My teaching is inextricably bound up with my intellectual life, which is, at its best, passionate, committed, and intense. Through aptitude, a complex set of historical circumstances, and an enormous measure of luck, I find myself doing something I care about deeply; if one looks around with a cool eye, one quickly realizes how poignantly rare that is. It pains me—genuinely, almost physically—to waste a fraction of such an opportunity, to engage in teaching or research in a merely dutiful or mechanical way, to exchange a chance to think for a set of comfortable platitudes. My worst faults as a teacher are a consequence of this pain: I am always tempted to cram too much into a class or a conversation, to talk to too many people in too short a time, to speak too rapidly, to assume too much. But I have, though it sounds fatuous to say so, improved over the years; moreover, and more important, my gifts as a teacher also arise from my fierce desire not to waste, for myself or my students, such a remarkable opportunity.

I cannot endure to log hours teaching "background" or "preliminary" material, but this does not at all mean that I am only truly happy when I am teaching an advanced graduate seminar. It means that I try very hard, when I am teaching introductory courses, to turn background into foreground, and preliminary into essential, that is, to recover a primary relationship to the texts or the skills I am teaching. I do not try to strip away what I already know and return myself imaginatively to the level of my students; on the contrary, I do my best to know more than they do about the subjects I am teaching. But I need to convince myself that I am stretching my capacity to understand, that I am actually learning something, if I hope to help my students to learn.

I like teaching students who are encountering fundamental and deeply important material for the first time. Even in more advanced courses, I try very hard to get my students not to take anything for granted, to look at familiar things as if they were opaque and in need of explication. One of the greatest obstacles to serious and original thought about literature, I have found, is a comfortable sense of transparency—as if one could look through a text from the past and discover, in perfect form, one or another ideological formula that particularly appeals to us at this moment. Beginning students are less likely than more sophisticated students to collapse what they are encountering into a premature and facile familiarity. They feel intensely the sheer distance between themselves and the figures they are studying, and I cherish that distance. With my more advanced students, I must work to recreate and intensify it.

Paradoxically, perhaps, I value such courses because there come moments for almost all of the students in which they suddenly reach out across this vast distance, touch one of the figures, and know that something powerful and strange has happened. We are so accustomed, through sophistication and self-protection, to glaze everything we say about ourselves with irony that it is difficult for me to express what I feel at such moments: I feel that I have functioned as a kind of shaman; I have helped the spirits of the dead to speak, and I have helped my students to understand their speech and even, in some sense, to answer. There is, I recognize, something vaguely ridiculous about such feelings—a middle-class shaman in a coat and tie!—yet I overcome my diffidence by reflecting on the fact that we too often routinize and flatten out that which is most remarkable about our profession. That, with my help, a sixteenth-century English poet can sing his verses to a twentieth-century Californian continually fills me with wonder. There is for me, in such moments, a small, temporary victory over death.

Revised: 1993