books by the foot

Add in The New Yorker (august 24, 2009, page 32)

Booksbythefoot.com

Dozens of styles for Interior Designers and Book Lovers, starting at $6.99 per linear foot.

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” –Cicero

I have seen the add before. Only today do I think about it differently, because of my initial discussion of books and “American Scholar” in the Emerson seminar yesterday. That is: the lover of books and the problem of books; the danger of becoming the “bookworm” and the bibliomaniac. The Cicero makes me think of how Emerson views the very problem of reading books: that books are not the soul, but the body (at some level, Emerson like all in his culture of copyright, as Katherine Hayles might suggest, is guilty of immaterialzing the book) that houses but potentially limits the soul: the idea, the genius. Every spirit builds itself a house…

And I also think of this line from American Scholar, of course; about what we readers forget (the line that leads up to the bookworm):

Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm.

So what’s being sold here at booksbythefeet? Who is the audience? On the one hand, book lovers, clearly–readers who probably know the line from Cicero, or at least believe it, and would want to enhance, perhaps transplant, the soul of their living rooms. But at the same time, if not on the other hand, notice how surely this same book lover is also the reader without a soul. The appeal, after all, is to create an effect that you have a room of books, create the style of being a reader: interior designers are this audience. One can think of Gatsby’s book shelves and realize that a great American tradition, perhaps, is here invoked. It makes one wonder about, say, The New Yorker: does one read it for love or for style?

I would like to suggest–at least, begin to speculate, and work on this a bit further–that this is where we find ourselves today in literary education (perhaps in the academy overall). Should our focus be on style (and styles)–but suitable for designers? Those who want to create and produce the style of “books” and yes, the appearances of being well read? Or should our focus be on the book lovers–on creating readers who will fill up their future rooms with books, carried with them (we presume) from their studies? Readers who might (like me) subscribe to The New Yorker but not answer the ad.

The latter is, it seems clear, the method of literary education of the last 100 years, certainly since the emergence of the New Critical classroom. The former, I speculate (allowing me the figurative room to borrow ‘interior design’ into the realm of English; though the word style suggests to me that I don’t need to beg too much in that borrowing) is where English seems to have come from (both classical rhetoric and the rhetoric that emerges with the university in the late 19th century), where practical elements in style is the focus. And perhaps this is also where English could go, or is under pressure to go: driven by student interests in more practical applications of writing, more technical. Writing that is professional, rather than rhetorical or literary.

My final speculation, for now, is that Emersonian pedagogy–the Emerson who is interested in the problem of readers and books, and plays a role, though forgotten, in these educational issues (think of James Berlin’s study)–that Emerson can help highlight these two polarities and perhaps offer us a middle ground.

Books by the foot of the familiar?

synecdoche against metonymy

Paul Hunter, “Synecdoche Against Metonymy: burke, Freire, and Writing Instruction” [Freshman English News, 18.2 (Spring 1990): 2-9]

“Emerson as Teacher”: Myerson

reading notes from Joel Myerson, “‘Not Instruction, but Provoocation’: Emerson as Teacher” [Emerson at 200: Proceedings of the International Bicentennial Conference. Rome, Arcane Editrice, 2004.]

Myerson takes up Emerson’s “thoughts on the process of teaching” and asserts that “Education was central to Emerson’s mission. Teaching, as the means of implementing education, was equally important.” Refers to “his Emersonian school without walls.” (23)

As a dean of Emerson studies, this essay goes as far as I have seen any Emersonian take up the idea of teaching in Emerson, beyond the metaphor (as I have framed it) of Emerson the teacher. Myerson cites Sealts (Emerson on the Scholar) though implies that his work is not focused on the process of teaching.

Much of the essay provides useful but somewhat familiar background to the context of thinking Emerson as an educator–specifically, the family obligation to teach (which I think he like every other biographical view, leaves too quickly); and thinking of his lecturing as his teaching. Where the essay offers new insight in analysis is when, toward the end, Myerson contrasts a “traditional linear view of education” with “Emerson’s more multi-dimensional and dynamic perspective” (34). But he then adds to this (which could be left at the level of ideal; tied back to Circles) in taking up a particular question: “What is the proper method of instruction? to begin with, teachers need to learn that they exist for the students, not for themselves.” But notice how Myerson goes furhter in contextualizing this in Emerson’s writing, not leaving it at the epigrammatic level of “Respect the child.”

Nor can the teacher attemtp to wihhold knowledge from students: Emerson warns that if ‘a teacher have any opinions which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into taht, as into any that he publishes’ (EL 2: 148; also JMN 3:284, 308). The good teacher needs to know that learning is multi-directional, that those behind the desk can learn from those in front of the desk. Emerson praises a Pestalozzian school ‘where the tutors quitted their chair at the end of an hour to go and become with their scholars a class to receive instruction of another teacher[,] each being thus in turn teacher and pupil’ (JMN 5:408). This type of school Emerson feels is a good model for society as a whole, a world in which all ‘are equally served by receiving and by imparting’ (CW 4:18). [35]

Myserson thus ties his assertion of Emerson’s “process philosophy” of education to a concrete vision (and condition) of a school: where students learn from the teacher as learner, where learning is in process for both student and teacher. The Deweyan echoes forward can be grounded, we see, in Emerson’s interest in Pestalozzi. Worth noting that this name comes up at the end of American Scholar–we forget that this figure is on his mind. I would also suggest that this understanding that the student learns from the teacher’s process (I return to the image of pulling back the curtain on the wizardry) is key to his later regret (visiting his former students) that he did not connect their lives to his own writing and learning.

So, again, more concrete a view of how this process philosophy might be enacted–at least as Emerson further thought it. It remains to be seen how we, in English say, might enact it. For one implication that Myerson identifies is certainly a shift away from locating instruction in books, in canons. But we hear nothing from Myerson (a book-lover and book-scholar, if ever there was one) about how he as an educator has taken up, or would have us take up, not just this kind of tricky ‘anti-mentoring’ (he cites Buell favorably) but what an anti-book curriculum or pedagogy in English today, in his very university, would look like. Perhaps that is not the point of this particular essay; but I would like to hear more.

I suspect; or I speculate, that we can take this process philosophy and pedagogy further, regarding books and the objects of our study, by focusing on a place where process is (as Lanham argues) most illuminated in communication and information today: the electronic word. So, connect Myerson’s views to Poirier (and Emersonian writing as process, not product; an essa earlier in this same collection) by way of the wire.

____

Later in the same collection is the essay by John Bryant, “‘Self-Reliance’ and ‘The Poet’: Teaching transcendentalism Transcendentally, and Critically”

asserts that to teach Emreson effectively professor need to help students ‘confront their relation to his thinking.’ Goes on to discuss not Emerson’s interest in education but his own experiment in helping students experience and perform Emersonian thinking. Refers to this as a learning game: ‘the game of ‘inhabiting’ Emersonian thinking” (223). He goes on to describe a series of paraphrase and revision assignments that are in line with his theory of ‘fluid text’. It seems to me that what is being experience and inhabited (without having yet read his fuller discussion of The Fluid Text) is Emersonian metonymy. Needing to experience and inhabit, hands-on, the thinking within the writing: partical extract stading for the whole. (237). He doesn’t name this metonymy; nor does he take this here, this sense of playing a game with the text, to the level of the digital tools that might enhance this. But can we?

His reference to playing a game with Emerson brought McGann and the interpretive games he discusses in Radiant Textuality. The view of playing/experiencing/inhabiting an Emerson text also brought the notion of virtual reality to mind. Is it necessary or better to experience Emerson virtually than to read him the way he tends to be read? [Bryant notes the problem of the quoted/cliched Emerson that ends up selling sneakers]