From dlupher@ups.edu Thu Mar 9 11:01:39 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA56148 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:01:38 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA11206 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:01:38 -0800 Received: from [10.80.1.53] (howarthdhcp53.ups.edu [10.80.1.53]) by mail.ups.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id LAA26889 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:01:37 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000309000113.033ca380@pop.ben2.ucla.edu> References: <200003090540.OAA11063@ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp> <4.1.20000308204951.0361dd90@pop.ben2.ucla.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:03:24 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: teaching what one dislikes (was: beautiful language) Jack Kolb writes: > I can't imagine your teaching >Joyce "successfully," since you obviously have no sympathy for him. I have no intention of prolonging the dispute over Joyce. It's frightfully "TAN," after all, and I've said my say. I will just fire two parting shots: 1) While there is something in what Bruce Thornton says about the teachability of Joyce (which he doesn't mean as a compliment, mind you), I would like to implore Steve and Bruce to be willing to consider that there are those who enjoy Joyce for reasons other than his current critical prestige and the fun of posing as "high priest" when teaching him to the impressionable and clueless young. I do somewhat resent the insinuation that I like "Ulysses" only because somebody told me to and because I enjoy pulling rank on those who can't make head nor tail of the book. 2) I'd like to strongly endorse Bruce's suggestion that one read the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" passage of FW aloud. But one can do something even better: hear Joyce himself read it. It's a marvelous recording. (And I also enjoy his scratchier earlier reading of the "language of the outlaw" speech in "Aeolus" of "Ulysses.") Now on to a query. The sentence I have quoted from Jack Kolb above raises an interesting question. I'll preface it with an anecdote. Once upon a time I team-taught "Ulysses" (yes, okay, the cat's out of the bag: I'm not just a harmless Joyce fan; I'm a "high priest"---Introibo ad altare Jacobi.) with a medieval Germanist who just *hated* "Ulysses." It wasn't its literary method that bothered him so much; it was its morality. It was his view that Molly and Leopold should have tried Marriage Encounter and worked out their problems instead of going to Blazes (or to pen-pals like Martha---and by the way, wouldn't Poldy have simply *loved* e-mail and the Internet?). And yet I have to say that my colleague did a superb job of teaching Joyce. He suppressed his disgust until the day after class, when he dumped it on me with a quaking passion that still unsettles me when I recall it. So my question is this: how do list-members who are in the teaching racket deal with the problem of teaching texts for which they feel little sympathy or interest? I can't contribute to this myself, for I revealed yesterday that I've got no standards: I promiscuously enjoy *everything." It does seem to me that we have something of a duty to suppress or disguise our distaste for things that are worth teaching (or that we dutifully agree to teach). I recall losing my temper with a former student who cheerfully informed me that as a student teacher she was telling her high school English class that she despised Milton. And right now my son is studying "Great Expectations" under the guidance of a teacher who declared yesterday that she is bored by Dickens. (Those with long memories will not be surprised to know that, yes, this is the "matriarchal prehistorian" to whom I referred last fall.) On the other hand, I have to say that I have long been grateful to the 12th grade English teacher in Salt Lake City who helped us see why Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" is a truly awful poem. Any good stories, anyone? How do you teach what you can't stand? David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .