TEACHING
John P. Fishwick Professor of English
Roanoke College
Words make you free. Without words and the mastery of them, the self remains trapped in cliché. This is the burden of any decent English class. Innocence is not benign. If we describe our experience only in terms of cultural clichés—shaped by stories received rather than constructed—accurate perception and genuine thought cannot occur. The watchword of literature is “accuracy,” and so reading and writing carry us into an original relation to the world, challenging generalization with particulars known in specific times and places.
Good reading is essential for selves and societies. Much of our moment's strife—the clash of ideologies and of religions, and the perceived conflict between religion and science—results from misreading. Fundamentalism, for instance, results from lifting sacred texts out of their contexts within histories and genres, and from the reification of word, image, and figure. The truth of myth, the power of story, and the accuracy of poetry are concepts—and experiences—foreign to non-literate readers.
The classroom is, for me, a kind of sacred space. This is true because both texts and classrooms are meeting places. Audience and artist meet in the text, and in the classroom members of the audience encounter each others' readings. Such encounters require special skills and knowledge; innocence in reading is no less disabling than in living. But when a group reads a rich, significant text together, I'm tempted to describe the experience in sacramental terms. A work of art can host communions.
Opinion Column
My best teachers read beyond red and blue
My teachers ... as I learned over the years, were strongly committed to social justice. Most of them were politically liberal, but their views combined values and positions that defied easy categorization. And they changed their minds! When a student brought up a stubborn "misfit" fact the professor had overlooked, it was received like a gift, an insight to crack open our too-small discussion and to release us into a wider play of thought. And when we students dug in our heels, settling on a fixed idea, our professors challenged us with all we were ignoring in order to feel comfortable within a partial view....
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