Margaret Brose– Teaching Statement 2002-03
Professorof Literature

Teaching: The Daily Epiphany

As an 11th grader, sitting in an honors literature class in an urban Detroit high school, I knew I was in the presence of the “important.” We sat on the floor, in a circle – sure evidence of the important in those days —and we discussed texts by writers such as Machiavelli, Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf. We were made to believe that each one of us had a voice, and we learned to listen to the voices of others. We learned to invest our energies in the enquiry, rather than in the answer. At the end of the semester our teacher gave to each of us a poem - a different poem for each student, chosen as a commentary on our particular intellectual style and as a doorway to new experiences. That class was epiphanic and I believe that all teaching bears the possibility of that same epiphanic grace. Epiphany means to make manifest, to reveal, and good teaching does just that: what is revealed is not the arcane knowledge of the teacher but the potentialities of the student born in a catalytic relationship with texts, ideas, and other minds. I am fortunate to have witnessed several epiphanies in my classroom; and I know of others that have occurred long after my courses have ended. Literature has a long after-life.

My pedagogical vision is based on the importance of reading, expressing, and listening to the human voice, and on the exchange of ideas. As a scholar I work on the rhetorical, stylistic aspects of texts, primarily poetry. I believe that the poetic text is a radical space of negotiations – civilizational and psychological. The poetic text is a liminal place of borders, constraints, and new possibilities: a foundry for individual and cultural identity formation. This is a “radical” position to hold at this moment, since we literary scholars find ourselves in an age which values prose over poetry, and which identifies the formal properties of poetry as elitist and obscurantist.

I teach Italian Literature within a Department of Literature. In this era of reduced language study, in one of the very few universities in the country without a language requirement, I teach literature in Italian and in translation --- over nine centuries of Italian literature to students with enormously differing linguistic preparations. Students assume that they will find poetry difficult to access; and that texts from the 13th or 14th or 18th centuries will raise issues too distant from their pressing concerns. I want to “defamiliarize” these assumptions and to “refamiliarize” these texts. While I am actually a Modernist, I teach Medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic literature as well. I encourage students to bring the critical terms current today to other cultures and other periods, and to recognize how these modern categories have their own historical trajectories. Many students assume that the modern has significantly reduced the value of the ancient; I want them to see how earlier texts and authors have significantly prefigured the modern. My especial challenge has been the teaching of Dante’s Divine Comedy (in translation) to large enrollments; I admit that every time I face 120 new students who are about to enter the Inferno, I feel the epiphanic rush.

I want to help students integrate their learning in the classroom with their lives outside of the classroom; I aim to teach to the whole person. The classroom must be a safe environment, where new ideas and strange juxtapositions can be aired. I attempt to experiment with the thought process in front of my students, to dissuade them of the belief (and fear) that one knows the answer before one starts to speak or to write. Following a yoga adage, I entreat each student to “bring the practice [of this class] into your daily life.” I ask them to find moments during the day when a thought, a feeling, a desire, a fear can be best expressed by a metaphor, or a poetic image. When I teach Dante I urge students to recognize the logic of the “contrapasso” (or poetic justice) in their daily lives and in the culture at large.

The courses I teach range from lower division introductory literature classes, with texts in translation, to large upper division lecture classes with several Teaching Assistants (“Dante’s Divine Comedy”). I teach seminars in Italian (which serve as the senior seminar requirement for students majoring in Italian Studies) and graduate seminars. My teaching thus requires a variety of approaches. I attempt to challenge students in all class formats; and especially in the lecture format, I try to engage students in question and answer exchanges that fold back into the subject of the lecture. The seminars in Italian cover a range of topics and genres: Medieval poetry; Dante; Petrarch; Romanticism, Modern Poetry; Modern Novel; Postmodern Literature; Autobiography; Women Writers. Within the parameters of these rubrics, I attempt to update my courses at each offering, with new pedagogical approaches: my classes now involve more film, video, slides, web materials, as well as popular and journalistic writing.

My goal is to offer collaborative work for students in all courses. This is difficult to achieve in a large lecture class, although I ask the Teaching Assistants to build such assignments and exercises into their own sections. I also have the students prepare for the final exam in study groups. In my upper division seminars, I consistently require group work; this usually takes the form of oral presentations by groups of 2 or 3 students. Each group of students meets together several times, then with me to discuss critical secondary material on their topic. These oral presentations are far more complex and provocative than individual reports. For most classes, I have students prepare oral comments/questions for every class, to read aloud. A few times each quarter I begin class with a free write, and these are also read aloud; this galvanizes class discussion as students become accustomed to hearing their own voices and those of their peers.

In my poetry courses I always designate several classes for translation exercises, some poems to be translated individually and some collectively. In fact, this past quarter my students in a Modern Italian Poetry class constituted themselves as the UCSC Italian Poetry Collective and translated a number of poems of an internationally known Italian Feminist poet visiting UCSC. At the public bilingual poetry reading, I read the Collective’s translations, and the poet was particularly impressed by the quality of the translations. A few students who had come to the course with no experience reading poetry, and thus with negative expectations, found the translations and poetry reading “epiphanic.” One of these students has since translated an entire volume of poetry.

In most classes I distribute handouts which revisit some of the important issues of the lecture or the texts; or, the handout may contain parts of an essay written by the author. Many of these are leads for students to follow up on by themselves, and some of my former students now in graduate school say that they are still carrying around these dog-eared notes. I tend to have students write 3 or 4 short papers, and then allow them to expand one of the short papers into a final paper. This seems to me a profitable way to manage the brevity of the quarter system, and allows students to revisit and improve earlier work.

My goal is to empower students with language and thought, to develop their curiosity, and to have them experience the classroom as a space of equality and exchange. The primary qualities I seek to offer them are generosity, levity, and a passion for the material.