Utile Dulci

In Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), Hester Mulso Chapone suggests that her young readers read "moral philosophy." These are, she notes, works that help readers understand "human actions." Such works "are particularly useful to young people . . . [and] introduce many ideas and observations that are new to them--and lead to the habit of reflecting on the characters and events that come before them in real life." Reading these books and essays, she claims, will help the reader to understand the world and the people around them. While many students in college (and high school) may be assigned to read Plato, Aristotle, or Plutarch--the ancient writers she may be thinking of--or Addison and Steele or Samuel Johnson--the eighteenth-century authors of moral essays--are these texts assigned as ways of understanding "the characters and events that come before [students] in real life"? Some of these texts, of course, reflect profound philosophical and ethical debates that continue today, but, as advice for real life, Chapone's recommendations seem a bit quaint.

Articulating a debate that sounds even odder to modern ears, Chapone sees a conflict between texts on moral and ethical matters and "fictitious stories," or novels. While she acknowledges the appeal of novels, she also worries that they compromise the "chief purpose of education" which is to "moderate and restrain" the "passions of youth." Here, we see clearly that Chapone is living in a world very different from our own. Surely very few people today would phrase the purpose of education in language that sounds so restrictive. Similarly, we now encourage students to read anything--and there are many recent attempts to prove the importance of reading fiction in particular (see "Your brain on Austen"; ""Read Chekhov"; "Novel Reading Improve Empathy" or just google "encourage students to read!).

In another way, though, Chapone sounds very contemporary--she wants education to be fun. She uses an idea that occurred often in eighteenth century discussions of education: utile dulci. The recommended books are "entertaining as well as instructive"; they will "afford you great pleasure and improvement"; there are "many agreeable and useful books"; these books will "introduce instruction in a easier dress." Utile dulci is a Latin phrase usually translated as "useful and agreeable." Chapone gets at the range of meanings: entertaining and instructive; pleasing and improving; agreeable and useful. This idea of utile dulci remains as important as ever--or maybe even more important. As a teacher, I am constantly bombarded with advice about how to keep my students engaged: don't just lecture; use different media; cycle through ideas within in each class period; use different kinds of activities; have students tweet about lectures.

While I applaud many of these techniques (and employ some), I do wonder about the line between entertaining and instructing. Does entertain and instruct mean education has to be fun all the time? Should we change the material we assign so that it is always agreeable? Who gets to define what is agreeable, anyway? I don't want to "moderate and restrain" my students' passions--or minds--but I do want them to be disciplined, rigorous thinkers. The process of becoming a disciplined thinker might not afford "great pleasure" all of the time! To what extent is it students' responsibility to stretch or change their notions about what counts as agreeable or entertaining? To what extent is it the teacher's responsibility to clothe learning in "easy dress?

Hester Mulso Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, London, 1773. Quotations are from 186-187.

Why Go to College?

Here's a link to one recent article.

Frank Bruni, College's Priceless Value

One More Time

A reposted repost.

Around the time the first draft of the first essay is due I start hearing questions that all start the same way: Can I . . . . ? The student then, almost inevitably, voices a "rule" about writing that he or she is worried about breaking: Can I use I? Can I use "you"? Can I use "we"? Can I use contractions? Can I use the word "because"?

The answers are: Yes, No, Yes, Yes YES!

Actually, the answers are all YES. I only make a tiny exception for "you" because it is difficult to use well and even more difficult to use it and maintain a sufficiently formal academic style.

I really hate these kinds of rules. Yes, of course, you (breaking the "you" rule here) have to abide by the basic grammatical conventions of standard English. But otherwise, there's an awful lot of ambiguity and flexibility in how we use language. Why put up obstacles to expressing meaningful ideas with all of these little rules?

More disturbingly, students frequently ask some variation of this: "Can I actually tell my reader what I'm trying to argue?" I know that some writing instructors come up with lists of rules and "Don't use the first person" or "Don't use contractions" might be on that list. But, "Don't tell your reader what you are up to"?!

Somehow, somewhere along the line, students get the sense that writing is about a set of tricks and isn't about trying to convey meaning to a reader. One the most literal level, I think students have been told to avoid "metacommentary"--saying what the essay is doing or arguing ( I will argue that . . . This essay will then look at . . . .). I fail to understand this rule given that most PUBLISHED academic essays use metacommentary extensively. If your ideas are complicated, giving your reader these concrete handhold really helps.

I also worry that this belief that writers have to disguise their ideas under fancy terms or convoluted sentence structures and follow a bunch of arbitrary rules means that beginning writers are afraid to fully engage in the messy work of drafting BEFORE editing. All of these rules can makes a writer stop and second guess every sentence before she has even worked out the main substance.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, students get the sense that writing is about a set of tricks and isn't about trying to convey meaning to a reader. One the most literal level, I think students have been told to avoid "metacommentary"--saying what the essay is doing or arguing ( I will argue that . . . This essay will then look at . . . .). I fail to understand this rule given that most PUBLISHED academic essays use metacommentary extensively. If your ideas are complicated, giving your reader these concrete handhold really helps.

Stopping to take a breath and write "Okay, what I'm trying to say here is . . . ." can lead to great revelations. If you been taught to avoid using the first person or to avoid using metacommentary, you've been deprived of this tool. You can always go back and take the main idea and edit out the thinking. But do the thinking first!

So, whatever it is, if it helps YOU say what YOU want to say--yes, you can do that.

Zombies

How was Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies received when it was first published in 2009? Here are a few reviews.

New York Times
New Yorker
Washington Post

"Any Satisfactory Description"

"Not all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her five daughters, could ask on the subject was sufficient to draw from her husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley. They attacked him in various ways; with barefaced questions, ingenious suppositions, and distant surmises; but he eluded the skill of them all . . . "*

My epigraph comes from the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Bennet has met Mr. Bingley, but, to his wife and daughter's dismay, won't reveal anything about Mr. Bingley's looks. A bit later in the novel, as Mrs. Bennet is relating the events of the dance, "Mr. Bennet protested against any descriptions of finery."* Mr. Bennet doesn't want to hear his wife prattle about clothes, which may not be so surprising, but it is interesting that Austen refuses to provide such description in any case. As John Wiltshire notes, Austen work is characterized by a "restriction of the visual."  Her novels often "leav[e] it entirely up the reader to imagine or, rather not to imagine"** any description of setting, dress, or objects.

I like Wiltshire's essay--after all, I keep assigning it to my students! But I'm interested in, and more than a little worried about, what happens when we are told that a writer is leaving something for the "reader to imagine." Of course texts leave much of the interpretive process up the reader; a large body of scholarship, in fact, argues that it is only when a text is read that meaning is generated. But this can be a dangerous position to act upon--or to take too far. Does that mean we get to make up the meaning? Does that mean we let our imaginations run wild? Clearly, in some sense giving imagination free rein is a good thing--we would not have clever adaptations and loose interpretations (like The Bridget Jones's Diary or The Lizzie Bennet Diaries) without such imagination. I get worried though, when too much emphasis is placed on the reader and we neglect the words and worlds that writers actually create. The important part of Wiltshire's statement is that Austen might be allowing us "not to imagine." In other words, Austen leaves descriptions of things out not because she wants to imagine or make up those details, but because she wants us to direct our attention to other issues.

The attempts of the Bennet family to find out about Mr. Bingley's person are phrased as if a battle or a hunt were taking place. The women "attacked him" but Mr. Bennet "eluded the skill of them all." While his elusive maneuvers are in keeping with his character--this is the man who refused to acknowledge to his wife that he plans to make the acquaintance of a near neighbor--Mr Bennet's reserve here is not fully explained. We are left to wonder whether he is unobservant of physical traits or simply teasing his family. It is clear, however, that the daughters are enthusiastically--even aggressively--interested in Mr. Bingley's appearance (as he is in theirs).  To what extent does Austen judge this interest in appearance? Is she asking us to sympathize with the frustrated women, and with Mr. Bingley, who find personal traits so interesting and delighting? Or is she, through Mr. Bennet, perhaps, teaching us to place less importance upon personal appearance? Is Austen making fun of us for also being curious about personal appearance?

I would claim that Austen doesn't care about appearance; I can't fully support that claim here. I do want to emphasize, though, that whether we think Austen is making fun of human nature and our superficial interest in appearance, or whether we would argue that she is underscoring Mr. Bennet's odd relationship with his wife and daughters, the key is that her text should guide us--or at least be the first place we look--in making the argument.


*Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Robert P. Levine (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 48, 52.

** John Wiltshire, 'Why Do We Read Jane Austen?" in A Truth Universally Acknowledged. ed. Susannah Carson (NY: Random House, 2009), 164.

Image: By C. E. Brock (Scans from the book at Pemberley.com) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons