After four decades as a professor at Smith College, Michael Gorra looks back on a career spent the best way possible: falling in love with literature. What begins like a campus novel quickly turns into something very different, and instead—in a lovely reversal of the martial-arts cliche—details what happens when the teacher becomes the student. May we all find our place in the world doing something that so delights us.
Anyone who regularly stands in front of a classroom will recognize this paradox: the best way to learn something is to teach it. You master a subject by figuring out what you need to know in order to make it clear to another person. All my books have come out of my teaching, at least after the first dull one I made from my dissertation. I wrote about what I taught, and yet after a while I also noticed that I rarely taught what I’d written about. The classroom was a place to try out a thought, to build an interpretive fiction, but once I’d taken what I’d learned there and turned it into prose I was usually done with it. My ideas had gelled, and it was time to move on, to try a new field, century, continent. I wrote a book about the postcolonial novel and gave up the class on “Commonwealth” literature that I’d been handed at my job interview. I put together a course on travel writing and finished it off by producing a travel narrative of my own. I even stopped teaching my Henry James seminar after writing a biography of him. Some of my friends and colleagues stuck with the same subject for decades. I was fickle.
More picks about teaching
The Humanities Aren’t Dead Yet
“Enrollment in the liberal arts has been in freefall for years. But despite apocalyptic declarations about the end of the humanities, in my own classroom I see signs of life.”
The Reenchanted World
“On finding mystery in the digital age.”
Course of Treatment
“After Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, he invited students to follow along.”
Does Teaching Literature and Writing Have a Future?
“Learning that one’s job might soon be eliminated by the emergence of an overhyped new technology puts one in good company.”
The Feud Tearing the Paleontology World Apart
“Two paleontologists have turned on each other, each claiming to have found new evidence about the worst day on Earth.”
The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t
“Academia is an industry, like journalism, that defines itself in large part by its ethical standards; we’re supposed to educate people and produce knowledge. So what does it mean that we’re also a haven for fakes?”
