Dr. Carl P.E. Springer is Professor of Classics and Chair in the Department of Foreign
Languages at Illinois State University.
In this paper, I address the current impasse in the academic study of literature, a state of affairs that James Ellis has dramatically described as "literature lost." The claims of social science methodologies to "scientific" objectivity and theoretical authority in application to disciplines traditionally associated with the humanities, the exaltation of the critic at the expense of the creative author, "the mutiny of theory...against the authority of the poetic,"{1} and the increasing tendency, especially among our students (thanks to the ubiquitous presence of television and the computer), to prefer the image to the word--all of these interrelated phenomena have helped to contribute to or are symptoms of the malaise which I am about to describe. At the heart of the problem is a fundamental position, manifested in a variety of discrete forms, sometimes called the "hermeneutics of suspicion," which may be said to characterize most contemporary critical approaches to literature. In what follows I attempt to articulate a different approach to literary texts which assumes presence instead of absence, which is innocent rather distrustful in its methodology, which is childlike (but not childish) in its embracing, or reembracing of "the wonderful" in language--whether it be a word, sentence, paragraph, poem, essay, short story, or novel--an approach, in short, grounded not in the grammatologies of deconstruction, but in what George Steiner has aptly called "the grammar of the overwhelming."{2}
When Robert Schumann was asked to explain a difficult piece that he had just played, he simply sat down and played it a second time.{3} Such an interpretive strategy must sound refreshing to the average doctoral student in the humanities today. By the year 2000, someone writing a dissertation on Hamlet will have over 25,000 books, essays, articles, papers, and other dissertations to read--to say nothing of Hamlet itself.{4} While there is no doubt much in these critical works that is worth consulting, useful commentaries, for instance, elucidating mythological references (e.g. Niobe's tears) or historical allusions (why would Hamlet want to attend the University of Wittenberg?), helpful textual notes (was it really "fardels" in the first folio?), the vast majority of scholarship devoted to Hamlet, one suspects, sheds less light on the melancholy Dane or his creator than it does on the theoretical presuppositions and political agendas of the critics--many of which are now judged to be passé. One would hope that Hamlet is not.
Much of the outpouring of scholarly treatises devoted to literary texts is the product of a positivistic conviction, with historical roots that go back at least as far as the Enlightenment, that it is possible to explicate their "real meaning" using "scientific" methodologies. One thinks, for instance, of the mythological structuralism of Levi-Strauss, the psychological analyses of Freud, or the socio-economic hermeneutics of Marx. 20th-century students of literary texts have moved from the more limited philological areas of study worked over with such rigor and thoroughness by their 18th- and 19th-century predecessors and have borrowed heavily from the so-called "sciences of culture" (Geisteswissenschaften). Unlike the "natural sciences" (Naturwissenschaften) which explain natural phenomena by subsuming them under grand causal laws, the "sciences of culture" must "understand events in terms of the intentions and meanings that individuals attach to them."{5}
So fervent has been the conviction of some literary critics devoted to Marxist, Freudian, or more recent theoretical perspectives, who have grown used to combing literary texts like Moby Dick or the Iliad or Faust in search of underlying meanings, whether these be defined in terms of Oedipal conflict, class warfare, or oppressive patriarchal social structures, that they have often reduced the study of literature to a single focus which seems to them to represent the only possible meaning it can or should have. I quote, by way of egregious example, from a letter which a professor of English at Syracuse University recently wrote to the Chronicle of Higher Education describing the only real issue in literary study as helping students to perceive "which side of the world-historical class struggle they take: the side of the owners of the means of production, or the side of the workers. This and only this is the real question in textual literacy."{6}
One of the problems, of course, with such approaches to literature is that they are more isegetical than exegetical. Issues such as "the world-historical class struggle" are not always obviously apparent in texts like Hamlet, and critics who adopt such theoretical stances need to "rigorously interrogate" or "tease out" the meaning in works which may appear to be quite "resistant" to such readings. The question of whether the author intended his or her work to be read in this way can, of course, be blithely ignored, for the author might very well not be aware of, let us say, the Freudian ramifications of his or her own work, or its participation in the systematic suppression of the working class. We have learned to "trust the tale and not the teller."{7} Indeed, our age has witnessed what Roland Barthes provocatively calls "the death of the author." The critic, with his or her insights into the deep structures of language, or the unconscious, or the mysteries of history, is the true genius, the wisest explicator of meaning, the most creative artist of our time. Oscar Wilde (in his dialogue "The Critic as Artist") says only half in jest: "Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in a way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself."{8} According to such a view, the author is much smaller and more limited than the critic, a puny plaything in the hands of powerful social, linguistic, psychological, and historical forces, which only the critic fully understands. Levi-Strauss declares with magisterial forcefulness: "We do not claim to show how men think in myths, but how myths think themselves in men, and without their knowledge..."{9} The critic reigns supreme, therefore, as the arbiter of meaning and everything, not just literature, traditionally defined, is grist for the theoretical mill, as a glimpse at a typical syllabus in the humanities at an average American university today gives ample witness. The Iliad and Dirty Harry have to share equal time; Ophelia and Janis Joplin jostle each other for students' attention; "apocalypse and indigestion are given the same edge."{10}
Now, the "death of the author" would not have been possible if it had not been preceded by what Nietzsche presciently called "the death of God." Questions like "What makes Shakespeare so great?" or "Why is Hamlet's soliloquy so hauntingly beautiful?" or "Do you think Polonius' advice to his son is true?" are difficult to ask or answer for the generations of readers who have followed Nietzsche, because such recognitions and valuations depend upon "nothing more nor less than the myth, now glaringly untenable, of divine guarantee."{11} Indeed, they sound embarrassingly naive today. As Steiner puts it,{12} "ours is an age in which embarrassment terrorizes even the confident and the lonely has sharpened the inhibitions." Passion is out; detachment is in. Structuralist semiotics and deconstructions are expressions of a culture and society which "play it cool." And, indeed, one could draw a direct line leading from Nietzsche's relentless exposure of the general bankruptcy of the assumptions undergirding traditional humanistic thought, his "rebellion against any naive view of human discourse as a vehicle and transmitter of intended verities,"{13} to the tone adopted by most college instructors of the humanities in this country, an undercurrent of "knowing irony," a disinterested or even sardonic lack of respect for "literature"--as opposed to a serious and passionate love of "great books" or such antiquated (in their view) notions as beauty, truth, and goodness.{14}
In the late 20th-century, it is difficult for many professional students of literature to believe not only in the traditional humanistic approach to cultural studies, but also in the Marxist myth that there is an overarching unity to the march of history which has always and will continue to be working towards the creation of a workers' paradise, or in other grandiose reductionist schemes such as Freud's conviction that all artistic expression is actually just a muted or transplanted expression of a frustrated sexuality. Indeed, it is far more common now for literary critics to begin with the assumption that there is no such thing as absolute truth, Marxist, Freudian, or otherwise, only human beings who construct their own version of reality and other human beings who accept these constructions or who deconstruct them. The idea that there would be absolute transcendent verities independent of human construction, signifieds which existed in their own right without any dependence on signifiers, no longer makes much sense. According to this view, language, previously understood as a vehicle to convey meaning, a reference to something else to which both speaker or author and audience would have access, is viewed now as a set of arbitrary signs to be manipulated and exploited. Language is certainly not, as Plato or Marx or Freud would have had it, a transporter of "presence" or meaning, whether that be located in the ideal world of forms or evolving human history or the human subconscious. Unlike many of the authors whom they study--one thinks of the ancient Greeks and their belief in the creative power of the Muses or the daimon inspiring the artist--most contemporary literary critics begin with a postulate of absence, not presence.{15} "There is no there there."
One of the great reductionist hermeneutical schemes, however, which is still influential--indeed in many quarters of the academy and elsewhere it enjoys the status of an unquestioned assumption--is the idea developed by one of Nietzsche's most acute students, Michel Foucault, who has followed up on his master's insistence that all cultural expressions, however represented, have to be reduced to a basic fundament, namely, the conflict of powers. The methodology employed by Foucault's latter-day disciples is startlingly simple: look for evidence of oppression. All other questions of style, content, beauty, and truth are not only irrelevant, but probably camouflage. The core issue is power; nothing else really exists. Frank Kermode writes witheringly of the "Foucauldian" school: "It is held to be axiomatic that all knowledge, being socially constructed, has no objective validity--though the knowledge on which this belief is founded is silently excluded from the censure. Professors who are willing to admit that they care very little for literature (it is now quite usual for some of them to do so) will seek in it the one thing that interests them, a political content of which the significance is predetermined, thus committing what Ellis calls "the fallacy of the single factor." They take away from the object of study only what they bring to it."{16}
In this connection, Jacques Derrida's "deconstructive" strategies can be used to great effect, to expose the inherent tenuousness of the fragile bond between "signifier" and "signified" and to suggest, with the Greek sophists, that even if something did exist we couldn't communicate it to anyone else. What is of far greater importance is that the reader quite self-consciously adopt a theoretical position, and, since everyone else has one too, make sure that those presuppositions are clear. That's why so many articles and books (and university courses, too, for that matter) ostensibly devoted to literature spend so much time talking about theory. Susan Sontag, in her famous essay "Against Interpretation," declares: "None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself." Of this remark, Roger Shattuck comments that this "up-to-date intellectual version of "You're a virgin only once"...sounds like a chant: Everything is always already interpreted. We live all our lives in the prison house of language, from whose codes and conventions no particle of our experience can escape. Only when you have picked out for yourself a literary theory and a critical method can you begin to discourse securely on literature with the other prisoners. The armed vision is the only vision."{17}
The denigration of literature in the academy is a trend that is mirrored in society in general. Nationwide, fewer and fewer books are being sold or read, as Birkerts so eloquently laments in The Gutenberg Elegies. The image, not the word, is the medium of choice today and television and computer offer entertainment that is far more accessible and irresistible, than, let us say, the traditional novel. It is beyond the scope of this paper or the competency of this essayist to speculate on which trend came first. Has the disdain for literature on the part of those who have taught several generations of our nations' young leaders in some way contributed to the situation? Or is the adjustment of the academic vision simply a reflection, probably unconscious, of a gradual societal swing away from serious reading? This author, for whatever it is worth, shares Birkerts' passion for books as physical objects as well as profoundly effective conveyers of meaning. The lofty claims that the computer's advocates make about its ability to create a virtual reality, "some bright new hyperworld, a kind of Disneyland of information" leaves me mourning, with Birkerts, "for the old hard world."{18} I miss the smell and feel of a book with its covers and pages and print when I have to read something on a screen and I am extremely skeptical about claims that students who learn via the internet instead of books are simply exchanging one neutral medium for another. As Birkerts observes, the principle of energy conservation applies here. The internet does promise instant communication made accessible to even more people, but "does a gain in one area depend upon a loss in another? My guess is that every lateral attainment is purchased with a sacrifice of depth."{19} More people perhaps may read, but they will read less of substance. Human beings in the next century may end up having more knowledge at their fingertips, or being more constantly entertained, but at what price to the human memory and imagination? The computer is unparalleled in its potential ability to help us access information, but it is unlikely ever to be able to teach us wisdom. Literature used to make that claim for itself. "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" (T.S. Eliot, The Rock).
Now, I do not mean to suggest, of course, that the criticism of literature does not have a long and distinguished history or that it can not still perform a useful function today. Philology is as old as the Alexandrian scholars who established the texts of Homer and the Greek tragedians. In the Book of Acts, Philip has to answer a very difficult literary question when the Ethiopian eunuch inquires whether Isaiah is speaking of "himself or another" in Chapter 53. Among the church fathers, Origen, Jerome, and Augustine thought and wrote profoundly on how to read the Book of Books. Their hermeneutic legacy was eventually crystallized in the medieval doctrine of the four-fold meaning of Scripture: the historical, the allegorical (typological), the tropological (moral), and the anagogical. Advances in literary criticism represent one of the towering achievements of the Renaissance (one thinks of Lorenzo Valla's exposure of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery or Luther's suspicion that the letter to the Hebrews was not written by Paul).
It would be impossible or undesirable for anyone, even Christians, to read without a healthy dose of suspicion. Certainly this is one half of Christ's equation about being wiser than serpents, but harmless as doves. Eve could have paid a little more suspicious attention to the underlying agenda of the serpent's remarks in the Garden of Eden. Satan was using words not to point to the truth or construct a beautiful sentence, but to deceive, manipulate, and gain power. Certainly, too, the idea that the scholar, the critic, the translator, the teacher would help others to appreciate the works of an author which they love is a noble one. It would be hard to improve on Blackmur's definition of criticism in his Language as Gesture: "Criticism, I take it, is the formal discourse of an amateur." As Roger Shattuck comments: "An amateur is both a nonprofessional and a person who loves something very much."{20}
This said, the problems faced by literary study today as articulated above, are real ones, which I have not exaggerated. The pendulum has swung to an extreme position and the situation has been exacerbated, not ameliorated, by the "hermeneutics of suspicion." In the time remaining to me, I would like to suggest that Christian scholars of literature are in a unique position not only to observe the impasse, but to point to solutions that are distinctively Christian.
One important presupposition that Christians bring to their understanding of literature is their belief in, as the Creed puts it, "God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth." This initial creation, according to Christian thought, is the reason why there is anything at all. When Christians deal with signifiers--and literature falls under this broad category--we take for granted the existence of the signified. And, in fact, it is the case that most art in one way or another does reflect or represent nature. It would be difficult to conceive of a landscape, no matter how abstract, without land. No novel or love poem could have been written without people to have lives and loves. The climax of creation, of course, according to Christian thought, is the human being, the one God made a little lower than the angels and crowned with honor and glory (Ps. 8) and whose form he himself chose to take in his incarnation. It is not much of a leap, therefore, to see (and value accordingly) in the creative artist the same instinct as God, whose first act recorded in Scripture is to put two things together that were separated, to create something out of nothing, to make order out of tohu vebohu. That's creation and that's primary. To tear apart, to dissect, to analyze comes later. As Steiner puts it: "There is priority in time. The poem comes before the commentary. The construct precedes the deconstruction."{21}
In this connection, let us raise the fundamental etiological question, a variation on "the famous question at the root of metaphysics: why should there not be nothing?"{22} Why should there not be no novel? It certainly isn't inevitable. Not every human being feels compelled to write a long prose work of fiction--even if he or she is sexually frustrated. As Steiner{23} observes, "The primary text--the poem, picture, piece of music--is a phenomenon of freedom. It can be or it cannot be." Whence does this impulse derive? Can this "vital excess"{24} which the ancient Greeks attributed to the Muses or the daimon, be reduced, as psychologists today might, to a matter of chemical imbalances in the brain? Or is it a matter of Freudian "counter-creation,"{25} in which the artist is an alter deus, wrestling for primacy with God the way a son competes with his father? Is there something inherently rebellious--and wicked--about the human imagination, as the chapters of Genesis describing life after the fall have often been taken to suggest? The traditional Christian explanation of the creative instinct in human beings preserves some of the same Old Testament reservations but also resembles the ancient Greek idea. It is the response of the human spirit to the divine spirit who originally brooded over the waters of chaos, "deep calling to deep," often expressed as a "gift" which the spirit of the artist owes entirely to the divine spirit. Here is where it is important to "test the spirits," because there have been many artists whose inspiration sprang from a different spiritual source and there have been other artists who took the credit for their inspiration themselves. We should contrast the latter approach with Bach's humble dedication of his work to the "glory of God." The popular movie Amadeus makes the same point: the artist is merely a conduit or vehicle--in Mozart's case, an unworthy vehicle--for divine beauty. D.H. Lawrence wrote: "I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me--and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist."{26} "All art starts from the altar," said Matthias Claudius, a sentiment which, one imagines, some creative artists, but few critics today, would echo.
If this is so, if a great work of art is essentially spiritual in nature, if it has something divinely mysterious in its origin, if it is a gift of God--or, I suppose, the work of the devil--there must be something wonderfully (or horribly) transcendent in its content, and we will recognize that "the criteria and practices of quantification of symbolic coding and formalization which are the life breath of the theoretical do not, cannot pertain to the interpretation and assessment...."{27} In other words, the answer to the etiological question we posed before must remain shrouded in the same awesome mystery where God is. We can't explain human artistic creativity any more than we can explain God's. Translated to the discipline of literary criticism, this means that it won't be adequate, to cite a glaring example of metaphysical tone-deafness, to pronounce Ezekiel's vision of wheels within wheels the result of paranoid schizophrenia, the product of a medical condition which today would probably be "cured" with a good prescription of Prozac.
A second, related, area where Christian literary scholars have a unique perspective is our attitude toward words in general and the Word in particular. Many of us have spent our entire life listening to the words of the Bible, read and proclaimed in our ears, and have learned to read them with care, respect, and obedience, to meditate on them day and night, as the Psalmist puts it. This kind of reading, obviously, involves a complete abrogation of power and an acceptance of an authority greater than ourselves (or any other reader or critic for that matter). Christians try to read and listen to Scripture with the eyes and ears of child-like faith. Human words can indeed be deceptive, but God's word is to be trusted. When he says something, it is not just empty verbiage used for rhetorical effect, but reality. Indeed, there is here a close connection with creation. God's word, at the beginning, creates light. Fiat lux. And to his creatures, God continues to use words effectually, with great seriousness of purpose--he does not expect them to return to him void. He is usually not ironic, manipulative, or deceptive in his use of language, but rather says something to us because he wants us to know something of great importance to us. He warns Abraham, for his own good, that Sodom will be destroyed. He reveals to Mary his gracious plan for Jesus' birth. He sends his son, the word incarnate, to carry out his will, namely to save the world which he loves.
Here, of course, is the central reason Christians read God's word so attentively. Why should those who have ears to hear, hear? Because we know that God's word matters. It isn't a sterile game which we play as we while away our time in "the prison-house of language," but a matter of life and death. Steiner says: "The archaic torso in Rilke's famous poem says to us: "change your life." So do any poem, novel, play, painting, musical composition worth meeting."{28} "Du musst dein Leben aendern." The Word--to the Christian--represents metanoia, meaning, hope, life--in the face of silence, meaninglessness, hopelessness, and death. Indeed, it is my guess that Christians instinctively look for meaning everywhere, in every word, every sign, whether written or not, no matter how faded the meaning might be, because we are convinced that the creator did not leave himself without witness in his creation. Indeed, his creative word was given concrete meaning in the incarnation. The logos became flesh. I was accused once, by a colleague, of being "hopelessly logo-centric." And I still wear that soubriquet with some pride. My galaxy of memories, thoughts, and imagination does indeed swirl around a fixed sun of central, core significance, the logos with a capital L. This conviction, this assumption of meaningfulness, has been, traditionally, one of the foundations underlying the entire enterprise of literature, but in this post-Christian century it has, not surprisingly, been dislodged. The ramifications of such a fundamental shifting of the ground under our feet are obvious and they extend far beyond the confines of the academy. Deconstruction is so inadequate in precisely this regard because it has no way of talking sensibly about the meaning of indisputable human verities such as birth, life, love, and death. There are all sorts of things, obviously, which are social constructs, dependent upon the accidents of history, upon the manipulations of the powerful, upon the differences between genders, classes, and races. Literature may indeed fall into this category, but this does not mean that everything that literature describes, like death, does, too. You can't deconstruct death. Of this undeniable constant in the human condition, De Man can only say lamely that it is "a displaced name for a linguistic predicament."{29} Christian readers, by contrast, no matter how critical they may be, are, with at least one part of their being, attuned to meaning, and, when faced with death, they understand (and speak) the language of hope (there's no word, as Steiner puts it, that's "less deconstructible").
I would suggest, then, that we must recover in our scholarship and teaching of literature a greater degree of innocence. We must recapture some of the child-like wonder, which, one would guess, even the most jaded critic once had in the power and pleasure of words. Much of what we enjoy most in literature does lies right at the surface: the narrative thread (what's going to happen next?), the sound of the language, and the author's message. What is he or she trying to say to me or us? This last (now unfashionable) question presupposes a sort of submission on the part of the reader, a willingness to take a leap of imaginative faith that transcends the distance, temporal, geographical, and cultural, that may separate us from the author, a loving forbearance of an author who may indeed be of a different sex, or of a different time, or of a different political mindset, and a preliminary assumption that the author has something he or she wishes to say to us, on which it is the reader's duty and delight to put the best construction. Such a position does not simply replicate the traditional "humanist" confidence in human reason and "reasonability" as the basis for communication (a la Habermas), but instead views language as an effectual activity grounded in God's love, in which humans, made in the image of God, may joyfully participate--or, which, like any other aspect of God's grace, we may disparage, manipulate, and reject. We should, then, in our study of literature, be amateurs in the strict sense of the word. Love is God's motive for communicating with humans, and it is also the backdrop for all Christian interrelations, including the way we respond to and ourselves use words. Martin Luther puts it well in his famous Small Catechism when he says that we are to "put the best construction on everything."
Some practical advice? When we teach literature, I propose that we imitate Sister Wendy Beckett. This grandmotherly nun who regularly appears on PBS "reads" paintings with an infectious joy which art professionals have dismissed as anti-intellectual but which has secured her a wide following among those, like her, who passionately love art and have "the quality that Henry James once attributed to Pierre Loti: the courage to be ridiculous."{30} Focus your students' and readers' attention on literature itself, first and foremost, and let context, background, or theory come second. Don't be embarrassed to pass considered value judgments, positive or negative. Why is the work worth our attention? What does it contribute to beauty, truth, or goodness? Don't always have your students write analytically about literature. Why not have them write a poem on the interpretation of a poem (like Keats' sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer")? Maybe you should try to write a novel, too, before you undertake to write a review (or monograph) about someone else's. Finally, read aloud to your students and have them read aloud, too. Jay Parini writes of a literature professor who influenced him deeply: "We were transported by the way he read aloud. Jim's vocalization of poetry was a form of Lectio Divina--or holy reading. I suddenly understood that here was the Word made flesh, given voice. I saw for the first time that one of the functions of a literature professor is to embody the voices of the past, to represent them and perform them, showing how a speaking voice breaks against the meter. This reading aloud is, as it were, one of the holy offices of the profession."{31} Some will, no doubt, call these suggestions "old-fashioned" or naive or extreme, but the dramatic nature of what Steiner calls "our eviction from a central humanity in the face of the tidal provocations of political barbarism and technocratic servitude" demands a response that does more than affix a band-aid to a gaping wound. The study of literature (and, indeed, of the humanities in general) is in serious trouble. If we do not ourselves reexperience (and help others to do the same) "the life of meaning"{32} in literature, it is difficult for me to see how the profession of the literary critic can continue. Perhaps, come to think of it, it will be better left to true amateurs.
{1}As George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago, 1989), p. 116, puts it [abbreviated hereafter as Steiner]. I am much indebted to this thoughtful little study and much of what I have to say, particularly in the first half of this paper, is indebted to my reading of this and other of Steiner's works.
{2}Steiner, p. 190.
{3}Steiner, p. 20.
{4}Steiner, p. 25.
{5}See Sven Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies (New York, 1994), p. 135 [abbreviated hereafter as Birkerts], on Wilhelm Dilthey's distinction.
{6}The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 1997, p. B13.
{7}Steiner, p. 173.
{8}Roger Shattuck, The Innocent Eye (New York, 1984), p. 314 [abbreviated hereafter as Shattuck].
{9}Shattuck, p. 314.
{10}Steiner, p. 25.
{11}Steiner, p. 120.
{12}Steiner, p. 178.
{13}Steiner, p. 125.
{14}In this connection see Mark Edmunson's amusing article, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education. I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students," Harper's Magazine, September 1997, 39 ff.
{15}Steiner, p. 122.
{16}James Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (Yale, 1997), reviewed by Frank Kermode in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1997.
{17}Shattuck, p. 346.
{18}Birkerts, p. 139.
{19}Birkerts, p. 138.
{20}Shattuck, p. 312.
{21}Steiner, p. 150.
{22}Steiner, p. 152.
{23}Steiner, p. 151.
{24}Steiner, p. 211.
{25}Steiner, p. 204.
{26}Steiner, p. 228.
{27}Steiner, p. 79.
{28}Steiner, p. 142.
{29}Steiner, p. 148.
{30}See the review of Alan Artner in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Sept. 6, 1997.
{31}"Cultivating a Teaching Persona," in Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 1997, p. A92.
{32}Steiner, p. 49.