Peter Coviello at n + 1:
As anyone who has had the job can attest, the enterprise of being chair of an English department—or, in my case, “head,” a term meant to designate a role still more managerial—comes with more than its share of these scenes of demoralized compliance and low-grade surrender. “A two-fisted engine of aggravation and despair” is how I recently described the gig to a friend, and it’s hard to find anyone who would disagree. So imagine my surprise, my wonder even, in having found for myself a nourishing antidote to all the in-built tedium, joylessness, and metastatic irritation. Yoga? Hypnosis? Ketamine? No. It has appeared in nothing so much as the revelation that my colleagues are, in ways and degrees I hadn’t quite grasped, extraordinarily good at what they do.
I don’t just mean that they write beautiful and field-shifting books that widen the circumference of humanist knowledge and proffer solace and delight. I mean something else. For instance: do you have any idea what kinds of foresight, acuity, and procedural fluency are required to run, say, a program designed to teach collegiate writing to thousands of new students previously unfamiliar with the concept? Can you imagine the resolve, the patience, and the extremes of pedagogical inventiveness necessary to keep lessons lively rather than rote, to make the axiomatically laborious and frustrating enterprise of learning how to write a scene of curiosity, imagination, even nourishment?
More here. [Thanks to Margit Oberrauch.]
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