Teaching American Literature

Teaching is not a process, it is a developing emotional situation. It takes two to teach.

—Jacques Barzun (1945: 43)

One book that speaks helpfully about teaching in the twentieth century is Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America. Wise with the experiences of a writer who was also a philosopher, Barzun's extended essay both describes and explores what pedagogy is. It wittily makes respectable (even honorific) a profession that later in the Sputnik-influenced twentieth century lost whatever luster it had had. In this book the cosmopolitan Barzun was able to engage in discussions about real classroom issues without condescending—after all, most of us were not, like him, working at Columbia University. Yet then and now the wisdom of his words still stretches to fit our much more mundane classrooms.

Barzun believed in individuation. He said that the most difficult teaching was the conference: teacher and student, one on one. But it also could be the most effective teaching. Published in the post-World War II era of crowded classrooms, Teacher in America took the heretical position that the best teaching occurred in small groups. To lecture was theater; to engage a few apt students in advanced discussion was teaching. Barzun compares the role of such a leader to

that of an orchestra conductor, except that neither [teacher nor students] have a score before them. ¹ Yet the result of the evening's noise must be as intelligible as a symphony. This takes mutual accustoming on the part of leader and lead. Calling on the right [student] for the right thing, balancing opinions, drawing out the shy and backward, keeping silent so that the group itself will unwind its own errors—and doing all this in the casual "colloquial" manner which the title of the course [discussion] prescribes—is an art that only comes with long practice. It calls for the best teachers in their prime. (41)

Throughout his treatise Barzun emphasizes that a teacher lecturing from the front of a room (large or small) is not the most effective way to lure students into listening. The art of teaching is, at base, the art of making instruction feel individualized, even if the classroom holds four hundred students. The wily teacher may find ways to create assignments that are themselves individualized and that prompt students to use the teacher's (plentiful) office hours. Engagement in the truest sense is the aim of the good teacher. As an aside, Barzun contends that teaching is a vocation separate from—and perhaps beyond—subject matter.

Though it is necessary, in understanding the fate of the American novel, to understand what European prototypes were available when American literature began, . . . it is even more important to understand the meaning of that moment in the mid-eighteenth century which gave birth to Jeffersonian democracy and Richardsonian sentimentality alike: to the myth of revolution and the myth of seduction.

—Leslie A. Fiedler (1960: 12)

Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel was a new kind of scholarly criticism. What radiated from Fiedler's most imaginative and intentionally outrageous and subjective study was its power to create ideas in its readers. Fiedler never intended to write a bible of chronological explication; he did not want to be Robert Spiller. Rather, he wanted sparks to fly—and they did. Love and Death in the American Novel either charmed or shocked, but it always provoked. And it provoked healthily.

In 1960 the study of literature was taken very seriously. Getting into graduate programs—for women, for people of color of either sex, for anyone who was a product of the public schools—remained difficult. The elite universities had no faculty except white men, many of them with Ivy League degrees...