Being-in-Communion or Re-learning to Read in the Academy

A graduate friend asked me recently if I wanted an office space at the university library and I politely said no because I prefer my office at home in my wife's and my third floor, St. John's apartment, overlooking the valley in which the university is nestled. The library office space would be windowless, only large enough for a desk and chair, and unventilated. My office at home has a futon, so I can read in my favourite position: lying down. It has art from artists I know on the walls, a nice desk and chair, my computer, and bookshelves my dad built me, all lined with my collection of books. My rejection of the library office space is not to say that that space is not useful or convenient or even extremely practical. I simply prefer "meaningful space," areas I have had a hand in furnishing or populating with books I like or paintings that challenge or inspire me.

This juxtaposition of untilitarian space versus meaningful space is an aesthetic example of the juxtaposition of literary studies versus literature that Bruce Fleming ellaborates on in his article "What Ails Literary Studies: Leaving Literature Behind," published in The Chronicle on December 19, 2008 (http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i17/17b01401.htm).

Fleming writes this: "Literary studies split off from reading in the early-to-mid-20th century as the result of science envy on the part of literature professors. Talking about books somehow didn't seem substantial enough. Instead of reading literature, now we study 'texts.' We've developed a discipline, with its jargon and its methodology, its insiders and its body of knowledge. What we analyze nowadays is seen neither as the mirror of nature nor the lamp of authorial inspiration. It just is — apparently produced in an airless room by machines working through permutations of keys on the computer." (Bruce Fleming)

Fleming describes literary studies as a utilitarian, pseudo-scientific discipline based on textual interconnection and codified supressions: a discipline that has surrounded itself with texts but has forgotten how to read. The type of reading that has been forgotten is what Fleming seems to put across as an authentic human interaction with a text that helps students "come to terms with love, and life, and death, and mistakes, and victories, and pettiness, and nobility of spirit, and the million other things that make us human and fill our lives" (Fleming).

As far as Fleming is concerned "We're not teaching literature, we're teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside [and seemingly little to do with the literature it professes to teach]. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary studies relates to the world of the reader. The academic study of literature nowadays isn't, by and large, about how literature can help students[...]. It's, well, academic, about syllabi and hiring decisions, how works relate to each other, and how the author is oppressing whomever through the work." (Fleming)

Though I think that Fleming's idea of the literary professor as a "coach" is a bit simplified, it does hammer home the point that literary studies is far more concerned with decoding literature or deconstrucing the canon than it is with reading as a human interaction with a work written by another human being.

Immersed in this academic discipline, it is easy to get caught up in the game of codes and playing with these codes in such a way as to attract funding and get back-slapped and handshaked into the old boys' club of the academy. Though the gender and age demographic has shifted in this sphere, the preoccupation with tenure and thus being safely subverversive has not changed.

The strength of Fleming's article is the call to the reader to put as much into the reading, humanly speaking, as the author did in its composition. Here we have echoes of Hans George Gadamer and an intimation of what Derrida may have meant by the "serious play" of reading. There is a cost in empathizing with the other through literature, or, as Homi Bhabha has put it, in inviting the other into the comfortable and clean home of your known experience of being in the world.

In her book A More Profound Alleluia, on theology and worship, Leanne Van Dyk writes that at "the heart of the universe is not the 'will to power' (Nietzsche) but rather 'Being-in-Communion' (Zizioulas)" (Van Dyk 8). In reading Fleming's article I came back to this quotation and thought of literary studies as this dry, utilitarian, library space in which the "will to power" in literature is decoded, mapped, and supposedly subverted and the names of Nietzsche, Foucoult, and Baudrillard are praised... or at least excessively cited. In my office - a privelleged space occupied by a white, educated male, yes - I find that my reading tends to feel less like a great yet hopeless textual experiment and more like being in communion with others in the world.

There is a cost to this communion. It can be messy, even worldview changing. And it is not always, contra the Romantics, salvific. But the communion is necessary and even sometimes, dare I say it, beautiful.