Imagination and Interpretation

I’ve found myself thinking about this comment Justin made in his response,  “I think it is important to teach interpretation as a human, artistic, expressive, act, one that is guided by more than strictures of authority, evidence, reasoning, certainty, etc.”  I agree with this, and I want to think about how the classroom can become a site for this kind of imaginative work.

Part of the answer comes from literature itself—an imaginative form should, by rights, allow for us to unleash our imaginations—isn’t that the pleasure of reading? Last night I was mentioning an article by Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin in Early American Literature that speaks to this issue in a useful and kind of inspiring way. Writing about the propensity among scholars of Early American literature to see texts “essentially as evidence: either indexes to empirical realities or discursive sources of sociopolitical ideologies and identities” (237).  What this looks like in my field is an over- (in my opinion) emphasis on seeing, say, seduction narratives, as mere allegories for aspects of Republican forces and ideas. While this kind of reading has brought certain early American texts into our classrooms, it has rendered others unreadable.  But what if our texts are giving us a different kind of evidence? How do we begin to access the (often very strange) texts’ imaginative aspects in the classroom?

Obviously we need to take more cues from the texts themselves, and allow ourselves to be a little more imaginative in the way that we approach these works of imagination.  As Cahill and Larkin write, “At stake here, of course, is what literature is and does. Does it merely reveal, however richly or inadequately, the historical contexts in which it is produced? Does it participate significantly in the construction of historical reality? Does it enable imaginative speculation—the invention of worlds? And by extension: What is the value of such invented worlds to the historian?  What should it be to the literary scholar?” (242).  Tangling with these questions on the scholarly level is tricky, but I’ll give myself away here and say that as a scholar I am most interested in early American literature’s investment in imagining worlds—buildable, inhabitable worlds—and the novel as a form crucial to bridging the gap between the fictive and the real by allowing readers to practice alternative ways of being that they then might bring to their developing worlds. 

But I’d like to add a question to Cahill and Larkin’s list: What is the value of such invented worlds to the classroom? Later in the essay, the authors claim that “as critics and teachers, we remain committed to the aesthetic interpretation of texts—alert to their wit, profundity, originality, and complexity—for its own sake. This is perhaps especially true for early American writing in all its strangeness, ungainliness, fragmentariness, anxiety, and paranoia” (245). But they don’t offer a whole lot of clues about how this commitment translates into what Elbow might call a phenomenology of invention, or maybe of imagination, in the classroom.  So I suppose that makes it our job to figure out what this kind of imaginative practice looks and feels like.

One problem is that even as we aim for inventiveness and productive imagination in the classroom, we get so stuck in our interpretive holes (but also the hole of the classroom, which comes with so many layers of expectation and anxiety about behaviors and performance that it can be hard to make it a space for creativity, expression, and joy.

But the best classrooms do just that.  We got a few clues for how we as teachers can try to facilitate such a mindset in some of your responses to last week’s readings. A few thoughts come to mind—please remind me of others in the comments or by email.

1.     Model creative engagement.  We saw from your responses that as students you are especially responsive to teachers who think outside (sometimes way outside) the box.  The obvious corollary is that as teachers we need to find ways to tap into our own creativity in the classroom. This creativity may come in the form of assignments, syllabus design, classroom activities, or a teacherly persona (or all of the above!). The point is, students are more willing to go “out there” to join a teacher who’s already gone beyond convention.

2.     Model joy. Hokey. Cheesy. Too bad. I think it’s really hard to expect students to enjoy literary study if the teacher seems to hate it. Enough said.

3.     Encourage expression. Think about the quotes from Halla’s supervising professor, Len von Morzé, that we put on the board (and can someone remind me that I want to take pictures of the board to put on the blog?) last night. “Interesting. Where do you see that in the text?” and “That’s not how I read it—did anyone else read it this way?” We talked about students wanting to see whether the teacher’s eyes betrayed a sense of right or wrong answer; I think the best teachers tend to want to hear all the responses students present, even ones that are a bit off the wall. Our job is to listen for the interesting ideas and to help students develop them. If we screen out answers that we weren’t expecting to hear, we risk both missing the most potentially interesting directions for conversation and we tacitly tell students to shut up, now and in future. Not good.

4.     Go all in. Remind students that these habits of mind aren’t simply pleasurable (although they are, and we would be wise to appreciate the importance of finding pleasure in our work). Creative engagement underlies all of the best scholarly work in the field. You don’t get that Arden edition footnote for doing what everybody else is doing, or thinking what everybody else is thinking.  You cultivate your ability to throw yourself into the work, to go a little nutty, to ask the crazy question, and then to do the work to figure out whether the crazy question in fact has the potential to illuminate the work anew for those who thought they knew it well.   If we are willing to go for it, it’s more likely our students will be—and at least (we hope) they’ll come to class to see what will happen next.

Cahill, Edward and Edward Larkin, “Aesthetics, Feeling and Form in Early American Literary Studies,” Early American Literature 51:2 (2016): 235-254.