Academia

Taylor 1: Liberal Arts Purpose to Leave Our Selves Behind

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Delbanco’s The Real American Dream argues American culture/literature narrows focus from God to Nation to Self. Paradoxically, such movement also universalizes God seen as a 17th century Puritan did; Nation as an Enlightened American did; but the self ah, going far inward, externals blur. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” or its opposite, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, are accessible whatever a student’s religious background. Understanding that “Self”, though, is also deepened by understanding the vestiges of history buried in our culture, affecting writers newly come to this continent as well as those who self-consciously reject much of that heritage (as do both Emerson and Hawthorne). So the first fourth of the first half of a chronological survey requires us to enter another world in another time with other beliefs to appreciate what they considered important, fought wars over, faced a wilderness to express.

Some heritage is general: Puritans brought with them an obsession with the word written, memorized, analyzed and a pared down, intense relationship with their God in which little church hierarchy intervenes. Translation of the Bible into the vernacular had powerful consequences. And church governance as they defined it seems to inevitably lead to government of, by and for the people. Of course, the communal remains important. The warmth of the Mayflower contract and agreements on the Arbella led to the great “ur” documents. Separatists like Williams were then, and are likely always to be, a minority. But individualism & self-conscious self-inspection are central to the 19th century. That tendency pulled American culture farther toward individualism as value and libertarianism as policy. To this day, our outlier position is characterized by individualism – a position most cherish, welcoming challenge.

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Re: David Foster on Empathy

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Perhaps the greatest pleasure of literature is its access to all those extra minds (and feelings). My freshman teacher asked why I wanted to major in English. Because I like people, I said, then paused. I don’t really like people many are irritating and frankly I can be a bitch. The real reason then and now – was they fascinate.

I loved critic’s insights though not as much as narratives. So, if the following is bitter, remember I’m more jilted lover than fair observer. When I was young, we spoke openly of our passion for our discipline, but now the academy discourages such talk, understandably fearing sentimentality. But is cynicism all that attractive? It is brittle. And thin. For isn’t “strange” as Gopnik privileges it, a superficial criteria? He condemns Gottschall, a literary critic who is breaking new ground in literary theory, as a “popularizer;” Gopnik speaks from his regular gig at The New Yorker as an academic and he’s probably right. More’s the pity.

David Foster comments that empathy includes both our ability to understand others and what we do with that understanding. We recognize that maturity comes from broadening sympathies but we’ve all known con men (and, if unlucky, psychopaths) who read us rather well. But the generative subset of bio-criticism in which Gottschall works include “Theory of Mind” studies, especially Lisa Zunshine’s. It analyzes one literary signal of empathy: our ability to “think” as another. asking what does he think, what does she think he thinks, what does he think she thinks he thinks? But empathy is also part of a fiction writers’ ability. We take it for granted, though a genre with a bad reputation for wooden characters and contrived plots is “the novel of ideas.” Authors don’t make works “live” since characters are means rather than ends. Perhaps that happens when we professionalize our reading as well – the ideas we seek dominate our understanding of character. David posits “The career pressure in academia seem to be toward a very clinical, theoretical, and even cold approach to subjects…indeed, I wonder about the ratio of actual fiction-reading to the reading of other academic papers ABOUT fiction.” Critics shouldn’t “lose themselves in a good story” but keep their antennae up.

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Barry Puts Williams in Context: Coke, the Law, & a very young man

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Roger Williams tells Winthrop “I desire not to sleep in securitie and dreame of a Nest wch no hand can reach.” Puritans could hope but Williams found certainty “monstrous” when it violated “soul liberty.” He sought no conversions: while he could convince the Indians with whom he traded to go through the motions of belief, it would be deeply wrong. Indeed, he argued “any bloody act of violence to the consciences of others” would be as if “the parliament of England hath committed a greater rape than if they had forced or ravished the bodies of all the women in the world.” (The Bludy Tenent). He valued restraints civil & spiritual.

John M. Barry’s Roger Williams emphasizes Sir Edward Coke’s (1552-1634) incrementalism and careful construction of precedents that ordered chaos and defined restraints; the purpose was “to take down common law, to precipitate it out of the cloud of centuries of argument and judgment into the hard crystal of precedent, to then crack that crystal open by analyzing it, and finally to lock the piece into place by defining precedent and law more firmly than could any legislative act” (24). After 1600, Coke’s annual commentaries applied those precedents. The English tradition, Barry argues, led to a “common law more arcane and labyrinthine than civil law, but its very arcana, along with custom, created a web which restrained power, making England more resistant to absolutism than states on the continent” (21). The English valued stability, grounded in property rights: the resonance of his speech still delights as in “Every Englishman’s home is as his castle” (63). (The quotes demonstrate how heady word choices must have been: Coke’s life covered King James’ translation and Shakespeare; Williams lived during Donne’s time and taught Milton Dutch. Their words retain a life familiarity has buried.)

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Theoretically, We Separate Church and State – But perhaps we need to know what each is first

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We signal academic style seems dowdy but members read its gestures; soccer fans treasure that moment of recognition. We note kinship, we signal we understand. We treasure that moment when we raise our eyes and see a surprised look, an – “I agree.” The academic style seems to troll obsessively for these moments – perhaps to still the cognitive dissonance.

John Barry’s Roger Williams inspired me I had known little and he has led me to study farther. But if I’m grateful, I’m also a bit irritated. Why a concluding criticism of John Yoo and equation of George Bush with James I (whom he has treated with considerable contempt)? And it alienates – no understanding look would pass between us in conversation, at a dinner table. The relation between the Patriot Act and James’ highhandedness seems tenuous at best and certainly irrelevant. Barry’s LA Times’ piece argues Williams would be today’s “warrior against religion.” Well, maybe. He cites the suit brought by a Rhode Island girl, requesting the school remove a prayer mounted on the wall. He concludes – “Presidential candidates and evangelicals ignore American history and insist on injecting religion in to politics. They proclaim their belief in freedom even while they violate it.” This simplifies; certainly, using Williams exiled from each New England community – as touchstone might mean your “American history” is more limited than you imply.

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Empathy – A Belated Response to Foster

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David Foster’s thoughtful “Fiction and Empathy” notes Keith Oatley’s research on reading fiction and empathy. Surely a writer’s empathy is important – Dreiser didn’t seem to like his characters, why would we? Literature often celebrates the sacred or unifies a people. Some is marginalizes the other. Surely, whether fiction leads to empathy or not is complex.

This belated riff is prompted by Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal. In a cutesy (his shtick) and dismissive review, Adam Gopnik simplifies Gottschall’s argument, using the ever popular straw man of academia. Well, no, these professional consumers of story are seldom moral exemplars. Indeed, some display an unusual inability to empathize.

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