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Edward Jayne
December 15, 1992

My teaching experience extends back to 1962, thirty years ago, and it involved having taught in one capacity or another at fourteen institutions of higher learning, including three junior colleges, one private college, three major American universities, two major German universities, one Brazilian university, and four state universities--in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan. I have taught a large variety of courses, and there has been almost as much variety in my approach to teaching as dictated by the circumstances and curriculum needs of the departments in which I have taught. Instead of recounting my record backwards to 1962, I want to emphasize the cumulative advancement of my experience by starting from the very beginning.

With an M.A. in English from Berkeley and brand-new teaching credentials for the State of California, I began teaching in 1962-63 on two successive one-semester contracts, respectively at the College of San Mateo and Modesto Junior College. In my very first semester of teaching, at San Mateo, a suburban junior college, I was assigned a total of 165 students in basic composition, remedial composition, sub-remedial composition, and spelling (also a sub-remedial course). All my texts were composition handbooks except for the required standard anthology, Toward a Liberal Education, which was as much an education to me as my students. As a composition teacher, I was expected to feature the structuralist approach to syntax as explained by Paul Roberts, supplemented when useful by both the traditional and transformational grammars. In my next semester, at Modesto Junior College, a central valley school that served a large rural area, I taught the introduction to literature as well as composition. In my composition classes I was expected to feature rhetoric and logic as presented in the required Brooks and Warren text, Understanding Rhetoric, augmented by a unit on the fallacies. I remember having taught the enthymeme with enthusiasm.

From 1963 to 1965, I taught at Oakland City College--what might be described as a tough inner-city school--just when the Black Panther Party, the core of what became the nationwide Black Panther Movement, first mobilized on campus. I befriended a couple of its members in my classes, including Richard Aoki, its first information minister (before Cleaver), with whom I had numerous friendly but heated discussions about politics. As expected by the English department, I taught basic and remedial composition with an emphasis on paragraph structure, as well as one course in American literature--a "plum"--the first advanced literature course I was able to teach at the college level. One semester I also taught at Hayward State College an evening course in composition with a paragraph-structure approach as taught at Oakland City College.

From 1965 through 1968, I served as an instructor at Humboldt State University (then, College). Again, I taught composition courses, but from an eclectic approach combining most of the materials I had learned at the three junior colleges. On an emergency basis, I also taught a creative writing course, one of the easiest and most satisfying courses I have ever dealt with, and I taught courses in the early and late history of the British novel, a field which at that time seemed my destined specialization. My student evaluations were among the highest at the university, and the difference between my evaluations in the two categories tabulated--students with cumulative 2.5+ and 2.5- GPAs (which was actually calculated in the distribution of evaluation forms)--was the very highest at the university. My 2.5- GPA students liked my classes well enough, but my 2.5+ GPA students were very enthusiastic indeed--partly, I suspect, because of my controversial role on campus as the primary faculty advisor and/or campus contact person of all the major California peace groups (including the VDC, VS, CLR, CNP, SDS, and PFM). I helped organize numerous rallies and debates, and later ran for office as a Peace and Freedom candidate, the only one in California's northern coastal region. I was a local celebrity constantly mentioned in the campus newspaper, one issue having somehow included me in every article but one, not counting the sports page. I had become a very electric young man (have since burned out), and everybody--myself included--breathed a sigh of relief when I returned to graduate school to obtain my Ph.D.

My new interest in politics primarily dictated my decision to attend SUNY at Buffalo for a Ph.D. with a Marxist emphasis in literary criticism, but political issues very quickly shifted to critical issues. During my two years at Buffalo between 1968 and 1970, the SUNY at Buffalo English department was generally considered the most innovative in the nation, and I was able to work with such critics as Fiedler, Holland and Abel--the latter, especially--in acquainting myself with current French and American trends in literary criticism. I also served as an instructor connected with a SUNY-based federal project for teaching in the inner cities--but without actually teaching there. My seminars were in the teaching of composition at inner-city schools, and I lectured to all the undergraduate students in the project on the potential use--not much, it turns out--of transformational linguistics at these schools.

From 1970 through 1977 I was an assistant professor on tenure track at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Here I taught a wide variety of courses --both graduate and undergraduate--including Advanced Composition, History of Criticism, Current Trends in Criticism, Theory of Tragedy, Literature and Psychology, Modern American Poetry, Dreams and Literature, Literature and Alienation, Literature and Paranoia, American Fiction in the Fifties and Sixties, Literary Deception, the Temptress Archetype, and a study group in Psychometrics and Literary Criticism, with MMPI and 16PF data gathered from as many students as possible.

Linked with my first seminar in literary criticism, I organized and moderated a panel discussion on psychoanalytic criticism that included Norman Holland, Simon Lesser, Leonard Mannheim, and Leo Marx, the latter as an unsympathetic critic of the psychoanalytic approach. My Frost paper, "Mending Wall," published by College English, was based on the response to this panel discussion by my students and myself in our literary criticism seminar later that day, and my article was still later included as chapter 4 in Negative Poetics.

In my course on the Temptress Archetype ("The Love Goddess"), attended by over a hundred students, most of them female, we collectively wrote a soft-core pornographic novel in less than a month. A large volunteer committee established the profile of the main characters and devised the sequence of encounters, each having its own chapter, so students who wished to participate could compete in writing particular chapters. Later, the volunteer committee chose the best versions of all the chapters and stitched them together, thereby producing a very bad novel we could all be proud of.

In my Literature and Paranoia class, we calculated our paranoid tendencies as well as possible by using the Pa scale of the MMPI and supportive scales of the 16PF, and then investigated the paranoid appeal of certain texts based on our response to them. The information I gathered in this class later provided the basis for my Genre article on paranoia and literature and, still later, chapter 5 of Negative Poetics. In my psychometric study group we gathered and studied extensive psychometric data more or less on a random exploratory basis. Perhaps the most dramatic discovery was the fascinating reverse correlation, that, as to be expected, male students with relatively high psychopathic tendencies as measured by scale 4 on the MMPI enjoyed violence and pornography more than those with lower scores, but--unexpectedly--that females who likewise scored high on scale 4 were more offended by violence and pornography than those with lower scores. It seemed that males and females with elevated psychopathic scores were at each other's throats, while the relatively normal males tended to be uncomfortable about violence and pornography, and the relatively normal females tended to be mildly curious about them. Unfortunately, too many of our subjects were directly and indirectly involved in conducting our experiment, so our results were tentative at best, and I did not have the opportunity to confirm them in later, more rigorous experiments.

From 1971 to 1973, while with the U.Mass. English department, I was also associated with the Brooklyn Career Opportunity Program (COP), the largest federal project nationwide for the education of inner city minority secondary school teachers. Specifically, our task was to help two hundred Afro-American junior high school paraprofessionals to obtain New York State Teachers Credentials. During my first year with the project, I served as one of the U.Mass. professors who flew in and out of La Guardia Airport to teach literature and remedial composition to these paraprofessionals in Tuesday evening classes at a junior high school in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district. During my second year with the project, I also served as the English Director of the program and helped to revise its composition classes to meet the needs of our students more realistically. The most sensitive of my tasks was to isolate the twenty or thirty paraprofessionals with the most basic problems in composition (for example the recognition of whole words, onefro mthen ext) and then to perform triage by bringing these students into a class I myself taught so I could eliminate from the program all those who could not be expected to pass the exams for obtaining teachers credentials. In the end I passed almost everybody in my section, and almost all of them later obtained their credentials, probably through an arrangement between HEW and the New York City school system.

During the 1973-74 academic year, I served as an exchange professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany based on a continuing arrangement between the U.Mass. English Department and the Freiburg Department in American Studies. I taught both graduate and undergraduate seminars in American literature as to be understood from the European perspective. It was a pleasure trying to explain American culture to outsiders, and I can still recall intense rapport with my students, whose attitude toward our culture I almost entirely shared. When each of my graduate seminars ended, as was customary at Freiburg, everybody went to beer halls located not more than two or three blocks away, where discussion continued with even greater animation.

The U.Mass. English Department featured pedagogical experimentation during the early seventies, and it was generally perceived that I took advantage of this freedom as much as anybody in the department--much to my disfavor, it seems, despite my excellent student evaluations, when a new chairman was elected and the 1976 bloodbath took place in tenure decisions. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I also served on perhaps a dozen Ph.D. dissertation committees for the English and Education Departments.

During my year's experience as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in 1977-78, I taught the standard courses in tragedy, Shakespeare, and literary criticism. In an introductory class in literature I gathered the short-term memory data I later used for my Style article. I partipated in three public forums: a lecture I presented on retention overload in the short-term memory of poetry; a debate with David Bleich about his approach to reader response criticism; and a lecture I presented explaining the negative dialectic I found at the root of literary experience. Here my later theory of literary form in Negative Poetics was already percolating, though I did not yet tie it in with deception by linking denial and negation with the lie.

During my year's experience as a substitute full professor at the University of Santa Catarina in 1978-79--in what at that time was the best American studies program in Brasil--I taught undergraduate survey courses in American literature and graduate seminars upon Joseph Conrad and Contemporary Literary Criticism. I scheduled three special events linked with my criticism seminar: a debate about literary value with Hugh Fox, a Fulbright visiting professor from Michigan State, based on his just-published novel, Honeymoon Mom; a presentation upon literary deception that later became the second chapter of my recent book, Negative Poetics; and a mini-conference on the American literary experience that featured Leslie Fiedler from SUNY at Buffalo plus Hugh Fox and a Fulbright professor from Rio de Janeiro--a young poet who otherwise taught at Princeton. I organized this conference and participated in two of its sessions.

While at Florianopolis, I taught an extension course in American literature at Joinville, a hundred miles to the north, and I flew to visit and evaluate a university English department in Porto Allegre. Perhaps most important, I also organized a system for funneling current publications in the United States to my graduate students in Florianopolis. I used my twenty-year collection of MLA bibliographies plus close liason with a cooperative bookstore in Massachusetts (the Odyssey) and my connections with former graduate students in Amherst to obtain with relative ease the books and xeroxed copies of articles needed for my students' M.A. dissertations. As a result, there was a dramatic improvement in the quality of research performed by graduate students in our department. I would have gladly remained in Brasil for the rest of my teaching career, but there was no guarantee that my position would or could be made permanent, and mounting family needs took precedence over my sense of professional accomplishment. As a result, I very reluctantly resigned my position at Santa Catarina and returned to the United States in the summer of 1979 without any definite prospects for a teaching position the following semester.

In the fall semester of 1979, I served as a temporary part-time instructor at Westfield State College in Massachusetts by teaching two basic composition courses as expected by the English Department. During my next semester's experience at Colby College in Maine (spring, 1980), I taught a survey course in American literature and two composition courses with a thematic emphasis on violence and literature. For these courses, I brought in a variety of interesting speakers, including a brain physiologist, a Harvard expert on the effects of heroin, and an exotic S & M poet who both read her poetry and vividly recounted the experience it was based on (lesbian rape, a stabbing, dominatrix lashings, attempted homicide, etc.), occasionally exhaling smoke at my students from her colorful Russian cigarettes. Her presentation perfectly suited the course, but it was more than I had bargained for.

In 1980 I was hired at Western Michigan University on a tenure-track assistant professorship. For my first seven years at WMU, I taught a variety of courses, including English 105 (Scientific Writing), 110 (Literary Interpretation), 305 (Practical Writing), 365 (Reviewing for the Press), 369 (Writing for Elementary Teachers), 372 (Development of Modern English), and 464 (Professional Writing). In Reviewing for the Press, I was able to edit and publish a large number of my students' reviews in the Kalamazoo News. In my advanced professional writing class, I experimented with a zero-sum profile of syntactic competence based on a tabulation of the syntactic habits of my students as compared to those of the authors they wanted to imitate. My purpose was to determine what adjustments would be needed to narrow the gap in syntactic versatility (more than generally recognized) between my students and these authors without altogether sacrificing my students' personal voice. Unfortunately, I was forced to shelve the experiment when the semester ended, but I eventually hope to return to it with the view of publishing my results. While on my Fulbright in 1988, I lectured on this zero-sum approach to a small group of linguists and their students at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and they were encouraging about the concept and its possibilities in the teaching of composition.

During my year's experience (1987-88) as a Fulbright Professor in the Amerika-Institut at the University of Munich, I taught undergraduate lecture courses in Contemporary American Poetry and American transcendentalism, and two graduate seminars in the theory of criticism in which the level of sophistication was often quite remarkable. Along with Frankfurt and Berlin, Munich is one of the three best and most prestigious American Studies programs in Germany, and my students ---among the best in Germany--were entirely comfortable with the most challenging concepts in contemporary literary criticism. Logical, systematic, and persistently argumentative, they were a total pleasure to work with. Two of my graduate students received additional credit for examining my manuscript Negative Poetics one chapter at a time and debating my ideas with me in weekly sessions over the course of a semester. Many of their arguments led to revisions on my part. I also gave a final public lecture about my experience as an activist during the sixties, and the attendance at my lecture included my Munich students and colleagues as well as a group of WMU students in a continental European art tour led by Larry Tenharmsel. Since then I have returned to Germany twice. In January, 1989, I went on a lecture tour dealing with the issue of academic neoconservatism in the United States (the basis for my paper, "Academic Jeremiad," published by Change magazine). I spoke at five schools, but my audience in Munich was the biggest and perhaps the most appreciative. In June, 1989, I returned to Germany as a participant in a Berlin conference upon the reunification of Germany sponsored by the International Educational Exchange. Based on this experience I participated in three colloquiums at WMU and K College upon the problems of reunification, making predictions that have pretty much come true.

Since returning from Munich to WMU, I have been teaching basically three courses for the English Department, English 112 (Literary Classics), English 310 (Literary History and Criticism), and English 615 (Literary Criticism)--the latter a graduate seminar based on the approach I used at Munich. I also taught a one-shot English 510 seminar in literary criticism that gave more emphasis to practical criticism as a supplement to critical theory. The year before last, I likewise taught English 111 for the Honors Program with an emphasis on current American fiction. My students seemed unusually bright, so I taught the course as it used to be taught back in the early sixties--to shake them up and force them to think for themselves. I pursued this approach so aggressively that some were taken a little aback, but now, I'm told, a few of them are trying to figure out a way to work up another honors seminar with me.

In my English 310 sections on English Literary History and Criticism, I mostly rely on the Norton anthology of major British authors to teach English literature from Chaucer to Joyce and Lawrence. In English 615 seminars on the theory of criticism, I have been using a variety of texts (Richter, Lentricchia, Leitch, and Abrams--now also the St. Martin's Press case study of The Heart of Darkness) to explore the history of criticism from Aristotle to the neo-Marxist, response-theory, and post-structuralist critics in vogue today. To clarify my arguments, I often xerox and distribute my own articles and papers, and my students keep weekly notebooks that add up to as many as a hundred pages of dense critical speculation supplementing their final research papers. This is the course I enjoy the most--an extension and culmination of the literary criticism courses I have taught at Massachusetts, Munich, and Santa Catarina. Of course I am biased, but I cannot imagine anybody, anywhere, teaching the course better--at least with more pleasure--than I do.

My English 112 classes in the literary classics have been taught on a lecture basis before auditoriums with between 120 and 220 students. I trace a literary tradition extending from Gilgamesh and the Akkadian creation myth through the Hellenic and Hebraic traditions to Shakespeare, Flaubert, and modern fiction. My students are mostly entering freshmen, so I try to expose them to college experience as being more free-thinking and intellectually demanding than anything they encountered at the high school level. For one hundred minutes non-stop twice a week, I lecture extemporaneously--but in well organized sentences and paragraphs and with a clear sense of what needs to be said. I emphasize the usual literary issues associated with each of the particular texts, but I have increasingly linked these texts with each other based on their implied attitude toward the nuclear family--both its pursuit and its avoidance. Quite by accident, the family romance has become a central issue--the subtext that links Christ with Hamlet and Emma Bovary, Ishtar with Ophelia and the disturbed narrator of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. Questions and comments are encouraged from the group with the understanding that contributors will be awarded accordingly in their final grades. This semester, I have also held extra study sessions on most Fridays. When I began teaching the course three years ago, my quizzes consisted of multiple-choice questions, but last year I shifted to essay questions--the same as in my midterms and final exams.

My student evaluations in English 112 might seem less impressive than my evaluations for other courses. However, there are important extenuating circumstances. My classes are necessarily taught on a lecture basis before large groups of students (this semester, two sections with approximately 140 students apiece), so my evaluations should be compared with those of other such sections taught before groups of a comparable size. Unavoidably, there is much less interpersonal dialogue--little chance for doing what seems useful (calling students by their names, for example) to improve one's student ratings on the 9 and 10 scales of our department's student evaluation forms. Moreover, I have kept my overall student GPA for my 112 sections in the neighborhood of 2.5, one of the lowest course GPAs--if not the lowest--in the department. Such standards are appropriate for lecture courses before freshman non-majors with relatively undeveloped verbal skills, but my student evaluations necessarily reflect this GPA difference. Moreover, I want to expose my students to what I find exciting in literature, not just its basic plots and themes or its conventional powers of affirmation. As a result, my critical emphasis might be offensive to some of my students --I hope a relatively small minority of them. To reach my best and most potentially enthusiastic students, I necessarily accept the risk of displeasing these others, though I try to cushion their displeasure as much as possible.

Finally, I gather my student evaluations on the very last day of classes, when attendence is as high as possible. As a result, students with attendance problems are more likely to be included in the totals, and of course their evaluations can be expected to be more critical. But if the variables of class size, GPA totals, intellectual risk, and evaluation totals relative to the total size of the class are calculated, I am confident that my English 112 student evaluations are excellent as compared to others in similar lecture courses for the department and university as a whole. Some of my students do catch fire--and that's what I want, even if it means their being a little singed around the edges at times.

So what exactly is my philosophy of teaching? When I returned to Arcata, California, a couple of years ago to visit some of my former Humboldt State College students still living there, I was given a grand tour of the region by Jack Sheridan, who back in the sixties had served as chairman of the Young Republicans, vice president of the student body, and, two years later (after three of my classes), the first president of SDS. With enough spare time on his hands to share in my nostalgic visit, Jack included in our itinerary my favorite cove beach a few miles up the coast. We parked at the top of a cliff, worked our way down to the sand, and took off our shoes to let our feet breathe. When a wave receded, we raced to an available rock; when the next wave receded, we advanced to a rock beyond, and when a later wave receded, we were able to make it to a small rock perhaps thirty yards off shore. Isolated from continental America by what seemed an acre of churning water, Jack finally felt free to blurt out the potentially embarrassing question, "What's it really like to be teaching in the midwest?" I asked if he remembered how spontaneous our classes had been back in the sixties in California, and he declared he certainly did. "Well," said I, "back east, in New England, one must instead be intellectually adequate to one's ideas. Knowledge and intelligence are emphasized rather than creativity." "But what about the midwest?" Jack persisted. "That's entirely different, too," I answered, "What's emphasized there is organization--everything must be organized--syllabuses, for example, and office hours. Everything gets spelled out." "Gad," cried Jack, "How can you stand it?" "No problem," said I, "And in fact I've come to like it." After a pause I added, "The best way to teach in my opinion is to combine all three approaches: to be both spontaneous and organized, but also intellectually adequate to what I am trying to teach." "Oh yeah?" "Yeah, really."

To this day I continue to stand by my purpose as a teacher that I shared with Jack at the edge of the Pacific. In my classes I try never to be so organized that I cannot lapse into spontaneity, but never so spontaneous that everything said cannot be subsumed to the organization of what I am trying to convey to my students. And I do try to keep up on relevant scholarship--to know as much as I can about what I am teaching, and to be able to synthesize it with anything else that might be suggested in class. What's left includes the compassion I learned in junior colleges and the pursuit of objectivity I learned abroad, as well as the chemistry of the particular classroom situation--sometimes excellent, sometimes less satisfying. But I do always try.