Tag: literature

Vocation and Life Studies

The final post in this series discusses how creative writing pedagogy can benefit vocational education. It emphasizes the importance of life stories in addressing students’ identity crises and fears about the future. By studying the lives of various figures, students can gain insights into their own unpredictable journeys, learning that success often comes from embracing unexpected paths and overcoming failures.

The final post in a series on what creative writing pedagogy has to offer vocational teaching in any discipline.

Teaching and advising creative writing students can mean dealing with frequent identity crises. “But how do I become a real writer?” my students often ask. “How do I get published?” they want to know, or, “How can I pay my rent while pursuing my art?” Instructors of other disciplines may be able to relate, with students doubting their abilities to become a skilled enough doctor, lawyer, or engineer. “Do I really have what it takes to go to med school?” they might ask, or, “How do I choose between my passions and a job that pays the bills?”

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Hope through Connection V: Becoming Ourselves in Community

In a gateway course at St. Norbert College, community-building enhances students’ vocational exploration. Through personal conferences, peer mentorship, and intentional interactions, this gateway course fosters trust and support. This class helps students discover their voices and lays a foundation for meaningful relationships and learning, emphasizing that vocation flourishes within community contexts.

Imagine starting your semester by asking your students, “Who inspired you as a child or teen? What lessons did they offer?” Or ending the course with this question: “What kind of world would you like to leave behind for future generations? How can you start to shape that world now?” Drawn from NetVUE’s Conversation Cards, these questions have set the stage for community-building in our gateway course for the English major at St. Nobert College. It may feel like such conversations are off topic, even a tangent. But we—Deirdre, the course’s professor, and Caroline, her student—give you permission to do this. We assure you that it will pay off.

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Hope Through Connection IV: Scholarly Conversation and the Real Work of Building a Meaningful Life

At St. Norbert College, an English gateway course integrates literary scholarship with vocational reflection. Professor Deirdre Egan-Ryan and her student Caroline Van Sistine discuss how this approach reshaped students’ understanding of literature and their personal callings. Reading texts on vocation led to deeper academic engagement, community building, and a redefined sense of purpose within their studies.

A series of posts on integrating vocation into a gateway course for the major, featuring conversations between a professor and her student.

Deirdre and Caroline

One of the biggest challenges we faced at St. Norbert College when we redesigned our gateway course for English majors was deciding how much scholarship from the field to include. Our answer? We scaffold engagement with research by asking students to integrate literary criticism selectively into a short research paper, saving more comprehensive methodological investigations for later courses. We also introduce the scholarship of vocation into our discussions about calling and literary studies. Creating this vocational context has helped our students cultivate deeper meaning within the major and set them on journeys of increasing purpose, embedded in community.

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Toni Morrison and the Call to Imagine

Perhaps it is less clear, or less clearly stated, however, that robust career preparation requires the intentional and focused cultivation of the imagination—the ability to dream, speculate, and create the world not as it is but as it might and should be.

Throughout my time as a college educator, the purpose of higher education has become more and more tied to career preparation. This is not news to anyone. The shift to career preparation has been explained, re-explained, and debated by many of us for the last decade with few surprises along the way, save for the occasional fresh takes like Dan Barrett’s recovery of what he calls “The Day the Purpose of College Changed.”

In many ways, the attention and resources being given to career services align with best practices and offer holistic care for students as learners and as people. Colleges and universities must take career preparation seriously not only to recruit and retain students and thus survive this era of uncertainty but also to support students’ intellectual, social, mental, and economic wellness. Career preparation is, in my mind, a matter of justice in higher education today. It is also, however, too often narrowly designed and practiced.

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Seeking the Irrelevant

By shifting from the individual to the whole, from the relevant to the irrelevant, from the “mine” to the “not mine”—by replacing the question “Who are you?” with the questions “Who are we?” and “Who can we be?”—we experienced a sense of community well beyond the walls of our classroom that relieved the isolation and the pressure for a few moments, which was profound.

I spent much of the past month reading essays by Marilynne Robinson with a small group of first-year undergraduate students. By way of the essays in When I Was a Child I Read Books, we talked about Moses, John Calvin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson; we explored questions of character, virtue, beauty, community, and the soul; and we worked hard—very, very hard at times—just to understand Robinson’s prose let alone to care about or enjoy her bold attachment for such long-dead and seemingly irrelevant things.

And yet, as Robinson says of her own early reading life, which was filled with books on Carthage, Constantinople, and the Cromwell revolution, “relevance was precisely not an issue” (85). Robinson describes reading as a way to roam meditatively and unassumingly through far-away stories, histories, experiences, and ideas, regardless of whether or not they were, in Robinson’s terms, “mine” or “not mine.” In fact, reading and meditating on the irrelevant became a way for Robinson to decenter herself, to dissolve herself, and to roam freely and joyfully away from herself and toward what might be called the “cosmic.”  

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Called to Endings

We cannot know the future. But to interpret our lives or to judge the best mode of action at any given moment requires us to consider that future—to imagine possible ends, to “project ourselves [. . .] past the End” like the poets.

During my graduate coursework in the late 1990s, Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction was revelatory for me. Published in 1966, it certainly wasn’t part of any hot, new direction in Victorian studies; it couldn’t even be described as canonical at the time. But it was vital for my own scholarly trajectory in its examination of our need for endings and how narratives play with temporality and shape our experiences both of reading and of living.

I’ve been thinking about endings a lot over the past year, prompted no doubt by the death of a parent and by my choosing to give up one of my administrative appointments, but also by our new realities in the post-pandemic academy. Perhaps it seems odd to consider endings just as we approach or anticipate the start of the new academic year—new classes, new students, new colleagues. But endings are bound up in beginnings, and to recognize their importance in our interpretive work brings vocational clarity. To begin anything is, paradoxically, to begin its ending.

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Genuine Callings Support Each Other

Genuine duties support each other. We might put it into vocational language by saying that genuine callings support each other. Our families can motivate and support our educations; our educations can enrich and support our families.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first edition

Victor Frankenstein is the most irritating protagonist I’ve ever met. Yet I love teaching Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and exploring the questions it raises, questions not only of what Victor creates but the process by which he creates it. Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein is no doctor, but a college student who deals with a predictable college student issue: keeping in touch with home. As he fails to visit or even write to his family, he remembers his father’s words: “I know that while you are pleased with yourself, you will think of us with affection and we shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected.”

“Is his father right?” I ask my students. Is failing to write really a sign that he’s neglecting his other duties? His work is what’s keeping him from writing. Isn’t his research also a duty, deserving focus? Is it even possible to do his kind of work and do other things, like keeping up his family relationships, at the same time? 

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The Anxiety of Choice

As we give students choices, we need to be present with them, too, in whatever times and ways we can.

One semester in college, I earned an A-minus in private organ lessons. That minus annoyed me: I practiced my required hours and did what I was told to do. But I’d hit a stage at which I wasn’t told what to do on a crucial point: namely, how to set the stops for a piece. I had to choose for myself: Viole or flute? Trumpet or krummhorn? I balked. Hence the minus.

Despite their predictable chafing for freedom—the freedom to make choices—students often get stuck at the same place I did. They don’t actually want to make choices; they want someone else to make choices for them. This creates an obvious problem for discerning, let alone responding to, a vocation. In this post I will suggest some common reasons that we reject freedom of choice as well as some theological and practical means for overcoming these obstacles to embrace that freedom, making vocation possible.

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Staying Home with Jane Austen

Empathy is a curious thing. As a scholar of historical literature, I often point to it as a justification for the existence of my field. Studying Jane Austen’s novels is hardly a practical area of study, even in the best of times, and can seem downright frivolous in a year marked by the murder of George Floyd, a global pandemic, and an historic election. But literature also cultivates, in elusive and remarkable ways, the kind of empathy our world so deeply needs right now. 

Let me share one example. This spring, I was scheduled to lead a Jane Austen Book Club at our local public library. With Kate Hamill’s new stage adaptation of Emma scheduled for its world premiere at the Guthrie Theater in April, and a new film adaptation also set for release this spring, we planned group outings to see both following weekly discussions on each volume of Austen’s novel. The spirited group of mostly retirees—some of whom collectively researched forgotten women in history together to satiate their curiosity between book clubs—adapted to the online discussions gracefully. I pulled out my tried-and-true discussion guides and thought only of the change in style of our conversation, not anticipating one of substance. But for me, after reading this book many times and settling into an easy familiarity with it, Emma suddenly felt new again. 

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