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Steven GoldsmithAssociate Professor, English |
Steven Goldsmith, who has been a member of the English Department since 1986, is a specialist in Blake and is also known for his class on the Bible as Literature. His book Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation has been called “brilliant, lively, and wide-ranging.” In addition to teaching Blake and the Bible, he has developed a number of new courses, including, “Why Do We Cry? The Literature of Sorrow, Sympathy and Indifference,” as well as a graduate prospectus-writing seminar that has transformed the graduate curriculum. Professor Susan Schweik, Chair of the Committee on Teaching of the English Department, says, “Professor Goldsmith is an inspired—and an indispensable—teacher and mentor at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.” Goldsmith regularly receives the kinds of comments on evaluations that most teachers can only hope to receive: “I am a different student, a different person, as a result of his class.” The Committee calls Goldsmith “A superb teacher and educator, a riveting storyteller even when lecturing on complex subjects.”
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Teaching is a way of "thinking aloud together." Early in every semester something happens that affirms Immanuel Kant's notion that thinking is a communal activity: a student asks a question I cannot answer or raises an issue that never occurred to me; students begin to debate among themselves, without routing their ideas through me; someone reports back with new information to illuminate a previous discussion. Even in a large Berkeley lecture, where I'm doing most of the "thinking aloud,” the give-and-take pulse of conversation remains an intellectual ideal, even if it needs some artificial grafting. I hoard chairs in my office so students from those large classes can enter in clusters and talk to each other. When bits of those conversations find their way back into a lecture, the whole class better understands that teaching is not a one-way dissemination of knowledge but a way of thinking "in community with others."
Even in my smallest classes, where discussion should be as genuinely open as possible, I try to leave room for sustained, dynamic argument. If by "thinking aloud" I can make the pleasure of careful, patient discovery accessible to my students, then they return that pleasure in the form of their own more rigorous and imaginative arguments, their own more probing questions, and their willingness to challenge limits I myself did not recognize. That pleasure is the origin and outcome of "thinking in community with others."
More than fifty years ago, Cleanth Brooks spoke for a generation of critics who passionately believed that teaching students to read literature closely contributes to the general social good: reading poetry makes them "better citizens." I do not know whether the intellectual excitement of literary encounter makes anyone "better." We have no idea what, if anything, our students will do with that excitement beyond the classroom.
Some of the skills English majors learn have practical uses, and the others won't harm them, but few of our students will benefit directly from what happens in our classes and almost never in terms of employment. Although this use-value deficit puts us in the position of always having to justify our relevance, and sometimes leads us to exaggerate it, the absence of clear outcomes can also be liberating. At their best our classrooms are the unacknowledged research and development laboratories of the world, experiments in "thinking aloud" where new ideas have a chance because they are not responsible to overly specific goals. Here, relatively freely, we can discuss the most sensitive and controversial issues, precisely because we are not making policy or shaping the future specialists of any given profession. Any respectful, well-argued idea is worth trying, for there is very little at stake should it fail. At the risk of sounding "romantic," I might say the literature classroom is one of the few places where unaccountable knowledge can still happen.