Ashmead, John

English

Haverford College: Haverford Scholarship

Haverford College Haverford Scholarship Faculty Publications English 1971 Class and Race in Humanities Teaching and Criticism John Ashmead Haverford College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.haverford.edu/english_facpubs Repository Citation Ashmead, John. "Class and Race in Humanities Teaching and Criticism." College English 32.7 (1971): 778-82. Print. This Journal Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Haverford Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Haverford Scholarship. For more information, please contact nmedeiro@haverford.edu. Class and Race in Humanities Teaching and CriticismAuthor(s): John AshmeadSource: College English, Vol. 32, No. 7 (Apr., 1971), pp. 778-782Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/375112 .Accessed: 12/04/2013 13:32Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toCollege English.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 165.82.168.47 on Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:32:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsJOHN ASHMEAD Class and Race in Humanities Teaching and Criticism IF ANY ONE DOUBTS that we are living in changing, even revolutionary, times, then I suggest that he read the latest cure for the woes of Freshman English, that most universally taught college course in the United States. As expressed by Louis Kampf, next president of the Modern Language Association, the new cure-all is a socialist revolution.1 And a socialist revolution which will compel English teachers to stop preventing the rise of lower class students by dubious grading systems. But the winds of change are not only blowing in the colleges. Fredson Bowers, speaking of graduate education at the Brown University Commencement (June 1, 1970), though not so sure as Louis Kampf about the coming revolution, con- ceded that "Involvement with life, not isolation in the pursuit of knowledge, is the current watchword."2 As for myself, I at last have a hazy recollection of some one on J. Edgar Hoover's ten most wanted criminals list. My bedside reading is Dostoievsky's The Possessed. In the mornings I struggle with Charles Reich's The Greening of America. For lunch I have Lewis Mum- ford, The Megamachine, Volumes I and II. Yet for better or worse, I am not what the late Hugh Kingsmill once called a dawnist. A dawnist believes that if only we adopt organic gardening, transforma- tional grammar, communal group gropes, peyote, or socialism, a new dawn will come and all our troubles will be over. If the newly-founded Rhetoric Society has taught me nothing else, it has con- vinced me that every society has gone through ghastly agonies in its attempts to hand on to the next generation a com- plex yet elegant form of its written lan- guage. I expect this lamentable state of affairs to continue. As P. G. Wodehouse once said, these sufferings are sent to us to make us more spiritual. Nor am I what I call a Zen Buddhist. By Zen Buddhist I mean the scholar whose primary goal is the elegant para- dox. Once you have heard the sound of clapping with one hand, you need no longer hear the cries of black children whose brains have been damaged by star- vation. I hear these cries, we must all hear these cries, or we, as well as our build- ings, deserve to be fire-bombed. As Hans Sachs says in Die Meistersinger von John Ashmead, Jr., Professor of English at Haverford College, has also taught in Japan, Taiwan, and India, and has edited collections of Japanese and Indian fiction for publication n the U.S. He lists his main interests as "writing fiction; linguistics and literature; rhetoric-espe- cially of film." This paper was first presented at the 1970 Annual Meeting of NCTE in No- vember. 1"Must We Have a Cultural Revolution," CCC, 21 (October, 1970), 249. 2"The Dilemma of Graduate Education," PMLA, 85 (October, 1970), 1118. 778 This content downloaded from 165.82.168.47 on Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:32:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsClass and Race in Humanities Teaching and Criticism 779 Niirnberg, speaking of the Guild rules for writing songs: Doch einmal im Jahre find' ich's weise, dass man die Regeln selbst probier', ob in der Gewohnheit tragern G'leise ihr' Kraft und Leben nicht sich verlier'. Still once a year I call it wisdom To test the very rules themselves To see whether in the dull routine of habit Their strength and life haven't become lost. Probably for most of us it is fairly easy, thanks in part to the alliterative Piers Ploughman rhetoric of Spiro Ag- new, to expose what Lewis Mumford in The Megamachine has called "the dubi- ous alliance between scientific determin- ism and authoritarian control that now menaces human existence." That rightist menace is now more and more clearly shaping up as an almost mindless com- puter-controlled corporate capitalism. But on the left that menace comes also from Maoist grammarians, scholars who argue for an intellectual elite to govern us, and those who claim that "recent [lit- erary] criticism usually expresses the val- ues of capitalism in its monopoly phase."3 Along with Rima Drell Reck,4 I don't want a revolutionary establishment iny more than I want a Spiro Agnew estab- lishment. I don't want any establishment. If I may judge this proposed revolu- tionary socialist establishment, which first began to give birth to itself at, of all the accouchement halls one could imagine, an MLA business meeting, and if I may compare it to those socialist establish- ments I saw at first hand in Hungary and Czechoslovakia this summer (1970), then I fear it will ultimately wish to put lim- its, and conscious limits, on what we think.5 How then can the 80 percent of us in America who, black and white, are mod- erate and middle class, like Hans Sachs, test the rules, without encouraging an es- tablishment, right or left? How can we blow apart the university and keep it in- tact? To paraphrase Alfred North White- head, how can we simultaneously pre- serve our traditions and yet accept eager- ly the most radical innovations? One rule-testing ground is already here-it is what we must do about class and race in our humanities teaching and criticism. How can we get the most recent an- thology of American literature to ac- knowledge the existence of a reputable black literature in the 19th century as well as in the 20th? How shall we en- courage study of the complex racism of Mark Twain, or of the sophisticated an- ti-Semitism of T. S. Eliot, without losing the benefits these authors have to give us? How shall we encourage the study of black literature, by blacks and for blacks when desirable, without producing aca- demic pocket ghettoes in our colleges and universities? Recently a white teach- er of black literature was asked by his black students to form a separate section from which whites were to be excluded. What would you do to be innovative and traditional in this situation? When a black argues, as one did at the MLA 3Frederick Crews, "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?" PMLA, 85 (May, 1970), 427. 4"The Politics of Literature," PMLA, 85 (May, 1970), 431. 5To speed up the enraged debate which this kind of non-dawnist remark invariably calls forth, may I anticipate by pointing out that Sweden is not a socialist country; only about 5 percent of its industry is government-owned. India, in which I have lived and taught, and which has at least a semi-socialist or socialist- trending state, has kept the preventive detention laws of colonial days. Under these laws dissent- ers against the government may be kept in prison without time limit or trial; I knew of several such cases at first hand, but there were many such. This content downloaded from 165.82.168.47 on Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:32:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions780 COLLEGE ENGLISH meeting in Denver last year, that only blacks should teach black literature to blacks, what do you say and feel as whites? Here I can only mention four innova- tive steps which have helped me. I guar- antee no new dawn from them. Nor will they help you in your Zen Buddhist med- itations, or in the struggles towards the new socialist utopia. They do make life and teaching more innovative; yet, as I see these four steps, they do not abandon some very usable traditional teaching methods. I have some evidence that these four steps may ease, though they do not solve, our great questions of class and race as these concern the humanities. 1. Grades I am now, however reluctantly and slowly, convinced that grades of any kind, College Board, high school, col- lege, or graduate school, do far more harm than good. They are especially harmful to minority students. A genuine letter about a student is far more effec- tive than any grade, both for the student himself, and for any future employer or admissions officer. In fact, I will go so far as to say that I now believe (I admit I did not always think so) a low grade is a mark of teacherly rather than student incompetence; probably for every grade he gives below B a teacher should be fined one percent of his salary. Once we give up grades completely, we will have to accept a far wider range of minority and working class students than we do even now. Here the humani- ties have a special responsibility. I can- not imagine that any physicist I know would take seriously the idea of a "cor- rect" physics, yet how many English teachers, at every level, believe still in a "correct" English, which very few mi- nority or working class children know. 2. The Open Classroom As rapidly as possible I think we should give up any kind of class in which a student is unable to go through the subject at his own speed, and in his own order of content. The worst offenders are the lecture class and the so-called Socratic dialogue class," the one a cultur- al lag from the middle ages, and the other from the Athenian law courts. As James Squire and other observers have noted, especially at the Dartmouth Conference, the open classroom has been used with some success in English sec- ondary education. Far more than other students, the minority and working class student benefits from the open classroom, in which he can find that part of the subject which interests him, and in which he can develop at his own pace. In an open classroom we might have six or sev- en tables, each heaped with attractive ma- terials clustered around a sub-topic of the general course subject matter. Under the roving and sympathetic guidance of a teacher, a student might work on any of these, as deeply as he chooses, and move to another, in any order which is best for his own development. As Charles Silberman has said, observers of the open classroom can hardly believe it is an edu- cational situation because the students are enjoying themselves so much, yet it is far from. an unstructured or random educational experience. 3. Linguistics Experts in communication usually the- orize that at best only 75 percent of any message gets across. A recent study of what students are actually thinking about 6By Socratic dialogue I mean one in which the teacher pretends to allow genuine give and take (Kenneth Burke's discussion rhetoric), but in fact the whole debate is a put-on, because the teacher intends to compel the student to a fore- gone conclusion. This content downloaded from 165.82.168.47 on Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:32:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsClass and Race in Humanities Teaching and Criticism 781 in class suggests that 20 percent of the time they are not thinking of your latest critical insight-they are thinking, even in these relaxed coeducational days, of sex. When we add to these limitations the problems of communication between a middle class teacher and a ghetto or working class kid, we have a linguistics and communications difficulty which is probably far more baffling than what happens when a Frenchman hears my French. Even worse than these communica- tions difficulties, is the probably uncon- scious sorting of students which we car- ry out, based on our instinctive reactions to their dialects. As William Labov has observed, department store clerks are consistently assigned to jobs on the basis of their dialect, especially their [r] usage. The girls with the supposed working class [r], or rather non-[r], wind up on the cheaper floors of Saks or Macy's, or are rusticated en masse to Klein's.7 Prob- ably many English teachers regard as im- poverished a certain kind of working class clause structure, which Labov has demonstrated is as logical, and certainly more vivid, than the typical clause struc- ture of middle class kids.8 Now that every teacher in the human- ities has minority and working class stu- dents as never before, I wonder how re- sponsible we are if we neglect the study of minority and working class English, and the effects of our attitudes towards this English in our teaching?9 4. The history of class and race in hu- manities teaching and criticism For the last two years, at MLA busi- ness meetings, at New University Con- ference meetings, even in the formerly conventional pages of PMLA, CE and CCC, we have heard a variety of charges about racism and class oppression in hu- manities teaching and criticism. When I have heard or read these charges, I have been struck by the absence of de- tailed historical information on what we have in fact taught or criticized over the last five decades. Wiser observers than I will have to explain why we maintain higher stan- dards of history for the study of Chaucer than for the study of our discipline of the humanities. Buf I should like to rec- ommend that we undertake a systematic historical and sociological investigation of what we have said and done about race and class, whether explicitly or im- plicitly, first in the pages of College En- glish and PMLA, and later in other noted critical journals over the last half-cen- tury. I can only guess at what we have done, but, based on a very imperfect sampling, here is my guess. Perhaps without our realizing it, much of our traditional literary history, our study of evolution as a biologist might term it, has had strong tinges of social Darwinism. Great periods and types (Elizabethans, romantics, more recently the modern novel) have been taught to the exclusion of so-called lesser periods and types (18th century, heroic poetry, 19th-century black autobiographies-so- called slave narratives). Great languages and cultures (English, European) have 7Discussed in William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Lin- guistics, 1966), Ch. III, "The Social Stratifica- tion of (r) in New York City Department Stores," pp. 63-89. 8The Logic of Non-Standard English, George- town Monograph Series on Language and Lin- guistics, No. 22 (Georgetown, 1969). 91 have found especially helpful the articles, too numerous to list here, of J. L. Dillard, Wil- liam A. Stewart, and Joan C. Baratz. Books and articles can be obtained from ERIC, and from the Center for Applied Linguistics (1717 Mass. Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036). This content downloaded from 165.82.168.47 on Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:32:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions782 COLLEGE ENGLISH pretty well wiped out so-called lesser languages and cultures (Asian, Afro- American). In recent departmental con- ferences I have attended, the fate of the Milton course or of Lady Murasaki's Genji has reminded me of the way biol- ogists talk about the dinosaur. In the thirties, by my time reckon-i ing, came a shift, or rather a parallel movement, to new criticism and to the study of the internal dynamics of liter- ary works, which a biologist might per- haps call a shift to cell biology. I cannot recall any work of black or Asian litera- ture which was deemed worthy of this close scrutiny, in those far off days at Harvard, but since Burns, a far greater poet than T. S. Eliot or Blake, was not deemed worthy either, that might have been a curious kind of compliment. In this kind of criticism, as I knew it, one always had the sensation of a gentle but unyielding Fiihrer prinzip or leadership. That is, the critical pastor had to drive his sheep into just the right critical pas- ture; straying sheep were far from wel- come. Today, and remember that I am con- tinuing to guess at this history, we have a third shift or rather parallel movement, to the study of the interaction of liter- ature and society, and not just of the interaction of literature (and the human- ities) with society, but of the interaction of the teaching of that literature with society. A biologist might perhaps say we have gone from a major concern with evolution and cell biology to a new con- cern with ecology-that is, to the study of class and race in our humanities teach- ing and criticism. I would guess too, that for the next three decades we are going to be keenly aware, not only of the evolution, or of the inner dynamics of, say, Melville's Benito Cereno. We are also going to be keenly aware of class and race in that work, and we are going to be aware of what we are doing, by our teaching of that work, to the class and race of our students. And to mention only my own particu- lar interests, those of us who in the past have taught only De Toqueville about America, are going to find him teamed with an equally brilliant observer of American culture from the slave's point of view, Frederick Douglass. And the subject of slavery is going to lead to dis- cussion of the kind of slavery that the Womens Liberation Movement protests against, or of subtler kinds of slavery that are felt by all kinds of minority groups in America. But these are only guesses, when we could have genuine history. The more we innovate, ecologically speaking, the more we need to know what we did in the past. Hans Sachs, in Wagner's Die Meistersinger, was a singer and teacher from the older generation. Sachs warned Walther, a singer of the new generation, that after his first burst of creative imag- ination, he would need the rules if he was to go on singing into middle and even old age. But after hearing Walther's first song, he generously said: Wollt ihr nach Regeln messen was nicht nach Regeln lauf, der eig'nen Spur vergessen sucht davon erst die Regeln auf! If you wish to judge according to rules Something which doesn't agree with your rules, Forget your own ways- First you have to seek its rules. And as we plunge now into several decades of teaching and criticizing on th- basis of class and race in the humani- ties, we shall want to know our past, and we shall want to forget that past and seek these new rules of the future. This content downloaded from 165.82.168.47 on Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:32:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Class and Race in Humanities Teaching and Criticism

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