English Teacher Weekly: Fall Break
Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities.
After 93 straight weeks of publishing ETW, I’ve decided to take this week off for a bit of a fall break rest. In lieu of a week devoid of ETW content, I raided the archives and came across a good Halloween edition from a year ago. What you’ll find below is a little flashback to a simpler place and time: October 2023. I also liked this Oct. 10th post from last year so much I removed the paywall in case you want a little extra. Enjoy!
From the ETW Archives:
The Week of Oct. 31st, 2023
Welcome to English Teacher Weekly! Your Tuesday morning chronicle of what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities at large.
Here’s my weekly promotional message:
Are you hoarding ETW? Are you keeping it to yourself as a secret little treat?
It’s time to stop the shenanigans! There’s plenty of ETW to go around. Don’t be afraid: You know the history teacher down the hall would like it. You’ve thought “I bet Mom would like this.” The time has come to forward that email, send the link, tweet the X.
The ETW community will be better for it, I will be better for it, and the generosity you’ll feel for spreading the love will make your ETW reading experience rise to new levels of ecstasy.
THE COLLECTION
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
There have only been a handful of my teaching years that I haven’t taught The Crucible. If called upon I could perform a fairly impressive one-man show of the tragedy. I’m sure there’s a host of high school English teachers who could say the same.
Throughout my years of study, a few things have become clear: One, this is a great play. Two, it is nowhere close to the historical record of witch trials. And three, Arthur Miller is a very complicated man.
While there are many good background sources on the making of this play, the best I’ve read was just published in the NYRB, “Hallucinatory Spitballs” by Stacy Schiff.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in the middle of personal and political torment. While he researched the 1692 witch trials in Salem, his dear friend and collaborator Elia Kazan named names before the House of un-American Activities Commission. All the while, Miller’s marriage to Mary, his college sweetheart, was icing over and, not coincidentally, his feelings for Marilyn Monroe were torturing him with guilt.
He found a strange refuge in his research of the Puritan accounts of the witch trials and his experiments in capturing the language and story of 1692 Salem:
Miller would say that he thrilled to the sensuousness of the early American prose, with “its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness.” He relaxed almost immediately into its dense, gnarled syllables. Contemporary diction seemed ill-equipped to accommodate the strains and stresses of the story; he attempted to sculpt an entirely new language, groping about for one that felt archaic yet flowed naturally, drafting most of the play in verse. At some point in 1952 he enlisted the poet Kimon Friar, then teaching at NYU, earlier the tutor and lover of James Merrill, for syntactical assistance. He worked his way steadily through the forest of material, copying out bits of testimony, fixing on plot points, drafting snatches of dialogue, trying to locate the fault lines, to connect a society in crisis with the logic behind that crisis. He collapsed individuals into each other. He discarded and invented others, permanently transforming a number of Salem afterlives. No one shape-shifted quite as dramatically as Tituba, Indian in the court papers, Black and versed in voodoo by the time Miller had finished with her. Miller invented the naked frolic in the woods, nearly impossible afterward to peel from the history.
When asked later about Abigail and Proctor’s liaison, Miller replied that he had included it for two reasons. In the first place, he believed they had truly had a relationship. Only much later did he add that trouble at home had played a role. “My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay,” Miller wrote in 1996. That Proctor’s strangling guilt might make of him the voice of reason reassured Miller. He was in the market for redemption: even a tarnished soul might deliver the sterling lines. With a few decades’ distance Miller emphasized the personal calvary over the McCarthy analogy. Some recognized the first from the start. Kazan read The Crucible as a public apology to Mary. “I had to guess that Art was publicly apologizing to his wife for what he’d done,” he observed. From the outset, the betrayal in the play struck him as more sexual than social, an observation largely submerged today. In a quip that Miller put down to professional jealousy, Clifford Odets dismissed The Crucible as “just a story about a bad marriage.”
Well, it’s not not about that. But, fortunately for millions of American high schoolers, the play is about much more.
How to Exclaim!
According to Florence Hazrat, in her article for The Millions, Hemingway used a grand total of 59 exclamation points in his published works, including one solitary ! in The Old Man and the Sea. In contrast, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has 2,131 in it alone.
Her examination of the exclamation point is an excellent step toward getting this much-abused and maligned punctuation mark back into culture’s good graces. She highlights five ways that we can '“wield its mighty sword of ‘here be feelings!’”
This is from her section on “Oh-ing and Ah-ing”:
Punctuation functions as the inky semaphore of the sentence. It tells our eyes where to linger, our minds to assimilate, and our breath to pause, catch itself, and propel the voice forward, whether that one in our heads or mouths. Punctuation is body, and no mark more than the exclamation point. As the period explodes its head, mushrooming into a !, so does the exclamation erupt from our diaphragms, pushing its way through our vocal cords into the ambient air. Early twentieth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew this when he peppered his lyrics with “Oh!” and “Ah!” Praising God’s gorgeous creation such as a windhover, Hopkins’s speakers frequently burst into ululation from sheer sublime wonder at the world:
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! and the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
Jesmyn Ward: Reimagining Southern Literature
For New York Times Magazine, Imani Perry profiles Jesmyn Ward, author of National Book Award-winning novels Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. They tour Ward’s hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi and look back on her upbringing and the roots of her creative life. Ward’s new novel Let Us Descend was just released.
DeLisle and the surrounding area are the inspiration for the fictional world of Bois Sauvage, where many of her stories are set. And like Faulkner and Morrison before her, the place is as alive as the characters, but Bois Sauvage isn’t merely inspired by her literary forbears. It’s an alternative reality.
Though Ward is frequently linked to Faulkner and Morrison, writers for whom narrative was also a function of place and the histories that attach to specific communities, the association has led critics to miss Ward’s particularity. Where both Faulkner and Morrison are gothic, Ward is hoodoo. “She’s not following Faulkner,” the writer Kiese Laymon put it to me. “Jesmyn is competing with him.” And she does so by delving into Bois Sauvage with comparable intensity to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or Morrison’s Ohio River Valley. “Where the Line Bleeds” begins with two epigraphs — one from Genesis, and another from the Georgia rapper Pastor Troy: “Why Jesus equipped with angels and devils with fire?/For God so loved the world that he blessed the thug with rock./Won’t stop until they feel me./Protect me devil, I think the Lord is trying to kill me.” That juxtaposition speaks to the way that the spiritual and physical worlds abut in Ward’s writing, how thin the veil is between life on the Coast and the land of the dead. In choosing the epigraph, Ward told me she was thinking about how Southern rap helped kids in her generation understand their world — one riven by the crack epidemic, the unraveling of social and economic institutions and the deaths of loved ones. “Southern rap was helping us to understand what we were living through, and also giving us language to process what we were living through in a way that other art forms weren’t necessarily doing,” she told me.
Her new novel is set in the antebellum South, following Annis, a young woman caught in the horrors of slavery:
Annis has a cut-up existence. As she descends into the Deep South’s brutality, every intimacy is ruptured; every treasured inheritance made partial. In the hands of another novelist, we might expect the spirits that appear to help Annis survive, but Annis’s relationship to them is begrudging, even antagonistic, and the fact of a spiritual realm often seems insufficient to confronting the bitterness of life amid so much sadness. In some cases, the spirits she encounters are deceitful. This wrestling with how to build a life in spite of the pull that loss exerts on us is Annis’s bildungsroman, the story of her spiritual education. In that sense, “Let Us Descend” asks us to imagine how we are to live a life here in the present, honoring the past while not being beholden to it.
The Burden of the Humanities with Bill McClay
Essays on the importance of the humanities and their tragic decline are a dime a dozen. So when you read one, make sure it’s from someone who knows a thing or two about the subject. Allow me to recommend Bill McClay’s remarks, given for The New Criterion’s Circle Lecture last month.
First, many of the troubles facing the humanities are self-inflicted—The call is coming from inside the house:
It is a bad sign that defenders of the humanities become tongue-tied so quickly when a layman asks what the humanities are and why we should value them. Sometimes the answers are downright laughable. At a meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies a number of years ago in Philadelphia, the subject was “Reinvigorating the Humanities,” but the discussion was anything but invigorating. Consider this witticism from the then-president of the University of Chicago, who was soon to become the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: “When the lights go out and our friends in science haven’t developed a national energy policy, they’ll be out of business. We, with a book of poems and a candle, will still be alive.”
Well, isn’t that special? This is the kind of airy-fairy, self-congratulatory narcissism that gives the humanities a bad name. And when the president of the council addressed herself to the big, obvious question—just what will it take to reinvigorate the humanities?—the answer was predictable. What was needed was, in the immortal word of the great American labor leader Samuel Gompers, more: more money, more fundraising attention from university leaders, more support from Congress, more jobs for professors.
What ever happened to that book of poems and a candle?
The title of his talk is “The Burden of the Humanities,” which dually refers to the weight we entrust to the humanities as a source of wisdom and the responsibility we have to carry on the tradition. His definition of what the humanities are is clear and simple: “the task of grasping human things in human terms.”
Science teaches us that the earth rotates on its axis while revolving around the sun. But in the domain of the humanities, the sun still also rises and sets, and still establishes in that diurnal rhythm one of the deepest and most universal expressive symbols of all the things that rise and fall, or live and die.
It utterly violates the spirit of literature, and robs it of its value, to reduce it to something else. Too often, there seems to be a presumption among scholars that the only interest in Dickens or Proust or Conrad derives from the extent to which they can be read to confirm the abstract theoretical propositions of Marx, Freud, Fanon, and the like—or Smith and Hayek and Rand, for that matter—and promote the correct preordained political attitudes, or lend support to the identity politics du jour. Strange, that an era so pleased with its superficially freewheeling and antinomian qualities is actually so distrustful of the literary imagination, so intent upon making its productions conform to predetermined criteria. This is why our leading publishers now employ “sensitivity readers,” and feel free to perform surgery on the works of the past, removing their perceived blemishes. Meanwhile, the genuine, unfeigned love of literature is most faithfully represented not in the elite universities but among intelligent general readers and devoted secondary-school teachers scattered across the land.
The End of the Extremely Online Era
predicts that our “extremely online era” will go the way of cigarettes and the Berlin Wall—something at one time so firmly entrenched in our cultural imagination that thinking of its defeat is almost silly. But culture can change in strange and unforeseen ways. From his great essay over at his Substack, The Commonplace:
When no one is using their phone and is not mindlessly filming and photographing everything in sight (above all themselves front and centre) to decide to then do so seems weird. Vulgar. Almost shameful. It’s only the current ubiquity of our devices that makes us not feel this way. And I suspect in their hearts plenty of people have always known that there’s something fundamentally not right with all of this and have simply not said anything for fear of ridicule or being seen as out of touch. Well, slowly but surely the mimetic tide is turning. Trends and culture are dictated by the coolest of the cool teenagers and twenty-somethings and here they were with no interest in being on their smartphones. Where they lead others will follow, slowly but surely.
Speaking of leaders, maybe this nonprofit, NoSo, is part of this trend. Their No Social Media November challenge begins tomorrow.
Chaucer Comes Alive
The British Library has been hard at work digitizing its Chaucer archives. It’s an incredible accomplishment; some documents in the collection are over 600 years old.
The entire collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works held by the British Library is being made available in digital format after the completion of a two and a half year project to upload 25,000 images of the often elaborately illustrated medieval manuscripts.
In a “major milestone” for the library, which holds the world’s largest surviving collection of Chaucer, it is hoped the digital platform will enable new research into the 14th-century poet, courtier, soldier, diplomat, and MP who is most famous for his Middle English epic, The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer, who died in 1400, was proclaimed by his contemporary poet Thomas Hoccleve as the “firste fyndere of our fair language” and is widely regarded as the father of English poetry. He was, in essence, the first poet laureate, being rewarded by Edward III with a gallon of wine daily for an unspecified task, thought to be for poetic work or works. He was also the first to be buried in what became Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
If The Canterbury Tales are your thing, why not join
in her piece-by-piece survey of the Tales. Week Four was dedicated to fan favorite, the Wife of Bath. (For some sick reason, I’ve always has a soft spot for the Pardoner.)Godzilla Raids Again
A new English translation of the original 1955 novellas that brought Godzilla into the world were published earlier this month.
Kayama’s treatment, however, contained a scathing indictment of the entire nuclear industry — and the United States in particular. The two films softened many of Kayama’s criticisms, and he therefore published his novellas to expand on the major themes of the film. “Through translating these novellas,” Angles says, “I wanted to show the English-speaking world what Kayama really hoped to convey.”
With an informative afterword by Angles, “Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again” finally allows English readers to better understand the important context behind the monster. Godzilla as a fictional creation was inspired by the real-life tragedy of the Lucky Dragon No. 5, a Japanese fishing boat that was caught near the detonation of a U.S. thermonuclear weapon test at the chain of islands known as Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. All 23 crew members were rushed to the hospital with radiation sickness, and one died soon afterward. Widely reported in Japan, the event was largely ignored by Western media. Kayama’s novellas make the historical inspiration for the monster obvious, starting one story with Godzilla’s attack on a small fishing boat and playing on Japan’s already considerable fears of the dangers of radioactive fallout amid the rampant arms race developing around the world.
Jim Burke and Dave Stuart Jr.—What Does it Mean to be an English Teacher?
It was a real treat to hear a long-form interview with Jim Burke, hosted by ETW Hall of Famer Dave Stuart Jr. Their conversation considers the perennial challenges to flourishing in the profession, as well as the current issues of ChatGPT and the intense political climate. But the best part of the interview is the posture both of these master teachers take toward the profession: a fully present and abiding care for their students and the craft of teaching. It’s not overly technical, flashy, or eccentric—instead, it’s creative, measured, thoughtful, genuine. A great listen on for an afternoon commute.
One resource that they mention is a book that sounds like just what the doctor ordered: Donald Graves’s The Energy to Teach. I have a feeling this book will be taking a shortcut to the front of my reading queue.
Also—I can’t help but mention—it is very cool to hear their plug for ETW: a real honor!
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
- takes us inside Mary Shelley’s drafting process for Frankenstein, including Percy Shelley’s suggestions along the way.
So many fascinating topics and texts covered on Continuing the Conversation: a Great Books podcast by St. John’s College—available on Spotify or YouTube
“The Air We Breathe Is Holy: Exvangelical Indie Rock”—Matthew Mullins on the faith, doubt, and influence of songwriter David Bazan for the LARB.
From Current: “Your Grandma Isn’t Cute”—Agnes Howard on how the Sisters of the Sacred Heart can help us embrace aging
A good playlist of 18 hours of ghostly ambient music for grading sessions. (Not creepy, but ghostly.)
A trailer for Freud’s Last Session, a new movie starring Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Freud and Matthew Goode as C. S. Lewis, produced by Sony Pictures Classics. Is there a chance that this could be good? We shall see.
ETW favorite
at the After Babel Substack: “Here are 13 Other Explanations For The Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of Them Work.”Register now for Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing. The speaker and workshop leader lineup looks promising.
Well deserved break methinks!