Kent Puckett
Kent Puckett
Associate Professor, English
B.A., Hofstra University
Ph.D., Columbia University
Kent Puckett, Associate Professor of English, teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory. One reviewer says that his book Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel“is a fascinating theory of authority, representation, and embarrassment that could interest readers far and wide.” His teaching is equally praised by undergraduates and graduate students: his nomination letter says that “graduate students, not ordinarily given to flights of enthusiasm, reach for words like ‘wonderful,’ ‘amazing,’ ‘fantastic’ and ‘incredible’ in describing his teaching.” On a course evaluation, one undergraduate wrote, “I’m pretty sure everyone in the class had a crush on his genius.” Another says, “I love listening to him because he talks about things that never would have occurred to me otherwise.” The members of the committee were equally strong in their praise: “His teaching philosophy was so insightful that I copied for my own edification,” said one. And another who attend his class said, “The lecture was perfectly organized and animatedly presented; it was, in word, luminous.”
A few years ago, I ran into a student from one of my classes while taking the train home from work. As we talked, he said that there seemed to be two kinds of teachers: teachers who presented a great deal of useful information about a topic and teachers who made more or less idiosyncratic arguments about a topic. He thought I was one of the latter and wondered why. Since that afternoon, I've have also wondered: Why do I value the presentation of argument over—but not instead of—the presentation of information? What do I want from a lecture or a class discussion? The answer lies in what seems to me the real goal of teaching: to create conditions that make thinking possible.
The first condition is the least visible and most remarkable. Simply by sharing a classroom for an hour or so twice a week over a semester, my students and I tacitly agree to treat our time differently and to think differently about the value of that time. Because my students and I agree to take things like novels, poems, and films seriously, they—as if by magic—become as serious as can be. Understood as an endeavor shared by students and teachers, teaching gives us the space, the time, and the will to take things seriously.
I try to manage the second condition before a class meets. I want, on the one hand, to come to class prepared, to know the material, to have thought in advance about potential student questions and concerns. On the other hand, I don't want that preparation to settle things in advance, to limit the directions in which my thinking and my students' thinking might unexpectedly go. This is to manage the difficult task of coming to class ready to engage in a careful, open, and learned way with what my students make me realize I haven't thought yet.
The third condition has to do with what happens in the classroom, and this brings me back to my student's sense of me as a teacher who values argument. Arguments aren't found; they are made. Because one of my goals as a teacher is to help my students to recognize and to make arguments, I try explicitly to model making them. This means both that I want to foreground the method or the architecture behind the claims that I make about a novel, a poem or a moment in literary history and that I want the classroom to be a space where my students and I can make new, unexpected, and unfinished arguments as we go. This means that we might need to abandon paths that seemed promising or that we might end up in surprising places. As long, though, as we as a class keep in mind that we are always in the midst of a shared process of making arguments and ideas, those arguments and ideas—whether airtight or wild and wooly—help make the really difficult work of really free thought all the more possible.