UVa
professor lectures on educational outlooks
By David Irvine
Contributing Reporter
>
February 16, 2001
Mark Edmundson,
a professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia, spoke
about the problems with an education system that concentrates too heavily
on job preparation on Feb. 8.
Edmundson,
who specializes in Romance poetry and literary theory, is the author
of the new book Not A Bad Teacher.
His past works include Towards Reading Freud, Literature Against Philosophy
and Nightmare on Main Street.
Additionally, Edmundson is a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine,
Raritan and Civilization magazine and has been published widely in a
number of other publications.
“Humanism Now?” was a follow-up to Edmundson’s earlier
article, “Has Higher Education Become a Casualty of Consumerism?”
which focused on the uses of a liberal arts education. With “Humanism
Now?” he took a step back and asked the question, “What …
should be the objective of an education in the liberal arts?”
While he is not opposed to teaching the practical, the prospect of concentrating
solely on marketable skills concerns Edmundson.
“A liberal arts education should be a quest for truth,” he
said.
This idea of searching for truth was a recurring theme throughout the
talk, as he outlined several approaches that he takes with teaching
literature to his students at UVa.
At the beginning of his courses, Edmundson asks his students to write
a paper on their idea of religion.
“I ask them, in short, how they imagine God,” he said.
Although this seems like curious assignment for a literature class,
Edmundson says that it is not when the goals of these courses are taken
into consideration.
“You want to get to the heart of the matter as soon as you can,”
he said. “You want to get to the issue of belief. You want to get
to the issue of truth.”
The term “final vocabulary” was repeated throughout the talk,
as a way of expressing each individual’s ideas of belief and truth.
Returning to the concept of truth, Edmundson described his methods of
assessing literary texts.
When teaching
any work, Edmundson asks students to pose the questions, “Is it
true? Can it ultimately change your final vocabulary?”
Edmundson’s argument is that seeking out specific themes of any
given work takes away from the overall message.
Interpretation is important, he said, but belief is more important.
“We seek, in short, a presentation of the work that ultimately
the author would agree with,”
Edmundson said. “It does seem to me that there are … unfolding
visions that one can freely and fully develop.”
The audience, consisting primarily of students and professors, was given
the opportunity to ask questions of Edmundson at the conclusion of his
presentation.
A reception for the speaker and all in attendance was held immediately
following the lecture.
Scott Klein, an associate professor of English who was active in bringing
Edmundson to campus, said, “Although I think that Professor Edmundson’s
approach is not for everyone and in some ways his emphasis on the search
for the true and the good in pedagogy is so old-fashioned as to be almost
avant-garde — it’s salutary to hear from a speaker who has
thought long and hard about teaching, and to be reminded of the reasons
why we teach in the first place: because we find something in literature
that is important to our sense of ourselves and the world,” Klein
said.
