My Experience
All of my preceding posts have been, by design, at a high level of abstraction, so now I’d like to get more concrete, and share some of my own story.
I first considered applying to PhD programs in English, and attempting to become a college professor, as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. The college didn’t technically have majors. Everyone who graduated from Sarah Lawrence officially graduated with the same degree in the same field, a Bachelor of Arts in the Liberal Arts, but the degrees did have “concentrations” (basically a form of shorthand for the subject in which you took the most classes). Mine was English.
The English courses I took at Sarah Lawrence were a model of what humanistic arts education has the capacity to be and to do. The faculty with whom I studied were without exception exceedingly generous and intellectually inspiring, and every single one of them had a remarkable gift for teaching.
Moreover, while they were all gifted teachers in their own distinctive ways, they all shared at least one teacherly skill in common, and it was on this skill that a certain amount of my early appreciation for the collegiate teacher’s art centered. All my literature professors at Sarah Lawrence were great at a certain kind of performance of paraphrase.
They were adept at paraphrasing passages from works of literature in ways that made those passages both perfectly understandable to everyone in a room, even if the writing was syntactically or lexically difficult, and helped you to appreciate how strange and funny, from a certain perspective, the passages were. They de-alienated literature for those to whom it might be alienating, in much the same way that certain critics have argued literature itself de-alienates experience. I think often of one example of this skill displayed by a professor whom I particularly admired. Our class was reading the following passage of Walt Whitman’s poem “The Sleepers”:
I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea, ….
I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks.
What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves? Will you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime of his middle-age?
After one of the students in the class had read the passage aloud, and after the professor had elicited some comments from students, he said at an appropriate opening in our conversation that he had always found the passage curiously melodramatic and childish, even as it had an undeniably exquisite pathos. He then paraphrased the lines more-or-less thus: “I hate the waves! What are you doing, you bad, bad waves! Mean waves!”
We all cracked up, but even as we did so, I had a wonderful feeling that he wasn’t just making jokes (even though he was, and doing it well): he’d nailed it. He’d led us into the tonal heart of the poem, in a way that made it amusing and mildly perplexing, and yet somehow without lessening its dignity. We felt (I felt) property in the poem now: now that it was something at which you could poke fun, as well as something beautiful and grand, it was more approachable, no matter one’s level of interest in poetry. This, I thought, is teaching.
Many more such moments in literature courses contributed, over my years in college, to a growing receptivity to the idea of becoming a college professor. At the time, I was undaunted by the increasingly frequent admonitions concerning everything through which one had to wade to get to such a place (the publish-or-perish competitiveness of academic careers, the administrative headaches, the geographic instability). I was, however, drawn off the path by another, competing vision of a possible career, and at the end of my time as an undergraduate I applied not to PhD programs but to law schools.
Doing so was something I did almost unthinkingly, as, I imagine and have been told, do many recent college graduates. The mercy of a year’s deferral of my admission to law school, coupled with the good advice of family and friends, helped me to see that it was not something in which I was sincerely interested. I declined to enroll, and continued working the entry-level office jobs and service jobs I had been working in the interval.
When I was thus forced to return to the drawing board, all I really felt I had to go on was the way I had felt and lived and thought while studying literature. It was something which, in many ways, I missed. I readied applications for PhD programs in English literature while delivering pizzas. I applied for entry into PhD classes of 2017 and was rejected from every program to which I applied, but received, along with a rejection from the PhD program at UVA, an offer of admission to their Master’s program in the discipline. I accepted, and my time in literary academia began.
