Teaching the Resonances

Abstract

The essays from the Paradigm Lost? session explore in different ways the fate of literature in the age of theory, raising divergent theoretical, practical, and pedagogical questions. The presentations range from theory as a pedagogical technique or tool to be deployed or avoided in the literature classroom to the inseparability of literature and theory to the inevitability of theory. None of the speakers, however, questions the validity of theory as a legitimate area of academic pursuit, and some offer moving testimonials about how theory challenges them and their students and revitalizes their classrooms. Obviously, Shakespeare does not face any immediate danger of being displaced by theory. Notwithstanding the disagreement in my own department, I think that an overwhelming consensus prevails in the profession and in the culture that Shakespeare has a place in the curriculum and an importance as both a literary genius and a cultural phenomenon. Yet in our postmodern taste for ideological confrontation and the oppositional, we as Shakespeareans may in fact be forgetting the art of diplomacy and the virtues of compromise. We may be allowing ourselves to be redefined and refashioned by our theoretical debates, and in the process, we may be recreating the world in our own image. We may have only begun to assess the overall impact of our theoretical pursuits on university curricula, on the everyday life of our English departments, and on the image that we project of ourselves. But theory or no theory, we have failed if we teach our students to hate what we love or if we are unable to educate our administrators, legislators, and our culture at large about the importance and excitement of what we do. In her 1980 inaugural address as president of the Modern Language Association, Helen Vendler invoked Wordsworth's vow at the end of The Prelude: What we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how. She added: we succeed at all in teaching others, from freshmen to graduate students, to love what we have loved, we hope that some of them will become the teachers who will replace us-and that they will teach out of love, and write out of love, when they do write.' '5 I would go farther: our primary challenge is to encourage a love for Shakespeare and the arts not only in potential teachers but also in a future generation of scientists, legislators, attorneys, and accountants. If theory helps us to achieve this end, so much the better. If it does not, we must reassess the place of theory in the classroom.