My goal is to give the student the basis for a knowledgeable and informed but independent relation to the text. In each course, at whatever level, I mark my success by the extent to which I can imagine myself as having vanished into thin air at the end, leaving each student fully able to carry on teaching him/herself.

To prepare for one's own demise means not only to give the student reasonable grounding in necessary background and in how to read the text but also to enable the student to feel that he or she can have an independent relation to the text, that he or she has something to say. This enabling process is at the center of my teaching. It depends in part on my own stance as a critic: as a psychoanalytic and feminist critic, I am always concerned to find a way of explaining my own responses to literature and to find a language that will enable one to talk about response without mushy-headed (or hearted)-ness. I try to create an atmosphere in the classroom and in office hours where students will feel able to take intellectual and emotional risks, to press beyond what they already know or what they think they're supposed to think is right. They see me giving detailed textual evidence for my views and know that they too will be required to give such evidence; but they also know that interpretation is an open-ended process and that their interpretations too will grow and change. (In a recent lecture class, I talked very openly about how my interpretations had changed; many of the students told me that they found these discussions of interpretative process the most useful single aspect of the class.) By enabling students to articulate their own responses, I try to give them a basis for talking about the text in a way that will continue to matter to them; by demonstrating the extent to which acts of interpretation are necessarily isolated moments in a long process, I try to free them from the constricting effect of feeling that they have to know already everything that they will ever know. Because this emphasis on enabling goes hand in hand with a very strong emphasis on logical argumentation and on textual evidence, students learn that they can take risks and still meet the requirements of rigorously logical exposition. They learn too that they can talk about the issues that most matter to them without abandoning clarity or analytical rigor.

One student in a recent class told me at the semester's end, "You know, you've only taught me one thing this semester: that under every question there's another question, and another one under that, and that you have to keep on asking them." No praise could have pleased me more. Most of the students whom I teach—even the graduate students, in this job market—are not going to become professors of English. But they are going to go on thinking and reading and caring about what they read; if I can teach them to be deeply engaged with texts and to express their engagement with precision and rigor, I feel that I can safely disappear at the end of the semester.