The Joy of Recognition; or, The Occasional Dangers of Mastery
A bit of an open secret exists in academia for graduate students. We sometimes experience frustrations with teaching. While most of us view teaching as perhaps the most rewarding thing that we do, we love to complain about our students (it is usually good-natured, I promise). After spending the past year without any teaching responsibilities, my return to the front of a classroom has led me to reflect on my own approach to teaching, and I’ve been struck by the way in which what interests me in how I approach texts, and how I teach texts to students, are rather at odds with one another. My deepest frustration is that I am unable to convey what I consider the most interesting aspects about engaging a literary text, and am instead left with a duller, albeit crucial, task.
In simplest terms, the discussion might best be described as a lack of a unifying principle guiding scholarly work. To over-simplify the debate immensely, some scholars advocate for the freedom that this lack of a dominant framework allows in our work, while others are invested in the power of an interpretive paradigm, often nebulously referred to as “critique” or “symptomatic reading.” This second process involves the unveiling of meanings hidden in a text, and, in doing so, attacking the cultural forces that structure such hidden meanings.
My deepest frustration is that I am unable to convey what I consider the most interesting aspects about engaging a literary text, and am instead left with a duller, albeit crucial, task.
Allow me to explain.
Part of my pedagogical method is a modification of something that I’ve taken away from an experience with an AmeriCorps program wherein I was working at a Philadelphia middle school. The teaching style emphasized in this school, which I remember as the “I Do, We Do, You Do” model but which I believe is more accurately called the “Gradual Release of Responsibility” model, is one that, despite some of its flaws, has provided a loose foundation from which I have developed my own approach to teaching.
I think that modeling behaviors and practices can be of use to students; a major part of my role as an instructor consists of providing students with concrete ideas or interpretive frameworks, with an approach or a set of details to look out for as they encounter the wide range of texts that an undergraduate course (and especially a survey) throws at them. In short, I consider it important to bring students to a certain degree of mastery in the field of “English,” broadly stated. I’ve often heard this sort of process referred to in other terms as getting a classroom of students to all speak the same language or “sing the same song.”
I consider developing such mastery as an admirable outcome for a typical course. However, my own work is informed by an idea that there is a step beyond mastery, and it is this additional step that leads to the truly interesting moments of engaging with a text.
The work of mastering a practice, broadly stated, is one that cultivates expectations and primes one to notice (and to actively look for) particular aspects or features of an object or situation. In the field of literary studies, taking a text as our object of study, this often means understanding the uses of that text’s formal elements: word choice, sentence structure, tone, narrative arrangement, rhyme scheme and meter, symbols, etc. Consistently drawing attention to the same elements across multiple instances establishes a pattern of expectations and a valuable sense of direction when faced with the daunting task of interpreting a text.
However, there is the all-too-real possibility that as these concepts become internalized, they grow increasingly singular in application, leading a reader to think that there is only one way of understanding the usage of these features in a single text. In my mind, the true moments of discovery come when we are able to forget what we have learned and internalized. They occur when we are able to be surprised by different aspects of a text, when a pattern of expectations fails to account for the whole.
In all of my own scholarly work, I have a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden ever in the back of my mind: “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions” (97). While Thoreau resonates with me in a way that he may not for other readers (and especially other academics), I see this line as a beautiful articulation of the way in which our knowledge and expectations actively shape the experiences that we have )a subject that, I will briefly note, is the preoccupation of many recent studies in perception psychology).
Part of Thoreau’s larger project while living at Walden (which is not always entirely evident in the text of Walden) was a deliberate cultivation of expectations through observation of the natural world, and finding joy in the moments when such expectations are thwarted. Because, unlike Thoreau, I do not have the patience to stare at an apple for hours and notice the ways in which my perceptions of it change (note: Thoreau’s Journals written during his time at Walden are often interesting, though quite dry), I take literature as my way of enacting this process. I consider reading and interpreting a text to be in many ways an exercise of noticing things, and what a reader notices in a text is largely influenced by the expectation that she brings to it.
In this endeavor I am heavily guided by the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a philosopher who wrote exclusively on hermeneutics, or interpretation. In his masterwork, Truth and Method, Gadamer speaks of the “joy of recognition” that we can derive from a text in terms similar to what I have attempted to outline above:
“what we experience in a work of art and what invites our attention is how true it is — i.e., to what extent one knows and recognizes something and oneself. But we do not understand what recognition is in its profoundest nature if we only regard it as knowing something again that we know already — i.e., what is familiar is recognized again. The joy of recognition is rather the joy of knowing more than is already familiar”
Hans-Georg Gadamer
If we think of mastery as a process of familiarization and internalization, then the moment of joy is one of noticing something new in what we thought we had mastered, in realizing the limits of our knowledge, in seeing something from a new perspective, in noticing new aspects.
The texts that are the most fun to read are only fun for experienced readers — those who have mastered the craft. I’m afraid that when I teach, I am often boring my students; mastery is often a dull experience. It is my hope that I have primed some of them to come to the joy of recognition on their own terms.
While I have attempted to sketch out in general terms this tension of mastery and recognition, such abstract reflections don’t have the same force as a concrete example. In order to provide a practical illustration, next week we will explore this tension in detail in a nineteenth-century text that takes it as its own subject matter.
Wil Marple is a PhD student in the English Department at Syracuse University. He studies American literature of the long nineteenth century with a particular interest in the Transcendentalists and other authors of the mid-century “American Renaissance.” He hopes that his current fascination with the notion that expectations shape perception will lead him to produce a project titled Great Expectations that has absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens.