20140115.0615

One of the things I am doing with my students this semester is online discussions.  I have tended to do this when I have taught literature classes, largely because it provides a valuable extension of the classroom (when students avail themselves of it, which has not always been as extensively as I would like it to be).  Admittedly, some students do the minimum work to earn their assigned points--but this is true of every assignment.  Sometimes, students do come up with some really interesting ideas, and one such happened yesterday.

The idea that struck me among the student comments I read yesterday is contained in one remark that a student wanted to find a class "dripping with literature."  I replied to the student that it suggests a metaphor of literature as fluid.  (Which fluid it is most like is a question well worth pursuing.  The obvious answer is "ink," but obvious does not mean right.)  And, if literature is a fluid and a class is a thing that can drip with it, does that mean a class can be damp with it?  Moist?  Flooded?  What does it mean to drip or flood or be moistened with literature?  How does one dry out from it?  Can one?  Should one?

I pose such questions to my students.  (I have yet to read any answers.)  It is, actually, fairly common for me to do so.  I am a student of language and literature guiding students of language and literature more junior than I am (and, whatever their majors, those in my class are students of language and literature while they are in my class), and I can only do so by prompting them to ask and answer questions, with the answers leading to yet more questions to be answered.  Some will be frustrated, no doubt; through years of conditioning and the legitimate demands of other disciplines, they want to see single, definitive answers to things, and the humanities offer no such things.  Not if they are done sincerely and with passion (and I have no desire to reward the insincere and apathetic).  Others will simply quietly hunker down and try to get through the "fluff" class their school and majors require of them so that they can move on to the "real" work they need to do, the kind that is supposed to lead them to a job doing something that makes money (although money more for others than for themselves).

Still others, though, will begin to be able to ask the questions for themselves, to look at things and wonder articulately and with subtlety and nuance.  They will see the pieces of creation and question them, working to answer those questions and expanding the field of human knowledge by their efforts even as they and I realize that there will never be an answer to all of the questions until the end; indeed, finding The Answer is the culmination of things, as the Good Doctor has noted at least twice to my recollection ("The Last Question" and "The Last Answer," oddly enough).  Those students will begin to move into The Work in at least some small way, and we will all be better for it.