Tag: literature

Teaching Shakespeare as Vocational Formation

The writer reflects on her complex relationship with teaching Shakespeare, acknowledging a history of not fully understanding his work. However, through teaching, she’s realized Shakespeare’s plays prompt essential vocational reflections and discussions about life’s ambiguities. These challenges evoke meaningful insights for students, shaping their perspectives on personal struggles and societal issues.

The Cobbe Portrait of William Shakespeare (circa 1610), public domain.

The first post in a series on Shakespeare, pedagogy, and the power of literature to help us navigate ambiguity.

I am a teacher of Shakespeare with a fraught relationship with the Bard. Every time I walk into my upper-level Shakespeare seminar, I hear notes of vocational dissonance, and my imposter syndrome surges.

This tension may have begun when I received a lower-than-expected grade on my Hamlet paper in the ninth grade. Or maybe because most of the performances of his work that I saw before adulthood (and after, if I’m honest) left me feeling like I didn’t quite understand what was going on. Even as I completed my dissertation on 16th-century British literature, my advisor had to nudge me: “You know, you should really let Shakespeare make an appearance.” I did, but reluctantly.

My resistance to Shakespeare wasn’t a response to his canonicity or to problematic depictions of sex, gender, or race—though these issues can be good reasons to evaluate when and how we teach his plays. Perhaps like others who feel pressured by our culture to like Shakespeare but don’t particularly enjoy or understand his work, I resisted him because his plays resisted my interpretive grasp.

My attitude shifted only after I started teaching his plays. I discovered that these interpretive gaps are often what make his work compelling to students, and they give Shakespeare vocational vitality, even today.

As Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies reminds us, literature of all kinds can nurture vocational exploration and discernment. For David Cunningham, fiction, poetry, and plays have the vocational power to shape faith and to shepherd us through suffering. Literature is full of stories and characters that evoke meaningful conversations on what it means to live a good and purposeful life.

But even beyond what literature says and depicts, the interpretive process itself can also evoke vocational reflection. Moments of difficulty—ambiguities, contradictions, lack of resolutions—become opportunities to wrestle with and return to, postures that can be vocationally formative. After all, our vocations are often circuitous and marked by doubt and uncertainty, as David Youland and Younus Mirza attest.

By vocation, I mean an expansive sense of calling—all the places, people, purposes, and processes that invite our presence, labor, and energy. Some of these are chosen callings; others may have been inadvertently acquired; and still others we may prefer to discard. To adapt a line about greatness from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Some are born to vocations; some achieve vocations; and some have vocations thrust upon them.”

Together, these callings shape our time, work, and leisure, and we spend much of our lives trying to negotiate their competing claims on us. Often these vocations leave us seeking the ever-elusive “balance” as we find ourselves stuck in the messy middle, not entirely sure how we got here or what step to take next. This reality is no less true of our professional lives than it is of our faith, friendships, marriages, parenting, or civic responsibilities—all those spheres where ambiguity and irresolution thrive. As Paul Burmeister reminds us, our vocations are dynamic and ambiguous, requiring a “fluidity of discernment.”

And so it is that I beckon my students to literature where they witness and wrestle with this murkiness, stretching interpretive muscles they’ll exercise across their vocational lives. And Shakespeare, I’ve found, is especially fruitful for this formation, a topic which Jason Stevens has also explored.

man holding and looking at a human skull
Photo by Никита Кригер on Pexels.com

Shakespeare’s plays are full of complicated depictions of agency, power, abuse, scandal, and sacrifice, themes that play out in the realms of sex, religion, politics, injustice, and tragedy. In watching characters discuss and embody different ways of understanding these ideas, students are compelled not by tidy endings and resolved tensions—we find little of such moments in Shakespeare’s canon, after all—but to the messy display of human dynamics that resist easy solutions and obvious answers.

Last spring, as my students reflected on what their study of Shakespeare had taught them, it wasn’t his poetic prowess or the riveting train wreck of Tudor-era politics that compelled them most. Instead, it was his surprising way of illuminating what they find most puzzling and problematic about their own present realities.

For one student, King Lear became a lens for processing the grief of losing grandparents to dementia. Another student reported thinking back to The Merchant of Venice when he pondered his instinct to avoid certain city streets or to ignore the man begging for money at the intersection near campus. The comedy Much Ado About Nothing catalyzed, for one student, a scathing critique of BookTok and, for another, helped her reimagine the perennial pressures women feel between marriage and independence. In each case, it was Shakespeare’s invitation to wrestle and re-see that drew them in.

Literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s “preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well-made, and settled” is a defining trait of his work. “The opacity,” Greenblatt writes, “was shaped by his experience of the world and his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations.” Shakespeare, it turns out, was quite a normal chap.

Shakespeare, it turns out, was quite a normal chap.

He knew the economic and relational pressures of marriage. Church records indicate he married Anne Hathaway (eight years his senior) when he was only 18, just three months before she gave birth to their first daughter. He spent most of his life building a career in London while his wife and children stayed behind in Stratford. He was deeply acquainted with grief, losing his son Hamnet at 11 years old. With high infant mortality rates and average life expectancy between 30 and 40 years, he was surely familiar with suffering and felt the pervasive pulse of fear. His sonnets and soliloquys reflect the psychological turmoil of unrequited love, the fear of being found out, disillusionment with church and state, the fragility of the human body, and the urgency of time’s unyielding march. While we don’t know the specific experiences that prompted these meditations, they attest to a life well acquainted with the tandem roads of joy and sorrow, hope and pain, faith and doubt.

It’s this familiarity that has, over time, eased some of my frustration with teaching his work. If the plays resist my interpretive grasp, they also mirror what it’s like to navigate an often unclear and always tenuous life. In the classroom, these moments of dissonance and disruption illustrate the continued vitality of teaching Shakespeare. In the next three posts, I’ll explore how moments of contradiction, disruption, and irresolution in Shakespeare’s plays have fueled opportunities for vocational reflection and clarity. Beyond what literature says, it’s the very practice of reading it—especially when it’s difficult—that we experience its power to change us and shape our callings.

Julianne Sandberg is an associate professor of English at Samford University, where she teaches first-year writing courses and British literature. Her teaching and scholarship often explore the intersection between theology and literature, and she is the author of Early Modern Literature and the Bodies of a Reformed Eucharist. A participant in the 2025 NetVUE Writing Colloquy, she writes about life, literature, and faith on her blog, A Companioned Life.

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?”

Continue reading “Vocation and Life Studies”

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.

Continue reading “Hope through Connection V: Becoming Ourselves in Community”

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.

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

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.

Continue reading “Toni Morrison and the Call to Imagine”

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.”  

Continue reading “Seeking the Irrelevant”

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.

Continue reading “Called to Endings”

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? 

Continue reading “Genuine Callings Support Each Other”

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.

Continue reading “The Anxiety of Choice”