Stream-feed: 11:56 p.m.

I'll be passing out syllabi tomorrow, and I'm kind of nervous since I've never really taught an actual literature course before. There was English 300, lit & film, but that was four weeks during summer, and we mostly watched movies. There was that 400-level post-Joyce Irish lit class I co-taught with another professor, but that wasn't really my class. There's the surveys I've TA-ed for and of course the myriad composition classes. But nothing like this one and it makes me anxious because being a literary critic and teaching literary criticism are two totally different things. What do I teach a sophomore or junior about literary criticism; even more importantly, what do I leave out? Where to begin? Do I start all sentimental and get all teary-eyed about how much I love words, language, and stories, and hope they pick up on my enthusiasm? Or do I go in there like a cold practitioner? I've made certain choices, I've chosen my texts, thought about the ideas, terms, theories, techniques, etc., I've learned and practiced over the years, but what is the best way to communicate these things other than just assigning readings and "discussing" the readings. It's not the little, detailed questions they'll ask me that make me anxious, but the big ones that are much more difficult to answer...why study literature? why is something good or bad? does goodness or badness even matter? what distinguishes literature from other pursuits of knowledge, truth, pleasure, love....I have answers for these questions but some of them are so tenuous. I change my mind about the answers to these questions constantly. I know that I know a lot more than they do, and I'm confident in what I know, but getting a PhD also means that yes, I have some answers, but it also means I have many more questions...more questions than my class will ask...anyway, I'm excited, at least, that I'll be able to teach the texts and authors that I love for reasons that extend beyond their capacity to receive literary analysis...I always appreciated enthusiastic teachers--ones whose lectures were living evidence of an extended love affair with what they study. I'm not exactly ebullient in front of a class, but I'm pretty fluid and sometimes I surprise myself when I utter a phrase and I'm not sure where it came from. Lecturing helps me to realize how much I've learned....but I also hope to engage with students more than I usually do this term. That will be easier given the fact that I want to be teaching the course, and am not being forced to teach the course..........Took care of Ada today. She began the day next to me in bed and played with my eyebrows with her index finger. She played, ate, swung in her...swinging chair? (don't know what else to call it)....rocker I guess...crapped twice, fell asleep while I watched Big Love, awoke hungry, laughed at me, played some more, waited for mom to come home...a pretty typical day but wonderful for its normality--a normality I like and can live with. It's amazing how much she smiles, as if Wordsworth were right--that children are purer and closer to wisdom than adults who become corrupted in their age and more distant from the simple truths that children know. I don't believe that sh#@ but sometimes I think Ada's living in a completely different realm than me and her smile is the only bridge between where I'm at and where she happens to be floating. I'm fine with that. I fully plan on communicating the standard cliche to Ada that she should stay young as long as she can because youth is full of illusions but aren't illusions so comforting, so necessary? Art is of course illusion, even the gritty kind intent on exposing our illusions, which is a kind of art whose intent is to replace one illusion with the illusion that complaining about the illusions isn't in fact an illusion, when in fact it really is. M. Arnold said, aptly, that literature is a criticism of life. I agree, but that criticism is no less an illusion than the illusions its intent upon correcting...perhaps a better illusion though...an illusion of one's own making, enjoyed consciously for its artifice...and not because one is ignorant that it's an illusion in the first place.