The wonderful epigraph of the text gives voice to this issue:

Nil Sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio [nothing is more odious to wisdom than excessive cleverness]

Before we begin, we must note that the word “cleverness” here carries two very specific connotations. First, the word invokes a myopic perspective: a narrow attention to detail, and a lack of ability to connect small details to some sort of greater significance. This is, more or less, the sense of cleverness as we would use it in normal conversation. The second sense, draws attention to proficiency in a particular domain of knowledge, sometimes referred to as “acumen.” The subject is not so much general cleverness as it is a trained mastery of a specific field. If we shift our attention to the details of the story itself, they help to make the clear distinction between a shortsighted lack of insight and acumen.

In the story, Poe’s amateur detective Auguste Dupin, a precursor to Sherlock Holmes, takes on a case in which he must find an incriminating letter hidden somewhere in a hotel room. The text begins with the Prefect D of the Parisian Police soliciting Dupin’s help and describing his own failed attempt to locate the letter. The Prefect knows exactly what he is looking for, possessing a “minute account” of the letter’s physical appearance and its contents. He conducts a thoroughly “microscopic” search of the premises, drawing upon a battery of investigative techniques developed over his “long experience” with such matters. Much of this search involves focusing on minor details that he hopes will lead him to the letter. He probes furniture upholstery and book bindings with thin needles, dismantles furniture, and uses a microscope to look for displaced dust and wood-shavings. Unfortunately, this detailed search yields no results, and the Prefect turns to Dupin. After a brief survey, Dupin finds it exactly where nobody would expect to find it: in a card-rack full of letters, slightly torn and marked to change its external appearance.

This story is often used to emphasize a “too-close attention to detail” which illustrates a “hidden in plain sight” dynamic; sometimes the things that most deserve our attention “escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious.” In this first use, the story highlights the pitfalls of myopic perspectives. However, the story also comments on the second component of cleverness, “acumen,” or the specificity of a field of knowledge. The problem is not so much that the Prefect is incompetent or that his methods are poorly executed. On the contrary, Dupin calls the search techniques “highly ingenious.” Rather, the problem is the assumption that a particular framework can be universally applied to any situation, that the way the Prefect follows clues will always yield the thing for which he searches. The prefect “forcibly adapts his designs” to his skillset, and cannot imagine another way of looking for a hidden item. It is his training and experience that set limits on what he is looking for, how he can conduct the search, and ultimately what he is able to find.

In my first post in this series, I spoke about the work of mastery in precisely these terms. I described mastery as knowing what to look for, and noted that this knowledge is cultivated through consistent practice and training. I hope that the Prefect illustrates why I expressed reservations about mastery in that same post. In certain ways, mastery is little more than mere “cleverness.” On the one hand, these skills can make engagement with a text a gateway to entirely new perspectives, which last week’s reading of Hospital Sketches demonstrates. On the other hand, ill-applied mastery can easily become a limiting factor, narrowing the focus of what the reader is looking for in the text, and consequently what she finds in it.

Unlike the case of the purloined letter, such directed searches do not always result in complete failure. A reader could easily, having seen the importance of biographical information to Alcott’s text, turn to authorial biography as the key to unlocking meaning in any text. I’m sure that I could read Poe’s life into “The Purloined Letter” and develop a coherent reading. The question, however, is whether or not I should focus on that detail. Doing so certainly wouldn’t have developed the reading outlined above. And it’s this that causes me pause. If my students have learned to apply a framework of author biography, or symbolic objects, or metaphors to the works they read, I worry that this is the only way that they will approach texts once they leave my classroom. Mastery and cleverness, while valuable, may also result in uniform interpretations. It is possible to be clever and to decide what to look for in a text before even reading the first word. It takes an investment in the joy of studying literature, in the joy of discovery, to let the text offer up which details are important on its own terms.

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.

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An article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic draws attention to the varied ways in which Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is read. The main suggestion is that knowledge of Alcott’s biography can drastically change a reader’s interpretation of the text. This knowledge about the author’s biography, one of many types of topic mastery I discussed in my post last week, illuminates greater meaning for the novel. One can read it either as a reproduction of sentimental feminine domesticity or as a criticism of that mode of understanding the place of women in society.

In much the same way that the protagonist, Tribulation Periwinkle (a fictionalized version of Alcott herself), is forced to reckon with her understanding of wartime heroism and gender roles, the reader is forced to come to terms with the same notions.

This theme of simultaneous reproduction of and resistance to conventional frameworks of knowledge is prevalent in much of Alcott’s work. It is undoubtedly the subject of the lesser-known Hospital Sketches, a semi-autobiographical account of an experience in a Civil War hospital. It is possible to read this text in the same vein of most Civil War memoirs: as a sort of valorization of patriotism and male courage. However, attention to the formal details of the text, particularly the military language and metaphors that pervade it, reveals that it is better considered as a reflection on these commonsense values. The text is, at its core, about the disappointment of expectations. In much the same way that the protagonist, Tribulation Periwinkle (a fictionalized version of Alcott herself), is forced to reckon with her understanding of wartime heroism and gender roles, the reader is forced to come to terms with the same notions.

The opening chapters of the text describe Tribulation’s decision to travel from Concord to Washington, DC to serve as a Civil War nurse. From the very start we get a sense of her grossly romanticized notion of what the experience will entail. These chapters largely focus on the mundane processes of obtaining train tickets and traveling from one city to the next. Despite the mundanity, we see Tribulation with her head full of “heroic purposes ‘to do or die,’ — perhaps both,” speaking with “martial brevity,” and viewing her actions in decidedly militaristic terms.

While it is worth noting that much of her “heroic” outlook is structured with reference to her reading — newspaper articles about “our brave boys” and romantic poetry like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” — I will not linger on that point. What I wish to emphasize is that the text introduces militaristic language and metaphors to emphasize a stark contrast between the domestic (typically synonymous with femininity) and the heroic (associated with masculinity). Tribulation constantly tries to leave her domestic behaviors behind in order to inhabit an entirely different sphere: heroic nurses absolutely do not cry on the train after leaving their mothers. This dynamic being established, the text proceeds to emphasize the ways in which Tribulation’s perspective on these categories shifts throughout her service. The deployment of military language and metaphor soon ceases to signal the sharp distinction between what constitutes domesticity or heroism. Instead, it signals a reflection on what such rigid ways of understanding the world occludes.

The third chapter begins with a frantic exclamation that “they’ve come!”, causing Tribulation to spring to action. Convinced that the Confederate soldiers have arrived to take the hospital by storm, she prepares to do battle. In doing so, she evokes a romantic poetic reference describing her willingness “‘To gird my woman’s form, / And on the ramparts die,’ if necessary.” Her heroic expectations are immediately undercut by the reality of the situation: it is not the rebels, but a group of wounded soldiers coming from the Battle of Fredericksburg. Her task is not to stand and fight, but rather to wash their bodies. While Tribulation is “staggered” and bewildered by the seeming mundanity, and there is a humorous element to the scenario, the point here is not to laugh at her naivety. Rather, this scene raises a more pointed question that the reader is asked to consider: what are the aspects of warfare that typically aren’t considered? What is ignored when all of the discursive emphasis is placed upon heroic deeds of manly valor?

The sequence that follows, then, is an effort to acknowledge these crucial yet oft-neglected features of war. What results is a breakdown of conventional cultural frameworks, a space in which the heroic and the domestic, the masculine and the feminine, are able to blend together. This blending is emphasized through the continued usage of militaristic language: a bar of soap can be “manfully” taken up and the washing of soldiers is accomplished “vi et armis” (that is, “by force of arms”); rough soldiers can blush “like bashful girls” while being scrubbed; the serving of a meal can be described as a “skirmishing” of utensils and a “marching and counter-marching” of rushing plates back and forth. Whereas in the first section Tribulation attempts to abandon the domestic, we see here the domesticating of the heroic military world.

Her illness manifests itself as a more acute sense of what was always present to her, but what she did not always pay attention to.

The text ends with Tribulation’s removal from the hospital, brought on by a bout of typhoid fever. Significantly, her illness produces in her “a painful consciousness of my pleura, and a realizing sense of bones in the human frame.” In other words, her illness manifests itself as a more acute sense of what was always present to her, but what she did not always pay attention to. In this way, Tribulation’s bodily illness mirrors her mental processes. While she hasn’t “learned” anything in the strictest sense, she undergoes a re-orientation of consciousness.

A similar re-orientation is possible for attentive readers, but it is by no means guaranteed. A reader lacking mastery of literary conventions may miss the close reading outlined above with its attention to specific language usage. Even readers aware of the importance of such details are likely to miss out. I expect students to pick up on Alcott’s word choice, but I know that they will likely need guidance while considering the overall effect. Guiding students through this reading is, in a way, an exercise in mastery. It serves as a sort of model for moving from minor details to the overall meaning that I discussed last week. However, my hope is that it serves another purpose. Even if students don’t get to this reading on their own, very few feel like they don’t understand the text. With that in mind, in offering this explanation I am implicitly posing a question; one that hopefully leads to a moment of “recognition.” What is actually happening in this text that seems so straightforward?

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.

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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.

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