Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill PDF
Preview Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill
Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltan teaching beauty in delillo, woolf, and merrill Copyright © Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltan, 2008. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60124-6 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan© is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37062-7 ISBN 978-0-230-61213-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230612136 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: April 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh from Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by several translators. Copyright © 2002 by Adam Zagajewski. Translation copyright © 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. In memory of our mothers: gardeners, lovers of beauty. Contents Acknowledgments ix A Note to the Reader xi Preface xiii Introduction: Teaching Beauty 1 1 Beauty and the Emotions: Introductory Lessons 15 2 Beauty Barred 33 3 “Aside from a Pushing World”: 49 Making Space for Beauty in the Classroom 4 “Beauty Anyhow”: Reading Virginia Woolf in Vermont 71 5 Beauty and Balance: James Merrill on Santorini 95 6 Beauty After 9/11: Don DeLillo in New York 113 7 Beauty’s Return 129 Conclusion: Falling Towers 155 Notes 167 Bibliography 183 Index 193 Acknowledgments This book grew out of a course that we teach together at the George Wash- ington University in Washington, D.C., and its greatest debt is to our stu- dents, whose passion and responsiveness convinced us that there was more to be said on the subject of why teaching beauty matters. Jennifer Green-Lewis thanks the friends whose interest in the project made her bold enough to persuade them to read bits of it: Allyson Booth, Harriet Chessman, and John Elder responded generously to the pieces they saw. Many colleagues at the Bread Loaf School of English graciously put up with longwinded accounts of the book at otherwise pleasant social events: special thanks to Dare Clubb and Bryan Wolf for memorable conversations on the topic of beauty. Thanks of course to the Scathing Online School- marm, Margaret Soltan. Above all, thanks to Craig Lewis. And to Phoebe, Max, and Oliver Lewis: sorry this took so long. Margaret Soltan would like to acknowledge, first, the hard work, love, and friendship of Jennifer Green-Lewis. She thanks David Kosofsky, friend and intellectual companion of a lifetime. She was inspired every day by Karol Edward Soltan, whose physical and metaphysical beauty deepens over time. To mark her gratitude to her daughter, Ania, Soltan will poach Christopher Lasch’s Shakespearean tribute to his daughter in his great book, The Culture of Narcissism: “For she is wise, if I can judge of her, / And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true, / And true she is, as she hath prov’d herself; / And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true, / Shall she be placed in my constant soul.” Parts of Soltan’s chapters have appeared in earlier versions under the fol- lowing titles: “An Oblivion that Knows its Limits,” in Message in a Bottle: The Literature of Small Islands, eds. Laurie Brinklow, Frank Ledwell, and Jane Ledwell (Prince Edward Island: Institute of Island Studies, 2000, pp. 101–21); “Hoax Poetry in America” in the journal Angelaki (vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 43–62); “No Field, No Future,” in the online journal Inside Higher Ed (December 6, 2005). Thanks to each for permission to republish. Parts of Chapter 6 appear as “Loyalty to Reality in Don DeLillo’s White Noise,” in Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise (New York: Modern Language x (cid:79)(cid:3) Acknowledgments Association of America, 2006, pp. 158–68), reprinted here by permission of the Modern Language Association of America. Both authors are grateful to the fearless Annie Lowrey, cite-checker extraordinaire; to Christina Mueller for computer expertise; to Lisa Rivero for taking care of the index; to Tracy Gibbons at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; to Yvette Chin for her painstaking work; and to Farideh Koohi-Kamali and Julia Cohen at Palgrave Macmillan. A Note to the Reader This book has two authors. In order to write it, we each assumed individual responsibility for certain chapters and then we exchanged, reviewed, and edited each other’s work. We speak as two people in agreement with each other. Our “we” is, therefore, literal rather than royal or coercive. The things we argue in this book are things that the two of us both believe. At times in our writing, however, a first person voice also emerges, as when we describe our own responses to reading and teaching a work or when we are moved to express something that has peculiar appeal to our own, and not necessarily to each other’s, ears or eyes. We could have made these sections more uniform, of course, for the sake of a smoother syntax, but to do so would have been to play down the discrete, idiosyncratic, and personal nature of the aesthetic experiences we all—which includes you—have as we move through the world. Our belief that we can usefully and affirmatively share these private expe- riences—that we can move in fruitful ways between the “I” and the “we”—is the foundation of this book. JGL MS Preface “How shall the heart be reconciled / to its feast of losses?” asks Stanley Kunitz in his poem “The Layers.”1 As Kunitz clearly knew, there are actually a few things available to us in a time of grief that, if they cannot reconcile the heart, at least may turn the shapelessness of loss into the consolation of elegy. This book is about one of them. It is intended, first and foremost, for our students who, after their early morning encounters with the world via CNN, appear in our classrooms to talk about Ruskin or Thackeray or Nabokov. How shall their hearts be “reconciled” to the world in which they find themselves? Why, they might well ask, should they study literature amid the ongoing global feast of losses? Our response to that question, and the starting point for this book, is our belief that beauty, and specifically the beauty to be experienced in literature, is one of the things that can offer our students consolation, can give them forms in which to shape their own present and future grief and joy. There have been times—on September 12, 2001, for example, while the sky visible from our classroom still bore traces of smoke over the Pentagon—when as teachers of literature we have felt ourselves at an almost grotesque remove from the misfortunes of the world. But our recognition of that remove also recharges our daily awareness of the extraordinary privilege that it is to be in the classroom with our students. As teachers of literature, we are not only intellectually excited but also ethically obliged to make the beauty of litera- ture—the reconciliation to our world that a written work may offer—a part of our discussion of a work. And certainly there is plenty of thinking about beauty going on, unfash- ionable as it has been in recent years to acknowledge it. Notwithstanding the shifting tastes of literature departments, beauty has never abandoned the province of literature, nor have readers failed over past decades to appreciate it. Our argument in this book, however, is that in its evolution into literary and cultural studies, what used to be called “literary criticism” failed to bring along with it what was once also part of its purview: namely, an apprecia- tion of, and the skills to describe, the aesthetic life of a work. As teachers of
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