Teaching Stevens in and beyond the Book

Abstract

Teaching Stevens in and beyond the Book Juliette Utard The point is that the hypertext, unlike the book, encourages greater decentralization . . . —Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality GIVEN THE BREVITY of my experience in teaching Wallace Stevens, and the straightforward conclusion it produced that I have learned much more from bringing his poetry into the classroom than I have actually taught, my thoughts will be less prescriptive than descriptive. Teaching Stevens today outside of the United States necessarily means reflecting on our position both as twenty-first-century readers casting a “backward glance” upon the past century’s literature and as European readers glancing across the Atlantic—something in the vein of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature yet wary of its exceptionalist underpinnings.1 The course I designed focused on “The Poetics and Politics of the American Poetry Book,” with Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Stevens’s Harmonium, and A. R. Ammons’s Garbage as the three core readings—three distinct poetry collections deploying their titular imagery around one governing metaphor for the book, architectural (with Crane), musical (with Stevens), and environmental (with Ammons). Can One Teach Stevens? My first serious experience in “Teaching Stevens” was a third-year elective course for a handful of English majors that was marked in the undergraduate syllabus as the “Poetry Option.” It took place two years ago in the Fall of 2015. Apart from the mandatory readings, students were asked to build their own individual research projects around one American poetry book not already on the syllabus: week after week they would deliver a brief update on their research, making (then defending) their final choice in a way that created a dynamic sense of unity within an otherwise miscellaneous group. I had, of course, previously exposed larger groups of students to individual poems by Stevens, each time with (relative) success—I remember the odd translation class in which students gleefully translated “The Snow Man” into French while I stood anxiously awaiting their [End Page 245] verdict, and one hour-long session of explication de texte (a highly structured form of close reading) entirely devoted to “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” both of them in the first years after I obtained my current position at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Never before 2015, however, had I been granted the opportunity of devoting more than an occasional class to my “favorite writer,” as Marielle Macé and Christophe Pradeau recently named those special literary figures who, for reasons often unaccountable or unavowed, accompany us through life. “‘The favorite writer,’” Macé and Pradeau write, “is a proper name that, for any period of time, any individual, or individuals, is simply enough, is fully satisfactory, amounts to literature, makes it possible to think about literature, and ultimately keeps alive a connection with literature that is at once sensitive, continuous, and recognized as entirely idiosyncratic.”2 Until recently, then, my encounters with Stevens in the classroom had been brief, improvised, and guilt-ridden. In part, this had to do with the kind of academic environment I was lucky enough to stage them in, one that privileges a core curriculum built around collegially approved literary works that students in years one, two, or three of their undergraduate English degree need to study before they can take the final examination—a mass ritual involving some three hundred students gathered in an amphitheater, pondering over the same text or essay question for several hours. In that context, adding one’s “favorite writer” to the common reading list just isn’t something any “one” can singlehandedly decide to do. Presumably, however, my anxiety also arose from what Jacqueline Vaught Brogan once identified as a quality of Stevens’s poetry that makes it unteachable or, to take up her words, “resistant to being taught”: “We can teach Yeats,” Brogan writes, “and we can teach Stein. . . . But I still believe it’s impossible to teach Wallace Stevens” (51). The “terror” that Milton Bates described in the same volume of essays seized me when at last I added Stevens to the reading list for my third-year American poetry class, an optional course designed as a stepping-stone toward graduate...