Why I Teach Literature (After Ten Years)

And why there's a future in literature, despite "progress"

Photo by Seema Miah on Unsplash

This school year marks my tenth year in the English Department at Oklahoma Baptist University. I taught as a graduate student at Baylor and Antelope Valley Community College before that, but I really began to teach literature here at OBU ten years ago. During that time, I’ve watched friends and acquaintances across the country leave academia for various reasons. I have even had students ask me why I continue to teach. It’s a good question for anyone in higher education right now, especially Christian higher education. The infamous “demographic cliff” is coming; AI is making cheating harder to detect and easier than ever, while also potentially replacing some of our essential labor (grading papers); the humanities are constantly under attack; students demand more assistance keeping track of assignments (probably due to a combination of COVID and over-use of learning management systems in high school); respect for higher education and academics seems to be declining socially; and the pay in education has never been that good. Challenges like these caused English professor (and beautiful prose stylist)

Phil Christman

to explore the question in the latest issue of Plough Magazine: “Does Teaching Literature and Writing Have a Future?” Like him, I’m going to answer in the affirmative, but offer some different, more personal reasons.

So after ten years, why am I still here? Why am I still teaching The Sound and the Fury and Dante? Nobody with any ambition stays at a teaching-first institution like OBU unless they love to teach¹. I see my calling as helping students follow Paul’s command in Philippians 4:8: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” I am a teacher because I get the blessing of helping people love what is lovely in a world that is often distracted, ugly, and hopeless.

The world most of us live in, including my students, is as T.S. Eliot says, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” A world of TikTok scrolling, Instagram stories, endless YouTube videos, mobile games—endless diversions. Sometimes this is a world that is (also as Eliot says) “Filled with fancies and empty of meaning.” There is a distinct lack of substance or vitality to life, except perhaps in the form of tragedy or mental suffering. The “fancies” that distract us are stories of drones flying over New Jersey or the latest news of some former rap star’s horrific sexual abuse, stories that will disappear in tomorrow’s headlines. In other words, it’s so very possible to go through much of modern life skimming across the surface, without contemplation or reflection. One can even do this with the Bible and prayer—reading the Bible and praying dutifully but absently.

This world also tends to lack beauty. That’s not quite true; there’s beauty everywhere, but we tend not to be attuned to it. Instead we have been trained by advertisements to be attuned to sensuality and our appetites. The “beauty” we see is in products: the latest car, iphone, a well-designed house which conveys a certain class, and so on. Our worlds are populated with stuff and things so that we rarely see creation or the transcendent break through.

The world is filled with broken, hurting people. People who hunger and thirst for something better, for even the hint of something that might give them hope: “If there were the sound of water only” (Eliot, again, this time from The Waste Land). Often we are those people, often those people are our loved ones. If we are firm in our hope, we may have a hard time sympathizing with those who feel so lost. They may seem to exist in a foreign world. Alternatively, if we are those who feel hopeless, we may feel alone and unseen, particularly in church.

It has been my experience that great literature speaks to these realities in the world, especially literature in the modernist and contemporary periods, but not exclusively. And being able to share the richness of literature that helps make sense of, open up, and enlighten the world students live in gives me the joy that enables me to keep going.

For example, literature requires us to slow down and meditate on words (as we ought to do with Scripture!), contemplating connections, meanings, associations, themes, and symbols. In other words, it focuses our attention. This is especially true of poetry, but fiction can be just as demanding (try to skim The Sound and the Fury or Mrs. Dalloway and you’ll be lost quickly). There is an attending to the text that is required, which is the direct opposite of meaningless distractions that our world calls us to. This attending is an act of love toward the text, and it is one of the reasons that when I teach, I teach only with the text. Other than a brief introductory Powerpoint, our attention is on the words on the page in my classes. And what those words reveal, if it is good literature, are profoundly meaningful questions of life and death and eternity—questions that ought to haunt students even after the class is over. While I set those questions within a Christian framework, I allow the students to wrestle with them themselves, trusting their ability to learn and grow.

Teaching literature also allows me to introduce students to beauty in a way that they may not have been exposed to before. Because “beauty” is socially treated as a private matter of taste, often students don’t know that they can declare something objectively beautiful. So when we read a truly lovely line of poetry, sometimes I just stop and say, “That’s beautiful.” Or a passage from Fitzgerald. Or Hurston. Or whoever it might be. The point is we behold what is lovely together, and by doing so, we attest to the loveliness of creation. God’s world is beautiful. And His creations create beautiful works worth beholding. I hope in this process there is a kind of awakening to beauty in general that occurs.

Finally, teaching literature allows me to explore the human heart and its terrible need for redemption. When I teach The Sun Also Rises, I teach it as the story of a group of people longing for existential justification and seeking it in all the wrong places. But I emphasize the earnestness of Jake’s desire, even though he is apathetic in acting on it. It is through looking at stories of hopelessness that we come to understand our neighbors better and we come to understand ourselves better. Regularly when I teach Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, students come to me and say they sympathize with the main character’s frustrations with modern life. They feel seen. The trick is that we don’t stop with hopelessness, whether our own or our neighbors, we see that that hope is fulfilled in Christ, that what so many people long for is the existential justification offered only through the sacrificial love of Christ.

All of these reasons why I keep teaching literature—contemplation, beauty, redemption—can’t be replaced by AI or by reading a study guide or a summary or asking ChatGPT a question. They are part of the experience of learning to love what is lovely from someone who loves the text and loves his students. I think I received that kind of teaching from my best professors, Scott Covell, Steven Frye, Luke Ferretter, and Richard Russell. That’s the other reason I keep teaching. They taught me how to teach. How to love students and how to love literature more than loving scholarship, which comes and goes.

One effect of teaching literature is that it directly feeds into my writing, here on Substack and in my books. If you’ve read Disruptive Witness, You Are Not Your Own, or On Getting Out of Bed, you’ve been influenced by my work with students and what they have taught me and shown me about literature and the world (which is one reason why they appear in the acknowledgements of some of my books). In particular, working with students keeps me grounded in the felt needs of younger people. Granted, they reflect a certain demographic, but our interactions help me understand a lot about what troubles and challenges and anxieties face the younger generation, which feeds directly into the work I’m doing in Re-Collecting, for instance, exploring how the virtues can provide a guide for listless and anxious people.

In the end, all of these reasons I’m still teaching come down to one overarching reason: the students. I show up each day because the students show up. I get disappointed when students have to miss a class because I don’t want them to miss something lovely. Getting to know and care for and mentor and share with students is why I keep teaching even while the doomsayers warn that we should all jumpship. The rich and sometimes tearful conversations I’ve had in my office hours with students are some of my sweetest memories of teaching. Sometimes the biblical life lessons I’ve shared have been just as important as the literature. I have a draw full of notes they’ve written me over the decade that is precious to me. I’ve had ten good years of students. I miss so many of them. The hardest part of teaching is the grading. But the second hardest part is knowing that someone you’ve cared for and poured into to for four years will graduate, leave, and lose touch with you as they get absorbed with their life—as they should! It’s beautiful, too, but also a little sad.

In any event, my point in all this is that there is a future for literature. It can teach us about God, our neighbor, beauty, society, and creation. It can help to refocus our attention on what is lovely instead of allowing our minds to be little distraction machines. And ultimately, it can’t be taught by a machine. Who knows what future the humanities hold in America, but for as long as I can be, I’ll be teaching students to love and contemplate “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable,” whatever is excellent, and whatever is worthy of praise. For me, the greatest feeling in teaching is when students walk into class skeptical of what they read, and after we discuss it in class and I model my love for the text and reveal some of its mysteries, they come away enchanted and in love. Such moments of revelation are a great gift to me.

1. Notably, I’m writing this while on sabbatical, teaching a half load. So it may be that my love of teaching is a bit biased right now. But I think these thoughts would hold true for each of my previous semesters.