Psyche’s imperative: recollections of Leland Roloff the teacher

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis personal essay explores Leland Roloff’s influence on the author, who was an undergraduate advisee near the end of Roloff’s teaching career. For a student intent on becoming both an academic and a writer, Roloff modeled conscious address to these sometimes divergent projects. His teaching methods called on students to exercise both intellectual and artistic skills, and to reflect in their work on the conjunction and disjunction of those spheres. The essay explores three sites of influence: (1) Roloff’s Archetypal and Psychological Approaches to Literature, in which his presentation of the Greek god Hephaistos had a deep and enduring impact on the author’s personal insight, academic work, and literary-performative work; (2) the significance of Roloff’s guidance through Goethe’s Faust as a meditation on teachers, students, and academic inquiry; and (3) the author’s encounter with Roloff’s own articulation of himself as a teacher through the papers held in the Northwestern University Archive. In every area, the essay draws on primary source material, including the author’s student course notes and personal journal, written responses from Roloff on academic work and in later correspondence, and material from the Leland Roloff Papers. The essay reflects on the nature of these textual sources, their embodied presence, and the performativity of their interleaving. Finally, the essay closes on the author’s first and most enduring impression of Leland Roloff: his treatment of students as artists, not student-artists or aspirants, but as already-responsible artists.