HUM 690 - Humanities Senior Seminar
Welcome to the course. I have posted separately the Grading Policy, Marks, Requirements. That's required reading.
Our Course: Backstage in Interdisciplinary Criticism.
Freeing one's creativity. Breaking one's writer's block.
This course offers you that backstage experience of interdisciplinary criticism-- criticism that involves working with objects as well as with literary texts. I'll give you an intense analysis of your prose using a special workbook I've created for you, Break Your Writer's Block. (It's all the tips that thirty-three years of students have told me were the most help.) You'll do an extraordinary amount of writing. It's a no lose situation. Non-fiction prose will never look the same to you again, and even if you decide writing is not for you, you'll be a more knowing reader the rest of your life.
We'll do an extraordinary amount of thinking, too-- particularly about ways to free our own creativity, through examining the human, strange, often inglorious ways creative thinkers have generated ideas. Over the last three decades of teaching I've learned that none of these methods can make an uncreative person creative, but they can free a creative person's creativity.
I was forced to learn these methods because-- believe me-- I have worse writer's block than anyone in the class. I have to break my own block every time I sit down to write. You can't invent a new way to sneak out of writing that I haven't used myself. Yet I've written book after book by admitting to myself that I have writer's block, and by learning how to beat it. The methods I've learned to break my own block have helped a lot of other people. When I was a creative writing teacher, for instance, in just five years 104 of my students finished first drafts of their novels. Over ten found professional New York publication right away, and more since. My students include a Pulitzer Prize winner and the regular book reviewer for the New York Times. (And she only got a B plus, back at Yale.) My main fiction teacher, Mr. Charles Calitri, was also Frank O'Connor's main teacher, and you can read Frank's loving tribute to him in Tis, the sequel to Angela's Ashes, originally written for Mr. Calitri. Some of the most potent methods for breaking block have turned out to be the most mundane-- simple self-help and time-management stuff. I've found it also helps to demystify publishing, so all during the course we'll talk a lot about practical matters: how to publish articles, reference works, books. We'll take the mystery out of the process, humanize it and make it less threatening.
This course, then, whether you decide to become a writer or not, is a way of starting the Tao of the writer/learner. That's not something added to an existing life like a hobby, it's a whole Way of organizing one's life to digest and use experience. We'll discuss methods of lifetime self-education you can use long after you leave the class. We'll start to build core libraries for ourselves, and I've already assigned certain books which are as vital to a scholar's toolbox as a Makita power screwdriver is vital to a contractor's. In college we don't "give you an education," we teach you how to educate yourselves for the rest of your lives.
This semester's deliberately broad topic: genius, society and history, which permits us to study humanistic themes in the interdisciplinary criticism of the verbal and visual arts, both East and West, from early classical times to the present. The methodology will be the same as in other courses the student may have taken with me. This course, which includes Asia as well as the West, is my broadest. The only real complaint the department used to have from grad students was that they'd fled conventional one-subject departments to join the interdisciplinary humanities department, yet many of the seminars could have been held in an English department-- they were all about written texts. The students had hoped to join a special and pioneering interdisciplinary department, but we weren't giving training in doing interdisciplinary work. We've largely fixed that, and in this course, at least one paper must involve visual arts.
Following the Harvard "case history" model for introductory science courses, we bear down on particular "episodes." James B. Conant claimed that "more benefit can be obtained by an intensive study of certain episodes" than by a broad survey. Better to do one case in depth than skim the surface of a dozen. By studying selected important episodes in the history of the discipline, students intuit the broader "interrelation between theory and experiment" in all science, and comprehend "the complicated train of reasoning which connects the testing of a hypothesis with the actual experimental results."
In other words, you'll learn the most about how all of it works if you can deeply understand how any of it works. In this course, therefore, we'll bear down on a few, carefully selected episodes.
Methodology: Interdisciplinary Humanities
The Interdisciplinary Humanities department is not the philosophy department. We believe that when certain subjects or cultures flower into art objects, you can understand the subject better by considering those objects-- not just by reading essays.
If you've never taken a seminar in this department before, you may be puzzled for a while, before you get the hang of it. To start, consider what Sir Kenneth Clark said at the start of his PBS series Civilisation. He quoted John Ruskin, who had claimed, "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last." Sir Kenneth said he thought that was true. "If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings."
John Ruskin said elsewhere, "Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you who you are." You know this already. A lot of people will tell you, in all honesty, "I'm... a Christian... sort of a spiritual person." And where did you spend your vacation? "Vegas." What you like reveals more about who you really are, down there in your gut values, than what you claim about yourself-- even when you believe what you're claiming. When we study art objects, we're studying precisely what cultures liked-- and sometimes it tells a lot about them. (There are some supposedly Christian cultures, in fact, whose art is closer to Vegas.) In this department we study a culture's history and its philosophy, but we're careful to take a long look at what it likes.
I can tell you from first hand experience that our method is highly respected and in demand at the most prestigious publishing houses. This is a great time to be learning it, if you write. It has such advantages. Remember the movie Bonnie and Clyde? There's a scene in which they rob a bank in Missouri, and some lawmen chase them in a car, shooting, until the gang crosses over a bridge. "That's Kansas," one of the lawmen says, getting out of the car. "I ain't getting killed for Kansas." There are many humanistic themes which are so vital or powerful they can't be contained within one art, but ride over the bridge into Kansas. "That's art criticism," the English professors say, pulling up at the bridge and watching the theme roar over it. "I don't do art criticism." What do the genre-bound intellectuals do, faced with Delacroix's many paintings based on Byron's plays, or genre straddling movements like Italian Futurism, or ambidextrous types like Dante Rossetti, whose best poems were written below pictures he had just painted? They have to glumly stand aside and watch us go over the bridge to Kansas.
The Plan of the Course
I modify the course depending on your interests, but I'll probably start at the root: what is known about creativity itself? "Problem solving behavior?" A broad consensus exists. Very well, does it have any practical consequences for us? Does it suggest any methods we can use to free our own creativity? I'll start by considering some influential ideas from Thomas Kuhn and Thomas Carlyle and James Joyce, which do indeed point to methods which free one's creativity. I'll mention David Carrier a lot. Carrier's daring and impudence will help jolt us out of any naive or amateur preconceptions about what "criticism" is-- and any such hard-and-fast notion of "genres." Carrier (one of the most respected art historians of our time) unites high and low culture, many genres, and many philosophic currents (both French and analytic philosophical). If anyone has managed to cull the best from "deconstructionism" without tumbling into its mannerisms, it's Carrier.
Depending on time we may relate Thomas Kuhn's legendarily emancipating Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Harold Bloom's questionable The Anxiety of Influence. Next, armed with some methodology (or blinded by paradigms, take your pick) we'll consider the process of "creative misinterpretation" by reading selections from my third-to-last book (much more tradtional in form than Carrier) Into the Light of Things: the Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage. Since the course's central goal is freeing your creativity, the only kind of work I won't welcome with outstretched arms will be the pious grad school papers that could be paraphrased, "What So and So would have thought about X." I want your ideas, not a timid book report. "It is interesting that when we examine what Mark Shorer would have called Pickle's 'analogical matrix'(Footnote 1) we discover that, although it exemplifies what Northrop Frye would have called the 'mythos of Summer,'(Footnote 2) it nonetheless contains clear example of what T.S. Eliot called the 'objective correlative.' (Footnote 3)
Oy! When I was in New Haven in the seventies there was, briefly, some hope that what we called "postmodernism" and "deconstructionism" would free us students from writing papers like that. We wanted to abolish hierarchies, paralyze the experts, and show that everyone had the right to an opinion. No luck. The sentences remained, only the names became French.
Many grad students around the country still write like that. Why, I'm not sure, since by this late date, you don't need to do it to publish, and it's very tedious to write. There certainly are respected journals that publish such work. But you can get just as far by writing your own ideas, instead of submissively seconding other people's. And if you can do that, why would you want to do anything else?
I've selected some texts which have triggered so much discourse over the centuries you must be aware of them, and papers must show that awareness. We'll be memorizing poetry, too, to help our style. By the end of the first or second night we will have agreed about this and shaken hands on it.
Lab fee: None as such, but you must bring to class enough xerox copies of your paper for the entire class to read, and mark, during your presentation. You may even have to make some slides.
READING LIST AND ASSIGNMENT:
Our books are at the Franciscan Shops' bookstore's text department, under our course number. They're clearly marked "Required."
WELCOME TO THE COURSE!
Now that all the legalistic junk is out of the way, let me say how much I'm looking forward to meeting you, learning about you as an individual, and working with you. Have a great semester.