University of Virginia Library

Forming Own Studies
Aids Goal Realization

After all, you see, the thing about formulating a curriculum
is that we're formulating a curriculum for you. And that's the
wrong way around. Because although we know what we think
you ought to learn, the question of whether we've done it in the
best possible way is only determined by whether we're getting
the best possible results in terms of your education. And if you
feel that the best possible results aren't forthcoming, something
is wrong. It's not working quite right. So we've got to try and
adjust it. And you help in adjustment - even a physician asks a
patient, you know, "What do you think?"

What Are You Doing?

Q. You talked about reaching certain points in your life
when you've got to rethink just exactly what you're doing in
literature. You did this by withdrawing from literature for a
while.... Is it possible to try to lead a double life, to continue in
graduate school and at the same time to try to figure what
you're doing there?

A. I think it's perfectly possible. It's a matter of deliberately
undertaking to extend your horizons....reading works that
provide a breather. I remember Professor Trilling saying one
time that after he finished his Ph.D. he couldn't read for a year
and a half: "I couldn't look at a book - it turned my stomach."
You've got your nose rubbed into these books....you've been
forced to read them when you didn't want to, and after a while
you've had it. But if you are really drawn to the life of ideas,
you'll read something else. You won't read fiction; you're sick
and tired of fiction. You're sick and tired of criticism. So you
read a book on science, if you're interested in science. You're
interested in psychology, you read a book on psychology.
You're interested in sex, read a book on sex. Your whole idea is
to clean your head out. (I'm not against performances either.)

Q. I was wondering if you feel, one, that good teachers don't
have to be critics and scholars, and two, if a person is a critic
and a scholar and a good teacher, will that make him better than
the other good teacher who isn't a critic and a scholar?

Good Teachers

A. Using the term "good teacher" in the way in which I have
means the man who is concerned with the central issues of
literature. And the "central issues" I would define as
being . . . the way in which the language expresses the idea, and
the ideas are related to the culture, so that all the key ideas with
which human beings are concerned, with regard to expressive
linguistic behavior, are touched on by the good teacher. To do
this you certainly have to study the literature and have to see
how it relates to the ideas and the culture through the language.
So you have to know something about language, and you have
to know how things work in language, and you have to be able
to move from the poem, not to outside the poem, but through
the poem. The poem, you see, is a kind of object that is like a
palimpsest; I mean, on the top you just have words, but
underneath are the ideas, and the feelings - the whole attitudes
of a man and a society. And you have to be able to plunge right
into it and through it, always beginning at the top and
recognizing how you've moving to the depth. Well, to do this,
you have to be very knowledgeable. You have to be, I think, a
careful thinker and scholar. And in doing this, as I said, I think
you occasionally touch off features in students which make
them turn upon themselves and begin to rethink what they are
doing. I think that such a person is a scholar, and if he's a good
teacher he's almost always a good scholar . . . If we want to use
the term in the way in which I have been using it, you can't be
accidentally good; it comes from the way in which you
understand the literature.

I don't think it's necessary for everybody who thinks deeply
and carefully and precisely and widely about literature to write.
Because I don't think there's any necessary connection between
thinking and writing criticism. I think writing criticism is a
special kind of creative discipline, just like being a good
gardener is a way of creating, helping to bring flowers to grow
and to grow in certain kinds of ways. It's a special kind of
creativity. Other people will write novels . . . I don't put any
special value upon publishing an essay or upon publishing a very
good novel, and I put a special value upon publishing a very
good essay, because I would put a value on anything well done.
If you build me a good bench I would put value on that.