Suzanne Hagedorn has taught in the English department and program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the College of William and Mary since 1997 and serves as corresponding secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Virginia. Off campus, she enjoys reading, cooking, opera and spending time with her husband, son and their two cats, Misty and Smokey. Contact her at schage@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
As an English professor at the College of William and Mary for nearly 30 years, I read with interest Nora Yoon’s ’27 column, “You won’t learn humanities through classes,” especially their comment, “Nor is there a guarantee that your [humanities] professor will be a grounded, lucid educator with the ability to impart the universality of their field, rather than just take the subject’s significance for granted and get right to making you memorize arguments, interpretations and other painfully specific information.” I regret both that Yoon’s past humanities courses apparently emphasized memorization and that they remain unsure whether their English professors’ scholarship “builds and contributes to an existing body of knowledge that is benefitted by their work” in the same way as their science professors’ research.
Still, whatever our failings, we humanities scholars expect that our students back up their claims with evidence, just as scientists do. Rather than reading a book written by any current instructor on campus to investigate this issue, Yoon quotes a 1949 journal entry by Susan Sontag disparaging humanities professors’ writings as “long (hundreds of pages) monographs on such subjects as: The Use of ‘Tu’ and ‘Vous’ in Voltaire.” Do any recent works by English or modern languages professors at the College strike them as THAT esoteric? I’d invite Yoon to read Adam Potkay’s “Hope: A Literary History” or Jennifer Lorden’s “Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry” (to name only two recent books by colleagues that combine deep thought about literary culture with critiques of existing scholarship) to see whether they still view English professors’ scholarship as needlessly narrow and obscure.
Later in their column, Yoon says that while taking a creative writing class, they found inspiration in a quotation from Werner Herzog that dismissed the need for factual knowledge in favor of the emotional truth of art. Frankly, I don’t understand why we can’t have both. I very much hope that Yoon and their fellow students will give literature courses in the College of Arts and Sciences a(nother) chance. Reading privately for inspiration certainly can aid in one’s personal development, but many humanities professors see our role as guiding our students toward illumination through art — much as Virgil leads Dante through the Inferno and to a reunion with his beloved Beatrice in the Purgatorio.
Especially now, when surveys show that students feel increasingly isolated and “vibes” often trump knowledge of facts, discussing literature with other human beings, having an educated instructor help shape that shared inquiry and studying selected background information relevant to a writer’s historical context can help students appreciate the value of literature and the humanities more fully than solitary reading. Give it a try — put a literature course in your PATH cart this spring!
