I suppose the thing about plans is that they change. My plan for the last several years has been “go straight to grad school to be an English professor.” Then I wasn’t sure what to study, so I decided to take a year or two off to do some independent study and find an academic passion that wasn’t simply knowledge. But always, I knew I was going to be an English professor.
During the last semester of my undergraduate degree, however, I started to feel a little bit like I was living and working inside a vacuum. I was writing my Capstone paper, “Science Fiction Sleeper Agent: Narrative Subversion in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lefthand of Darkness” and loving it. I was having a great time immersing myself in great writing and in the thoughtful, though at times disappointing, scholarship of others in my field. I was having a blast but I couldn’t shake a certain feeling of futility.
To understand this feeling, we might have to delve a little bit into my life and educational philosophies. In life, I value learning. As an existentialist, I believe that what I choose to value has global and societal ramifications; In light of this fact, I must value the act of learning over knowledge itself which can be understood to be finite. I can consider myself fully knowledgeable on a given subject but I can never consider myself to be finished learning about a given subject. It is that eternal questing which excites me and that gives us a tangible point of entry into the future. We can always learn more, we can always seek more knowledge, more understanding. The act of learning, of seeking knowledge, is endless and open and freeing.
By contrast, the educational system, our great institutions of learning, seem to be focused on knowledge, or worse, on information. Students learn information to have the knowledge and write it down on tests. In my experience, this was true almost universally during my years in public school and remained a prevalent attitude even in the university system.
If schools cannot teach students the act of learning, to love the quest for knowledge, where can we reasonably expect them to learn it? At their desk jobs? In their cars during rush hour, or on buses and trains? During preschool and after-school programs? Surely, the best environment to develop a positive relationship with discomfort and thrill of new perspectives and information, with the challenges of processing new knowledge, with the setbacks that come in the pursuit of that knowledge… Surely that place is a school.
As I was writing my Capstone paper, buried in books that a lot of people don’t read and academic articles that almost no one reads, I was confronted with a profound sense of the egoism of it all. Who was I doing this work for? I asked myself. I couldn’t claim that I was doing it to help the public learn to love and appreciate literature and to respect its potential to improve the world because the public was never going to read it. I also couldn’t reasonably say that I was doing it to contribute to the discipline or to scholarship on Le Guin because I didn’t expect even other scholars to read it. If they did, cool, but they would be reading it in the same spirit as I read their work: to inform, challenge, or reinforce my own work and interpretations.
Here I have to confess that I think I might be cited in a high school sophomore’s English paper on The Lefthand of Darkness after she found me on Twitter because I’d tweeted about the novel so much. Every time I think about that, I get a flutter of happiness, but I think it’s because she told me I’d contributed to her enjoyment and understanding of the novel itself, not because she read and used my work.
When I think about my academic work and style, it feels infused with larger scale conceptual thinking. Sure, I use literary criticism in the technical and specific ways that I see published in academic journals. The difference is that I don’t think I care about it. Instead, I use it as a means to get to my interest in the gestalt function and impressions of a piece of literature. I want to know what it does for people and I want to know how.
When I think about my intended audience, I hope that people with casual interests in the subjects I write about would find my work both accessible and challenging enough to broaden their understanding.
With “SF Sleeper Agent,” I think I accomplished some of those goals. When I presented it to my peers in the English department, others from my University, family, and friends, I heard that my paper was interesting, that it made them rethink their reading of the novel, that it made them want to revisit it, or read it for the first time.
I heard that I didn’t engage quite enough with existing scholarship and with theoretical approaches. I also heard that I was so smart and that the paper went “over my head.”
I realize that I can’t reach everyone, but I do think that everyone could benefit from a deeper knowledge, or at least appreciation, of the humanities. What I do know is that everyone doesn’t have access to academic journals. Since graduating college, I don’t even have access anymore.
Lindsey Grundyson 