“Teaching a Fusky Alphabet” to Belgian Students: Stevens’s Poetry as a Spider Web

IF THIS SPECIAL ISSUE of The Wallace Stevens Journal were in need of an epistemological rationale, it would have to be found in some form of philosophical pragmatism. In this tradition, knowledge is invariably regarded as context-dependent. The same principle automatically applies to the exchange of knowledge in a pedagogical environment. Anybody who has ever attempted to teach outside of their national, linguistic, and cultural environments knows how much they need to adapt to the displacement. This can be simply at the microlevel of in-class improvisation, yet if the displacement isn’t just national but also linguistic and cultural, it will require more radical modifications: it is likely to demand the fabrication of novel methodologies tailored to specific circumstances. In one sense, then, the story that follows offers but another illustration of this fundamental pedagogical contingency, which affects the teaching of all writers who spread their wings beyond their immediate habitats to enter classrooms around the world. But in another sense, my example also invites every reader—in particular if that reader happens to be a teacher—to reflect critically on the cultural and material differences between my Belgian story and their own conditions for discussing Stevens’s poetry. Ultimately, moreover, my narrative will have more than pedagogical relevance: it will also show how the way we decide to teach Stevens can have an unsuspected impact on the way a larger community of critics comes to research him.¹

For nearly ten years now, I’ve been teaching a graduate course at the University of Antwerp in Belgium that has been flying under various official flags but is generally described by me as “Wallace Stevens and Intertextuality.” I’ve developed a specific format for this course, which I call a research seminar to distinguish it from regular seminars. I don’t, for instance, teach the full ten to twelve weeks, but only about half of them, after which I invite my students to develop their own individual research.

The logic behind this format, which I don’t use for any other course, is comprehensible only for someone familiar with the institutional conditions under which I operate. Some time ago, my university decided to come up with a one-size-fits-all educational policy. (I live in a country of top-down policy plans, starting with the way the Flemish Ministry of Education lays down the rules and regulations to be followed by all universities.) One key element in the university-wide plan was the need for faculty to invest in the “nexus between research and teaching,” more specifically in our graduate programs. While this might sound obvious to those who work in English departments of twenty or thirty colleagues, where all major areas of specialization may be covered by individual experts, it is less so in my case. At my university, all literatures in English, in all genres and all historical periods, have to be taught by four colleagues within a handful of courses spread out over three undergraduate years and one graduate year. During their undergraduate program, furthermore, our students are introduced to little more than the general history of literatures in English, with some deepening of attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The infrastructure on which we have to build the superstructure of our graduate program in English, in other words, is more than a little rickety, and we’re very limited in the number of literary courses we can offer to graduate students (some seven or eight). Ordinarily speaking, then, nobody would think of reserving one of these courses to a topic as narrowly specialized and demanding as Stevens’s poetry. Yet the new policy implied that I should nevertheless force-feed Stevens’s work to my graduate students, because that is where my main scholarly expertise lies.

I’d had some experience with teaching Stevens previous to this—with very mixed results, I felt. What is more, I remembered the most intimidating remarks from the essays gathered in Teaching Wallace Stevens: how to Milton Bates the prospect of teaching Stevens struck “terror into [his...