Henry James and the Art of Teaching

Abstract

Henry James and the Art of Teaching John Carlos Rowe As I write this essay, I am involved in the second year of our summer institute, “Bridging the Gaps: Critical Theory, American Literature, and American Culture,” which brings together teachers from Southern California high schools, community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities to the University of California, Irvine campus to do collaborative research. 1 This summer’s topic, “Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” was the result of work by a coordinating committee composed of representatives from these different segments of higher education. Sometime last fall, the coordinating committee selected the following four literary texts to focus our collaborative research during the summer: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), William Apess’ A Son of the Forest (1831) (and other shorter selections from this Pequot-American’s writings), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Each of the six members of the coordinating committee proposed a literary text, and we talked about its appropriateness for our summer institute and possible adoption as a classroom text in the several different kinds of higher education represented in the institute. My proposed text for the summer was Henry James’s In the Cage (1898), which I proposed because of its potential for raising questions about late nineteenth-century attitudes toward gender roles and sexual identities. As one of the few texts by James to deal centrally and explicitly with the conflict between the working, middle, and upper classes, it impressed me as an opportunity to teach Henry James to students without lapsing immediately into the stereotype of James as a difficult, modernist defender of bourgeois values. It was precisely these assumptions about Henry James that shaped my colleagues’ decision not to include In the Cage in the syllabus of our summer institute. The text was voted [End Page 213] down as “too difficult” for high school and community college students, too “restricted” in its “scope,” and insufficiently “relevant” to our announced focus on nineteenth-century race and gender. Let me begin first with the notorious problem of James’s difficulty. Of course, James’s writings require great concentration by the reader, careful attention to the dialectic of form and content, a special ear for shifts in tone, and a heightened awareness of how narrative perspective is often worked through multiple narratorial centers. For formalist critics, just such technical and stylistic difficulty was what established James as one of the preeminent modern writers and made him a “major author” in most post-World War II college and university curricula in literature. For my teachers in the 1960s, when formalist methods still held sway, James’s writings were virtual textbooks in the key aesthetic techniques and rhetorical devices used by “great” or “classic” literature. The primary emphasis on Jamesian technique has always impressed me as an odd, even perverse, strategy for teaching Henry James. It has been just this emphasis that has caused contemporary students and their teachers to think of Henry James as a difficult writer. In practical terms, this focus on aesthetic form is best suited to the specialized group of creative writing students who study literary texts to develop their own techniques, understand literary conventions, and otherwise reflect on literary craft. Graduate students and those preparing for graduate work in English and American literatures might also be reasonably expected to develop expertise in such aesthetic and technical areas of literature, even though such concerns should not be the primary areas of their training. Yet in too many graduate programs, just such an obsession with the rhetorical and stylistic techniques of literature, to the exclusion of other literary functions, remains central to the curriculum and professional training of graduate students. One reason for this is that despite the waning of the New Critical and formalist assumptions about literature, many graduate programs are still dominated by senior faculty trained in the critical age when formalism and modernism worked in complementary ways to justify themselves. In addition, many high school and community college teachers of literature studied literature in the formalist era and have, in many cases, not had opportunities to read any...