By Ian MacAllister-McDonald

The first time script I ever read was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. I played the role of the Count himself in my Catholic high school production back in 2001. The production was about what you would expect out of a group of American teenagers pretending to be European adults. I was mortified when, as I stood on stage during the final dress rehearsal in my dopey cape and fangs and white face paint, watching as the actress playing Mina asked — as politely as she could — if we could please change the scene at the end of Act One where Dracula kisses Mina on the lips. We’d rehearsed it a dozen times already, always stopping just short of the kiss, which, as a bookish teenager in the theater club was about as close to girls as I generally got. The director looked at my co-star, registering her shame and terror, and conceded. Perhaps, he suggested, Dracula could kiss her on the neck? No, that wouldn’t work. Perhaps bite her neck….? She hadn’t even stopped shaking her head. “Okay, he can start to bite your neck, but we’ll drop the curtain before he makes contact. How’s that?” The actress winced, then gave a deep shuddery sigh and nodded, eyes locked in a thousand-yard stare. A true professional. In the end, the scene played out much as Mr. Stoker had surely imagined it, with a 17-year-old Count Dracula almost maybe probably going to bite the neck of a noticeably grossed-out Mina. The scene was taught, real, and very powerful.

Ultimately, the experience made me realize that I lacked the basic skills necessary to be a capable performer (i.e., confidence, grace, a good speaking voice, and that magical ability to make people want to look at you); however, I managed to come away with a deep and abiding love of plays — writing them, watching them, and, of course, reading them.

Yes, there’s something a little strange about reading plays — they tend to be pretty talky, comparatively slow-paced, and require the reader to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of imagining how the scene actually looks and moves. But there’s also a special joy to reading plays that you’re not going to find in a novel, short story collection, or book of poems. At their best, plays marry the probing characterizations of a novel with the rich language of poetry — so much so that it’s become common practice for playwrights to break up their dialogue into fragmented stanzas. And then there’s the time element: because plays are intended for performance, brevity is generally of, at least, some importance. Creatively-speaking, this tends to force the work to find its narrative and linguistic essence, which heightens the poetic effect. Practically, it means that plays make for quick reads. Even very long scripts like Angels In America and The Kentucky Cycle are shorter than most novels, and the vast majority of plays fall somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 words — roughly the length of a short story — and can be read in an hour or so. This always struck me as a nice solution for all the people who complain (usually around the new year) that they really wish they read more.

Still, there’s some debate about reading plays — particularly between playwrights themselves. Sam Shepard said in a 1996 New York Times interview that “The play is only a blueprint for the production,” a common argument for the primacy of performance. In his 2004 essay “Read Plays?” Edward Albee argued more or less the opposite: “Plays…are literature, and while they are accessible to most people through performance, they are complete experiences without it.” And then there’s Wallace Shawn, whose essay “Reading Plays” represents a kind of sensible middle-zone: “It is strange, then, to isolate the dialogue of a play in a book, and it’s strange to read it — to sit somewhere alone and read it silently to yourself. Reading a recipe is not the same as eating a cake. Reading about love-making is not the same as making love. And yet, on the other hand, one has to say that a written play can have a special magic of it’s own.”

I would argue that they’re all right, and that whether or not a script represents a “complete experience,” has mostly to do with what play you happen to be reading. Albee, for instance, was famous for the dictatorial level of control he exerted over productions, and this is reflected in his scripts, which are full of detailed instructions to the actors, not only on where to pause and for how many seconds, but also how to perform their lines. Flipping to a random section of The Goat, I see nine of the eleven lines of dialogue on that page paired with parenthetical directives like “Slow; deliberate,” and “Grotesque enthusiam.” Compare this to the work of Mac Wellman who will frequently include stage directions like “Something strange happens…” leaving what that might be up to each individual production and reader to decide for themselves. It quickly becomes clear that not all plays are designed to be read the same way.

When weighing the merits of seeing plays versus reading plays we are often comparing the reading experience to an ideal performance, which obviously isn’t always the case. There is simply nothing worse than seeing a bad play (bad stand-up comedy runs a close second). How does one prepare, psychologically and spiritually, for a high school production of Guys And Dolls or Damn Yankees? One doesn’t. (I can speak from experience — I acted in these productions as well.) The magic of theater hinges on an audience’s willingness to pretend that the actors they’re looking at can’t look back, and that the moonlight spilling through the window is being caused by, well, the moon, and not those giant black lights hanging from ceiling. Strip away that suspension of disbelief (it doesn’t take much) and suddenly, the play feels less like art or even entertainment, and more like some excruciating endurance test wherein time slows and every line belted out by an actor feels like a knife in your heart, because what you really want to do is go up on stage, stop the show, give everyone involved a hug, and tell them that while it didn’t work out so well this time, next time will be better, so how about we all just go home. In such a case, reading really is the way to go. I’ve seen three productions of Edward Albee’s The Goat, and while all had their virtues, I really can’t say that any of them equaled the experience I felt the first time I read the script. The flip side of this would be Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, a play I read in college and which struck me at the time as rather saccharine. Some years later, I was lucky enough to see David Cromer’s masterful production at The Barrow Street Theatre in New York (and then again, the following year, when it moved to Boston) and the play was revealed to me in a way it hadn’t been on the page, and I spent the better part of two hours in a puddle of tears, spellbound by the majesty of a script that I’d long since written off.

But of course, none of these factors really matter if you can’t afford to see a play in the first place, and given the cost of tickets these days, that’s a reality that many of us face. Broadway musicals are notoriously expensive, averaging around $100 a pop, and often times going for as much as $500 for front row seats. Even smaller off-Broadway productions (which is arguably where serious theater lives these days) frequently cost around $65 a seat — over four times as much as a movie ticket. Most major theaters have Student or “Under 30” memberships, as well as ties to various discounting websites, like Goldstar. Nevertheless, the finances surrounding live theater remain largely exclusionary, which is a shame, because there are powerful tales being told by masterful storytellers, and it would be a bummer to think that large swaths of the public won’t get to experience them because they don’t live in a major city, are over 30, or don’t have an extra $130 bucks to spend on a Friday night. Bear in mind, this isn’t me railing against the theaters themselves — plays are expensive to produce (especially for the rare company that aspires to pay their actors a decent, if not livable, wage) and their audiences are extremely finite. But it doesn’t change the fact that many people’s access to the medium is quite limited. Which brings us back to reading them, and given the vast number of diverse playwrights working today, there’s quite literally something for everyone.

Into Stephen King novels? Check out The Weird or The Velvet Sky by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (who adapted Stephen King’s The Stand for Marvel Comics), or Something in the Basement by Don Nigro, or The Humans by Stephen Karam, a powerful, slow-burn chiller that recently won the Tony award for Best Play.

Like Ex Machina-esque mind-bending sci-fi movies? Read The Nether by Jennifer Haley, or Stone Cold Dead Serious by Adam Rapp. Both use speculative technology as a way of exploring what it means to be human.

How about Southern gothic meditations on evil, à la Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy? In that case, take a look at The Jacksonian by Beth Henley, The Glory Of Living by Rebecca Gilman, Killer Joe by Tracy Letts, or Bash by Neil Labute (which is more of a Utah-Gothic, but still fits snugly into the sub-genre).

For fans of literary dysfunctional families, à la The Corrections, oh man, do we have you covered: There’s Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, The Goat by Edward Albee The Brother Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCranney, and Housebreaking by Jakob Holder, a searing, darkly-funny drama, and one of my personal favorites on this list; a hidden gem of the American theater (Artistic directors, take note).

For fans of postmodern fiction (i.e. Pynchon, DeLillo, Barthalme, et al.) your theatrical allies are going to be Erik Ehn (The Saint Plays), Mac Wellman (Sincerity Forever), Jeffrey M. Jones (Seventy Scenes of Halloween), Len Jenkins (Dark Ride), and María Irene Fornés (Mud). Weird, wonderful, challenging playwrights all.

And if all of this is sounding a little heavy, here are a few comedies worth taking a peak at: The Big Slam by Bill Corbett, The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno, The Aliens by Annie Baker, and Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo.

And all of this is to say nothing of the classics, which I’ll save for another essay.

Last spring, I worked as an adjudicator for an artist residency and found myself working through a pile of over 220 submissions by authors, playwrights, screenwriters, essayists, and poets. Like all writers, I started as a reader; however, it had been a while since I’d read any contemporary poetry. The three months I spent reading poetry submissions reminded me not only what I love about the medium itself, but the importance of periodically mixing up your cultural intake. I’ve developed certain expectations when it comes to fiction, theater, and film, that I haven’t with other art forms, and so the poems contained strange, new surprises that I hadn’t expected. Everything about them felt new and raw and interesting, and I found myself connecting with them in a way that was, at times, startlingly intimate. In a very real way, they reminded me why I love to read, and I’ve spent the past few months blind-buying poetry collections off the shelf.

Often times, cultural participation is discussed as a kind of race — “Have you seen the latest episode of [insert much-hyped television show]?” or “Have you read the latest book by that [insert critically-lauded author]?” — as though consuming art is somehow a competition. And while there’s certainly a good argument to be made in favor of reading deeply (as opposed to widely), I’ve noticed that the people who engage in this kind of cultural Keeping-Up-With-The-Jones simply seem to enjoy things less. This strikes me as the best reason to read — if not a play then at least something new. At worst, it’ll tell you something you didn’t know about your usual reading. At best, it’ll tell you something you didn’t know about yourself.

By Bailey Pickens

At the end of August, John Ellison, dean of the University of Chicago, joined the ranks of many an essayist penning searing critiques of something that does not exist.

Trigger warnings and their ostensible sidekick, the safe space, have featured regularly in the news and essays of cultural criticism in the last year, since protests at schools like Yale and the University of Missouri sent them rocketing to the forefront of the national consciousness. Piece after piece, by writers ranging from the quite conservative to the avowedly liberal and even the leftist, declares trigger warnings and safe spaces indicative of weakness of intellect, character, or courage on the part of students: these millennials are coddled, unwilling to engage with ideas in conflict with their own opinions, demanding that the university bend itself to their every emotional whim. In short, they are antithetical to everything the Western academy stands for.

If it were the case that trigger warnings were, in fact, “get out of discussion free” passes, or that safe spaces were meant to keep students from ever touching an unfriendly idea, then much of the frustration and passionate opposition coming from the academy and the unaffiliated intelligentsia would be warranted. But it is not.

The discrepancy between what trigger warnings and safe spaces are and what they are taken to be has already been pointed out. Kate Manne, a professor at Cornell, wrote in support of trigger warnings last year, observing of that “the point is not to enable — let alone encourage — students to skip these readings or our subsequent class discussion (both of which are mandatory in my courses, absent a formal exemption). Rather, it is to allow those who are sensitive to these subjects to prepare themselves for reading about them, and better manage their reactions.” (It is telling that essays a year or more old remain as fresh and relevant as they were when they were penned: this debate has gone nowhere since it began.) As L.V. Anderson writes for Slate, Ellison’s apparent misunderstanding of the purpose and effect of trigger warnings and safe spaces is a common one.

Conor Friedersdorf argues that this is not a misunderstanding, but rather that their defenders employ the original usages of the terms and their critics the “post-concept creep meanings” at play in “ways that undermine free inquiry,” wagging his finger at defenders who avoid “acknowledg[ing] the excesses that obviously motivated [the critique], rather than treating them as straw men or bizarre, unrepresentative anomalies.” This, however, comes down to battling anecdotes and epistemologies (where is the line between reasonable and bizarre?) — and conveniently brushes away the question of the usefulness of the pre-creep concept.

This brushing away is not coincidental. In a wide-ranging essay called “Against Students,” again written last year when this debate was bubbling up, Sara Ahmed describes how good or useful things — concepts, protests, initiatives — can be cast as something undesirable or unreasonable and “swept up” in critiques of the undesirable or unreasonable, and how particular images of “problem students” are employed to do that sweeping work. “The ‘problem student’” as Ahmed observes, is “a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student.” Ahmed goes on to describe how issues in the academy are made to reside in the bodies and persons of students: “Even if that failure [of students to act and think as they ought] is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for — whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism — it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located”: with students who are “consumers” of a commodified education, “censors” of free speech and open discussion, “over-sensitive” to issues of little import, and in all cases “complaining” in a way that throws a wrench in the operations of the university:

I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

What Ahmed suggests is that the students being depicted in these pieces are not neutral objects: they are doing work. If Friedersdorf is correct that the rising horrified tide of antis is using post-creep terminology, it is nonetheless true that their critiques crowd out the issues of triggers and unsafeness, leaving much more cleanly drawn battle lines. On the one side is the liberal tradition, a Western academy enshrining “free inquiry” and vigorous debate; on the other, excesses and sulky fragility. When this is the proposed configuration, the faintly dismissive tone in which Jonathan Chait, again last year, inveighed against trigger warnings as part of a resurgence of “p.c. culture” is not only understandable but sympathetic.

Trigger warnings at their most basic are, in the words of a much-reviled Oberlin student, “trivially simple.” A sentence or two on a syllabus is one option, a verbal heads-up (“The readings for next class contain graphic descriptions of rape/transcription of violently homophobic rhetoric/other; see you Wednesday”) is another. Trigger warnings are not the same thing as safe spaces, despite them being invoked in the same breath more often than not. Safe spaces have been explained at length, but differ from every other affinity grouping (imagine: your church, your golf buddies, the people you pay the most attention to on Facebook) in their location (campuses) far more than in their purpose or function (emotional-social support and brief respite from the everyday grind of dealing with humanity at large, which may or may not “get” you). It is absurd to suggest that brief disclaimers and deliberate affinity groupings might bring down the entire edifice of Western academe.

The decibel level of attacks on “p.c. culture,” trigger warnings in the university, and the very concept of a safe space on campus is bewildering within the confines of the debate as it is carried out — that is, according to the configuration posited by the academy’s defenders. The requests described on the one (pro-warning) hand are so modest and the demands being bemoaned on the other (anti) are so unreasonable as to render the whole discussion too silly to merit tens of thousands of words. Yet the volume is less bewildering if we resist the casual “sweeping up” of the demands with the antis’ depiction of the unreasonable student, if we lift it like a rug to look underneath.

John Ellison’s letter to incoming first years declares that it is the University’s “commitment” to “freedom of inquiry and expression,” “engagement in vigorous discussion, debate, and even disagreement,” and “academic freedom” that is behind its principled rejection of “so-called ‘trigger warnings’” and “the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces.’” The free exchange of ideas is what makes the campus welcoming for everyone, says the letter. But the letter has just told incoming first years what kinds of ideas are not permitted on campus in order to create a campus environment in which the free exchange of ideas may flourish.

The University of Chicago’s dedication to freedom of inquiry and vigorous debate is not an illusion or a lie. It encourages its students to engage critically with texts and with each other. Its unsentimental expectation that I would do more than regurgitate what I had read was the beginning of a sea change in me that, at eighteen, I could not fathom and for which I remain grateful. But there are nonnegotiable limits to what may be inquired about, debated, and criticized, and the university itself is outside of them. Ellison’s letter is an attempt to re-cover the exposed borders of an ideal that is understood to be borderless. Any text, yes. Any other student, yes. Any theory, any idea in the abstract. But the foundation of the western university itself, by virtue of its place as the source and guardian of free speech and inquiry, should be exempt from inquiry. When the critical eye the University of Chicago and other traditional liberal arts labor to cultivate in their students is turned back on them, things get heated.

As the President of Brown University pointed out recently in her open letter, it is not the case that the college students calling for trigger warnings and safe spaces shy away from discomfort: the very issues they want to talk about publicly (rape, racism) make people “very uncomfortable indeed.” And yet it is from these concrete discussions — about the liberal university’s complicity in or indifference to rape and the perpetuation of institutional racism on their campuses and in the communities that surround them — that universities and their administrations most want to shy the moment they get too rowdy or too close to home. When students protest, administrators refuse to meet, hand-wring over civility, hide in their offices, and threaten to expel the student body president. The cancellation of speakers is a case in point: students did not invite the speakers and are in no position to cancel them, but when their vocal objection to a speaker’s ideals — that is, critical engagement — becomes uncomfortable for the administration, the administration may cancel the speaker rather than confront a substantive disagreement. And then sweep their capitulation up with criticism of students’ stubborn over-sensitivity. In the same way, this debate focuses tightly on trigger warnings and safe spaces on campus, without observing the ties between demands for more accessibility to the education offered on campus and demands for — to offer examples from Chicago — living wages for campus workers, transparency within the University’s private police force, a trauma center at its famous hospital, and improved responses to sexual assault, lest the “problem students” seem to have larger, less self-involved agendas on their minds.

The western university is dedicated to freedom of inquiry and exchange of ideas, but these ideals are predicated on a host of assumptions that ruffle feathers when examined. Personal investment in questions, for instance, is widely held to preclude objectivity: if you care about something too much, if it is close to you in some way, then you cannot properly think or argue about it; “objectivity” (which, as any good postmodernist knows, is fake) is the thing. It is to the advantage of the University of Chicago, as synecdoche for the Academy, to imagine that the “vigorous discussion, debate, and even disagreement” that it treasures are without meaningful stakes. If these debates are just debates, then everyone can go home invigorated by the mental jousting and think no more of it. If these debates are not just debates, if they in fact are one end of a long strand woven into systems of abuse and oppression, then the university finds itself on rather more dubious moral ground. For the university to deny the usefulness of trigger warnings and safe spaces on campus is to insist that the university is somehow kept apart from the sordidness of the world around it, is not subject to the same forces, the same blindnesses, the same selfish interests, the same prejudices; that all ideas get equal airtime and implicit professorial support; that all of its students and faculty are somehow cleansed of prejudice when they arrive. It is to deny that students from different backgrounds have had different experiences, and those experiences may make the UChicago, or Yale, or Mizzou, or any other college experience substantively easier or more difficult. It is to deny that the particularity of the human can, or should, affect one’s education beyond providing “diverse” aesthetics and perhaps “interesting” perspectives to “contribute” to the “discussion.” It is to deny the possibility that the university is not an unmitigated force for good in the world — that it may in fact both do good and be part of the problem. It is to refuse to consider that the university may need to change in many of the same ways as the society around it, that it may in fact be subject to real criticism by people who, until relatively recently, could not attend at all.

Universities and defenders of capital-L Liberalism — those who worship at the feet of Free Speech and Not Getting Unreasonably Offended — oppose trigger warnings and safe spaces like some people vote for Trump: instinctive defensiveness of a treasured good and deep anxiety over the continued viability of that good — the university itself; over their own power to create and maintain a cultural environment; over the goodness of what they have given their lives to; over instability of what has seemed bedrock. It is not trigger warnings or safe spaces or protests over speakers that are the problem, it is the implication that the university as it is simply isn’t enough, that the values at its core are relative and not absolute, that it might not be able to withstand truly critical inquiry into its mechanism and its priorities. And yet the education that the University of Chicago, and Yale, and their peer institutions are selling, one that broadens the mind, sharpens the thought, and deepens humanity, is precisely the kind of education that ought to benefit from vigorous debate over how it should be carried out. If the inviolability of the present model — one that was perfected when there was almost no one in the desks but white boys from families of means — is an ironclad presupposition, then no debate can be had, and craven letters to hopeful teenagers will continue to be the preferred mode of its defense.

 

Bailey Pickens graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Japanese) and Yale Divinity School with a Master of Divinity. She is a Southern transplant living in Connecticut, where she works as a hospital chaplain.

 

Image by BKP

By Maximillian Alvarez

I. “Love in the Ruins”

When I begin to lose hope—when I sense that I am, in the most existentially sticky way, wasting time—I think of the things I’ll really miss about this place.

I love driving, for instance. Driving lets me think. But driving alone with certain playlists going can have the effect of running a hose from the tailpipe to my window: endlessly masochistic, even suicidally so. My eyes sink back like shriveling fruit and the car fills up with heavy, odorless thoughts.

Some playlists make me think about death. In the abstract, that is. Not about dying, per se. At times I get overwhelmed by a feeling I can only describe as pre-nostalgia. Close, I suppose, to what an exile or refugee must feel when they know in their bones they’re seeing their home for the last time. They’re not coming back.

The Greek breakdown of “nostalgia” is “homesickness,” or, literally, a painful longing to return home. In my car, what I feel is a kind of anticipated homesickness; a deep, rib-scraping sadness about the fact that I, like everyone else, will die and I’ll no longer get to see and touch and be a part of all this beautiful stuff. But, because I won’t have a chance to really miss it all — or anything — once I’m actually gone, my dumb brain tells my dumb heart to feel it all now, before it’s too late.

Even when I’m listening to the radio, the same kind of feeling can creep up. It’s easier to zone out between songs, though, because my petulant brain wants to believe it’s resisting advertisers’ attempts to talk it into caring about what they’re saying. It just stares forward stubbornly, uncomfortably, like when it tries not to make eye contact with a homeless person.

Yet the dopeyness of local ad spots, too, can make me pre-nostalgic. It forms a kind of background noise to your existence, at this time, in this place. Like it or not, it sizzles and pops with the sense that hundreds (thousands? millions?) of people in the broadcast area are also doing something this very minute, in the mist of this same noise. They’re listening in other cars, offices, garages, kitchens — or maybe they just hear it faintly wafting over from a neighbor’s window. You’re sharing something with them, even if that something is, at the most basic level, tacky and stupid and trying to get something out of you. There’s something in it that anchors you in the understanding that you are here. And, at some point, you won’t be. And you’ll miss it.

Anyway, I’m in my car. The radio’s on. Local ads are filling up time with stuff about mattresses, McDonalds, an upcoming fair, so on. My brain lets its guard down, probably out of boredom, and I start to listen more closely to what the voices are saying. An ad for an auto repair shop asks me if I’m “tired of paying an arm and a leg for” a bunch of car parts, the very names of which make me feel totally inadequate.

That question got stuck in me: “Tired of paying an arm and a leg for…?” It’s hard to explain, but it comforted me while also making me incredibly sad, in a pre-nostalgic way. My brain exhaust coughed up a whole bunch of stuff, filling up the cabin, and I started to clench up. The lady in the next lane looked over at me — maybe concerned, definitely confused — the way you look without trying to look at a couple breaking up in a restaurant. One half of the no-longer-couple starts breathing shallowly and looking around as if the room were sinking. That was me in the car. I had to crack the window.

 

II. Floating Particles

“Postmodernism” as a term (a movement, an era, a sensibility) describes both too much and too little. And rumors of its death may not be exaggerated. But these things, these terms, don’t just float away and get replaced by something entirely new. Their dust gets blown around, leaving some places, collecting in others.

As a teacher of literature, I have plenty of opportunities to gauge how much postmodern dust has settled on my students in their 18-19 years of life before walking into my classroom. I look for it in their thinking, writing, ways of talking. The concept of postmodernism is, of course, new to them, but some of its practical effects (you could call them “applications,” or dust) are so much a part of their common sense already that they end up feeling like the whole thing is pretty darn familiar. I am also acutely aware of how much dust they leave with as a direct result of my classes. And I feel kind of guilty about it.

There are many moving parts in the historical machine that help explain this, but one of the most basic, philosophy-101 characteristics of postmodernism is the feeling that everything has been done and felt and said before. Which can lead to anxiety, boredom, apathy, etc. Everything that happens now just seems like a rearrangement of elements that have already existed: all stories fit into one of a handful of archetypal plots, new fashion trends are just recycling old ones, every new movie is a remake of another goddamn movie, etc. In sum, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Now, of course, that’s a pretty big generalization. And it’s not entirely true. Again, these things are not total; they’re like dust. But the fact remains that, in our neck of the developed world, many sectors of society can’t shake that nagging feeling. There’s dust in our lungs. Here’s how I see literature courses, like mine, adding to that dust…

Pretty much always, no matter your major, you have to take a first-year college writing course, and that course is pretty much always in a literature department. As lords of these writing classes, it’s essentially our job to teach students to think and write in a way that will prepare them for the big assignments they’ll have to do for their majors and upper-level courses, whatever those may be.

In high school, students get overwhelmingly bad training in writing analytical essays, which is bound up with their bad training in reading literature, since they work on this writing in literature courses. Literature is taught as a kind of puzzle, the answer to which has been cleverly hidden by a tricksy know-it-all author who plants symbols to lead you to the right interpretation, which you’re expected to squeeze into a five-paragraph essay. This has a double-whammy effect: it teaches students that literature is just some kind of symbolic anagram (“the house represents society!”) and that the goal of writing is to present the “right answer.”

I remember taking shop class in junior high. The goal of every assignment was to follow directions and use tools that would help you turn your lump of wood into something that looked exactly like the teacher’s (or, if you were like me, to just make the wood look like something). We are essentially using the same model to teach literature and essay writing.

For the most part, even at an upper-level writing course at an elite university, the majority of students who come into my classroom have only been given a boilerplate understanding of literature and how to write about it. And it’s not their fault. Everyone knows high school English classes have to prepare students for the AP test. And the AP test is crap. Even the essay portions feel like multiple-choice questions. It’s understood that there’s a “right” way to answer them, that there are basic features every essay requires, and when test graders look for signs of a nebulous thing called “creativity” this ultimately means that students must, absurdly, master prepackaged tricks that will make them appear creative (“throw in a fanciful metaphor three sentences into your second body paragraph [see ‘fanciful metaphor’ section in study guide appendix D]”).

Then these students show up to their first-year writing class at a fancy college and things change. Drastically. Teachers like me spend a good deal of time getting them to unlearn most of the stuff they had to master just to get here in the first place. Silly, and frustrating for everybody, but necessary. It’s a lot like the plot to The Matrix (the first one, obviously — don’t be stupid). Our bright-eyed freshmen are unplugged from the worlds they knew, some big needly thing is un-drilled from the backs of their heads, and they’re flushed into a cold, goopy blackness where they flop around and thrash until they find their legs enough to stand, with their own arguments, in “the desert of the real.” Most of them tap into critical thinking and communicating skills they didn’t know they had. Seeing this keeps us teachers loyal to the cause, till death. Some of them resist, though. Like the ratty bald guy in the movie, the saboteur, who just wants things to go back to the way they were.

We teachers stress things like: writing about specialized topics; doing legitimate research into ongoing debates about those topics and setting up their papers as contributions to those debates; treating counterarguments with real empathy and doing the gritty work of understanding the logic, mindset, and lifeworlds of those who think differently; crafting analytical arguments that matter. This last one is exceptionally tricky. It is actually written into many university-mandated requirements for first-year writing classes. But what does it actually mean?

Students go from the staleness of the shop-class method — interpreting something in a vacuum the way their teachers want — to the brutality of the intellectual free market. They’re now asked to craft clear arguments about stuff that can be presented to an imaginary audience, which (a) needs to be convinced that the subject is worth their attention and who (b) will often judge the argument by harsher standards. It has to “matter.”

It makes sense for a university to push this mindset on its students. Doubly so for a major research university. Because, as we’re often told, the whole point of our collective brainwork is to “advance” our fields, to “produce” new kinds of knowledge, and to haul our asses up the jangly, wheezing pile of our predecessors — to stand “on the shoulders of giants.” This is ultimately what directs the hazy calculus of which arguments “matter” and which don’t.

But here’s the thing: there’s something terribly harmful in using this directive to structure the way students read and write about literature. I’ll never forget the one time — once was enough — I felt that harm while discussing a paper I had written with an advisor. Something had clicked for me while reading a certain 19th-century Russian short story. Something I personally hadn’t ever grasped before. Then my advisor bluntly delivered the news that this interpretation was not “new,” that the takeaway point was “rather banal.” I was devastated.

Listen. I’ve devoted my life to studying, teaching, and writing about literature. What my advisor told me was essential. I had to hear it. To this day, his words are a nagging popcorn kernel lodged in my brain. They make my work better, because, in the end, I want it to “advance the field.” And I can’t do that by saying banal things everyone already knows.

Still, something died in me the moment the words “not new” rolled across my advisor’s desk. I’ve lost it for good. And I wish I had appreciated it more. From that point on, no matter what I read, even if I’m really, really, childishly excited about it, I simply can’t read un-professionally. By that I mean: there is always someone else in the room. Every thought, reaction, and scribbled note that comes from my reading is always filtered through a consideration of what other people might think of it, whether or not they would think it “matters.”

As teachers and researchers, as the people college students pretty much have to get past before moving onto whatever degree they end up pursuing, we are in a sticky situation. What we do involves something Derrida called a pharmakon — something that both poisons you and acts as the only antidote to that poison. There is something in what we teach that harms our students. That same thing also becomes, at least as far as we know, the only thing that can save them.

Students are introduced to an almost sickening sense of how un-original their thoughts and arguments are. They’re taught to avoid being banal and move beyond “the obvious.” This involves a real mental workout, which trains them to figure out, on their own, how to see harder, more clearly, to interpret the hidden details, to consider the “bigger picture.” But it also requires that students be introduced to hardcore research methods, which push them to understand what has already been done and said about a topic before they even think about trying to add something to the discussion themselves.

The pharmakon: the more conscious students become of the inadequacy of their ideas (the poison), the more they seek, through research and re-drafting, to make them “matter” in the world (the antidote). And the cycle never stops. Every idea is cranked through the meat-grinder that compares it to what’s already “out there,” and the only way to combat the crushing sense of banality and shame is to keep scrambling back to the top of the pile. Or to give up.

To explain to students what all this is for, to justify introducing them to the painful pharmakon of higher research, many faculty members and administrators seem almost creepily obsessed with using the term “knowledge production.” It’s, frankly, a little weird when the ways we teach writing, and the language we use to describe it, are tinged with the I-love-the-smell-of-assembly-lines-in-the-morning lingo of capitalism. At a time when universities are increasingly following the corporate model, it feels like students are being taught to “produce” for a knowledge economy that has very specific ideas about what kind of work “matters.” This undoubtedly affects how we underlings down in the trenches of university writing courses are supposed to answer our students when they ask what they’re reading and writing for.

Back to dust… The most characteristic feeling that settles on people in so-called postmodern times is, well, whatever we want to call this concrete-in-your-lungs heaviness — a more pervasive, more existential expansion of that feeling you get when your instructor tells you your interpretation of something is “not new.” Your soul is turned inside out. You are perpetually exposed. There’s always someone else in the room.

Your very personalized reactions to stuff, which may be so incredibly and beautifully new to you, are weighed up against the record of all those who have come before. All of history. You can’t help but subject your unique collision with life and love and literature to the scrutiny of a real or imagined audience that can tell you flatly whether or not you have anything “new” to say on the matter. And by “new” they mean new to them, not to you. And you probably don’t. The odds are against you here. And you start subjecting everything you do to this imagined scrutiny: what you wear, what you talk about at parties, what you allow yourself to feel. You even do it inside your head: “is what I’m thinking ‘new’?” Probably not. But does that mean it doesn’t “matter”?

Listen. The fact that college writing classes are taught in literature departments isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s one of the few things literature departments have that universities still want. But when we, the teachers of literature, are tasked with showing students how to make their writing “matter” in the game of “knowledge production,” we may end up killing the transformative soul of literature.

Students must know that, even if it’s old news to everyone but them, there’s something in their individual encounters with texts (old and new) that glows with the same beauty and kinship and random fortune that creates whole new worlds when un-special particles floating in the galaxy collide. Students have enough postmodern dust all over them, causing them to second-guess whether what they do and say and think and feel “matters,” whether it’s “new.” They don’t need to, and shouldn’t, participate in this second-guessing when it comes to literature. Literature is where the stickiest parts of what it means to be human can stay as shamelessly old as time itself and be infinitely new when someone else touches them.

We can do things differently.

 

III. ________ Was Here

What is it? Am I dying? I mean, Jesus, I feel like I’m being pulled apart. Like every atom is making a break for it, floating off.

“Tired of paying an arm and a leg for…?”

…

You are here. In your car. You probably look like a nut. A woman in the next car over looks like she’s about to call 911. Is that…? Yup. You’re actually crying a little. You’re overcome with a pre-nostalgia for something entirely banal, cheesy. You’re really, really going to miss this when you’re gone.

You’ve grown up, like everyone, wanting to be special, to do something special. To bring something “new” to the world. And it is very easy to get disheartened by the slow, stubborn dumbness of things. You may spend a lifetime pushing without ever getting to see a budge. And, yeah, people are disappointing. And life is very rarely fair. Even if you have something to offer, chances are slim you’ll get noticed.

But there are so many things that you yourself are a part of — so much history you yourself carry. Already, always. Think, for instance, of one of those old truisms you just happen to know. Maybe you’ve never actually used them yourself, but you’ve heard them so much they’re practically stitched onto you. Maybe only your mom and grandma used them, and maybe they won’t actually come out of your own mouth, taking you totally by surprise, until you have a kid. If you have a kid. Something like “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” “the grass is always greener on the other side.” Or “kick the bucket,” “elephant in the room,” “shoot the breeze.” “An arm and a leg.”

There’s something especially comforting about them that makes you feel the opposite of loneliness. They’re not new. They’re cliché. And that, in its own way, is what makes them glow. They’ve survived, changed, and been passed down so much that they’ve ended up here. And you’re here. It’s pretty amazing that they’ve actually hung around long enough to still mean something to you. Because plenty of other things didn’t. There are so many older idioms that have, at best, been preserved in a book somewhere. They meant something once. And I bet the people they meant something to miss them.

There’s something in these kinds of phrases that catches us directly between community — a historical we — and individuality — the I, here, now, nowhere else. Every time you hear them and understand them, you’re embodying a cultural history of meaning that has, for some reason, seen it necessary to preserve the custom of saying “an arm and a leg” to mean “too much.” You are the living mark of a community that’s immeasurably bigger than you (you learned the phrase from somewhere, right?). At the same time, as a member of this community, it is entirely up to you to decide whether and how to keep these things alive. There may come a time when they no longer mean anything to anyone. They’ll be dead, and so will you. And you’ll miss them.

Even if you only do it once, even if you have to explain what it means to a curious kid, when you repeat an old idiom you give it new life. More than that, you affirm that you have life to give. No one will ever come up and thank you for it, nor should they. It’s both yours and not — like your copy of a book written by someone else who used language and idioms she herself didn’t invent. There’s something old, unoriginal and communal about it, which is also unpredictably new and personal. It’s less like carving “______ was here” into a tree than being part of the uncountable number who have rested in its shade, who have made love under it. Who kept that tree from getting chopped down. And who planted so many others.

 

Maximillian Alvarez is a dual-PhD candidate and graduate student instructor in the departments of History and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

Located a block from Capitol Hill, East City Bookshop is a fresh face in the world of Washington D.C. bookstores. The two-story bookshop is tucked in the same retail building as a game shop and a photography store, but with its neon green sign, it’s hard to miss. Painted in bright colors and sporting a welcoming spirit, the shop has excited many, especially those on the eastern side of the city.

Laurie Gillman, the owner of East City Bookshop, was not one who dreamed of owning a bookshop. “There are a lot of people I’ve met who say, ‘Oh, I’ve always dreamed of having a bookstore.’ I was not one of those people.” But while D.C. boasts several other bookstores, such as Kramerbooks & Afterwords and Politics and Prose, Laurie found the dearth of independent bookstores on the eastern side of the city disheartening. Watching independent bookstores close one after another for the past decade, Laurie decided something must be done. After researching the logistics of opening a bookstore and finding an affordable space, Laurie became convinced it was her new project. “Once I got a little into it, I couldn’t really let it go. I was a bit obsessed.”

When East City Bookshop opened its doors a year and a half ago, Laurie wanted to create a community bookstore with a comprehensive collection. While literary fiction is the standout customer favorite, Gillman’s shelves are stocked with everything from political theory to graphic novels to children’s books. Laurie has even partnered with a local running store and created a joint running/book club.

East City Bookshop promotes local authors to the outside world, or at least to Washington D.C. At its beginning, East City Bookshop hosted a reading once a week on average. Laurie has now more than doubled the events with a minimum of two a week, and she is in communication with several publishers to plan future events. She wants more out of the bookstore: more author events, more community events, and more readers. While she has not preconceived notions of what might come out of the community, she is both excited about their prospect and willing to help make them happen.

Their overall mission is to make people feel welcome, so head on over to East City Bookshop if you’re in the D.C. area. If you’re a LARB member, there’s an extra incentive to popping into Gillman’s shop. Your Reckless Reader discount card—a coveted perk that comes with every membership level and offers deals at a growing number of independent bookstores nationwide— will score you 10 percent off any purchase. To learn more, take a look at our digital, print and book club membership programs.