The humanities are not progressive, their problems and lessons are timeless. One of the strong arguments for beauty is that the study of these issues can be a joy rather than a burden when the most beautiful examples that have accumulated over time are the vessels for transmitting them. Why suffer through Derrida when you can enjoy Shakespeare’s; “A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!” The path to the timeless concerns of humans can take us through the toxic waste dump of much present-day writing in the humanities or through an enchanted forest of beautiful works. Why not choose beauty?

Which path?, at 8:00 am EDT on April 21, 2008

Teaching beauty is all fine and well when aimed toward undergraduates. But in graduate level classes, a focus on the political and the material is still important if these young scholars want to get jobs. Yes, there’s been a resurgance in the last few years in the study of aesthetics, but its mostly studied in relation to the political. One still needs to understand the political to talk intelligently about any of the great works you’ve mentioned; that is, one need know this if one wants to get a job.

Looking for Work, at 8:45 am EDT on April 21, 2008

It is interesting that Paul Fussell, according to the authors, felt that he had to keep “his emotions checked when teaching certain works.” There is nothing wrong with allowing students to see that one cannot “navigate unmoved through certain things.” There are passages in Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Eliot—yes, and indeed in Tolkien—that I cannot read aloud toi a class with dry eyes and a catch in my voice. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t read them to my classes.

BAB, at 9:05 am EDT on April 21, 2008

The current state of literary study seems to me responsible for a great and unforgivable loss — poetry is now a marginal matter in many programs of study.

Some of us who graduated *within* the last thirty years are indeed dedicated to exploring the art of literature with students — in poetry and prose.

Yes, there are no “minority” writers mentioned in this piece, but what does that mean? I find tremendous beauty in, say, Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred, or Toni Morrison’s Jazz, and I share that with students too. (And I for can’t read the final pages of Jazz without trembling.)

I’m still here, at 11:30 am EDT on April 21, 2008

“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea” sonnet 65

“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea” sonnet 65 As for teaching beauty: We lose all credibility and abandon all claims to rigor as soon as we have to tell students something is beautiful, (in)appropriate” (everyone’s favorite nowadays it seems), or important. Every time I hear some visiting writer or lecturer introduced as “important,” I have to bite my tongue, so as not to blurt out, “if she’s really important, we’ll know soon enough. If you have to us he’s important, he probably isn’t.”Maybe next Lent we’ll all give up adjectives to get at “the quintessential human experience.”

Bloom again, at 2:35 pm EDT on April 21, 2008

some responses

“a joy rather than a burden” — Yes. One of the crucial points we try to make in the book is that an engagement with beauty can lighten the anhedonic feel of many humanities classrooms, which tend to remain theory torture chambers.

“[M]oral seriousness” [depends] on irony, especially irony about our own motives and assumptions. Otherwise, Fussell wrote, “the moral impulse” will “decline into the moralistic” in The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism.” We agree. We were unable to shoehorn irony into this short piece, but will perhaps — if it generates enough comments — ask to write a follow-up in which we get ironic all over the place.

“Teaching beauty is all fine and well when aimed toward undergraduates. But in graduate level classes, a focus on the political and the material is still important if these young scholars want to get jobs.” Agreed, and we say this in our book. But aesthetics is theory too; and theory can be done in ways that don’t hold art in contempt.

“Is there an inevitable dialectic, in literature and the arts, of beauty at someone else’s expense?”

No, but there’s a basic moral dialectic involving any good, let us say, that I enjoy as a rich American, creating suffering for someone living in an unlucky country. Philosophers like Peter Singer are particularly strong, I think [this is UD speaking] on the subject. If we insist on hauling this basic imbalance into every discussion of literature, the literature class becomes a seminar on distributive justice. It is only one of many important things to think about in a literature class.

“It is interesting that Paul Fussell, according to the authors, felt that he had to keep “his emotions checked when teaching certain works.” There is nothing wrong with allowing students to see that one cannot “navigate unmoved through certain things.” There are passages in Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Eliot—yes, and indeed in Tolkien—that I cannot read aloud to a class with dry eyes and a catch in my voice. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t read them to my classes.” Couldn’t agree more.

“This essay brilliantly displays why some of us might choose not to ‘teach beauty.’ Not a single minority author is mentioned. And to pre-empt the list of Hughes, Baldwin, and Morrison that might follow this comment, let me point out that if we need to add then there’s always already a problem.” Could you say more? Your comment is unclear. Are you saying that minority writers don’t write beautifully and therefore you can’t teach beauty if you teach them?

“The current state of literary study seems to me responsible for a great and unforgivable loss — poetry is now a marginal matter in many programs of study.

Some of us who graduated *within* the last thirty years are indeed dedicated to exploring the art of literature with students — in poetry and prose.

Yes, there are no “minority” writers mentioned in this piece, but what does that mean? I find tremendous beauty in, say, Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred, or Toni Morrison’s Jazz, and I share that with students too. (And I for can’t read the final pages of Jazz without trembling.)” I agree, which is why I — like you — don’t understand the comment just above.

“I feel like its the 1990s (or 80s) all over again. And I don’t mean that we shouldn’t argue the issue, just that we shouldn’t argue it in the terms of a reductive binary ("I’m for art!"; “I’m for politics"!). Surely the debate has moved forward and there is now interesting work that explores the *relationships* between these terms. And it seems to me that literature is great enough to contain both. More: isn’t the relationship between literature or art and the world itself a concern of many great literary works? Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, for example, certainly reflected on this relationship. Did I worry that we hadn’t gotten past the 1990s or 80s? How about the 1590s or 80s?” Our point is not that literature and politics are not allied, but that there has been a significance imbalance in the discussion of literature in literature classrooms, toward the political and away from the literary as such. Obviously we spend a lot of time in the book disentangling those two terms. Unlike Alize Shvarts and her Yale enablers, we think some things are art and some things are not art, and that the most interesting thing about a lot of valuable art is not whether it reflects or promotes a political issue or history.

‘As for teaching beauty: We lose all credibility and abandon all claims to rigor as soon as we have to tell students something is beautiful, (in)appropriate” (everyone’s favorite nowadays it seems), or important. Every time I hear some visiting writer or lecturer introduced as “important,” I have to bite my tongue, so as not to blurt out, “if she’s really important, we’ll know soon enough. If you have to us he’s important, he probably isn’t.”Maybe next Lent we’ll all give up adjectives to get at “the quintessential human experience.”’ On the contrary, we absolutely have to tell students that we (thoughtful people, literary historians, intellectuals; not just Jenny and UD) consider this thing or that thing beautiful. And we have to tell them why we have for so long considered it so. We’re teachers.

As for the comment about cruel and unjust UD — sorry you feel that way.

UD, at 6:40 pm EDT on April 21, 2008

‘...the very thing that makes literature beautiful and powerful is that it cannot be excised from the flesh of history, that “long nightmare.” ‘

What makes literature beautiful and powerful seems to me its inability to be excised from the flesh of human beings. History doesn’t have flesh. It is a concept. And history isn’t all a nightmare. It’s lots of things, some not nightmarish.

Obama wins the presidential election. It’s historic. Is it a just another moment in the long nightmare of history?

UD, at 10:30 pm EDT on April 21, 2008

Unnecessary Suffering

I meant to include: Ruskin’s burning with the “gemlike flame” of aesthetic experience is wonderful even as it begs the question: What is the nature of the aesthetician’s simultaneous utopian AND ideological impulse to turn to that flame? Is it not just from the world’s suffering, but his own secret knowledge that so much of suffering is unnecessary relative to his Victorian, imperial England?

One of my favorite utopian moments in all of literature comes near the close of Harriet Jacobs’s _Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl_. After her (well-documented) unimaginable suffering and struggle: “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.”

It is a moment in the dialectic, for though she and her children “are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in MY condition” (Harvard UP ed. 1987).

Literature is historical not as a mere chronology of human events (say, an Obama election) but evolving human institutions which generate unnecessary suffering always haunting us from the past. Literature ("the autobiography of the human race’s soul” said Richard Altick) SHOULD be a reminder that institutions are humanly made, and therefore can be humanly changed.

In the few words above, Jacobs indicts the institutions of slavery (and its then and, I would argue, continuing, symbiosis with capitalism), 19th-c.marriage, and capitalism itself (with its increasingly neurotic culture)—all of which are inherently exploitive modes of production. It’s a profoundly beautiful passage, precisely because its gigantic ironies open onto the tragedy of history itself as so much unnecessary suffering and from which “gemlike flame[s]” alone cannot save us.

Emily Monroe Norton, at 9:50 am EDT on April 22, 2008

What a remarkably deep political depression you’re in.

Jenny and I are worse off by your account, though, since we are addicted to exploitation and find literature beautiful primarily because it gives us a glimpse of what freedom from our addiction might feel like.

“...often, what’s beautiful in literature (whether we admit it to ourselves or not) are utopian moments in which our desires to be rid of our addictions to inherently exploitive economic systems speak to us through the texts.”

Literature is about people, not economic systems. When I read it, I am reading about human beings, not the free market.

When I read Das Kapital I’m reading about exploitative economic systems.

You seem to believe that everything one reads — an essay about economic exploitation, a poem by James Merrill — is about economic exploitation, or is beautiful to the extent that it stirs one’s desire not to be an exploiter.

What you’ve written isn’t an argument. It’s a psychoanalysis. You have psychoanalyzed readers of literature, and you have reported to us that whether we like it or not, these are our deepest desires.

There is no way lovers of literature can respond to what you have disclosed to them about their unconscious motives. It’s not an argument to report to someone that they have a twisted addiction within that you see, they don’t, and they can’t control. By definition, you know it all, and they know nothing.

UD, at 10:20 am EDT on April 22, 2008

Beauty and trauma?

One may be forgiven some bemusement at the tone of the authors’ response to Ms. Norton, since they, too, relate aesthetic beauty to historical trauma:

“The centrality of aesthetic experience in the struggle toward adaptation to a world forever changed by the particular political traumas of our time, and in the struggle toward the creation of a more humane world, means that professors of literature have in fact a special, even extraordinary, responsibility. In conveying the fullness of powerful aesthetic gestures, they must convey more than the form and content of particular poems, plays, and novels. They must embody in their very mode of teaching the paradox of passionate control which so often characterizes the greatest works of art; and they must embody the moral value for each individual of this dynamic act of balance.”

Here we have examples of “passionate control” instead of “desires to be rid of our addictions"; both can be understood, it seems to me, in terms of an Aristotelian account of the virtues, according to which judgments about the good and the beautiful issue in good and beautiful—to wit, reasoned and temperate—actions. There are significant differences, of course, between an approach that derives its ethical lineage from the Aristotelian spirit in Marx, and one that consigns Marx to the alienated labor of theoretical or epistemic reason—differences having to do with how far one is willing to bring one’s account of virtue into tune with the contemporary drone of rationality (or, conversely, with how much one appeals to a fading consensus about the value of certain cultural objects as totems of social distinction).

Why so much concern over the “correct” approach to the text? Doesn’t this concern risk getting the pedagogical relation the wrong way round? Let me pull a sophism for a moment: one teaches students, not texts, not politics, not beauty. I daresay that an approach to teaching founded on one’s superior sense of the beautiful runs just as much risk of being dogmatic, and of doing damage to any nascent appreciation of new difficulties on the part of the students, as an approach that reduces all affective engagement to the terms of a spurious determinacy.

Benjamin, at 1:50 pm EDT on April 22, 2008

I appreciate your response. And at the risk of appearing prolix, I would revise what I wrote: I wish to be careful of “...an approach to teaching that justifies itself by reference to one’s superior sense of the beautiful….” I teach, and I write poetry, or I try to do both things, and speaking purely for myself, I find the most durable approach to either lies in the notion of practice. My own (so far rather dim) speculation on the issue leads me to think that the real problem for beauty these days is posed by the general condition—reflective of both a style of language and a style of life—that requires every “serious” endeavor to give a rational, discursive (if not quantitative) justification for its existence. (Here is one reason why Marx remains important to me: this condition seems the counterpart of the rationalization of the social relations of labor.)

As a practice, to teach means (for me) to come into a relation with others in which what can be presupposed—including my particular knowledge of and affinity for the subject matter, as well as the institutional conditions that translate my knowledge into power and authority—no more determines what gets created in the classroom, than the tradition of poetry and my acquaintance with that tradition determine the next poem that I will write. The poem may be nothing, but if it were not something _other_ than the conditions of its composition, there would have been no sense in writing it in the first place. Its conditions determine only the possibility from which it takes the risk of appearing.

I’d like to think it’s the same with teaching. The lesson may be a flop, but it’s nevertheless more than the sum of its parts, and surely more than what I bring to it, since it involves real, live others, with their own ideas and desires and plans. The “beauty” of tradition, if I may, is that it can connect us; it can become a medium through which we can relate; I cannot “represent” it—and who am I to do so? If I can act as an agent of tradition, it is in a “weak” sense, not a “strong” one (i.e., not in the sense in which one transmits information from a source to a carrier, but in the sense in which one invites others to participate in something—something that does not exist without their participation). Tradition is the prosody to the rhythm of a social relation. If I am lucky—and I don’t know that I ever am—I can prompt the marginal emergence of something new in other people’s imaginations. But then it belongs to them, because it comes from them, not from me (a point Plato’s Socrates makes again and again). And at the same time, they will prompt me to think or feel something unexpected and unfamiliar.

I’m not too worried about taking knowledge for arrogance, for I have to assume that others will know their own knowledge from arrogance, and if I err in that regard, it is only for the sake of reminding myself that humility, not hubris, is the bosom friend of the beautiful.

Benjamin, at 4:40 pm EDT on April 22, 2008

Anecdotes and arguments

I’m sorry UD, but a single story said to be representative of an entire culture (or even cultural trend) is an anecdote, not an argument, no matter how internationally significant (not that I believe that the world’s eyes *are* all turned toward this Yale student). Even on its own terms, however, the anecdote is ambiguous: I took your advice, read more, and discovered that the thesis advisor was a lecturer who’s been disavowed by Yale, not a regular member of the Yale faculty. And from this you’re announcing the death of art? Please.

As for my muddled thinking: even if the Yale story is “history and politics” (there might be a few people who could think of more significant subjects to go under these headings), you’re not relating history and politics to the aesthetic (what I was arguing for) you’re dismissing a putative work of art (this Yale student’s thesis) as mere politics, an example of how politics corrupts art. Those aren’t the same.

As for aesthetic judgments, I’ll venture two, though of course my fellow travelers will pinch me with urchins and give me the cramps for it. What that Yale student did (and apparently it’s still not clear) was not good art. And drawing conclusions from it is not good cultural criticism.

RM, at 4:40 pm EDT on April 22, 2008

“I’m sorry UD, but a single story said to be representative of an entire culture (or even cultural trend) is an anecdote, not an argument, no matter how internationally significant (not that I believe that the world’s eyes *are* all turned toward this Yale student).”

I agree, and should have made clear that in talking about it I understand that I need to refer to earlier performance events like it (it’s hardly a singular event in the performance art world), and to generalize in a responsible way from it.

But — and on this we’ll have to disagree — this IS a big story.

I don’t argue it’s representative of our entire culture — on the contrary, many diverse elements of our culture are doing a creditable job of rejecting the gesture with disgust.

I argue that it represents an important nadir in the history of the degradation of aesthetic activity and aesthetic judgment.

By the way, the project was sponsored not only by the part-time lecturer you mention, but by the director of undergraduate studies in the art department — a person who has also been singled out by Yale for having acted irresponsibly. So when you write

“Even on its own terms, however, the anecdote is ambiguous: I took your advice, read more, and discovered that the thesis advisor was a lecturer who’s been disavowed by Yale, not a regular member of the Yale faculty. And from this you’re announcing the death of art? Please.”

you are incorrect. The project had the backing of tenured faculty in the art department.

And nobody’s announcing the death of art here, since, unlike you, I am quite sure that what this student did — is still doing — is not art. It doesn’t threaten art in any way. It has nothing to do with art.

I suspect you’re in principle unwilling to claim of anything calling itself art that it’s not art — correct me if I’m wrong. If I’m right, this unwillingness forces you to call the Yale thing “bad art.” This in turn makes it unlikely you’ll have anything interesting to say about politics in this case. Here’s what you say:

“As for aesthetic judgments, I’ll venture two, though of course my fellow travelers will pinch me with urchins and give me the cramps for it. What that Yale student did (and apparently it’s still not clear) was not good art. And drawing conclusions from it is not good cultural criticism.”

Of course if it’s only “not good art” — just a young artist’s feeble effort — then drawing conclusions from it is certainly not good cultural criticism. We can just dismiss it.

If it is not art at all, however, but instead an institutionally sanctioned and encouraged political act (the artist herself says it’s political — in that all art is the same as politics — she makes no distinction) — a political act of the most reactionary and destructive sort (note, along these lines, that the contempt pro-choice organizations have expressed for what this student is doing is more intense than the contempt expressed by anti-abortion groups), then it’s quite possible to derive excellent cultural criticism, pertinent to the condition of art and the condition of universities in our time, from it.

UD, at 8:45 pm EDT on April 22, 2008