Teaching Literary Value

Abstract

MARK WOLLAEGER is professor of English at Vanderbilt University. His publications include, most recently, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton UP, 2006) and the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford UP, 2012), as well as articles inModernism/Modernity, Modern Language Quarterly, English Literary History, and James Joyce Quarterly. He is a cofounder of the Oxford University Press book series Modernist Literature and Culture and a past president of the Modernist Studies Association. My university’s first-year students are required to take a small, onesemester writing-intensive seminar, and departments hope this seminar will recruit students into their disciplines. More important, the seminar ushers students into college-level thinking and discourse in a class small enough to permit close attention to writing and to provide a space of sociality in which overwhelmed and anxious students may find not only new ways of thinking but also friends. I had a specific, somewhat personal goal in mind when I designed the seminar I discuss here. I wanted to provide the kind of educational experience I wish my own children had received in their first semesters in university. I felt my engineer son with a second major in economics would have benefited from a course in which he was encouraged to reflect on value along with quantitative analysis, and I thoughtmy policy studies daughter (initially educational policy, ultimately healthcare) would have benefited from a course focused on, say, the place of affect and creativity in contemporary society. So I designed a course on literary value titled The Uses of Literature that raised questions about what students tend to value and why, what professors tend to value and why, and why even though final answers are hard to come by, it is important to pose the questions anyway. Which is to say that all firstyear students, I believe, regardless of imagined career path, should be encouraged to reflect on life choices, and how higher education may inform those choices. (Don’t get me started on the rigidity of most premed advising.) Thus I did not teach the seminar the way I teach classes designed for English majors. Like Michael Clune, I aim with majors to provide a gradual inculcation of literary expertise that ultimately will help students make informed judgments about literature. My first-year seminar, in contrast, is designed more like general education with a hook: students learn to take on greater complexity when problem