I am for some reason going to try to write a blog on CUNY’s platform. Mostly I think I’m doing it to motivate myself to get some writing done during this academic year. I’ve cranked out a few articles in the last year, but now bigger projects are off the back burner and I have to get cracking, which is both exciting and a little daunting.
In any case, the title of the blog comes from a quote from one of Flaubert’s letters that I often put on syllabi to promote reading for pleasure to my students. In a letter to Leroyer de Chantepie, Flaubert said something pretty awesome. I’m going from memory here and don’t know the French, but the quote is roughly, “Do not read as children do for amusement, or, as the ambitious do for instruction. No, read in order to live.”
Read because it makes you more alive. Pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Educate yourself as the very purpose of life, rather than a preparation, to paraphrase John Dewey. These ideas are all of a piece for me as a teacher and scholar. I’m skeptical of the utilitarian bias towards STEM fields for, paradoxically, a utilitarian reason. If you don’t enjoy the process of education it just makes it that much harder to accomplish all the challenging and demanding work that a college education requires.
Not that Flaubert was thinking about such matters. He was just a pretty smart guy, who wrote a few things (to put it mildly). When I decided to start taking literature courses in college and maybe double major after feeling like there wasn’t enough qualitative writing in the music curriculum I had been taking, I fatefully was assigned Madame Bovary in the first class I took in the literature dept at UC Santa Cruz. What a novel! More than 10 years later I had one of my favorite experiences teaching Madame Bovary at QCC. In between those two readings of the novel, I read a lot of other things, some by Flaubert, and got a Ph.D. with an emphasis in literary and film theory, along with Romanticism broadly understood. Going back to Flaubert reminded me that all that stuff was nothing if you can’t convince students who aren’t there yet that they just need to start enjoying literature in the first place.
Okay, enough with the stump speech! But yeah for Flaubert!
