, students reflect back to me that studying literature through the lens of gender fulfils the university’s stated mission ‘to educate leaders for a global society who are strong in character and judgment, confident in their identity and vocation, and committed to service and justice’.40 The world is in great need of such leaders, and my vocation calls me to help my institution send more of them into the world each year.

39. Used with permission. 40. See (last accessed 24 June 2021).

Chapter 7

Anti-Racism as Vocational Practice: Reading with Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Edwidge Danticat Kerry Hasler-Brooks

For Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Edwidge Danticat, three of the leading American writers at work today, one of the most delightful stories is that of their own miraculous lives as readers. In words that echo through the academic, the popular and the digital, these Black women tell their own reading stories, trekking through racial histories of enslavement, migration and colonisation to marvel at their work as readers and writers who, surrounded by a long legacy of racial and gendered injustice, were never meant to be. In the words of Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, she and many women of colour are, by some accounts, ‘accidents of literacy . . . people who might not have been able to go to school . . . who might never have learned to read and write . . . who have lived in the shadows for too long’.1 Perhaps for this reason, even after a decades-long career of critical and popular acclaim, Danticat confesses the sheer ‘thrill’ of poring over ‘readers’ stories’ like hers that testify to the ways literary reading shapes people for lives neither they nor their communities may have imagined. In personal essays that simultaneously function as aesthetic treatises, literacy narratives and vocation memoirs, Walker, Adichie and Danticat demonstrate the reading practices that have shaped their work as both literary writers and

  1. Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 19.

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practitioners of anti-racism. Collectively, their essays enact literary reading as a fundamental practice for both personal vocation formation, which for them has meant working and living as storytellers and writers, and social vocation formation as contributors to a shared call to enact anti-racism in the world. While Walker, Adichie and Danticat have long practised anti-racism as part of their literary vocations, the scholarship of vocation is just beginning to consider the specific call of anti-racism. Reaching back to Frederick Buechner’s well-known description of vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet’,2 scholar and clinical psychologist John Neafsey recently and explicitly named ‘social conscience’ as part of vocation formation. Neafsey stretches vocation formation from a personal emphasis on the emotional, spiritual and career wellness of the individual to an ethical, social and even political emphasis on the health of the community, nation and world. According to Neafsey: Circumstances in the life of our local or national or global communities can also call upon us to rise to the occasion, to take a stand, to take a risk, to do the right thing . . . [in] response to the Iraq War, torture, capital punishment, poverty, abortion, racism, sexism, or any other important moral issue of our time.3

For Neafsey, the call to ‘social conscience’ and then social action is both broad – in that it includes a full range of moral issues playing out in the socio-political landscape of a community – and elective, as suggested by Neafsey’s use of the word ‘can’. This auxiliary notion of anti-racism in vocation is illustrative of other scholarship that calls on racial theories like W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness to explore personal vocation as an ‘awakening to self’, to borrow from Homayra Ziad, without attending to the social vocation of racial justice building.4 Notably, womanist theologian and Episcopal priest Kelly Brown Douglas makes a more pointed vocational claim, casting antiracism as a core call in American life. Girded by centuries of Black

  2. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (New York: HarperOne, 1993), 119.   3. John Neafsey, A Sacred Voice is Calling (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 4–5.   4. See Homayra Ziad, ‘Attentiveness and Humor: Vocation as Awakening to Self’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 195–212.



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preachers, artists and intellectuals who have called the nation to see, resist and repair the particular and foundational evil of American racism, Douglas boldly recasts Ta-Nehisi Coates’s now seminal ‘Case for Reparations’ as an unequivocal ‘Call for Reparations’. Using the vocational language of ‘call’ from the Latin vocare, Douglas describes a shared social vocation to ‘free . . . the nation from its captivity to the sinful, systematic, structural, cultural, and ideological legacy of the White Lion’, the British ship that brought the first enslaved Black people to the colonised land that would become the United States.5 For Douglas, the call for all people tied to these United States, and specifically for communities of faith reading her argument in Sojourners, includes both speech and action to dismantle an American racism that has been exported to the world. In contrast to the narrow focus on career and profession that currently dominates American education, Douglas casts the vocational net beyond individual professionalisation and even social engagement to emphasise a common responsibility to fight racism. Joining Douglas’s specific call to anti-racism, this essay explores the vocational urgency of anti-racist reading as modelled by Walker, Adichie and Danticat. Drawing on and extending my experience teaching essays by Walker, Adichie and Danticat in core, first-year composition, general education and advanced literature courses, I organise this essay around the modes of reading that have shaped these writers’ anti-racist vocational ethics and by extension the anti-racist vocation-building of their readers. As Laurie McMillan has suggested, we should note the ways Walker writes directly to and for readers of colour, an assessment that can be applied similarly to both Adichie and Danticat.6 However, when read through the lens of vocational exploration, Walker, Adichie and Danticat’s reading lives call all readers into literary practices that foster anti-racist thinking and action. After a brief introduction to the history of anti-racist reading, this essay looks closely at three specific modes of anti-racist reading practised by these Black women writers: Alice Walker’s reading for personal reckoning, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s reading for social transformation and Edwidge Danticat’s reading for global connection.

  5. Kelly Brown Douglas, ‘A Christian Call for Reparation’, Sojourners (July 2020), (last accessed 24 June 2021).  6. Laurie McMillan, ‘Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, Journal of Modern Literature, 28.1 (Autumn 2004), 113.

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An Introduction to Anti-Racist Reading The urgency for this work has come to a head recently. I am drafting this essay six weeks after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, six weeks after the world broke open again to grieve and fight for a Black man murdered by the police, six weeks after streets all around the world became sites of protest with renewed chants both painful and hopeful that ‘Black Lives Matter’. In these six weeks, Black activists, journalists, scholars and artists have implored the people of the world not only to act but to read. While filling newspapers, magazines and social media feeds with accounts of deep-rooted racism and Black survival, they persistently name the Black writers – Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates – whose work we must read if we are to be a people, individually and collectively, who can do anti-racist work and live anti-racist lives. In so doing, they urge us not only to take anti-racist action but also to read the poets, novelists and essayists who have fundamentally and creatively shaped the possibility for anti-racism today. More than a year ago, historian and leading anti-racist voice Ibram X. Kendi codified his own ‘Antiracist Reading List’ for The New York Times Book Review. Kendi’s is a public list coming out of his own private reading life, a catalogue of the academic and creative books that have shaped his understanding of race, racism and antiracism, texts which he believes will continue to reshape the world. The list includes recommendations across genres and disciplines from biology to law, but is particularly rich with literary texts. One of the ‘best ways’ to ‘build a nation of equal opportunity for everyone’, writes Kendi, and to ‘dismantle this spurious legacy’ of racism taught and learned ‘is by reading books’. He continues: Not books that reinforce old ideas about who we think we are, what we think America is, what we think racism is. Instead we need to read books that are difficult or unorthodox, that don’t go down easily . . . By not running from the books that pain us, we can allow them to transform us. I ran from antiracist books most of my life. But now I can’t stop running after them – scrutinizing myself and my society, and in the process changing both.7

  7. Ibram X. Kendi, ‘An Antiracist Reading List’, New York Times (29 May 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021).



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Kendi echoes a growing body of work from social scientists and literary scholars that makes the case for what might be called literary activism, a term I use to name the work of literary reading towards social justice. A number of recent studies8 correlate literary reading, distinct from popular reading, with increased capacities for openmindedness and theory of mind, empathetic qualities that allow one to acknowledge, understand and take interest in the ways others’ beliefs and desires differ from one’s own. More specifically, a study of the relationship between literary reading and racial empathy found that targeted reading of counterstereotypical literature – literature that shows characters thinking, acting or speaking in ways counter to dangerous racial stereotypes – decreases readers’ categorical race biases.9 For many scholars of language and literature, this recent research parallels their own research and teaching experiences with diverse literatures. As Greg Mullins summarises, pulling from the philosopher and influential language theorist Richard Rorty, literary reading, especially in the context of a college class, is a uniquely robust practice to cultivate a person’s commitment to ‘human rights culture’.10 Looking to the literary record, Elizabeth Ammons points to the long ‘progressive activist tradition at the heart of so much of US literature’ that includes writers like Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Pauline Hopkins, Zitkala-Sa, Wendell Berry, Gloria Naylor and Leslie Marmon Silko to claim that ‘words do have the power to transform people’ and ‘achieve social justice’.11 Collectively, this body of work finds and flexes the activist potential of literary reading, pointing to the transformational power of literary words both for individuals and societies. In this way, the literary text can serve as an important tool in the vocational work of civic engagement described by Darby Kathleen Ray. Ray emphasises the vocational value of ‘community engagement’, reflective and thoughtful participation in public life that

  8. See Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley and Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, ‘Opening the Closed Mind: The Effect of Exposure to Literature on the Need for Closure’, Creativity Research Journal, 25.2 (2013), 149–54; and David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, ‘Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind’, Science 342.6156 (18 October 2013), 377–80.  9. See Dan R. Johnson, Brandie L. Huffman and Danny M. Jasper, ‘Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction’, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36.1 (2014), 83–90. 10. Greg Mullins, ‘Labors of Literature and of Human Rights’, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 20.1 (2008), 7. 11. Elizabeth Ammons, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), ix, ix, xiv.

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‘complements’ and expands traditional ‘learning and mentoring’ for personal or individualised development.12 Community engagement, writes Ray, emphasises ‘self-awareness, self-transcendence, and radical empathy . . . [It] functions as a counterweight to the tendency for vocation to be exclusively or primarily focused on the self, with the world considered merely a convenient backdrop for one’s personal odyssey.’13 Ray’s language of ‘self-awareness, self-transcendence, and radical empathy’ parallels the language of literary activism, which might be seen as a ‘complement’ to the community engagement of Ray’s argument. As Ray’s literary reference to the ‘odyssey’ indicates, literary reading plays an important role in the way we see, describe and ultimately act in the world. The call to literary activism, however, may oversimplify the value of the reading act, and certainly the anti-racist reading act, by depicting exposure to certain kinds of reading material – literary, nonstereotypical, activist – as a straightforward catalyst for social and, in the case of this argument, racial justice. There is a long history of suspicion about the simple good of literary exposure, particularly when it comes to putting literature by people of colour in the hands of white readers. Since Norman Mailer’s landmark 1957 essay ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’, major scholars including bell hooks, Eric Lott, Susan Gubar and Greg Tate have taken an understandably sceptical stance on reading for racial empathy, warning against the devastating appropriation, impersonation, fetishisation and erasure of Black lives by white readers who consume Black texts.14 While acknowledging the real danger of such ‘colonising’ by some or even most white readers, Kimberly Chabot Davis more recently reconsiders the vitality of empathetic reading

12. Darby Kathleen Ray, ‘Self, World, and the Space Between: Community Engagement as Vocational Discernment’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 320. 13. Ibid. 320. 14. See Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’, Dissent, 4 (1957), 276–93; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Greg Tate (ed.), Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (New York: Broadway, 2003).



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of Black texts by all readers.15 In Beyond the White Negro, Davis argues for a particular posture of anti-racist reading that, at its most palatable, she dresses with appealing language – a ‘desire for social justice and equality’ cultivated by thoughtful reading of others’ stories – but at its most radical, exposed and direct, she characterises as ‘a self-implicating’ act, a ‘self-reckoning’ with one’s own ‘complicity’ in ongoing systems of racism, and ultimately, for the white reader, ‘radical acts of treason against white privilege’.16 The potential for such ‘radical’ anti-racist reading depends significantly on textual content that urges readers towards the truth of structural racism, content that Kendi calls ‘difficult’, but it also depends on the ‘difficult’ practices we use to read those texts. Simply put, anti-racist reading depends not only on what is read but how it is read. Textual recommendations from expert scholars, artists and activists like Kendi are wildly important for an American reading public that consistently points to Harper Lee’s beloved but flawed novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which anoints a white hero while silencing a Black victim, as the ‘best’ or ‘most important’ novel in the United States.17 However, as the ‘self-implicating’, ‘self-reckoning’ and ‘radical act’ Davis describes, anti-racist reading demands an active posture. It cannot be a posture of consumption, of taking in the right words or ideas, however new, truthful or anti-racist they may be, but must be a dangerous posture of participation focused on both internal and external examination, both the personal and the social. In making this argument, I along with Davis lean on the scholars of colour committed to the hard work of reading as engaged antiracist practice. Early in her career, while working on her masterpiece Beloved, Morrison began to shape her writing around a theory of ‘participatory reading’.18 ‘It’s not just about telling the story,’ according to Morrison, ‘it’s about involving the reader . . . My language has to have holes and spaces so the reader can come into it . . . can feel

15. Kimberly C. Davis, Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 3. 16. Ibid. 9, 5, 9, 3. 17. ‘The Great American Read’, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) (2018), (last accessed 24 June 2021). 18. Toni Morrison and Claudia Tate, ‘Toni Morrison’, in Danille Taylor-Guthrie (ed.), Conversations with Toni Morrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 164.

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something visceral, see something striking. Then we come together to make this book.’ A decade later Morrison sharpened this vision of co-creating readers and writers to describe the work of discerning the polluted racial vision that accompanies the beauty of so much of American literature. As she argues in Playing in the Dark, reading – together with writing – ‘require[s] being alert . . . for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination’, but it also ‘require[s] being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision’ with the legacy of racism.19 Morrison claims that reading race – both as it is written and as it is silenced in a text – is always a ‘sweaty fight for meaning and response-ability’, a Morrisonian term that emphasises the reader’s call to responsible reading and responsible action.20 Paralleling Margaret E. Mohrmann’s interest in ‘responsibility’ as a key ‘virtue’ of vocation formation, leading scholars for the development of racially just pedagogies extend Morrison’s vision of ‘participation’ and ‘responseability’ into practicable approaches to teaching literature.21 Drawing from her own experience reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, Audre Lorde, Paula Gunn Allen and Gloria Anzaldúa, AnaLouise Keating argues for ‘transformational’ reading practices rooted in ‘intense exploration of both the external world and internal self’.22 Similarly, bell hooks’s vision of ‘education as the practice of freedom’ depends on transformative reading practices.23 She writes, ‘Through books I learned that there were other ways to think and live in the world than the ways I knew most intimately.’24 Morrison, Keating and hooks emphasise literary reading as part of racial justice-making, which requires self-reflection and world-reflection. The work is personal and structural, intimate and vast, and, perhaps above all, it is hard. This is where I turn to miraculous readers like Walker, Danticat and

19. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), xi. 20. Ibid. xi. 21. Margaret E. Mohrmann, ‘“Vocation is Responsibility”: Broader Scope, Deeper Discernment’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 22. 22. AnaLouise Keating, Teaching Transformation: Transcultural Classroom Dialogue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 123. 23. See bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994). 24. bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (New York: Routledge, 2010), 138.

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Adichie as bold practitioners of their own anti-racist reading work and as master readers, teachers and guides for the work of anti-racist vocation.

Reading with Walker Alice Walker is one of the most prolific Black American women writers, with work spanning a fifty-year career. Since its 1982 publication, her award-winning novel The Color Purple has been made and remade in film and on the stage, arguably becoming one of the most important – and most consumed – Black texts in the collective American imagination. The year after she created the unforgettable women of The Color Purple, Walker published In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, a collection of thirty-six intimate essays detailing her creative life as a reader. Performing as a self-conscious rereader and close reader throughout the collection, Walker thinks about, with and through the words of others, especially other Black women, recasting their work to do her own. In the collection’s title essay, Walker claims an ancient family of women, especially the literary Black mothers who, in ways bold and quiet, high and low, ‘kept alive’ the spirit of creation that has always filled her work as a Black woman writer.25 Weaving together cultural and textual criticism with her own personal narrative, Walker tells a complete story of racial violence and creative survival rich with both the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘grand’, according to McMillan.26 As a result, Walker models a practice of reading both literary and life texts, teaching her readers not only how to interpret the erasures and silences in the racialised literary record but also to reckon with themselves and their own vocational formation as people who, like her, are called to confront, survive and remake the racial traumas of the United States. Walker begins the essay as a literary critic, close reading the once wildly popular and enslaved Black poet Phillis Wheatley. In an act of reclamation, Walker casts Wheatley, the first Black woman to publish in colonial America, as a most foundational – though ‘most pathetic, most misunderstood’ – artist.27 She then tackles some of Wheatley’s

25. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 237. 26. McMillan, ‘Telling A Critical Story’, 113. 27. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 235.

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most devastating moments of inherited and internalised racism, such as her notorious description of a ‘golden hair[ed]’ liberty, asking alongside so many other angry Black readers of Wheatley, ‘How could she?’28 However, in a series of paragraphs often beginning with the contrasting conjunctions ‘But’ and ‘Yet’, Walker returns to Wheatley’s troubling words, trying on postures of critique and understanding. She reads indiscriminately, censoring neither judgement nor sympathy, honouring the clash of simultaneous feelings that these words from her literary foremother conjure. Notably, Walker does not journey through Wheatley’s words alone. Rather, she invites us into rereading practices that are thick with the words and ideas of others, most notably Virginia Woolf. In an act of bold intertextual reading, Walker brings together Wheatley and Woolf, women divided by race, class, condition, continent and time: Virginia Woolf, in her book A Room of One’s Own, wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself. What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself? . . . Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phillis, that ‘any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert ‘eighteenth century’, insert ‘black woman’, insert ‘born or made a slave’] would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert ‘Saint’], feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts [add “chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one’s body by someone else, submission to an alien religion”], that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.’ The key words, as they related to Phillis, are ‘contrary instincts.’ For when we read the poetry of Phillis Wheatley – as when we read the novels of Nella Larsen or the oddly false-sounding autobiography of that freest of all black women writers, Zora Hurston – evidence of ‘contrary instincts’ is everywhere. Her loyalties were completely divided, as was, without question, her mind.29

In what follows, Walker imbibes Woolf’s notion of ‘contrary instincts’ to trek towards a culminating reading of Wheatley’s ‘contrary’ words,

28. Ibid. 236–7. 29. Ibid. 235–6.



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a reading Walker directs intimately – hinting at the personal shift yet to come – to the poet herself: ‘We know now that you are not an idiot or a traitor . . . [but] a woman who still struggled to sing the song that was your gift, though in a land of barbarians who praised you for your bewildered tongue.’30 Wheatley’s words are the explicit target of Walker’s reading, and she makes clear the role Woolf’s words have played in helping her read Wheatley’s text again and read it well. And yet, in perhaps the boldest moment of redemption for Wheatley, Walker also makes clear, through the simple technique of adapted quoting, Wheatley’s role in helping her and us read Woolf’s text again and read it well. Walker’s bracketed words in the quotation above quietly interrupt Woolf’s, correcting but not condemning one of the most influential writers in modern literature. Taking equal footing with Woolf, Walker’s unhesitating interruptions resurrect the life, body and voice of Phillis Wheatley and, alongside her, the many nameless Black creators forgotten by the world. They replace the ridiculed bad poet of two centuries ago with a bold ‘black woman’ who, though ‘made into a slave’, forged rhyming couplets however imperfectly against the ‘chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of [her] body by someone else’. And with this restored Wheatley in place, standing right in the middle of Woolf’s most famous lines, we see Woolf’s words anew for all their truths and their untruths. Without undermining what Woolf has given, including what she has given to the Black women writers before and after her, Walker exposes Woolf’s complicity with the economic, political and literary systems of white privilege that surround her life, career and words. It is this almost impossible act of generosity and critique that is so important: to know Wheatley and the sacred humanity of her words, readers must reckon with the unwritten powers and privileges of white life, either their own or those around them. Walker removes the scales of whiteness from readers’ eyes, compelling them to see and reckon with themselves and the racist structures that help or harm them. In the classroom, Walker’s essay is a remarkable site for students to face the truth of white privilege. A master of subtlety, Walker does not name whiteness or make it a clear target in her essay. Rather, her essay functions primarily as a sacred space for Black women; it is a world built by and for Black women as creators, artists, writers, singers, quilters, gardeners and mothers. Yet, in this bold womanist

30. Ibid. 237.

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text, Walker carves out room, in the brackets, for all readers to do the important work of Davis’s ‘self-reckoning’ with racism. In class, I ask student-readers seemingly simple questions of formalist textual analysis – Why do these brackets exist? What work does Walker do in the brackets? Why is this work set apart, done in the brackets? – but thanks to Walker, these questions about structure, quotation and punctuation open up questions about Woolf’s white privilege and by extension the privileges of whiteness in or around their own lives. Walker’s essay may be understood to advocate for a discipline of self-reading shaped by and in critique of the decidedly vile narratives of whiteness that construct American identity. The subtlety of Walker’s own craft means there is a real danger that student-readers and even teacher-readers pass right over her brackets, missing the critical opportunity to face whiteness directly. However, there is also real potential for readers to begin this critical work of personal reflection surrounded by the simultaneously devoted and audacious lives of women like Walker, Wheatley and Woolf. Walker seems to know how terrifying this work of personal reflection might be. She calls her readers to shift from the intellectual critique of a literary text to the intimate critique of the self, from the historical idea of racism to one’s own culpability and indoctrination into the legacy of the racist record. As a teacher, she stands with her readers, not only ‘call[ing]’31 or ‘prepar[ing]’32 them for critical reflection as McMillan and Jennifer Nash have argued, but by supporting them as co-participants and allies in the transformational practice of personal reckoning. To do this, immediately following the critical reading of Wheatley by way of Woolf and Woolf by way of Wheatley, Walker shifts to her own personal history, suspending the traditional performance of objective literary critic to showcase an intimate reckoning with herself that is a ‘personal account that is yet shared, in its theme and its meaning, by all of us’.33 This story, both personal and common, is also a version of the ‘beauty’ and ‘pollution’ Morrison describes. Looking to her earliest memories, Walker describes her mother, like so many Black women of the time, sentenced to a ‘muzzled’ and ‘mutilated’ spirit, flung into monotonous, mindless and back-breaking work in the fields and

31. McMillan, ‘Telling a Critical Story’, 112. 32. Jennifer C. Nash, ‘Practicing Love: Black Feminism: Love-Politics, and PostIntersectionality’, Meridians, 11.2 (2011), 10. 33. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 237.



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at home but never escaping the perpetual poverty destined by the forces of racism and sexism.34 And yet, even more so, Walker’s is a reckoning with survival. The story cannot be one defined by suffering or injustice, for this ‘muzzled’ and ‘mutilated’ mother also bore the ‘creative spark’ that would carry Walker forward into a life and a work of powerful Black art.35 Walker did not escape a childhood of poverty rooted in racism and sexism, but she did survive it, carried by her mother’s gardens into a life of creativity herself. ‘So many of the stories that I write’, confesses Walker, ‘are my mother’s stories.’36 With a ‘heritage’ of ‘love’, ‘beauty’, ‘respect’ and ‘strength’ handed down by the many Black mothers who made her, Walker brings readers straight through the brutality and into the utopic hope that marks so much of her work as she writes the world she wants rather than the world that is.37 This is a kind of promise to her readers that if they reckon with racial history, there may be paradise on the other side. It is an invitation to join her in the hard but life-giving and soul-saving work of anti-racism. In this way, Walker’s call for the honest reflection of a self surrounded by the truth of American racism becomes the hopeful work of anti-racism or, as Douglas V. Henry might call it, ‘vocation prompted by love’.38

Reading with Adichie and Danticat It is significant that the words of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens continue to shape Black women writing into and transforming Walker’s legacy of anti-racist reading. Like Walker, Edwidge Danticat and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have been captivated by their own reading stories, and in chronicling their reading lives as immigrant Black American women in the twenty-first century, they continue to grow Walker’s critical space for personal reflection. To do this, they have recalled and recast Walker’s words in the making of their own, responding to Walker’s call in ways that stretch anti-racist reading from the vocation of personal reflection to the vocation of social transformation and global connection.

34. Ibid. 238. 35. Ibid. 238. 36. Ibid. 240. 37. Ibid. 238. 38. Douglas V. Henry, ‘Vocation and Story: Narrating Self and World’, in Cunningham, At This Time, 187.

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In ‘Create Dangerously’, a composite essay of personal narrative and aesthetic treatise originally delivered as the 2008 Toni Morrison Lecture at Princeton University, Haitian American novelist, memoirist and critic Edwidge Danticat refers back to Walker to understand the legacies from which she writes. She examines reading and writing as acts of survival for a vast historical community of immigrating global artists. Catalysed by a move from Haiti to the United States during her coming of age as a reader, Danticat moves through chronological and national borders to claim a literary family from Sophocles to Toni Morrison, Albert Camus to Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Walker to Danny Laferrière. This robust literary tribe stands in contrast to the ‘deficit’ of ‘fanatical readers’ in her family of birth,39 but just as Walker reread and resurrected Phillis Wheatley from a grave of ridicule, Danticat by way of Walker rereads and resurrects the impossible reading lives of the family to which she was born: Perhaps there are no [readers or] writers in my family because they were too busy trying to find bread. Perhaps there are no [readers or] writers in my family because they were not allowed to or could barely afford to attend a decrepit village school as children. Perhaps there are no artists in my family because they were silenced by the brutal directives of one dictatorship, or one natural disaster, after another. Perhaps, just as Alice Walker writes of her own forebears in her essay ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, my blood ancestors – unlike my literary ancestors – were so weather-beaten, terror-stricken, and maimed that they were stifled.40

Calling on and calling back to Walker in the tradition of so many Black preachers, musicians and writers, Danticat is able to imagine and thus understand the unwritten creative lives of a family that has felt to her both familiar and strange. Similarly, Nigerian American novelist and essayist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Danticat’s contemporary – turns to Walker along with others to understand her own reading life. Adichie became an international literary celebrity with her 2009 TEDGlobal presentation ‘The Danger of a Single Story’,41 most recently published

39. Danticat, Create Dangerously, 11. 40. Ibid. 13–14. 41. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, speech at TEDGlobal (July 2009), (last accessed 24 June 2021).



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in Black Ink.42 Calling on her own reading life as a Nigerian and then a Nigerian American, Adichie decries the pervasive singularity of the stories we know and tell. Adichie’s personal reading story twists through a childhood love for British and American fiction, rebirth with Nigerian and Guinean novelists Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, rereadings of ‘classic’ texts from Locke to Steinbeck, and finally a Walkerian literary ‘paradise’.43 In a powerful act of call and response, Adichie recasts Walker’s own recasting of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. She speaks aloud Walker’s description of her Black, southern, migrated family, reading and recovering their full, complicated and forgotten selves: ‘They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.’44 Adichie responds, ‘I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.’45 Danticat and Adichie – like Walker – dig through vast personal histories shaped by racial injustice to move towards a social paradise of vast racial transformation rooted in practices of deep reading that move outward from the textual to the personal to the social. Warning against ‘the danger of the single story’, Adichie calls readers to notice and interpret anew through literary reading practices that awaken not only personal but also social transformation.46 For Adichie, this work goes beyond Nirvana Tanoukhi’s notion of ‘reading more’,47 although that is certainly part of what Adichie wants when she calls readers away from stories that ‘show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again’.48 As a result, she casts the imaginative work of reading as a fundamental space to do the vocational work of restoring and remaking a world held in the grasp of broad structural and infrastructural racisms. After beginning with what Tanoukhi describes as a ‘well-trodden’ emotional path to bring ‘writer and audience together into harmonious play’ – a ‘familiar story of the young

42. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, in Stephanie Stokes Oliver (ed.), Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing (New York: Atria, 2018), 215–23. 43. Ibid. 223. 44. Ibid. 223. 45. Ibid. 223. 46. Ibid. 216. 47. Nirvana Tanoukhi, ‘The Movement of Specificity’, PMLA, 128.3 (May 2013), 669. 48. Adichie, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, 219.

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peripheral writer discovering the catharsis of self-recognition through literature’ – Adichie redirects her audience.49 In the very middle of the essay, she suddenly halts the catalogue of personal stories designed to bring us into her own private awakening and compels us, her now eager and allied audience, to hear the call for a more dangerous social awakening: It is impossible to talk about the single story, without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is ‘nkali.’ It’s a noun that loosely translates to ‘to be greater than another.’ Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.50

With a single word – ‘power’ – it is suddenly clear. Readers are not innocent bystanders reading a personal account of racial awakening, the story of a young Black girl who comes to critique the parade of ‘white and blue-eyed’ characters that have filled her pencil and crayon stories.51 Like Neafsey’s emphasis on social conscience as part of personal vocation, Adichie calls readers to move from self to community and participate in the radical work of reimagining and transforming a world ‘dependent on power’. In this way reading is not only a private act but a public one; what we read and, more importantly, how we read shapes the way we live as social, political, economic neighbours in a global community. While Adichie notoriously avoids using the terms ‘race’ or ‘racism’, she guides the reader through living stories of racialised injustice – Latin American immigration, Native American agency, the colonial state in Africa – that play out on the nightly news, in voting booths and in government policy. In the refrain that carries the talk near its conclusion, readers ask with Adichie, ‘What if [we] knew . . . ?’52 What if our stories told whole, complex truths? What if we not only heard the call of those truths but were brave enough to answer with our imaginations, our work, our lives? What could the world be then? It is a call to do nothing less than change the world, or at least our corner of it.

49. Tanoukhi, ‘The Movement of Specificity’, 668. 50. Adichie, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, 219. 51. Ibid. 216. 52. Ibid. 221.



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Adichie crafts her own vocational journey as literary reader, literary writer and social agent as an invitation for readers to imagine their own vocational journeys as transformation of story, self and society. While Adichie remains rooted in the social transformation of diverse local communities, Danticat makes a bold plea for a global transformation by inviting her reader into a life as a global reader and citizen. Writing from her own vast literary family shaped by an immigrant reading life unattached to a single literary tradition, Danticat theorises reading as a practice of global citizenship that transcends borders to bond readers and writers from contemporary Japan to ancient Egypt, effectively tying the individual vocation journey to a vast global family. Building on well-known tropes embedded in the words of previous cosmopolitan readers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Camus, Danticat describes reading and writing as ‘passport’ practices that transport us across time and place to ‘make us honorary citizens of [another’s] culture’.53 However, distinct from Emerson and Camus, Danticat envisions this possibility of global citizenship as a radical counter to the global racisms she has faced as a Haitian become Haitian immigrant become Black American. Danticat’s essay is hard in a way that Walker’s and Adichie’s are not. She calls readers to face devastating human suffering up close, thrusting them into horrifying experiences of pain without the buffering of Adichie’s humour or Walker’s utopic hope. She does this most strikingly at the very start of the essay, forcing readers to stare – as she did – at the 1964 political executions of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin in Haiti, bringing them closer page by page to their still-warm bodies: ‘Blood spills out of Numa’s mouth. Drouin’s glasses fall to the ground, pieces of blood and brain matter clouding the cracked lenses.’54 She takes readers from the Duvalier regime to the 2010 earthquake that together killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians over the course of fifty years. She piles the bodies up – ‘black bodies in motion and in pain’, as she described in a 2015 essay for The New Yorker55 – and she calls readers to bear witness to distinctly Black suffering from Haiti to the United States. She makes all of her readers

53. Danticat, Create Dangerously, 10. 54. Ibid. 4–5. 55. Danticat, ‘Black Bodies in Motion and in Pain’, The New Yorker (22 June 2015), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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citizens in this suffering, trusting them to ‘participate . . . by witnessing what has been told, transmitted and heard’, but also, according to Denise R. Shaw, calling them to ‘participate in healing the wounds of injustice’.56 By connecting readers to such suffering, she also connects them to the anti-racist work of healing, a version of the anguish and joy that Jason A. Mahn links in the experience of calling, but a version written and lived by a Black woman and immigrant living in the United States.57 For Danticat, readers are called into the great suffering of the world held in the stories that have been told in all times and places, but they are also called into the work of healing. She ends the essay no longer staring at the bloody and broken bodies of two murdered men but at the possibility for salvation. Danticat’s notion of salvation is wide. She lives and writes as part of a global community, and offers reading as a shared practice that could save us all. Like the ancient Egyptians who made sculptures to replace the enslaved in the tombs of their rich masters, she calls readers to imagine new ways ‘to save’ a ‘life, a soul, a future’.58 Together, Danticat and Adichie insist that careful and critical reading practices make reconciliation uniquely possible. Their texts are, like Walker’s, distinctly hope-filled and perhaps even more grandly so, but their refrain of ‘danger’ frames this reconciliation work in strikingly unromantic terms. Up to the final moments of her talk, Adichie emphasises not the possibility of paradise but the dangerous likelihood of ongoing injustice. Even as Adichie ultimately names the ways stories ‘repair’, ‘empower’ and ‘humanize’, the grammatical structure of her sentences holds on to the ways stories continue to ‘break’, ‘dispossess’ and ‘malign’. This refrain shows the ongoing work of true reckoning. Walker’s reckoning with whiteness, neatly modelled within the precise boundaries of her brackets, for Adichie becomes a lifetime of messier re-reckonings with a most dangerous and most resilient single story, that of American racism. This is an important vision for readers, especially white readers, who are notoriously eager for the quick promise of justice and reconciliation. Just

56. Denise R. Shaw, ‘Textual Healing: Giving Voice to Historical and Personal Experience in the Collective Works of Edwidge Danticat’, The Hollins Critic, 44.1 (February 2007), 13. 57. See Jason A. Mahn, ‘The Conflicts in Our Callings: The Anguish (and Joy) of Willing Several Things’, in Cunningham, Vocation Across the Academy, 44–66. 58. Danticat, Create Dangerously, 20.



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as Catherine Fobes articulates in her sociologically rooted examination of lifelong vocation discernment, the ‘ongoing process over the course of one’s life’,59 Adichie’s narrative teaches students to see the long work of racial reconciliation together with the long work of re-reckoning. As a careful reading of Adichie’s text helps us see, the work of reconciliation demands ongoing and messy encounters with our own participation in systemic racial injustice. For Danticat, like Adichie, reading is an inherently dangerous act. Adapting Camus’ famous phrase, she implores artists to ‘create dangerously, for people who read dangerously . . . Writ[e] knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.’60 Danticat acknowledges the extreme physical dangers for some who risk ‘arrest, or execution’ by reading under the rule of powerful dictators like Stalin and Duvalier as well as the more subtle intellectual or ideological dangers all readers face when they pick up a book that may and often does transform them. Danticat does not equate these risks.61 Remembering the public executions that framed her parents’ early lives in the Haiti of the Duvaliers, she writes, ‘My stories do not hold a candle to having lived under a dictatorship . . . Reading, and perhaps writing, is nothing like living in a place and time where two very young men are killed in a way that is . . . entertainment.’62 And yet, in her profound generosity Danticat is able to take seriously the dangers that more quietly shape so many student-readers’ lives, as well as her own. In this world of quiet danger, reading is a risky affair; it is a ‘revolt against silence’, an invitation for a chorus of unfamiliar voices to change us. The risk is real, but as Danticat concludes, ‘[W]e have no other choice.’63 Anti-racist readers, like creators, are not called to lives of security or stability but rather to risky acts of reconciliation; we are called to relinquish the power that has come through systems of white privilege and to forge radical new anti-racist alliances that must inevitably transform us and our world.

59. Catherine Fobes, ‘Calling over the Life Course: Sociological Insights’, in Cunningham, Vocation Across the Academy, 91. 60. Danticat, Create Dangerously, 10. 61. Ibid. 12. 62. Ibid. 12. 63. Ibid. 20.

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Conclusion I teach Walker, Adichie and Danticat’s reading stories across wildly different classes, including foundational composition classes, general education literature courses, the research methods class for first-year English majors, and an advanced class in feminist and womanist literary theory. As reading stories, these texts are full of the names and words of other writers. It is as if, like Kendi, these women are giving their own anti-racist reading lists. These lists include Wheatley, Toomer and Morrison as well as Woolf, Emerson and Camus, but they also direct students to read their own lives and, as readers who can reach from the intellectual to the personal to the global, to take the bold and explicitly anti-racist action of imagining and making a better world for themselves and others. In these essays by Walker, Adichie and Danticat, reading becomes anti-racist practice, a defining ‘station of life’ for all of us. May we read and respond, guided by the lives and words of these Black women readers and writers.

Chapter 8

The Possibility of Intervention: Vocational Exploration in Non-Fiction Immigrant Narratives Esteban E. Loustaunau

At the present moment, faced with overwhelming uncertainty and social unrest, students dedicated to vocational exploration can find new meaning and life purpose by reading non-fiction immigrant narratives of intervention. New forms of meaning appear when social disruption and economic uncertainty cut across dividing lines of space, age, class, gender, race and identity, bringing us closer with those deemed to be distant and different from us. In these non-fiction narratives, immigrants tell their stories, which can serve as inspiration and motivation for students seeking their own callings. Many of these stories include examples of intervention, the solidaric participation in the lives of the dispossessed to improve and transform lives reciprocally. In these situations, vocation may flourish through a heightened awareness of a critical social issue, but it may also arise through anger, especially in moments of injustice. When this happens, vocational exploration can encourage courageous action for the restoration of hope and justice. The non-fiction immigrant narratives examined in this essay introduce readers to new forms of cultural and literary expression by socially underrepresented subjects who speak and write for themselves rather than being ‘spoken for’.1 The most common literary genres for immigrant storytelling are autobiography, memoir and testimonial narratives, in which the reader experiences as real both

  1. John Beverley, Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 71.

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the narrator’s voice and the relationships and events recounted.2 These genres share in common ‘the need for a general social change in which the stability of the reader’s world must be brought into question’.3 These challenging narratives can become relevant to all students but especially to those who feel out of place, as the act of reading can help them find their own purposeful agency and new paths towards callings and commitments. My analysis of non-fiction immigrant narratives focuses on the real-life experiences of the narrators, who describe the role intervention plays in their lives and in the lives of others. I consider the notion of intervention from its Latin root, intervenire, meaning ‘to come between’, an action that triggers the possibility of transformation. Intervention goes one step beyond mentoring as it involves solidarity with and love for the Other. Intervention exemplifies the kind of human reconciliation and redemption that Martin Luther King, Jr saw in agape love, ‘an overflowing love that seeks nothing in return’, and that Gustavo Gutiérrez described as God’s gratuitousness, which calls us ‘to make that same love central to our lives’ as we serve and love the poor.4 This emphasis on community and unconditional love by King and Gutiérrez brings together intervention and vocation as the latter is often found in community with others. Therefore, reading non-fiction immigrant narratives through the lens of intervention can help unlearn the master narratives of fear and estrangement that dehumanise the Other. At the same time, this reading practice can

  2. Ibid. 73. By identifying these testimonial narratives as real, I want to emphasise the urgency and honesty with which they are written. Rather than speaking of all forms of autobiography and memoir, I am specifically referring to the uses of these genres to tell a real-life story from the perspective of a marginalised, subaltern subject who speaks about injustice and whose personal experience ‘can stand for the experience of her community as a whole’. See John Beverley, ‘The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio’, in Georg M. Gugelberger (ed.), The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 35.  3. Beverley, Against Literature, 84.  4. Martin Luther King, Jr, ‘The Role of the Church in Facing The Nation’s Chief Moral Dilemma’, lecture delivered at the Conference on Christian Faith and Human Relations in Nashville (23 April 1957), The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, 190, (last accessed 24 June 2021); Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 110.



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move us to listen to the experiences of immigrants and hear them articulate their own ways of being and belonging in the world. When we invite our students to read non-fiction narratives, we introduce them to real-life journeys from trepidation to trust via communitybuilding interventions so that they can also imagine their own ways of being and belonging in the world.5 Two elements that set apart these non-fiction immigrant narratives from other autobiographical fiction or non-fiction texts are an ongoing struggle for social change that is not always resolved (undocumented immigration stories are often inconclusive), and the narrator’s self-affirmation even while remaining directly involved and committed to the struggle of a marginalised group or community. These non-fiction immigrant narratives can cultivate in students a desire to explore life purpose and vocation precisely in moments and situations of uncertainty and hopelessness. In the end, the challenges these narratives pose can help us to realise better the connections between our identities and callings in relation to particular causes and the communities to which we belong. In this essay, I address the importance of introducing undergraduate students to narratives written by immigrants in the United States as these can inspire and stimulate connections between identity, deepest longings, callings and belonging in the world. Two authors who focus on these categories are Jose Antonio Vargas in his memoir Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, and Valeria Luiselli in Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.6 Vargas, a first-generation college graduate, an award-winning journalist and an immigrant rights activist, tells a compelling story that ties together his migration journey from the Philippines to California when he was twelve; his double coming out as a gay man and an undocumented journalist; his political activism that led him to start the non-profit Define American; and the people who intervened on his behalf as he struggled to find a home, a way of belonging to this country. Luiselli, an award-winning Mexican novelist and college professor, chronicles her experiences as an immigrant in the United States, a mother, a teacher and an interpreter at a federal immigration

 5. Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose and Faith (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2011), 176–7.   6. Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (New York: Dey Street Books, 2018); Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2019).

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court in New York who worked with Central American immigrant minors awaiting trial during the record-breaking deportations that began in 2014. In what follows, I will first draw connections between non-fiction immigrant narratives and testimonial literature in Latin American and US Latinx contexts, then analyse intervention in Vargas’s and Luiselli’s narratives, and conclude by comparing both texts and their relevance for student vocational engagement.

Immigrant Narratives as Testimonial Literature In Against Literature, John Beverley argues in favour of recognising the relevance of literary texts that tend to be considered marginal or outside of the Western literary canon.7 Beverley critiques the literary traditions and institutions, including the academy, that have obstructed and excluded the cultural experiences and literary discourses of marginalised social subjects across colonial and postcolonial contexts in the Americas, such as the voices of slaves, Indigenous populations, people of colour, LGBTQ+, women, children and immigrants. He questions traditional assumptions about literature in favour of a kind of literary criticism that goes ‘against the grain of the prevailing interpretations of canonical texts’ that contributed to the propagation of European colonialism and its aftermath.8 Influenced by the ideas of Ranajit Guha and the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, Beverley aims to ‘recover and re-present’ the marginal and subaltern as ‘subjects of history’.9 In many ways, Beverley’s advocacy for a Latin American subaltern studies project is closely related not only to works by Guha, Gayatri Spivak and other South Asian literary and cultural critics, but also to works by Raymond Williams and the New Left movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Citing Williams, Beverley describes how in Western Europe the rise of the bourgeoisie brought the creation of new literary forms like the essay, the short story, the picaresque novel, new variations of poetry, the autobiography and secular theatre as literary representations of an emerging order.10 According to Williams, autobiography became the preferred literary form of many

 7. Beverley, Against Literature, 69–70.   8. Ibid. viii.   9. John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 27. 10. Beverley, Against Literature, 70.



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nineteenth-century European working–class writers, who often wrote autobiographies instead of novels because the former was the closest form to a shared religious tradition of a witness confessing their life stories or testifying in front of a judge about their lives and actions, among other kinds of similar speech.11 This tradition of recording eyewitness accounts by the marginalised also took root in Latin America. Beverley notes that since the 1960s, increasingly more marginalised voices across Latin America have been heard, recorded, published and read publicly thanks to the solidarity of committed intellectuals who have intervened to co-create testimonial witness accounts of social, political and economic struggle.12 These modern collaborations on behalf of subaltern literary expression have ideological and political connections with earlier labour movements. Nineteenth-century European working-class genres share common literary, ideological and class characteristics with testimonio, a new literary genre that came of age in the 1980s in Latin American and US Latinx literary contexts. According to George Yúdice, testimonio can be understood as an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g., war, oppression, revolution, etc.). Emphasizing popular oral discourse, the witness portrays his or her own experiences as an agent (rather than as a representative) of a collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history.13

Perhaps the two most well-known Latin American and Latinx testimonial narratives for an English-reading audience are Rigoberta

11. Raymond Williams, ‘The Writer: Commitments and Alignments’, Marxism Today, 24 (June 1980), 25, in Beverley, Against Literature, 69–70. 12. Similarly, in today’s digital world there has been a shift towards computerbased forms of writing and reading of literary hypertexts accessed through screens and tablets. This new electronic literature brings together various genres and new technologies, and turns authors into practitioners who adopt and manipulate various modes of artistic expression. See Davin Heckman and James O’Sullivan, ‘Electronic Literature: Context and Poetics’, in Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens (eds), Literary Studies in the Digital Age (MLA, 2013), (last accessed 24 June 2021). 13. George Yúdice, ‘Testimonio and Postmodernism’, in Gugelberger, The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, 44.

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Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.14 Both of these narratives exemplify Beverley’s notion of writing against literature and Yúdice’s definition of the genre; Menchú’s and Anzaldúa’s life stories are counternarratives to official history and to hegemonic academic discourse and the literary canon. In the case of Menchú, her testimonio blends her personal life story and the story of all Indigenous peoples suffering discrimination, persecution and violence in Guatemala. The empowering message of Menchú’s narrative of collective identity and human rights activism led to her Nobel Peace Prize award in 1992.15 Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera, now a classic text in many Latinx, English and women’s studies courses in the United States, is what she calls an ‘autohistoria’ or self-story, a hybrid genre of mixed media that includes personal narrative, testimonio, factual accounts, short story and poetry. Although these two narratives differ from each other, both address gender, identity, race, sexuality and colonialism from their particular Indigenous and Chicana/Latina experiences and perspectives. The life stories of Menchú and Anzaldúa give meaning to testimonio as a genre committed to the advancement of disenfranchised, colonised and oppressed voices. Similar to these texts by Menchú and Anzaldúa, contemporary non-fiction narratives that speak from the perspectives of documented and undocumented immigrants in the United States belong to the genre of testimonio as they bring the marginalised into the centre or, in the words of Gregory Boyle in Tattoos on the Heart, as they have the intention of moving the reader ‘closer to the margins so that the margins themselves [can] be erased’.16 The non-fiction testimonial narratives discussed in this chapter share a strong commitment to solidarity by intellectuals on behalf of the subaltern and

14. Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. and introd. by Elizabeth Burgos Debray, trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1992); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). 15. In part because of its counter-hegemonic stance, Menchú’s testimonio was not free of controversy. In 1999, historian David Stroll questioned the veracity of some of Menchú’s accounts, accusing her of having lied about her past and, therefore, challenging the authenticity of her testimonio. Stroll’s charge generated a polarising debate in the academy on issues regarding testimonio, historical truth and the politics of memory. See Arturo Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 16. Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (New York: Free Press, 2010), 190.



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marginalised. These texts introduce the practice of intervention by exposing an urgent social issue that is then addressed in a dialogical relationship formed when the privileged and the less fortunate meet. These diverse narratives also share several common literary characteristics that solidify the textual arguments of the author and speaking subject. The characteristics include the function of the author as an agent of his/her community; the metonymic association of the author’s testimonio with his/her community’s collective voice; and the hybridity of literary forms within a testimonio to suit the author’s speech, world view and writing style. The foremost characteristic of testimonial narratives is their understanding of authorial function. Whereas in nineteenth-century autobiography, authority rests in the uniqueness of the author’s life over and above other characters or social groups, in testimonial narratives, including those written or told by immigrants, the single speaking subject or narrator holds authority without being separated or placed against or above other vulnerable, marginalised or oppressed individuals and social groups in the story.17 In testimonio, authorial function speaks directly to the author’s or speaking subject’s integrity and loyalty to community, two fundamental values that lead to moral self-awareness and vocational exploration. A second characteristic of testimonial narratives is the metonymic function of the witness’s voice. Following Yúdice’s notion of the narrating witness ‘as an agent (rather than as a representative) of a collective memory and identity’, in testimonial literature the witness’s use of the first-person ‘I’ has a double function: as ‘I’, speaking as the protagonist in the story, and as ‘I/We’, having the ability to stand for the collective experience of the community as a whole.18 Importantly, Elzbieta Sklodowska warns about the limits of a narrator’s range of memory: ‘[t]he discourse of a witness cannot be a reflection of his or her experience, but rather a refraction determined by the vicissitudes of memory, intention and ideology.’19 Even when a witness’s account between what is real and what is fiction could be questioned, the use of the personal and collective use of the I/We builds veracity and authenticity in the story.20 For example, when Jose Antonio

17. Beverley, Against Literature, 83. 18. Ibid. 83. 19. Elzbieta Sklodowska, ‘La forma testimonial y la novelística de Miguel Barnet’, Revista/Review Interamericana, 12.3 (1982), 379, in Beverley, Against Literature, 81–2 (his translation). 20. Beverley, Against Literature, 82.

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Vargas writes about his personal experience living as an undocumented journalist in the United States, he articulates an urgent call for immigration reform that would grant legal status to people like him and the thousands of undocumented children and young immigrants who know no other country yet continue to struggle to be fully welcomed in the US. Vargas’s urgent plea on behalf of all undocumented immigrants is at the heart of what Yúdice understands as testimonio. Testimonial literature is also characterised by its hybridity of genres and of dominant and marginal discourses, languages and cultural world views. The inclusion of various literary forms in testimonial literature constitute its ‘permeability’ as a genre committed to the political and social struggles of the marginalised told from a variety of contexts and human sensibilities.21 Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is a perfect example of this third characteristic. As a Chicana and lesbian cultural critic, Anzaldúa writes about growing up along the Texas–Mexico border being caught between two dominant cultures. Through the use of prose and poetry, and writing in English, Spanish, Spanglish and Nahuatl, she re-writes the history of the borderlands from the perspective of her community, with an emphasis on cultural and racial inclusivity. Textual hybridity is a useful technique, especially in texts where the circumstances in which they are written depend on the witness’s fragmented memory, intermittent mobility and diversity of cultures, languages and subject positions. As Laura Webb states in ‘Testimonio, the Assumption of Hybridity and the Issue of Genre’, the use of hybridity in these texts should be based on ‘the nature of the events themselves that compel authors to write’ about ‘events which are usually of a traumatic nature’.22 Having access to an ample range of literary and cultural forms of expression, the author and witness in a testimonio can share their stories in more personal and direct ways. The possibility of speaking one’s truth with suitable

21. Claudia Andrade Ecchio, ‘El testimonio: Arenas movedizas entre lo histórico y lo ficcional’, Revista Itsmo, 25/6 (2012/13), 8. 22. Laura Webb, ‘Testimonio, The Assumption of Hybridity and the Issue of Genre’, Studies in Testimony: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Works on Testimony, 2.1 (2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021). See par. 31. By including trauma, Webb acknowledges the importance of testimonios narrated by survivors of war and state-sponsored violence in Latin America, such as that narrated and experienced by Rigoberta Menchú.



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forms of expression makes testimonial narratives significant for vocational discernment as the author and witness reflect on their own lives and on the meaningful connections with the lives of others, and the reader finds inspiration from a life of responsibility and commitment under struggle.

Dear America: A Narrative of Unconditional Love and Transformation In Dear America, Vargas tells his personal and professional life story over the span of twenty-four years: from the day he immigrated to California from the Philippines to live with his maternal grandparents, to 2017, when, as an accomplished journalist, he joined the struggle for immigration policy reform. Like many narratives about undocumented migration, this memoir has a beginning and a middle, but no end. This is because a lack of access to legal residency status keeps most undocumented immigrants living in perpetual precarity. Vargas’s first words to the reader are these: ‘I do not know where I will be when you read this book.’23 This is how he introduces the reader to the precariousness shared by an estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States. The deep anxiety and vulnerability in Vargas’s opening words invite readers to engage in a meaningful conversation about what it means to be an American. In fact, the book’s title and structure – each chapter is written as a vignette – become an open letter ‘from a sender . . . with no return address to call home’.24 Dear America is Vargas’s journey of self-discovery, which includes his quest to answer two key vocational questions: ‘Who Am I?’ and ‘Whose am I?’25 Read intentionally from the perspective of vocational engagement, Vargas’s life story is a journey of human reconciliation and redemption that shines light on the selfless and gratuitous love from people in his life who intervened on his behalf. Through the

23. Vargas, Dear America, ix. 24. Janine Joseph, ‘What Happens After You Become “The Most Famous Undocumented Immigrant in America”’, review of Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (24 October 2018), (last accessed 24 June 2021). See par. 13. 25. Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass), 17.

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narrative, Vargas links three main features of his identity that he could not reconcile at first: his Filipino American grandparents, who kept his undocumented status from him for fear of his deportation; his desire to pass as an American while holding his undocumented status a secret; and his relationship with those he calls his ‘American family’, friends and mentors who helped guide and support him in his educational and professional aspirations. Vargas reconciles elements of his past and present life to redeem himself from the selfinflicted shame of being undocumented, thanks to the unconditional love manifested through the intervention of his teachers, mentors and friends. Such intervention ultimately helps him find his own calling as an advocate for immigration rights, yet the narrative still has no ending, as Vargas’s undocumented status remains unresolved. Before he could find his calling, Vargas first needed to figure out who he was as a Filipino, gay, undocumented teenager living in the United States. Understanding who he was turned out to be a slow and unnerving process over which he had little control. He writes, ‘Passing as an American was my way of exerting control over a life I had no control over . . . At the very least, I felt I had to control the kind of American I was going to be, what kind of cultural connections I was going to make, which led to what kind of mask I had to wear.’26 At first, Vargas thought that to be an American meant having to hide his Filipino cultural identity and connection to his family and community. But, similarly to what Anzaldúa discovered as a young Chicana growing up in the borderlands, Vargas realised that his future depended on blending cultures and on interweaving the parallel relationships he was forming with his Filipino grandparents at home and with his American teachers and mentors at school. In Dear America, the vignette ‘Strangers’ begins with this phrase: ‘There is no passing alone.’27 Reflecting on his life since his years in high school, Vargas realises that none of his accomplishments would have been possible without the support and generosity of strangers who became his lifelong friends and mentors. He declares, At every challenging, complicated and complicating juncture of my life – getting to college, getting a job, getting a driver’s license so I could have a valid proof of identification so I could get a job, keeping the job – a stranger who did not remain a stranger saved me.28

26. Vargas, Dear America, 55. 27. Ibid. 95. 28. Ibid. 95.



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Interventions are powerful connections that lead to human flourishing as they carry the potential to transcend the personal and become links in a chain of broader social transformation. The intervening relationships that Vargas formed in high school enabled him to see through the cultural divide that made him ‘wear a mask’ and pretend to be someone he wasn’t, and also empowered him to become a more self-confident and courageous young man. With the love and support of a group of dedicated friends and mentors, Vargas found the strength to transcend the limitations of his own undocumented status and to turn this into the broader power that drives his writing and advocacy for immigrants’ rights. There is an important difference between intervention and mentoring. Drawing on Sharon Daloz Parks’s work on mentoring, Cynthia A. Wells suggests that ‘a mentoring environment creates an institutional ethos that invites students into the work of vocational exploration and discernment’.29 There are instances when a mentor enhances the life of a young mentee by providing advice, encouragement and trust. But an intervention goes a step further because it involves a relationship in which the young person being served is usually experiencing a deep level of precarity and marginalisation. For Vargas, Mountain View High School was a place of intersection, of numerous encounters with people who saw his potential. His mentors provided Vargas with attention and affirmation, but they also offered him a safe space within his school and community based on unconditional love and protection for a young, undocumented student with limited family support. Dedicating time and resources, and creating spaces and opportunities for intervening relationships, lead teachers and mentors to live their vocations, but such acts also encourage marginalised and underrepresented students in these relationships to trust their teachers and mentors to explore vocation together.30 Specifically, Vargas’s narrative illustrates how intervention can provide a platform for increased agency and exploration of one’s purpose. Vargas’s vocational exploration emerges through significant actions by his high school English teacher and other school leaders who intervened or supported his development. They formed what Vargas calls a ‘bighearted community of strangers’.31 Vargas describes 29. Cynthia A. Wells, ‘Vocational Discernment as Things Fly Apart: Vocation and the Common Good’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 69. 30. Ibid. 71. 31. Vargas, Dear America, 60.

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the impact that his teachers’ actions had in his young life. For example, he writes about how Mrs Dewar, his English teacher, suggested he study journalism because, as she said, ‘You ask too many annoying questions.’32 The key idea here is that Mrs Dewar did not stop at the suggestion; she dedicated many hours of her time and created a space in her heart and classroom for Vargas. When Vargas asked why she thought he should study journalism, she replied, ‘It is for annoying people like you who love to ask questions.’33 Here is where their intervening relationship started. For Vargas, this meant that he could trust in someone outside of his family who paid attention to his skills and potential. His relationship with Mrs Dewar continued to grow over time as she encouraged him to write for the school paper, attend a journalism summer camp and study journalism at San Francisco State University. By sharing these kinds of stories in his testimonial narrative, Vargas recognises his teachers’ and mentors’ dedication and invites readers to examine their own lives and learn from these examples of intervention. Vargas has had a successful journalism career which includes working at the Washington Post, where he and his team of journalists earned a Pulitzer Prize for covering the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, writing for various news magazines and appearing in the cover story for Time magazine in 2012. Of more significance, however, is how Vargas found meaning and purpose for his fragile life in journalism: [W]riting was a form of existing, existing through the people I interviewed and the words I wrote as I struggled with where my physical being was supposed to be. Writing was also a way of belonging, a way of contributing to society while doing a public service-oriented job that’s the antithesis of the stereotype that ‘illegals’ are here to take, take, take. I didn’t realize it then, but the more stories I reported on, the more people I interviewed, the more I realized that writing was the freest thing I could do, unencumbered by borders and legal documents and largely dependent on my skills and talents.34

Here, Vargas realises how writing becomes his life calling. He discovers that all his questions and anxieties about identity and belonging can be explored and voiced through his writing. In his testimonio, 32. Ibid. 57. 33. Ibid. 57. 34. Ibid. 58.

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Vargas declares himself ‘an agent of a collective memory and identity’ of all undocumented immigrants claiming their right to be free in this country. Another significant strain of personal discovery in Vargas’s narrative comes partly in response to his observance of young undocumented Americans marching at rallies chanting, ‘We’re undocumented, unafraid and unapologetic.’35 They were the ‘Dreamers’, undocumented teenagers who supported the DREAM Act legislation and who were fearlessly chronicling their personal stories of immigration through social media and other internet outlets. Their work motivated Vargas to come to terms with his own life: There comes a moment in each of our lives when we must confront the central truth in order for life to go on . . . I realized that I could no longer live with the easy answer. I could no longer live with my lies. Passing was no longer enough. Before I could write any more stories, I had to investigate my life.36

By examining his life, Vargas introduces the question of authenticity to the reader. This is important because so many of our students find themselves pretending to be who they are not while at the same time struggling to discern their callings. No doubt, they end up feeling discouraged as the two do not align. However, in his testimonial narrative, Vargas shows the reader that authenticity is best addressed by listening to our true selves in the contexts in which we live. This involves listening to our inner selves as well as to the people who are important to us and understanding the cultural, social, political and economic conditions that impact our lives. For Vargas and the Dreamers, becoming who they are involved forming a community and facing the truth about their shared undocumented immigration status. Young Dreamers have had a tremendous impact on Vargas’s personal as well as professional life. Thanks to the intervening power of many Dreamers who were also telling their personal stories, and against both his lawyers’ professional counsel and his grandparents’ trepidation, on 22 June 2011 Vargas published his essay ‘My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant’ in The New York Times Magazine. At the same time that his story came out, he launched the website Define

35. Ibid. 112. 36. Ibid. 112–13.

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American, an online platform dedicated to news media fact-checking and to collecting narratives of immigration, identity, race and citizenship in a changing America.37 A year after his immigrant coming-out story, Vargas approached the managing editor of Time magazine to pitch an idea for a follow-up story about the contradictions within the immigration reform debate. The editor decided to make this the cover story and to have Vargas and a group of Dreamers appear on the magazine cover. At that moment in his immigrant narrative, Vargas’s personal ‘I’ turns into a collective ‘I/We’ as he becomes an agent of his community’s identity struggle. Through the accompaniment and intervention of family, teachers, mentors, co-workers, friends and Dreamers in his life, Vargas discovered who he truly was and how, through journalism, he found purpose in asking ‘annoying questions’ against the upholders of the master narrative that denied undocumented immigrants their rights. Vargas found his vocation in the very idea that helps us define who we are as Americans: citizenship. He explains: Because I am not a citizen by law or by birth, I’ve had to create and hold on to a different kind of citizenship . . . what I call citizenship of participation. Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience.38

Vargas resignifies the meaning of citizenship from a right to which he and other undocumented Americans have no legal access, to the driving force that sets their work in motion and gives meaning to their lives. This testimonial narrative reminds us that vocation is capacious as Vargas learns to explore it through his loyalty and solidarity with the undocumented immigrant community.

Tell Me How It Ends: A Testimonial Essay of Anger and Clarity Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends offers an opposite perspective of the immigration experience to Vargas’s Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. Vargas’s is a story of social mobility without the certainty of legal immigration status; Luiselli’s is a narrative

37. See (last accessed 24 June 2021). 38. Vargas, 199–200.

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about the legal process for unaccompanied refugee minors without the promise of social stability. Luiselli’s text registers the testimonies of unaccompanied immigrant children who flee a life of violence and abandonment in Central America only to find themselves living in similar conditions of precariousness in the United States. She shows how immigrant children and teenagers, especially those who migrate from Central America’s Northern Triangle – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – are threatened by family separation, gang violence, poverty and loneliness. More than migrating, the intense violence that the children face forces them to flee: ‘It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.’39 Luiselli’s anger and frustration responds to a dehumanising immigration system and the lack of a social safety net for refugee children. The text provides a clear record of how anger can transform into a collective commitment to the struggle for immigrant rights. Written in essay form, Tell Me How It Ends is a hybrid testimonial narrative that pieces together the fragmented voices of children as young as five and six years of age who were asked to relive many traumatic memories and moments from their treacherous journeys that they would rather have forgotten. Luiselli mixes memoir, chronicle, testimonio, history, statistics, questionnaire, poetry, music lyrics and images as she records the missing stories and broken lives of the unaccompanied children she interviewed in immigration court. Her writing carries a strong sense of urgency to inform readers about how the current immigration crisis brings out the best and worst in humanity. She writes critically against the master narrative that blinds us from taking responsibility for the lives of the Other. She persuades the reader to think about the immigration crisis not just as a Central American problem but one that has ‘hemispheric proportions and historical roots’ involving the history of US consumer habits and addictions, economic expansionism and foreign policy in Central America.40 Despite being caught in the midst of frustration and hopelessness, Luiselli emphasises the clarity of hope through the possibility of intervention. She states, Because – how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so

39. Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 12–13. 40. Ibid. 45.

188   Esteban E. Loustaunau we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about that.41

At the heart of Tell Me How It Ends lies ‘anger and clarity’ – anger at the tremendous suffering that unaccompanied children experience and clarity that comes from reflecting and taking action on this issue. The will to intervene in the lives of the dispossessed is one way to answer the call ‘to do something about’ their hopelessness. Luiselli weaves together the fragmented stories collected from refugee minors, two of which are excellent examples of intervention. The first story involves Luiselli and two unaccompanied refugee girls from Guatemala; the second is about a group of student activists at Hofstra University who found purpose through community engagement and activism. As in Vargas’s narrative, in these two stories, intervention appears as an action motivated by love and solidarity with the marginalised. In the first story, Luiselli tells the migration experience of two girls from Guatemala whom she interviewed at the federal immigration court in New York. The two girls are sisters who were five and seven years old at the time of the interview and had a difficult time remembering the details of their journey. To record the information requested by the girls’ lawyers, Luiselli had to ask for special permission from court officials to allow their mother to join the interview and speak on behalf of the girls. Prior to the mother’s testimonio, the girls’ story had no beginning, middle or end. The mother then told Luiselli that she had immigrated to Long Island three years before to seek work, leaving the girls in the care of their grandmother. After saving enough money to pay for a coyote to bring the girls across the US–Mexico border, the girls were found by a Border Patrol officer and taken to ‘la hielera’ or ‘the icebox’, the name immigrants use for the Customs and Border Protection detention centres. Luiselli learned that before handing the girls to the coyote, their grandmother had sewed their mother’s ten-digit telephone number on the girls’ dresses, thus allowing the girls to be identified by the Border Patrol and reunited with their mother in Long Island. This story would not have been recorded if it weren’t for Luiselli’s insistence to court officials to break protocol and allow the mother of asylumseeking minors to speak on their behalf. Although her role as an

41. Ibid. 24.



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immigration court interpreter only placed Luiselli as responsible for interviewing immigrants and filling out a questionnaire, she took an active role as an advocate for the right of the girls to have their story properly told and recorded. Thus, Luiselli helped create a safe space for an undocumented mother to speak on behalf of her daughters. This testimonial narrative reveals Luiselli’s answer to the call to be an immigration advocate in a double act of courage with the girls’ mother. In this story, the reader sees the enactment of vocation as an intervention that led to collective action. Speaking as a collective ‘I/We’ subject of history, these women’s voices challenge the normative discourse that assigns immigrants identities of powerlessness and victimhood. Here we have a savvy and skilled grandmother who sews a telephone number on her granddaughters’ dresses so that they can locate their mother, and who reminds them never to take off their dresses as a way to protect their small bodies on a long, dangerous and uncertain journey. The mother’s testimonio is also important because it makes the reader realise the tremendous risk and sacrifice an immigrant family has to endure. It helps the reader to see the love and care that a grandmother and a mother share for their two girls. This narrative runs against the current of a normative discourse on motherhood that thinks less of undocumented mothers who, to provide food and clothing for their children, are forced to leave them behind and to travel long distances to find work.42 By including this story in her testimonial narrative, Luiselli shines light into new subjectivities of immigrant motherhood and community advocacy. A second story of intervention in Tell Me How It Ends is closely related to Luiselli’s role as a college professor. In Fall 2015, Luiselli taught an advanced Spanish conversation course at Hofstra University, which is located in Hempstead, New York, an area of Long Island where several of the unaccompanied children that Luiselli interviewed live. Over the course of the semester, Luiselli and her students discussed the pressing issue of undocumented immigration and decided to redesign their class as an ‘immigration think tank’ rather than calling it ‘Spanish Conversation’. They invited various guest speakers – immigration lawyers, activists, social workers, political

42. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, ‘“I’m Here, but I’m There”: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood’, in Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella (eds), Women and Migration in The U.S.–Mexico Borderlands: A Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 393.

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scientists – to enhance and inform their discussions. The course took a turn when Luiselli’s students announced that they were done being ‘voluntourists’ in their college town. They declared that they were ready ‘to do something that matter[ed]’.43 The courageous students at Hofstra organised themselves to engage in what Darby Kathleen Ray calls ‘world work’, a way to ‘understand and transform the systems of thought and practice that contest and undermine the world’s goodness and integrity’.44 Bringing nuance to Frederick Buechner’s definition of vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet’, Ray highlights the ‘thoroughgoing reciprocity’ between self and world, and reminds us that ‘not only the world, the “other”, [is] deeply needful, but the self as well’.45 Luiselli’s students recalled advice from Nimmi Gowrinathan, a political science professor who had previously visited the class, who emphasised ‘that the most important thing’ in political activism ‘was to know how to transform emotional capital – the rage, sadness and frustration produced by certain social circumstances – into political capital’.46 Aware of the limitations of social services available in Hempstead, Luiselli’s students formed the organisation TIIA, a play on words with tía, Spanish for ‘aunt’, that stands for Teenage Immigrant Integration Association.47 Since Spring 2016, TIIA builds mentor–mentee relationships with refugee children and teenagers living in the area, providing services such as intensive English classes, college preparation workshops, sports activities, a radio programme and discussion groups on civil rights and responsibilities.48 TIIA came about under an uncertain local and national context that included the stigma that many new arriving immigrants and refugees suffered, poorly funded public schools and limited local social services, and the election of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. By interacting with and meeting the needs of Central American refugee minors and their families in Hempstead, the TIIA students responded to a local call

43. Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 94. 44. Darby Kathleen Ray, ‘Self, World and the Space in Between: Community Engagement as Vocational Discernment’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 301. 45. Ibid. 301. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 95. 46. Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 94. 47. See (last accessed 24 June 2021). 48. Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 95–6.



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for social justice to live out a story of intervention in partnership with young immigrants and their families. This story exemplifies how a flexible and critical approach to teaching can provide students with the necessary openness and freedom to engage with vocational discernment. In his epilogue to At This Time and In This Place, David S. Cunningham identifies ‘community’ and ‘provisionality’ among the themes that best articulate the relationship between vocation and pedagogy. In terms of Luiselli’s pedagogical approach to meaning and purpose, we might look to Cunningham’s framing of how the classroom space can be one of those communities of belonging and participation where students ‘can find themselves immersed in the same, or similar, narrative worlds’.49 Immersing themselves in the narrative world of a testimonio as part of a course curriculum can challenge and motivate faculty and students to seek collective opportunities of outreach and service in their local communities. Furthermore, provisionality suggests we approach vocational discernment with a kind of humility and reservation needed to appreciate the process rather than the destinations of our life journeys.50 Luiselli’s class reflects this disposition. Similar to the flexibility exhibited by immigrants and refugees, Luiselli approaches teaching while knowing that intellectual formation is ‘never complete, never encapsulated, in a single moment’.51 This testimonial narrative invites the reader to engage with vocational exploration as an ongoing, open dialogue between faculty, students and the community at large.

The Possibility of Intervention The two non-fiction immigrant narratives examined in this chapter are grounded in the tradition of testimonio as they seek to include undocumented immigrants as subjects of history. An important feature of these narratives is the practice of intervention that aims to tie together relationships of mentoring, community and solidarity with the Other. Exposing students to non-fiction immigrant narratives

49. David S. Cunningham, ‘Epilogue: In Various Times and Sundry Places: Pedagogies of Vocation/Vocation as Pedagogy’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 327. 50. Ibid. 328. 51. Ibid. 328.

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interpreted through the lens of intervention serves to inspire them to seek their vocation in community with the dispossessed and marginalised. At the same time, reading these narratives can encourage students who may be facing anger and distress from the injustice in the world to imagine ways to turn their frustration into clear-sighted possibilities for vocational discernment. Dear America and Tell Me How It Ends provide readers with two different examples of the way intervention relates to mentoring and forming relationships with the Other. Dear America shows how an educated and professionally successful young man could still struggle to find freedom in this country because of his undocumented status. Some of Vargas’s relationships with teachers and colleagues may have started as mentoring opportunities, but his undocumented status, with no legal right to be who and where he was, turned these opportunities into interventions and moments of advocacy on his behalf by teachers, mentors and friends. As part of a reciprocal process, Vargas found his calling by utilising his journalism skills to advocate on behalf of other undocumented immigrants like him. Intervention led Vargas to find vocation with courage. Tell Me How It Ends focuses on a different immigration experience, one of unaccompanied refugee minors forced to flee from their countries to search for a lost parent or a new home in the United States. The terrifying stories these children told Luiselli were so difficult to explain that instead of finding inspiration, she felt a combination of anger and clarity. Part of Luiselli’s anger came from knowing that the immigration crisis has not been a priority for the United States and for most Americans. Clarity came in realising that something could be done about it. Similar to Vargas, Luiselli found in writing her calling to advocate on behalf of unaccompanied refugee minors. The immigrant advocacy services under TIIA that Luiselli’s students started in Hempstead was another example of intervention, of serving in solidarity with the marginalised and the dispossessed. Reading non-fiction testimonial narratives of undocumented immigration can raise awareness of the possibility of intervention and can affirm the power of action and love that are vital in the process of vocational discernment. Vargas’s and Luiselli’s narratives show how reading stories of intervention can encourage students to find meaning and purpose beyond themselves. These narratives speak about the revealing possibilities that appear through intervention and lead to proximity to the marginalised, a closer move towards creating spaces of human solidarity and hope.

Chapter 9

Translating Vocation Jeremy Paden

The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life.1

Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a novel about how the self relates to society and also a novel about literature. The hero is a precocious reader whose particular form of madness is trying to live out the ideals of chivalric romances in a world far removed from those codes of behaviour. To adapt Eliot Weinberger’s pithy formulation, Quixote is a reader who has translated what he has read into his ‘intellectual and emotional life’. Quixote’s translation, however, is problematic. Among other things, he interprets these stories of giants and wizards so literally that he misinterprets the world he sees. Scholars have long classified Quixote’s madness as loco/cuerdo, a foolish wisdom or an insane sanity, one whose madness serves as a foil to society.2 To build his novel, Cervantes not only satirises heroic romances but also incorporates multiple genres in vogue at the time, from poetry to drama to picaresque novels. Nearly every character is a storyteller, and many important moments take place while stories are being told or read. Numerous characters even criticise the literature they read and share. At the birth of the modern novel, Cervantes presents two vignettes that address the significance of literature, vocation and the value

  1. Eliot Weinberger, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated (New York: New Directions, 1987), 43.   2. For a recent example with a good bibliography on madness in the Quixote, see Antonia Preto, ‘La locura del mundo que amenza al Quijote’, Hispanic Journal, 24.1/2 (Spring and Fall 2003), 23–39.

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of translation. One such moment of early modern literary criticism happens when Quixote meets a man named Don Diego de Miranda, whose son would rather study poetry than something useful, like law. Don Diego is mystified that his son wants to spend his days figuring out how to translate the meaning of particular words in Homer or Virgil. He believes this is a distraction from the real world. Quixote defends the study of literature as a mode of knowing that brings the student into all forms of knowledge. A second instance occurs when Quixote walks into a printer’s shop and talks to a literary translator about translation. As they converse, the knight errant claims that reading translations is like looking at the backside of a Flemish tapestry. Translation is a useful endeavour, Quixote says, but he believes it to be a poor substitute when compared to the original. For these exchanges to serve as a guide for us today, we must remember that they are conversations within a polyphonic novel between interlocutors and a knight errant who is as crazy as he is wise. Don Quixote is dialogic, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s language, which is to say it understands that ‘truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for the truth’.3 Answers are to be tested in and through conversation with others. Translation comes from the Latin translatio, which is the verbal noun form of transfero. Both the abstract noun and the verb mean to carry across or to carry beyond. The practice of carrying words across language barriers involves the ability to recognise and respect difference. Translation, writes Willis Barnstone in his acrostic essay ‘An ABC of Translating Poetry’, is an ‘ART of revelation . . . [that exists] BETWEEN tongues . . . and acquires difference [since] the words and grammar of each language differ from every other language.’4 Barnstone uses the term ‘poetics’ to name the art of translation because poetics contains ‘the notion of both art and method’.5 Translation, he notes, ‘dwells in imperfection’ and shuns ‘mechanical replicas’.6 To presume, then, that translation can be done with literal faithfulness is a madness as mad as Quixote’s. But even mad

 3. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Doestoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 110.   4. Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (New Haven: Yale, 1993), 273.   5. Ibid. 7.   6. Ibid. 265.

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Quixote left all amazed by his wisdom and insight. Barnstone describes translation as ‘a voyage . . . across the sea of fidelity or the sea of license’.7 Vocation is also a voyage, one where individuals move inwards in order to move outwards. Parker J. Palmer calls it a ‘transformative journey’.8 Vocation, as the recent literature on the concept argues, is more than finding a career. Instead, it has to do with coming into a self-understanding that recognises how one’s own gifts and interests coalesce with the needs of the world. The literary arts, as this volume of essays proposes, are a unique site that lets us explore and come to understand who we are and what the world is and needs. Translation provides its own distinct journey characterised by encounters with difference, specifically with the linguistic, grammatical and cultural differences between languages. When reading literature in translation with an eye towards the kinds of decisions a translator makes, we learn to listen to the multiplicity of choices available when translating, to see how choices have downstream consequences and to understand that understanding has limits.

Translation: A Brief History In chapters five and six of Book 1 of Don Quixote, the priest and the barber of Quixote’s unnamed town cleanse the knight’s personal library of books. Not counting the prologue, this burning of his chivalric romances is the first site of literary criticism in the novel. As they rifle through his library and toss books on the fire, they discuss the merits of each author. When the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto comes up, the priest states that the book can stay if it is in Italian, but not if translated. Translation comes up again in chapter nine of Book 1 when the narrator stumbles upon the manuscript of Don Quixote in Arabic and asks a local Moor to translate the story for him. While translation is presented as part of the novel’s origin and is present in the first discussion about literature, no extended exposition on translation happens until near the end of Book 2 when the hero and his squire wander into a printing house in Barcelona. Quixote, more of a reader than a fighter, enters so that he can witness the magic of book-making. Inside,

  7. Ibid. 269.  8. Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2000), 17–18.

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he finds the typesetter preparing a book translated from the Italian. The translator, who is also paying for the printing of the book, is there to oversee matters, and they engage in an exchange about the meaning of various Italian words. As they talk, Quixote says that translating ‘is rather like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side, because even though you can make out the figures, they’re partially hidden behind this thread and that thread’.9 Quixote believes that translation, except from the queen languages of Latin or Greek, obscures the meanings of words, as the reader experiences neither the wit nor the eloquence of the original text. While the tapestry metaphor was common within early modern discussions of translation, Quixote takes it and spins it in such a way that by the twentieth century, critics consistently take it to be an example of ‘a mad knight with some perfectly sane doubts about the limits of translation’.10 Kathryn Vomero Santos recontextualises this metaphor by focusing on the art of tapestry and on how early modern literary culture used tapestry as a metaphor for both writing and translating. She argues that the metaphor is not a censorious comparison between the back and the front, but one that highlights the process ‘and often provides access to the inner workings of language itself’.11 While modern critics have largely taken the doubt expressed by Quixote at face value, according to Hugo Friedrich this doubt would have been an opinion held by a minority of literate individuals.12 The poet and translator John Dryden held the majority opinion. Although Dryden never developed an explicit theory of translation, he did explain and defend his art in various prefaces. At this time, translation was central to schooling within the liberal arts, and most literate men would have learned grammar and rhetoric by translating from the Latin and Greek. In the preface to his 1680 translation of Horace’s Epistles, Dryden notes that metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation make up the three modes of translation. Literal translation,

  9. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Raffel Burton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 694. 10. Katheryn Vomero Santos, ‘The knots within: Translation, Tapestries, and the Art of Reading Backwards’, Philological Quarterly, 95.3/4 (2016), 344. 11. Ibid. 352. 12. Hugo Friedrich, ‘On the Art of Translation’, trans. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, in Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 14.



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or metaphrase, is a pedantic and blind method that renders the text word by word and line by line. Imitation sits at the other extreme and takes only general hints from the author and ‘assumes the liberty’ to wander away from the author’s words and sense. Dryden advocates for paraphrase, the middle path: ‘translation with latitude’, keeping the author in view even if ‘his words are not so strictly followed as his sense’. With paraphrase, the translator might amplify but not alter the original.13 In his preface to Sylvae (1685), we see just how much latitude he affords the paraphraser. Dryden asserts that his changes to the Greek and Latin for the sake of their beauty are such that were those poets living Englishmen, they probably would have expressed themselves as he had rendered them.14 This enrichment of the original through translation, as Friedrich notes, was the more commonly accepted position up until the late eighteenth century. It traces back to Quintilian and Pliny.15 This commonly held Renaissance understanding began to change in the middle of the eighteenth century when a new awareness of linguistic difference coupled with the problem of untranslatability began to take hold, and writers began to discuss translation in a systematic way. According to Friedrich, this heightened respect towards linguistic difference and authorial style first led to a sense that the best translations were approximations and none was adequate, ‘for the spirit of the original source-language text seemed to make all attempts at translation illusory’.16 Quixote could almost have expressed this Romantic distrust of capturing the spirit of the original. In fact, a respect for the original lies at the heart of Quixote’s criticism. When he exclaims, ‘translation from easy languages requires neither wit nor eloquence’, and then compares translation to a simple transcription of another document, Quixote is defending the original form of expression and the originality of the author.17 Wit, in this case, is a stylistic marker that shows the author’s command of language. In the eighteenth century, as Friedrich notes, attention to the difficulty of rendering authorial style in translation ushered an initial attitude of distrust. This did not last long, though, and ‘the respect for the foreign’ that caused this despair ‘was followed by the

13. John Dryden, ‘On Translation’, in Schulte and Biguent, Theories of Translation, 17. 14. Ibid. 23. 15. Friedrich, ‘On the Art’, 13. 16. Ibid. 15. 17. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 694.

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courage to move toward the foreign’ in ways that tried to translate the stylistic nuances of the original.18 Modern approaches to the art of translation that pay attention to the differences between languages and authorial style begin here. In the opening chapter of Composing a Life, Mary Catherine Bateson argues that a life, like music or literature, can be composed. Bateson focuses on the art of improvisation and collage, mentioning jazz and Arabic poetry, for which practitioners rely on imitation and memorisation to learn the craft and later employ improvisation as a way to make a song or a poem their own. Rather than imitating biographies, structured as quest narratives, she proposes that the ‘knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way, may be a better model for our times than the knight who is questing for the Grail’.19 Bateson’s use of imitation and improvisation is analogous to Dryden’s metaphrase and imitation. Translation as a metaphor for thinking about how to compose a life helps bring into relief how one relates to one’s life models. It also stresses choice and responsibility within the context of fidelity to the model, and it can reveal how decisions, like the decision to use rhyme, can limit and constrain future decisions. Translation, though, is more than just a metaphor to think about vocation. It also a way to think about understanding.

Translation as Understanding ‘When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate,’ asserts Octavio Paz in his 1971 essay entitled ‘Translation: Literature and Letters’.20 Paz’s opening paragraph presents a mother teaching a child new words by connecting them to words already known. This rendering of the unfamiliar into simple language understood by the child is a form of translation. For Paz there is essentially no difference between ‘translation within the same language’ and ‘translation between two tongues’.21 In both cases, the unknown and the unfamiliar are made accessible and understandable by connecting them with words that are familiar. In this sense, translation (the carrying over of meaning),

18. Friedrich, ‘On the Art’, 15. 19. Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 10. 20. Octavio Paz, ‘Translation: Literature and Letters’, trans. Irene del Corral, in Schulte and Biguent, Theories of Translation, 152. 21. Ibid. 152.



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hermeneutics (the study of interpretation) and epistemology (the study of how we know what we know) are related to one another. The act of translation is part of the process of coming into knowledge of the world and of texts. Paz is not alone in thinking that translation and communication are related, if not synonymous. George Steiner, in his classic and comprehensive After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, writes that ‘translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.’22 For Steiner, all modes of communication, whether ‘acts of speech, of writing, of pictorial encoding in any given language’, share in ‘the essential structure and executive means and problems of the act of translation’.23 Translation between languages is simply ‘a particular application of a configuration and model fundamental to human speech even where it is monoglot’.24 Paz and Steiner see language as a system of symbols we learn to understand and manipulate as we translate. This conception of understanding as a mode of translation owes much to the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. In his magnum opus, Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer presents translation as a limit case of hermeneutical difficulty: ‘language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs’, he states, and ‘all understanding is interpretation’.25 In an essay published ten years after Truth and Method and included as a supplement to most English translations of the work, Gadamer makes the connection between understanding and translation even more explicit. He writes, ‘Reading is already translation, and translation is translation for the second time . . . The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.’26 Gadamer portrays human understanding, which is interpretation and translation, as a conversation that leads to a ‘fusion of horizons’.27

22. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), xii. 23. Ibid. xii. 24. Ibid. xii. 25. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2003), 389. 26. I quote from a different translation of this passage, mainly because Marshall’s rendering of it is so interpretive that it obscures the connection between reading and translation. See Schulte and Biguent, Theories of Translation, 9. 27. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 388.

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Thus, Gadamer lays a foundation for Paz and Steiner, as well as for Weinberger’s formulation of reading as bringing ‘translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life’. Though Paz believes that translation brings about understanding by making the unfamiliar familiar, he also asserts that translation in the modern age is ‘a vehicle’ that exposes our ‘individualities . . . [and the] irreconcilability of differences’.28 Anthropology and linguistics highlight the differences between languages and cultures; in their incipient form, these modern disciplines ushered in the doubt about which Friedrich wrote. For Paz, through translation ‘we become aware that our neighbors do not speak and think as we do’.29 Even Gadamer, who stresses conversation and reciprocity, notes that the translation of foreign languages presents an ‘extreme case of hermeneutical difficulty’. At one point, he describes translation as an encounter with ‘alienness and its conquest’.30 This bellicose metaphor shows a connection between Paz and Gadamer. At the heart of translation, which is also the heart of hermeneutics, is an encounter with otherness and difference. As Paz’s example of the mother and child reminds us, translation occurs even within the familiar. For Gadamer, the difficulties presented by translation exemplify the difficulties of achieving understanding. Yet, he believes these difficulties can be overcome. Paz, who is more interested in translation than the nature of understanding, sees one of translation’s values in the fact that it reveals human difference and irreconcilability. For the purposes of my argument, I want to stress the importance of a hermeneutics of difference within the context of vocation. To approach vocation through the lens of translation, to think about vocation through difference and choice, can be transformational. Here, my position echoes that of Lawrence Venuti, who believes that ‘the translator seeks to build a community with foreign cultures’. This work ‘to share an understanding’ with otherness and ‘to collaborate on projects founded on that understanding’ will, Venuti hopes, ‘allow [said understanding] to revise and develop domestic values and institutions’.31 Though translation might bring us face to face with radical difference, this encounter can lead to a transformation of the self and the world (or at least the new, local, imagined community

28. Ibid. 153. 29. Ibid. 154. 30. Ibid. 387. 31. Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (London: Routedge, 2000), 469.



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of readers who share in the reading of that translation). This potential transformation comes about because translations, even as they inscribe domestic values and beliefs into the translated text, carry over difference and foreignness. Like Quixote, foreignness can serve as a foil to help better articulate oneself and what one believes. An encounter with foreignness can even move one to redefine oneself.

Vocation as a Term in Need of Translation Whether secular or religious, blue-collar or white-collar, the ways in which different communities use the term ‘vocation’, if at all, present an occasion to confront linguistic barriers and work towards a more nuanced understanding of vocation. Finding a way to make the concept available and applicable across the academy is an important act of translation. Yet, to examine vocation through the lens of translation also means recognising irreconcilability and the limits and failure of understanding. Institutionally, translating vocation provides a lingua franca for the various constituents of an academic community with which to reflect on purposeful living and to link academic disciplines to the needs of the world. It also helps parents and students understand the value of a liberal education, which can become a lifelong resource that grounds students and alumni in practices of self-reflection. In Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life, theologian Douglas Schuurman notes the difficulty of using a term like ‘vocation’ as common coin. The term divides and subdivides between secular and religious, between ‘public service’ or work that involves ‘higher pay or status’.32 Given the many definitions, Schuurman positions the word in Reformed Christian theology so as ‘to recover the power of vocation to infuse all of life with religious meaning and extend its range into all relational fields’.33 In ‘Meaningful Lives, Religious Pluralism, and the Case of the Bodhisattva’, Barbara Reed notes that Buddhism does not possess the concept of vocation, but that it does speak of ‘right livelihood’.34 While the terms share some overlap, the

32. Douglas Schuurman, Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 1. 33. Ibid. 4. 34. Barbara Reed, ‘Meaningful Lives, Religious Pluralism, and the Case of the Bodhisattva’, in Kaethe Schwehn and L. DeAne Lagerquist (eds), Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 96.

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way these traditions conceive of the self and of society is different enough that they cannot be brought into consonance. This does not mean that an encounter with different religious traditions might not be useful. It functions as a foil. According to Reed, the study of ‘an unfamiliar tradition encourages students to articulate more clearly the basis of their own values and to consider the ways by which they can interact with those of another tradition’.35 While literature grounds vocation differently than religion, Reed’s conception of the usefulness of encountering an unfamiliar religious tradition is similar to how literature works. Specifically, literature presents competing values and asks readers to be active conversation partners. Translation, for its part, heightens the multivocal and dialogic nature of literature by bringing attention to the ideas that words have multiple translations, that literal translations are never literal, and that fidelity to form often competes with fidelity to content. Yet, in the face of these difficulties, we translate. To approach vocation through translation, beyond the metaphor of composition, means paying attention to the limits of one’s tradition and attending to the multiple historical uses of the word. Two celebrated American educators illustrate this varied history. Mike Rose, who writes about the intelligence of blue-collar workers in books like Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared and The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, uses the term ‘vocation’ in the context and history of blue-collar America. Rose draws from the semantic shift that ‘vocation’ underwent in the wake of the Vocational Guidance Movement at the end of the nineteenth century, employing the adjectival form where it modifies training or career. Here, vocational training names the kind of schooling that prepares students for manual labour, not for a life of the mind. Rose notes how the divide in American schooling between academic and vocational preparation has often been used to separate the seemingly intelligent from the seemingly unintelligent. Alternatively, Parker J. Palmer defines the noun ‘vocation’ in Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation as a listening to life. For Palmer, it is a deep, contemplative listening that does not impose a pattern on life, but one that lets life guide the listener into an answer. He notes that he first learned of vocation through religious experience, where he understood it to be an external call, a moral demand to become

35. Ibid. 95.



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someone different and better. Now, he understands it as a call from within, ‘to be the person I was born to be’.36 Palmer’s use of vocation tracks more closely with the current academic reconceptualisation of it than Rose’s. Yet, by reframing blue-collar work as work that demands a full engagement of human intelligence, Rose helps provide models that force us to redefine vocation away from white-collar careers. As Rose reflects on his mother’s work as a waitress in The Mind at Work and the economic and social freedom it helped provide her, he admits to being struck by ‘the intelligence manifest in making choices within constraint [and] by the way we try to shape our lives and gain a little control by the work we do’.37 Though he uses the term differently than Palmer, his focus on intelligence and ‘choice within constraint’ and on the shaping of a life is deeply vocational, should one understand vocation as connected to life purpose. His books help translate important forms of work considered by some in our culture to be less meaningful, and they show how the fashioning of a rich life is not dependent on a career, but on curiosity, intelligence and service to others. William Sullivan, in Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose, provides another translation of vocation. His translation is within the context of the current academic reconsideration of vocation as an approach that asks students to examine the relationship between learning and the meaning of life.38 ‘The pedagogical problem of the age’, Sullivan believes, is how to ‘foster leaders and citizens for whom the challenge of avoiding [global] catastrophe and forging a new level of global solidarity is a matter of real, daily concern’.39 The solution lies in a vocationally grounded humanistic enquiry that helps develop ‘moral empathy and imagination’ and ‘an ethic of responsibility’.40 For Sullivan, we must open up the curriculum and the canon to classic texts from across the globe, not, however, ‘with a triumphant vision of future progress, but with a call for a new level of responsibility, [one that] demands collective self-scrutiny and willingness to change’.41

36. Palmer, Let Your Life, 10. 37. Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (New York: Penguin, 2004), 30. 38. William Sullivan, Liberal Learning as a Quest of Purpose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2. 39. Ibid. 150. 40. Ibid. 150. 41. Ibid. 150.

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Though Sullivan does not use the term ‘translation’, his vision of a vocationally grounded liberal education enriched through an expansion to other traditions and an inclusion of these different voices in how one shapes one’s moral imagination picks up Weinberger’s formulation of reading as a kind of translation that transforms the intellect and emotions. Furthermore, this moves in the direction of Venuti’s utopian community founded on the transformative possibilities of translation through an encounter with difference.

Translating the Value of Literature It is perhaps more difficult to grasp the need for translation when dealing with historically remote periods than it is when encountering different languages and cultures. Yet, time is another form of difference that needs translation. While the past might house potential lessons to help us think about who we are, we can lose the thread of meaning in the labyrinth of time. There can also be the happy shock of recognition when we see a familiar drama unfold that can serve as a mirror or foil for our thought. Early in Book 2 of Don Quixote, the hero and his squire cross paths with Don Diego de Miranda, or the Knight of the Green Coat. Don Diego presents a life so exemplary that Sancho Panza interrupts his list of good deeds to kiss his boots, for surely Don Diego must be a saint. This living embodiment of the ideal Christian knight has a problem, however. Don Lorenzo, his eighteen-year-old son, who has been studying Latin and Greek in Salamanca for six years, would rather study poetry than law or theology. The father complains that his son is ‘so steeped in the knowledge of poetry (if one can call that truly any sort of knowledge at all)’ that he wants nothing else but ‘to find out if Homer was correct in this or that verse of the Iliad’. All Don Diego has wanted is for his son ‘to be an honor to his family, for we live in an age when our kings proffer rich rewards to virtuous, well-deserving knowledge’. Yet, he is currently ‘lost in the construction of a poem’ the father suspects to be ‘for some literary competition’.42 For Don Diego, literature is purely didactic. Its purpose is to teach literacy so students can study weightier and more practical matters. Quixote admonishes that parents should not force their children to study the discipline they think useful, but should let

42. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 440.



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their children choose their own way, and he reminds Don Diego that literature is a worthy discipline in its own right as it touches on all forms of knowledge. Don Lorenzo was sent to university to prepare for life, not to squander it on a trifle like poetry. In the early seventeenth century, a university education meant something specific to families of means. The University of Salamanca, founded in the twelfth century and given a royal charter in the thirteenth, is one of the oldest European universities still in operation and was the pre-eminent school on the peninsula at that time. In the late fifteenth century, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand restructured the Spanish government and made it highly dependent upon university-trained specialists.43 Sons would be sent to Salamanca to study the trivium and the quadrivium and to move further up into the study of law or theology. Luis Enrique Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezar notes that Salamanca was known for combining law, Thomist theology, the new logic, and classical languages, which would then be applied to practical concerns like the nature of power and justice within the European and American contexts, Just War theory, economics and other such matters related to Spanish imperial governance.44 Someone like Don Lorenzo, before inheriting the family estate, would have had three options: the study of law, the study of theology, or military service. All three paths were highly useful and practical to the empire and gave students something to study that would provide them with professions until they came into their inheritances. Despite the many changes between the early seventeenth century and now, students still go off to university to prepare for careers, and family expectations can still limit a student’s horizon by providing a limited set of narratives and by emphasising career so strongly that self-development is ignored. One way Palmer describes this limitation of horizon is as ‘wearing other people’s faces’.45 He encourages us, instead, to find our own ‘deep identity . . . the seed of authentic vocation’.46 Translations are,

43. For an account of these changes see Héctor H Gassó, ‘Los Reyes Católicos y la Universidad de Salamanca: la formación al servicio del ideal monárquico’, in Jesús Cañas Murillo, Fco Javier Grande Quejigo and José Roso Díaz (eds), Medievalismo en Extremadura: Estudios sobre Literatura y Cultura Hispánicas de la Edad Media (Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2009), 119–31. 44. Luis Enrique Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezar, ‘La universidad de Salamanca: Evolución y declive de un modelo clásico’, Studia histórica. Historia Moderna, IX (1991), 15. 45. Palmer, Let Your Life, 13. 46. Ibid. 9.

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almost by definition, the wearing of another’s face. We must read them in ways that peel back the layers of the mask. In the case of Don Diego, a reading that pays attention to translation can bring forward how the father’s concern is less about helping the son make his way through life and more about his wanting his son to pursue a highstatus career. In his lament over his son’s interest in poetry, immediately after noting that the king rewards ‘virtuous, well-deserving knowledge’, Don Diego states, ‘for knowledge without virtue is like pearls on a dungheap’.47 In his translation of the novel, Burton Raffel uses the term ‘knowledge’ where Cervantes wrote ‘letras’, ‘virtuosas y buenas letras’ and ‘letras sin virtud’.48 The context certainly allows for Raffel’s translation of ‘letras’ as knowledge, though he could have also translated it as ‘learning’, even literacy. ‘El camino de la letras’ – the path of letters – was often a metaphor for university education. Given how Don Diego has equated ‘virtuosas y buenas letras’ with royal recompense, it is quite probable that virtuous knowledge is a euphemism for the kind of training that would lead to a position within government. Indeed, near the end of Book 1 of Don Quixote, Juan Pérez de Viedma, a respected and well-to-do judge, ‘had taken the road of learning’ at his father’s insistence. Not only did he become wealthy, he was appointed a post in the Indies, ‘to serve on the High Court of Mexico’.49 This reading of ‘virtuosas y buenas letras’ as a euphemism for a career in government rather than as a site where students develop their moral imagination resonates with aspects of Don Diego’s character noted by many Cervantes scholars. While some take seriously his self-presentation as the embodiment of Erasmian wisdom and classical virtue, Charles D. Presberg sees him as a decadent caballero who lives out a self-serving type of virtue rather than true classical virtue.50 Though Quixote’s defence of Lorenzo and his choice to follow poetry centres on literature’s role within the context of a moral education, his defence would be considered overzealous by many early modern readers, as he places it in the spot normally reserved for theology. Quixote affirms that poetry is the discipline served by all other disciplines. For Presberg, Quixote’s defence, along with 47. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 440. 48. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1991), 648. 49. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 293. 50. Charles D. Presberg, ‘“Yo sé quién soy”: Don Quixote, Don Diego de Miranda and the Paradox of Self-Knowledge’, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 14.2 (Fall 1994), 48.

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his later consideration of knight errantry as a discipline that also comprises all forms of knowledge, means that neither knight is a model of virtue. Presberg posits that a close reading of the chapters that make up the Don Diego/Don Quixote exchange can lead to the understanding that ‘self-knowledge takes the form of an unfolding, social and dialogic enterprise’.51 The kinds of ‘encounters between the self and others, between text, reader, and life’ that these chapters present are not ‘an occasion for final certainty. Instead, they call for contemplation in the face of unfolding mystery, and for the attendant action of mutual self-creation and self-renewal.’52 These chapters present a series of conversations between a wise fool and a foolish wise man in which both demonstrate wisdom and poor judgement. In wise Don Diego, we see someone who values the study of poetry only as a way to perfect grammar and a father who is so preoccupied with his son’s choosing a high-status career that he cannot take joy in his son’s interests. It is mad Don Quixote who defends poetry as a way of knowing the world and who values Don Lorenzo’s literary interests. Their exchange, as Presberg argues, helps us see that we come into self-knowledge through dialogue and contemplation. These chapters serve, then, as a model or a foil. As demonstrated in the reading of ‘virtuosas y buenas letras’, when we peel back the translation we come into a more nuanced understanding of the exchange.

Translation as Transformative The thrust of this essay is that translation is a mode of reading that pays attention to difference and foreignness, even to the point of noting the limits of understanding, and that this mode of reading allows for an encounter with difference that is transformative. While the kind of transformation that translation might bring about in an individual is difficult to show, we can see the transformative possibility of translation when we consider literary history. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe says: ‘Left to itself every literature will exhaust its vitality, if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.’53 The translated text is the first and most obvious

51. Ibid. 64. 52. Ibid. 69. 53. Quoted in David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7.

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example of translation’s creative and transformative potential. The ways in which translation transforms and renews literary traditions is another example. Don Lorenzo studied poetry in order to gain mastery of language, modes of argument and eloquence of speech. For him, the pleasure of reading and translating from Greek and Latin transformed into the deeper pleasure of trying to understand another’s thought across the divide of time, language and culture. Furthermore, it birthed in him the desire to write poetry. This is not surprising if we consider how Santos rereads Quixote’s Flemish tapestry metaphor within the context of craft making. In her reading, translation is an apprenticeship in the art of creative writing because it pays attention to how texts are woven together. In W. S. Merwin’s The Mays of Ventadorn, a memoir that is part travel narrative and part bildungsroman, in which the poet tells how he learned his craft, he writes of a visit to Ezra Pound in the early 1930s. Pound tells Merwin that he ‘should learn languages . . . then translate’.54 Translation, in Pound’s account, ‘will make you use your English and find out what you can do with it’.55 Careful readers of Merwin, like the poet Mark Jarman, track a relationship between Merwin’s work as a translator and his poetry.56 Most obviously, there is a major change between Merwin’s first books of poetry, clearly inspired by the work of the medieval European poets Merwin translated in his early years of poetic apprenticeship, and the books Merwin published beginning in the 1960s. These latter books leave aside form and punctuation, focus on lyrical fragments that depend on intuitive leaps rather than logic, and make full use of surrealistic imagery. This change coincides with the kind of avant-garde verse Merwin had begun to translate in the 1950s. By the 1960s, Merwin’s work in translation and that of a cohort of poet-translators like Robert Bly, James Wright and Denise Levertov radically transforms American poetry. Not all literary apprenticeships through translation are as radically transformative as Merwin’s. Randall Jarrell, for example, translated Rainer Maria Rilke throughout his life. His collected poems contain

54. Translation was central to Pound’s own aesthetic project and to the Imagist revolution. 55. W. S. Merwin, The Mays of Ventadorn (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2002), 8. 56. Mark Jarman, ‘Found in Translation’, The Hudson Review, 65.2 (Summer 2012), 192.

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published and unpublished translations of Rilke that date back to before his first volume. For Russel T. Fowler, ‘Rilke’s own dreamlike settings and paradoxical revelations charted technical and emotional courses for the young American poet and eventually touched every phase and facet of Jarrell’s work.’57 Fowler sees similarities in the ‘general approaches and themes’ between the two, and he sees Jarrell appropriating ‘syntactical innovations and concrete images’ from Rilke.58 The role that translation plays in the development of a poet like Jarrell, though undeniable, can easily be obscured. After all, both were formal poets who shared a sensibility, and poets regularly assemble their language and moves from other poets.

A Pedagogy of Translation The British Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in ‘Thick Translation’ that literature, reading and translation are ‘indissoluble from pedagogy’. For Appiah, we should teach diverse texts through a mode of reading, or of ‘translation that seeks with its annotations and its accompanying glosses to locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context’. This mode of reading or translation helps lead students to think about the world and themselves through an understanding of other cultures and times. This mode of ‘thick description’, he posits, helps instil an informed respect and tolerance, defined not as cultural relativism but as an understanding of and respect for difference. If anthropology and linguistics opened up translation to an awareness of difference for Paz, then for Appiah, ‘an ethics and politics of literary pedagogy’ in emphasising cultural and linguistic context illumines ‘the rich difference of human life in culture’.59 A linguistic and cultural informant is necessary for translation.60 In the classroom, the professor is the informant. Appiah’s thick translation is a pedagogy that uncovers cultural and linguistic difference to bring students into a transformational encounter with difference, or at least one that might lead them into an understanding

57. Russel T. Fowler, ‘Charting the “Lost World”: Rilke’s Influence on Randall Jarrell’, Twentieth Century Literature, 30.1 (Spring 1984), 122. 58. Ibid. 103. 59. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Thick Translation’, Callaloo, 16.4 (Autumn 1993), 816–18. 60. Barnestone, Poetics, 2.

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that respects why other cultures might do things differently. Manuel Vargas, in an essay that defends the worth and value of the study of Latin American philosophy in an Anglocentric academy, explicitly addresses the value of studying cultural difference. Vargas believes universities play an important role regarding cultural resources: ‘By preserving, producing, and propagating complex cultural resources, the university contributes in a profound and systematic way to the attainment of cultural utility.’61 Yet, he finds himself in an AngloAmerican academy that has failed to recognise the valuable cultural resources of Latin American thought. The university professor should model an understanding of foreignness that does not misread it and that shows how valuable cultural tools can be found outside of a student’s home culture. A pedagogy of translation guides students into an understanding of cultural difference so that they can respect why other cultures operate in the way they do. It uncouples the notion that technological advancement or socio-economic status tracks with the development of culturally complex resources.62 Thick translation as a pedagogy and the defence of complex cultural resources provide concrete examples as to how vocationally grounded humanistic enquiry can be transformational. Readings in world literature departments and courses in translation are places where students encounter difference. Vargas limits his discussion to philosophy, but he acknowledges that the study, production and propagation of cultural resources falls under the larger umbrella of the humanities. If modern philosophy, largely a Eurocentric discipline, has not spent much time thinking and reading beyond the borders of Europe, literary studies has. Yet, even the field of literature is not immune to problems similar to those Vargas writes about. In ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, Franco Moretti argues that the discipline of comparative literature still needs to move beyond Eurocentricity. World literature should, he believes, pay attention to the periphery; be aware of the lack of symmetry in the encounter between the margins and the centre; and know the ways in which the centre will use itself as the standard and, in doing so, misread the literary history of the periphery. This criticism matters because translation should open up a student to the transformational possibilities of difference rather than reinforce their cultural prejudices.

61. Manuel Vargas, ‘On the Value of Philosophy: The Latin American Case’, Comparative Philosophy, 1.1 (2010), 41. 62. Ibid. 40.

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In What Is World Literature? David Damrosch admits that lurking in the Goethe quotation from above is an imperial self-projection of cosmopolitanism. He warns that ‘non-Western traditions may be almost impossible for Westerners to assess without falling into neocolonial patterns of projection and outright appropriation’.63 To prevent this, Damrosch proposes that world literature should be a ‘writing that gains in translation’.64 This involves paying attention to language in the way that translators attend to the polyphony and heteroglossia of the original text. It also means realising that ‘language study should not be a preliminary to literary study but a partner for life’.65 Damrosch also suggests that a focus on translation should not shy away from what is untranslatable and from what gets lost in translation.66 In order to respect foreignness, we must note what is lost and what we cannot translate. To use Vargas’s language, not all complex cultural resources can be made available. Yet, even in this loss, there is something to gain: intellectual humility.

Translating Vocation We live in a globalised world with multiple canons. Our pedagogical challenge is to educate citizens who will use their imagination and empathy to live responsible lives, by cultivating tools that allow them to translate difference with an eye towards appreciating complexity. Translation, as we have seen, can serve as a metaphor to visualise how we relate to life models and the licence we might take as we compose our lives. It can also be a way to learn the craft of weaving words by seeing art from the backside. To read with an eye towards translation is to pay attention to language and culture, to listen to otherness with care. This kind of listening to difference can provide us with new cultural resources and can even transform us. Yet, the study of translation also means encountering the limits of understanding by coming up against that which resists translation. This encounter with difference can help us clarify our own beliefs and positions, which will bring us into a better knowledge of ourselves. And it can help us come to respect difference, which brings us into a better knowledge of the world.

63. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 113. 64. Ibid. 281. 65. Ibid. 290. 66. Ibid. 289.

Chapter 10

Encountering the Archive Joanne E. Myers

A couple of years ago, I was turning over the pages of an eighteenthcentury manuscript prayer book when I came across an arresting injunction: ‘When you read this, remember me.’ A simple instruction, but one that opened up questions that drew me away from the tasks I’d set myself for the day. How could I remember this author? What would such remembering mean to my scholarly work? In the years since, I have sought to find answers to such questions not only in my research but also in my teaching, principally by developing an introduction to book history that aims to give students opportunities to come into contact with materials that will, in different ways, speak to them. A sprawling, interdisciplinary field that spans bibliography and economic history as well as literary studies, book history has only just begun to make inroads into undergraduate settings. In what follows, I suggest some ways in which book history can enrich students’ experience of their English major, primarily by harnessing their deep-rooted love of books to motivate their engagement with more analytic frameworks. In so doing, I will further propose, book history can aid students’ vocational discernment. By summoning students to a direct encounter with the creative work of the past, book history allows them to practise intellectual skills that are simultaneously skills of discernment: decentring the self to make room for the radically other, pondering the relationship between individuals’ labour and the constraints imposed by their historical and cultural contexts, and encouraging the practice of epistemic humility in a situation in which much cannot be known. In calling these skills ‘vocational’, I suggest that we see vocation as a concept capable of being appropriated in rigorous ways to varied disciplinary contexts. In my own institutional context, discussion of explicitly religious concepts of vocation would be jarring for many students. Nonetheless, I believe that there is value in making the book

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history course a place to ask students to linger over larger questions about the meaning of their academic work and its role in the larger world. There are not many venues in either our departmental or college-wide curriculum for such conversations, despite the fact that many institutions like mine have in recent years found it necessary to justify the ‘value’ of a liberal arts education. In the process, we have come up with some of the usual (and respectable) answers: that a liberal arts education prepares students to engage in flexible problemsolving and positions them for a lifetime of civic engagement. Yet we, like many of our peers at similar colleges and universities, have also done away with a fixed core curriculum in which larger questions about the significance of the education we purvey might be raised, and where the skills to help students achieve such lofty goals might be taught. At the department level, a decentred approach also applies: students who major in English take a set number of lower-level and upper-level courses but have a wide latitude in their choice of those courses so that only a ‘methods’ class is required. This class, of which the book history course is one version, is taken by most students about halfway through their studies as they transition from broader survey courses to more specialised topics courses. The class has a privileged position, engaging students around the midpoint of their academic careers, when they have an intrinsic interest in pursuing questions about how their academic studies will figure into a purposeful life. To capitalise on that potential for engagement, I take seriously the opportunity I have not only to inculcate a certain amount of content but also to introduce students to modes of enquiry that can serve them flexibly in the years to come. As Kathryn Kleinhans has noted, students and teachers alike benefit from understanding that each of us has not just one but many roles and identities we will inhabit over the course of a lifetime, and that higher education can help students to prepare for that multiplicity of roles and ways of being in the world.1 What it will mean for students in my department to ‘be’ an English major at different points in the future may vary greatly. Rather than tie that identity solely to a specific content, therefore, a methods course has the opportunity to help students ‘learn to think

 1. Kathryn Kleinhans, ‘Places of Responsibility: Educating for Multiple Callings in Multiple Communities’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), At this Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 99–121.



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and to act responsibly, as whole persons, within the complex intersections of lived human experience’.2 I have found students open, even drawn, to such topics. For them, the future is urgent, pressing: they are often preoccupied with questions about how their studies might be relevant to what they hope to do in the next few years as well as further down the line. In this essay, I will propose that the encounter with old books can provide a framework for pursuing those questions, despite and in part because of the potentially alien quality that archival works possess.3 Book history is well positioned to draw students more deeply into vocational discernment, I will suggest, because it offers them a richer context for such discernment than a simple consideration of their ‘passions’. At the heart of book history – as my experience with the prayer book made clear to me – is an encounter that involves both a recognition and a decentring or displacement. Old books call to us from the past, teaching us how people in other eras exercised their intellects and creativity not alone but in profoundly social contexts. Students brought into encounters with these works often relate strongly to the past’s material traces. At the same time, to make sense of the past on its own terms – to make space for the speaking voice of the other – means accepting as a key part of that encounter productive forms of alienation and humility. By learning how genuinely to encounter old books, therefore, students can practise bridging affective response with analysis. Because book history is often preoccupied with the interaction between individual labour and larger structures and constraints, students are also afforded the

  2. Ibid. 102.   3. In what follows, my discussion largely assumes that students are encountering older books in person in their campus library. However, there are of course many excellent sources for digital archives, many of which I have had occasion to share with my students and which are helpful for teachers whose institutions may have very limited on-campus resources in book history. The thrill of being able to page through the Gutenberg Bible on the British Library’s website is hard to beat – though I believe it requires some discussion of the methods, costs and intellectual property questions raised by digitisation for students to learn a necessary humility in encountering such materials. The question of whether digitisation interferes with the ‘aura’ that older works possess when encountered in person is one I address directly with students when we discuss Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’. A full discussion of the role of digital materials as a way to introduce students to book history is beyond the scope of this essay, but I believe there are varied and rich ways to use them that align with my general approach as discussed here.

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opportunity to consider how they can do good, generative work in a variety of different situations. Built into the nature of the field, then, is a series of intellectual procedures that can have personal as well as academic resonance. Studying book history, I will ultimately propose in this essay, allows students to engage in a series of encounters with the past that can prepare them in the future to be responsive to the world beyond them.

Relating to the Archive To be startled out of routine is often salutary: on the first day of the book history class, when students are usually expecting just to get the syllabus and an overview of the course content, I announce that we will shortly be leaving our classroom to head to the library. Students arrive on the top floor at Special Collections a little out of breath and often a little disoriented, even wary. Why can’t they bring pens? Will a Bible that has endured since the fifteenth century suddenly crumble in their hands? Will they have to wear gloves? Inside, the slightly dimmed lights create an atmosphere that is, if not quite reverential, at least contemplative. The library staff have laid out a table full of books for us to look at, and the students hover along the edges, cautious but also curious. The books draw them in, but the elaborately tooled covers and spines reveal little. One book, nestled in a book cradle, is open to an ornately decorated Latin title page. At this point in the semester, the books keep their own counsel, but they radiate a kind of energy. ‘Books are not absolutely dead things’, Milton writes in Areopagitica, ‘but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are’.4 Students’ first encounter with this ‘potency’ initiates a semester-long exploration of how to integrate our affective response to books with the analytic skills that reveal them to be not mute tokens but speaking, relatable interlocutors. Relatability, of course, has increasingly become for students a key criterion of a work’s value. Initially, I was sceptical of this drive to ‘relate’ to books. As someone whose teaching primarily focuses on eighteenth-century British literature, relatability felt like a poor index of a work’s value, no matter how much I believe

  4. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1953), 720.



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that eighteenth-century concerns continue to resonate today. When students complained that they couldn’t relate to a text, I heard a refusal to be challenged and a desire to reduce a complicated text to the boundaries of their own comfort zone. As someone trained in broadly critical and historicist methods of reading texts, I was quick to interpret requests for relatability as challenges to my commitment to asking students to analyse how literary works mediate larger cultural processes. Moreover, the impulse to find relatable texts long struck me as a failure to appreciate a key dimension of literary study: its ability to offer a sustained encounter with varied world views in a way that can enlarge our intellectual horizons and engage us with lives very different from our own. Despite these hesitations, I have developed greater tolerance for – if not a total acceptance of – students’ dogged return to the virtues of relatability. The eighteenth century, after all, is no stranger to the genre of the vade mecum, a book written to serve as a handbook or reference whose etymology imagines the work addressing its reader as a guide or companion: ‘come with me!’ Books have long served as guides, companions and mentors. A champion of mentorship in higher education, Sharon Daloz Parks has suggested that the success of undergraduates’ natural drive to weave significance into their lives often hinges on their being anchored in forms of belonging.5 To get where we are going, we need to know where we are from, but we may need what Daloz Parks describes as ‘active mentorship’ to make the transition.6 In this light, students’ search for ‘relatable’ texts can be understood as a drive for the kind of connection that can nourish meaningful development. By extension, my teaching cannot simply reject students’ drive to connect with texts but should try to route it productively. In the book history class in particular, my goal is to help students decentre their initial reactions to texts without thereby feeling that those reactions are being dismissed. Book history is a particularly fruitful intellectual framework for practising the displacement of the self that is central to authentic encounter, in which genuine otherness is allowed its place even as an impulse to connect is nurtured. In that first visit to Special Collections,   5. Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith, rev. edn (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2011); on metaphors of home and rootedness specifically, see also ‘Home and Pilgrimage: Companion Metaphors for Personal and Social Transformation’, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 72.2/3 (1989), 297–315.   6. Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams, 217.

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the goal is to show students how connecting with a work is compatible with seeing it as a site of discovery. Turning from the earliest works in the collection, we look at a selection of editions of The Great Gatsby: the familiar first edition, enclosed in a dust jacket with the iconic midnight-blue sky presided over by a pair of sad, sultry eyes; a movie tie-in edition with a cover featuring a shirtless Alan Ladd; and the smallformat Armed Services edition, whose overseas distribution during World War II prompted a rediscovery of the work and helped propel it to the status of a classic. Through a fairly simple exercise of show and tell, this visit serves two important functions. First, it helps students begin to think about how an abstract ‘text’ is incarnated in, and mediated by, its material forms. Second, by creating a juxtaposition between the old and the new that causes them to see a familiar version of the work afresh, the session reminds students that their initial reactions to texts are a starting point for discovery, not a final assessment of a work’s meaning or value. In his framework for helping undergraduates think about discernment, Michael Himes also emphasises the value of acknowledging where students are when they begin the discernment process, even as he counsels them to build bridges outward to larger networks in which their ‘joy’ can have meaning and purpose. Himes has developed a popular set of ‘Three Key Questions’ that ask students to consider first the forms of activity that they find deeply rewarding, whether they are good at any of those things, and if the world needs what they do both joyfully and well.7 The structure of the enquiry Himes proposes – introspection, self-assessment and contextualisation – is adaptable for students with minimal religious formation. Similarly, his underlying suggestion that one’s vocation can be a ‘gift’ can be framed for students as a way to think about the situated quality of our lives and life’s work. Students, I believe, are ready to respond to a summons to such situatedness. To relate to the world need not mean only to foreground the self: it can also involve the process of making room for others, accommodating oneself to that which is other. To assume that thoughtful discernment involves a decentring of the self provides a useful counterweight to the all-too-prevalent language of ‘passion’ that pervades popular discussions of vocational

  7. Michael Himes, ‘On Discernment: Three Key Questions’, Visitation Monastery of Minneapolis, . For a more theologically informed discussion of the same topics, see ‘Living Conversation’, Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, 8 (1995), 21–7.



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discernment. Many institutions, my own included, successfully steer clear of this language, but it has enough traction in the culture more broadly that many students draw on it when discussing their future plans, often with a note of concern. ‘I just haven’t found what I’m passionate about yet,’ students will say in advising meetings, sounding as if they’re making a confession. The framework of ‘passion’ may be a popular one for discernment, but it can have a distorting effect on students’ as-yet-unformed intellectual inclinations, putting too much pressure on them to identify strongly with career paths that are not necessarily clear. Nonetheless, as their drive for ‘relatable’ reading matter implies, students are often hungry for guidance about how to move forward with the process of integrating their academic pursuits with decisions about the future. Many of the students in the book history class have begun to grapple with the way the academic study of literature can seem to call into question the value of what initially drew them to books and to reading. Without mentorship and guidance, they can find their teachers’ emphasis on the historical situatedness and ideological complexity of texts alienating in a negative sense. Even entry-level methods of literary study such as close reading can feel estranging for students who take some persuading to see this attentiveness as an extension, not an interruption, of their reading practices. When they arrive at my book history class, then, students may have become slightly jaded about the extent to which majoring in English really connects with the love of literature that often drew them to the field in the first place, and they are sometimes sceptical that their teachers have much to say about how to integrate that love with forms of meaningful work that go beyond the academy. One way to mitigate such scepticism is to ask students consciously to engage in telling a story about how their early love of literature is evolving. As Shirley Hershey Showalter has suggested, helping students narrate their experience can help them build meaning in their academic studies. ‘[M]ore conscious attention to story . . . can help to develop greater connection to larger questions of meaning and purpose.’8 The early session in Special Collections also serves as a way to foreground rather than bracket students’ attachment to books – to bring explicitly into our conversations their histories as readers by putting books’ charisma literally ‘on the table’ in front

  8. Shirley Hershey Showalter, ‘Called to Tell Our Stories: The Narrative Structure of Vocation’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 68.

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of us. To capitalise on the energy sparked on that first day of class, I ask students to follow up on the visit by writing a short history of their lives as readers. This is not a literacy narrative but a history of their material engagement with books. We share a couple of these memories as an icebreaker exercise in the next session. As students narrate their lives as readers, they can restore their affective ties to books within their current academic context. Often, if not invariably, students share poignant memories of being read to as children, of books that were treasured companions, of books as personal totems, identity markers and objects of desire. (I share a couple of highlights from my own history as a reader, too, including a memory of the first book I recall reading, about industrial cheese production.) Even if my ultimate goal is to invite students to decentre their initial reactions to books, those reactions matter, and this early exercise helps uncover forms of pleasure about which many of us have felt compelled to fall silent. By having these stories – students’ stories – on the table, we make space for the imperative to integrate our deeply felt responses to books and texts with their academic study and, by extension, with the work for which such study is a preparation. The value of decentring those responses, though, still has to be addressed directly. A key text that I use is Walter Ong’s essay ‘Writing Restructures Consciousness’ from his classic book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Ong’s essay asks students to consider how the invention of books requires not only material resources like type and paper but also broader ‘technological’ innovations – including written language itself. Early in the essay, Ong proposes that Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.9

I ask the students to linger over this passage, because I appreciate its counterintuitive enlistment of ‘alienation’ as a positive part of a ‘full human life’. In context, Ong is suggesting that writing is the technology that allows individuals to gain the distance on their experience that is an essential ingredient for understanding it. ‘Writing’, he points

  9. Walter Ong, SJ, ‘Orality and Literacy: Writing Restructures Consciousness’, in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds), The Book History Reader, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 136.

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out, ‘heightens consciousness.’10 Apt as we are to muddle through our days, writing invites perspective-taking, analysis. More broadly, and in keeping with Showalter’s argument, writing allows for the narrativisation of reality – the transformation of the raw material of life into a story we can understand and in which we can more easily conceive ourselves as actors. Such analysis, though potentially difficult, is, Ong insists, natural to us because of rather than despite the artifice involved: ‘Technologies are artificial’, he writes, ‘but . . . artificiality is natural to human beings.’11 In introducing Ong’s dynamic of ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’ as a key to meaning-making, I want to give students an opportunity to shift their attention from where they are to where they might be. Realistic discernment should account for students’ genuine uncertainty about what comes next for them and how they can best use their gifts. Presuming that they should already know what can kindle their curiosity and sharpen their work ethic puts the cart before the horse. At the same time, as Daloz Parks and Showalter both suggest, forms of connection and communion are crucial for students to integrate their intellectual development with their developing sense of self. At the level of method, book history allows for such integration by tapping into students’ affective investment in literary studies. The exercise in which students narrate their lives as readers positions their authentic voices in the stories they are learning to tell about themselves, but as they move through the course, they learn to consider how gaining distance on their feelings can be a healthy rather than costly part of their development.

Pausing To make room in our minds and allow new ideas genuinely to take hold, we may need to pause a little and put aside the imperative to master or solve problems, a pedagogical focus that is understandable but also in need of supplementation. Building pauses into our teaching, Paul Alonzi has suggested, can interrupt our usual drive to cover material and ‘open wedges in class time providing opportunities to behold’.12 The infinitive here usefully reminds us that, in the rush to

10. Ibid. 136. 11. Ibid. 136. 12. Paul Alonzi, ‘Pauses’, in Karen E. Eifler and Thomas M. Landy (eds), Becoming Beholders: Cultivating Sacramental Imagination and Actions in College Classrooms (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 87.

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analyse, discuss, integrate and theorise, there may also be something more to behold. In the book history class, two things that readily become visible when pausing are the beauty of others’ creativity and the labour involved in bringing that creativity to fruition. Books are great places to find creativity and labour intertwined: there are the delicately illuminated letters unfolding into the margins of an old manuscript, for example, or the ornate and oversized pages of the Kelmscott Bible published by the nineteenth-century designer and activist William Morris. In beholding and even wondering over such works, students also confront the constraints that context imposes on creativity. A wide, clean margin becomes visible as a luxury; the powerful exhortations with which Luther touched off the Reformation appear in the pages of an inexpensive pamphlet that could be readily passed from hand to hand. To be drawn into the field of book history is to learn how to pause to consider how creativity and constraint can interact productively. As Himes suggests, one’s contribution to the world is shaped by the world. A simple but important point that emerges early in the class is how much work it takes to make a book. This is a salutary lesson in a historical moment when downloading a full-text version of most classic works is second nature. Pausing to behold labour can restore some of the dignity of the physical object that can be obscured by the affordances of digital culture. As we conclude the first unit, which introduces students to the series of innovations that gave birth to the book, I pause to ask students to enumerate the various hands that touched what became one of the books we have handled. Thinking about the manuscript era, students have to consider who might have prepared vellum for writing, who made the ink, how many individuals spent hours copying portions of the exemplary text, who rubricated or illuminated it, and who bound it. As we shift to the hand-press period, they think about the work involved in founding and setting type, operating the press, drying and folding and cutting the printed sheets, and transporting the book from printer to bookseller. Pausing in Special Collections to behold a Greek Aldine Bible from 1518, we think about the resources of imagination and will that must have been involved in commissioning the font, finding a compositor skilled enough to set the type, and scrupulously amassing the sources required. Such thought experiments reinvigorate students’ sense of what the Renaissance was all about and sharpen their understanding of how monumental the commitment to humanistic learning was in the early days of the printing press. Implicitly, they consider how



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one individual’s work gains meaning in a wider context, how great work comes from many hands working together. This part of the course culminates in a project in which each student ‘adopts’ one of the early books from Special Collections. Asking each student to take responsibility for a particular book builds a structured ‘pause’ into the course for everyone because it requires students to visit Special Collections individually and spend time examining and getting to know their assigned works. All students are given a rough outline of basic research tasks and asked to find the ‘story’ of their work – to tease out a narrative from the facts they can assemble about its physical form, its author, its subject matter, its publication information and its cultural life and afterlife. In practice, this may be a more diffuse ‘pause’ than Alonzi envisions. Nonetheless, students are often energised by the task of bringing their adopted work to life for their classmates, whether it be an obscure work or one so famous that students are surprised to encounter it in an early edition. Students develop a special relationship with their adopted text, becoming the local expert on its past and significance. By pausing and lingering in this way, students encounter the kind of ‘open-ended’ or ‘ill-structured’ problem that, research has shown, both motivates genuine learning and foreshadows the problems they will encounter most often in the world of work.13 Such problems, which by definition lack a clear answer, typically require students to be reflective about their own knowledge base, develop their own research questions and draw reasonable inferences from the data available. All these processes cultivate a useful humility about the limits of what can be known and how confidently conclusions can be asserted. Most importantly, students must pay close attention to the artefact in front of them, playing detective to follow the clues that will lead them to potential threads of a plot that they can stitch together into a compelling tale about their adopted book. They follow hints: the names of past owners on a flyleaf may point to an interesting provenance, and searching for a publisher’s name may uncover evidence of an interesting printing enterprise of which their book is only one part. Some stories are sweeping in scope and highly significant. The student investigating the edition of Bede’s Martyrologium published by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp in 1564 stumbles

13. The literature on problem-based learning is extensive. See for example Patricia M. King, Phillip K. Wood and Robert A. Mines, ‘Critical Thinking among College and Graduate Students’, The Review of Higher Education, 13.2 (1990), 167–86.

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into a fascinating tangle of stories – about a medieval saint, the manuscript circulation of texts, the genre of the martyr-tale, and one of the key printing houses in the first century of the history of the press. But students also learn a great deal from humble texts whose stories require much more guesswork. Listening to the story whispered by an old book is a valuable process in itself. As they listen, students learn to suspend their impulse to solve or master a problem and submit more fully to their object of study, whose lessons may be far from obvious. In the papers that come out of this exercise, many students talk about the sheer value of coming in touch with an artefact that has survived the rough and tumble of history, and many allude to the quality of an encounter that they experienced while handling and reading it. Such encounter – the fruit of pausing – is itself a form of submission, a generous and attentive opening to that which is truly not yet known. This lesson, of course, is one that more experienced researchers encounter all the time, and it is sometimes available to undergraduates, though perhaps principally in the sciences and other empirical fields, where analysis of raw data can be more regularly incorporated into the curriculum. In the humanities, by contrast, our materials tend to be so mediated for students that some of their wilder pleasures – their potential radicalness and also sometimes their wisdom – tend to be effaced. By reminding students about the radical epistemological humility at the heart of intellectual work, this modest paper assignment gestures to how we might respond humbly – or attentively – when we lack full understanding in other areas of life. Leon Kass has suggested that a key aim of undergraduate education is to cultivate a disposition towards ‘thoughtfulness’, which encounters puzzlement not with a ‘willful’ effort to minimise uncertainty but rather with an acknowledgement ‘that ambiguity and mystery are in the nature of things’.14 If students who encounter old books both humbly and thoughtfully learn to pursue rather than simply seek to solve intellectual problems, this lesson can carry over into a life in which, as Cunningham has noted, the process of discernment ‘demands attention over an extended period of time’.15 The residuum of mystery imparts a meaning

14. Leon R. Kass, ‘The Aims of Liberal Education’, in John Boyer (ed.), The Aims of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 88. 15. David S. Cunningham, ‘Time and Place: Why Vocation is Crucial to Undergraduate Education Today’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 7.



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that is both intellectual and developmental: uncertainty shadows much of our work, and it is a skill to engage with that uncertainty constructively without too quickly driving towards answers. For emphasising the value of humility and attentiveness, not much beats the hands-on process of assembling a book. Thanks to the skills of the College’s conservator, Mary Wootton, the students and I are treated to a book-making workshop that provides a concrete opportunity for humble practice. For two evenings, we assemble in the Special Collections workroom, creating another pause in our usual routine. We each receive the raw materials of a (simple) book: a book block, boards, endpapers, some thread, and cloth for binding. Under Mary’s guidance, we practise the basic skill of stitching quires together, watching the books take shape in our hands. While a few students might have some experience sewing, others are holding a needle for the first time. The stitching is not especially difficult, but it requires patience and a modicum of skill. Once again, we are reminded of the sheer effort that went into making early books. As we talk about what it might be like to spend long days, weeks and years in a printers’ shop, our potential impatience with the task is put into perspective. Book-making requires humility, but it also brings out students’ creativity and technical prowess. Their choices of decorative endpapers, titles and bindings offer a delightful window into their personal styles and predilections. Some of them also show real aptitude for the skills of book-making, from the artful hammering required to round the spine to the careful folding and gluing needed to attach the endpapers and cover smoothly. As someone without such aptitude, I enjoy practising my own humility while watching others move confidently through the process. The workshops reveal how each person’s strengths are always balanced by areas in which each can still grow and improve. At the same time, the invitation to try something almost wholly new is a further way to remind students to value experiment and trial and error rather than mastery alone. One cannot hide a rumpled cover or a mis-glued binding – nor should one. As Mary gently and gracefully shows, mistakes are reparable with some guidance from those with more knowledge. We unmake and compensate for errors rather than start afresh, for the materials are too precious and specialised to waste. As a complement to the other early assignments in the class, this book-making workshop emphasises the sheer investment of time that good work requires, together with the importance of patient effort leavened by creative pleasure. By combining a fixed set of conditions with the opportunity for some

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improvisation and skilful development, the workshops reiterate the point made in our readings that creativity is rarely exercised without some form of constraint. While everyone’s book looks quite similar, each represents different lessons learned. Students instinctively intuit the numinous quality of old books. The hands-on investigation of them, together with a modified experience of the labour that created them, deepens that intuition by allowing us to pause to consider how old books continue to embody the past, to testify materially to the fleeting but creative life of individuals whose work, whether intellectual or manual, builds a bridge between us and them, and between us and the past as a real, inhabited place. By reminding students of the element of humble encounter required by all intellectual endeavour, the course further lays foundations for processes of discernment that emphasise watchful waiting over self-fulfilment.

Forming Readers Although students talk a lot about ‘choosing’ a major, such choosing is of a special sort. It is quite different from, say, ordering at a restaurant, when you know with some certainty what you’ll get. Rather, to choose a major is to choose a path without necessarily knowing the destination or the experiences you’ll have along the way. The philosopher L. A. Paul has argued that life is enriched when we embrace the possibility of ‘personally transformative’ experiences that require us to let go of our criteria for rational decision-making and accept the possibility of radical change or re-making.16 Though reluctant to include ‘personal transformation’ as an objective on my syllabus, I do think that the process of acquiring disciplinary methods can usefully be seen as a process of formation. Paul’s insight emphasises that we develop not necessarily by pursuing what we know we want, but by being formed by what we intuit we desire. Formation is a framework familiar in religious orders, who have long presumed that vocations are not self-evident but must be tested by an extensive discernment process. In the context of higher education, formation can be another valuable framework to help students think about vocation as a diachronic, accretive process, rather than a one-and-done deal. Like Himes’s relational model for discernment, formation also offers a counterweight to the prevalence of the language of passion

16. L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).



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and choice in vocational discernment. Lastly, formation has embedded in it a notion of humility: to allow oneself to be re-formed is to acknowledge not just the possibility but the benefit of change. In its role as a course in literary methods, the book history class incorporates a range of theoretical works. Humility does not immediately strike many of my students as their key virtue. Their reservations about these essays’ bearing on ‘real life’ echo the battles fought within the humanities over the last several decades. If what these writers are saying is so important, students sometimes grumble, can’t they say it more simply, more clearly? To become an advanced student of literature, must one become hopelessly erudite, a splitter of semantic hairs? As with students’ interest in texts’ ‘relatability’, it would be easy to interpret such wariness as merely lack of sophistication or intellectual laziness. Yet I have found consistently that the opposite is true: students are perceptive about both the explanatory power that literary theory seeks to achieve and the near-existential unease it creates in them about being largely self-determining agents – as choosers of their own fate. Some, indeed, become eager to treat a particular theoretical perspective as a magic decoder ring that will let them see the truth where few others do. Navigating between these reactions, I aim to position theoretically informed analysis as another form of the decentring that students had to practise in their encounters with old books. As a field, book history is itself structured by such decentred analysis: students who are used to privileging the abstract text learn by reading Robert Darnton’s account of ‘the communications circuit’ to consider how an author’s words are transferred to a publisher, entrusted to the work of a printer and sent out to the world via networks of shippers and retailers.17 The challenge that book history mounts to the notion of the isolated creative artist can resonate for students grappling with their own choices about the future. ‘Authors themselves do not have, as authors, singular identities,’ textual scholar Jerome McGann writes; ‘an author is a plural identity.’18 If such insights dislocate the individual from a privileged position, they also liberate us to think about how creativity and purpose can flourish in collaborative and relational contexts. More fundamentally, some of the more difficult theoretical texts we read together propose a stance of epistemic humility towards 17. Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, in Finkelstein and McCleery, The Book History Reader, 9–26. 18. Jerome McGann, ‘The Socialization of Texts’, in Finkelstein and McCleery, The Book History Reader, 69.

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the world that can lay the foundation for an ethic of modesty and openness to the other. Difficulty need not be obfuscatory, although certainly students can be tempted to see it that way. When we read an essay by Derrida, for example, I try to rehabilitate the text’s difficulty for students as a resistance to the kind of sweeping explanatory power that is attractive but – as Derrida points out – inappropriate given the limitations on our ability fully to understand and speak truthfully about the world. Reframing humility not as a painful lack but as the foundation for further growth helps students cope with what they are quick to take as a vein of nihilism in theoretical writing. Encountering Derrida’s claim that ‘there is no transcendental or privileged signified’, for example, they can feel that such an argument takes away the grounds of meaning altogether.19 What Derrida offers in the place of transcendence – the play of substitutions, the chain of signifiers – can seem an inadequate compensation, until students begin to recognise that such play will necessarily be undertaken with others. With others, words will be exchanged, meanings agreed upon: meaning is not, ultimately, the property of the individual. If this realisation is destabilising, it has its comforts because it means that we are not alone in our efforts to determine significance. Overall, the theoretical impulse to speak truthfully about the world, even when doing so is difficult, is a key resource for forming students to appreciate both the contingency and necessity of shared intellectual work. In addition to questions of truth-telling, literary theory opens up productive conversations about tensions between determinacy and freedom to which students are sensitive and that are relevant to their discernment process. Just as many of our readings in book history explore the tension between creativity and the contexts in which that creativity can be realised, theoretical texts force students to grapple with the way larger cultural forces both structure aesthetic categories and delimit our own sense of agency. In the abstract, students often resist seeing themselves as subject to abstract ‘hegemonic’ forces. When asked to analyse how external conditions impinge on their own decisions about the future, however, they are quick to describe how their choices are overlaid by others’ expectations, whether familial or cultural. Viscerally, students feel the pressure

19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (eds), Critical Theory Since 1965 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1986), 85.

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of others’ expectations on their vocational choices, and the introduction of theoretical perspectives can help them perceive those expectations’ implication in larger systems of cultural reproduction. Such a perception can be both sobering and potentially liberating. On the one hand, students have to grapple with a sense of paralysis about how to move forward in an environment in which their choices seem overdetermined; on the other hand, as in reading Derrida, discovering the contingency of that which passes itself off as transcendent frees one to make responsible, authentic choices about how to move forward. Here I find it useful to introduce the work of Michel de Certeau, who explores the ‘shadows and ambiguities’ that individuals can create within larger structures of power.20 To bring home the disciplinary context of Certeau’s arguments, we consider his work on ‘reading as poaching’, in which reading figures as a site for the appropriation rather than the passive consumption of others’ discourses. Self-consciously engaging with more deterministic theorists, Certeau offers strategies for balancing an appreciation of constraint with a commitment to human creativity. The teaching of literature can, as in other disciplines, all too easily turn into a content-delivery system. By recognising the extent to which our courses offer students frameworks for formation and selfdevelopment, however, we capitalise on students’ intrinsic desire to live significant lives. We also build on the field’s intrinsic strengths, for we have a privileged role as guides who can help students speak intelligently about the processes of representation so central to human life and so crucial for defining community. By asking students to think rigorously about how representation can be both humane and truthful, and how each of us can engage with the constraints placed on representation, we engage them in a process of self-formation that prepares them to engage with the world humbly but creatively.

Afterword As I contemplated designing this book history course, one worry that held me back was that I was fetishising old texts for their own sake and asking students to do so too. A particular pleasure of actually putting the class together was thinking more deeply about what I

20. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press), 101.

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found compelling about work with older materials. Ultimately, I am fascinated by the testimony they offer to human creativity and human labour, and to the ways these forces are modified as they circulate in the world. In the classroom, I value how the encounter with older works helps reanimate literary study’s affective potential while channelling it into intellectually challenging directions. Taken together, the estranging and compelling features of book history can provide a valuable preparation for vocational discernment, since discernment always entails a balance: between individual vision and communal context, between aptitude and need, between self and world. As they pause to listen to and amplify the voices of old works and those who wrote, assembled, sold and read them, students can do stimulating work that is also broadly in service to others. In so doing, my hope is that they can practise habits of mind that will allow them better to discern their own vocations.21

21. My development of this book history course also has important institutional supports. Paramount is the close, collaborative relationship I enjoy with the head of Special Collections, Carolyn Sautter, and conservator Mary Wootton, who have committed many hours to the course, from helping me troubleshoot the structure, curating and presenting dozens of works for class sessions, and selecting a range of books for students to research. I also garnered institutional funding to take a course at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia on teaching book history at the undergraduate level.

Chapter 11

Narrating Our Wounds: Trauma, Literature and Vocation John Peterson

In the opening two chapters of Wendell Berry’s 2000 novel Jayber Crow, Berry’s titular narrator describes the death of his parents, Iona and Luther Quail, from the Spanish Influenza of 1918, and the death of his subsequent family caregivers, Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy, from age-related illnesses. The deaths of Jayber’s parents and family guardians take place near his fourth and tenth birthdays respectively, leaving him with a series of traumatic wounds that dramatically alter his adolescence. As Jayber passes through an orphanage, a seminary and a university, he is a young man without a home, an identity or a clear sense of calling. His anguish reaches its greatest intensity during his time at the university, of which he writes, ‘I was living, but I was not living my life . . . Without a loved life to live, I was becoming more and more a theoretical person.’1 The Spanish Flu that kills Jayber’s parents and contributes to the suffering he experiences during his university studies has drawn frequent comparisons to our current global pandemic. Thus, Berry’s novel highlights a critical aspect of our students’ lives that intersects dramatically with the topics of vocation and calling: many of them arrive on campus having endured traumatic events. The recent flourishing of scholarly writing on vocation has argued that the role of the university should not be reduced to simply credentialling graduates for the job market; rather, it should also equip students to reflect more deeply on questions of purpose, meaning and community so that they might fashion lives that are responsive to multiple places of commitment.2 To assist

  1. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000), 73.   2. See David S. Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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students in this process, scholars working within the field of vocation must also more fully explore the profound role that trauma and suffering play in shaping our students’ vocational journeys. Catherine Fobes draws on the field of life course theory and its language of ‘transitions and turning points’ to illustrate why the undergraduate years are well suited to discussions of vocation and how one’s turning points can be frequently embedded within traumatic events. Fobes writes, Turning points are specific types of transitions that are unalterable, such as the change in status from being a high school graduate to becoming a college student, losing a parent, or receiving the diagnosis of a chronic and progressively debilitating illness. In the cases of both transitions and turning points, these significant alterations of one’s life course can have a profound impact on vocational discernment.3

As Fobes reveals, turning points oftentimes intersect with traumatic events that reshape our life paths moving forward. Consider, for example, this year’s class of college freshmen and how the turning point of entering college has been irrevocably altered for them by the coronavirus pandemic. As this example and Fobes’s essay illustrate, the blending of turning points and trauma can be deeply impacted by socio-cultural forces, while simultaneously registering in ways that are profoundly personal. Over the past thirty years, trauma theory has figured prominently in the field of literary studies. Scholars working in this field argue that literature possesses a special ability to respond to trauma. Indeed, if we are to describe more fully the relationships between vocation, trauma and suffering, the insights of these scholars and the study of literature may be key to doing so. In the introduction to Trauma and Literature, J. Roger Kurtz defines trauma as ‘a wound’ and the Greek origins of the term as denoting ‘a physical injury from an external cause’. Kurtz writes that in ‘Luke’s Gospel we read of a traveler (the “Good Samaritan”) who, encountering the body of a man lying beside the road, took pity on him, went to him, and bandaged his traumata [τραύματα] – his wounds’.4 Kurtz then pivots to the modern context of trauma as

  3. Catherine Fobes, ‘Calling Over the Life Course: Sociological Insights’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 95–6.  4. J. Roger Kurtz, ‘Introduction’, in Kurtz (ed.), Trauma and Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2.



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‘emotional or psychological injury’5 by reflecting on such decisive influences as psychoanalytic theory, the Holocaust and the establishment of PTSD as a medical diagnosis in shaping our contemporary understandings of trauma. Joshua Pederson’s essay ‘Trauma and Narrative’ tracks the emergence of trauma theory in literary studies during the 1990s – a decade after the formal creation of PTSD as a medical diagnosis – as well as many of its major developments over the past thirty years.6 Of particular interest to my essay are three areas of enquiry that have emerged from trauma theorists during this period: literary language’s ‘special ability to communicate . . . trauma’,7 literature’s capacity to reveal the dimensions of transgenerational and structural trauma and the role of narrative in stimulating ‘post-traumatic growth’.8 Unlike literature’s ability to communicate trauma, many theorists argue that ‘nonliterary language . . . historical, objective, or archival . . . often fails to capture traumatic experience’.9 Summarising the insights of Geoffrey Hartman, Pederson writes that whereas ‘nonliterary language tries to pinpoint trauma and fails, literature gestures toward or evokes trauma and sometimes succeeds’.10 The paradox of more accurately detailing trauma by foregrounding the uncertainty of its dimensions undergirds the work of what Pederson refers to as the ‘first wave of trauma theorists’.11 He writes, ‘For the most significant trauma theorists of the 90s – Hartman, Felman, Caruth, and LaCapra’, literary representation of trauma ‘often returns to three tropes: absence, indirection, and repetition’.12 The literature classroom offers an ideal context for examining these tropes, as the close reading of such devices is critical to a student’s interpretive engagement with a text. For example, in my course on vocation and calling, students read Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay ‘How it Feels to Be Colored Me’.13 In describing the trauma of moving from the all-Black   5. Ibid. 1.  6. Joshua Pederson, ‘Trauma and Narrative’, in Kurtz, Trauma and Literature, pp. 97–109.   7. Ibid. 98.  8. Suzanne LaLonde, ‘Healing and Post-Traumatic Growth’, in Kurtz, Trauma and Literature, 196.   9. Pederson, ‘Trauma and Narrative’, 98. 10. Ibid. 98. 11. Ibid. 105. 12. Ibid. 100–1. 13. Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’, in Nina Baym (ed.), The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Seventh Edition, vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 982–5.

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town of Eatonville, Florida to Jacksonville at age thirteen, Hurston writes, ‘I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl . . . In my heart as well as the mirror, I became a fast brown – warranted not to rub nor run.’14 While a close reading of this passage might begin with Hurston’s word choice – the loss of personal identity evoked in the transition from ‘Zora’ to a ‘little colored girl’, Hurston’s counterbalancing of this loss through her use of the phrase ‘Colored Me’ in her essay’s title, a historicising of the term ‘colored’ within the 1920s in which the essay was written – it might also begin with the silence of the section break that follows it. Hurston’s words, ‘warranted not to . . . run’, evoke the legacy of slavery and thus underscore the traumatic nature of her move, yet the absence of words that follow this sentence communicates this trauma with significant power as well. Thus, a close reading of this passage and its silences can bring students into greater proximity with Hurston’s experience, while at the same time honouring the ways in which it remains inaccessible to them. Recent trauma theorists have expanded on this scholarly interest in ‘absence, indirection, and repetition’ in vital ways. Pederson underscores this shift by describing Gabriele Schwab and Greg Forter’s analysis of the transgenerational and structural dimensions of trauma. Pederson writes, For Forter, too many literary critics adopt an understanding of trauma psychology that addresses only the catastrophes that strike in a single moment . . . Forter argues that such models ignore what theorists call ‘structural’ or ‘insidious’ trauma: persistent, aching pain often related to enduring societal pressures – like racism or patriarchal oppression.15

Pederson describes Forter’s approach to structural trauma as demanding a ‘deep dive into social history’.16 In his analysis of Faulkner’s novel Light in August, Forter writes that such an ‘excavation reveals . . . how the characters’ apparently “personal” stories cannot be told independently – are, indeed, inextricably intertwined . . . – precisely because all are implicated in the social history and legacy of slavery, the bloodshed of the Civil War, and the violent suppression

14. Ibid. 983. 15. Pederson, ‘Trauma and Narrative’, 107. 16. Ibid. 108.



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of Reconstruction’.17 The study of literature supports the structural analysis that Forter articulates, as the close reading of literary texts invites students to consider the ways in which these works have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped, the historical and cultural contexts from which they emerged. Once again, Hurston’s essay provides a model for this type of enquiry. Not only does the traumatic nature of her move from Eatonville to Jacksonville reflect the same historical contexts and structural forces that Forter describes, but the beginning of Hurston’s essay further highlights the ‘inextricably intertwined’ nature of our stories as a result of this shared history. In this scene, Hurston deploys the metaphor of a theatre to capture the blind spots of white, Northern tourists who gaze at the young, joyful Hurston as they pass through Eatonville. While these tourists assume the role of spectators gazing upon a Black community, Hurston describes her own front porch as a ‘gallery seat’ in which she watches the white tourists serve as ‘actors’ in a play, as they unknowingly perform the racialised history that has shaped their gaze.18 In addition to literature’s capacity to reveal traumatic events and their structural dimensions, Pederson writes that ‘it is a widely accepted therapeutic truth that the stories we tell about the catastrophes that beset us – both individual and collective – can be crucial tools for recovery’.19 In his book The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Arthur Frank fleshes out some of the narrative dimensions of this perspective. He writes, First they resist the call: the disease, or trauma, or chronic pain that is being forced upon their bodies. As their stories develop and as they develop in their stories, they resist the silence that suffering forces upon their body-selves. Finally their resistance finds a voice; they make suffering useful. In the wounds of their resistances, they gain a power: to tell, and even to heal.20

In studying first-person narratives like Zora Neale Hurston’s, students encounter narrators who ‘gain a power: to tell, and even to

17. Greg Forter, ‘Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form’, Narrative 15.3 (October 2007), 270. 18. Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’, 983. 19. Pederson, ‘Trauma and Narrative’, 97. 20. Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 200.

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heal’ by integrating trauma into their narratives and even mining it for inspiration. In Hurston’s essay, this mining takes place in relationship to language itself, as she examines the word ‘colored’ from multiple angles, and in so doing, undercuts racist narratives and the identities embedded within them. Thus, in studying her narrative, students are better prepared to investigate the narratives in which their own identities are embedded and to reflect more closely on the language they use to tell their stories. While the breadth of insights and developments that characterise the field of trauma theory defy the scope of this essay, these three areas – literary language’s ability to communicate trauma, literature’s capacity to reveal the transgenerational and structural dimensions of trauma, and narrative’s ability to stimulate post-traumatic growth – offer important contexts for exploring how trauma theory and literature might help illuminate the important role that trauma and suffering play in shaping our students’ vocational journeys, in particular those turning points that appear to threaten their callings, the transgenerational and structural wounds that aim to circumscribe them, and the construction of vocational narratives that integrate and reframe the meanings of these traumatic elements. In this essay, I pursue these areas of discussion through an analysis of Parker J. Palmer’s memoir Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation and Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, as well as situating the questions raised by trauma theorists and these texts in relationship to our students’ vocational journeys and the composition of their own vocational narratives.

Downward Mobility In his essay ‘Vocation and Story: Narrating Self and World’, Douglas V. Henry asks, Within which narratives are we already actors, and in which do we hope to act? Should we accept the culturally ascendant narratives of our time? What guidance, modeling, and avenues of vocational discernment shall we offer, as students frame their stories and listen for their call?21

21. Douglas V. Henry, ‘Vocation and Story: Narrating Self and World’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 165.



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One narrative that has proven invaluable in its ability to speak the language of vocation, especially the impact of traumatic turning points on one’s vocational path, is Parker J. Palmer’s memoir Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation.22 In my courses, I assign Palmer’s book to help students build greater fluency with the language of vocation so that they can better apply its insights to the texts we read, as well as write their own vocational narratives. Reading Palmer’s book through the context of trauma theory opens his narrative in ways that can be especially fruitful for our work with students. The section that corresponds most directly with this context is the fourth chapter, ‘All the Way Down’, in which he writes with great vulnerability and poignancy of his struggles with clinical depression. This chapter intersects with all three areas of trauma theory I have described – trauma’s silences, its transgenerational and structural dimensions, and the role of narrative in responding to it. Palmer begins his description of his struggles by emphasising the challenge of translating them into words. He writes, ‘I still find depression difficult to speak about because the experience is so unspeakable.’23 Thus, the silences and gaps that early trauma theorists have described in literary representations of trauma can also be gleaned in Palmer’s attempts to speak the ‘unspeakable’, as well as the ways in which he speaks to a fellow sufferer of depression. Palmer describes a ‘woman who had wrestled with depression for much of her adult life’ and who asks him, ‘in a voice full of misery, “Why do some people kill themselves yet others get well?”’24 Palmer recognises the deep ‘struggle to stay alive’ from which her question emerges, as well as his desire to ‘answer with care’, but he can offer only one response: ‘I have no idea. I really have no idea.’25 Thus, Palmer’s book foregrounds the uncertainties that prevail when discussing trauma and depression and honours the mystery that may surround it. Paradoxically, it is this very uncertainty that proves helpful for the woman that Palmer recalls, as she writes a letter to him expressing that the most valuable words he shared with her were ‘I have no idea,’ a limited truth which provided her with an

22. Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). 23. Ibid. 57. 24. Ibid. 59. 25. Ibid. 59.

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alternative to the ‘cruel’ and simplistic moralising of her church, and which helped her ‘depression’ lift ‘a bit’.26 The role of uncertainty and silence also extends to one of the most valuable forms of help that Palmer receives: his friend Bill’s daily massaging of his feet in silence. Palmer’s description of his friend’s assistance underscores the critical role of the body in storing and healing from trauma, as well as the structural dimensions of trauma. Palmer writes, Blessedly, there were several people, family and friends, who had the courage to stand with me in a simple and healing way. One of them was a friend named Bill who, having asked my permission to do so, stopped by my home every afternoon, sat me down in a chair, knelt in front of me, removed my shoes and socks, and for half an hour simply massaged my feet. He found the one place in my body where I could still experience feeling – and feel somewhat reconnected with the human race . . . It is impossible to put into words what my friend’s ministry meant to me. Perhaps it is enough to say that I now have deep appreciation for the biblical stories of Jesus and the washing of feet.27

A recurring word that Palmer uses to describe the two bouts of depression through which he has struggled is that of ‘disconnection’. ‘Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection – it deprives one of the relatedness that is the lifeline of every living being.’28 Hence, Palmer’s account of the physical connection that exists between him and his friend Bill is especially important. The physical intimacy of his friend’s ministry contrasts with normative depictions of masculinity in American culture, which exert tremendous pressure on men to remain physically disconnected from one another unless it be to ‘gallop terribly against each other’s bodies’,29 as the poet James Wright so beautifully writes of football season in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio. Although the ‘persistent, aching pain’ that Greg Forter describes in regard to the structural traumas of ‘racism or patriarchal oppression’ is specific to marginalised peoples, the spectre of structural trauma is nonetheless present in the warping influence of gender norms that Palmer’s scene rejects. 26. Ibid. 59. 27. Ibid. 63–4. 28. Ibid. 61. 29. James Wright, ‘Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio’, Poetry Foundation, (last accessed 24 June 2021).



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How can we place the silences, uncertainties and traces of structural trauma that are present in this chapter to good use with our students? One approach to this question is to remind students that like Palmer’s friend Bill, or like Palmer himself as he seeks to help the woman who reaches out to him, we stand on the edges of Palmer’s narrative as readers. If close reading can serve as a form of listening to the other, as the editors of this anthology argue, then we would do well to resist simplistic conclusions as a result of our listening.30 Concluding a classroom discussion of this scene by listening collectively in silence might serve as a means of honouring the sanctity of another person’s vocational narrative, particularly one that describes the places of trauma that have shaken and threatened it. This is not the compulsory silence that oftentimes surrounds mental illness in American society but rather a contemplative silence that honours the wholeness of another’s journey. Second, if close reading can also serve as a means of listening to the self, we might ask our students to consider the structural forces that have exerted a shaping influence on their vocational journeys. How, for instance, has sexism or the pressures of gender conformity shaped their life paths? How does the process of listening to Palmer’s story invite them to listen more deeply to their own stories? This emphasis on story highlights the importance of narrative to trauma theorists, as well as the central role that it plays in Palmer’s description of his healing process. Although Palmer’s story is deeply autobiographical, he repeatedly situates his life story within larger ‘framing narratives’.31 For example, his chapter on clinical depression begins with an epigraph from The Inferno that describes being lost in the ‘dark woods’32 and also references ‘the biblical stories of Jesus and the washing of feet’, which calls to mind the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John. These are not literary flourishes. Rather, throughout his narrative Palmer looks to literature for orientation and direction. His book begins with a poem by William Stafford entitled ‘Ask Me’, whose imagery of a frozen river and hidden currents serves as a metaphor for one’s deeper callings.33 In response to this poem, Palmer writes, ‘the poet’s words’ are ‘precise, piercing, and disquieting. They remind me of moments when it is clear – if I have eyes to see – that the life I am living is not the same

30. Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham, ‘Introduction’, this volume, 8–9. 31. Henry, ‘Vocation and Story’, 172. 32. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 56. 33. Ibid. 1.

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as the life that wants to live in me.’34 Palmer traces his struggles with depression to this internal conflict and articulates his process of healing in narrative terms, as he describes his journey through depression as the antithesis of the spiritual path he had imagined taking. He writes that it was not ‘an upward climb into rarefied realms of light, not a mountaintop experience of God’s presence’.35 Instead, it ‘was a journey in the opposite direction: to an inner circle of hell and a face-to-face encounter with the monsters who live there’.36 Yet, an unexpected turning point occurs amidst this downward journey when Palmer’s therapist pointedly suggests, ‘You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you . . . Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to ground on which it is safe to stand?’37 Building on the writing of Judith Herman, Suzanne LaLonde describes this collaborative work as the survivor’s articulating ‘emotions, sensations, images, and bodily experiences’, while the therapist fulfils ‘“the role of the witness and ally in whose presence the survivor can speak of the unspeakable”’.38 Palmer initially responds defensively to his therapist’s suggestion, regarding it as ‘impossibly romantic, even insulting’,39 yet it ultimately proves therapeutic, as Palmer learns to personify his depression as a ‘friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand – the ground of my own truth, my own nature, with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light’.40 Palmer’s characterisation of depression as ‘a friendly figure, standing a block away . . . trying to get my attention by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing truths about myself’41 underscores his therapeutic use of narrative language. Palmer draws on the writing of Thomas Merton to describe this figure’s paradoxical gift as the gift of ‘true self’,42 and he depicts this true self as ‘the self planted in us by the God who made us in God’s own image – the self that wants nothing more, or

34. Ibid. 2. 35. Ibid. 66. 36. Ibid. 66. 37. Ibid. 66. 38. Suzanne LaLonde, ‘Healing and Post-Traumatic Growth’, in Kurtz, Trauma and Literature, 199. 39. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 66. 40. Ibid. 67. 41. Ibid. 68. 42. Ibid. 68.

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less, than for us to be who we were created to be’.43 In less overtly religious language, the discovery of this self can be understood as the recovery of what Wendell Berry refers to in Jayber Crow as a ‘loved life to live’.44 How might Palmer’s narrative assist our students as they construct their own vocational narratives? I believe the answer to this question can be found in part through the ‘downward’ trajectory of Palmer’s narrative, a quality that is reflected in his description of arriving at ‘the ground on which it is safe to stand’ and in his allusion to the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John. In this chapter, Jesus’s unexpected kneeling and washing of his disciples’ feet surprises them, particularly the headstrong Peter, as it contradicts the hierarchies that have shaped their world views and instead models leadership through service.45 It is an act of downward mobility. Unlike the path of downward mobility, our students enter college having travelled the path of upward mobility, the strain and stress of this path oftentimes visible in their body language, manner of speaking and fragile relationships. In contrast, Palmer’s narrative presents students with a downward journey and a belief that our encounters with trauma, woundedness and suffering, though perhaps unspeakable, and certainly unwarranted and undesirable, might also come to be understood as integral to our vocational narratives. While these experiences may threaten everything we once held to be true, our journey through them may also bring us face to face with even deeper truths. Hence, Palmer’s narrative is a deeply humanising and potentially life-giving gift.46

Called to Community Like Palmer, a white individual who has reflected on the structural wounds of racism and his vocational journey, Wendell Berry has also written on the connections between the structural trauma of racism

43. Ibid. 69. 44. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000), 73. 45. John 13:1–20, NRSV. 46. Importantly, Palmer begins his chapter on depression by emphasising that it ‘comes in many forms’ and that what ‘is true’ for him, may not be ‘true for others’. He writes that some forms of depression ‘are primarily genetic or biochemical and will respond only to drugs; some are primarily situational and will respond only to inner work that leads to self-knowledge, choices, and change; some lie in between’. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 57–8.

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and his identity as a white man. In her book Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma,47 Shelly Rambo explores the historical and contemporary wound of racism in America and examines Wendell Berry’s moving and forthright memoir, The Hidden Wound, as an example of a white individual willing to engage deeply with the racialised wounds that are embedded in his whiteness. In this memoir, which was published in 1969, Berry describes racism as ‘a historical wound, prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life’.48 He continues, If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society. This wound is in me, as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves.49

Berry’s insights provide a critical reminder to white scholars who teach and write about vocation: to avoid uncritically linking difference and woundedness together, one’s assigned readings must not only feature writers of colour who approach discussions of difference and vocation through an asset-based lens but also white writers who have examined the racialised wounds that are embedded in their whiteness. The work of Wendell Berry assists us in addressing the latter of these two areas. Berry’s engagement with the structural wound of racism can be understood as part of his lifelong project to belong more fully to the place in which he was raised and in which he and his wife Tanya have lived the majority of their lives, Port Royal, Kentucky. In his book The Long-Legged House, which was published just one year before The Hidden Wound, Berry describes

47. Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017). 48. Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1969), 9. 49. Ibid. 9–10.



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his return to Port Royal and the Kentucky River as a process of learning to ‘see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether home here’.50 Belonging fully to a place requires that Berry look deeply into the traumatic wounds of that place and their effect on him: It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved in history. What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forefathers were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it; the lives of most of them diminished it, and limited its possibilities . . .’51

Hence, Berry’s abiding love for the place to which he belongs and his willingness to look deeply into its ecological and racialised wounds so that he might participate in healing them underscores his focus on community not as an abstraction but rather as a place, a people and a labour to which he has been called. Thus, it should come as no surprise that in Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, the traumatic event that alters Jayber’s life path is the loss of his immediate community through the deaths of his young parents from the Spanish Influenza: I don’t know how I learned that this had happened. It seemed to me that they just disappeared into the welter of that time: a war off somewhere in the dark world; a river of ice off somewhere, breaking trees and boats; sickness off somewhere, and then in the house; and then death there in the house, and everything changed.52

The gaps and indirections that Pederson describes as the focus of the ‘first wave of trauma theorists’ are evident in this passage, as Jayber’s memory of his parents’ dying combines with an ice storm that ravages the local countryside, the conclusion of World War I and the onset of a global pandemic. In spite of these uncertainties, Jayber claims this traumatic event as an essential part of his story and recognises something definitive in it. As he writes, after the loss of his parents, ‘everything changed’. The death of Jayber’s parents

50. Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), 49. 51. Wendell Berry, ‘A Native Hill’, in The Long-Legged House, 72. 52. Berry, Jayber Crow, 13.

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is replicated in excruciating fashion when the family members who lovingly adopt and raise him, Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy, die near his tenth birthday, the death of Aunt Cordie marked by the enforced silence of a chapter break.53 Thus, the deaths of Jayber’s parents and family guardians serve as traumatic turning points. For Jayber, these turning points shuttle him away from home and through a series of institutional settings, beginning with an orphanage and continuing with a seminary and a university. Like Palmer, who details his downward journey through depression, Jayber reflects on the painful losses he experiences in each of these settings – lost identity, lost calling and lost community – thereby continuing the focus on loss that is initiated through the deaths of his parents and family guardians. Jayber’s loss of identity is described through the headmaster’s process of naming him at the Good Shepherd Orphanage. Upon meeting Jayber, whose birthname is Jonah Crow, Brother Whitespade studies him intently and declares, ‘Mr. Crow, since I believe you have not yet found your way to Nineveh, I will call you J.’54 Brother Whitespade’s reduction of Jonah’s name to ‘J’ parallels his naming of the other children in the orphanage by their first initials as well. As Jayber reflects, For a while anyhow, and for how long a while it would be hard to say, we all acted on the assumption that we were no longer the persons we had been – which for all practical purposes was the correct assumption . . . I remember walking around saying my name to myself – ‘Jonah Crow, Jonah Crow’ – until it seemed that it could never have belonged to me or to anybody else.55

Jayber’s loss of identity accentuates the confusion he experiences over his sense of calling, which is ironically and painfully described through his mistaken belief that he might have been called to the ministry. This mistaken assumption arises from living in an orphanage where no one ‘ever suggested that a person could be “called” to anything but “full-time Christian service”’,56 as well as Jayber’s anxiety over the thought of having ‘missed’ his calling. ‘Though I knew that actually I had heard no voice, I could not dismiss the possibility that it had

53. Ibid. 28. 54. Ibid. 31. 55. Ibid. 31–2. 56. Ibid. 43.



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spoken and I had failed to hear it because of some deficiency in me or something wrong that I had done.’57 Jayber pursues his misunderstood calling to the ministry by enrolling ‘at a small denominational college in Pigeonville’,58 but soon finds himself beset with questions for which there are no answers. Unlike his encounters with Brother Whitespade, who seeks to mould Jayber in his own ministerial image, Jayber’s encounter with Dr Ardmire, a professor of Greek and New Testament studies, dispels the notion that his calling lies in the direction of the ministry. When Jayber shares his sense that ‘maybe I had been called’, Dr Ardmire responds, ‘And you may have been right. But not to what you thought. Not to what you think. You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out – perhaps a little at a time.’59 While Dr Ardmire’s insights are helpful and far-reaching, they cannot relieve Jayber of his immediate pain and confusion, which reaches its greatest depths during his subsequent enrolment at the university in Lexington, where Jayber describes feeling ‘sad beyond the thought or memory of happiness . . . It got so that whenever I was by myself I would think again and again of myself running barefoot over the frozen grass the morning Aunt Cordie died, and I would cry.’60 The repetition of these images in Jayber’s mind reflect the unprocessed nature of his traumatic losses, which also manifest in his ongoing inability to connect with others. He writes of this lack of community, ‘By the time I had got to Lexington, I was so convinced of the temporariness of any stay I would ever make in this world that I hadn’t formed any ties at all.’61 Although Jayber does not draw on the language of depression, Palmer’s description of depression as ‘the ultimate state of disconnection’ corresponds powerfully with Jayber’s alienated experience. Andrew Barnaby’s essay ‘The Psychoanalytic Origins of Literary Trauma Studies’ is helpful in better understanding the turning points that shape Jayber’s loss of community and his return to community. In his essay, Barnaby draws from an interview with Katherine Anne Porter to illuminate the parallels between a patient’s storytelling process and Porter’s approach to writing. What Barnaby finds most thought-provoking is Porter’s description of writing the conclusion

57. Ibid. 43. 58. Ibid. 45. 59. Ibid. 54. 60. Ibid. 71. 61. Ibid. 72.

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to her stories first and then working backwards to clarify the narrative’s development. Barnaby writes, On the one hand, before writing she thinks about the past as a patient or even a psychoanalyst might begin therapy: not yet understanding ‘even a little of some important event that had happened.’ But as a writer, she is more like the patient or analyst at the end of therapy: knowing ‘what it meant’, knowing ‘the consequences’, knowing ‘the ending.’ Observing that she ‘always write[s her] last lines, [her] last paragraph, [her] last page first’, and that she ‘then . . . go[es] back and work[s] towards [her] . . . goal’ (not just the ending she began with but a true understanding of the ending as the consequence of something that came before), she concludes by saying that the ‘goal is the clearing up of disorder and confusion and wrong, to a logical and human end.’ While what constitutes a ‘logical and human end’ for a storyteller might not be the same as it would be for the patient or analyst, the sense of ‘clearing up of disorder and confusion and wrong’ as a present moment grapples with a past that is not yet assimilated into an unfolding life narrative does very much sound like the goal of psychoanalytic-based therapy.62

Barnaby’s insights can be productively applied to Jayber’s retrospective narrative because in telling his story from the position of old age, and as someone who is now fully enmeshed in the Port William community, Jayber is like Porter in that he knows the relative end of his story. In other words, he is better positioned to describe the traumatic deaths of his parents and family guardians as ruptures to his sense of self and community because he has returned to that community and has experienced the healing effects of that return. Jayber describes his return to Port William as having been prompted by his despair at the university in Lexington, and he details his terrifying journey through a rain-lashed and flooded countryside as he follows the river of his childhood back home. Amidst his despair at the university, Jayber imagines ‘the water rising in the river valley. I seemed to feel it rising in me. That feeling was my old life coming back to me . . . I now longed to see the waters.’63 Thus, water functions as both a spirit of renewal and a compass that leads Jayber home. In his article ‘If Dante Were a Kentucky Barber’, Anthony Esolen draws

62. Andrew Barnaby, ‘The Psychoanalytic Origins of Literary Trauma Studies’, in Kurtz, Trauma and Literature, 33. 63. Berry, Jayber Crow, 77.



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connections between Dante’s journey and that of Jayber.64 Esolen describes ‘the swirling flood of the Kentucky River that . . . washes him back to his home village and life’ as a ‘bringer of grace’, and ‘the truck driver from Port William who gives Jayber a lift’ as a ‘Virgil in the midst of the Dark Woods, come to lead Dante eventually to the threshold of Heaven’.65 For Jayber, Heaven is the small community of Port William, Kentucky, and although his membership in this community is in some ways a birthright, he is still dependent on the living members of Port William to welcome him back into the healing warmth of their relationships and the town’s communal body. Two characters are especially important to Jayber’s entering back into the life of Port William; the first, Burley Coulter, helps Jayber locate work within the community, while the second, Mattie Chatham, provides Jayber a place of love that endows his life with meaning and purpose. As he approaches the end of his arduous journey back home, Jayber spies Burley Coulter silhouetted on the water in a fishing boat, ‘he and the boat and the water all so still that I could see the gleaming line where boat and water touched’.66 Burley pauses from his work to greet Jayber, who responds in kind. Jayber feels ‘called upon to continue the conversation’67 and does so by sharing his birth name for the first time since leaving home. ‘My name is Jonah Crow. They call me J.’68 Jayber’s identity as Jonah Crow is tethered to his community, and for this identity to be fulfilled, he depends in part on Burley recognising him. It is a subtle yet profoundly vulnerable moment for Jayber, and in vocational terms it recalls Darby Kathleen Ray’s insight in her essay, ‘Self, World, and the Space Between’, when she reframes Frederick Buechner’s iconic description of the ‘world’s great hunger’ to reflect a ‘more thoroughgoing reciprocity’.69 Ray writes, ‘it is not only the world, “the other,” that is deeply needful, but the self as well’.70 Jayber’s need for connection is met when Burley responds, ‘Aw! You’re the one that lived with Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie. You

64. Anthony Esolen, ‘If Dante Were a Kentucky Barber’, in Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter (eds), The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry (Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014). 65. Ibid. 193. 66. Berry, Jayber Crow, 90. 67. Ibid. 91. 68. Ibid. 91. 69. Darby Kathleen Ray, ‘Self, World, and the Space Between: Community Engagement as Vocational Discernment’, in Cunningham, At This Time and In This Place, 301. 70. Ibid. 301.

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went away when you was just a little bit of a boy – after Aunt Cordie died.’71 The needs of the community are also met in this scene, when after hearing that Jayber has been trained as a barber, Burley notifies him that Port William has recently lost its haircutter, and upon Jayber’s request, he rows him back to Port William and assists Jayber in securing a place to live and work as the town’s new barber. While Burley welcomes Jayber back into the Port William community, it is not until Jayber dedicates his life to serving Mattie Chatham that he discovers his deepest calling as ‘the way of love’.72 As Jayber reflects on this decision, ‘Maybe I had not solved a single problem or come any nearer to the peace which passeth all understanding. But I was changed. I had entered, as I now clearly saw, upon the way of love.’73 As Jayber’s use of scriptural language indicates, his devotion to Mattie transcends the context of romantic love. In fact, Anthony Esolen’s analysis of the parallels between the Divine Comedy and Jayber Crow envisions Mattie as fulfilling a similar, albeit more earthly version of Beatrice. Esolen writes of Mattie, her beauty and goodness . . . cause him, if not to soar, at least to struggle upward to manhood. It does not send him to heaven, but it does help him to see the shadows of heaven about him. It does not usher him among the communion of saints, but it does place him firmly within the communion of sinners, wondrous in its own right, in a place called Port William. The smile that Jayber Crow says he has never seen and will never see on earth is reserved to the private love between Mattie and her unappreciative husband, Troy. And that, says Jayber, was well.74

As Esolen indicates, Jayber’s commitment to Mattie is complicated by the fact that she remains unhappily married throughout the novel to Troy Chatham, who serves as the book’s primary antagonist. Within the context of vocation, this complication serves as an opportunity, for it broadens our reductive understandings of love as primarily romantic to an exploration of love in its various forms. While the ‘way of love’ provides Jayber with a path forward, as well as a person and a community to serve, it is not a path that is shielded from the world’s suffering. As Jayber reflects in the book’s final chapter,

71. Berry, Jayber Crow, 91. 72. Ibid. 248. 73. Ibid. 248. 74. Esolen, ‘If Dante Were a Kentucky Barber’, 191.

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This is, as I said and believe, a book about Heaven, but I must say too that it has been a close call. For I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell – where we fail to love one another.75

Thus, while the turning points that alter Jayber’s life path gradually reorient him to the ‘way of love’, this love serves as a place from which to encounter, endure and address suffering, not a place from which to escape it.

Narrating Our Wounds Our vocational journeys are shaped in part by turning points. While some of these turning points, like entering college, may seem full of promise, others are characterised by traumatic events. Many students entering college this year have experienced a blending of these two contexts. Furthermore, like all facets of American society, the colleges and universities these students enter have been shaped by multiple forces, many of them life-giving while others are dehumanising – including institutionalised racism and patriarchal oppression, each of which produces what recent trauma theorists have referred to as ‘insidious oppression’ or ‘structural trauma’. Thus, teaching and writing about vocation requires that we integrate the context of trauma and woundedness into our understanding of this subject matter. These questions and concerns are not merely theoretical. They are deeply personal and communal. In my own experience, they have been shaped in part by the tragic events that took place in 2018 at the institution where I teach, Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. The first of these events was a deadly school shooting that took place off campus on the night of 7 November. Sixteen of our students were present at the Borderline Bar and Grill shooting that night, one of whom was tragically shot and killed. The second was a catastrophic wildfire that began just two days after this shooting. The Woolsey Fire resulted in hundreds of students sheltering in place on campus, the temporary closure of the university, and the loss of homes and property for numerous students, staff and faculty members. In reflecting on the impacts of the Borderline shooting and the Woolsey Fire just days after the fire

75. Berry, Jayber Crow, 354.

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began, John Barton, the director of Pepperdine’s Center for Faith and Learning, wrote, Pepperdine is usually a quiet and secure space for young people to contemplate and explore life’s meaning and their own sense of purpose and calling. This week, it feels very different. We often imagine vocational discussions and processes happening in secured offices and classrooms. This week, we are reminded that vocational discernment must also grapple with contexts that are fragile, unpredictable, and insecure. It reminds us that vocation is less about easy optimism and more about service, love, and the search for hope in the midst of challenges and unanswered questions.76

Trauma theory and literature support the vocational discernment process that Barton describes because they provide a language and a narrative structure that avoids ‘easy optimism’, while also affirming that traumatic events and forces can be encountered and even integrated into our vocational journeys in ways that are supportive of our deepest calling to what Wendell Berry describes as the ‘way of love’. In my own classes, students engage this process by writing their own vocational narratives. This is a carefully scaffolded writing assignment in which students first build fluency with core vocational concepts through a variety of readings, while then integrating these concepts into a vocational interview they conduct with a mentor outside of their immediate family. Hence, by the time they begin writing their own vocational narratives, they have read, listened to and reflected on the stories of many others. One topic that they discuss in their vocational interviews and have the option of responding to in their vocational narratives is how times of deep struggle can serve as turning points in our vocational journeys. In reflecting on the impacts of the Woolsey Fire, one student wrote about fleeing the fire in the early morning hours while ash was raining from the sky and I could feel my lungs being coated with smoke. I put my duffle bag in my car and then impulsively went back to grab a couple more things. That was the last time I saw the place that had so quickly become home.77

76. John Barton, ‘Vocation in a Time of Crisis: Reflections from Pepperdine, November 2018’, Vocation Matters (15 November 2018), (last accessed 24 June 2021). 77. Emilie Schutt, ‘The Way That Closed with Fire’, essay, Pepperdine University, 2020, 2. Used with permission.

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The destruction of this student’s home extended well beyond her living arrangements, as her narrative describes the crisis of faith that emerged from this event and the ineffectual efforts of many who sought to help her through it: ‘People tottered the line between empathy and pity . . . Their favorite phrases were “at least.” “At least you got out safely.” “At least you brought a bag.” . . . They did not understand that it was not the “at least” that would help me.’78 In contrasting these forms of assistance with those of her supportive boyfriend, this student integrated the story of Parker J. Palmer’s friend Bill, who massages Palmer’s feet in silence during his depression: My boyfriend served for me the same role that Bill served for Palmer. He did not come over and rub my feet each day like Bill, but he did sit with me in silence and let me rant and make my morbid burning jokes and held me when my emotions became too much. For months he never tried to offer advice or false hopes, he just respected my healing journey.79

This student’s vocational narrative reaches a culminating point when she describes her decision to minor in digital humanities and to pursue a career in archival preservation as a result of the Woolsey Fire: The fires also helped me realize what I feel as my particular vocational calling. I was in the digital humanities class the fall of 2018. During the fires, we were working on our class project to create a digital collection of the Margaret Brock letters in the university archives . . . All of these items could have easily been lost forever . . . Wildfires do not pick and choose their victims . . . They do not care if the victim is a Shakespeare folio or not. They just destroy everything in their path. . . . This fear of loss changed my worldview. I now know that we have a job as humans to preserve our history. With the introduction of DH, we can now preserve our history using tools that do not seem to belong to the humanities field.80

As with Berry’s novel, love and suffering coexist in this student’s vocational narrative, and like Jayber’s story, this student’s narrative moves from loss and woundedness to love and labour on behalf of community. This trajectory recalls Tim Clydesdale’s use of the phrase ‘grounded idealism’ to describe students who display ‘resilience and

78. Ibid. 4. 79. Ibid. 4. 80. Ibid. 5–6.

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persistence’ as they ‘progress toward a life that would positively impact others’.81 Our students are being severely tested by multiple crises – the coronavirus pandemic, the United States’ ongoing racial violence and anthropogenic climate change, to name but a few. What languages will we offer students to help them navigate these contexts? What narratives will we provide them? Will we share our stories in a way that empowers students to more fully claim their own? Each of these questions is central to the calling of teaching and mentorship. The more skilfully we respond to these questions, the more fully and lovingly our students can live out their own.

81. Tim Clydesdale, The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students About Vocation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 18.

Chapter 12

Creative Criticism and the Vital Friction of Otherness Giffen Mare Maupin

What Other People Make of It: Toni Morrison and the Impingements of Others When I remember the morning of my college graduation, I return to Toni Morrison’s voice weaving in and out of a spring storm. Towards the middle of her commencement address, Morrison cautioned my classmates and me to abandon any expectations we might hold of futures determined solely by our own choices and plans. She warned us that our unfolding lives belonged to others as much as they belonged to us: But the fact is [the future] is not yours for the taking. And it is not whatever you make of it. The future is also what other people make of it, how other people will participate in it and impinge on your experience of it.1

As I reread these words, I notice how swiftly Morrison excises from the imagination a future capable of being taken by any single human being. She asserts that the future is made, created, worked for.2 She

  1. Toni Morrison, ‘Commencement Address’, delivered at Wellesley College (28 May 2004), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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insists that our futures are collaborative, shaped in the context of others, and articulates that those who cross our paths are capable of both participating in our lives and impinging on them. Yet when Morrison returns to the disruptive potential of others at the end of her speech, she suggests that we can meet disruption with attention: ‘[a]lthough you will never fully know or successfully manipulate the characters who surface or disrupt your plot, you can respect the ones who do by paying them close attention and doing them justice.’ If the words ‘impinge’ and ‘disrupt’ evoke the suddenness and sharpness with which others can move towards, enter and even break in to our lives, the word ‘attention’ reminds us that we can orient ourselves towards those who interrupt us, allowing them to make claims on our consciousness, our time and even who we imagine ourselves to be. I return to Morrison’s speech when I need to remind myself both why and how I want to write and why and how I want to teach writing. I begin this essay with these particular excerpts because Morrison’s words have propelled me to design courses in which students compose pieces of creative criticism: dialogic essays whose purpose is to use the perspectives of others to unsettle the writer’s own. In the process of writing creative criticism, students experience a version of selfhood in which the ‘self’ is plural, temporary

  2. Morrison joins scholars of vocational exploration who describe the individual life as a story. She explains how building a life, like writing a story, involves some degree of individual agency, and, in particular, the agency to shape imaginatively generous lives in which we reject hatred, fear and domination over others: Of course, you’re general, but you’re also specific. A citizen and a person, and the person you are is like nobody else on the planet. Nobody has the exact memory that you have. What is now known is not all that you are capable of knowing. You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth. What it feels like to be human without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you, without rotating, rehearsing and reinventing the hatreds you learned in the sandbox. And although you don’t have complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you), you could nevertheless create it.

For more on vocational exploration and storytelling, see, for example, Shirley Hershey Showalter, ‘Called to Tell Our Stories: The Narrative Structure of Vocation’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 67–90.



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and dynamic. I use the term ‘creative criticism’ throughout this essay to describe pieces in which writers set in motion a sustained, question-driven exchange between their own perspectives and the perspectives offered by other texts. The self who emerges in creative criticism is made and reimagined through the attention it offers to others as they are encountered. As students shape their work for this course, they learn a vital principle of vocational exploration, namely that the moments when their lives are interrupted by others are also opportunities to direct their attention towards those others. The discomforts of such interruptions can serve as provocations to think, feel and perceive in newly collaborative ways. By writing creative criticism, students develop strategies for reaching towards and navigating the perplexities of engaging with textual and human others. They grow in their capacity to sit with the sense of self-disruption that such reaching creates, and to perceive such self-disruption as a component of newly vital work, whether that work is an essay or a life. Scholars of vocation have long emphasised that the process of discerning one’s calling requires one to engage deeply with the world beyond the self. David S. Cunningham, for example, summarises the relational nature of vocational discernment when he writes that ‘vocation is most often discerned through our relationships with others’, and, more broadly, that ‘[t]he process of “discerning one’s calling in life” requires an exploration, not only of one’s own capacities and proclivities, but also of the world into which one has been “thrown” – and not just in its present state, but also the world of the future.’3 In this essay, I argue that the process of experiencing the friction generated by writing in response to others prepares students to move through the friction they experience while living among them. By juxtaposing their own experiences with careful close readings of texts that add complexity to those experiences, students learn to understand the perspectives of others as uncomfortably generative provocations to shift the focus of their vocational journeys from the worlds they make alone to the worlds they build among and with others. Because creative critics both analyse texts and situate their own perspectives among the perspectives offered by the texts they describe,

  3. David S. Cunningham, ‘Epilogue: In Various Times and Sundry Places: Pedagogies of Vocation/Vocation as Pedagogy’, in Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 326; and ‘Why Vocation is Crucial’, in ibid. 4.

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essays of this kind necessarily limit and compel us to reimagine what we say about ourselves. Creative criticism offers students strategies that help them to navigate the restlessness, vulnerability and uncertainty of moving with and against others on the page. Such a practice also helps them to understand the disorientation they experience during encounters with the unfamiliar as a vital component of creative making and living alike. If others will interrupt each of our lives in unexpected and unsettling ways, we can help students to cultivate attention to otherness in the face of such interruptions. Courses in creative criticism can also encourage students to understand the self as a being we grasp only to lose, a fleeting presence who is remade each time it engages with someone new in the world. As the words of others prompt us to reimagine our own ways of knowing, perceiving and feeling, practitioners of creative criticism ultimately learn to understand selfhood as something dynamic and malleable. We experience ourselves in stillness only to have those selves remade in the course of troublingly generative meetings with the others who change us. Students of creative criticism engage in two modes of writing throughout the semester. They begin by shaping concise, attentive close readings focused on brief passages from our course texts, and then compose concise pieces of creative non-fiction based on single moments from their lives.4 By writing in both of these modes, students learn to  4. To gain a sense of the range of possibilities for the topics that creative critics address and the forms in which they do so, see, among others, Marianne Boruch’s ‘Poets in Cars’, In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2005); Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Grafton, VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011); Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’, in Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions, 1995); Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things (New York: Random House, 2016); Charles D’Ambrosio’s ‘Salinger and Sobs’, in Loitering: New and Collected Essays (Portland: Tin House Books, 2014); Priscilla Gilman’s The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014); Siri Hustvedt’s A Plea for Eros (New York: Picador, 2005); Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014), The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (New York: Back Bay Books, 2019) and Make It Scream Make It Burn (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2019); Maureen McLane’s My Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013); Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014); Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow (New York: Picador, 2019); and Zadie Smith’s ‘Some Notes on Attunement: A Voyage Around Joni Mitchell’, New Yorker (17 December 2012), 30–5, and ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does the Word “Soulful” Mean?’, in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).



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recognise vital similarities between the values of critical and creative work. These values include deep attentiveness and care, resistance to cliché and willingness to suspend certainty in favour of questioning. They also learn to explore how their writing practices prepare them to live out these values in their relationships with others. Yet it is the process of shaping the course’s final piece that most definitively asks students to dwell with a provisional and dynamic version of selfhood. By structuring an extended essay in which the words of other poets, novelists and essayists exert pressure on their own, and vice versa, student writers inhabit both the discomforts and the creative possibilities of living among the others who will shape their futures. The structure of this final essay, in which students intersperse moments from their own lives with their textual analyses, mirrors a life that upholds selfhood only insofar as that selfhood is communal, conversational and plural. Creative critics thus live out an approach to vocational discernment in which our own stories emerge in dynamic relationship with the others who interrupt us, require our attention and ultimately collaborate with us, however disconcertingly, in defining what it means to be a human being, now.

‘The fuller the sharing’: Creative Criticism and the Place of the ‘Thou’ Martin Buber’s I and Thou links both freedom and creativity to an individual’s capacity to enter into relation with others: ‘But [a human being] is free and consequently creative only so long as he possesses, in action and suffering in his own life, that act of being – so long as he himself enters into relation.’5 Buber offers ethical grounds for the creative critic’s work: [w]here there is no sharing there is no reality. Where there is selfappropriation there is no reality. The more direct the contact with the   5. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 54. Adam Kirsch offers the following observation about Buber’s central concerns: ‘At the heart of Buber’s theology was his theory of dialogue – the idea that what matters is not understanding God in abstract, intellectual terms, but, rather, entering into a relationship with him. Such a relationship, he believed, is only possible when we enter into genuine relationships with one another.’ See ‘Modernity, Faith, and Martin Buber’, New Yorker (6 May 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

260   Giffen Mare Maupin Thou, the fuller is the sharing. The I is real in virtue of its sharing in reality. The fuller its sharing the more real it becomes.6

Buber advocates here a way of living and, implicitly, a way of writing, in which shared reality, rather than the singular self, is central. He advocates for direct contact between ourselves and others, a depth of sharing that increases the reality of the ‘I’. If we are to help our students develop writing practices that prepare them to experience a version of selfhood made more vital through abundant sharing with others, then teachers of writing have the responsibility to frame creativity as a discipline that requires us to reach towards others. By crafting essays in which other voices describe, question and contemplate alongside their own, student writers experience alternatives to images of the solitary artist that abound in both literature and film. When they study well-known depictions of solitary creativity, ranging from invocations of the Muse in The Odyssey, Paradise Lost and the poetry of Alexander Pope to William Wordsworth’s 1802 ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, students encounter a model of making in which ideas emerge in a private room. Yet even as such models can encourage student writers to inhabit the generative discomfort of solitude, this vision of the sole self, if left uninterrogated, can perpetuate solipsism both on the page and beyond it. So, too, can practices of vocational exploration that focus exclusively on a self defined by separation unwittingly exclude one’s responsibility to one’s fellow beings. The practice of creative criticism offers a salutary alternative to modes of making in which the separate self is both the source of ideas and the primary focus of the work at hand. As they expose their own memories to the shaping pressures of other texts, student writers also learn to orient themselves towards the others whom they will meet in their workplaces, friendships, families and communities. Contemporary scholars of vocational exploration approach from various angles the pressures that others exert on how we choose to live. Many identify the enlivening effects that those who surround us can have on our processes of vocational discernment. Hannah Schell suggests that faculty can encourage students to contemplate the shaping force of their relationships to others by asking them to think in terms of community, belonging and solidarity:

 6. Buber, I and Thou, 63.



Creative Criticism and Otherness   261 For example, if they have drawn their communities as a series of concentric circles, with themselves at the center, it can be helpful to have them reverse the direction of emphasis by asking, ‘what communities make a claim on you?’ or ‘where do you belong?’ That is, with whom are you already in relationship, to whom do you already have obligations or responsibilities? Or, borrowing a phrase from Richard Rorty, with whom are you in solidarity?7

Schell offers here an outwardly oriented model of being in the world, a model in which one’s relationships and responsibilities lead one to oneself. Jason A. Mahn reminds us of the destabilising impact that others have on individual vocational exploration: To find one’s calling is to find one’s self. Nevertheless, that self includes, at best, many others who impose on it. To ‘have’ a vocation is thus to be interrupted by, and made open to, unbidden others; for some, this might also include the divine Other.8

Instructors of creative criticism have much to learn from the juxtaposition of interruption and openness in this sentence. Mahn implies that the process of being interrupted by others also allows us to become open to them. Echoing Morrison’s contention that we can respond to interruption with attention, Mahn suggests that being interrupted causes us to ‘[be] made open’, even as such opening arrests and unsettles us. Creative critics enact this openness on the page, demonstrating on the levels of both language and an interwoven structure how an ‘I’ might remain ever open to the influence of a ‘you’. Process-focused writing courses like creative criticism can be particularly vital spaces in which to help students write through and learn to demonstrate resilience in response to the experience of being unsettled by other voices and ways of being. As teachers of writing, we have ample opportunities to remind our students of, and even insist on, the challenges of finding the words adequate to the unsettling interactions between ‘I’ and ‘you’, selfhood and otherness, both on the page and in the world. Rather than bypassing the messiness,

 7. Hannah Schell, ‘Commitment and Community: The Virtue of Loyalty and Vocational Discernment’, in Cunningham, At This Time, 254.   8. Jason A. Mahn, ‘The Conflicts in Our Callings: The Anguish (and Joy) of Willing Several Things’, in Cunningham, Vocation Across the Academy, 48.

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slowness and inarticulacy of these spaces, we can structure courses that prioritise process and provide students with practical tools to help them write the next truest word.

Losing One’s Place: Creative Criticism and Responsive Living My course on creative criticism began from a place of restlessness, as the students with whom I worked posed beautifully urgent questions about their vocations as beginning writers. Why do we choose to write about texts in the first place? What can an essay that engages a literary text look, sound and feel like? To whom do individual writers address themselves, and how do they hope to affect their readers? Although some students revelled in the process of constructing arguments about the texts we were reading, many questioned why they were writing in a mode that felt impersonal, detached and dry. Senior students who were shaping article-length persuasive essays for their theses expressed particular concerns about their audiences. ‘Who will care about what I have to say?’ they wondered. ‘Who will read my writing at all?’ Students in introductory courses posed equally pointed questions about approaching literary criticism in the right way: ‘What am I allowed to do when I write about literature?’ they asked. ‘Can I use the word “I”?’ Underneath all of these questions, I heard others: why does writing about literature matter at all? What am I doing or learning when I engage with a text? Who do I become in the context of the words I bring to the page? How will my work impact those who read it? What will my writing do in or for the world? In answer to these questions, the first paragraph of my course syllabus for creative criticism asserts that texts, like other human beings, both evoke responses in us and require responses from us. The prospect of responding to a poem, essay, novel or other text shifts students’ focus from a set of imagined rules about how they should write about texts to a range of alternatives for how they could write about them. By experimenting with and exploring different approaches to writing about literature, both topical and structural, and reflecting on how the choices they make situate them in relationship to their readers, student writers practise the same kinds of agency and discernment that they will summon in their ongoing vocational explorations. The framework of textual responsiveness also encourages students to understand both their writing



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practices and their lives as a whole in relational terms. As they shape pieces of creative criticism, students learn to situate themselves in relationship to the texts about which they write, and to consider how a writer’s choices about both language and form allow a text to act on the world. Writers focus particularly on how texts invite their readers to imagine new experiential and affective possibilities for human lives. At the same time, students explore how the choices they make about an essay’s language, pacing and structure impact the kinds of intimacy and distance they cultivate with those who read their work. Throughout the semester, students gather, compose and repeatedly reshape artful descriptions of our course readings, including Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, alongside moments from their lives. In creative criticism, we use the word ‘describe’ in lieu of ‘analyse’ or ‘argue’ for several reasons. First and most importantly, even as it acknowledges the agency of the describer, the word ‘describe’ emphasises the particularity and complexity of the thing being described. By thinking about both the textual and experiential components of our work in terms of description, student writers practise humility in the face of both texts and memories whose intricacies they may never fully capture. Mark Doty’s The Art of Description: World into Word introduces students to the habits of mind that prepare them to represent on the page both images from their own lives and passages from texts that expand the circumference of these lives. Doty insists that the more exactingly we describe the world, the more closely we involve ourselves with it. Such involvement compels us to protect the world we learn to particularise: ‘the more we can name what we’re seeing, the more language we have for it, the less likely we are to destroy it’.9 Students have responded to Doty’s invitation to see linguistic specificity as a form of care by sharpening the language they apply to images as varied as a kitchen sink in which dish soap rises to a tattoo parlour to a mother’s empty classroom. Particularly when we apply the word ‘description’ to our close reading practices, students begin to write about literature in ways that acknowledge how a text acts on its readers and the surprising possibilities that it creates in the world. By thinking in terms of description, writers begin to cultivate

  9. Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010), 108.

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both the patience and care necessary to engage fully with other lives in the world and to prioritise a version of creative making and living that centres dynamic reciprocity rather than the singular self. As they enact humility, patience, generative uncertainty and wonder in the face of unfamiliar texts, students engage values on which they can draw as they converse with and live alongside others in the world. Using the word ‘describe’ also encourages students to think about the skills and habits that they are developing throughout the course and to recognise that so-called critical writing and creative writing require similar capacities, even as their practitioners describe different materials. As they move through the readings, in-class exercises and writing prompts in creative criticism, students learn that writing about literary texts, on the one hand, and writing about the world, on the other hand, require patient receptiveness and a willingness to be acted upon, even changed by, the text or memory they are rendering on the page. If we use the word ‘describe’ throughout the semester to highlight the similarities between critical and creative writing and to allow our sentences to be shaped by the dynamic particularities of the object to which we are attending, then we use the word ‘encounter’ to underscore the connections between writing in response to others and living among them. The word ‘encounter’ reminds us of the ways in which the uncomfortable pressures of interacting with others can yield new and vital ways of perceiving and being in the world. If terms like ‘analyse’ and ‘argue’ prioritise the agency of the writer and imply that she can fully know the text at hand, then ‘encounter’ makes space for the discomfort and uncertainty that often accompany our experiences of the unfamiliar and the new. Just as encounters with strangers, friends and family members can introduce us to surprising and unsettling ways of existing in the world, encounters with intricate and challenging texts often invite us to puzzle through new forms of perceiving, feeling and being among others. By structuring discussions and offering writing prompts that make space for students to not yet know in the face of the new, instructors of creative criticism walk alongside young adults as we learn together how to approach and to sit with the disorientation we experience in the face of otherness. Both on the page and in the world, such disorientation can serve as a vital seed for essays and lives shaped by generative meetings. In their introduction to Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide, Steven Benson and Clare Connors define creative criticism as the ‘writing out’ of an encounter between reader and writer. In



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such encounters, practitioners of creative criticism can expect to feel disoriented and lost: Creative criticism, in short, is writing which seeks to do justice to what can happen – does happen; will happen; might or might not happen – when we are with an artwork . . . To encounter is to be turned, whether for a moment or for life; to encounter is always in part not to know, to be a little or to be very lost; to encounter is to surrender something of oneself, willingly or otherwise, even to lose a sense of what one’s self is or to be faced with other forms of such sensing; to be provoked or unsettled into losing one’s place.10

The language that Benson and Connors use here to capture the practice of creative criticism has important implications for a process of vocational discernment grounded in encounters in which one lets oneself be lost. The practice of creative criticism involves actively seeking out unfamiliar texts and allowing what we think of as ‘ourselves’ to be remade by our embodied meetings with them. Although such meetings involve sensations of discomfort, frustration and friction, such sensations will, as Buber suggests, lead one to a version of selfhood made more real by being collaborative. When Benson and Connors describe the experience of ‘being with an artwork’, they situate text and reader in a non-hierarchical dialogic relationship whose meeting makes something happen in the world. By locating themselves in ongoing parallel relationship to texts, creative critics prepare themselves to adopt similar postures as they encounter families, friends, neighbours and strangers. Reading requires vertiginous self-surrender, and a willingness to move through the discomforts of such surrender affords one the gift of ‘other forms of such sensing’, alternative conceptions of the world around oneself that prompt one to ‘lose one’s place’ in the name of becoming attuned to other lives.

‘Leaning against other texts’: Reading and Writing Creative Criticism As instructors of creative criticism, we can offer students both readings and writing prompts in which they learn that our ‘own’ lives

10. Steven Benson and Clare Connors, ‘Introduction’, in Benson and Connors (eds), Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 5.

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depend on the lives of others who sustain and remake us, even as they also disturb and disorient us. To help students explore how others challenge us to reimagine the meanings of those words we think we know best, my creative criticism course culminates in a word-centred extended essay. Students choose a single word that they have encountered in one or more of our course readings and use these readings to reframe moments from their own lives in which this word serves as a theme. The essay as a whole demonstrates that we define words in dialogue with others, that definitions often take the form of complex constellations of related words and that, both on the page and in our lives, our own senses of terms like solitude, tenderness, wonder, exposure, anger and more are generatively unsettled by those whose presences call on us to imagine newly intricate experiences, ideas and feelings. During the second part of the course, when students describe moments from their own lives, I respond to a series of short exercises by identifying a central word or phrase that seems to capture the writer’s often unspoken central preoccupation. By doing so, I encourage students to see how they might link our course texts with significant questions drawn from their personal histories.11 I use prompts inspired by our course texts to help writers mine their memories for significant images and to practise carrying those images to the page. Taking a cue from Ross Gay’s ‘Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt’, for example, an early exercise asks students to choose an ordinary ritual from their day and to describe themselves performing it, while another, drawing on Gay’s ‘Armpit’, invites students to write about a moment in which they chose to ignore a spoken or unspoken rule. Prompts like these support students in the work of both identifying a central question in their lives and seeking out other voices who will challenge how they engage with this question. Given the difficulties that students have when composing final essays that draw on material from both course readings and their own histories, it can be useful to begin a course on creative criticism

11. In ‘How “One True Question” Will Clarify Your Life’s Purpose’, Marjorie Hass describes how one might think about one’s purpose in terms of a defining question: ‘I have a friend, the poet, scholar, and leader Laurie Patton, who asks her students “What is your one true question?” She intends, I think, to help them find the place of their deepest curiosity. The question that comes up for them over and over again and that can never reach a definitive answering spot. The one that is endlessly fascinating’, Human Parts (24 June 2020), (last accessed 24 June 2021).



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by reading and discussing published works in this mode. By studying an associatively organised text like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets during the early weeks of the course, for example, students engage with a text whose author links otherwise disparate textual and personal material together with the word ‘blue’ and related concepts. Although two distinct narratives emerge in Bluets, one focused on the shattering of a love affair and the other centred on a dear friend’s sudden, debilitating injury, Nelson interrupts these narratives with the words of others, including Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sir Isaac Newton, who become partners in her enquiry. As they study texts like Bluets, students learn that when they choose an interwoven or conversational structure for a piece of writing, such a choice implies that they view human consciousness as inherently dialogic in nature. By allowing other texts to provoke, disturb and disorient them into new insights, student writers are, to borrow a phrase from Nelson, making ‘[wagers] about how deeply intertwined our consciousnesses may be’.12 Even as thinking with other texts may allow us to write something new, the so-called product of this collaborative thinking unfolds alongside something even more vital, namely our ability to recognise our inextricability from those among whom we live. As students shape the raw materials for this final essay – focused descriptions of moments from our course texts and equally careful renderings of moments from their own lives – our discussions foreground a writing practice that begins from texts that create restlessness within us. Writers of creative criticism shape intricate networks of thinking, description and questioning, an endeavour that importantly transcends the practice of mining texts for

12. In an interview with Genevieve Hudson, Nelson describes the dialogic nature of her work as an implicit argument about the nature of consciousness: All of which is to say: leaning against other texts, thinking with other minds, letting another person’s writing (or art, or being) haunt you, inhabit you, inspire you, bother you, quite thoroughly, isn’t just a means of spurring one to produce thoughts or books. It’s also a wager about how deeply intertwined our consciousnesses may be. It is to wonder (as Henry James did, in his late novels), whether consciousness exists between us, in the air, rather than within individual minds.

Rather than upholding the unassailable sanctity of the individual mind, Nelson celebrates the generative potential of a shared consciousness. See Genevieve Hudson, ‘An Interview with Maggie Nelson’, Bookslut (June 2013), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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moments to which one can relate. As Rebecca Onion notes, claims about a text’s relatability foreground the self: The word bothers me most, I’ve since decided, because it presumes that the speaker’s experiences and tastes are common and normative. ‘Relatable’ is in the eye of the beholder, but its very nature is to represent itself as universal. It’s shorthand that masquerades as description. Without knowing why you find something ‘relatable’, I know nothing about either you or it.13

Both the practice of reading for relatability, then, and the kinds of writing that treat texts as mere offshoots of a writer’s story allow the writer to remain comfortably central, safe from the discomfort of allowing others to change who we think we are, and the language we use to say so. In both classroom discussion and in the preparatory work they complete for their close reading and creative non-fiction pieces, students write in response to the questions ‘What are some things you don’t yet know how to describe about this text or experience? Which aspects of this text or experience leave you without words?’ As they dwell with and address these questions in words, students often make their ways to the complexity and contradictory nature of texts and experiences alike. For example, when one student posed the question ‘whose heart?’ of the phrase ‘]heart/]absolutely’ during a discussion of one of the translations of Sappho included in Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter, she created space for both herself and her classmates to articulate the poem’s refusal to locate this heart in a particular body. We can help students to develop the resilience necessary to navigate the discomforts of relational life by allowing them to see uncertainty, doubt and questioning as signs of deep involvement with the vital strangeness of both textual and human others. Prompts that foreground uncertainty encourage students to meet the perplexities of otherness with concrete, tangible action and engagement. By creating space for students to build towards increasingly intricate formulations, we prepare them to soften into the unknowing that will characterise so many moments of their vocational journeys, particularly as they engage with others. 13. Rebecca Onion, ‘The Awful Emptiness of Relatable’, Slate (11 April 2014), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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Just as the experience of describing what they do not yet know how to say about a text or experience can lead students to surprising and fresh formulations, the process of reshaping their work over time can help students to understand their relationships with others as dynamic and evolving. Indeed, the revision process can afford space for student practitioners of creative criticism to grow more accustomed to reaching beyond themselves by doing so repeatedly, returning to both texts and memories to renew their intimacy with the world. While Benson and Connors emphasise the humility required to represent our encounters with texts, Mark Doty reminds us that our efforts to describe the world will fall short. Even after depicting a fireworks display with loving exactitude, Doty pauses to consider the details he has left out: Here I sigh. That last sentence just doesn’t come anywhere close to evoking the actual visual or auditory experience. Not to mention the smell of burnt powder or drifting smoke picking up a little salt and seaweed tang, mingling with the annoying cigarette of the man next to me.14

Even as we can hear Doty’s frustration in these sentences, we can also hear a note of longing to return to the previous moment with fresh attention and new, more fully adequate words. As we inhabit the gaps between our experiences and the words we use to describe them, we cultivate the patience required to notice and come closer to articulating the world in words. The longing that motivates Doty’s repeated returns to the world around him also models for students the incremental proceeding of relational life, the ways in which our knowledge of any other human being unfolds gradually, comes to rest only to be set in motion once more. Rather than solidifying our singularity or calcifying our distance from others, Doty suggests, the distance we experience from the world when we fail to capture it instead trains us to build intimacy as we continue to reach towards those things we do not yet know about other lives. A course that prioritises revision does so in the name of promoting the patience and care required to both articulate the complexities of and live in dynamic relationship with those others who reshape our understanding of ourselves. Doty’s suggestion that the practice of describing the world intensifies our sense of responsibility for the human and non-human lives around us resonates with the work

14. Doty, The Art of Description, 6.

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of contemporary literary theorists who describe how close reading trains us to engage with others in the world.15 Students of creative criticism learn that both the close readings and creative non-fiction exercises that they revise throughout the semester demand curiosity, humility, patience and a willingness to be surprised. In his recent New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice, Fredric Bogel argues that close reading prepares us to move beyond cliché into more thorough forms of responsiveness to, and responsibility for, those whose lives intersect with our own: As I see it, close reading – patient, inventive, detailed attention to how language works in a text – represents our best hope of getting beyond the clichés of superficial acquaintance, taking responsibility for the being and interpretation of the full text, and allowing ourselves to be surprised both by what it is and by how much it differs from what we had thought it was.16

Here, Bogel reminds us that if we are to know other texts and other human beings more deeply than ‘superficial acquaintance’ permits, we must encounter them over time. Rather than resting in the comfortable familiarity of cliché, we must instead dwell with the human

15. Doty’s language here also reminds us that the practice of artful description not only intensifies a writer’s care for the world, but also allows a reader to be surprised by that world, to see it anew. This passage thus recalls Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham’s observation in this volume’s Introduction, via David Richter, about the work texts do to re-involve us with the world: ‘by its use of unaccustomed language, art makes the world strange again, so that we can see it with the freshness of a child’ (10). 16. Fredric V. Bogel, New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 23. Such sharpening of attention is particularly important for all of us who are navigating an increasingly networked digital world. In Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2013), Sherry Turkle writes that ‘our networked devices encourage a new notion of time because they promise that one can layer more activities onto it’ (164). Later, she cites a study that links our increasingly fragmented patterns of attention with decreased empathy: A 2010 analysis of data from over fourteen thousand college students over the past thirty years shows that since the year 2000, young people have reported a dramatic decline in interest in other people. The authors of this study associate students’ lack of empathy with the availability of online games and social networking. An online connection can be deeply felt, but you only need to deal with the part of the person you see in your game world or social network. (293)



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and textual objects of our attention long enough to develop language adequate to their complexities. Such an enterprise involves a willingness to be surprised, to recognise the new possibilities presented by a text or a person and to acknowledge that both we and others are always evolving in time. To familiarise themselves with a practice of embodied close reading that centres the ways in which a text acts on its readers, students in creative criticism utilise a series of enabling constraints. Their work with such constraints has several important implications for vocational exploration. First, syntactic constraints offer pragmatic ways to engage with uncertainty and the wordlessness that can accompany it. By working with syntactic constraints, student writers experience concretely a form of collaborative language-making in which a structure imagined by someone else can prompt one to imagine new forms of expression. Second, enabling constraints teach students to acknowledge what Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham identify beautifully in this volume’s Introduction as the ‘paradoxically liberating constraints of form’.17 In other words, writing into the shells of sentences offers a model for the surprising possibilities that can emerge, both on the page and in one’s day-to-day life, when our contexts, including the human beings who participate in them, limit our choices. Enabling constraints foreground a shared mode of making and living in which selfhood is tenderly collaborative rather than withdrawn and self-isolating. Third, these constraints suggest how both syntax and the structure of an essay as a whole can function as an argument for the ways in which the self is informed, sustained and shaped by others. By working with the syntax of other writers and using it to reimagine their own, students learn to contemplate the ethical implications of the choices they make about how to structure their own work, including, but not limited to, the placement of pronouns within sentences, the location of their own stories in relationship to the stories of others, and the sequence in which they present their ideas. For example, I offered the following prompt to students who were studying Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping: Taking your cue from Housekeeping, imagine someone you know as he, she, or they walk through or dwell temporarily within a space, either indoors or outdoors, that is familiar to you . . . If you include the word ‘I’, do so no more than twice.

17. Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham, ‘Introduction’, this volume, 11.

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Prompts like this one encourage students to foreground the experiences of others while quieting the particular intensities of the self.

Conclusion: Attention, Justice and the Artful Life As I shape these pages, I remember that the most recent iteration of my course on creative criticism concluded over a year ago. Morrison’s perspectives on ‘those who may surface or disrupt [our plots]’ are especially relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to remind us of our inescapable proximity to one another, the disproportionate effects of the pandemic on marginalised groups and the urgency of racial justice. What might it mean, during this time and in the moments and years that follow, to pay close attention and do justice to those whose paths we cross in parks and in gas stations, in libraries and at food banks, in hospitals and in streets? The provocation of Morrison’s statement lies in the endlessness of the work it invites us to do. Creative criticism teaches students that their own plots become more vital when they orient themselves towards others, even as doing so may also cause them to feel less settled and comfortable, less satisfied and still. By engaging deeply with other texts and reimagining moments from our own lives in conversation with them, creative critics seek out and make our worlds by moving among others. In the process of doing so, they allow what they think of as themselves to be made new by others. Taking their cue from Morrison, student practitioners of creative criticism hone their attention, learning to describe the stories of others with the same care they use to render their own stories on the page. By creating a sustained essayistic dialogue between the words of others and their own, students experience in miniature the relational conversations through which their lives will unfold and be made new. Creative criticism courses like the one I have described here thus make space for an exploration of a dynamic self that is sustained by relational life. Morrison concludes her speech by emphasising the agency of the creative self: ‘[from] my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.’18 Creativity, as Morrison imagines it in the world, and as students in creative criticism experience it on the page, involves a

18. Morrison, ‘Commencement Address’.



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willingness not only to acknowledge but also to seek out others who will exert pressure on one’s own ideas and choices. Morrison thus offers us a vision of artful writing and living alike. By acknowledging that our lives are made new through the attention we give to others, we ready ourselves to learn better how to do justice to those who surface and disrupt our plots, both on the pages we write and in the lives we build alongside them.

Chapter 13

Community-Engaged Pedagogy, Literary Studies and Vocation Deirdre Egan-Ryan

One of the first times I taught my ‘Literature of Service’ course, as we discussed Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a student related an experience of serving at a local group home for teenage mothers and their infants. A young mother was holding her infant without supporting the baby’s head well enough, and the student wondered if she should tell the mother. She considered her own role: she was a teenage student, lacking the experience of handling many infants. Did she have the right to impose her views on the young mother? The student eventually decided to intervene in favour of the child’s safety, but the moment was key, and her decision was informed by our discussion of Gilman’s story. In reading about how Gilman’s narrator is improperly prescribed a rest cure for postpartum depression by her physician-husband, the students had realised the importance of authentically listening to those forced into positions of ‘being served’. The students had concluded that the husband in Gilman’s story represents ‘disservice’ because he does not listen to his patient-wife. While my student reached a decision in favour of the safety of the child while volunteering at the group home, her moment of discernment demonstrated that she had internalised the text along with the best tenets of community-engaged teaching and learning. She recognised that, like the narrator of the story, the young mother also had a point of view and a story to tell. Furthermore, the student did not want to diminish the mother’s dignity by imposing her perspective. Through such reflection, consideration and intentional action, community-engaged literature courses can foster vocational discernment. This essay suggests that a combination of community engagement, vocational exploration and literary analysis helps students develop a



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foundational perspective for lifelong learning that contributes to the common good. My students’ work in surrounding communities helps them discern how their passions and gifts can be applied to good work in the world, while skills fostered through literary analysis such as close reading and argumentation help them understand and act in authentic partnership with those communities. Let me be clear: I do not want to suggest that all literary studies courses should include vocational exploration, nor should they use community-engaged pedagogy. But, when incorporating the best practices of communityengaged pedagogy and an in-depth discussion of vocation, literary studies courses are excellent platforms for enhancing student experience and ultimately benefiting our communities. The discourses of community engagement, vocational exploration and literary analysis mutually produce a meaningful teaching and learning experience that, I would argue, reinforces why we teach in the first place. Some literary critics have warned that reading literature in such community-engaged courses might overlook the complexity of the texts themselves while at the same time aestheticising the lives of real individuals encountered in service interactions.1 In my experience, however, these liabilities can be minimised through vocational exploration. At the intersection of literary analysis and vocational storytelling, especially from marginalised voices, students find that analysis of the systems that marginalise both fictional characters and real people can indeed amount to a service in the form of writerly advocacy. Students begin to identify concepts from literary theory in the real stories they encounter in their service and in the texts they read, oftentimes from a feminist, postcolonial, or race and ethnic studies perspective. In this process, many students find new voices themselves; indeed, this empowerment can contribute to their own vocational explorations. Such advocacy follows what rhetoric and composition studies scholars such as Thomas Deans have suggested: that advocacy can take the forms of writing for, about, and with the community. The most authentic, and presumably the most reciprocal, partnership occurs when advocates write ‘with’ the community.2 A similar partnership is found in what John Neafsey describes as ‘authentic vocational discernment’ through the balance

  1. See, for example, Laurie Grobman, ‘Is there a Place for Service Learning in Literary Studies?’, Profession (2005), 129–40.   2. Thomas Deans, Writing Partnerships (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000), 17.

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and interplay between the ‘inward listening’ of personal vocation and ‘outward, socially engaged listening’.3 Ultimately, I suggest that community-engaged work in literary studies courses, completed within the context of vocational discernment, builds an analytical perspective characterised by mutuality, attentiveness and intentional action grounded in recognition of privilege. This analytical perspective is applied to literary texts, systems of oppression and stories of vocation. Such critical enquiry cultivates greater empathy and capacity for understanding, both of which ultimately encourage work towards the common good.

Community-Engaged Pedagogy and Vocational Discernment in Literary Studies In her polemical 2005 essay ‘Is There a Place for Service Learning in Literary Studies?’ in the influential Modern Language Association (MLA) publication Profession, Laurie Grobman concludes that, in fact, there is not a place for service-learning in literary studies.4 Grobman is a long-standing practitioner and dedicated proponent of service-learning, yet her concerns about the potential liabilities of teaching literary studies through a service-learning pedagogy are warranted. In her literature courses, she observes that such methods might ‘undermine literary studies rather than imbue it with the cultural significance’ for which advocates of such methods had hoped.5 She warns that problems persist in integrating service-learning into literary studies courses: ‘because service learning is for many students their first real-world encounter with some of the nation’s profound social ills, it can be difficult for them to avoid seeing themselves as saviors despite the emphasis on mutual learning’.6 Although she

  3. John Neafsey, A Sacred Voice is Calling: Personal Vocation and Social Conscience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 1.   4. It is accepted practice in the field to include a hyphen in the term ‘service-learning’ to emphasise the inherent pedagogical connection between acts of service and student learning. Laurie Grobman and Roberta Rosenberg do not follow this practice, however, so I do not use the hyphen when quoting their work or other sources that do not use the hyphen. See Laurie Grobman and Roberta Rosenberg (eds), Service Learning and Literary Studies in English (New York: Modern Language Association, 2015).   5. Grobman, ‘Is There a Place?’, 129.   6. Ibid. 130.

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remains dedicated to the possibilities of this form of teaching and learning, Grobman notes that the most marginalised writers and their work could be further marginalised: Despite my attempts to address the problem, I have found that service learning can too easily encourage narrow interpretations of literature to fit or explain real-world situations, especially those related to race, class, gender, and other categories of difference, thereby erasing the complexities of literary interpretation. I also remain concerned that service learning may reinforce the insidious notion that texts by writers of color are valuable only as sociological documents, not as works of art, or that ethnic writers of imaginative literature must be authentic spokespersons for their racial group. In these pairings, literature becomes at times subservient to, or a rubber stamp of, what students find in the real world of their service organizations.7

Indeed, these are major concerns. In pairing literature with servicelearning, all parties – writers, texts, members of vulnerable communities – are diminished. Students might oversimplify complex social problems by applying literature to them, and, at the same time, those literary texts may lose their aesthetic power when they are seen only in their one-toone correspondence to real life. Despite these potential liabilities for combining service-learning and literary studies, Grobman finds reasons to support it. Even in her 2005 criticism, she argues that ‘service learning can encourage students to theorize difference’8 and that it can deepen their understanding of complex categories of difference. She conveys that in her own experience of students’ learning, they spoke readily about how service-learning ‘allowed them to connect to the literature at a more personal level, how it gave them new lenses through which to understand the literature and vice versa, and how both service and literature exposed them to unfamiliar cultures’.9 In many ways, Grobman uses this early warning as the staging ground for further scholarship: [L]iterature as a means to resolve community conflicts can only be realized, in my view, if we remember that literary texts are imaginative constructs. We must remain mindful of literature’s cultural and aesthetic capabilities;

  7. Ibid. 130.   8. Ibid. 133.   9. Ibid. 135.

278  Deirdre Egan-Ryan otherwise, service learning in a literature course becomes boilerplate, and literary study loses its specific functions in a comprehensive curriculum.10

By maintaining a focus on literature as artistic work, she hopes, service-learning courses avoid the pitfall of assuming that literary texts can solve serious and complex social issues. And by extension, presumably, they can avoid a damaging aestheticising of poverty, for example. While her concerns are valid and critical to assuring that communitybased work engages most effectively with literary studies, much of what Grobman is concerned about here is addressed by the best practices in the field of community engagement. In a pivotal 1995 essay, ‘A Service-learning Curriculum for Faculty’, Robert Bringle and Julie Hatcher defined what they then called ‘service-learning’:11 [a] course-based, credit-bearing educational experience in which students (a) participate in an organized service activity that meets identified community needs and (b) reflect on the service activity in such a way as to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation of the discipline, and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility.12

They note the importance of the hyphen connecting the words ‘service’ and ‘learning’ so that all of the work in the community is embedded in the context of classroom reflection. They emphasise that the work in the community must be credit-bearing and offered in the context of this deep critical reflection. In other words, grounding the experiential work in credit-bearing and classroom practices of reflection and analysis avoids both the charity framework that

10. Ibid. 137. 11. I use the terms ‘service-learning’ and ‘community engagement’ and ‘communitybased learning’ throughout this essay to refer to course-based, community-engaged work as defined by Bringle and Hatcher. They distinguish between experiential learning, in which students join the worlds of experience and more traditional classroom knowledge-making to engage in the learning process, and servicelearning and community-engaged courses, in which the faculty and students make an authentic partnership with community agencies and individuals, whereby both community partner and the students and faculty benefit from the interaction. In a sense, experiential education can be understood as the umbrella term for applied learning, of which service-learning and community-engaged learning are one form. See Robert G. Bringle and Julie Hatcher, ‘A Service-learning Curriculum for Faculty’, Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning 2 (1995), 112–22. 12. Ibid. 112.



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distances the server from the served and what has become known as a ‘saviour’ complex. Such community–partner interactions, they suggest, must be understood in terms of reciprocity, emphasising that classroom instructors not impose their learning goals on community partners but instead use those partners to teach their students.13 Course learning goals should take into account the goals and interests identified by the community partner. Summarising what has become standard best practice in the field, Barbara Jacoby suggests that instructors consult community partners when setting up a project or placement.14 Such consultation allows for the work of the course and the work in the community to benefit both parties rather than only the students in their learning goals. When interactions are framed in this reciprocal manner, John Hamerlinck and Julie Plaut suggest that such interactions are more authentic and richer; they are partnerships that are ‘asset-based’.15 In this understanding, all parties – representatives of the college or university and community members – bring their expertise and assets to the act of problem-solving. This view espouses a mutual humility, recognising that people hold expertise in various ways, so that together partners can address real issues facing the collective community. This understanding rejects a charity model in which some actors (those from the academic setting) carry more weight according to their privilege, and other actors (those in the community) carry only their needs. Most recently, the field of community engagement has begun to emphasise what feminist theory, cultural studies and race and ethnic studies have offered to the study of literary texts. Tania D. Mitchell, for example, argues that best practices in service-learning pay heed to the workings of privilege through the categories of race, class, gender and sexuality. She describes this informed perspective as ‘critical service-learning’ to recognise the use of critical thinking across categories of difference when building and analysing community-based teaching and learning projects.16

13. Indeed, some partners become co-teachers with the classroom teachers, but their contribution to the course should not be seen as utilitarian. 14. See Barbara Jacoby, ‘Developing and Sustaining Campus–Community Partnerships’, in Service-Learning Essentials (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2015), 51–80. 15. See ‘Introduction’, in John Hamerlinck and Julie Plaut (eds), Asset-Based Community Engagement in Higher Education (Minneapolis: Minnesota Campus Compact, 2014), 1–16. 16. Tania D. Mitchell, ‘Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models’, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (Spring 2008), 50–65.

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Ten years after publishing her initial concerns about servicelearning in literary studies courses, Grobman co-edited a collection of essays with Roberta Rosenberg to propose best practices based on her earlier experiences and those of others. The introduction to Service Learning and Literary Studies in English contextualises how service-learning pedagogies contribute to larger questions of social justice. Here, Grobman and Rosenberg rehearse debates about the relative value of literature for the public good and the moral imagination. They propose three goals for service-learning in literary studies: [S]tudents will develop a genuine understanding and sense of civic responsibility and commitment; work performed by students will positively impact the community and fulfill an important need as identified by the community partner; and courses will offer new questions and answers about literature, criticism and theory.17

These goals represent the best scholarship on community-engaged teaching and learning, emphasising an assets-based model focused on social change. For literary studies in community-engaged courses, the goals reiterate that such courses understand literature as an art form studied in its constructed nature, rather than as fictional stories to be applied to real situations. I would like to suggest that the practice of vocational exploration can likewise help address the relationship between the real and the literary representation of human experience. The inclusion of stories of vocation, along with the habits of vocational discernment, deepens, solidifies and reinforces the skills of analysis that we seek to inculcate in the literary studies classroom. Vocational discernment helps students avoid the liabilities of enacting a saviour complex and marginalising community voices. Theorists of vocation bring together the analysis of an individual’s talents and gifts with a deeper understanding of the collective world beyond the individual in a parallel way to the processes of reading and action involved in community-engaged literary studies courses. Frederick Buechner’s now well-known articulation of vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet’ becomes the fundamental understanding of vocation in courses

17. Grobman and Rosenberg, Service Learning and Literary Studies, 28.



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such as these.18 Likewise, vocation scholar John Neafsey paraphrases Michael Himes’s attention to joy, talent and service to suggest the reciprocity of vocational discernment – that is, that our discernment of intentional action in the world is grounded in both the world’s needs and an individual’s abilities. Neafsey defines vocation as ‘an authentic calling [that] brings together three things: what we most enjoy doing, what we are good at, and what others most need from us’.19 For literature students engaged in community work, vocation exploration can be highly generative. It dissipates their fears about a number of concerns: that their vocations are unknown, singular, inaccessible and unresolved; that their vocations might turn out to be unwelcome; and that their vocations might not involve meaningful work. When combined with their practices of close reading, vocational exploration counters such student fears by paying heed to detail and allowing for deeper understanding. Specifically, by prompting them to analyse their own stories, we can help students understand that stories can be multiply directed and complex, and see that stories might include competing perspectives while still being knowable, accessible and ultimately meaningful. In addition to conceptualising self and world as connected for vocational exploration, other understandings that appeal to a literarycritical, community-engaged perspective emphasise the roles of responsibility and reciprocity. This articulation of vocation is particularly useful for discussions of narrative and service-learning that lead to a formulation of intentional action. Neafsey claims that ‘our ability to size up and critique our social reality helps us discern our social responsibilities within it, and helps us figure out how to best use our energies and talents for the common good’.20 In a similar way, Margaret E. Mohrmann engages with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of ‘responsibility’ as the ability to respond to the world in which we are embedded. Rather than foregrounding concepts of duty or requirement as responsibility, though, Mohrmann traces the etymological roots of the term to establish how a response is more than simply an answer; it ‘refers to a

18. Frederick Buechner, ‘Vocation’, in Mark R. Schwehn and Dorothy C. Bass (eds), Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020), 181. 19. Neafsey, A Sacred Voice, 43. 20. Ibid. 46.

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promise or a pledge’.21 This concept allows students to see that as they encounter the world through their reading and through their community engagement, they can begin to understand to what the world is calling them as specific agents of change. In keeping with a community-engaged focus on the interaction between students and community partners as reciprocal and assets-based rather than needs-based, Darby Kathleen Ray connects it to vocational discernment. She says, ‘vocational discernment involves a kind of negotiation or reciprocity between self and world – a process in which the self allows its own desires to be re-formed by the needs beyond the self’.22 Ray likewise chronicles how community-engaged work can cultivate the ‘attentiveness’ so needed by a fast-paced and surfaceoriented contemporary world. Such attentiveness represents the very craft that literary scholars can and should bring to discussions of vocational discernment that have until now remained the purview of theologians: the practice of close reading. Although the skill of close reading has been identified with New Criticism’s understanding of literary texts as hermetically sealed and deeply self-referential, Jane Gallop makes the case that close reading is in fact a highly applicable skill that embodies Paulo Freire’s call for individual students to produce their own knowledge in freedom, thus resisting the tyranny of a ‘banking model’ of education in which teachers simply transfer information to students.23 The Introduction to this volume gestures towards Gallop’s understanding of close reading as a means to ‘a more just treatment of others’.24 Indeed, Gallop demonstrates that the attentiveness of close reading notices what is actually on the page rather than what a given reader hopes might be behind it, so to speak.25 She suggests that the craft of close reading pays heed to the marginal aspects of a given

21. Margaret E. Mohrmann, ‘“Vocation is Responsibility”: Broader Scope, Deeper Discernment’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 23. 22. Darby Kathleen Ray, ‘Self, World, and the Space Between: Community Engagement as Vocational Discernment’, in David S. Cunningham (ed.), At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 309. 23. Jane Gallop, ‘The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading’, Profession (2007), 181–6. 24. Jane Gallop, ‘The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (Fall 2000), 17. See ‘Introduction’, this volume, 8. 25. Ibid. 7–9.



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text or that which cannot be glossed over in a quick summary. In these details, she includes such elements as unusual repetitions or odd vocabulary and formal choices, such as italics or parentheses. As students train their minds to notice seemingly marginal details that might even interrupt a narrative that seems too pat or too totalising, Gallop argues they train themselves to notice the importance of the apparently marginal. Such close reading, I maintain, is what students in a community-engaged course should espouse with the texts they read and the experiences they have in the community. Rather than making assumptions about the world, students who cultivate close reading skills can read their experiences to understand how the world is instead of how they imagine it to be. In this way, they can more authentically understand the world’s injustice and work for the social change that they seek.

Overview of ‘Literature of Service’ As context for the observations I make about the intersection between community engagement, vocation and literary studies, I offer here a brief overview of the course from which these observations are drawn. My course ‘Literature of Service’ combines deep analysis of literary texts and service experiences through mutually reinforcing habits of reflection in the context of a vocational discernment that emphasises intentional action directed towards the common good. The course grounds itself in literary analysis while incorporating service and vocational discernment to help students contemplate individual callings in light of the needs of the community.26 The course connects with a range of twelve potential placements in community organisations, and students typically work at three or four of those potential sites, depending upon their interest, schedules and ride-sharing.27 During

26. It is an upper-level elective in the English major and American Studies minor and carries a designation of CENG or Academic Service-Learning/Community Engagement. Currently, the course is not included in our Core Curriculum. As such, it often attracts a self-selected, seminar-sized enrollment of ten to fifteen English majors and other students from Peace and Justice, Sociology, Psychology, Theology/Religious Studies and Chemistry, among others. 27. The partners represent a variety of local, direct service programmes with missions focused on shelter, brain trauma, equestrian therapy, developmentally disabled student mentorship, second-language literacy and after-school programmes.

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the fifteen-week semester, students perform at least twenty hours of service work at those regular site placements. In addition, they engage in one or two group service projects as a class. These activities allow the members of the class to compare the longer-term individual connections with the brief, one-time group events. The students invariably feel more comfortable with the group events but typically learn more in the longer-term placements. The course is divided into three units that are each structured around a primary writing project that demonstrates the connection between concepts of vocation in literary readings and in experiences of service. Writerly advocacy, such as that theorised by Thomas Deans, encourages students to embody a shared sense of empowerment in their writing. The first unit begins with the analysis of concepts of service and community engagement in literary texts; the second unit analyses narratives of vocation as students engage more regularly in the community; and the final unit concludes the semester with a meta-discussion of how the concept of servant leadership can foster a vocation of advocacy. The writing assignment in the first unit is a close reading analysis of the concept of service in one of the initial literary texts. This exercise hones students’ critical thinking skills of textual interpretation along with their ability to analyse acts of service. These two acts – of reading and of service – are similar in their attention to detail. The writing assignment in the second unit is a grant proposal, directed to the guidelines of a local foundation and informed by conversation and collaboration with the students’ community partners. The formal writing assigned in the final unit is an opinion-editorial, in which students take the research from their grant proposal and pitch it to a new, broader and more public audience. This assignment asks the students to use the close attention they have honed in literary analysis and repackage it in a storytelling and advocacy mode. In this new rhetorical situation, they make a case to the public that is grounded in their experiences with their community partners. Throughout the semester, students keep journals in which they reflect on their service and readings. Significantly, the journal is framed as analytical writing to emphasise the parallel practices of close reading texts and experiences. At the same time, it remains low-stakes and reflective. The students also complete a vocation interview with a staff member or client at the community partner agency, using a series of prompts and their own questions raised by their individual vocational journeys. The connection to stories of vocation allows students to understand their skills in service of the world and to realise similarly to John Neafsey that ‘vocation is not



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only about “me” and my personal fulfillment, but about “us” and the common good’.28 The course readings move from literary texts that intentionally address the complexities of service, to readings that intentionally address vocation and finally to those that theorise servant leadership. Robert Coles’s discussion of his similar course in The Call of Service sets the groundwork for students’ expectations.29 The literary texts include William Carlos Williams’s collection of short stories, The Doctor’s Stories, which examine the difficult interpersonal negotiations of serving even the most disenfranchised Americans, and in which often the ‘server’ turns out to be needier, less virtuous and less sympathetic than the ‘served’. In addition to materials assigned to teach students the craft of grant writing, we examine the vocational questions posed by Mark Schwehn and Dorothy Bass in their anthology Leading Lives that Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be.30 The questions of this volume, including ‘Must My Job Be the Primary Source of My Identity?’ and ‘How Shall I Tell the Story of My Life?’ directly engage students in vocational discernment that parallels the work they are doing in the community. Using close reading skills, we analyse short stories, poems and essays, and then connect those same skills to the work students are completing off campus. Robert K. Greenleaf’s essay ‘The Servant as Leader’ theoretically frames the final unit of the course to suggest that higher education should prepare students with the ability to be servant leaders.31 This reading encourages students to understand the power of their own voices, using their writing skills for the common good. In Mohrmann’s terms, they begin to understand their own ability to ‘respond’ to the local community through their skills of analysis and writing. As an additional ‘text’ of the course, several guest speakers – typically those who direct programmes at local non-profit agencies and use their writing skills for advocacy – discuss their vocational journeys with the students in the class. They model for students that the vocation of an engaged life can take on many forms, that vocation encompasses many facets of being in the world, professional

28. Neafsey, A Sacred Voice, 1. 29. Robert Coles, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). 30. Schwehn and Bass, Leading Lives that Matter. 31. Robert K. Greenleaf, ‘The Servant as Leader’ (South Orange, NJ: Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership, 1970).

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and personal, and that rich vocations change over time. An analysis of my students’ work in this course32 suggests that three capacities arise at the intersection of community engagement and vocational discernment in literary studies classrooms: attentiveness, mutuality and intentional action.

The Habit of Attentiveness One way in which this course has responded to Laurie Grobman’s concern – that in service-learning courses students tend to apply literary texts to actual experience, undermining the aesthetic value of a literary text while glossing over the particularities of actual people – is through a focus on attentiveness. The foundational work in the first unit of this course cultivates the habit of attentiveness upon which students will rely in their work in the community and in their vocational discernment. Students foster this habit by practising close reading of both literary texts and the details of their service experiences through reflection and analysis. In close reading literary texts, the students ground their arguments in attentiveness. Just as my student from that first semester considered her own position in reference to the teenage mother as a result of reading Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, other students make similar connections about positionality. Their senses of self, for example, are informed by intersectional understandings of identity that help them attentively read their experiences as well as those of the characters in the text. These readings align with much of what feminist scholarship has argued about Gilman’s work, but the students in this class arrive at this conclusion through the lens of community engagement and critical service-learning.33 Such reading habits are valuable to understanding power and how it functions in fictional and real worlds. This argument also invariably touches upon questions of vocation, yet we can see its grounding in the field of literary analysis. These discourses create a conversation for students that might not happen without literary analysis; both community

32. Quotations come from student work produced in my ‘Literature of Service’ classes from Fall 2017 and Fall 2019. The works referenced in this chapter include students’ portfolios, analytical journals, final reflection essays and course evaluations. All student work is quoted with permission from the authors, and names have been removed to protect their anonymity. 33. See Mitchell, ‘Traditional vs. Critical’, 50–65.



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engagement and vocational discernment benefit from the cultivation of attentiveness in reading practices. These complex arguments often conceptualise literary theories in different and experiential ways. Because they are attentive, students are able to transform texts and transform themselves through discernment. For example, students often comment on the ‘hazards’ of service as Robert Coles has articulated them,34 yet they adapt this understanding using feminist theory to expand upon Coles’s work. One student argued that August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson provides a model of societal-level service in its articulation of restoration and healing of past trauma, reflecting the contributions of race and ethnic studies. One student also noted that reading literary texts that focus on multicultural characters and cross-cultural exchange, such as Fae Myenne Ng’s novel Bone, through a racial and ethnic studies lens informed a ‘direct realisation of the consequences of racial stereotypes and how they must be resisted’ in their service experiences. In the process of their analyses, students often refer to Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness,35 Deborah K. King’s notion of multiple jeopardy,36 or the myth of the model minority, all theories drawn from race and ethnic studies. Utilising these habits of attentiveness, through paying heed to the hierarchies of power that theories of race and ethnic studies illuminate, students are better able to reflect upon their own positions within such hierarchies, and they become more adept at the reflective processes of vocational discernment. In addition to drawing upon recognised literary theories, students also identify new theoretical perspectives throughout the course. They begin to understand service-learning and community engagement as a methodology for approaching the reading of literary texts, some going so far as to categorise the set of readings we read as a genre or school of thought. In the final reflection essay, for example, one student claimed that the course taught them to ‘learn new ways of analyzing text[s], and think about how service impacts every piece of literature’. Another student expressed an ability to ‘analyze literature with a different analytical lens – [new] assumptions

34. See Coles, Call of Service, 115–44. 35. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’, in Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), 1–8. 36. Deborah K. King, ‘Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology’, Signs (Autumn 1988), 42–72.

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to approach the text with’. This comment indicates what has become commonplace in this course: that students read literary texts in new ways by reading them in a new context and with a new perspective. In terms of vocational exploration, this newfound perspective deepens students’ ability to theorise and conceptualise reality. As they become more nuanced and sophisticated interpreters of literary texts, they cultivate a more adept sense of vocational discernment. Such detailed and attentive reading practices encourage students to pay heed to literature as an art form rather than as simply a way to interpret or access experience. In their analysis of service in literary texts, the most sophisticated of student responses attend to the constructed nature of the texts themselves as, for example, the student who suggested that Fae Myenne Ng’s novel Bone utilises a fractured narrative structure to redefine love as a model of service. In attending to the constructed nature of these literary texts, students recognise the aesthetic value of the texts themselves in a complex way. Understanding such constructedness in literary texts prepares students to understand that the social construction of categories of identity – race, class, gender, sexuality, for example – can be questioned and challenged in their own lived reality, thus paving the way for their engagement and empowerment. Such attentiveness, honed through the dual practices of close reading texts and experiences, allows students to envision themselves within the larger discourses of identity and structures of power within which they find themselves.

The Mutuality of Understanding Another way that sustained close reading and attention to literary analysis bears fruit for vocational exploration is in the students’ ability to embody a metacritical stance towards their work in the community. Specifically, their close reading of texts and their analysis of service experiences mutually reinforce each other in developing a critical awareness. Even before the class reads articles about the best practices of community engagement, students are able to discern them through their analysis of service in the literary texts they read. A key practice of the course is to spend the first unit reading texts for the ways they theorise service and the best practices for community engagement, all before the students begin work in the community. Rather than lecturing them on the best practices of service-learning, I assign literary texts through which they discern and draw their own conclusions about the



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most effective practices in community engagement. For example, they recognise the importance of critical reflection in service-learning by reading Williams’s The Doctor Stories. In a similar vein, they understand the value of asset-based community engagement by seeing how Williams’s Doctor at times is able and other times unable to recognise the skills and abilities of the people he serves. When the Doctor recognises the assets his patients possess, he is simply a better doctor, they observe. In this way, students’ ability to discern well-practised community engagement through literary analysis also helps them discern vocational choices. One of the most significant impacts of bringing together community engagement and literary analysis is in the transfer of student skills in a mutual exchange between writing as advocacy and writing as analysis of texts. The students embody writerly advocacy, which Thomas Deans defines as writing for, about and with community partners. They use the skills of argumentation on varied levels, addressed to varied audiences, building on the insights of rhetorical theory through the skills of argumentation on varied levels and to varied audiences. In the grant writing assignment and the opinioneditorial, students switch audiences while yet using similar evidence. The more private or individual journal entries extend to specified audiences with the grant proposal and then to the public audience of the opinion-editorial. Students transition their skill of analysing literary narratives to stories of vocation, often finding such stories not only in the texts but in the insights of community partners and the class’s guest speakers. Reflecting Gallop’s articulation of the ethics of close reading, one student noted that the skills she developed as a literary critic prepared her for the complexity and contradiction she found in stories beyond literary texts: Careful analysis of textual aesthetics like character and plot requires attention to be paid to intricacies and contradictions, no matter if the narrative is evaluated with a service-oriented perspective or not. This practice forms habits and analytical skills that train us to close read, if you will, people and situations in the real world. Thus, in environments of service and interpersonal interactions, the habits of literary analysis translate into attentiveness, cultivate listening, and give us the possibility to use imagination to apply pragmatic skills, like we demonstrated in grant writing.

As a riposte to Grobman’s concern about potentially simplifying reading practices of service-learning students in literary studies

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classrooms, I would suggest that this ability to address complexity in its deep detail helps the students in the class extrapolate their skills beyond literary texts out into the world, and to move across levels of difference. Indeed, the work of these students demonstrates that an attentive reading of stories and other forms of literature improves not only their comprehension of reading and story but also the discernment of their own vocations, and it provides a template for action and social change. Along with the transfer of skills across sites of close reading, literary studies courses that utilise community-engaged pedagogy and vocational exploration demonstrate the importance of mutuality in terms Ray would perhaps describe as ‘self-work’ and ‘world-work’.37 One of the largest benefits of bringing together literary analysis and community-engaged work is that my students are pressed to analyse structures. For such students of literary studies, who are accustomed to analysing the structure of stories, this structural equivalence feels familiar and comforting; neither their community-engaged work nor their vocational work can be characterised by imposition. Over the course of the semester, the students hone their skills of attentiveness to recognise the limitations of one-day service events that reduce the possibility of authentic connection across categories of difference. Students list limitations of one-day events to include an ‘us and them’ dichotomous perspective, a white saviour complex and a scattershot approach to needs that can foster privileged complacency. Group projects are also an effective tool to teach the limitations of a ‘fulfilling needs’ framework, in which community partners are merely recipients of services. Instead, we can highlight the richness of an ‘assets-based’ structure, in which all partners have something valuable to offer one another and the relationship can be more effectively reciprocal. As students are able to recognise via structural analysis of literary and other texts the inherent mutuality between self-work and worldwork, they engage in the practice of vocational discernment.

Intentional Action as Vocation As literary scholars, my students see a parallel cultivation in their close reading practices, service experiences and vocational exploration. As they practise attentiveness in their community work 37. Ray, ‘Self, World, and the Space Between’, 301.



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and in their reading, the students realise that such habits assist in their vocational discernment. Armed with their close reading skills and theoretical perspectives as literary critics, the students in this community-engaged class readily turn their attention to questions of vocation – both personal and societal. One of the most productive lines of enquiry we pursue in the class begins by assessing the students’ talents and passions and then turns to evaluating means for contributing their individual skills to their developing perceptions about the needs of the world. Vocational discernment, therefore, becomes critical to how students understand their own intentional action moving forward. By the end of the course, students understand that their vocations might intersect with their careers, but they need not be the same. They might take on paid work that expresses their vocations, or not. Students experience a sense of freedom and relief as they discover that their vocations are more capacious and flexible than a specific career. Mohrmann’s notion of vocation as responsibility serves as a framework for intentional action. Responding to this articulation of vocation as comprised of an outer and inner call, one student suggested in the final reflection essay that ‘our vocation is not only found when we look deeply within ourselves to discern what we are attracted to do, but also forces us to listen to the outer call; to truly see what the world is asking us to do’. Another student wrote that ‘vocation calls for individuals to take responsibility of their communities. When individuals recognise their talents, they are responsible for using these skills in their community.’ Here it is key that responsibility is not just a duty imposed upon the individual, but rather a recognition of what skills one possesses to connect with the needs of the world. In the final analysis, the students’ realisations in terms of their vocational discernment build upon the connections between their reading strategies and practices and their community engagement. The students note that the readings help them process the experience and that the connection between analysing texts and experiential learning leads to a greater understanding of vocation, encouraging them to envision social justice more readily. One of the premises of intentional action involves seeing oneself in authentic relationship with others in the community, and that such community can only exist when all are free to explore and flourish in their vocations. In the ‘Literature of Service’ course, this is often the moment in which the class moves beyond individual vocational exploration to considering the vocations of others. This process has been especially poignant when the students have worked

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in programmes with people of varying abilities – a school for individuals with what has been called ‘developmental disabilities’, a live-in community for such individuals, and a vocational and equestrian therapy programme. Tellingly, in such circumstances, the college students have chosen to do their vocation interview with one of the students at that school rather than with one of the programme administrators. In this way, they recognise an authentic relationship and that all members of the community have vocational stories to share. Students are able to apply those skills honed in analysis of literary texts to the vocational stories of real individuals, recognising the structural inequality that exists in deciding whose stories get told, whose perspectives are heard and how we understand vocational purpose. In this process, students begin to see their responsibility to the community as their ability to examine structures critically and to act in ways that bring about more equity. They recognise the power of living out a vocation that is characterised by intentional action in the hope of contributing to the common good characterised not only by understanding their own vocations but also, and more importantly, by enabling the vocations of others.

Conclusion Thinking beyond the end of this volume of essays in its sustained attention to vocational exploration, we can indeed conclude that the field of literary studies enriches how we help our students engage in the world as lifelong learners. As Jane Gallop writes, ‘close reading is thus a technique to make us learn, to make us see what we don’t already know’.38 In other words, Gallop claims that reading for what we do already know – reading for the summary, for the gloss, for the master narrative – gives us nothing. But reading for the marginal, for the exception, for the voice speaking back to the powerful, this is the life of the mind that I hope my students will embody. In response to the final reflection question for the course prompted by Schwehn and Bass’s anthology title, ‘What does it mean to lead a life that matters?’, one student explained: ‘we uncovered, analyzed, and practiced the capacity of art, story, writing, and service to function as instruments of justice. As students of literature and

38. Gallop, ‘Ethics of Reading’, 11.



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engaged citizens, we have a responsibility to act as conduits of truth.’ Ultimately my hope for a course like ‘Literature of Service’ is that it would not have to exist; that we would live in a world that is more just, free and egalitarian than the one in which we now live. But as long as structural inequality exists, I hope that my students are able to see our collective participation in perpetuating such injustice. And I hope that they understand, beyond any disillusionment from this harsh reality, that they have the responsibility and power to address such inequity – through their analytical skills, through their writing, through their voices and through their vocational choices.

Epilogue: The Professoriate as Vocation Stephanie L. Johnson and Erin VanLaningham

Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness.1

In all of the essays collected here, we hear hopefulness. The work of these contributors rests on the premise that the act of reading intensely offers each of us new ways of seeing ourselves and the world. It reminds us that transformation arises from such ways of seeing, or what bell hooks describes in her nod to Paulo Freire as the ‘places of struggle’ where individuals can be seen ‘positively transforming their lives and the world around them’.2 In these essays, we hear a commitment to developing such intensity in students, moving between literary forms, popular forms and the varied forms of lived experience to prepare them for the practice of their vocations – civic, relational, professional – both now and in years to come. We hear hope that students will become better listeners, better critics of the structures in which they live, and better communicators in whatever rhetorical situation they find themselves. Within classrooms, as we guide and shape students’ listening and interpretive skills, we sharpen our own; our conversations with them about purposeful living, if we attend carefully, prompt us to consider our own commitments and goals as well. And while such considerations may extend to all of our vocations, their most concentrated effect transforms the source itself: our vocation of professor. How do we negotiate a role that requires us to ‘profess’ and create new

  1. bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York, Routledge, 2003), xiv.  2. Ibid.



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knowledge but that demands our intense listening at the same time? What character are we or should we be forming and re-forming as we embody this role? How do we act or speak as full human beings for whom the personal is as important as the professional? Within the conversation about the value of higher education, what is our value? As editors of this volume, we have hope that these essays will contribute to new ways of seeing the professoriate that begin to answer such questions. The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ characterising literary studies that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick addressed over twenty years ago still has a significant hold on our discipline,3 yet we see how her work, and the work of many scholars after her, has contributed to making the academy itself a ‘place of struggle’. This volume is meant to further the struggle of transforming our self-understanding as professors and the institutions in which we teach and research. Rita Felski’s claim that the ‘heightened insight’ offered by literary texts not only reveals something about our individual selves but also exposes something about the ‘circuits of acknowledgement and affiliation between selves and others’ suggests that our reading and rereading has much to contribute to that transformation.4 Our intensity of reading as literary scholars allows us to experience new ways of seeing our own vocations, both as they participate in such circuits of affiliation and as they can break and reform them for the better. In her most recent book, Felski observes that lately, among literary scholars, ‘there has been a surge of interest in the language of generosity, receptivity, hope, vulnerability. How might such calls be actualized?’5 This language of ‘call’ within the work of teaching students to read generously, even hopefully, means that we can return to our work as professors of literature with less fear and more courage. All of the essays in this volume demonstrate that the call towards vulnerable reading in literary studies classrooms means opening wide conversations about vocation. Our discipline provides a place to consider questions of meaning and purpose through text

 3. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You’, in Sedgwick (ed.), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).   4. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 48.  5. Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 129.

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and context, form and character, critique and interpretation. As teachers, we are called to invite students to return each day with hope for the discovery and transformation that our common learning affords. Thinking in vocational terms about our work as teachers resonates with literary scholarship not only in Felski’s terms of hope and vulnerability but also in the ways we come to see teaching as means to remember, even restore, what brought us to the profession in the first place. In her presidential address to the Modern Language Association over four decades ago, Helen Vendler inspired literature and language scholars to consider our work – inclusive of writing, research and reading – as an invitation for students to ‘love what we love’.6 She used the language of love as a reminder that for us to reach students at all levels, and to show persuasively and effectively the indelible mark that teaching has on public life, we must teach in such a way that emphasises how we come to know ourselves and each other through literature. Teaching in this way, however, is hard. It takes courage to show what we love and why we love it, and potentially, to paraphrase Parker J. Palmer, to have our hearts broken again and again.7 This is the professor’s vocation. In the literary studies classroom, teaching careful consideration of literature and the crafting of language brings us to places within and beyond ourselves that are both terrifying and exhilarating. It threatens to dislocate what we believe is true and good, which is exactly why we alternatively shy away from and return to the work each day. As teachers of literature and language, we must find that courage when the crowding of questions and responses to texts disconcerts us, even pushes us to surrender to the world. Such openness – implicit in texts, made explicit in teaching – is certainly a hallmark of vocational exploration and, not surprisingly, we resist it regularly in the classroom. It is difficult not only to navigate the complexities of literature and all of its varied effects but also to ask how this new knowledge changes me – my mind, my heart, my world view. How does literary reading make me reconsider my purpose in

  6. Helen Vendler, ‘What We Have Loved, Others Will Love’, in David H. Richter (ed.), Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd edn (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2000), 31–40.   7. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 11.



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the world? In our effort to embody a sense of expertise or gravitas in front of students, we avoid a seeming dismantling of self and position. It makes us uncomfortable. It seems contradictory to what we consider to be our purpose in the first place: to develop students’ critical, analytic and aesthetic sensibilities; to cultivate empathy in reading closely; to draw out the ethical and moral frameworks that can guide us within texts and beyond. Yet what we miss, and our students miss, is the chance to share in a level of connection and renewal that happens only through vulnerability. We miss the possibility of cultivating vocation if we don’t return to what we love and why we love it. Wayne Booth advised graduate students in 1987 at the University of Chicago, ‘you must not teach to [the] future but to a delight in learning in the present moment’, trusting that ‘what I have loved today I will want to have more of tomorrow’.8 Booth’s invitation is an invitation to return: a return to knowledge of self and subject, and a return to the classroom, each day. As teachers of literature and language, however, we know that to return means more than familiarity; it means also reimagining something new. The delight in learning is a delight in close reading, contextual exploration and connective thinking that calls us to attend carefully, once again, to the text. Textual interpretation also directs us to attend to ourselves and our world. A return to teaching each day and year means returning to the specific ways we ‘know’ in literary studies and delighting in the ways that our field and our work contribute to our common humanity. Our value, and our vocation, in the exceedingly harrowing and crisis-filled time in which we live – fraught with economic, racial and political pressures – is to point continually to texts and contexts that speak to contemporary life. This is not a retreat from the realities of human experience but a walk directly into the eye of the storm. Our classrooms are sites of such confrontation. When we note the shifts of tone or the surge of emotion in words, when we see language’s effects upon audiences, when we read texts that reveal an urgency about personal and public concerns, we teach out of a position of strength built from creativity and courage. bell hooks, drawing on the work of theologian Mary Grey, says ‘that what we cannot imagine we cannot bring into being’.9 Indeed, our vocations as teachers involve the work

  8. Wayne Booth, ‘What Little I Think I Know about Teaching’, in The Vocation of a Teacher: Rhetorical Occasions 1967–1988 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 213.   9. bell hooks, ‘Practical Wisdom’, in Teaching Community, 195.

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of imagining something new in the face of despair. We invite direct engagement with difficulty and, in so doing, move towards possibility and change. Part of what we love, then, is the challenge of the classroom and the challenge of the reading. Our responsibility – our vocation – is to situate such challenges within a framework of hope. As the essays in this volume have demonstrated, this hope is not born of reductive reading or naïve affection but is instead born out of our teaching towards an openness to the difficult complexities that literature, and life, reveal. Positioning ourselves as receptive to the new, and being vulnerable enough to transform ourselves through encounters with texts and each other, returns us to the act of discovery. Annie Dillard describes such connections as a ‘pulse’, suggesting that ‘the thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.’10 The vocation of a teacher is not static; it involves a feeling – a ‘pulse’ – of what drew us to the discipline and to the profession originally, and what draws us today. As we consider our collective work as a professoriate, we can realise our calls by approaching our work with a generosity towards self and others. By giving ourselves permission to love learning, to love the discipline and to love the work, we can also give our students permission to hope and to love in their own pursuit of purpose. Teaching with generosity should push us into participating in and publishing more generous forms of scholarship as well. Certainly, our teaching and service responsibilities seem more obviously aligned with the language of vocation than our research, at least as that language is commonly used; the concept of teaching as some sort of spiritual calling should seem familiar to us even if we have not been persuaded by it,11 and certainly our service on committees

10. Annie Dillard, ‘Living Like Weasels’, in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper/Perennial, 1982), 69–70. 11. The public discourse around teaching as a calling has become heightened in recent years as more teachers and non-teachers alike warn of the potential for the economic exploitation of employees when a profession is singled out as a calling and its labour effaced. For one of the many examples, see Dylan Fenton, ‘Let’s Stop Referring to Teaching As A Calling’, HuffPost (17 August 2016), (last accessed 24 June 2021). Instead of avoiding the language of vocation or calling, however, this volume argues that teaching is a vocation like all other forms of work or professional life and should not be considered as special in any sense.



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and in administrative roles resonates with this concept as well, since it often seems like a sacrifice when we agree to ‘serve’. But as an equally vital aspect of most tenure-track faculty positions, scholarship should be conceptualised as vocation to the same degree as the other areas of responsibility that have historically distinguished the professoriate. When we view our research and publishing through the lens of vocation, then we may begin to conceive of our purpose in less competitive terms than those introduced to us in graduate school. We may not only think of publications and presentations as contributions to knowledge in the abstract but also as participation in mutually beneficial conversations. Given that scholarship connotes an intellectualism that is often compartmentalised and not extended to our teaching and academic service, identifying it as vocation will perhaps also help reinforce a broader concept of that term that renews all aspects of our academic lives. In literary studies in particular, a more generous form of scholarship may also mean seeking new ways of knowing, and publishing against the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ characterising our discipline. This is not to privilege any particular literary theory or critical methodology but rather to suggest that we might approach interpretation with an attitude other than scepticism. To listen more carefully to texts and to fellow scholars, to acknowledge aesthetic experience, and to value the artistic creation as much as we value the craft of criticism – such goals would most certainly transform more than academic discourse; they would transform the community itself. And perhaps they would inspire us to collaboration rather than competition so that our struggle would be against structural injustice and its perpetuation rather than against one another. We might, then, attend more to real crises within higher education, such as the dismantling of tenure and the exploitation of contingent faculty members, than to any tired theory war.12 Certainly activism has been present in pockets of the academy for decades, yet scholarly attention to labour issues in literary studies as connected to our working lives has not been taken as seriously as the theorising of labour; it has not significantly altered the ethos

12. Data compiled by the AAUP shows only 30 per cent of faculty members in 2015 as being tenured or on the tenure track in US colleges and universities. (See ‘Trends in The Academic Labor Force 1975–2015’, American Association of University Professors, , last accessed 24 June 2021).

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of literary scholarship or the institutional structures in which we produce and publish.13 An ethos of generosity, founded in our professional calling, may also move our scholarship out of what others might see as its rarefied air or, in harsher terms, its irrelevance, making it more accessible to a broad readership and thus making the discipline itself more inviting. It will prompt us to recognise an affinity with – perhaps a home within – the public humanities, the movement to recognise and support public-facing scholarship that addresses a largely non-academic audience.14 Through the public humanities, we may recuperate a kind of public intellectualism that avoids the trappings of elitism or the exclusion of marginalised groups, not just in literary studies but across disciplines. In her essay ‘Practical Wisdom’, published almost two decades ago, bell hooks writes about leaving the academy in part because she ‘learned that being an academic was different from being an intellectual’ and that intellectuals were seen as ‘cold, unfeeling, and unable to function in the context of community’.15 When she was labelled a ‘public intellectual’ upon achieving success outside the academy, however, she did not understand that phrase as defining her ‘sense of self and vocation’ either, for similar reasons;16 she cites Noam Chomsky’s definition of a public intellectual as someone who presents values and ideas that do not challenge the status quo and says that the label is thus applied wrongly to her. hooks sees herself instead as a ‘dissident intellectual’, who, as Chomsky defines it, criticises the status quo and is a ‘defender of freedom’. For those of us who have found vocations within the academy, unlike hooks, her critique asks us to examine the place of intellectualism within higher education and to reimagine how it might be embodied. If we reconceive of intellectualism as necessarily relational, dependent upon an inclusive community and shared knowledge to flourish, then it will both have a place in the academy and move us to a wider, more

13. One group of scholars taking action to push institutions to ‘pay their instructors a living wage and treat them with dignity and professionalism’ through multiple initiatives is Tenure for the Common Good (see , last accessed 24 June 2021). 14. See Anne Ruggle Gere’s ‘Rethinking Public Humanities’, originally published in the Summer 2018 MLA Newsletter, in which she argues for the urgency of ‘making humanistic knowledge more accessible’, (last accessed 24 June 2021). 15. hooks, ‘Practical Wisdom’, 186. 16. Ibid. 187.



Epilogue  301

inclusive audience at the same time.17 Through our reimagining as public-facing humanists, we can challenge the distribution of power in multiple spheres. In their call for an ‘activist presentism’ in the public humanities, Danielle Spratt and Bridget Drexler suggest the significant impact that such an approach could have not only on literary studies but also on the profession itself: Ultimately, we suggest that revising and valuing the practice of public humanities requires that we stop evaluating ourselves and our fields by the typically separate categories of research (directed only toward those trained like we are in our specialized subfields), teaching (serving only those students who sit in our classrooms), and service (benefitting our professional organizations, our universities, and maybe the communities immediately surrounding them). Instead, we can use the public humanities to revise this evaluative structure by viewing research, teaching, and service as mutually constitutive and as inherently demanding the participation of multiple agents and entities beyond these three typically distinct categories. In so doing, we begin to allow our fields more appropriately to represent the voices and experiences of the past and the present that have remained marginalized or entirely unheard. And through this (admittedly imperfect) process, we become better scholar-teachers of the historical literary periods that we study.18

When we start to see our work in the professoriate holistically, as being all an expression of our vocation, then we can recognise it as situated within a wider network of ‘agents and entities’; we can move towards a more purposeful realisation of our own work even as we empower that of others as mutual participants in discovering, creating and validating a shared knowledge. As advocates for the public humanities, we may hear better the call, in Felski’s terms, to ‘the language of generosity, receptivity, hope, vulnerability’ – language that gives us the means to re-evaluate ourselves, and our discipline, for the common good. Bringing the concept of vocation to bear on the public humanities will illumine their shared goal of a strengthened community, which can

17. For a recent book on the public humanities and fostering a generous and collaborative community, see Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 18. Danielle Spratt and Bridget Drexler, ‘Pride and Presentism: On the Necessity of the Public Humanities for Literary Historians’, MLA Profession (Spring 2019), (last accessed 24 June 2021).

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only be met through destabilising those structures of power that have impeded access for some of us and not others. In literary studies in particular, as we seek to cultivate vocation in our students and in ourselves, the re-evaluation of our work as situated within structures of power that extend beyond college and university campuses should clarify that our ‘students’ are not only those persons present in our classrooms. We can and should be cultivating vocation in ‘students’ as more broadly defined, with the understanding that our discipline’s particular attention to an intensity of reading and interpretation will prepare them well for purposeful living and make our shared life better. As Spratt and Drexler note, Within the public humanities, literature is a medium uniquely positioned to work on the deep beliefs we hold about ourselves and other people, and we believe that reconsidering these beliefs is the first step toward creating sustainable, actionable change in our departments, our communities, and our nation.19

Our courage as teachers and scholars, in higher education and in civic society, can ultimately yield intellectual work that is not buried and irrelevant but hopeful and life-giving. As we bring the concept of vocation to bear on all aspects of the role of professor, including that of the public intellectual or publicfacing humanist, we may begin to address the failures within the academy that hooks identifies and that drove her to leave. We may begin to dismantle the barriers that have historically kept many women and scholars of colour from claiming expertise, speaking to the larger community as experts in their fields, and being heard. At the same time, we may begin to redefine the public intellectual as one who is committed to defending freedom, one who is by definition as likely to be a ‘dissident’ as not, by re-evaluating and re-forming the institutional structures that have so often exiled such voices. While public support for the humanities continues to erode and while colleges and universities face uncertain economic futures, reconceiving the professoriate as a vocation in the broad sense can position us to defend the value of liberal education convincingly and fearlessly. As we articulate the purposefulness of our own lives, the commitment to our own multiple responsibilities, and the meaning of our own multiform work, so, too, will we enable others to do the same.

19. Ibid.

Index

Achebe, Chinua, 167 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 153–5, 161, 165–6, 171–2 ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, 166–70 Aeschylus, 89, 91 aesthetics, 6, 11, 277–8, 286, 288 affect, 9, 89, 98, 105, 217, 218, 222, 223, 232 alienation, 114, 116, 123, 217, 221, 222, 247 Allen, Paula Gunn, 160 Alonzi, Paul, 223, 225 Alvarez, Julia, 32–4, 40 ambiguity, 7, 27, 42, 49, 69, 83, 85, 92, 226 Ammons, Elizabeth, 157 anti-racism, 19, 82, 138, 138n, 153–6, 165 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 160, 178, 180, 182 aphorism, 18, 68–9, 76–7, 79, 82–3, 87 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 209 Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, 90, 90n Poetics, 7, 47n, 90, 90n, 92–3, 94, 95–6, 97 attentiveness see listening autobiography see personal narrative autohistoria, 178

Bakhtin, Mikhail The Dialogic Imagination, 47 Problems of Doestoevsky’s Poetics, 194 Baldwin, James, 156 Barnaby, Andrew, 247–8 Barnstone, Willis, 194–5 Barry, Peter Beginning Theory, 46 English in Practice, 5, 5n, 7n, 27, 32, 38 Bass, Dorothy C., 3n, 48n, 70, 70n, 281n, 285, 285n, 292 Bateson, Mary Catherine, 198 Bede, 225 Benjamin, Walter, 217n Benson, Steven, 264–5, 269 Berry, Wendell, 157 The Hidden Wound, 243–4 Jayber Crow, 233, 238, 243, 245–51, 252, 253 The Long-Legged House, 244–5 Betts, Reginald Dwayne ‘Temptation of the Rope’, 82–5, 87 Beverley, John Against Literature, 173–4, 176–8 Subalternity and Representation, 176 Bezar, Luis Enrique Rodríguez-San Pedro, 205 bildungsroman, 46, 208 Bly, Robert, 208 Bogel, Fredric, 270

304  Index Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 281 book history, 19, 215–18, 219–20, 223, 224–5, 229, 231–2 Booth, Wayne, 297 Boruch, Marianne, 258n Boully, Jenny, 258n Boyle, Gregory, 178 Bringle, Robert 278, 278n Buber, Martin, 259–60, 265 Buechner, Frederick, 154, 190, 249, 280 Buell, Lawrence, 5n call and callings, 2–3, 9, 14, 26, 31–2, 33–7 38, 40–1, 44, 46, 46n, 50, 53, 55, 60, 72, 81, 81n, 85, 87, 88, 90n, 107, 111–14, 117, 120–2, 126, 129–32, 141, 148, 151, 154–5, 158, 160, 164–5, 165–8, 173–5, 182, 184–5, 188–9, 190–1, 192, 202–3, 217, 233, 237, 238, 241, 246–7, 250, 252–4, 283, 291, 295–6, 298, 300, 301 to community, 16, 19, 62, 65, 121–6, 127, 135, 151, 169–70, 192, 243–5, 253 Callings, 69 Camus, Albert, 166, 169, 171, 172 Cantor, Paul, 93n Carson, Anne, 258n, 268 catharsis, 18, 93, 97–8, 168 Cavanaugh, William T., 35–6, 53, 65 The Center for Disease Control, 118 Certeau, Michel de, 231 Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote, 193–7, 201, 204, 206–8 charity model, 278–9 Chomsky, Noam, 300

civic engagement, 4, 16, 81, 157, 216 community engagement, 16, 20, 36n, 157–8, 188, 274–5, 278–9, 278n, 282, 283–4, 286–9, 291 service-learning, 276–281, 276n, 278n, 286–9 Claiming Our Callings, 3n class see socio-economic class Clifton, Lucille ‘won’t you celebrate with me’, 85–7 close reading, 7–9, 14, 27–8, 30, 33, 35, 43, 71, 78, 80, 113, 161, 207, 221, 235–7, 241, 257–8, 263, 268, 270–1, 275, 281–3, 284–5, 286–8, 288–90, 290–1, 292, 297 Clydesdale, Tim ‘How Can Colleges Help Students Grapple with Vocation?’, 26–7, 44 The Purposeful Graduate, 26, 41, 90–1, 253–4 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 155–6 Cole, Teju, 258n Coles, Robert The Call of Service, 285, 287 The Call of Stories, 48 Collins, Billy, 68n Colossians, Book of, 99 comedy, 92, 93n, 99, 104, 106, 107 common good, 7, 12, 20, 22, 81, 151, 275–6, 281, 283, 285, 292, 301 community, 15, 67, 81, 92, 144, 154–5, 166, 168, 170, 174–5, 191–2, 200, 204, 231, 233, 260–1, 275, 277–83, 283–6, 288–90, 290–2, 302 academic, 27, 201, 299, 300, 301 classroom, 38, 40, 191

literary representations of, 55–8, 60, 62–5, 94, 102, 113, 114, 119, 121–6, 126–9, 131–2, 174n, 179–80, 183, 185–6, 189, 247–50 of readers, 13 see also call and callings community engagement see civic engagement Connors, Clare, 264–5, 269 Copper Woman, 146, 147–8 creative criticism, 20, 256–9, 259–60, 261–2, 262–5, 265–72 Critchley, Simon, 89, 91,107 critical consciousness, 12, 14–15 critical reading, 9, 43, 66, 164, 170 critical thinking, 30, 44, 279, 284 Culler, Jonathan Literary Theory, 12–13 Theory of the Lyric, 81–2, 81n Cunningham, David S., 70 ‘Epilogue: In Various Times and Sundry Places’, 22, 47, 49, 191, 257 ‘Introduction: Language that Works’, 42 ‘Introduction: Time and Place’, 25–6, 27, 39, 95, 226 ‘“Who’s There?”’, 112, 128–9 D’Ambrosio, Charles, 258n Damrosch, David, 211 Dante Alighieri, 71 The Divine Comedy, 241, 248–50 Danticat, Edwidge, 32, 153–5, 160–1, 165, 172 ‘Black Bodies in Motion and in Pain’, 169–70 Create Dangerously, 153, 166–7, 169–71 ‘Wall of Fire Rising’, 36, 36n

Index  305 Darnton, Robert, 229 Davis, Kimberly Chabot, 158–9, 164 Davis, Michael, 95 Deans, Thomas, 275, 284, 289 decentring, 19, 215–17, 219–20, 222, 229 Define American, 185–6 depression, 120, 239–42, 243n, 246, 247, 274 Derrida, Jacques, 230–1 desire, 9, 46, 60, 67, 85, 95, 151, 157, 159, 175, 182, 208, 231, 239, 282 Diaz, Junot, 32, 36 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 63n A Christmas Carol, 121 Dickinson, Emily ‘I dwell in Possibility’, 4, 22, 72–5, 81 difference, 19, 71–2, 113, 117, 122, 194–5, 197, 200–1, 204, 207, 209–11, 244, 277, 279, 290 digital culture, 177n, 224, 270n digital humanities see humanities Dillard, Annie, 298 diversity, 16–7, 138n, 148 of communities, 17, 169 of texts, 17, 70n, 157, 179–81, 204, 209 Doty, Mark, 263, 269, 270n Douglas, Kelly Brown, 154–5 Douglass, Frederick, 156 drama dramatic action, 90–1, 93–5, 96, 96n, 97–8 dramatic roles, 100, 102–3 as genre, 18, 32–3, 36, 70, 107, 129, 204 vocational, 91–2, 127 DREAM Act, 185 Dreamers, 185–6

306  Index Drexler, Bridget, 301–2 Dryden, John, 196–7 Du Bois, W. E. B., 154, 156, 287 Edwards, Jr, Mark U., 117 Eliot, George Middlemarch, 51–4, 54–8, 59–62, 62–5, 66 Eliot, T. S., 11 Ellison, Ralph, 32 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 160, 169, 172 empathy, 16, 20, 52, 57, 62, 101, 105–6, 107, 144, 146, 150–1, 157–8, 203, 211, 270n, 276, 297 racial, 157–9 equity, 29, 37, 38, 44, 138n, 292 erotic, 112–14, 119–20, 127, 130 Esolen, Anthony, 248–9, 250 Faulkner, William, 236 Felski, Rita Hooked, 48, 49, 295, 296, 301 Limits of Critique, 9, 9n Uses of Literature, 6–7, 88n, 295 Ferrante, Elena, 54 Fessenbecker, Patrick, 60–1 Fish, Stanley, 88 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 220 Flynn, Elizabeth, 144–5 Foakes, R. A., 102, 106 Fobes, Catherine, 171, 234 foreignness see difference form, 9–11, 14, 17, 20, 28, 30, 36–8, 42–4, 75–6, 164, 174n, 176–7,179–81, 187, 197, 208, 263, 266, 271, 294, 296 disciplinary, 18, 20, 27–32, 42 narrative, 18, 34, 36, 46, 50–2, 54 poetic, 35, 73–4, 81–2, 88 Forter, Greg, 236–7, 240 Fowler, Russel T., 209

Frank, Arthur, 237 Freire, Paulo, 135, 282, 294 Friedrich, Hugo, 196–8, 200 friendship, 128–32 Fussell, Paul, 71–3 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 75, 199–200 Gallup, Jane ‘Close Reading in 2009’, 9 ‘The Ethics of Reading’, 8, 282–3, 289, 292 ‘The Historicization of Literary Studies’, 282 Gates, Jr, Henry Louis, 13 gateway course, 17, 29–33, 37, 41–2, 44 Gay, Ross, 263, 266 gender, 18–19, 33, 37, 47, 58, 61, 74, 86–7, 111, 113–14, 115–17, 128, 133, 134, 137, 140–2, 142n, 146–8, 152, 153, 173, 178, 240–1, 279, 288 and academia, 137–40, 139n, 140n, 142–3, 142n non-conformity (non-binary), 113, 140, 141 and political representation, 137n and reading, 143–6 sexual violence, 87, 137n wage gap, 137n generosity, 57, 163, 171, 182, 295, 298–301 Genesis, Book of, 146n, 146–7 genre see form Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 274, 286 Gilman, Priscilla, 258n Girard, Rene, 94n Glaspell, Susan, 36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 207, 211 the good life, 89–90

Gopnik, Adam, 76 Gordon, Mary, 140n Gowrinathan, Nimmi, 190 Graff, Gerald, 13, 32–4, 40 Graver, Susan, 63 Greenleaf, Robert K., 285 Grobman, Laurie ‘Is there a Place for Service Learning in Literary Studies?’, 276–8, 286, 289 Service Learning and Literary Studies, 276n, 280 Gubar, Susan, 158 Guha, Ranajit, 176 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 174 habit, 20, 65, 100, 100n, 132–3, 150, 280, 283, 286–7, 289, 291 habits of mind, 27, 32, 42, 44, 145, 232, 263–4 Hall, Donald, 116 hamartia, 98 Hamerlinck, John, 279 Hansberry, Loraine, 32, 36–7 happiness, 45, 56, 57, 90, 90n, 92, 96, 247 Hartman, Geoffrey, 235 Hass, Marjorie, 266n Hatcher, Julie, 278, 278n Heaney, Seamus, 107–8 Heidegger, Martin, 75 Hemingway, Ernest, 143n Hemphill, Essex, 124 Henry, Douglas V., 48n, 165, 238 hermeneutics of difference, 200 hermeneutics of suspicion, 6, 295, 299 Hesiod, 146, 146n heteroglossia, 211 heteronormativity, 18, 114, 115–16, 121, 125, 147 Himes, Michael, 220, 224, 228, 281 Homer, 194, 204, 260

Index  307 homophobia, 82, 112, 121–4, 128, 147 homosexuality see sexuality hooks, bell, 136 Black Looks, 158 Teaching Community, 136, 294, 297, 300, 302 Teaching Critical Thinking, 134–5, 136, 160 Teaching to Transgress, 136, 160 ‘Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy’, 12 hope, 165, 169–70, 173, 187, 192, 294–6, 298, 301 Hopkins, Pauline, 157 Hui, Andrew, 76, 79 humanities, 1, 14–15, 29, 43, 87, 210, 226, 229, 302 digital, 217n, 253 humility, 19, 61, 86, 91, 105, 191, 211, 215, 217, 217n, 225–6, 227–8, 229–31, 263–4, 269, 270, 279 Hurston, Zora Neale, 162 ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’, 235–6, 237–8 Hustvedt, Siri, 258n Hutcheon, Linda, 54 hybridity, 178, 179–80, 187, 193 imagination, 1n, 15, 17, 21–2, 45, 88n, 105–6, 107, 114, 160, 168, 203–4, 206, 211, 280 intentional action see vocation intersectionality, 111, 120, 137, 138n, 139, 151, 286 intervention, 19, 173–4, 179, 182–4, 186–191, 191–2 Jacoby, Barbara, 279 Jagose, Anamarie, 115 Jamison, Leslie, 258n Jarman, Mark, 208 Jarrell, Randall, 208–9 Job, Book of, 78

308  Index John, Gospel of, 241, 243 Joyce, James, 144 justice, 29, 36, 103, 107–8, 131–3, 152, 170, 173, 205, 256, 265, 272–3, 292 injustice, 34, 44n, 83, 85, 132, 135–6, 138n, 140, 143, 151, 153, 165, 167–8, 170–1, 173, 174n, 192, 283, 293, 299 racial, 44n, 83, 85, 154, 158, 160, 138n, 167–8, 170–1, 272 see also social justice Kass, Leon, 226 Keating, AnaLouise, 160 Keats, John ‘camelion poet’, 72, 72n Negative Capability, 72n ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, 32, 35 Kelly, Bridget Turner, 139 Kenan, Randall A Visitation of Spirits, 111–12, 114, 120–6 Kendi, Ibram X., 156–7, 159, 172 King, Deborah K., 287 King, Jr, Martin Luther, 174 Kirsch, Adam, 259n Kleinhans, Kathryn, 216–17 Kojiki, 146, 146n Kurtz, J. Roger, 234–5 Kushner, Tony Angels in America, 111–14, 126–32 LGBTQ see sexuality labour, 19, 32, 34, 39, 46, 57–61, 61n, 119, 127, 137, 137n, 138n, 139n, 143, 152, 153, 160–1, 164–5, 167–8, 170–1, 177, 201–3, 215–17, 221, 223–5, 227–9, 232, 245, 249–50, 253, 275–6, 278–9, 283–4, 290–1, 295–8, 298n, 299, 302 Laferrière, Danny, 166

LaLonde, Suzanne, 242 Larsen, Nella, 156, 162 Quicksand, 148–51, 152 Laye, Camara, 167 Leading Lives That Matter, 3n, 48, 70, 70n, 285, 292 Lee, Harper, 159 Levertov, Denise, 208 Levine, Caroline, 9–10, 28, 37, 62–4, 63n, 74 Levine, George, 51 liberal education, 1–2, 5, 201, 204, 216, 226, 302 Lioi, Anthony, 128, 130 listening, 7, 9, 18, 34, 114, 126, 167, 185, 195, 202, 211, 226, 241, 274–6, 294, 295 attentiveness, 9, 20, 79–80, 154, 221, 225–6, 227, 232, 259, 276, 282, 286–8, 289–90 Literature of Service, 283–6 literary activism, 157–8 literary reading, 9, 19, 21, 54, 66, 71, 153–4, 157–8, 167, 296 literary studies beyond the classroom, 14–15, 19, 300, 302 characteristics of, 3, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 22, 39, 42, 47, 49, 176, 195, 219, 221, 231, 295 difference from other disciplines, 5–6, 37–8, 48, 210–11, 297 as form, 17–18, 27–32, 42–3, 46 significance of, 4–5, 31, 231, 293, 299 literary theory, 6, 12–14, 30, 176, 195, 229–31, 275, 299 aesthetic, 6–7 feminist, 172, 279, 287 New Criticism, 5, 7–8, 282 Post-structuralism, 4, 230–1 queer, 112 race and ethnic, 275, 279, 287 service-learning as, 287–8 trauma, 234–7, 238, 239, 252

Living Vocationally, 46n Locke, John, 167 Looser, Devoney, 17 Lorde, Audre Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 111–14, 119–20, 133, 143n, 160 Lott, Eric, 158 Luke, Gospel of, 234–5 Luiselli, Valeria Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, 175–6, 186–92 Luther, Martin, 135, 224 lyric see poetry lyric ‘I’, 81–2, 84–5, 86 McGann, Jerome, 229 McHugh, Heather, 67, 88 McKeon, Michael, 50 McLane, Maureen, 258n McMillan, Laurie, 155, 161, 164 McRuer, Robert, 122 Mahn, Jason A., 34, 70n, 170, 261 Mailer, Norman, 158 Márquez, Gabriel García, 166 Marsh, John, 73n Martin, James, 122 Mead, Rebecca, 55n, 258n Menchú, Rigoberta, 177–8, 178n, 180n mentorship, 182–3, 184, 186, 190–2, 219, 221, 252, 254 Mentz, Alan, 60, 61n, 65 Merwin, W. S., 208 Miller, Andrew, 45, 66 Milton, John Areopagitica, 218 Paradise Lost, 167, 260 Paradise Regained, 167 mimesis, 18, 92–3, 94–5, 99, 100, 103–4 Mohrmann, Margaret E., 53, 160, 281, 285, 291 Moretti, Franco, 210 Morris, William, 224

Index  309 Morrison, Toni, 156, 166, 172 ‘Commencement Address’, 255–6, 255n, 261, 272–3 Conversations with Toni Morrison, 159 Playing in the Dark, 47n, 143n, 160, 164 Morson, Gary Saul, 46, 52–3, 59 Mullins, Greg, 157 mutuality, 20, 276, 286, 288–90 myth (origin), 146–8 narrative, 3, 18, 69–70, 241–2 alternative, 34–5, 49–50, 58–61 counter, 58, 178, 189 dominant, 12, 52, 59, 129, 151, 186, 187, 283, 292 hybrid, 176, 194, 208 ideologies of, 50–1, 61, 63 immigrant, 19, 173–5, 174n, 182–9 limits of, 53, 61, 63, 66, 177 master see dominant the novel, 10, 18, 49–52, 56, 58, 62, 64, 66, 114, 126 personal, 34–5, 113, 161, 166, 176–7, 181, 185, 221–3, 235, 237 reading of, 49, 50–4, 62, 148–51 structure of, 15, 36, 45–7, 50–1, 53, 57, 59–63, 66, 75n, 129, 182, 242, 252, 288 vocational, 15, 20, 46–9, 51–4, 55–6, 58, 64–5, 113, 129, 198, 205, 253, 281 of whiteness, 164 Nash, Jennifer, 164 Naylor, Gloria, 157 Neafsey, John, 21, 48n, 68n, 71, 154, 168, 275–6, 281, 284–5 Nelson, Maggie, 267, 267n Newton, Sir Isaac, 267 Ng, Fae Myenne, 287–8 novel see narrative

310  Index Nussbaum, Martha C. Cultivating Humanity, 1, 1n, 2 Poetic Justice, 11, 17 Political Emotions, 107 Oliver, Mary ‘The Summer Day’, 68, 68n, 77–80, 81, 85 Omer-Sherman, Ranen, 127 Ong, Walter, 222–3 Onion, Rebecca, 268 Other, 145, 174, 187, 190, 191–2, 215, 217, 220, 230, 249, 255–9, 259–62, 264, 265–6, 268–71, 272–3 otherness, 200, 219, 258, 264 Palmer, Parker J., The Courage to Teach, 296 Let Your Life Speak, 7, 48n, 71, 195, 202–3, 205, 238, 239–43, 246, 247, 253 To Know as We Are Known, 38 paradox, 11, 67, 69, 74, 80, 235, 239, 242 Parker, Dorothy, 76 Parks, Sharon Daloz, 21, 183, 219, 223 passion, 92, 98, 107, 217, 220–1, 228–9, 275, 291 patriarchy 86, 151 Paul, L. A., 228 Paz, Octavio, 198–200, 209 pedagogy, 32, 39–40, 44, 52, 54, 64, 144–6, 149–51, 163–4, 172, 191, 209–11, 218–23, 223–8, 241, 295–8 assets-based, 282, 289 community-engaged, 191, 275–83 problem-based, 225–6 service-learning, 280 writing, 144–6, 149–51, 252–4, 284–5, 289, 256–7, 257–9, 261–2, 262–4, 265–72 Pederson, Joshua, 235–7, 245

Piercy, Marge, 68 Pinches, Charles R., 46n, 48n Plato, 146, 147 Plaut, Julie 279 poet, 6, 21, 47n, 58, 67–8, 71–2, 74, 78, 82, 88, 142n, 156, 161–3, 197, 208–9, 258n, 259 poetry conventions of, 71–2, 73n, 74, 78–9 function of, 35, 67–8, 88, 112, 162, 176, 194, 204–9 lyric, 81–2 poetic language, 69, 71, 80, 88, 178, 180, 187 utilitarian use of, 68–9, 75–7, 88, 162 polyphony, 84, 211 polysemy, 18, 69, 75, 80, 81, 85, 88 Pope, Alexander, 260 Porter, Katherine Anne, 247–8 potentiality, 69, 75, 87, 88, 157, 159, 164 Pound, Ezra, 208, 208n Presberg, Charles D., 206–7 profession, 4, 15–16, 20–1, 29, 41, 43–4, 46, 55–8, 60, 75, 138n, 147, 149, 155, 181–2, 185, 192, 205, 284, 294, 296, 298, 298n, 300–1 professoriate value of 20, 295, 297, 299 see also vocation Proust, Marcel, 134 public humanities, 17, 300–2 public intellectual, 300, 302 purposeful living, 2, 3, 4, 20, 52, 54, 60, 67, 146, 174, 201, 266n, 294, 301–2 Pyle, Forest, 64 queer literature, 18, 41, 132–3 form, 112–13 queerness, 112, 115, 129 queer desire, 112–14, 114–19, 122–3, 124, 126, 128, 129–32

race, 33, 37, 82–5, 85–7, 114, 121–6, 143n, 148, 151, 156–7, 160, 173, 186, 244, 287 racial trauma see trauma racial violence, 87, 161 white privilege, 152, 163, 167, 289 racism, 82, 207, 124, 134, 136–9, 138n, 148–50, 151, 152, 155–6, 159–60, 162, 164–5, 168–71, 236–8, 243–4, 251; see also anti-racism; race Rambo, Shelly, 244 Ray, Darby Kathleen, 16, 36n, 42, 157–8, 190, 249, 282, 290 realism, 50–4 Ream, Geoffrey L., 118 reciprocity, 190, 200, 249, 264, 279, 281–82 Reed, Barbara, 201–2 Rich, Adrienne, 47n, 143n Ricoeur, Paul Freud and Philosophy, 6n ‘Metaphor’, 77, 85 ‘Naming God’, 80, 87 ‘Poetry and Possibility’, 69, 75, 75n, 88 Rig-Vedas, 146, 147 Riley, Denise, 258n Rilke, Rainer Maria, 208–9 Riswold, Caryn D., 14, 34, 39, 43, 117, 119, 135–6 Robert, Marthe, 45 Robinson, Marilynne, 263, 271 Rorty, Richard, 157 Rose, Mike Lives on the Boundary, 202 The Mind at Work, 202–3 Rosenberg, Roberta, 276n, 280 Rumi, 71 Ruth, Jennifer, 55n Sachs, Joe, 90, 90n, 95, 97, 98 Santos, Kathryn Vomero, 196 Sappho, 268 Sarton, May, 71

Index  311 Schell, Hannah, 260–1 Schuurman, Douglas, 201 Schwehn, Mark R., 3n, 48n, 70, 70n, 281n, 285, 285n, 292 The Scope of Our Art, 2 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Novel Gazing, 6, 295 Tendencies, 115, 120 selfhood, 256–7, 258–9, 260, 261, 265, 271, 272 service learning see civic engagement sexism, 19, 86, 134–7, 137–41, 138n, 146–7, 148–9, 151, 236, 241 heterosexism, 137 see also gender sexuality, 111, 138n, 141–3, 178, 279, 288 gay, 82–3, 111–12, 114–15, 120, 122–4, 126–32, 175, 182 homosexuality, 113, 115, 121, 128 LGBTQ, 41, 111–21, 124, 132–3, 141, 147, 176 see also queerness Shakespeare, William, 142n King Lear, 93–4, 99–106 Othello, 94 The Tempest, 106 Shaughnessy, Brenda, 68n Shaw, Denise R., 170 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 21 Showalter, Elaine, 30, 38, 43, 44, 44n Showalter, Shirley Hershey, 31, 37–8, 40, 49, 221, 223 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 157 Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 179 Smith, Charlotte, 142n Smith, Zadie, 258n social action see social justice social justice, 20, 36–7, 107–8, 157, 159, 191, 280, 291 social responsibility, 16 socio-economic class, 33, 47, 50, 58, 64, 148, 151, 210, 277, 279, 288

312  Index solidarity, 174, 177–8, 186, 188, 191–2, 203, 260–1 Sophocles, 166 Oedipus the King, 96 Philoctetes, 107 Spivak, Gayatri, 176 Spratt, Danielle, 301–2 Stafford, William, 241 Stein, Gertrude, 267 Steinbeck, John, 167 Steiner, George, 199–200 Stendhal, 94 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 157 subjectivity, 77 queer, 18, 111–18, 121 vocational, 58, 59, 60 see also selfhood suffering, 19–20, 114, 127, 165, 169–70, 178, 188, 251 as tragic wisdom, 18, 90–2, 93–4, 96–7, 98, 99, 101, 104–6 see also trauma Sullivan, William, 203–4 Tanoukhi, Nirvana, 167–8 Tate, Greg, 158 teleology, 90n, 113 tenure, 299–300 testimonio, 19, 173, 174n, 176–81, 178n, 180n, 184–9, 191 testimonial literature see testimonio Thoreau, Henry David, 157 TIIA, 190 Toomer, Jean, 172 tragedy and civic life, 106–8 definition of, 90, 93 and vocation, 18, 89–92, 95–6, 97–9, 106–8, 126 tragic wisdom see suffering translation, 19 definition of, 193–5, 198–9 history of, 195–8 transformation through, 196, 198, 200–1, 207–10

trauma, 19–20, 161, 180, 180n, 187, 233–8, 239–41, 243, 245–7, 248–9, 251–2 racial, 243–5 structural, 251 theory see literary theory The Trevor Project, 118 Turkle, Sherry, 270n values, discourse of, 9, 113, 200–2 Vargas, Jose Antonio Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, 175, 179, 181–6, 192 Vargas, Manuel, 210–11 Vendler, Helen, 296 Venuti, Lawrence, 200, 204 vocation of advocacy, 284 anti-, 99, 103 anti-racist, 154–5, 161, 165 as calling see call and callings conflicts between, 34, 101–2 definitions of, 2, 22, 60–1, 67–8, 190, 195, 201–3 failure of, 58–9, 61–2, 92, 98 as formation, 10–11, 12, 154, 160, 228–9, 231, 280, 295 as intentional action, 20, 274, 276, 281, 283, 286, 290–2 literary, 153–4, 169, 184, 262 as meaning and purpose, 4, 12–15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25, 50, 53, 58, 62, 111, 115–6, 120, 203, 215–16, 221, 295 ontology and, 75, 77, 85 politics of, 74, 85, 107–8, 173–4 as process, 50, 53, 55, 59, 84–5, 281 of the professoriate, 20, 38, 42, 49, 88, 93, 152, 210, 254, 294–5, 296, 297–302 queering of, 111–17, 119–120, 126–7, 133 religious definitions of, 113, 201–2

as responsibility, 291–3 social, 153–5, 165, 189, 281 as story, 31, 33, 35, 38, 40, 70, 238, 239, 241, 243, 256n, 280–1, 289, 291 as translation, 195, 198, 200, 201–4, 210–11 and trauma, 233–4, 237–8 vocational discernment and exploration, 5, 6, 7, 12, 28, 30–1, 34, 50–1, 53–7, 59–65, 67, 92, 97, 135, 148, 150, 171, 175, 183, 215, 217–18, 220–1, 223, 226–8, 230–1, 232, 233–4, 252, 257, 259–61, 262, 265, 271, 274–6, 280–2, 285–8, 290–3, 296 vulnerability, 15n, 78, 181, 239, 258, 295–8 Wadell, Paul J. Becoming Friends, 129, 132 Happiness and the Christian Moral Life, 48, 48n ‘An Itinerary of Hope’, 120 Living Vocationally, 46n, 48n Walker, Alice, 153–5, 160, 160–1, 166–8, 172 The Color Purple, 161 ‘I said to Poetry’, 35–6 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 161–5, 169–70

Index  313 Warner, Michael, 116 Watt, Ian, 50 Webb, Laura, 180 Wee, Allison, 71 Wells, Cynthia A., 13, 183 Wheatley, Phillis, 161–3, 166, 172 Wilbur, Richard, 32, 35 Wilde, Oscar, 76 Williams, Raymond, 176 Williams, William Carlos, 285, 289 Willingham, Daniel T., 39–40 Wilson, August, 287 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 267 Wright, James, 208, 240 writerly advocacy, 183, 189, 192, 275, 284, 289, 293 Woolf, Virginia ‘Kew Gardens’, 144 ‘The Life and Work of George Eliot’, 54–5 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 51 A Room of One’s Own, 140–1, 162–4, 172, 260 Wordsworth, William, 260 work see labour Wroth, Lady Mary, 142n Yúdice, George, 177–80 Zapruder, Matthew, 71, 88n Ziad, Homayra, 154 Zitkala-Sa, 157