Modern Language Studies — Issue 52.1 — Summer 2022

front matter

2 Modern Language Studies 52.1

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52.1

VOLUME 52, NO. 1

SUMMER 2022

staff LAURENCE ROTH EDITOR AMANDA LENIG CREATIVE DIRECTOR PATRICK THOMAS HENRY ASSOCIATE EDITOR Fiction and Poetry ANGELA FULK ASSOCIATE EDITOR Profession and Pedagogy RANDY ROBERTSON ASSOCIATE EDITOR Reviews NICK STEPHENSON WEBMASTER CRYSTAL VANHORN SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER ALLEE MEAD COPYEDITOR DEANNAJAMES BUNCE MANAGING EDITORIAL ASSISTANT HEATHER BAMERT EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

about NeMLA The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) is a scholarly organization for professionals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other modern languages. The group was founded as the New York-Pennsylvania MLA in 1967 by William Wehmeyer of St. Bonaventure University and other MLA members interested in continuing scholarly discourse at annual conventions smaller than that hosted by the Modern Language Association. In 1969, the organization moved to wider regional membership, election of officers, formal affiliation with MLA, and adoption of its present name.

NeMLA continues its traditions of intellectual contribution and advancement at the 54th Annual Convention, to be held at the Niagra Fall Convention Center March 23–26, 2023. The conference theme is “Resilience,” an anchor term for critical and creative work that explores how we bear up under trauma, counter ableism, and redress social and racial marginalization and environmental destruction; how we celebrate bodily, cognitive, and neurological difference, access silenced voices, and recover from the pandemic; and how we struggle to save the humanities, and humanity itself, from the maw of neoliberalism.

NeMLA is delighted to host, for the Thursday opening address, Tim Dean, James M. Benson Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious (1991), Beyond Sexuality (2000), and Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009), and a co-editor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (2001).The Friday keynote event will be given by Anne Enright, acclaimed Irish writer and author of the prize-winning novel The Gathering, the focus of this year’s “NeMLA Reads Together.”

Please see the NeMLA web page at www.nemla.org for information on joining the organization and about the fellowships, awards, and publications available to members.

Modern Language Studies appears twice a year, in the summer and winter, and is a publication of the Northeast Modern Language Association. © 2022 Northeast Modern Language Association

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ISSN 0047-7729

NeMLA board of directors 2022–2023 EXECUTIVE BOARD JOSEPH VALENTE, University at Buffalo President MODHUMITA ROY, Tufts University Vice President VICTORIA L. KETZ, La Salle University Second Vice President BERNADETTE WEGENSTEIN, Johns Hopkins University Past President

OFFICERS CARINE MARDOROSSIAN, University at Buffalo Executive Director ASHLEY BYCZKOWSKI, University at Buffalo Associate Director

BOARD OF DIRECTORS DONAVAN L. RAMON, Kentucky State University American and Diaspora Studies Director THOMAS LYNN, Penn State Berks British and Global Anglophone Studies Director FRANCISCO DELGADO, Borough of Manhattan Community College–CUNY, CAITY Caucus President and Representative JULIA TITUS, Yale University Comparative Literature Director MARIA MATZ, University of Massachusetts–Lowell Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing Director KATHLEEN KASTEN-MUTKUS, Stony Brook University–SUNY Cultural Studies and Media Studies Director JENNIFER MDURVWA, University at Buffalo Diversity Caucus President YVES-ANTOINE CLEMMEN, Stetson University French and Francophone Studies Director CHARLES VANNETTE, University of New Hampshire German Studies Director ESTHER ALARCON-ARANA, Salve Regina University Hispanic and Lusophone Studies Director CHRISTIAN YLAGAN, Western University Graduate Student Caucus Representative TIZIANO CHERUBINI, Baylor University Italian Studies Director JINA LEE, Westchester Community College–SUNY Professionalization and Pedagogy Director JUSTINE DYMOND, Springfield College Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus Director

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MLS 52.1 contents

Mindfulness in Writing and Literature Classrooms Introduction Donetta Hines Matthew Leporati

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Mediating Mindfulness for Skeptics Natalie Mera Ford

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Minding the Whole Person in Academia: Meditation in the Writing and Literature Classroom Kim Coates

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In Pursuit of Eudaimonia: Activating Empathy through Connected Reading and Writing Processes Jennifer Cho

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Contemplative Pedagogy in the College English Classroom and Online Beth Sherman

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Fiction & Poetry Jim Goar: The Fool Elizabeth Laughlin: Twenty-Seven Article Explaining Baseball to Kurt Schwitters: Donald Hall’s Philosophy of Mortality in “Baseball” and “Extra Innings” Paul R. Petrie Review Stanley Fish. The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump José Antonio Arellano

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special cluster

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The term “mindfulness” tends to be associated in the popular imagination with practices such as meditation or yoga, but how often do we, as writing and literature instructors, think of mindfulness in our classrooms and pedagogy? Although it may be easy to see why the training of one’s attention has profound implications for everyday life, it might be less evident why mindfulness could be beneficial in a college classroom or why it might be a particularly valuable mindset for the teaching of composition or literature. Yet, as James M. Lang cogently argues in Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, instructors’ as well as students’ experiences in the classroom are a product of how we all direct our attention. Too often, instructors and students alike are consumed by distractions that impede our work. And when it comes to learning how to write well, one of the major hurdles that students encounter is the barrage of negative self-talk and second-guessing that beginning writers bring to their assignments.

Other students need help calming their thoughts, locating their best ideas about the texts or topical events about which they are writing, and refining those thoughts on the page. Or, as Lang puts it, our students need us to help them learn to cultivate their attention rather than avoid distraction (see “Preface” and “Introduction”). Although Lang proposes for this purpose what he calls “signature attention activities” (174), more so than classroom mindfulness interventions, we have found that the insights of mindfulness practice—and a variety of techniques based upon a framework of focusing attention—can greatly foster learning in writing and literature classrooms.

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Indeed, in recent years, the benefits of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have gained significant attention in the study of contemplative pedagogy.1 Inspired by Eastern practices of concentration and attention, techniques that fall under the category of MBI prompt both students and instructors to become increasingly aware (without judgment) of the present moment and their reactions to it. Some instructors lead students in brief meditation as a preparation for writing exercises or class discussion, as the articles in this cluster from Beth Sherman and Kim Coates describe. Others, like Natalie Mera Ford, encourage students to freewrite their initial reactions to texts, observing and recording their inner monologue. Jennifer Cho prompts students to engage in pre-writing exercises that stimulate empathy for the subjects they read about.

Mera Ford employs descriptive writing assignments that require students to pay close attention to common objects, including the smallest details that might normally escape their notice. And once faced with the 2020 pandemic, all of our contributors learned to leverage our usually distracting technology to foster mindful pedagogical exercises, such as leading brief mindfulness meditations in Zoom, encouraging students to use their smartphones to record themselves reading short texts out loud and commenting on them in real time, or photographing things they see in their everyday lives that remind them of literary texts they are studying. Such activities use technology to encourage students to become more aware of their surroundings and connect them to their writing and literature course material. These varied implementations of mindfulness in the classroom are united by their explicit concern with how we can guide students to direct attention.

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But smartphones and social media are not all that command our attention. Personal, political, social, racial, environmental, and economic conditions—and since 2020, a global pandemic— preoccupy and affect us, our students, and our communities. These “internal” and “external” conditions inevitably filter into our classrooms; even if visibly absent, they are present in us and in our students: in thoughts, feelings, perceptions, bodies, and experiences2. As writing and literature instructors, we are faced with the challenge of guiding our students to focus on how to learn to read closely, think and write critically, and meaningfully connect with themselves and others through reading and writing, despite or perhaps especially because of their and our reactions to these internal and external conditions. Since learning to write well and read closely requires cultivating a new relationship with one’s own thoughts, feelings, and even body, we can see our work in the classroom not only as a chance to model mindfulness but also to encourage increased mindfulness as a bridge from inside to outside ourselves, our students, and our classrooms. We can envision our writing and literature classrooms as mindful spaces where we can guide students in attending to their own thoughts and feelings as they read and write, to sharpen and revise their ideas on the page, as well as empathize with those they read, and connect with the very real people for whom they write. The authors we study seem invested in these ideas as well. To cite two examples discussed by Cho, Walt Whitman’s effusive celebrations of an inclusive democracy and James Baldwin’s disappointment at a lack of a widespread civic empathy both serve to guide the reader’s attention. To read mindfully is to pay attention not

only to the details of the text but to what those details do to our minds, bodies, and feelings, as well as to our (mis)perceptions and experiences of the world around us.

To explore the heightened attention to and growing interest in mindful pedagogy, this special cluster on “Mindfulness in Writing and Literature Classrooms” began as an exploratory Workshop at NeMLA’s 2019 conference, then grew to bubbling, participatory roundtables at NeMLA 2020, 2021, and 2022.3 We invited roundtable participants to discuss the theory and especially their practices of mindfulness in writing and literature classrooms.

Suggested topics included strategies for stimulating mindfulness; examinations of which techniques work well and which are less effective; methods for dealing with student resistance to mindfulness; reflections on the relationship between mindfulness and writing and/or literary studies; the potential for mindfulness practices to open discussions about ethics, empathy, and care within and beyond the classroom; and ideas for working around the recent commercialization and commodification of mindfulness in popular culture and the corporate world (sometimes called “McMindfulness,” as popularized

by Loy and Purser).

Our 2020 roundtable revealed three key takeaways that surprised us and that we want to share with our NeMLA community and MLS readers.

First, although many of us anticipated student rejection, resistance, disinterest, or ambivalence when we first tried formal breathing, meditation, and writing intention activities in our writing and literature classrooms, we have been surprised that students tend to embrace these activities and wish to keep them as part of the class. In their contributions to our special cluster, Mera Ford and Coates

each recount how they navigated initial skepticism to integrate mindfulness exercises into their classrooms and evaluate the positive reception they ultimately received. Second, as all four contributors to our special cluster attest, students reported that these mindfulness activities and exercises “helped the words flow better” and “made me less self-conscious about writing,” as Sherman notes some of her students explained. And third, many students have also reported using the mindfulness techniques we have employed in the classroom outside of our classes. Our surprise and desire to understand better and share these three key takeaways are the point of departure for this special cluster.

This triple surprise of overwhelming student support, positive outcomes, and hunger for more mindfulness both in and out of the classroom called to us even more in the weeks after the 2020 NeMLA conference, as fears over the Covid-19 pandemic forced us all into what has been alternatingly referred to as social isolation/distancing, physical isolation/ distancing, and even quarantining. Classes migrated into online spaces, and instructors and students alike struggled with the physical and mental effects of the radically altered world we had entered. If ever there were a time to focus on the present moment, to be attentive to our own and others’ well-being and not succumb to the growing uncertainty and fear over the duration and consequences of the pandemic, it is now.

Even though mindfulness had been a concept in the public sphere before the pandemic, the fear, distancing, isolation, and uncertainty over the pandemic and its effects on our and others’ personal, professional, and academic lives transformed mindfulness into a more commonly referenced term. Almost from one day to the next, the media,

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educational communications, and even massive social awareness and benefit efforts began to refer regularly to “mindfulness” as a pillar of our individual and communal mental health.4 Such increased public awareness suggests that Covid-19, along with the pandemic’s extension beyond 2020, has had the interesting corollary effect of making us all more mindful about mindfulness.

Yet the popularization of mindfulness runs the risk of transforming it into a mere buzzword or a toolbox of stress-relieving techniques. Rather than understanding mindfulness as a transformative practice that can nourish an intellectual, humanistic, and ethical life, many people might be tempted to see it as a fad, practice it shallowly (if at all), and pay only lip service to the power of attention.

Such concerns dovetail with those of Ronald E. Purser, who has been critical of what he calls “McMindfulness,” capitalism’s tendency to co-opt and commodify mindfulness, framing it as little more than a collection of tactics that help people deal better with the anxiety and stress that their work, school, and personal lives cause them.

According to Purser and many other critics, such tactics can discourage people from identifying and modifying those aspects of their professional and academic lives that create the conditions that cause the anxiety and stress in the first place.5 In this way, “McMindfulness” reinforces the neoliberal(ized) institutions, values, and ideologies that privilege the maximizing of workers’ (including students’ and instructors’) productivity and efficiency and that cause the suffering in the first place. While such concerns are obviously valid, it could also be the case that a focus on resisting or avoiding instrumentalized mindfulness—especially that which

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falls under the dismissive and catchy banner of “McMindfulness”—can inadvertently divert our attention or even discourage us from broader discussions about the potential of what mindfulness can help us see, do, feel, and be when it is practiced and taught with depth and care. Even Purser feels the need to clarify that he does not wish to “throw out,” let alone “drown […] the baby with the bathwater” (109). For his part, Lang contends that “mindfulness has the potential to help both faculty and students manage distractions in the classroom […] if we focus on the mindful attitudes and actions of the teacher,” but cautions against “imposing” mindfulness practices on students (219). Echoing such calls to rehumanize and critically examine mindfulness itself, our roundtable panelists and special cluster contributors, especially those who persisted with mindfulness in their classrooms in spite of their doubts, hesitations, and skepticism, reported overwhelming support for the perceived benefits of those practices. Students valued the mindfulness exercises, not merely for relieving stress or getting more work done, but for engaging more meaningfully and intentionally with the subjects, processes, and people in their courses and even their lives.

This newly recognized internal motivation of instructors and students to extend mindfulness from the classroom to their “inner” and “outer lives” indicates to us that there is an unrecognized need or hunger for mindfulness as something missing from both the classroom experience and instructors’ and students’ daily lives, yet perhaps not “nameable” as missing, whether because the notion had not yet been common currency or because of our own reticence to call it “mindfulness” so as not to be

associated with its uncanny double, the shallow self-help of “McMindfulness.” At a time of protracted debates and administrative decision-making about the “value” of the humanities, mindfulness in, as, and of 6 writing and literature also allows us other ways to engage students (and our campuses and communities) in an exploration of the “value” of taking, for example, a course on the twentieth-century novel, poetry, or first-year composition. Beyond the utilitarian value of earning course credits while reading some good books or poems, or learning to write essays more effectively, writing and literature connect us to ourselves and to other people, our own and other worlds, lives, and value systems; they invite us to imagine the needs, knowledge, and expectations of an other, and how we might attempt to meet them on [and off] the page. As such, we want to tell our stories of what happened when we tried mindfulness in, as, and of our writing and literature classrooms.

Our hope, then, with this special cluster is to respond to that need by showing how mindfulness in writing and literature classrooms benefits our students, ourselves, our campus cultures and communities, as well as illustrating what we have found to be the best practices to do so, both in traditional, physical classrooms and in our new remote and online teaching platforms. To reflect how we practice mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy in different settings, in different ways, and with different groups of students, we asked each of our contributors to expand on and deepen their roundtable presentations by answering the following questions: •H ow do you approach mindfulness?

What do you do? Why?

• How does it help the students? What does it enable students to be able to understand/ see/do differently?

• How does it help you, as an instructor, and the rest of us, the “profession,” by extension? What does it enable us to be able to understand/see/do differently?

• What is left to do?

Our special cluster is simultaneously a response, an offering, and an invitation to behold the challenges and the opportunities that we, our colleagues, and our students face in our writing and literature classes, taught in physical classrooms or in remote learning environments, and to consider how mindfulness in, as, and of our pedagogy can help to (re)infuse our students, classrooms, campuses, and communities with our shared (rather than competitive) learning objectives, empathy, and common humanity. The contributions to this special cluster record our experiences with engaging our own and students’ mindfulness both in our classrooms and remotely, such that we may learn new ways to guide and join our students in extending attention from our classrooms to our inner and outer worlds. As we would like to think all writing and literature instructors would recognize, guiding our students as they transform their reading and writing ultimately empowers them also to transform themselves and, by extension, their campuses and communities.

Above all, we thank you for your interest and hope that you find some ideas to try in your own classrooms, both in-person and online. We look forward to hearing from you about your implementations and especially to learning from you about your own mindful practices as well.

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NOTES 1.

See for example Barbezat and Bush; Chick; Ergas “Deeper” and “Mindfulness”; Hoyt; O’Donnell; Peary; Schonert-Reichl and Roeser; Wenger; Wetzel; Zajonc.

Donetta thanks Katelynn DeLuca for introducing her to the idea of the “absent-present” in Katelynn’s NeMLA 2019 panel and NeMLA 2020 “Mindfulness in the Writing and Literature Classroom” roundtable presentation.

2.

Matthew and Donetta co-chaired the roundtables and were joined in 2020 by Jennifer Cho, Lilach Naishtat-Bornstein, Beth Sherman, Katelynn DeLuca, Ryan Orr, Natalie Mera Ford, and Kimberly Coates; in 2021 by Lilach Naishtat-Bornstein, Beth Sherman, Ryan Orr, Natalie Mera Ford, Laura Hartmann-Villalta, James Thibeault, Matthew Sumpter, Netta Bar Yosef-Paz, Nirit Assaf, and Melissa Goldman Davidson; and in 2022 by Natalie Mera Ford, Kimberly Coates, Netta Bar YosefPaz, Nirit Assaf, Melissa Goldman Davidson, Jen Sweeney, and Sarah Winterberg.

3.

To cite just a few examples, as early as Mar. 13, 2020, Dr. Sue Varma, an NYU psychiatrist, appeared on an MSNBC News health segment where she listed “mindfulness” as one of the four pillars of mental health, with the others being “mastery, movement, and meaningful engagement.” (https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/reducing-anxiety-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-psychiatrist-shares-tips-80626245971). She was featured again reiterating mindfulness as one of these same four pillars during the April 18, 2020, massive online “One World: Together at Home” benefit concert organized by GlobalCitizen.org. During the Canadian event, “STRONGER TOGETHER, TOUS ENSEMBLE,” on April 26, 2020, mindfulness was again catapulted to the forefront of popular consciousness when the rapper/singer Drake spoke about the importance of mental health during the pandemic by citing three of Varma’s four pillars: “mastery, movement, and meaningful engagement.” Although Drake did not specifically mention the fourth word, “mindfulness,” he modeled it simply by calling attention to the need to be aware of and attentive to our mental health. Perhaps more importantly, as a rapper/singer and black man, this popular star embodied mindfulness for a diverse audience.

4.

See for example O’Donnell; Ergas “Deeper” and “Mindfulness”; Forbes “Critical” and Mindfulness.

5.

In his comprehensive review of “Mindfulness In, As and Of Education: Three Roles of Mindfulness in Education,” mindfulness and education scholar Oren Ergas offers this succinct, insightful series of prepositions to simultaneously clarify and expand current and potential educational mindfulness conceptualizations and practices. We thank Ergas for this series of prepositions, and the knowledge and intentions behind it, which encapsulate the shift we want to see, and be part of, as writing and literature instructors and as people. In doing so, we also respond to his call for more qualitative research recounting instructors’ and students’ perceptions of and experiences with mindfulness in, as, and of education.

6.

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WORKS CITED Barbezat, Daniel P., and Mirabai Bush. Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning. Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Chick, Nancy. “Mindfulness in the Classroom.” Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/contemplative-pedagogy. Accessed 29 April 2020.

Ergas, Oren. “The Deeper Teachings of Mindfulness-Based ‘Interventions’ as a Reconstruction of ‘Education’.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 49, no. 2, 2015, pp. 203-20.

—. “Mindfulness In, As and Of Education: Three Roles of Mindfulness in Education.”

Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 53, no. 2, 2019, pp. 340-58.

Forbes, David. “Critical Integral Contemplative Education.” Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement, edited by Ronald E. Purser et al, Springer, 2016, pp. 355-67.

—. Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Education, Self, and Social Transformation. Fernwood, 2019.

Hoyt, Mei. “Teaching with Mindfulness.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, vol. 31, no. 1, 2016, pp. 126-42.

Lang, James M. Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Basic Books, 2020.

Loy, David, and Ron Purser. “Beyond McMindfulness.” Huffington Post, 1 July 2013.

Accessed 4 Mar. 2019.

O’Donnell, Aislinn. “Contemplative Pedagogy and Mindfulness: Developing Creative Attention in an Age of Distraction.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 49, no. 2, 2015, pp. 187-202.

Peary, Alexandria. Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing. Routledge, 2018.

Purser, Ronald E. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.

Repeater, 2019.

Schonert-Reichl, Kimberly A., and Robert W. Roeser, editors. Handbook of Mindfulness in Education: Integrating Theory and Research into Practice. Springer, 2016.

Wenger, Christy I. “Writing Yogis: Breathing Our Way to Mindfulness and Balance in Embodied Writing Pedagogy.” JAEPL, vol. 18, 2012, pp. 24-39.

Wetzel, Grace. “‘The Most Peaceful I Ever Felt Writing’: A Contemplative Approach to Essay Revision.” JAEPL, vol. 22, 2017, pp. 33-50.

Zajonc, Arthur. “Contemplation in Education.” Handbook of Mindfulness in Education: Integrating Theory and Research into Practice, edited by Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl and Robert W. Roeser. Springer, 2016.

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mediating

MINDFULNESS FOR SKEPTICS CONTEMPLATIVE PEDAGOGY TODAY

The benefits of mindfulness have become widely recognized in twenty-first-century academic culture.

In fact, opening an essay on contemplative pedagogy with a nod to the burgeoning research on mindfulness in learning has itself become a stock move.

This increased acknowledgment and promulgation among educators of meditative practices is partly thanks to a rise in research from cognitive and behavioral psychology and neurobiology on the positive effects of mindfulness meditation, visualization, and related attention-focusing techniques.1 Cognitive neuroscientist Dusana Dorjee, noting the quality as well as quantity of this research surge, has suggested the field of contemplative science “is moving away from initial questions investigating whether meditation can produce measurable changes in health and well-being, and toward increasing research rigor of studies with closer focus on how meditation techniques modify the mind and brain.”

A parallel can be claimed for the field of contemplative pedagogy, which is shifting from exploring

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whether mindful approaches can yield improvements in the classroom, toward diversifying robust studies that examine how specific exercises can enhance learning within and across the disciplines.

Yet skepticism from various sides continues to limit the use of mindfulness as a central teaching tool. Some professors have voiced explicit concerns about incorporating contemplative approaches into education. Religious Studies scholars, for example, have argued that the Buddhist roots of mindfulness meditation lead to a collapse of the sacred and secular in public schools, while cautioning that contemplative pedagogy could further amount to “a cultural encroachment” (C.G. Brown). In a similar vein, Education Studies scholars have flagged the problematic intersection of “New Age values, neoliberal economic and cultural values, and mindfulness practices in contemporary democratic societies and schools” (Schwimmer and McDonough). The neoliberal critique especially stresses the risk of a commodified, individualized packaging of mindfulness that neglects its compassionate-ethical

framework, thus diminishing its ability to spark social activism (O’Donnell 189). Even if these vital concerns are addressed, the inclusion of any contemplative tradition’s embodied method of “bringing the mind into the heart” (Bourgeault) or revealing “the connection between the mind and the … heart” (Sik Hin Hung qtd. in Littlefair) may make the class focus appear more religious or spiritual than intellectual. Such a departure could cause some instructors, students, and members of the public to resist mindfulness pedagogies, in particular for the ostensibly cerebral pinnacle of higher education.

One could counter that the past decade’s popular critiques of “McMindfulness”2 show that mainstream society has already accepted meditation-based interventions—so much so that corporate and commercial sectors now often dilute or distort mindfulness into a capitalist good far removed from its Buddhist origins (Purser). However, the marketing of a book as recent as the 2017 Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics (Harris et al.) suggests that contemplative practices still strike parts of the general public as unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and in need of additional, preferably quantifiable, justification. In this milieu, debates persist over the appropriacy of mindfulness programs in education, as reflected in the article “Does Mindfulness Belong in Public Schools? Two Views” (Tricycle). Within higher education, mindfulness techniques arguably have reached the status of a valued standard, but not in the lecture hall or seminar room: many campus support services provide resources on mindfulness, which mental health research has demonstrated can help students cope with the stressful performance pressures inherent in modern schools (Gouda et al.). Although mindfulness has joined time management and study strategies as a staple academic support workshop

topic,3 contemplative approaches are not so fundamental to our concept of education that students, instructors, and administrators expect mindfulness to be systematically integrated into courses as they expect, say, critical thinking skills to be.

The slower spread of contemplative pedagogies into strictly academic spaces may also be due to less conscious resistance from within as well as outside campus lines. Apprehensions of dubious family responses, perhaps whetted if relatives are paying tuition fees, can affect student responses to unconventional teaching methods, and the pandemic turn to remote instruction may have intensified this influence as courses became visible at home. Yet doubts from our own learning communities can prove equally, or more, constraining. With successful reviews needed for retention and promotion, the possibility of pushback from students, colleagues, and/or supervisors can deter instructors from growing their pedagogy in contemplative directions.

Alongside tenure-track faculty, contingent faculty tend to be most alert to how they will be evaluated: despite the desire to develop high-impact approaches, many “are leery to try new pedagogical practices” that, if criticized by students, could jeopardize reappointment (Kezar). The sense of mindfulness as instructional novelty instead of norm further points up limited pedagogical training during graduate school, where emphasis falls on discipline content. Without guided exposure to meditative learning strategies in theory or models, instructors might understandably hesitate to put mindfulness or like approaches into practice. This situation may be improving—Mirabai Bush, for instance, has traced the integration of contemplative practices through Fellows in the academy and reported facing significantly less resistance than anticipated (184).

Natalie Mera Ford, Swarthmore College

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The advances she details, however, occurred at a fraction of U.S. colleges and universities and so, at best, indicate an emergent higher education subculture—nationally, as globally—rather than the established mainstream.4 Supporting that subculture, in this essay I discuss a way to bring contemplative pedagogy into the academic writing classroom that aims to work with skepticism rather than against it. The class described consists of a single session, which raises wariness about superficial treatments of mindfulness. While striving to guard against this valid concern, I nonetheless want to present an introductory lesson that, in scope as in structure, offers instructors and students a thoughtful, experimental entry into contemplative learning for composition. This, I hope, provides one example of how secularized education can incorporate “beginner practices that allow for a taste of some elements of complex and rich wisdom traditions” (O’Donnell 196)—or, to borrow Kate Pantelides and Erica Stone’s metaphor for phasing in another progressive practice (ungrading), it offers a modest, initiatory way to “dip your toe in the water.” The example below is additionally designed to respect inquiring skeptics because I mediate mindfulness for first-year writers at a small liberal arts college with a large percentage of STEM majors, whose critical dispositions tend toward doubt.

First, to contextualize the lesson, I clarify aspects of the introductory composition course that inform my use of contemplative pedagogy here. I then outline the class, further teasing out intertwined skeptical strains frequently at play while situating the lesson within a unit on metacognitive revision.

Though discrete parts are presented chronologically, this order can be altered, and I mention variations

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that I have tried over iterations of the course (plus the Appendix overviews an online adaptation). To conclude, I consider the potential of doubts to do more than just challenge the rise of contemplative approaches in higher education. Instead, by treating reservations as closer to a pedagogical ally than foe, I suggest we can harness the raised-eyebrows critique that may reside in some of our students (and in some of us) to transform skepticism from a hindrance into a real-world aid to mindfulness for the academic writing class.

CRITICAL COURSE CONTEXTS

Several key contexts shape the purpose and method I have evolved for this multi-stage mindfulness lesson.

Ranging from the logistical to psychological, they reflect the need for instructors to intentionally adjust contemplative class strategies to fit their department and institutional cultures.

Although I periodically update its theme, the course’s learning outcomes remain constant: in this writing-intensive English first-year seminar, students develop 1) the ability to write effectively for academic audiences; 2) rhetorical knowledge for various disciplines; and 3) robust, agile composition processes.

The course therefore serves as the equivalent to the "introduction to college writing" standard, with two possible distinctions. First, it is elective, though fall sections fill up as quickly as if it were required. Second, and importantly for this essay, the course decenters humanities discourse and—heeding the profiles and goals of most students who enroll—aligns more with a writing in the disciplines approach. As my predominantly non-humanities-bound students tell me in letters composed at our first meeting, almost all seek to become better prepared to meet the

discourse expectations of social sciences and natural sciences fields.

In addition to expanding their academic repertoire, students commonly register for this first-year seminar because they fear that their writing does not display college-level thought or expression.

Many also want to bolster their composition process, partly by minimizing obstacles like procrastination.

No student has ever said that they signed up for the course to deepen their self-understanding, ethical compassion, capacity for wonder, or ability to sustain single-pointed concentration. As I learn later, a few have heard the slang phrase “That’s so meta,” but none seem confident about explaining what metacognition precisely means. For the handful who remember having encountered mindfulness in school, it was along the lines of a daily minute of silence in homeroom when they were half-asleep.5 The class’s attitude toward contemplative pedagogy thus might be summed up as unconsidered, yet the general group disposition is alertly critical.

The small size of this class, which is capped at 15, creates an intimate atmosphere favorable to mindfulness. Seated around one table, I can observe each student (as we analyze readings, rehearse genres, develop writing projects, and collaborate in discussions and activities), and students can observe their peers and me.6 Despite the boon of low numbers, a psychological strand of resistance can dovetail with intimacy during contemplative practices. While issues of student privacy have not been ignored in studies of contemplative pedagogy,7 little attention has been paid to the effect of self-consciousness on mindfulness in academic settings. A college classroom does not provide an ideal space for the vulnerability ingrained in many meditation-based exercises, perhaps especially for emerging young

adults asked to undertake what might feel like self-exposure that goes beyond being called on in class. Closing one’s eyes, holding a peer’s gaze, intoning a mantra, breathing profoundly—even tackling an emotionally reflective freewrite could inhibit rather than intensify some students’ engagement. While instructors can design practices to avoid triggering resurfaced trauma, the much lesser but still potentially undermining phenomenon of embarrassment is harder to control and could reduce the sum-total benefits.

Giving the option to not participate is, I think, essential, though this does not remove every pressure—namely, grading—to which today’s undergraduates are sensitive (Fisher 17). My institution’s policy of Credit/No Credit for freshman fall courses minimizes the likelihood that students would comply due to concern about evaluation. Nevertheless, Candy Gunther Brown’s argument has convinced me to switch to a more vigilantly ethical “opt-in model” in the future (9). The late-semester scheduling of this mindfulness lesson further promotes willing, authentic student involvement: by this point, a solid learning community has been constructed (e.g., through peer feedback workshops and groupled presentations), thus boosting students’ comfort levels in trying new or unconventional practices.

In this critically poised environment, filled with first-year students serious about launching their academic, often scientifically oriented careers, mindfulness meditation is neither expected nor automatically embraced. In the following sequence (I-IV), I review how I have endeavored not to eradicate voiced or tacit doubts about contemplative pedagogy, but rather to redirect these by guiding the skeptical mindset into an engaged mode of inquiry infused by experience.

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PART I. A CONSTELLATION OF TERMS

To respond to possible resistance in my frequently STEM-trained students, and in myself as an off-ladder visiting assistant professor in a Writing Studies program at an elite liberal arts college, I have started to introduce mindfulness through a constellation of terms.

This opening attempts to harness the first-years’ intellectual energy, including any skepticism, into mature rational thinking and philosophical consideration about labels within contemplative discourse.

I find it useful to lead students into what is usually a novel educational experience by way of traditional tactics. Instead of immersing them cold in a mindful exercise (III), I begin the class by eliciting conceptual interconnections and distinctions for a cluster of terms on the board. The move may echo a vocabulary building tactic from their secondary, even primary, schooling, except the spotlighted ‘Word of the Day’ has morphed into an intricate set: meditation contemplation mindfulness reflection metacognition As evidenced in this essay, these words and their cognates appear together in numerous discussions of mindfulness, frequently with semantic blur.

Indeed, their technical definitions in the discursive contexts of contemplative science, psychology, and pedagogy are continually debated and asserted by experts in the respective fields. Contemporary meditation research similarly struggles with “terminological unclarities” (Dorjee); psychologist Ellen Langer’s seminal conceptualization of mindfulness is enlisted to separate it from metacognition (Van Gelder); and cognition researchers lament that “much public confusion and media hype have

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stemmed from an undifferentiated use of the terms mindfulness and meditation” (Van Dam et al.).

This first section therefore invites my first-year class to join transdisciplinary scholars in disambiguating these words that, like stars in a constellation, evoke meaning separately and together. As the articles cited just above indicate, the task is both necessary and complex. It activates the students’ critical attention to linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural nuance—intersecting layers of analysis that I regularly ask them to perform over the course—while introducing the day’s less traditional academic writing focus. As they work to articulate definitions for the terms on the board, the students become challenged and curious along contemplative lines.

Some appear to anticipate that a pedagogical connection will be made, though probably for creative, inspirational aspects of writing. And all of them, any skeptics included, are cognitively primed for our next step: considering how these mindfulness-related concepts, in isolation or in concert, can imbue strategies that have been shown to foster intellectual development across academic fields.

To move forward, I explicitly connect the terms on the board to the umbrella category “contemplative pedagogy.” Following the lead of many educational institutions, I cite Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching,8 a source we will soon look at, which defines contemplative pedagogy as “the integration of meditative practices into higher education”— practices that promote holistic as well as cognitive and academic growth (Mcdaniel). More exactly for our lesson, contemplative pedagogy comprises, according to Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, “an approach to teaching and learning with the goal of encouraging deep learning through focused attention, reflection, and heightened

awareness.” Equipped with a functional understanding of these central terms, the students are thus prepared to start contemplating relevant research.

PART II. MULTIDISCIPLINARY SUPPORT

English now resembles Religion, Psychology, and Education as a scholarly discipline with substantial interest in contemplative pedagogies. Despite the enduring forms of skepticism outlined above, the exploration and advocacy of mindfulness practices for writing and literature classes in particular has increased over the past decade. Witness, for instance, the popularity of NeMLA pedagogy sessions such as the “Mindfulness and the First-Year English Sequence” roundtable (2017), the Contemplative Pedagogy meeting (2018), the “Mindfulness in the Writing and Literature Classroom” workshop (2019), the “Mindfulness in the Writing and Literature Classroom” roundtable (2020), and annual meetings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Contemplative Writing Pedagogies Special Interest Group. These dynamic professional discussions have not limited their focus to mindfulness for fiction or poetry writing courses. As Grace Wetzel, co-convenor of the 2017 NeMLA roundtable, summarizes, composition scholars more broadly have “highlighted a link between contemplative pedagogy and meaningful student writing— re ve a l i ng how me d it at i on ( among ot he r contemplative practices) fosters more insightful, creative, and focused writing” (35). Her own article then extends “meditation-based contemplative pedagogy” to revision (Wetzel 35-36)—an essential composition process taught in presumably all academic writing, and many literature, courses. Our disciplinary consensus has thus begun to recognize

the value of incorporating mindfulness techniques into the college or university English classroom.

Yet this rise in qualitative endorsements from the humanities would not instantly convince my first-year writing students, not even when coupled with social sciences support from Education Studies and Religious Studies. Like good empiricists, the students in my composition course often stay skeptical until shown ample, statistically robust quantitative data from laboratory experiments or clinical trials. It is unsurprising, then, that out of the terms we examine in our mindfulness lesson, the word that most attracts their attention every semester sounds the most scientific: metacognition.

In higher education, both students and educators seem readier to accept practices labelled “metacognitive” rather than “meditative” or “contemplative,” with the latter terms’ religious/spiritual connotations, or “mindful,” with its generic evocation of well-being.

Although conceptual distinctions clearly figure, it might reflect latent skepticism—or apprehension of others’ latent skepticism—about the efficacy of contemplative pedagogy that “metacognition” alone appears among the sixteen habits of mind publicized by leading educators (Costa and Kallick) and eight habits of mind in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (Council of Writing Program Administrators). The fact that metacognition and additional listed habits of mind resonate with mindfulness, meditation, and contemplation practices implies that the word officially foregrounded in education contexts is not by chance.9 Is it the appropriate breadth of metacognition as a concept, or is it the term’s more technical, intellectual, legitimate sound that led me to name this class session “Metacognition and Composition”? Looking back at my choices during the first autumn of my

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current position teaching mostly STEM-grounded high achievers, I suspect both.

And dropping neuroscience into a mindfulness English lesson does work for the students I teach.

I have never prompted them to dwell on “metacognition” among the constellated words; they gravitate to it. As they parse its meaning, I share the spreading awareness across the disciplines—including the natural sciences—that metacognitive tools in the classroom have been shown to improve undergraduate success (Stanton et al. 1). To prevent a simplistic interpretation, I clarify that metacognition refers to conscious self-regulation on top of self-knowing; this provides an opening to note that mindfulness has been theorized to bolster individuals’ metacognitive skill at monitoring their learning by strengthening their ability to observe their mental processes (Global Metacognition). It only seems logical, therefore, that a study in biology found that college seniors use their metacognitive skills to greater self-governing effect than introductory biology students (Stanton et al. 12). But highlighting this conclusion in my introductory writing course of many prospective science majors feels like gently throwing down the pedagogical gauntlet. With extra time, I could put on the screen recent neuroimaging studies of mindfulness meditation (e.g., Yang et al.), yet the class’s critical inquiry is already piqued in the pedagogical direction I am prioritizing.

My delivery here does not ring overly sympathetic with the burgeoning multidisciplinary support for metacognitive/mindful teaching and learning techniques. Instead, I assume an inquisitive, slightly wary tone that mixes scholarly circumspection with an openness to being persuaded. My sentences turn interrogative, as in “Could this effectiveness be limited to certain contexts? How big are the sample

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sizes? What about confirmation bias?” For further information, we turn to two webpages I put on the screen to showcase examples of the contemplative research and pedagogies under scrutiny. An unstated aim in this part of class is to make students aware of the diversity of academic fields recognizing the benefits of mindfulness in education. At the same time, I continue to respectfully create space for skepticism by vocalizing questions and doubts about such an approach. This is not intended to preemptively dismiss resistance, though the dialogic rhetoric does set up affirming responses from multiple disciplines, social and life sciences included.

The first webpage features a news item from our college announcing the results of a meditation study by a Swarthmore professor of psychology and neuroscience, a Swarthmore graduate, and psychiatry researchers from Yale. As the heading emphasizes, their collaboration “Link[s] Meditation With Cognitive Improvement” (Greim). I spotlight this research in part because it locates investigations into contemplative pedagogy in the students’ common intellectual home, and in part because it offers topical clinical support from a neuroscience journal.

Above all, I share the study because it suggests that a single ten-minute mindfulness meditation can improve attention in people with minimal or zero experience meditating (Norris et al.). The majority of first-year students relate to this test group as meditation novices, an identification reinforced by the fact the study participants were college and university students.

The second source we look at is the aforementioned “Contemplative Pedagogy” page from Vanderbilt’s website. I leave up the peaceful picture—green leaf on gray stone in a Zen garden—but, due to timing constraints, do not dissect its stock

visual rhetoric. I guide the class to the text, which states, “The ancient practice of contemplation is being explored by many institutions of higher education as a new means of enhancing liberal education” (Mcdaniel). By this point, the students can predict the claims for contemplative pedagogy, which span “improved cognitive and academic performance,” developed “capacities such as creativity, empathy, compassion, interpersonal skills and self-awareness,” and increased abilities in “focusing attention, improving concentration and accessing self-knowledge” (Mcdaniel). I like to note, too, a connection this text makes: contemplative pedagogy’s stress on holistic, socially engaged learning resonates with the liberal arts philosophy that these first-years have chosen for their undergraduate experience.

The pacing in this section can be compressed or expanded, but I tend to keep it on the short side.

My primary goal is to present multidisciplinary support for meditation research and related pedagogies, thereby addressing and perhaps modifying whatever preconceptions the students might have held. While actively engaged, they typically appear ready at this stage to slide into small-group or whole-class discussion to analyze and assess the materials we have reviewed. I am always surprised at their surprise when, instead, we enter a hands-on, experiential mode.

PART III. THE IN-CLASS EXPERIMENT

I owe my awareness and diversifying range of contemplative pedagogical approaches to colleagues whose practices have inspired me at former institutions, at conferences and workshops, and through their publications on mindfulness-based pedagogy.

For this particular class exercise, I am indebted to Nancy Chick and the Vanderbilt University Center for Te aching for a lucid int ro duc t ion to “Mindfulness in the Classroom” that includes a shortlist of activities. By way of that resource, I discovered a memorable early promotion of learning through mindfulness-meditation in Sid Brown’s “Cultivating Wonder.”

Serene images on webpages like Vanderbilt’s add apt visual appeal as contemplative pedagogy continues “blossoming” (Wetzel 33) across higher education. Yet to behold a “wrinkly, ordinary fruit” (S. Brown 16) steers clear of aesthetically romanticizing mindfulness techniques. This humble route to introducing possibly skeptical writing students to mindfulness for academic purposes might counter a stereotype of an English class with idealized or impractical content.10 In a similar vein, and mirroring other instructors’ careful word choice for contemplative activities,11 I refer to our mindfulness “experiment” by an objective, probing term.

The nod to lab discourse helps cultivate the productively inquiring spirit I want to encourage over or within (un)conscious resistance. On occasion I have offered students a selection of natural objects instead of raisins, although nothing non-organic for this experiment that amounts to a sensory meditative exercise (suggesting students sniff metal or taste plastic seemed unhygienic even before Coronavirus!).

Sid Brown, a Religious Studies professor who specializes in Theravada Buddhism, recounts a classroom activity that immerses students in mindfulness. The directions are simple: they sit together in silence, each using their range of senses (bar hearing, though listening to movements in the room could count) to contemplate one raisin for ten

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minutes. The results, Brown finds, are richly complex: by “spending 10 minutes with a single raisin,” students amplify their capacities for attention, self-awareness, and wonder (16). An ostensible end goal exists for those who prefer one —to eat the raisin—but the real, pedagogical goal lies in slowing the embodied process— eating

this

raisin —thereby intensifying students’

presentness in their moment-to-moment experience.

The average “mindless” time it takes to consume a raisin, by my home trial, is twelve seconds. This means the exercise, within tighter class parameters, could be adapted to a five-minute version and still push students to reach a heightened level of mindfulness. With our course’s seventy-five-minute meetings, the full time is feasible; moreover, it matches the neuroscience research that I have shared (II), where Norris et al. found one ten-minute mindfulness meditation yields cognitive attention benefits for “meditation-naïve college students.”

This section—the core of the class—assumes in-person instruction (see the Appendix for my synchronous/asynchronous digital adaptation). The essential steps are: 1. Before class, I prepare a tray with raisins or natural objects that I have collected (e.g., chestnuts, pebbles, twigs). A former colleague once used apples for a similar activity, and a guide to mindfully eating chocolate (Mind Space) could work with adjustments.

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2. When we reach this part of class, I ask students to remove everything from the table except for a piece of paper and pen or pencil. Devices are closed/turned off and placed out of sight.

3. Next, I pass around the tray, inviting each student to take one item. A hush often falls at this point, though I have not yet requested silence. (The stage can also be punctuated by humor: sometimes students laugh, agonizing over which raisin or stone to choose.)

4. I then explain the experiment, asking them to spend the following ten minutes silently focusing their senses on the object in front of them before—if they wish—drawing the object or writing down any thoughts or associations that arise. In a given semester, about a third of the students in this firstyear writing course are multilingual, so I say “writing in any language” to ensure fluid, free expression.

5. Finally, I check the time and tell them to begin. A timer causes an abrupt ending and brings the distraction of technology back to the table, so I watch the classroom clock.

6. After ten minutes, I ask them to stop.

The atmosphere during this part of class tends to be very quiet and still, but not solemn or static.

When I have to speak, I use a calm, even voice but avoid what could come off as, in the academic setting, a touchy-feely lilt. Critically, in every semester, I have joined the class in contemplating

a raisin or chestnut, etc. My participation is by necessity shallower, however, as I stay alert to the time and, discreetly, to the students.

What I perceive, gauging their experimentation from my place at the table, must be considered in relation to their self-reported results (IV). Yet my consistent impressions are of acute inwardness, focus, and absorption. Sometimes, a student will write swiftly for minutes on end; another will create a detailed sketch of their object; another will not pick up their pen at all. A few students set their item on the paper and behold it like an objet d’art on display. Once a student held his twig to one ear, listening intently. For the iterations when we use raisins, many people do not eat theirs: while they might just dislike nature’s candy, I heard one student after class confess to being unable to eat “my raisin” in a tone bridging guilt and affection; in a different class, I overheard someone express reluctance to throw out “my” ginkgo leaf. Though advanced meditators would warn against the attachment indicated by these possessive pronouns, in this introductory context I read it as a signal that these students deeply engaged in the exercise. They now see and value a mundane object—a minute raisin, a crisp leaf—that we usually overlook.

This experiment appears to stimulate a radical attentiveness in students, an attentiveness that lifts them out of a peripheral, passive, and potentially circumspect position on the use of meditative tools in the higher education classroom. Of the first-year students I have taught, the majority have only just learned earlier in this session (I, II) about the argued benefits of contemplative pedagogy for college-level cognition. Their prevalent skeptical, data-driven orientation sets them up to be curious, but inclined to challenge and reserve judgment. This in-class

experiment therefore serves as a crucial personal step that enables the students to begin forming an internal perspective on the subject. Now, individually and together, the class can draw on at least one firsthand experience of mindfulness in education as we return to the studies that claim meditative techniques can enhance academic learning.

PART IV. THEORETICAL AND EXPERIENTIAL REFLECTIONS

The pivot from doing to reflecting is one my students quickly become used to in the semester. As with most composition courses, our course aims to develop recursive writing processes, so when we reach this lesson on mindfulness, which opens the final unit, the first-years have engaged in almost three months of reflections on readings, mind maps, drafts, and revisions. However, the familiar move to reflecting as we enter the last part of this particular class can spark a retrospective insight: some students have announced that they suddenly see that the many written reflections in our course were fostering a metacognitive, contemplative, and meditative habit of mind.

If a student voices that insight, I affirm it but lead the group’s focus back to the ten-minute mindfulness exercise that they have just experienced.

I ask them to do a pair of one-minute freewrites, in whatever order they wish, in which they jot down their current, initial responses to and appraisals of contemplative pedagogy based on 1. the pedagogical theory and multidisciplinary studies presented earlier (II) 2. the experiential “evidence” they gathered through the raisin/object exercise (III).

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Employing short, individual freewrites here ensures that everyone engages in this key reflection. They simultaneously ensure privacy, promoting honesty by removing the possible influence of what students perceive as peer opinions or my expectations.

Moreover, I use these freewrites because we practice “thinking through writing” throughout the composition course, which also explains why I add an optional writing (or drawing) dimension to the raisin activity. While that unstructured option aligns with writing mindfully from what Alexandria Peary has called the “permissive, exploratory” moment (3), these prompt-guided freewrites spur a focused sifting through of students’ intellectual, psychological, and/or emotional responses with an evaluative turn. If a class seemed restless after the experiment, though, or if time was running out, an oral check-in with a partner could achieve most of these aims.

After keeping time again, I elicit volunteers to share some of their theoretical and experiential reflections with the group, either reading part of it aloud or summarizing an endorsement or criticism. If several students want to speak, I model close listening so that all views are respectfully heard; if only a couple volunteer, I build on their input to initiate a full-class discussion about mindfulness pedagogy in theory and practice. If everyone stays silent (in a prolonged meditative state?), I shift our consideration to a related concept that student athletes have raised. For competitive sports, as for academics, recent studies suggest that mindfulness-based interventions fortify the psychological skills requisite for performing under pressure (Birrer et al.). It is easy to connect this research to the everyday rhetoric of entering “the zone” in exercise, and doing so permits every student, not only athletes in the class, to assess the

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popularized benefits of mindfulness from another dual theoretical-empirical stance.

As mentioned above, components of this seminar session can be reordered to cultivate various effects.

I have altered the sequence to adapt to fluctuating class factors (e.g., late arrivals) but also to test whether a special ordering had more impact. Most provocative is to launch the class into the experiment (III) without preparation and then articulate contemplative pedagogy through the constellation of terms (I) and multidisciplinary support (II).

(Sections I and II can themselves be covered in reverse order, although this depends on the students’ grasping the terms enough to follow the research and pedagogical support.) The “experiment first, theorize after” approach can have energizing surprise value; it additionally can limit the effect of confirmation bias or other cognitive biases—including skepticism—on students’ raw experience of mindfulness meditation. Yet if any class members arrive late, the hushed, concentrated atmosphere is jarred for all: despite whispered catch-up instructions from the instructor, the tardy student cannot become as completely immersed in the activity, while others’ attention will be diverted from their objects. Another option, which buys buffer time at the start, is to allow the class to determine the order. This route appeals by enhancing student agency and immediately activating everyone’s involvement, but it does rely on consensus and a swift shuffling act from the instructor.

Regardless of the sequence for I, II, and III, the lesson needs to finish with the multilayered reflections of IV. Because students here reflect on and appraise contemplative pedagogy independently and collaboratively, from a theoretical lens and personal experience, the private freewrites and

follow-up community sharing serve as the culminating section of the class. This final part adds coherence to the day’s session, exposes students to diverse perspectives from their peers, and empowers them to metacognitively bring to the surface of consciousness the intricacies of their own reaction to mindfulness as it may have progressed over the past hour, stage by stage. Loosely resembling the “results” and “discussion” sections of an IMRaD article,12 this last part of the seminar provides space for the airing of affirmations, qualifications, concerns, and a spectrum of introspective observations.

These meet in a constructive friction, as the students’ positions in the abstract intersect with their actual experience.

The skepticism reviewed at the opening of this essay has not vanished by the end of this class meeting, nor, I believe, should it. For every iteration, the majority of volunteers in this reflective stage report an overwhelmingly positive experience of our mindfulness exercise, with phrasing that tends to confirm its capacity to promote holistic centeredness, to reduce distractions and so deepen concentration, and to “recharge” their depleted, end-semester mental energies. Yet in every class, one or two students hint at or directly express continuing uncertainty about whether meditation-based techniques lead to measurable academic benefits, beyond a general psychological boon. Such critiques of contemplative pedagogy have been politely couched (to paraphrase one, “I can see how it might help some people or have a placebo effect, but for me personally, meditation doesn’t improve my studying.”). I find it valuable—vital—to draw out these skeptical lines of inquiry. For any resistance can remind us of the irony that inflects contemplative pedagogical discourse: why fixate on outcomes for

what are, in essence, liberatingly goal-less practices?

And specific kinds of persistent doubts about mindfulness in learning can generate critical points to investigate in future research and consider in pedagogy design.

MEDIATING MINDFULNESS WITH SKEPTICISM

Skepticism about the role of mindfulness in higher education seems enmeshed with the vexed issue of pedagogical priorities. In class meetings—no matter the duration, frequency, or format—it can feel like an impossible task to cover all the targeted field knowledge and skill-building work. Logistical limitations may thus exacerbate the tendency for faculty and students to expect or accept contemplative pedagogy solely in courses with clearly related content, or possibly a focus on creative processes.

Even when meditation-based exercises are tailored to complement an academic lesson and scholarship documenting the cognitive benefits of meditation is presented, in many college classrooms, and among professors, students, administrators, and families, an unspoken question can hover: Is this the best use of limited class time?

The contemporary approval of holistic learning, then, only goes so far. Though instructors, like myself, often frame contemplative pedagogy in secular terms (Bush 196), its origins in sacred meditative practices such as Christian centering prayer and Buddhist chanting (S. Brown 16) can readily be traced, as is the case for other contemplative learning activities spanning Lectio Divina to Aikido (Barbezat and Bush 10-11). Resistance to even introductory mindfulness exercises, like my class’s ‘experiment,’ can result, since meditation, as Paul Castle and Scott Buckler note, may carry a

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social “stigma” due to its perceived links to religion, new-age spirituality, or cult rites (142). Thus, while some educators and students welcome active means that nurture connections between the heart, body, and mind in scholarly study, others balk or object on ethical, legal, philosophical, logistical, curricular, and sociocultural grounds. Those on the fence might find it tempting to stick to conventional teaching strategies, taking comfort in the argument that critical thinking—which “turns attention inward, training the mind to concentrate on an idea or an experience and observe its details” (Fisher 10)— already achieves meditation learning objectives.

However, for those instructors wondering whether or how much to embrace contemplative pedagogy, it may help to recall that the trend of pedagogical doubt in tension with pedagogical progress has precedents. “As practical professionals, teachers are often suspicious of new claims and the implementation of new ideas without proof of effectiveness. Teachers tend to adopt a new technology when that technology helps them do what they are currently doing better” (Albaugh). These lines from a 1997 piece on overcoming skepticism about computer technology use in education sound quaintly surreal in the wake of spring 2020, when no instructor could have viably functioned without an online platform. Yet the lines underscore, too, how professional caution perennially acts in concert with innovation and change. They further point to a narrative for the gradual adoption of the latest learning-enhancing devices—and, as we have seen, interdisciplinary research increasingly casts meditation as the newest (oldest) neurobiological technology. The move from perusing empirical studies to advocating mindfulness pedagogies follows

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a logical arc in a story about a tool that enables us to teach, and students to learn, better. Even concerns about overloading course lessons might be calmed, as “efficiency gains” have recently been added to the cognitive processes that evidence suggests are bolstered by meditation training and mindfulness-based interventions (Schöne et al.).

In the current climate of persisting ambivalence, though, I approach contemplative pedagogy for academic writing in a way that does not aim to remove resistance but rather acknowledges potential skeptical responses and, in so doing, possibly mitigates doubts by motivating students to authentically, reflectively engage. As mindfulness permeates more of society and schooling, the skepticism that meditative practices can provoke in the higher education classroom will surely lessen; but subconscious skepticism will most likely persevere. The rise of meditation-based techniques in managing stress, test anxiety, and sports performance may in fact slow students from appreciating how contemplative pedagogies can enrich course learning.

Faculty, too, might still regard mindfulness more as an intrapersonal study skill tactic than a cognitive development tool. Yet as research evidence accrues and, perhaps, pedagogical training advances, contemplative approaches in the classroom may become widely recognized as a critical part of holistic educational praxis, not least for the field of composition.

For the present, my single-seminar introduction to mindfulness with its skeptical framing is, on one level, a compromise—with my predominantly STEM-oriented students; with the constraints of our course’s scope; with professional precarity in light of my non-tenured position; and with my

program, departmental, and administrative colleagues, whose expectations of pedagogical rigor along with teaching excellence might not (yet) embrace contemplative strategies that could be seen to blur scholarly inquiry with religious, spiritual, or culturally commodifying practices. The compromise, though, serves the purpose of this opening class of a unit on how metacognition enhances recursive academic composition. Therefore, by working within familiar critical modes of academia, I am able to integrate a more progressive pedagogy that cultivates the sort of process-based, experimental, self-reflective habits of mind that empower first-year students to grow as scholars and writers.

On another level, the way I mediate mindfulness for any skeptics in the course is uncompromising.

The pedagogical approach presented in this essay insists on our considering meditative classroom interventions from multiple angles: in theory and practice, identifying support and research gaps, promoting a critical stance and an immersive experience. Ultimately, the various forms of skepticism and student engagement in the session I have discussed suggest that meaningful class dialogue about the appropriacy and benefits of mindfulness in academia is ripe to emerge. By inviting the students to explore underlying doubts, which first-years in particular might feel but not express, I enlist a critically inquiring stance as something to work with instead of around or against. This amounts to more than a negative psychology trick: introducing contemplative pedagogy with an interrogative tone may have roused primarily affirmative responses from my classes (so far), yet the vital message is that skepticism can deepen and extend, rather than cut off, our conversation. Especially for students inclined toward the social and natural sciences, balancing

such skeptical reserve with experiential openness offers an effective first step in promoting students’ awareness of the potential that mindfulness has to enhance their learning, in the academic writing classroom and beyond.

APPENDIX: AN ONLINE ALTERNATIVE

In spring 2020, my institution switched to online instruction before the metacognitive mindfulness class discussed above took place. To compress and reconfigure material for the new format, I adapted the session to a hybrid synchronous-asynchronous version for delivery via Zoom and Moodle. For the small section I was teaching, with students who had all self-identified as intended STEM majors or minors but also as introverts, this version seemed to adequately promote the main learning outcomes.

More training in digital pedagogies would surely lead me to revise, yet here is an outline of that online alternative: 1. In our live meeting via Zoom (abbreviated to reduce screen fatigue), I present metacognitive mindfulness for higher education by sharing my screen with an excerpt on metacognition in first-year composition (Carpenter), followed by the webpages on the Swarthmore/Yale neuroscience study and Vanderbilt’s introduction to contemplative pedagogy cited above (II). These materials are also posted to Moodle for later reference.

2. Then, I invite volunteers to describe any metacognitive practices they have encountered in high school or college classrooms

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before we briefly discuss the constellation of related terms and concepts (I), which I type into the chat.

3. Moving toward the asynchronous classwork, I review the instructions posted on Moodle and stress that students can do the two assignments (a. and b.) in either order, but should answer the questionnaire (4.) only after completing both.

1. watch a short video in which I give a micro-lecture on multidisciplinary theory and research support (II) for contemplative pedagogy 2. conduct an at-home experiment: find a natural object—e.g., raisin, stick, flower —and clear desk space, then spend ten minutes silently focusing on the object.

The Moodle instructions include the same encouragement to use all senses and the option to write or draw as the in-class version (III) 3. B efore midnight of the same day, students should complete the anonymous “Contemplative pedagogy questionnaire” that I have created via Moodle. The questions ask them to reflect on the use of mindfulness exercises in academic

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contexts, appraising it from theoretical and empirical perspectives.

4. Finally, I ask students to return to the questionnaire results the next day to view the full class’s responses. This two-part step (4.-5.) thus replaces the freewrites and group sharing of the on-campus session (IV).

Though I prefer the in-person mindfulness seminar, the online alternative has arguable advantages worth noting. It gives the opportunity for greater privacy, which may reduce some students’ self-consciousness about trying a less familiar “classroom” approach. (This benefit might be offset by distractions or stressors within students’ home environments, however.) Everyone can choose their own sequence: theory before experiment, or vice versa; no group or instructor decision dictates. Moreover, the concluding questionnaire allows for expansive reflection time in written form, which introverted and multilingual first-year students might especially appreciate. Spontaneous dialogue cannot evolve, yet the questionnaire has the benefit of getting everyone to contribute critical and experiential reflections. And, significantly, its anonymity enables students to voice impressions, including reservations, without in-class pressure to expose personal views or make teacher-pleasing comments.

NOTES 1.

See Dorjee, for instance, for an overview of contemporary meditation research.

According to The Guardian, Ron Purser and David Loy did not coin but influentially publicized the term and notion of McMindfulness in their 2013 online article “Beyond McMindfulness” (Forbes).

2.

Champlain College provides a salient example: see the “Mindfulness & Stress Relief ” resource offered through their Academic Support Services webpages. cf. Purdue University Global’s Student Resources blog, which in 2019 posted under its Student Life section “The (Nontraditional) College Student’s Guide to Mindfulness.”

3.

Bush notes that by 2010 over 100 higher education institutions were hosting Contemplative Practice Fellows (187), but this represents only about 2% of the 4,599 degree-granting U.S. institutions in 2010-11 (NCES).

4.

I am grateful to a former first-year writing student for the real-life example of a homeroom minute of silence.

5.

6.

In a larger class, similar intimacy could be fostered by arranging desks in a circle for this session.

See Fisher, plus her sources, on how contemplative practices in education risk intruding on students’ personal lives and privacy (16-17).

7.

Iowa State University, Guilford College, and Montclair State University, for instance, all cite Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching on contemplative pedagogy or mindfulness.

8.

Reinforcing my speculation about one foregrounded term, “mindful” appears in the “word splash” of synonyms and key terms for the habit of mind “Metacognition” (Costa and Kallick 119-120).

9.

Candy Gunther Brown herself describes using the raisin meditation in an Introduction to Environmental Studies class (18).

10.

Even at the 2020 NeMLA pedagogy roundtable that generated this Special Cluster, several presenters and participants said they deliberately give mindfulness approaches a neutral label, such as “breathing exercises,” in class.

11.

12.

e IMRaD format—Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion—is a structural Th convention in natural sciences papers presenting original research.

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WORKS CITED Albaugh, Patti R. “The Role of Skepticism in Preparing Teachers for the Use of Technology.”

“Education for Community”: A Town and Gown Panel Discussion, 26 Jan. 1997, Westerville, OH. Paper presentation.

Barbezat, Daniel P., and Mirabai Bush. Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning. Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Birrer, Daniel, et al. “Mindfulness to Enhance Athletic Performance: Theoretical Considerations and Possible Impact Mechanisms.” Mindfulness, vol. 3, 2012, pp. 235-46.

Bourgeault, Cynthia. “A Seamless Whole.” Center for Action and Contemplation, 17 Feb. 2017, cac.org/a-seamless-whole-2017-02-17.

Brown, Candy Gunther. “Why I Do Not Use Contemplative Pedagogy in the Public University Classroom.” Contemplative Studies and the Religious Studies Classroom: Spotlight on Teaching, edited by Sarah Jacoby and Jessica Tinklenberg, American Academy of Religion, 2019, pp. 6-10.

Brown, Candy Gunther, and Saki Santorelli. “Does Mindfulness Belong in Public Schools? Two Views.”

Tricycle, Spring 2016, tricycle.org/magazine/does-mindfulness-belong-public-schools/.

Brown, Sid. “Cultivating Wonder.” Sewanee Magazine, Spring 2008, pp. 14-19.

Bush, Mirabai. “Mindfulness in Higher Education.” Contemporary Buddhism, vol. 12, no. 1, 2011, pp. 183-97.

Carpenter, William J. “Metacognitive Development in First-Year Composition.” Council of Writing Program Administrators, 2014.

Castle, Paul, and Scott Buckler. How to Be a Successful Teacher: Strategies for Personal and Professional Development. Sage, 2009.

Chick, Nancy. “Mindfulness in the Classroom.” Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, 2010, cft. vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/contemplative-pedagogy/.

“Contemplative Pedagogy.” Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, 2021, ctl.columbia.edu/ resources-and-technology/resources/contemplative-pedagogy/.

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Costa, Arthur L., and Bena Kallick. “Creating a Culture of Mindfulness.” Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind: 16 Essential Characteristics for Success. ASCD, 2008, pp. 271-90.

Council of Writing Program Administrators, et al. Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. 2011.

Dorjee, Dusana. “Defining Contemplative Science: The Metacognitive Self-Regulatory Capacity of the Mind, Context of Meditation Practice and Modes of Existential Awareness.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, 2016, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01788.

Fisher, Kathleen M. “Look Before You Leap: Reconsidering Contemplative Pedagogy.”

Teaching Theology & Religion, vol. 20, no. 1, 2017, pp. 4-21.

Forbes, David. “How capitalism captured the mindfulness industry.” The Guardian, 16 Apr. 2019, www. theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/16/how-capitalism-captured-the-mindfulness-industry.

Gouda, Sarah, et al. “Students and Teachers Benefit from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in a School-Embedded Pilot Study.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, 2016, doi: 10.3389/ fpsyg.2016.00590.

Greim, Roy. “Psychologist Cat Norris and Dan Creem ’16 Link Meditation With Cognitive Improvement.” Swarthmore College, 29 Aug. 2018, www.swarthmore.edu/news-events/ psychologist-cat-norris-and-dan-creem-16-link-meditation-cognitive-improvement.

Harris, Dan, et al. Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book. Harmony, 2017.

Kezar, Adrianna. “Toward High-Impact Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.” Peer Review, vol. 14, no. 3, 2012, p. 31.

Littlefair, Sam. “Buddhist researchers seek to reveal link between heart, mind.” Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time, 15 June 2017. www.lionsroar.com/ buddhist-researcher-heart-mind/.

Mcdaniel, Rhett. “Contemplative Pedagogy.” Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, 2 Apr. 2010, cft.vanderbilt.edu/2010/04/contemplative-pedagogy/.

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“Meditation, Mindfulness & Metacognition.” The Global Metacognition Institute, 24 Aug. 2019, www.globalmetacognition.com/post/meditation-metacognition.

“Mindfulness & Stress Relief.” Champlain College, 2020. [webpage no longer exists].

“Mindfulness and the Art of Chocolate Eating!” Mind Space, 2013, www.meditationinschools.org/ wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Mindfulness-and-the-Art-of-Chocolate-Eating.pdf.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). “Table 317.10: Degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by control and level of institution: Selected years, 1949-50 through 2016-17.”

Digest of Education Statistics, 2017, nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_317.10. asp?current=yes%20NCES. “The (Nontraditional) College Student’s Guide to Mindfulness.” Purdue University Global, 8 July 2019. www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/student-life/college-students-guide-mindfulness.

Norris, Catherine J., et al. “Brief Mindfulness Meditation Improves Attention in Novices: Evidence From ERPs and Moderation by Neuroticism.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 12, 2018, doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00315.

O’Donnell, Aislinn. “Contemplative Pedagogy and Mindfulness: Developing Creative Attention in an Age of Distraction.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 49, no. 2, 2015, pp. 187-202.

Pantelides, Kate, and Erica Stone. “Dipping Your Toe in the Water: A Visual Metaphor for Ungrading in OWI.” The Online Writing Instruction (OWI) Symposium, August 20, 2021. Presentation slides: www.owicommunity.org/uploads/5/2/3/5/52350423/01_erica_stone___kate_pantelides.pdf.

Peary, Alexandria. Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing. Routledge, 2018.

Purser, Ronald. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.

Repeater, 2019.

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Schöne, Benjamin, et al. “Mindful Breath Awareness Meditation Facilitates Efficiency Gains in Brain Networks: A Steady-State Visually Evoked Potentials Study.” Scientific Reports, vol. 8, 2018, doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-32046-5.

Schwimmer, Marina, and Kevin McDonough. “Mindfulness and ‘Educational New Ageism.’” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, 2018, doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.175.

Stanton, Julie Dangremond, et al. “Knowledge of Learning Makes a Difference: A Comparison of Metacognition in Introductory and Senior-Level Biology Students.” CBE—Life Sciences Education, vol. 18, no. 2, 2019, doi:10.1187/cbe.18-12-0239.

Van Dam, Nicholas T., et al. “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 13, no. 1, 2017, doi: 10.1177/1745691617709589.

Van Gelder, Tim. “Mindfulness versus metacognition, and critical thinking.” 27 May 2009, timvangelder.com/2009/05/27/mindfulness-versus-metacognition-and-critical-thinking/.

Wetzel, Grace. “‘The most peaceful I ever felt writing’: A Contemplative Approach to Essay Revision.” The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, vol. 22, 2017, pp. 33-50.

Yang, Chuan-Chih, et al. “Alterations in Brain Structure and Amplitude of Low-frequency after 8 weeks of Mindfulness Meditation Training in Meditation-Naïve Subjects.” Scientific Reports, vol. 9, 2019, doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-47470-4.

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minding the

WHOLE PERSON IN ACADEMIA Meditation in the Writing and Literature Classroom

It was a simple question—“How are you?”—yet in the context of the theoretically intense and often abstract graduate school classroom, it startled me.

It was my first year as a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and I was taking a small seminar consisting of four students with Dr. Patrice Nganang called “History of Literary Criticism and Theory.” Before Professor Nganang started class each day, the first thing he did was ask each of us one-by-one the question, "How are you?" This was a startling, radical practice compared to how hurriedly and impersonally other professors started class or addressed students around campus. It felt radical to me because Professor Nganang was acknowledging us students as human beings beyond just our brains. Unsurprisingly, being acknowledged as a feeling human and not just a brain made me feel much more comfortable in class, able to participate in discussion with my fellow graduate students and explore ideas outwardly with others.

The hierarchies and classifications of academia were

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uncomfortable pressures I felt strongly in graduate school, yet thanks to Dr. Nganang’s example of beginning class with this simple gesture, I realized early on in my academic training a path to decreasing these pressures and anxieties: starting class periods with a simple, humanizing pause.

As a professor, now on the other side of the classroom but still within its same bureaucratic space, I have tried to pay forward this helpful model by leading a three-minute meditation practice at the start of each of my classes. I believe whatever technique teachers use to treat students as whole bodies, and not just brains in a vat, shifts students' experience of education for the better.1 In this article, I share what I have found from years of leading this short meditation in my college literature and writing classes. I discuss the effect of anxiety in increasingly corporatized higher education within student and professor populations and how mindfulness can work as one lever of resistance to that suffering and strain. Including

meditation in my classes was so successful that I continued the practice past graduate school to another university in New York City and then a college in Massachusetts. In this article, I share why the practice has been successful, covering my fieldwork and results, as well as providing suggestions for others looking to incorporate mindful meditation into the classroom. I underscore my findings with the theoretical implications of mindfulness for education and universities at large.

Universities are corporations that tend to recreate the inequalities of capitalism generally and educating can feel futile and disorienting when students—and faculty—are beholden to the profit values of this economic system.2 Thus, I believe there is import to small, resisting, liberatory practices in academic life. I liken beginning class with meditation to a strategy that feminist scholar Sara Ahmed calls “loosening the bolts” of the behemoth institution of the university.3 To Ahmed, who resigned from her position as a professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016 due to sexual harassment of students by staff that was normalized within the corporate academic culture, the notion of destroying the institutional culture completely is daunting. She instead emphasizes the strategic power of undermining the too-often sexist nature of academia in micro acts that can be lifesaving to individuals within the system, such as empathetic colleagues “venting” to one another about inequalities. Such small actions make up the “loosening the bolts” method of undoing systematic inequalities at a structure’s weak joints little by little instead of seeking to redo the system all at once. I suggest that teaching students meditation is a mindfulness tool that can loosen the bolts

of hyper-productivity, busy-ness, and anxiety that many reportedly struggle with in academia.

Furthermore, hyper-productivity is historically linked to racism within the United States; scholar Matthew Desmond has noted that modern corporate management techniques designed to increase productivity were first implemented on plantations.4 Modern American corporate cultures are thus based on a history of racial inequality that values surplus and profit at the expense of human life.

The intersectional nature of oppressions positions sexism, racism, and productivity as interrelated threats to those living and working within corporate, academic spaces today.

The benefits of meditation in the classroom have been well-documented in the past few decades. For example, in their review of the literature, Shapiro, Brown, and Astin (2008) note that “meditation is noted as contributing to enhanced cognitive and academic performance (including attention and concentration), management of academic stress, and the development of the ‘whole person’” (Chick).5 Another educator and mindfulness teacher emphasized in 2016 how teaching students the neuroscience of emotions increases their emotional intelligence by increasing spaciousness in the brain, spaciousness meaning “the gap between a child’s emotional state and her understanding of it” (Moses and Choudhury 452). Meditation practice in my classes has resulted in less anxiety for students, greater focus, community, self-awareness, and open-mindedness—all traits which are necessary for good writers and readers and necessary for understanding the economic, social, racial, and gender inequalities of our world and, particularly if one is in a privileged group, addressing them effectively.

Kim Coates, Bristol Community College

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I: CONFRONTING OPPRESSIONS OF THE CEREBRAL CLASSROOM

Introducing meditation into my classroom began from the challenging work environment I encountered in graduate school. Upon starting my degree, I learned that my program, Comparative Literature, did not have secure funding. In my third year the department was defunded by the university, leading to an anxious climate for faculty and graduate students alike and adding to concerns over career prospects. Current students were allowed to keep funding and finish their degrees, which I did, but the aura of the overall environment was distressing.

Like many, I had entered graduate education hopeful and genuinely interested in furthering my education in a vibrant community of scholars. It had never occurred to me that an institution based on such a lofty value as the pursuit of knowledge would uphold what amounted to nearly unlivable working conditions. My colleagues and I—joined by my advisors—frequently had to organize marches, sit-ins, letters to deans, and many other activities to ensure our annual stipends. The defunding of my home department, along with a handful of other humanities departments, increased the sense of insecurity among graduate students and faculty in my program, leading to an environment that I experienced as an obstacle to open dialogue, discussion, and sharing of ideas. In other words, the work conditions presented a challenge to the very purpose we were ostensibly at the university.

Researcher and writer Rogé Karma has discussed this workplace juxtaposition in relation to the term “moral injury”—a term first used to describe war veterans suffering from PTSD—as an alternative to “burn out,” which is often used to describe

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contemporary American professionals. The term “moral injury” specifically refers to a disconnect between a role one intended to enter for its ethical appeal and the reality that it is not possible to perform the tasks of care the role demands due to work conditions that make it impossible. As Karma puts it, this can feel like “realizing that the internal culture is completely at odds with any social mission the organization may have.” He goes on to say that these experiences of moral injury are “forms of cognitive, emotional, moral dissonance that result in something that goes beyond just feeling exhausted, or tired. There’s this sense of existential anguish, of identity crisis, of spiritual malaise” (Karma). Karma emphasizes that moral injury is prominently experienced by essential workers whose workplaces are corporatized or underfunded. The defunding and subsequent cutting of my home department resulted in what I consider now an experience of moral injury. Marked by “spiritual malaise” at work, I found myself searching for solutions to the troubling environment.

Some books analytically helped make sense of the situation such as Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins, which presents universities as transnational corporations driven primarily by profit margins. This foundational understanding of the corporatization of the university system allowed me to make sense of the defunding of my department as typical within the business model of capitalism. In addition, bell hooks’ book Teaching to Transgress called out precisely some of the discomforts I was feeling in the classroom such as the challenges of open conversation. As hooks writes, “In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated, yet a place where I struggled to claim and

maintain the right to be an independent thinker.

The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility” (hooks 4). By putting voice to this affect of oppression with the graduate classroom, hooks voiced what I felt in the classroom. Specifically, Teaching to Transgress links the oppressive atmosphere of the classroom to how teachers embody a mind/body split (16) and reproduce many of the inequalities and hierarchies, particularly racial inequalities, from society directly into the classroom. hooks points to the compartmentalization of the scholar in the sense that while scholars are expected to be whole, there is little regard for their spiritual health within “bourgeois educational structures” (16). In other words, the mind/body split of Western civilization that prioritizes the mind is recreated in the figure of the scholar and teacher, who is encouraged to cut their brain off from life practices outside of the classroom. As hooks writes to this point, “whether academics were drug addicts, alcoholics, batterers, or sexual abusers, the only important aspect of our identity was whether or not our minds functioned, whether we were able to do our jobs in the classroom. […] Part of the luxury and privilege of the role of teacher/professor today is the absence of any requirement that we be self-actualized” (17). This over-emphasis on the brain in contemporary higher education can be seen in the most basic elements of how education is structured, such as a professor walking in and standing in front of a classroom of students who are sitting down; the physical hierarchy of the professor over the students automatically projects

an authoritarian, top-down model of knowledge—at least that is the goal. hooks wrote that her “reaction to this stress and to the ever-present boredom and apathy that pervaded […] classes was to imagine ways that teaching and the learning experience could be different” (5). She urges the teachings of “liberatory practice” in education, which acknowledges the extent to which educational institutions are never neutral but rather reproductions of the racist, sexist, classist systems which built them and encourages teachers to constantly push back against these norms to make the classroom a space of freedom where every student’s presence can be appreciated and where teachers can continue to grow.

To reimagine the classroom as a place of freedom, I wondered how I could “self-actualize,” to become a more credible, healthier leader and teacher to my students and push back against ingrained inequalities of the university system. I was immediately confronted with the reality that Western education is predominantly cerebral, thus making the status quo difficult to subvert, a difficult grain to go against, despite my intent. As scholar Deborah Orr writes about this prioritization of “mentative process” in education, “Educational institutions both reflect and entrench the ramifications of this ideological valorization of mind and suspicion of embodied experience in the endorsement of pedagogical practices grounded in the belief that, while the learning process and knowledge production may be stimulated by or call up emotional experience, this experience is extraneous to the processes of learning and knowledge production” (479). I felt uncertain how to confront the biases of embodied education in a productive manner to break down

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the assumption that the mind is separate from, and of greater value than, the body. Moreover, Orr points out, “This assumption has been elaborated ideologically and institutionally to structure the discourses of sexism, racism, class, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination” (479). Orr's point is that prioritizing the mind at the expense of the body forms the systematic basis for other forms of oppression. The problem with not including the physical body and its knowledges into teaching, then, is that education does not challenge the fibers of inequality that are woven into dominant cultural practices and society. For her part, Orr has implemented Buddhist and Hindu techniques of antibinarism in her classroom and finds that long-term learning must include the holistic body of a student, not just their mind. She finds that yoga traditions that resist binaristic thinking “can be used to address oppressive ideologies and practices in the lives of students and thereby foster change not only on the intellectual level of a student’s learning but also on the levels of body, emotion, and spirit, the levels where the most insidious and resistant formations of oppression are often lodged” (Orr 480). I agree that lasting education must include holistic and experiential practices, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people erroneously believe intelligence resides in the brain.

The summer after my first year as Ph.D. student, suffering from moral injury and contemplating leaving graduate school, I completed a ten-day meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery where I learned from monks how to meditate. While at the monastery, it seemed possible to incorporate the deeply calm and aware mind of mindfulness meditation into my Western classroom. Perhaps due to a spiritual balancing, I felt a new sense of opportunity to return to academia with a mindfulness

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practice that might redress education models that recreated societal hierarchies. I clearly saw the limits of the university as an institution but wanted to test my limit to impact the norms of the space as an individual. Thus, I started a practice of beginning class with a short meditation.

II: MEDITATION METHOD, RESULTS, AND STUDENT RESPONSES

I felt nervous walking into class the first day of the fall 2015 semester knowing I was going to be teaching breathing along with literature. I walked into the fluorescently lit classroom where rows of sand-colored chairs and attached maroon desks lay before me with about twenty undergraduates sitting in them. I placed my notebooks and books on the table and faced the students. After making sure we were all in the right place I proclaimed: “We are going to begin each class period this semester with a three-minute breathing exercise to settle our attention completely here in the English classroom.”

The students stared back at me silently. One girl turned her head to stare out the window.

“So,” I continued, “if everyone could please turn their attention to me. Make sure your feet are flat on the floor. Put down anything in your hand. No pens or paper. Close your eyes, sit up straight. And we are going to focus on breathing in through our noses and out through our noses.”

I thought back to what the monks had said in the monastery that summer.

“Take a deep breath in, feel where the air hits your nostril. Now set your awareness on that spot, when you breathe out feel the same spot. Continue this breathing normally.”

As I spoke, I made every effort to stay still and

not fidget. I pulled to the fore the knowledge that my body remembered, of sitting in meditation with the monks. The memory quickly affected my entire demeanor and settled my physical body into the traits of meditation: calm, aware, present, and focused energy. I stared at the clock behind the students, and when the three minutes were completed, I launched into discussing the twentieth-century novel and getting to know the class.

I chose to start class with this exercise because the beginning of the first meeting is important for establishing the course's tone. Research has confirmed the positive impact of the first five minutes of the class period (Lang),6 and a recent article by scholar Molly Ferguson details her use of Twitter to create a feminist, non-hierarchical classroom in the first five minutes.7 Thus, I knew with the meditation experiment I was going to take the beginning of class to implement it and establish the routine by not missing any sessions.

I knew empirically that breath work helps calm and settle the mind and body, priming it in an excellent way for learning, but I was uncertain how to bring it into the classroom, as I had no guide to do so other than my ten-year practice of yoga and single meditation retreat. However, I did have enough training to know how to translate the teachings, which are essentially simple. I was heartened to learn of resources for incorporating breath work into classes, such as Happy Teachers Change the World. Author Thich Nhat Hanh nicely articulates the positive impact that teachers can have toward holistically teaching students: We can, as teachers, breathe in and out and generate the energy of mindfulness to help our students suffer less. This is a very beautiful thing to see. If you understand their

suffering and listen to their suffering, you can tell them, “I have also suffered, but I practice like this and now I suffer less. Would you like to learn how to do it?” And they will listen to you. Communication like this between teacher and students transforms the class into a community. (Hanh 8) Hanh includes examples of types of breath work to do with students such as bringing a bell into the classroom to accompany meditation. His advice mirrors what I learned from the monks, which is that meditation is simple. It is physically as simple as breathing in and out. I believe that this simplicity is the key for incorporating breathing exercises into the classroom. I will never forget how one of my most powerful experiences on my meditation retreat found me sitting on the same patch of sand for hours focusing on my nostril—nearly comical simplicity.

The monks’ point was that the benefits of meditation are achieved with the simplest of actions: awareness of breathing, which calms and grounds the mind away from the busy-ness—and business—of thoughts, settling it into an openness that is more alert and detached from distraction.

This awareness of simplicity was crucial to my implementation in the classroom. I wanted the practice to seem as quotidian as opening our books—because breathing is. My motivation was to provide myself a space of self-awareness in the moment, to decenter authority, to include all students equally, and to create the classroom as a place of freedom. Though I have implemented different techniques during practice, I will explain the three most common and successful in terms of ease of incorporating and positive student response. These are methods I learned at the Wat Suan Mokkh monastery, where I learned meditation.

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The first technique listed below, “Marking the Breath,” I typically use for the first three to four weeks of the semester. I then start to sprinkle in sessions of “Tracking the Breath” with an explanation first on how to try this technique. After a few more weeks of these two methods, I will then start to include other varieties such as “Counting the Breath.”

These are the three main methods that I circle through during any given semester. Each technique I use for three minutes at a time of any given meditation session.

Marking the Breath This is the simplest type of meditation I have encountered. It is finding a place where you feel the breath enter your body; usually I instruct the nostril, but it can be in the belly or chest if students feel it there and settling awareness on the spot as the breath comes in and out. You can tell students to take a deep breath in and out to feel where that spot is, and then once they feel it, they can return their breath to normal while maintaining awareness on that physical spot.

Tracking the Breath After becoming familiar with marking the breath, you can track the breath. This consists of “following” the breath as it travels in through the nose, down the esophagus, into the belly, and then back up in reverse.

Imagine the breath as a dot that you are tracking down and then up through your body. Settling your awareness into that single dot of attention as it moves through the body.

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Counting the Breath Breathe in for a count of 4. Hold the breath for 4. Breathe out for a count of 4. Or any number you are comfortable with. The exact number does not matter.

On the first day of class, when I explain the practice to students, I also explain that if students arrive late they will be expected to simply take their seat and join the practice. Over the course of the semester, if students arrive late, they are not surprised to see the rest of the class silently sitting, and they usually join the class silently and with minimal disruption.

There are always times students will be disturbed by a door opening or closing, but the practice quickly becomes known to everyone in the class as a silent time and is generally well respected. If a student comes in five or more minutes late, they have simply missed the meditation.

Often, I teach the meditations inspired by a yoga or meditation class I attend—outside of the university—that week. I encourage any teacher who incorporates breath work into their classroom to also regularly attend their own meditation practice and learn from certified mindfulness or meditation teachers as well. There are many resources for incorporating meditation into the classroom, but from my own experience, my greatest advice is to have familiarity with meditation. My interest in sharing my results from implementing meditation in the classroom is primarily to explain how it worked for me, but research on the positive impact of mindfulness in the classroom as well as resources for curious practioners is robust.8 Moreover, it is important to note that while mindfulness is not only limited to breath work, breath work is mindfulness.

By mid-semester I was curious to know how the practice was affecting my “Twentieth Century Novel” students. In the spirit of decentering authority, I decided to have the students fill out a quick survey to determine if we ought to abandon the practice, simply stating “Yes” if they would like to continue or “No” if they would like to stop. I let them know if the results came back overwhelming negative we would indeed stop.

At the end of class as the students filed out, I collected the surveys. A few minutes later, walking down the emptying halls of the classroom building, I leafed through the surveys quickly. I moved over to the wall to recount, surprised at how all surveys indicated the same response. My class was around 27 students, not a large sample size, but it still shocked me to read unanimously positive feedback.

I had been teaching for long enough to know just how rare consensus is on anything. I felt gratitude wash over me with the sunlight streaming in through a window at each positive response, a feeling of connection to my students and at the way this simple practice had a positive impact on our classroom community. Some responses went on to express looking forward to the meditation and how it helped their anxiety. I was surprised that my students who often sat slouched and bored looking in their chairs as I led the breathing exercise were in fact enjoying and appreciating it.

Based on this positive first experience, I decided to keep the meditation for my future classes with the mid-semester survey and add a longer end-of-semester survey. In addition to asking if students wanted to continue the practice or not, I asked if they would continue with the practice outside of class and if it was helpful to them. Again, I received

mainly positive results. The most common response, 54% of those surveyed, wrote that the practice was either “calming” or “relaxing.”9 In addition, 38% of students reported that the practice helped them “focus,” and 19% of students said it “cleared their head before class.” From my (admittedly) limited sample size of 62 students, 85% had a very positive response and experience with the practice; 11% were neutral; and 3% preferred to stop (each of those students reported becoming sleepy).10 Some particularly interesting student responses included: • I found the meditation useful because it helped me to focus on this class and to open my mind to different ideas and ways of thinking. It helps with the thinking process.

• I would use this meditation technique before exams to just sit and concentrate on my breathing.

• When I come to class I feel very overwhelmed and confused, but when I do the 3-minute meditation it helps me to feel comfortable.

• As a senior, and as a naturally anxious person, I really, really appreciate the three minutes of meditation before class. I actually look forward to it because it is a relaxing routine. I feel like it's an opportunity to prioritize mental health and I think it is important to keep doing it. Thank you.

• I personally love the three-minute meditations. It feels refreshing not focusing on the

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world but just the breath. If it could be five minutes it would be even better.

• When you first told us that you wanted us to do the 3-minute breathing thing, I rolled my eyes. It seemed unnecessary and forced.

But, honestly I love it. I think that it brings my anxiety levels down, if only a few levels.

I think it's a good way to get us all focused and I want to keep doing it.

• I really enjoy the meditation at the start of class. As a busy college student, it sometimes feels like I have so much on my mind that it can be hard to focus in class, but the meditation helps me slow down, relax, and get prepared for class and have attention focused on the novel and not elsewhere. I'm in the education program and I definitely plan on using this technique for my future classes.

This data, collected over two years, represents a wide range of voices from both writing and literature classes, and from two different universities and from varied student years, levels, genders, races, classes, backgrounds, etc. Yet, across all of these variables, a majority of students reported feeling overly busy, stressed out, and needing focus. Again, I was struck that students whom I saw multiple times a week and who conducted themselves civilly in class and never acted in any noticeably alarming way, reported such consistently high levels of stress and anxiety.

In other words, these were the group of students deemed “ordinary” by education standards to be in a regular-level English or Writing class, yet their internal stress as reported in relation to the meditation was expressive. Psychological strain of students is easily overlooked by educators, in part due to the

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typical hierarchy of classrooms that feature a professor as an active authority and students as passive recipients of knowledge. While the mindfulness exercise I introduced cannot completely do away with student anxiety, it is a gesture of solidarity by acknowledging that holistic health systems of the physical body affect the ability to be completely present and engaged in class. While some might see this gesture as small and insignificant, I contend that it is radical for its ability to humanize others in the often-dehumanizing atmosphere of the corporate university. Perhaps the fact that my students wanted to continue a short meditation practice in the classroom is not surprising based on my own experience with similarly humanizing practices in the classroom from my advisors and mentors at my alma mater and the prior research that has been done on this topic.

In addition to creating an atmosphere of humanity, I also believe that meditation increases student capacity for self-regulated learning. In her book Creating Self-Regulated Learners, university English professor Linda B. Nilson writes how, especially in developmental writing or freshman-level classes, the biggest lesson for students to learn is how to learn. Nilson draws a parallel between metacognition and self-regulated learning. She explains becoming intrigued at hearing how some professors had worked wonders with failing students through metacognitive activities. Nilson emphasizes the import for students who come to college unprepared for the requirements of academic duties to learn accountability for their learning. As she writes, “Study skills really aren’t the point. Learning is about one's relationship with oneself and one's ability to exert the effort, self-control, and critical self-assessment necessary to achieve the best possible results—and about overcoming risk aversion, distractions, and sheer laziness in

pursuit of real achievement. This is self-regulated learning” (xxvii). I agree with Nilson that lasting learning is based in self-awareness and knowledge of oneself and that self-regulation is key to getting there. In Creating Self-Regulated Learners, Nilson explores activities, readings, and workshops to teach students to become more self-aware of their learning practices, such as beginning the semester with a writing exercise where students write “How they got an A in this course” imagining themselves at the end of the semester looking back (17).

I posit that the brief meditation in my classroom works toward this same goal of self-accountability and self-awareness as a practice in learning. Enacting some of Nilson’s self-regulated learning techniques into my classes correlated seamlessly with the three-minute meditation because they both operate on the metacognitive level that focuses on how students are learning. Thus, to the extent that meditation requires self-regulated awareness to breath, I suggest it also helps to create self-regulated learners. Though more research on this point is needed and would require following students years past the time they were students in a class that introduced meditation, student responses to the practice in my class indicate a heightened level of self-awareness. For example, one of my students wrote, “I would use this meditation technique before exams” and other students wrote similarly that they would continue the practice as needed for their anxiety levels outside of my classroom.

The fact that many students are feeling bad in the classroom cannot be ignored, as it poses a formidable obstacle to learning. If educators can introduce a habit—such as a brief opening meditation—to lessen the anxiety, stress, or just hustle and bustle of traveling to class that a majority

of students feel, a better learning environment can be created that also provides a lifelong skill that extends past the semester of our classroom.

Carrying a productive method of self-awareness in one’s physical body is reflective of the lasting effects of educating holistically.

As a graduate instructor, I continued to implement a starting meditation in my classes until my last semester. By that semester, my home department of Comparative Literature no longer had undergraduate students, so the Writing and Rhetoric department had absorbed the remaining few Ph.D. students in the closing Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature department, and we were tasked to teach Writing Workshops. I felt like a soulless resource being deployed without consent at the university administration's will. When I met with the Director of Writing and Rhetoric to discuss my new role, I also was discouraged by his apparent lack of concern for myself or the other graduate students in my position. I did not establish a strong rapport with the director that day. When he came to observe my Writing Workshop a few months later, I didn't think twice when launching into my habitual beginning meditation. I was surprised, however, to glance over at him and see him calmly seated along with the students, eyes closed, immersed in the meditation.

After the class, he expressed his gratitude for the meditation. I came to see that my prior impression of the director, then, as needlessly perturbed was in fact me projecting my frustrations with the corporate university onto him personally.

Within the created and shared space of purposeful mindfulness, we had bridged a gap between the bureaucracy of the administration that had pitted us against each other. The director ended up

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mentoring me on aspects of the job market and wrote me letters of recommendation for jobs post-graduation. As previously stated, mindfulness is no miracle worker, but I suspect that some of my unhappiness with academia as a graduate student stemmed from the general aura of despair, busy-ness, and negativity that hung around the Humanities building like a palpable chill. Focusing on breathing allowed myself and the director to open an avenue of communication and connection apart from the spiderweb of capitalism and budget cuts plaguing the university. Thus, in addition to decentering authority in the classroom and reducing student anxiety, mindfulness in the classroom has the potential to unload some of the weight of the neoliberal university that professors and students bear.

III: MEDITATION AS A FEMINIST STRATEGY FOR ADDRESSING CORPORATIZATION

Here, some readers might object that the trending popularity of mindfulness is a fad. Some might say that teaching meditation in the classroom before literature or writing is “McMindfulness,” a term made popular by David Loy and Ron Purser in a 2013 article to refer to the marketing of mindfulness practices as a commodity. As Loy and Purser put it, “The rush to secularize and commodify mindfulness into a marketable technique may be leading to an unfortunate denaturing of this ancient practice, which was intended for far more than relieving a headache, reducing blood pressure, or helping executives become better focused and more productive.” Loy and Purser argue that stripping mindfulness of its spiritual component is harmful because the spiritual element is necessary to develop

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social harmony and compassion, not just productivity. They write that “corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee: stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments.” Other articles like “How Capitalism Captured the Mindfulness Industry” critique mindfulness on similar grounds, focusing on how the commodification and marketing practices of capitalism has rendered the practice devoid of a deeper, transformational potential.11 These articles rightly point out the problems with mindfulness as a commodity when the ethical aspects of the practice are excluded. However, I do not find that mindfulness as strategic pedagogy falls into the category of “McMindfulness” because when the practice is coupled with the goals of the English and literature classroom such as paying attention to other perspectives, understanding marginalized voices, and developing logical and ethical communication skills—the effects of meditation in the classroom create an environment of equality and freedom, not monetary profit. Though I concede that capitalism has co-opted mindfulness by deploying it as a performance booster for employees, I still insist that the component of mindfulness necessary to initiate inner compassion and change can be strategically taught in writing and literature classrooms as the unanimously affirmative support of the three breathing exercises in my TwentiethCentury Novel class have shown.

To survive in corporate and neoliberal professional settings, other academics have also extolled strategic measures. In their book The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, Maggie Berg and

Barbara K. Seeber promote the idea of “slow”—as taken from the slow food movement—to challenge the pace and productivity expectations of careers in contemporary higher education. Statistics from a 2007 CAUT survey on occupational stress reified their own feelings of negativity and despair with their academic careers, so the authors decided to actively research alternatives.12 Descriptions about academic life from their book resonated with me (much like bell hooks’ words on discomfort in the classroom) such as: “Campuses have become tragic places. […]

[Universities] are cowering and underfinanced and overexamined and overbureaucratised” (qtd. in Berg and Seeber 4). These descriptions are reminiscent of my experience my first few years inside the corporate university setting, and that has never entirely left. The Slow Professor is a clarion call, with the data to back it up, announcing what many already sense from teaching within the institution: academic careers are too often unfulfilling, stressful, and harmful to health.

The authors of The Slow Professor cite many of the same reasons for this situation that students claim about themselves, such as time management and time pressures, which make academic work discouraging and tiring: “The major obstacle to creative and original thinking […] is the stress of having too much to do” (Berg and Seeber 28). This stress means that professors rarely have the time to reach mindful “flow” states where time is not counted and real, creative, cognitive work is accomplished (26).13 However, the authors note, “We believe that we can combat stress and cynicism - while keeping ourselves alive - by promoting a pedagogy of pleasure. Such a notion has the additional attraction of being antithetical to corporate values” (35). What

the authors mean by a “pedagogy of pleasure” is teaching with awareness to the moment, with care, thoughtfulness (11), joy and enjoyment (34), and intention (51). They posit reframing the classroom space from one of solely duty to a space where laughter, fun, self-awareness, and enjoyment abound.

To encourage a pedagogy of pleasure, Berg and Seeber promote embodied intelligence. Recalling to me the words of hooks and Orr on feminist pedagogy, they write, “Learning does not and cannot take place in some transcendent brain. […]

Academia's tendency to conceive the body as life support for the brain has had deleterious effects on our teaching (not to mention our lives)” (35).

Berg and Seeber focus specifically on how positive feelings and emotions can increase the class's intellectualism because intelligence is embodied and situationally based on feeling (36). They laud the practice of pausing at the beginning of class, noting the import of gearing up for class in the vein of athletes or actors preparing for a performance.

As they state, “Being conscious of a transition to class has vastly improved my state of mind” (41).

This “opening pause,” they note, “improves the teacher's confidence and delivery, the atmosphere in the room, and the students' attention” (42).

The Slow Professor also specifically covers breathing in relation to increasing embodiment practices in teaching. They write that “breathing mirrors our relationship with our students” (43).

Research shows that we habitually breathe shallowly, which can convey anxiety. Students mirror what the teacher is doing, so shallow breathing influences students to also breathe shallowly. On the other hand, breathing easily and deeply conveys ease, confidence, and a sense of concentration that can aid in focusing the course material.14

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The authors cover other techniques like laughing and not taking oneself too seriously in order to enjoy class and promote positive affect within the classroom. They create a frame that juxtaposes academia's reliance on speed with its purported goal of learning, thus claiming that we ought to infuse slowness into our teaching and into the academy. As they say, “The culture of speed (and its associated values of efficiency, productivity, applicability, transferability) is at odds with an understanding of the ethical dimension of time because it forecloses potential ways of being and knowing. [...] Slowing down is a matter of ethical import” (58).

The increasingly normalized fast pace of academia is also a threat to feminist pedagogy.

Berg and Seeber cite Margaret Thornton, who has written on the important link between feminist scholarship and the critique of neoliberal trends of speed, “the type of knowledge production fostered in the corporate university is deeply ideological. Corporatization ‘has facilitated the remasculinization of the academy behind a facade of rationality, neutrality, and technocratic knowledge’ […] The ‘undervaluing’ of the humanities and social sciences ‘has a deleterious gender component’” (Berg and Seeber 63).

I experienced this logic of corporatization firsthand via the cutting of my humanities program while in graduate school, which showed that feminist and cultural studies are at-risk intellectual pursuits in higher education. The practice of meditation in the classroom can momentarily subvert the corporate forces of categorizing, labeling, and quantifying by simply starting off with silence. Language itself can

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be harmful, as hooks writes: “Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear, the speech of the Gullah, Yiddish, and so many other unremembered tongues” (168). Meditation and silent breathing at the beginning of class is intended to set the stage of equality by removing the typical tools of white supremacy—language, authority, directions—in order to enable and foster a free mind. From this space of freedom of mind, I believe the pedagogies of pleasure are enabled that students and professors can carry forward to “loosen the bolts” of corporate practices.

In the face of the systemic corporatization of the university, it behooves those of us in the increasingly threatened humanities to impart practices that encourage students not to leave the oppressive status quo untroubled. A great benefit of introducing meditation practices in the classroom is that it is embodied. Teachers are able to, in ways that university professors often cannot, actually show what we mean theoretically. In other words, teachers help students install praxis in the moment. For example, scholar Amy E. Winans supports the praxis of “critical emotional literacy,” which is the concept that the cognitive and emotional abilities of a student are inextricably intertwined. She uses embodied, contemplative practices in her class such as asking students to go somewhere on campus and simply stand still and do nothing for ten minutes and then discuss what they felt or thought during that time. She writes that such contemplative pedagogy “helps students experience a different relationship to their emotions, one that is

more reflective and less reactive, it can open students up to different relationships to and experiences of identity. This work has particular relevance in English studies classrooms, given the important role that identity formation plays within literary studies, especially in the context of difference” (166). Activities such as this require students to critically self-reflect on the interwovenness of embodiment and thought, translating theory into practice in a manner rarely employed in education.

Strategic, embodied pedagogies, such as meditation in the classroom, converge with the interests of feminist pedagogies and the worthwhile goal of making life more enjoyable as a professor and as a student within the corporate university.

IV: CONCLUSION

Meditation in my classroom began as an attempt to address the “moral injury” of graduate school and has resulted in a practice that lessens anxiety among my students and colleagues and that provides lasting tools for effectively confronting disembodying and dehumanizing corporate environments. While the breathing exercise may not always directly benefit everyone, nor does it harm the collective. Since starting my class with a short meditation, I have found the classroom is a better learning environment for students because meditation gives students an opportunity to lessen their anxiety, create a calm and collective mindset before course begins, and feel humanized as entire bodies and not solely brains.

There is very rarely resistance to the practice, and I have never seen a student act overtly disruptive during the practice. I sense the reason for so little

resistance is the same reason I felt startled by the “How are you?” question: the welcome relief students feel when they are treated as whole people, not just brains. Moreover, meditation aids in creating lasting learning through providing a practice students can use at any time to address stress or anxiety and contributes to students’ overall self-awareness required to become self-regulated learners. Based on the positive results in my classroom and corroborating evidence from other scholars (Winans; Orr), I believe more research should be done on how awareness and observation without judgment makes students better learners, particularly in our writing and literature courses.

Meditation in higher education can also be a tool for those working in the institution to undermine the hegemony of corporate and capitalistic division; it can reveal new ways to teach in the neoliberal climate of today by reminding researchers to prioritize the body as integral with the mind.

Furthermore, meditation in the classroom creates a feminist classroom space because it decenters authority and power and builds a class community apart from deeply engrained societal assumptions.

The praxis of mindfulness in the classroom benefits everyone, not just women or minorities, for the pace of the current system is hard on both teachers and students; everyone reports similar problems with academic life. In this age of the corporate university and all its anxieties, it is a liberatory practice to teach mindfulness techniques in the classroom alongside academic subjects.

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NOTES 1.

e brain in a vat (BIV) thought experiment in philosophy presents the skeptics theory that Th we may be brains floating in a vat of liquid and hooked up to a machine that simulates reality.

The thought experiment is intended to explore issues of embodiment, simulation, reality, and consciousness deriving from the Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”) that prioritizes the brain. BIV is a popular trope in the science fiction genre.

For more on the topic of universities as corporations, see Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education (2011) by James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar; The University in Ruins (1997) by Bill Readings; the chapter “Corporatization of the University: Rhetoric, Trends, Actuality” in the book The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America (2011)

by Gigi Roggero; and the article “How the University Became Neoliberal” (2018) in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Andrew Seal.

2.

In “Sara Ahmed: The Institutional As Usual: Diversity Work as Data Collection.”

3.

4.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html Recent neuroscience research further supports the findings that meditation cultivates emotional intelligence and neuroplasticity and particularly is useful to developing brains in adolescence.

See Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement (2016), edited by Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, and Adam Burke. Also see “Mind The Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation” by Nicolas T. Van Dam et al, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758421/

5.

6.

See Lang.

See “The First Five Minutes”. Among Ferguson’s findings, she notes starting class with a Twitter activity decentered instructor authority and tendency to control the discussion and knowledge of the classroom space and allowed a greater array of student opinions to be heard.

7.

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For further reading and resources see: https://www.contemplativemind.org/resources/highereducation/links, http://www.mindfuled.org/resources/, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-subpages/contemplative-pedagogy/.

8.

9.

Data from my surveys in class.

10.

Personal research at [redacted] between 2016-2018. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/16/ how-capitalism-captured-the-mindfulness-industry

11.

Canadian Association of University Teachers. Over 20% responded that they experienced substantial numbers of physical and psychological health symptoms and used stress-related medication (2). For studies related to unhappiness/stress of faculty in the United States and the UK: “Mental Health in Academia: An Invisible Crisis” (2019) by Lindsay Bira et al: https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/mental-health-in-academia-an-invisible-crisis/ And “Dark thoughts: why mental illness is on the rise in academia” (2014) by Claire Shaw and Lucy Ward: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2014/mar/06 mental-health-academics-growing-problem-pressure-university.

12.

“Research shows that periods of escape from time are actually essential to deep thought, creativity, and problem solving“ (Berg and Seeber 26).

13.

14.

J oshua Searle-White and Dan Crozier note, “We habitually breathe shallowly […] especially when sitting at the computer; yet shallow breathing in the classroom signals anxiety to our students: ‘Holding our breath as a student asks a question, for example, will make it physically more difficult to respond to the question because we will need to exhale first and rebalance our breathing before we can speak.’ (4-5). Breathing easily, on the other hand, ‘signals relaxation and can convey confidence and ease, and it may even make it easier for the students to concentrate on the class material’” (Berg and Seeber 43).

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WORKS CITED Ahmed. Sara. “Sara Ahmed: The Institutional As Usual: Diversity Work as Data Collection.”

The Barnard Center for Research on Women, 16 Oct. 2017, bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/ sara-ahmed-the-institutional-as-usual-diversity-work-as-data-collection.

Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Toronto P, 2016.

Chick, Nancy. “Mindfulness in the Classroom.” Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching,cft.vanderbilt. edu/guides-sub-pages/contemplative-pedagogy. Accessed 25 May 2020.

Desmond, Matthew. “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.” The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine, 14 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes. com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html. Accessed 29 June 2020.

Ferguson, Molly. “The First Five Minutes: Teaching with Twitter in the Feminist Classroom.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 49, no. 2, 2020, pp. 94-109.

Hanh, Thich Nhat, and Katherine Weare. Happy Teachers Change the World: A Guide for Cultivating Mindfulness in Education. Parallax Press, 2017. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Karma, Rogé. “The Case Against Loving Your Job.” The Ezra Klein Show from The New York Times, 19 Nov. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-sarah-jaffe. html?showTranscript=1. Accessed 18 Jan. 2021.

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Lang, James M. “Small Changes in Teaching: The First 5 Minutes of Class.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11 Jan. 2016, www.chronicle.com/article/Small-Changes-in-Teaching-The/234869.

Accessed 16 June 2020.

Loy, David, and Ron Purser. “Beyond McMindfulness.” Huffington Post, 1 July 2013.

Moses, Joshua, and Suparna Choudhury. “A ‘Mechanism of Hope’: Mindfulness, Education, and the Developing Brain.” Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement, edited by Ronald E. Purser et al. Springer, 2016, pp. 447-58.

Nilson, Linda B. Creating Self-Regulated Learners: Strategies to Strengthen Students' Self-Awareness and Learning Skills. Stylus Publishing, 2018.

Orr, Deborah. “The Uses of Mindfulness in Anti-Oppressive Pedagogies: Philosophy and Praxis.”

Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, vol. 27, no. 4, 2002, pp. 477-97.

Bill Readings. The University in Ruins. Harvard U P, 1997.

Winans, Amy E. “Cultivating Critical Emotional Literacy: Cognitive and Contemplative Approaches to Engaging Difference.” College English, vol. 75, no. 2, 2012, pp. 150-70.

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“ Wait with me through the waiting, wait up might take until nothing whatsoever was done.

To be left, not alone, the only wish— to call you out, to call out you.”

— Claudia Rankine, Citizen Reading fiction calls for suspending disbelief as we immerse ourselves in the fabricated worlds that writers dream into existence. We are able to walk in others’ shoes, so to speak, and to stretch the limits of our imagination by vicariously inhabiting the lives and emotive landscapes of fictitious characters. We accept they might be compositions of people, not necessarily intending to convey a universal representation of human experience, but they invite us to feel something both familiar to and outside ourselves.

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In “Song of Myself,” for instance, we delight in Whitman’s elation at the possibility of a democratic American nation as diverse and connected as the individuals he celebrates in his poem: “Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me / the current and index. / I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, / By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms” (lines 86-87). However, the circumstances shaping our immediate reality signal otherwise, blatantly revealing that Whitman’s ideation remains just that.

Nearly a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, the imperiled state of American democracy came to a head when a mob of mostly white insurgents laid siege to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and refused to concede that President Donald Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election. Their efforts to reclaim America as a country rightfully theirs also made evident to whom it did not belong—the undocumented children sundered from their

families at the U.S.-Mexico border, travelers from Muslim countries forbidden entrance due to a legislated ban, Asians and Asian Americans violently beaten or killed for being carriers of the “China Virus” or “kung flu,” and George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others whose unjust deaths became rallying points for Black Lives Matter protests across the country. Clearly Whitman’s “afflatus” never quite assembled in the way he imagined, the social corpus disunified as ever.

In this context, James Baldwin’s mounting frustration in “Down at the Cross”—for the dearth of compassion he experiences as a Black man—takes on continued relevancy. Love is missing, Baldwin mourns, precisely because he is met with a void of collective understanding and response to his compromised liberty. He writes, “The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can” (30). As this line evidences, Baldwin attributes the failure of love’s expression to those who respond with indifference to his diminished status. His existence and attending grief stand outside of their own, therefore perceived as irrelevant to a collective vision of social progress.

While Baldwin never explicitly references a practice of mindfulness in his work, he underscores how our lack of collective response to social crises creates real consequences on our psychological well-being. Only when we recognize that our apathy can compound the pain of others can we begin to conceptualize alternative futures; our human connectedness and obligation to care for one

another is the only “power” that can “swing wide the gates” to bring forth a more inclusive and healing state. We might also explore how this repeated failure to connect with others’ pain serves to privilege and preserve white feelings and is, in fact, entrenched in the very production of ideas cohering community and nation.

Recognizing Baldwin’s pain because it reflects to us our own vulnerability and possibility of social abandonment first involves an approach of mindfulness that lets us be doubly present. Not only are we asked to sit with Baldwin’s disappointment in his very present moment of explication, asking us to be present in his past of writing, but we as readers require an immediate attentiveness to our reading present. In making ourselves purposefully contemporaneous with Baldwin’s moment of expression, we might begin to reconcile the gaps between Baldwin’s past and our present moment of reading, figuring out how this navigation aligns or conflicts with existing interpretive schema we have relied on to receive, process, and organize new data.

The question of what to do next with this new knowledge then arises: do we simply sweep it into the recesses of our minds, having momentarily indulged in another’s suffering because it could not possibly be like our own, or do we inspire a larger call to action through an encounter with another’s suffering? To suggest that readers would react in one way or the other would, of course, simplify the infinite range of responses to a particular text, but it is this play between affective estrangement and familiarity we experience in a text that creates an opportunity to experience empathy for another and to make a decisive choice inspired by this emotional resonance.

Jennifer Cho, Boston University

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This call to be with the other in our moments of reading extends beyond the realm of literature.

As much as we emphasize teaching conventional literacies in the classroom, enabling students to develop reading and writing skills that are transferable across disciplines, we also challenge students to practice empathy across different mediums and social spaces. Remembering that the compounded effects of quarantining and isolation during Covid19 have burned through many of the social bonds that once defined us or, perhaps, just laid bare the fractures which were always there, this ability to mindfully discover one’s recognitions for empathy is all the more necessary. At this ethical juncture where readers can respond to their experiences of empathy, I examine the possibilities of moving into a more informed position of everyday activism and awareness through a praxis of writing.

In this essay, I understand writing as one practice that allows readers to be doubly present in reading a text (present in the temporality of the text and present in their time of reading), while enabling them to process their initial emotive connections to a text because of the social exigency it presents— oftentimes, this demand is rendered by the failure of a text to provide viable resolutions for the represented crisis. I also find an opportunity to illuminate a blind spot in recent studies, mostly in the field of psychology, that have narrowly focused on the connections between improvements in social cognition skills and reading fiction without exploring how these improvements materialize in practices beyond reading alone. Current studies that interrogate the connection between social cognition and reading fiction offer a cold stop to a measure of increased empathy in readers, failing to explore how this development can be expressed in more concrete and lasting forms.1

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Ellen C. Carillo’s work on mindful reading also helps bridge the gap between reading skills developed in the moment and their potential for transferability into other classes and disciplines; particularly of interest is Carillo’s emphasis on mindfulness as a metacognitive practice inviting students to “become knowledgeable, deliberate, and reflective about how they read and the demands that contexts place on their reading” (11). I contribute another layer to Carillo’s understanding by suggesting that approaching reading as a metacognitive exercise lends itself to experiences of empathy that can transmute into socially invested writing projects.

I draw attention to the first-year writing classroom as a space where students are invited to participate in a form of engaged reading akin to mindfulness, providing students the freedom to intimately access and inhabit characters’ thoughts and emotions and then make rhetorical choices in response to these displays of empathy. Through writing exercises aimed for this purpose, students also develop a metacognitive practice that traces their own reactions to and perceptions of the affective intimacies they are able to create with a text’s characters while asking if these intimacies can generate prosocial and civically engaged writing in response to noted instances of empathy.

In “Fiction Reading Has a Small Positive Impact on Social Cognition,” authors David Dodell-Feder and Diana I. Tamir consider the connections between reading fiction and increasing demonstrations of behaviors that reveal readers to be emergent “good citizens” (1713). In tracing this development towards empathy and civility, DodellFeder and Tamir suggest that through lived and emotional simulations afforded by reading fiction, readers are able to practice responding to scenarios that test “real-world social cognition” and to access

experiences otherwise unavailable, thus complicating our extant knowledge of different peoples, places, and cultures unfamiliar to us (1713). The authors, however, unveil the need for more demonstrative proof showing how the effects of improved social cognition translate into “real-world or dayto-day social behavior” (1724). I suggest that student writing might be one arena where growing emotional intelligence and awareness, resulting from reading literary works and growing their critical thinking and writing skills, may be articulated to a larger readership, thus affirming the bonds that make social progress a collective venture.

If, indeed, reading literature can enlarge our capacity for empathy through our imagined and willful insertion into storylines and the psychological and emotive states of its narrators and characters, I ask how an evolving social awareness can lead students to assume charged positions and interventions through their own writing. Of equivalent import would be an exploration of students’ own metacognitive realizations during this process, where connections between literary texts and their lived, real experiences manifest: how do students—in identifying and responding to the personal and social crises presented in literature—become cognizant of their own empathic possibilities through reading and writing? How might students transmit this burgeoning awareness in their writing in order to enact positive social impact?

As teachers of literature and writing, we are not obliged to instruct students how to generate some uniformly “correct” emotional response to a text and the ethical crises it poses. Asking students to feel a certain way about a text or that they should feel anything at all can operate as a quiet form of indoctrination, where instructors control and narrowly contain students’ creative freedom in

producing their own identifications of empathy.

Instead of teaching students how and when to experience empathy in an externally determined fashion (moving from teacher to student), we might invite students to teach themselves and their classmates about their abilities to empathize and the calls to action they produce (moving from student to student and/or student to teacher). Altering the vertical flow of knowledge enables students to see that their emotional and intellectual labor in reconciling texts with the present world are valuable and even necessary.

This essay first moves through an exploration of attempts to link social cognitive improvements to fiction reading alone and introduces writing as one possible “virtuous” response to ethical crises that may be seen as an obstruction to social advancement and understanding. To effectively establish the connection between writing as an act of “virtue” and its potency in conjuring up an improved state of collective well-being, I draw upon the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia, a state of “human well-being” that results from a collective expression of our own “virtuous” possibilities (Ryff and Singer 15).

“Eudaimonia is not a transitory emotional happiness ... but rather represents the activity of living well throughout the course of a lifetime,” as John Duffy writes (233). Locating in Aristotle a contemplative approach to ethics, I show how mindfulness, practiced through reading, can lead students to discoveries of their own ethical character and their potential to contribute to an improving world. This endeavor also allots space to share a small sampling of in-class exercises rooted in methods of conscious embodiment and experiential affinity, both of which help students identify the potential connectivity across the processes of reading, writing, and critical inquiry by placing students in close proximity to texts,

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whether through imagined embodiment or through parallel experiences. These exercises provide students with an openness to generate their own understandings about their roles in mediating a text; they aim to show if and how moments of empathic identification experienced during the reading process can rouse students to their own capacity for compassion, their potency as emergent socially invested writers, and their improving critical ability to identify the uneven distribution of citizenship’s privileges.

I.

The possibility of experiencing an empathic connection with a text’s characters or narrators through reading can occur spontaneously and unpredictably.

As it might be mirrored in the fragility and tenuousness of our own reality, the security of a text’s imagined world is never guaranteed and hangs in fine balance based on ensuing plot revelations, narrative surprises, and developments in character.

Or, it may be the case that readers, particularly in first-year writing courses, never discover a meaningful way to connect with a text and its characters perhaps from disengagement with the text and the issues it presents, a lack of interest based on content or writing style, varied degrees of motivation in reading, and an (un)conscious reluctance to move past these impediments and towards a more open reception to the text. To account for this wide range of possible receptive modes to texts (and simply the act of reading) is to also consider the diversity of our lived experiences and subjectivities as well as the institutional divisions of power that have determined our social positionings; our “schematized narratives about self and world” are, in large part, informed by our own histories, hurts, memories, and experiences (Garland et al. 299). Thus, the

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suggestion that all readers might react to a text homogenously quickly dismisses the possibility for a verisimilitude of responses as varied as the “schematized narratives” that shape and condition our sense of self in relation to others.

If experiences of empathy do, in fact, improve learning for students, then designing in-class exercises geared towards empathic discovery could add to the repertoire of different reading approaches that students can use and transfer to other contexts.

Carillo advocates for teaching diversified reading approaches in the writing classroom, understanding that certain reading approaches (for example, rhetorical vs. critical) may prevent students from fully comprehending the complexity and nuances of a given text (14). As Carillo argues, a marker of a student’s ability to transfer knowledges and skills across classes is knowing when and how to alternate between different modes of reading based on contextual clues: “Students need to be able to identify specific moments in complex texts when they need to shift reading approaches, and they need to have enough knowledge and practice with various approaches to make informed decisions about the approach they will abandon and that which they will use in its place” (14). If students’ adaptability to different reading modes enrich their understanding of written texts, then how might imagining empathy as a reading mode facilitate students’ comprehension of the world as text?

Thinking about the multiplicity of reader responses highlights some of the critical limits of studying empathy and its function in the classroom.

Empathy itself is a uniquely subjective reaction that may be difficult to measure in strictly quantifiable terms. It also involves an assumption of a privileged moral code that might be universally applicable to all arenas of human social life and experience; in

some cases, it might actually breed complacency.

Eric Leake warns of this imposing “colonization” of empathy in his work, “Writing Pedagogies of Empathy: As Rhetoric and Disposition”: [T]o empathize with the less fortunate without acting to change the systems that position them as less fortunate only acts to preserve inequalities and future occasions of empathy.

[It] also can serve a colonizing agenda when the empathizer starts to remake the empathized in his or her own image or begins to assume too much about what is known, because we can never have full access to another’s point of view.

Subsuming another’s feelings and experiences into the authoritative scope of one’s own comprehension of the world or in a way that reaffirms the sturdiness of one’s own social grounding and ontological security potentially reveals how empathy can be a tool of the “colonizer”; simply acknowledging a transfer of sympathy and an improvement in emotion-sharing through reading is insufficient, precisely because it does not track evidence of empathy becoming much more than a fleeting instance of self-gratification. Instead, due to limitations in ever fully understanding the other, readers may have to fill in the gaps of knowledge with their own interpretive prerogatives.

In choosing to respond to the empathized, how does the empathizer forge a response that goes beyond simply reestablishing her position in the world and her interpretive power in “reading” the empathized? How does the empathizer resist the trap of benevolent salvation, “rescuing” the empathized from their circumstances and rehabilitating them in a way that leaves the empathizer’s privilege

intact? Particularly when empathy moves in the direction of minority communities, how might empathizers erase the culturally specific differences that make up these communities’ lived experiences so they can be absorbed into the dominant, “colonizing” culture? As these questions show, exercising empathy too freely has its own set of dangers; the empathizer can have her own agenda whether or not she is conscious to her motivations.2 While we cannot completely extricate our reading responses from our individual and social histories and the institutional apparatuses that shape them, I might venture to suggest this is where a method of mindful reading may be useful in recognizing when “colonizing” forms of empathy occur. When readers are confronted with different communities and experience empathy on their behalf, they might tune into the ways they are reassured about their positions in the world. Through mindful attentiveness to the way we react and respond to a text and its characters, we can assess our motivations for empathy, heightening awareness of our complicity in continuing to silence or displace othered communities through a projection of our own knowledge and biases. More than simply integrating this new learned and emotional knowledge into the reader’s existing schema of understanding and being in the world, how might it stretch, shrink, even shift that schema in tending to the relationship between the “self and world” through the possibility of the world’s betterment?

This inquiry into the relationship between the self and the world is illuminated by the concept of eudaimonia, which has recently garnered the interest of scholars in the emergent field of Happiness Studies.3 Evoked by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, eudaimonia speaks to a vision of collective social thriving and prosperity, not necessarily facilitated through or measured by material wealth,

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political stature, or economic fortitude, but rather achieved through a relentless pursuit of arête, or “virtue” or “moral excellence” (Ryff and Singer 16).

In expressing arête through individual actions and choices, the “process of fulfilling or realizing one’s daimon or true nature—that is, of fulfilling one’s virtuous potentials and living as one was inherently intended to live” leads to a replenished state of eudaimonia (Deci and Ryan 2).

In Book 10 of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle contends that “happiness” is far more than material procurement and wealth or a transient feeling but rather a state informed by one’s expression and manifestation of virtue: If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us. Whether it be reason or something else that is this element which is thought to be our natural ruler and guide and to take thought of things noble and divine, whether it be itself also divine or only the most divine element in us, the activity of this in accordance with its proper virtue will be perfect happiness.

That this activity is contemplative we have already said.

Aristotle's emphasis on the “contemplative” nature of happiness demonstrates that the pursuit of ethics is intrinsically mindful. According to Aristotle, our recognition and ensuing expression of our fullest virtuous potential comes through reason and the rigorous exercise of our mental faculties. This work shows that virtue does not readily become available or manifest itself automatically as one lives one’s

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life, but instead it reveals itself over time through repeated practice and reflection; reason afforded through disciplined contemplation produces an understanding of one’s virtuous possibilities.

In “Know Thyself and Become What You Are,” Ryff and Singer make a necessary distinction, conveying that eudaimonia or “well-being, construed as growth and human fulfillment, is profoundly influenced by the surrounding contexts of people’s lives, and as such, that the opportunities for self-realization are not equally distributed” (14).

While we each have the potential to strive for eudaimonia, Ryff and Singer clarify that access to self-realization of one’s virtuous possibilities may be limited due to socially determined conditions and uneven access to educational opportunities.

In their study, the authors apply an understanding of the Psychological Well-Being (PWB) model to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, attempting to see how they correlate. They find that of all the six core dimensions that improve PWB (personal growth, autonomy, positive relationships, environmental mastery, purpose in life, self-acceptance), personal growth is the closest parallel to eudaimonia for its ability to propel the “self-realization of an individual” (21). Ryff and Singer observe that the extent to which “personal growth” is possible may be proportionally linked to an individual’s education and socioeconomic status, suggesting that access to resources helps facilitate one’s journey towards “self-realization.” Inequitable distributions of wealth, resources, and power limit “personal growth,” compromising one’s access to education and one’s freedom to be socially mobile. In this sense, resisting from interpreting eudaimonia in monolithic terms takes into consideration these differentiations in access and opportunity. Echoing

Ryff and Singer’s inquiry, we may ask if there are “multiple forms of eudaimonic well-being—distinct varieties of self-realization nurtured by different societal contexts and culturally distinct ways of being” such that there is no singular interpretation of eudaimonia that universally applies to all (33).

Extending any one understanding of eudaimonia to a diverse range of experiences would be a “colonizing” gesture that repeats one’s power and privilege.

Our capacity to make virtuous choices that honor our social connectivity and feed into a more heightened eudemonic state emerges from a process of self-reflexive mental engagement, which can also produce recognitions of one’s privilege and the ways in which a dominant application of eudaimonia can threaten the well-being of other individuals and/or groups. Aristotle continues to remind us of our obligations to one another, as he writes, “Just and brave acts, and other virtuous acts, we do in relation to each other, observing our respective duties with regard to contracts and services and all manner of actions and with regard to passions; and all of these seem to be typically human” (The Nicomachean Ethics). Thus, like empathy, the concept of arête (virtue) can also be globally indeterminable since a universal application or understanding of the term runs the risk of privileging the cultural position that interprets moral principles for a given society, arête offers us a way to think about bridging readers’ empathic identifications with their next “virtuous” acts in the form of writing.

This contemplative pathway to virtue and, on a larger scale, eudaimonia, might reveal itself through the emotional contact established between the empathizer and the empathized. The success of empathy relies on the ability to be aware of another’s experience and its emotional resonance, and it is

this external recognition that validates and gives presence to the other’s experience. Being present in the other reveals how mindfulness can not only increase our sensitivity to a character’s emotional world but also to track the privilege and power of our own social orientations communicated (un) intentionally in our desires to show empathy.

II.

Mindfulness is most commonly understood as an intentional contemplative practice in which an individual turns “inward,” acknowledging then dismissing the distractions that unpredictable, transient inner thoughts pose in the present moment of reflection. As Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests, “Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally ... in the service of self-understanding and wisdom” (qtd. in “Jon Kabat-Zinn: Defining Mindfulness”). Through a mindful practice, one replenishes knowledge of the self and some deeper “wisdom” is imparted in service to that self.

Through this new knowledge, the more mindful self can reflect on and even rework her position in the social grid that lends her a unique identity and a set of associated privileges.

In his most recent book, The Healing Power of Mindfulness: A New Way of Being, Kabat-Zinn creates a promising pathway between the self and others, recognizing that mindfulness initiated by the self can lead to an identification of interconnectedness with others. Becoming aware of another’s suffering functions as “the birthplace of empathy and compassion, of our feeling for the other, our impulse and tendency to put ourself in the place of the other, to feel with the other” (19). However, Kabat-Zinn

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does not consider the larger social dimension of this newly identified suffering; instead, he reduces it to an epistemological problem rather than one possibly created by and sustained through institutional forces beyond the individual: “From this perspective, in a very real sense you are not who or what you think you are. And neither is anybody else.

We are all much larger and more mysterious” (19).

Rather than write off a shared identification of suffering as simply a human exchange or as knowledge impossible to ever demystify, I ask how we might add onto the current promise shown in Zabat-Kinn’s understanding of empathy. Rather than submitting to the mystery shrouding our connections to one another, how might we employ mindfulness and our experiences of empathy to clarify and address the social conditions that give rise to the suffering other? Taking this even further, how might recognizing others’ pain reveal our complicity in its production? “[T]o feel with the other” then involves much more than just emotion-sharing; it also invokes an ethical response from the empathizer who learns to locate the sources and root causes of another’s suffering, even if this involves taking on the emotional labor of learning our place in it.

This mindful practice of reading first requires participants’ commitment to active, engaged reading and a suspension of disbelief; even if we are reading fiction or a work located in or written in the past, I suggest being present as an intentional reader can create more awareness not only around characters’ emotive reactions to the situations in which they find themselves, but also around our own self-awareness and growing discernment of our social orientations.

In “To write what you know: Embodiment, authorship, and empathy,” Meadow Jones examines how this

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burgeoning self-awareness can transmute into an awareness of others; Jones identifies this transference an “empathetic response,” glimpsed “in a movement from self-awareness to awareness of others, and imagined experiences of others in the classroom or elsewhere” (52). Returning to Carillo’s concept of mindful reading and the ways in which it “create[s] knowledge […] about [students] as readers,” this “empathetic response” produced through reading and writing acts emerges as evidence of this newly produced knowledge (11). It reveals that students are not only learning to read the actual text before them, but also developing a socioemotional literacy that enables students to read themselves as part of and obliged to the well-being of a larger social constituency.

This metacognitive process—becoming aware of one’s own awareness of others—is necessary in moving towards self-actualization, according to Eric Garland, Norman Farb, Philippe Goldin, and Barbara Fredrikson: [A]s one decenters from distressing psychological content [experienced through mindfulness], one continues to monitor the contents of consciousness while becoming aware of the quality of awareness itself— becoming aware, for example, of how one is or is not paying attention to the subtle, ever-changing mental phenomena that constitute each moment of consciousness. (298) During mindful exercises, the ability to detach from negative stimuli and experiences and integrate them into one’s existing mental framework as enriching, invaluable ones not only nurtures self-awareness but also opens up closed channels

to eudaimonia. The authors suggest this state of eudaimonia, of “flourishing in life,” is linked to an individual experience of mindfulness through its “promot[ion of] positive reappraisal, a salutary form of evaluative cognitive-affective processing” (297). However, the rearticulation of formerly distressing experiences and emotions as positive and even necessary vehicles to creating a more enriching life for individuals involves losing the broader, collective scope of eudaimonia. In championing the individual experience of mindfulness as a way to generate more “meaningfulness in life,” such meaning loses its social cache. Returning the collective element so characteristic of Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia may complicate Garland et al.’s understanding of self-awareness as a direct pathway to individual eudaimonic achievement; rather than being an exclusively individual phenomenon, self-awareness always already involves a growing awareness of our relation to others as well as the social conditions that cement or threaten the fragile bonds among citizens.

The reaffirmation of social relationships constituting many rather than the individual alone amplifies the possibility for eudaimonia. One’s realization of “virtue” can only occur in the context and interest of her relationships with others in service of larger civic duties and responsibilities.

Individual actions and choices are determined through careful reflection of their implication on the collective body, not simply because they indulge the self. In this consideration, Aristotle was obliquely referencing the significance of empathy in two ways.

First, we learn our capacity for virtue or arête through the choices we make on behalf of others and the social contracts that bind individuals together; second, the acquisition of knowledge around our

civic and social responsibilities is related to a collective pursuit of prosperity and abundance.

In the context of the writing classroom, these relationships are established among students who collectively produce a community founded on trust and shared expectations. In his work, Duffy characterizes the relationship between “reader-writer” as “eudaimonistic,” since the motivations of writers in appealing to and connecting with imagined readers derive from a common “ethics of rhetorical virtues” that position the writer as the enactor of “goodness” over time and through revisional acts of composition (241). Duffy posits that “[w]riting involves proposing a relationship with others, our readers ... the good writer is one who writes in ways that promote the health, well-being, or flourishing of the relationship” (241).

It would seem that arriving at an aligned understanding of how eudaimonia is promised between reader and writer also involves sharing empathy across these roles and being able to selectively anticipate which rhetorical approaches would best preserve the relationship. As Duffy points out, the term virtue is fraught with negative meaning, given its association with Christian conservatism and its historical uses of policing racialized and women’s bodies (235).

Generated through practices of mindful reading and writing, empathy can intensify our awareness of social connectedness despite the uneven social privileges, material and constructed differences, and systemic inequalities that often prevent us from acknowledging our shared humanity. In feeling the pain of another who might be so like or unlike us and recognizing the ways in which social thriving has been restricted for some based on their perceived differences, readers might be inspired to strategize

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a course of action that enables them to exercise their “virtue” in a way that enhances Aristotle’s collective vision. Additionally, readers can practice their revealed virtue in a way that consciously confronts the ways in which the multiplicity of their social placements can lead to biased and problematic gestures of empathy, those instances of “colonizing empathy” that Leake warns against. Instead of locating virtue through one’s ability to rehabilitate the empathized given her social privileges or to incorporate experiences of the other into the dominant framework of one’s egocentric world, we might expand our capacity for virtue through our conscious recognition of when and how these tendencies shape our responses to empathy.

Since my aim is not necessarily to teach the precise moments when and how to experience empathy, I have developed assignments inspired by methods which I call conscious embodiment and experiential affinity. Both methods help facilitate students’ exploration of their immediate connections to a text and their own capacity for empathy, while asking students to contemplate their next actions as readers-cum-writers. The first of these methods—conscious embodiment—asks students, when possible, to physically reenact a problematic experience in a text and to be open to the cognitive, physiological, and emotional feedback the exercise creates. The point of connection between a student and a character-in-question begins with the body. In challenging students to inhabit another’s physical experience of the world, the exercise opens up opportunities for discovering empathy without demanding it.

One example I offer is from a first-year writing course I taught at a R1 public university, framed around the experiences of individual and social

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exile. Students read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

Given the text is nearly a century and a half removed, Walden’s immediate significance is often a hard sell to students who already have a difficult time digesting the course’s relevance beyond the classroom. To make the text more accessible and palatable for resistant students, I ask students to enact a form of self-imposed “exile” that is more impacting: students eliminate their access to technology and social media, much of which organizes their lives and their relationships with friends and family. In this exercise, students embody the experience of Thoreau’s forced detachment from society by recreating similar conditions; they record their observations to their surroundings and to the flurry of thoughts and feelings that spring from the void of technology, also connecting their own writing to Thoreau’s and other students’ experiences of exile.

While the conditions that define Thoreau’s and students’ versions of exile are far from equivalent, conscious embodiment permits students to momentarily experience parallel feelings of silence and isolation through the shared physical experience of being alone. Students also come to understand the freedom and privileges associated with the choice to go into technological “exile”: that without smartphones, social media applications, and the promise of 24/7 social connectedness, they suddenly lose their former privileges of moving through and accessing the world. As students reflect on their experiences beyond the personal, they often come to recognize that, for many, the experience of exile is neither a choice nor a fleeting, performative moment.

Whereas conscious embodiment identifies the physical body as a potential site of emotional connectivity, experiential affinity considers the

possibility of parallel or intersecting lived experiences that reveal themselves through a text and a student’s own personal history. Rather than rush to make false equivalencies between the two, students identify a particular crisis afflicting a character or a community in a text and then examine if and how they have experienced something analogous to what is being represented. For example, in teaching Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, I ask students to ponder if and how cultural markers of difference and stereotypes associated with their self-identified communities have narrowly defined the ways they have been able to act and live freely.

Through an active engagement with their own struggles to step outside of idealized versions of themselves and their communities, students might begin to express empathy for others so unlike themselves. They may develop an emotive kinship not only with a text’s characters but also other classmates who confess to the ways in which dominant understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and other identifying traits have compromised their self-worth. Additionally, opportunities to recognize one’s own possession of group biases arise through exercises of experiential affinity; if there is a lack of empathic transfer between the self and a text’s character, or between the self and other classmates, the student might inquire which personal and structural impediments stand in the way.

Experiential affinity can also spark the complicated, nuanced movements in connecting reading acts with more socially invested forms of writing.

Through a recognition of shared experiences between the character of Pecola and themselves, or even an understanding of how they have failed the Pecolas of the world, students might situate themselves as part of the problem leading to Pecola’s demise and

also consider their social obligations to care for those like her. To not enact one’s virtue to make eudaimonia available to disenfranchised, forgotten communities is to risk “not plant[ing] the seeds too deeply” and thus contributing to “the fault of the earth, the land, of our town” (Morrison 206).

This self-recognition, not only of one’s potential for empathy but for the ability to write against the threats of eudaimonia, leads to what I conceive as sociocritical autonomy. It is an ability derived through mindful reading that inspires the writer to consciously create an informed and urgent response to obstructions of eudaimonia. In the divide that poses itself between the reader’s present and the present of the text, between shared affective tendencies and the strange unfamiliarity of others’ emotions, emerges a choice for readers to synthesize these differences in a way that reveals how eudaimonia has been compromised due to systemic failures and problems deeply woven into the social fabric. Deci and Ryan emphasize the significant role of a more general version of autonomy in facilitating a eudemonic state. They write, “Autonomy refers to volition, to having the experience of choice, to endorsing one’s actions at the highest level of reflection” (6). Through a process of reading that enables readers to intentionally place themselves in the temporal moment of the text and inside the emotive landscapes of its characters, evidence of sociocritical autonomy surfaces not only in the readers’ vulnerability to the emotional plights of characters but also in readers’ transitions into their role as writers. As writers consider their audience before writing even begins, their response is already public. In this sense, a reader might practice sociocritical autonomy as she develops an emergent relationship to an imagined audience and make conscious rhetorical choices

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intended to best connect with a greater social collective for whom eudaimonia is designated.

Though their suggestions arise in the context of public writing classes, Scott Sundvall and Katherine Fredlund offer an understanding of a rhetorical education that is connected to its capacity “to produce effective citizens.” They write, “education [is] a lifelong process that not only increases the student’s intellect but also their morals, thus better preparing them for civic life.” In this case, a study of rhetoric offers students the opportunity to study the appeals meant to persuade them as citizens and equip them with the language to “participate in society and create change.” Sundvall and Fredlund’s understanding that “rhetoric remains the primary delivery system of activism” means that writing can never be neutral; instead, the reader as writer and writer as reader, performing these dual identities simultaneously, may acquire the sociocritical autonomy required to navigate between the external text and her own self-produced written text, while meditating on the social crises that initially provoked empathy in the reader. In the complex movements across texts and the negotiation of different roles (reader and writer), students may claim their roles as citizens to contribute to a collective eudaimonia.

Building on Leake’s suggestion to view “reading and studying literature [as] a way to develop empathy and teach toward a more inclusive and civic-minded democracy,” I suggest that writing helps readers process their experiences of empathy and negotiate their civic responsibilities as part of the larger body politic. In appealing to an imagined audience whose differences may run the gamut, writers may highlight the shared principles that define our relationships to one another; how we show empathy and exercise

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our “virtue” through writing can reveal our care and advocacy for others despite the material and constructed differences that can fracture our social bonds. As writers make rhetorical moves intended to persuade readers, they situate themselves as part of a broader collective “we” capable of producing immediate social and political impact and improving eudaimonia as it appears in its present form. In this sense, eudaimonia is not some distant state of future attainment or realization, as Ryff and Singer assert.

They identify a teleological progression to achieving eudaimonia, suggesting that “the essential end point (telos) is to achieve the best that is within us” (17).

While I have been directing recognitions of empathy, the development of a sociocritical autonomy, and writing projects that challenge readers to make rhetorical choices reflective of these experiences, towards this aim of eudaimonia, I resist making this state an “essential end point.”

Doing so poses its own set of problems, from fantasizing some ethical paradise at which we can all arrive, to suggesting we have yet to become our best selves and citizens. In this scenario, we are always bent towards some unobtainable future, distracted by the noise of our present lack. Rather than conceptualizing eudaimonia as a finite end, I might approach it as a state always reimagined in the now and in relation to the others we encounter through reading and writing. Particularly during writing, we strategize how we make our ethical appeals and convey the urgency around the crises our writing identifies. Through these ethical appeals, the writer’s own readers are confronted with a reminder of our interconnected social well-being and the problematic ways eudaimonia has been compromised for some communities.

My examples of conscious embodiment and experiential affinity resist from teaching students how and when to react with empathy as if it happened like clockwork; instead, they are designed to encourage students to be cognitively and emotionally present in reading a text, to develop finesse in transitioning between reader and writer roles, and to become active proponents of eudaimonia through writing. I ask how we as educators might cultivate reading and writing opportunities for students to independently (or with support) discover their own “virtuous” possibilities, used to further cement social connectedness and enhance collective well-being in a way that confronts our part in upholding cycles of systemic oppression and denying care and support to those who require them most.

This outreach is especially important when the long durée of Covid-19 and the vulnerabilities and anxieties it has produced continue to make our racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and political differences all the more pronounced.

Inviting practices of mindfulness into the classroom involves reconditioning students’ attitudes toward reading and writing processes. Rather than assuming that reading and writing are technical skills meant to advance academic and professional successes, students are challenged to reconceptualize reading and writing as intimately connected processes that may begin with themselves but ultimately take on added depth through creations in social understanding and connection. In this way, the unfolding of intellectual discourse and discovery in the classroom—as a polyvocal, collaborative, and, sometimes, disharmonious effort—reflects student efforts to debate and (re)imagine eudaimonia or “human flourishing” (Deci and Ryan 9).

Although subjective and perhaps informed by their individual dispositions, varying degrees of self-motivation, and their own personal and socially directed histories, student work can reveal the process through which students become more aware of their capacity to experience and respond to empathy, while confronting the biases, privileges, and social scripts that have promised their social positions, sometimes at the risk of diminishing others’ well-being. In student work we may also discover the ways in which students mediate their intersecting roles—sometimes newly identified—as reader, writer, and citizen. More profoundly, student work reveals evidence of sociocritical autonomy generated through active and mindful engagement with literature and empathy and through students’ negotiations of multiple roles. In self-actualizing their roles as readers, writers, and citizens, students can view their critical and connective interventions as meaningful and even necessary. It is not any one fell swoop of empathy or singular experience of emotion-sharing that “swing wide the gates” for excluded communities, to return to Baldwin’s words, but perhaps the repeated show of empathy that leads to action through writing, a practice of rhetoric that is already “activist” in its yearning for a eudaimonia available to many and not just a few.

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NOTES 1.

hile I focus on David Dodell-Feder and Diana I. Tamir’s article, “Fiction Reading Has a W Small Positive Impact on Social Cognition: A Meta-Analysis” in this article, readers can turn to other psychological studies that link the act of reading fiction to improved social cognition and behavior. Studies that strive to understand how reading generates improved empathy as well as civil and prosocial behavior include Micah Mumper and Richard Gerrig’s “Leisure Reading and Social Cognition: A Meta-analysis” (2017), E.M. Koopman’s “Empathic Reactions after Reading: The Role of Genre, Personal Factors and Affective Responses” (2015), P. Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltcamp’s “How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation” (2013), Dan Johnson’s “Transportation into a Story Increases Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Perceptual Bias toward Fearful Expressions” (2012), and Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley’s “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience” (2008). Dodell-Feder and Tamir evaluate the methods through which these mentioned studies evaluated improvements in social cognition and empathy. Subjects’ ability to mentalize (or imagine others’ feelings through textual images and descriptions) and to emotionshare (the ability to show compassion or empathy for others) was measured through self-reporting and performance tests designed to observe increases in empathy and prosocial behavior.

As Leake warns against potentially showing empathy to ascertain our own positions in the world, display our power over the powerless, and even give ourselves the affirmation we need about our intrinsic goodness, he also points us to other scholars who have been careful to

2.

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accept all expressions of empathy. Leake cites Todd DeStigter for his advocacy of “critical empathy,” a process of emotion and experience sharing among individuals that is sensitive to the “sociohistorical forces” that create inequitable conditions, and Min-Zhan Lu for her generative term, “critical affirmation.” Lu suggests that in our shared yearning for social justice (or, as I suggest, a shared vision of eudaimonia), remaining cognizant “of the different material circumstances which shape this shared yearning and the different circumstances against which each of us must struggle” invites us to honor the multiplicity of different lived experiences.

While happiness remains a subjective field of inquiry (what makes me happy does not necessarily promise the same level of happiness in another), the field of Happiness Studies offers an interdisciplinary terrain where individually and socially determined understandings of happiness can be further explored. The Journal of Happiness Studies, in which several of my referenced articles appear, explains that it “provides a forum for two main traditions in happiness research: 1) speculative reflection on the good life, and 2) empirical investigation of subjective well-being” (Journal of Happiness Studies website). My article considers how both of these traditions can also inform students’ learning processes as students consider how “the good life” and social “well-being” can be advocated through the rhetorical positions they take in their own writing.

3.

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WORKS CITED Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W.D. Ross, The Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html. Accessed 22 Apr. 2020.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. 1963. Vintage Books, 1993.

Carillo, Ellen C. “Creating Mindful Readers in First-Year Composition Courses: A Strategy to Facilitate Transfer.” Pedagogy, vol. 16, issue 1, 2016, pp. 9-22.

Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan. “Hedonia, Eudaimonia, and Well-Being: An Introduction.” Journal of Happiness Studies, vol. 9, issue 1, 2008, pp. 1-11.

Dodell-Feder, David, and Diana I. Tamir. “Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: A meta-analysis.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 147, issue 11, 2018, pp. 1713-27.

Duffy, John. “The Good Writer: Virtue Ethics and the Teaching of Writing.” College English, vol. 79, no. 3, 2017, pp. 229-50.

Garland, Eric, et. al. “Mindfulness Broadens Awareness and Builds Eudaimonic Meaning: A Process Model of Mindful Positive Emotion Regulation.” Psychological Inquiry, vol. 26, issue 4, 2015, pp. 293-314.

Jones, Meadow. “To write what you know: Embodiment, authorship, and empathy.” Sensoria: A Journal of Mind, Brain & Culture, vol.10, issue 1, 2014, pp. 49-56.

“Jon Kabat-Zinn: Defining Mindfulness.” Mindful, 11 Jan. 2017, www.mindful.org/ jon-kabat-zinn-defining-mindfulness.

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Journal of Happiness Studies website. Springer, 2022, https://www.springer.com/journal/10902.

Accessed 22 Apr. 2020.

Kabat-Zinn, Jon. The Healing Power of Mindfulness: A New Way of Being. Hachette Books, 2018.

Leake, Eric. “Writing Pedagogies of Empathy As Rhetoric and Disposition.” Composition Forum, vol. 34, 2016, compositionforum.com/issue/34/empathy.php. Accessed 11 May 2020.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage Books, 2007.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.

Ryff, Carol D., and Burton H. Singer. “Know Thyself and Become What You Are: A Eudaimonic Approach to Psychological Well-Being.” Journal of Happiness Studies, vol. 9, issue 1, 2008, pp. 13-39.

Sundvall, Scott, and Katherine Fredlund. “The Writing on the Wall: Activist Rhetorics, Public Writing, and Responsible Pedagogy.” Composition Forum, vol. 36, 2017,compositionforum.com/ issue/36/writing-wall.php. Accessed 11 May 2020.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” The Complete Poems, edited by Francis Murphy, Penguin Books, 2004, pp. 63-124.

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contemplative PEDAGOGY in the

College English Classroom and Online

It is 10:30 a.m. on an unseasonably warm day in February 2020. The windows of my classroom are open, and birdsong drifts in, along with scraps of conversations that are just barely audible. People on their way to class, talking about exams and homework and a party that someone is hosting over the weekend. Further away, a leaf blower drones and a truck on Kissena Boulevard backs up, creating a staccato series of beeps. In the room, the overhead lights are off though sunlight streams in. The computer screen shows a writing prompt. Laptops are closed. Coffee cups have been abandoned for the moment. Twenty-four students are sitting at their desks with their eyes closed, listening to the sound of my voice. Here is some of what I tell them: Focus on your breathing. Feel your breath enter and leave your body, filling the nostrils, expanding your chest and abdomen, gently rising and falling.

Notice the sensation of air. In and out ... in and out.

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The breath is our anchor. It helps us have something to return to when we can’t quiet our thoughts or calm our nerves. This simple act of breathing. In and out ... in and out. Your attention may wander. Your mind may drift. When it does, simply notice what is happening and return to the breath. Let’s take the next few minutes to concentrate on our breathing ...

After about five minutes have elapsed, the students open their eyes and immediately turn their attention to the prompt on the computer screen.

We have been discussing Dracula for weeks; many students are planning to write their final paper on the novel. The question I have posed on the Smartboard is this: In what ways does Mina represent the Victorian New Woman and in what ways do you feel she is a traditional Gothic heroine? For another five minutes the room is quiet as students record their impressions of Stoker’s sole female vampire catcher. Then we do a pair-square-share,

breaking up into groups of two, then four, before finally coming back together to discuss what they have written.

For the past several years, I have been doing a version of this exercise in my composition, literature, and creative writing classes. It is part of contemplative pedagogy, a practice that focuses on the embodied experience of writing in order to heighten cognition and creativity. What is contemplative pedagogy? Ellen J. Langer, one of its first proponents, describes it as “sideways learning” (23). According to Langer, this mode of teaching involves five “psychological states that are really different versions of the same thing: (1) openness to novelty; (2) alertness to distinction; (3) sensitivity to different contexts; (4) implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and (5) orientation in the present” (23). Rhetoric composition scholar Alexandria Peary adds that writing is like meditation in that it requires awareness to the present moment, without judgment: “The moment—permissive, exploratory, uncorrected, and multi-faceted— becomes the entire basis for all written work” (3).

Contemplative pedagogy can encompass both the body and the mind. Christy Wenger combines mindful breathing known as pranayama in the Iyengar yoga tradition with brief exercises in asana, or yoga poses. She argues that engaging in contemplative pedagogy can enrich students’ imaginations and stimulate creativity: “As students breathe their way into writing, they place new value on observing the writing process as it unfolds, documenting and analyzing the felt experience of composing, which helps them become more generative and reflective writers” (Wenger 155).

While I have not yet tried yoga with my students, I believe mindfulness helps them feel more confident in their writing abilities and makes the overall writing process itself less stressful. In my classroom, mindfulness exercises range from breathing techniques to body scans to creative visualization to reciting a writing-centered mantra. Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of a dozen books on the subject including the best seller Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, defines mindfulness as the awareness that rises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. In an interview in The Guardian in 2017, Kabat-Zinn notes, “It often results in apprehending the constantly changing nature of sensations, even highly unpleasant ones, and thus their impermanence.” This quote struck a chord in me when I first read it because in my nearly nine years of teaching college English, I have found that many students view writing as an “unpleasant” activity. For the most part, my students are not English majors. They are focusing on subjects like Computer Science, Accounting, Education, Business, and Biology, in the hopes that these concentrations will lead them to find jobs once they graduate. (I believe English will too, but that is a topic for another day.) Each semester that I teach ENGL 110, my college’s version of College English 1, I give students a brief poll to assess how they feel about their own writing skills. The choices are as follows: 1. Help! I would rather do anything than write. I really struggle to express my ideas on paper and the thought of writing an eight-page paper makes me feel ill.

Beth Sherman, CUNY Graduate Center

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2. I do not like to write. Often my ideas do not seem to come out the way I want them to. I get stuck a lot and I am often not satisfied with the results.

3. I like to write and for the most part I can get a general idea across. For me, writing is not a problem.

4. I love writing. It just seems to come easy to me and once I get started, I feel that I can express my thoughts and ideas clearly.

Most students choose the first two options nearly every semester. Overwhelmingly, I have found that virtually none of them (even the ones I view as proficient, skilled writers) think they are “good” at writing, whatever they believe that means. Instead, college writing is an activity that they perceive as stressful and anxiety-producing, something that must be endured in College English 1 and 2, because these courses are mandatory; dozens of other English classes in the department are also mainly used to fulfill what’s known as a Writing Intensive requirement (a total of two English classes must be taken for this). Even when I teach Creative Writing or Creative Nonfiction, which, despite being designated as Writing Intensive, are often thought of as more “fun,” students are still stressed out about coming up with ideas for the poems, short stories, plays, and anecdotal memoirs they conceive, along with the quality of what they’ve written once they finally decide on a topic. Many complain how hard writing is, though the subject is something they are interested in. As a fiction writer myself, I can relate. Typing your thoughts onto a screen is a fraught, frustrating process, rife with stumbling blocks, brain freeze,

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and dead ends. Some days, I would rather be doing just about anything else—including weeding or cleaning out the garage. In what follows, I will discuss my rationale for incorporating mindfulness meditation into class and I will detail its advantages for students, especially when it comes to feeling more confident as a writer.

MINDFULNESS MINIMIZES DISTRACTIONS AND LOWERS STRESS LEVELS

To complicate the issue, for college students today, writing is rife with all sorts of distractions. John Yates, author of The Mind Illuminated, identifies two types of what he calls subtle distractions. The first are attractive distractions, which draw your attention away because they capture your interest, such as what students might be thinking about having for lunch or how they plan to prepare for an upcoming test in a Finance class. The second “sneaks in gradually, eventually displacing your focus” (128).

This could be something as small as a background noise or a bird flying past a window. In the classroom, the biggest distraction is of course the cell phone: Netflix, YouTube, and Tik Tok are only a click away.

I have a no-electronics policy in all the courses I teach unless we are engaged in a communal research project. Still, students often stare at or swipe their phones during class, even when they are supposed to be discussing a text or engaging in a freewriting assignment.

There have been numerous studies about the deleterious effects of using technology for personal (and not educational) reasons in the classroom— anything from checking email to playing video games to posting on Snapchat. A study published in College Student Journal in 2013 found that students

who use cell phones or instant messaging during class perform less efficiently and take longer to complete a given task, concluding that the problem in “attempting multi-tasking activities lies in the distracting nature of the non-primary activity” (586). A 2012 study surveyed 269 college students from 21 academic majors at a small northeastern university and discovered that 92% used their phones to send text messages during class time (Tindell and Bohlander). Other activities included browsing the Internet, sending pictures, or accessing social networking sites. The authors conclude that “the use of cell phones in the college classroom is an issue that academic institutions cannot ignore, and it demands action by faculty to ensure an effective learning environment for all students” (6). I am not in favor of confiscating phones, as some high school teachers do, or other punitive actions. I have discovered, however, that having students do a mindfulness exercise before they engage in any in-class writing decreases the likelihood that they will check their phones (or other forms of technology) when they’re supposed to be writing subsequently. It seems that once they begin purposefully focusing their attention it becomes a welcome habit. Although I have not conducted formal, extensive studies on this topic, I have found it frequently proves to be the case, especially when compared to those times when I assign a writing task without practicing mindfulness beforehand.

More broadly, a growing body of literature has confirmed that the practice of mindfulness can produce positive benefits when it comes to the overall health and well-being of college students.

The American College Health Association has identified stress as the most impactful factor on the academic performance of college students and

numerous studies. Bergen-Cico et al., de Bruin et al., Dvořáková et al., Keye and Pidgeon, and Vidic and Cherup attest to the fact that mindfulness helps students lower their stress level and increase their focus in the classroom. One study split 71 students into an experimental group and a control group (Vidic and Cherup). The experimental group participated in a ninety-minute meditation-based relaxation class that met twice a week over the course of seven weeks and engaged in relaxation, breathing, and body scan techniques, as well as guided imagery and progressive body relaxation. The authors found that the group that participated in the mindfulness exercises experienced lower overall stress levels and higher levels of resilience and self-efficacy. They write that “by embedding mindfulness [practices] within the academic curriculum, students can improve their overall health and well-being, and at the same time, meet their academic goals” (Vidic and Cherup 139). Another study recruited 109 freshmen from a large public university in Pennsylvania who participated in an eight-week mindfulness program designed to promote first-year college students’ health and well-being (Dvořáková et al). To facilitate the practice outside the classroom, students were provided with home practice cards and stickers that reminded them to use mindfulness techniques in response to stress, as well as home worksheets with mindfulness suggestions. In addition, students were provided with a link to access an audio recording to guided meditations, like body scans and loving-kindness practices, led by the facilitators. Participation in the pilot intervention was associated with a significant increase in students’ life satisfaction, along with a significant decrease in depression and anxiety.1 The control group, meanwhile, reported a decline in life satisfaction

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and mental health and an increase in sleep issues and alcohol use. The authors conclude that: Mindfulness skills can provide students with a toolset of healthy ways to approach discomfort and challenging experiences associated with entering college. Rather than emotionally reacting, students learn how to regulate their emotions which leads to a sense of empowerment, a positive loop that helps students make healthier decisions. The intervention effects on depression, anxiety, and life satisfaction are particularly important as they play a foundational role in predicting students’ success and adjustment, which in turn leads to better long-term adult outcomes. … There is a need for further research on the potential benefits of mindfulness programs in colleges that will include larger sample sizes, longterm follows-ups, and integration with academic material. (Dvořáková et al. 264) While none of these studies address writing specifically, I have found mindfulness to be helpful in disconnecting from technology and staying in the moment, if only temporarily. It also aids students in becoming less self-critical and judgmental about their own capabilities when it comes to writing.

Cynthia A. Arem, author of Conquering Writing Anxiety (part of the resource library at my college for instructors teaching first-year writing), devotes an entire chapter to what she calls “calming techniques” that help reduce writing anxiety. Arem notes that students who are anxious about writing often feel thwarted in their attempts to express themselves on paper. The very act of writing leaves them feeling

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unfulfilled, dissatisfied, or downright frustrated.

She asserts that regularly practicing calming techniques can improve memory and imagination, increase confidence levels, and help people feel more comfortable about writing: When people are anxious, their breathing is high in their lungs and is shallow and rapid. … If you have a tendency to feel anxious and apprehensive whenever you approach writing, and your writing is suffering because of this, your breathing might well be the culprit. The underlying principle of mind/body/relaxation training is to learn to breathe slowly and deeply from your lower lungs. Through the regular practice of breathing exercises, you can learn to control and gain mastery over the discomfort you feel when writing. (Arem 28)

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WRITING AND MINDFULNESS Begin to tune into your breath. You don’t need to do anything special to it, like making it long or short.

Just breathe naturally. When one breath ends, the next breath begins. As you do this, your mind might start to wander. You might start thinking about other things. If this happens, don’t think of it as a problem.

It’s very natural. There’s no need to stop your thoughts.

Just notice that your mind has wandered. You can say to yourself “thinking” or “wandering” and then gently redirect your attention back to the breath.

We’ll stay with this for some time in silence. Just noticing the breath. Letting yourself relax into the breath, finding a sense of ease and well-being in yourself…

I first noticed the connection between mindfulness and writing before I even started teaching college English. I am what I call a woulda-shoulda-coulda person because I am usually thinking about all the things I could and should have done differently, whether it is something small, like regretting that I did not exercise at all today, or a larger concern like second-guessing the way I presented my research interests for a fellowship I did not receive. When I am not doing that, my mind is constantly occupied with worries about the future: How can I access all the materials I need to write my dissertation now that libraries are closed? How is my 86-year-old mother going to survive this pandemic alone in New York City when she refuses to come live with me or my sister? What if my son cannot get a flight out of New Zealand, where he has been studying abroad, because the country is still on lockdown? How will I ever finish this article on time? Worries about the past and the future revolve over and over in my head like a Spotify playlist, encompassing the two types of distractions Yates has cited.

There is, however, one thing that causes me to ignore the worries temporarily and keeps me focused on the present moment, and that is writing. My background is in journalism. For more than a decade I worked as a reporter at Newsday, a daily newspaper in New York. Though I have always been the kind of person who is rarely in the moment, I found that when I was sitting at my tiny cubicle, in the middle of a busy newsroom, writing a story for the paper on my desktop computer, all the background noise—in the room and in my head—melted away.

Ringing phones. Clusters of people talking. The person in the next cubicle conducting an interview.

None of it distracted me in the least because I was

so immersed in the article I was writing. I was so focused and so engaged in what I was doing that there was nowhere else to be but in the present moment. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this “flow,” a state of complete absorption or concentration with the task at hand that is so involving that nothing else matters. In a Wired interview, he describes flow as “[b]eing completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one ... Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Similarly, I have found that flow factors into the college writing experience by helping students stay in the moment and focus on what they are trying to say. Writing essays is about more than coming up with a strong thesis statement or avoiding run-on sentences. It is about focusing your attention on the task at hand long enough to be able to develop a cohesive argument and find evidence to support it or devoting a block of time to the revision process, without rushing on to the next homework assignment. It is about being appropriately challenged by an activity that is not too hard nor too easy. For some students who lack experience or expertise, this can be difficult. But building students’ confidence helps. Flow is also about quieting the voice in your head that says you are a bad writer, English is just not your thing, you hate writing, you can’t write—all of which I’ve heard from students over the years.

The authors of How Learning Works: 7 ResearchBased Principles for Smart Teaching describe a situation many students encounter, which they call “cognitive load.” This refers to the phenomenon that occurs when performing simultaneous tasks needing

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a great deal of attention while attempting to process large chunks of information at one time. It is a type of processing overload, where the given tasks exceed the capacity to complete them, and students wind up paying an insufficient amount of attention to whatever they are asked to do: How then can we help students manage cognitive load as they learn to perform complex tasks? One method that has proved effective in research studies is to allow students to focus on one skill at a time, thus temporarily reducing their cognitive load and giving them the opportunity to develop fluency before they are required to integrate multiple skills. (Ambrose 105) I have found that one skill students have trouble focusing their attention on is writing—not just in class but at home. At the start of every semester, I have students record their writing process. Whether we are aware of it or not, all writers have one. It is what we do when we sit down to write and it is different for each of us, but most people don’t really think too much about it. So, what does the writing process consist of? Lots of things, including how students come up with ideas for an essay, whether or not an outline is used, whether they talk over ideas with friends or family members; whether the writing is done in stages or all at once; whether they reread what they write as they go along, reread it at the end, or never reread it; whether the writing is done at a particular time of day, close to the deadline or not; and whether the writing is associated with students’ own experiences, attitudes, and opinions.

While each person’s writing process is highly

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personal, I believe that mindfulness is one tool students can use to focus their thoughts and feel less scattered when they sit down to write. My students tend to report that they have trouble concentrating when they write papers. Their thoughts wander, they lose track of what they want to say, they feel they can’t get their ideas straight, and often they leave the task at hand to get a snack, listen to music or go online, interrupting the writing process. As one of my students puts it, “My mind keeps wandering when I write. I usually get patches of ideas, like my topic sentence for one paragraph while I’m writing another so it’s hard to stay on track and the finished product is all jumbled up.”

SOUND, VISION, AND MINDFULNESS Take a moment to notice the sensations in your body.

There may be pressure or tightness. Movement or stillness. Heat or cold or tingling. It might be a strong, obvious sensation—a muscle tightening, a place where you feel discomfort or pain. It might be a soft or subtle sensation. You may find yourself jumping from sensation to sensation or there might be one that grabs your attention. Notice the curiosity with which you take in these sensations—not making up a whole story about the experience. Just being present with your body, in the current moment. Start with the forehead. You might imagine a wide, expansive space.

Bring attention to the eyes, allowing them to soften.

Relaxing the jaw. You might even feel a slight smile at the lips. Allow your shoulders to release and relax.

Bring your attention to your right hand. Notice any energy or heaviness in the hand. Now, bring your awareness to your left hand. Is there any difference between the two? Breathe through your arms, into

your upper body and your heart. Feel the expansion of the belly on the in breath and a softening on the out breath. Relax your hips, legs, and feet. Imagine your whole body breathing. In and out. Focusing on how the breath moves through the body.

No matter what the specific mindfulness exercise consists of, I find it useful to set an initial intention for the writing practice. My students have focused on improving organizational skills, worked on grammar and sentence structure, generated ideas for a longer paper, and increased a sense of overall clarity in their writing, among other things. While we have talked about these concepts throughout the semester, the practice helps students concentrate on what they feel they especially need to work on. I generally start the practice after the first two weeks when the class has begun to coalesce, and we are starting to get to know one another. The mindfulness sessions last anywhere between five to ten minutes. There is no set time for the practice. I tend to use them before each freewriting (low-stakes) assignment, which are never collected and which students often refer back to before starting longer writing projects.

Over the years, I have found that several of my students have tried mindfulness in the past but have misconceptions about it. Some, for instance, reported that the goal is to “stop thinking about what’s bothering you,” when this is the opposite of most mindfulness practices. Rather, practitioners are encouraged to notice a negative thought or obsession and return to the present moment by concentrating on the breath or on a creative visualization. Some academics also express skepticism about the place and value of mindfulness in the classroom. When I told a professor in my department that I was on a 2019 NeMLA panel about mindfulness, she snorted loudly in derision.

Part of the problem is that mindfulness has come to be associated with business profits—even derisively called McMindfulness—in light of the plethora of DIY books on the market and apps like Headspace and Calm, which charge users a fee.2 I also think that educators, such as my departmental colleague, see contemplative pedagogy as some hippy-dippy activity that has no place in a serious, scholarly environment.

That is because they have not yet discovered the pedagogical connection between mindfulness, writing, and learning. They do not understand that mindfulness can help students trust themselves as writers and enable them to become more focused instead of being caught up in the myriad distractions that cellphones and their own active minds present, as Yates has suggested. Sure, some students are resistant to mindfulness exercises: they usually sit quietly while the rest of the class is engaged in the practice, an option that is open to everyone. But by the end of the semester, most students have given it a try and are glad they did. When I polled students in ENGL 161 (a Gen Ed class called Introduction to Narrative) at the end of the semester about their in-class mindfulness experience, here are some of their comments: “It reminded me of yoga—very relaxing.” “It helped the words flow better.” “It made me feel less nervous about writing.”

“I like setting a goal in the beginning and then it was like, hey, I accomplished it.” “It made me less self-conscious about writing.” “I liked that I was actually writing instead of listening to the voice in my head telling me I wasn’t a good writer.”

Because of such feedback, for years I have felt that mindfulness was having a positive impact on the writing practices of my students and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, changing everyone’s approach to teaching across all disciplines, changing

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all our lives in general, and changing my approach to contemplative pedagogy. At the 2020 NeMLA conference in Boston—held three days before Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, closed every college in the state for the entire semester—the first workshop I attended was “Essential Elements of Online Teaching.” I took some notes and then we broke up into groups to discuss our expectations, concerns, and fears. My primary concern was that I would be unable to lead discussion-based classes (I do not lecture or give exams) in a virtual space.

So much of my work in the classroom, whether it is talking about fiction or having students share their writing with one another, depends on personal interaction. The people in my NeMLA group at the panel had never taught an online class either and we all sat there looking worried. I ended up leaving before the session was over, telling myself that if we had to teach virtually it would only be temporary—a week, maybe two. Then the pandemic struck, and every educational institution shut down and was forced to transition to online learning.

The college where I teach is located in New York City, the first epicenter of the coronavirus in the United States. Some of my students reported that they had lost relatives to the disease—a beloved great-grandmother, an uncle, a close family friend.

Others had parents who became sick and decided to remain at home, because we were told by healthcare officials it was safer than going to the hospital.

Their sons and daughters—my students—took care of them, did the grocery shopping, and looked after younger siblings who were also forced to learn from home. Still others confided that they were worried about parents who worked as doctors and nurses,

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concerned that they would get sick and bring the virus home. Makeshift field facilities sprang up in hospital parking lots in our area and in Manhattan’s Central Park, which took patients from hospitals in Brooklyn and Queens, two of the hardest-hit boroughs in the city’s outbreak. Queens is where I teach and where most of my students live. Students themselves became ill. They were sorry, some emailed me, but they could not read We Have Always Lived in the Castle just now. It hurt their heads and their eyes to read. They could not write anything at the moment. They were having trouble breathing. Many of those who stayed healthy and kept coming to our online Zoom classes had the shell-shocked look of people living through a war. Pale faces. Wild, uncombed hair. Glazed, tired expressions. We all seem to need mindfulness now more than ever—not only to focus on our writing but to get through the stress and anxiety of each new day. In fact, after the Covid-19 virus struck, taking mindfulness to the virtual classroom became not only beneficial but necessary. I still continue to center our practice around freewriting exercises but now I have the additional goals of calming and centering my students during this difficult, unsettling period. I find I am no longer the only one with this idea. In the last couple of months, I have received invitations from my synagogue, my graduate program, and my local library to participate in group meditation sessions. Mindfulness is on everyone’s mind as the nation collectively tries to figure out a way to destress.

Right now, just for a moment, let’s pay attention to sound. Inside the room you are in or outside the room. Simply listen ... There might be pleasant sounds, unpleasant sounds, or no sound at all. Listen with

curiosity and interest ... Notice sound coming and going ... Without getting caught up in a story of what that sound is or why it’s there. Keep listening … Try not to judge the sound and label it as something annoying or distracting. Just listen. And when your attention starts to wander, bring it back to the sound ... You can also notice the sound of silence. Is it pure silence or can you hear your laptop humming or very faint sounds in the distance, coming from a long way away? Notice the difference between sound and noise.

When there is too much noise, especially noise that we cannot control, it tends to bother us. But if we create the noise, it’s okay. Keep listening. Try not to judge the sound or label it as good or bad ... What is too much noise? Or too little noise? Do you ever think it’s too quiet? Listen to the sounds around you ... Try not to make up a story as to what the sound is or why it’s there. Simply listen. Is your body making noise as you adjust it in the chair? Your mouth when you swallow? Or your feet when you move them?

Listen ... Do we tend to forget about sound because we’re concentrating on our other senses? Like sight or taste? Let’s spend the next minute just listening and if your attention wanders, bring it back to the sounds you hear ...

Sound is an interesting part of the mindfulness practice and there are several places where mindfulness and sound studies intersect. In its broadest sense, sound studies aim to understand sound as part of an auditory ecology that consists of the relationship between music, speech, noise, and silence. R. Murray Schafer writes that the soundscape of the world is changing and that noises are “the sounds we have learned to ignore” (95). According to Schafer, it is still unclear what impact our new

environment of screens and headphones will have on this field. For now, sound continues to play an important role in contemplative pedagogy. In our in-person English classroom, students initially found their attention wandering as we heard voices waft in through the open window, as planes roared overhead and people used the snack machine, directly across from the classroom door, and as students shifted in their seats, moving chairs, coughing, chewing gum, and so on. For the most part, I felt that these noises eventually blended into the background as students focused on their mindfulness practice. Online mindfulness is quite different, however, because in order to engage in a mindfulness session (or any teaching practice) on Zoom, I need all twenty-four students to mute their audio controls. Otherwise, there is too much static, and it is difficult to hear anyone clearly. There is a need to control the soundscape and to be actively aware of it. Moreover, the collective mindfulness experience has shifted, and each person is now in their own sound environment with attendant dogs barking, parents talking, siblings playing, and so forth. As Joseph Klett, author of “Sound on Sound: Situating Interaction in Sonic Object Settings,” puts it, “No space is silent, and no sound is perceived without a cultural frame. A sonic object setting, be it a classroom, a parking lot, or a meadow, externalizes meaning in its material and practical extensions as audible” (147). Students tend to apologize profusely for attendant background noise in their home environments, as if it were somehow their fault.

The digital technologies that we are all having to use in the time of Covid affect mindfulness

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interactions, particularly in regard to sound. For instance, I have discovered that my laptop makes a humming noise most of the time but, at intervals, the sound abruptly goes away and there is utter silence in my home office. The first few times this happened while I was sharing my screen and could not see anyone’s faces, I panicked. Were my students still online or had they vanished into a virtual black hole? It turns out they were there—alone together— but I missed the classroom noises that alerted me to their presence—the scratching of pens on paper, the click of the keyboard, the hum of conversation as students worked in groups to hash out their ideas.

Now when my students listen to my voice, they also hear the wail of sirens outside my window, which has become the new soundtrack of our lives in New York City. At first, I worried the sound would be a jarring aural contrast, but then I realized this was precisely what mindfulness is about—staying in the present moment comfortably when confronted with unpleasant reminders of past and future fears.

Another change I have made to our collective online mindfulness practice has to do with vision.

When we were together in the classroom, students simply closed their eyes or lowered their gaze for each meditation session. On Zoom, which I keep set on Gallery View, we appear as tiny faces filling a large square, like an exploded version of The Brady Bunch, or, in some cases, just a name in white letters against a black background for those students who either cannot or prefer not to turn on their video cameras. I wanted to give us a break from “seeing” one another this way, as we do during class discussions, so I created a PowerPoint slide show of 35 soothing images—a field of wildflowers, the

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beach at sunrise, the northern lights, a peaceful forest. I choose one slide per class and put it on the screen during our mindfulness intervals. (Most students choose to leave their cameras off at all times, and I would rather they gaze at a soothing scene than at me.) Sometimes, I have students do what is called an object meditation; the image becomes what the mind is focused on—paying attention to colors, shapes, light, patterns, details.

I like to leave the image up during the freewriting prompt that follows so they do not get distracted by one another’s screens. Yet another change I have made is to slow down, especially when reading poetry. Before, when we were in a physical classroom, the focus of any poem I taught would be to close-read it, getting students to concentrate on specific words, phrases, or even punctuation that helps uncover the hidden meaning below the surface. In fact, the first essay assignment in most classes I teach is to close-read a poem. Often, when we practiced close reading in class, I did not even bother to read the poem aloud at all. I just launched into examining it, pulling its components apart.

In this strange new online teaching world, I always read poems aloud before we begin deconstructing them. I will also sometimes share a poem with students merely because I think it is beautiful or timely or even helpful. They are not necessarily scholarly, and students do not need to analyze anything; they can just listen and hear the words wash over them. They can drink in the images and appreciate them, without analyzing anything, being in the present moment with the poem. Here is one,

by John O’Donohue, that I especially like:

This is the time to be slow Lie low to the wall Until the bitter weather passes Try, as best you can, not to let The wire brush of doubt Scrape from your heart All sense of yourself And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous, Time will come good; And you will find your feet Again on fresh pastures of promise, Where the air will be kind And blushed with beginning.

What is contemplative pedagogy actually accomplishing? I believe it helps prepare students to get into a headspace where they can concentrate more on their own writing and give it their full attention.

Mindfulness is a shared experience in the classroom, one that has become more important in these uncertain times. Dewey stresses the importance of experience in education, but he makes it clear that an experience by itself is not the sole value of learning. It is the thinking around that experience that makes it valuable. He also states that the thinking that happens around each experience is more than simply “uncontrolled coursing of ideas through our heads”; it is purposeful, reflective thinking (Dewey 4), which is what mindfulness aims for. In What the Best College Teachers Do, the authors pose a series of questions about instructors’ learning goals, with the basic assumption that learning is a developmental process rather than merely about the

acquisition of knowledge. They include: What have I tried to help and encourage students to learn?

Why are those learning objectives worth achieving?

What strategies did I use? Were those strategies effective in helping students learn? Why or why not? Contemplative pedagogy is one of the strategies I employ. Before the pandemic struck, it was one of the many tricks I had in my bag to help keep my students focused and to hopefully improve their self-confidence and concentration when it comes to writing. During the time of Covid-19, I feel mindfulness has become more of an essential tool in the college classroom, providing a sense of calm in a changing, stressful world. Hopefully, by staying in the present moment, students’ writing will become more focused and their self-critical inner voices will be quieted. But possibly, in the bigger picture, contemplative pedagogy will also help provide students with a coping mechanism that they can use in their lives beyond the classroom as they navigate the difficulties and challenges that we are all currently facing.

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NOTES Students reported that the three most effective in-class practices were three mindful breaths, breath awareness, and mindfulness of emotions (Dvořáková et al. 263).

1.

These books on mindfulness have reached best-seller status on Amazon: Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (New World Library, 2004), Matthew Sockolov’s Practicing Mindfulness (Althea Press, 2018), and Ram Dass’s Be Here Now (Harmony, 1978). I prefer an app called Insight Timer, which is free and offers thousands of guided meditations on everything from reducing anxiety to preventing insomnia, along with meditation music playlists and sound therapy.

2.

WORKS CITED Ambrose, Susan A., et al. How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching.

John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

Arem, Cynthia A. Conquering Writing Anxiety. Morton Publishing, 2010.

Bain, Ken. What the Best College Teachers Do. Harvard UP, 2004.

Bergen-Cico, Dessa, et al. “Examining the efficacy of a brief mindfulness-based stress reduction (brief MBSR) program on psychological health.” Journal of American College Health, vol 61, no. 6, 2013, pp. 348-60.

Booth, Robert. “Master of Mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn.” The Guardian, 22 Oct. 2017, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/22 mindfulness-jon-kabat-zinn -depression-trump-grenfell.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial, 2008. de Bruin, Esther I., et al. “Mindfulness in higher education: Awareness and attention in university students increase during and after participation in a mindfulness curriculum course.”

Mindfulness, vol. 6, no. 5, 2015, pp. 1137-42.

Dewey, John. How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

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Dvořáková, Kamila, et al. “Promoting healthy transition to college through mindfulness training with first-year college students: Pilot randomized controlled trial.” Journal of American College Health, vol. 65, no. 4, 2017, pp. 259-67.

Elder, Anastasia D. “College Students’ Cell Phone Use, Beliefs, and Effects on their Learning.”

College Student Journal, vol 47, no. 4, 2013, pp. 585-92.

Geirland, John. “Go with the Flow.” Wired magazine, 1996, Issue 4.09. wired.com/1996/09/czik.

Keye, Michelle D., and Pidgeon, Aileen. “An Investigation of the Relationship between Resilience, Mindfulness, and Academic Self-Efficacy.” Open Journal of Social Sciences, vol 1., no. 6, 2013, pp. 1-4.

Klett, Joseph. “Sound on Sound: Situating Interaction in Sonic Object Settings.” Sociological Theory, vol. 32, no. 2, 2014, pp. 147-61.

Langer, Ellen J. The Power of Mindful Learning. Hachette Books, 1997.

O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Doubleday, 2008.

Peary, Alexandria. Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing.

Routledge, 2018.

Schafer, R. Murray. “The Soundscape.” The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, Routledge, 2012.

“Spring 2016 Reference Group Executive Summary.” American College Health Association National College Health Assessment, 2016, www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-II%20 SPRING%202016%20US%20REFERENCE%20GROUP%20EXECUTIVE%20SUMMARY.pdf.

Tindell, Deborah R., and Bohlander, Robert W. “The Use and Abuse of Cell Phones and Text Messaging in the Classroom: A Survey of College Teaching.” College Teaching, vol. 60, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-9.

Vidic, Zeljka, and Nicholas Cherup. “Mindfulness in Classroom: Effect of a Mindfulness-Based Relaxation Class on College Students’ Stress, Resilience, Self-Efficacy and Perfectionism.”

College Student Journal, vol 53, no. 1, 2019, pp. 130-42.

Wenger, Christy. Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies: Contemplative Writing Pedagogy.

Parlor Press, 2015.

Yates, John. The Mind Illuminated. Atria, 2017.

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fiction+poetry

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the

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jim goar

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When all we have is sea

before us

the diving bell fictions words as he finds them paraphrased as force given their isolation dripping between the union

physical

of stars as if all leaves have

sun and breath together caught in everything

seaborn clouds

obey horizons relentless accuracy a system of sunlight but differently

of

grind and forage blue

orbits of nest entangled itself beneath the broken window gathered entropy of this coherent sense the layers hold with weighted motion out ward into existence of archetypes wobbly from

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cracking taste and discard compel each

if contagious the twiggy things hearing and whole the frame to yield

Frigidaire each constellation

open and ambulance behind his shoulder this molting knight who could not gather anything

the radio hums ya, selva

oscura

defined nothing incurred how then black knives or leaves and where the prattle of ruin and yet the passage sang to me my 43rd year where

of blighted moon bright upon the forest cluster and so they went where

polis hid their lonely trees in sheltered breath

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if cold can be so called this is the part where nothing gleams where mirrors frame where chickens roost this is the graying this is the catalogued land this is the part stretched wide to blame you who enter here the almost seeing the flashing ghost where church bells pack the golden dawn in smaller rooms as something suffered on every side each knight forgot to ask as drops of blood in the privacy of extinction whispered for who is there in the empty cul-de-sac I’ve squandered a trembling exfoliant of bones for this your seed encircled for this your television forgets how odd

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the autumn sun goes dark as dishes cleared what bitter worm in fallen rag will search the abstract beast my father said without a cup we paddled through hourglass bays until we lit a hive of glass remember these darker woods descending for all that greens our glassy face in the knotted breaching of every surface the garden gate extracts its sleeping knight grey

in the nest in the silt of seabirds landing in the dream of chlorinated water someone

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will answer the door nonsense

terrible

in

circumscribed

where

trees won’t grow we’ll whisper the drawbridge is falling

anthem of subtraction and sea released its binary act in sequence after sequence the frenzied salt of softer sound what wider perceptions of walls and life therein as proof is rent with thorns in the meantime in the castle before the heartless bride becomes would you occasion and poorly phrased would you recur with in

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wheel

with liver with water with urn with rock

linden’s captivity

the

form

ask this broken cup to answer and echo wooden mask wetter scent of opens

endure the grassy garment’s sway to me

and human

its diluvian petals by waterside

if spellbound

lungs despair their service door who are you

then

past side-eyed sun of silhouette but spinning fool before the silent knight need only ask where in the documented field as chimney sweepers come to dust am I a happy man

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Elizabeth Laughlin

In a world full of color, I only saw Violet.

Black-and-white photographs wouldn’t have captured her magnificence, the way she transcended space and time and everything between.

I went for walks in the morning light, my chin raised, focusing on the clouds and how they danced together, then pulled apart again.

Every time I saw Violet, I stopped to take a picture, not wanting to miss the moment—her silhouette, the shape of her body in the setting sun. The almost-invisible gap between her teeth. Her eyebrows, furrowed, when she was perplexed or befuddled or amused.

Even getting coffee with Violet was an adventure. She drank it as if it were a shot: no sugar, no cream.

“I need it to get by,” she would say before glancing out the window, her mind always running. Racing—as if it were going to miss something.

I would laugh, prepared to take another photo. I adjusted the camera to find the perfect angle, the perfect lighting.

She was my greatest muse, the reason I believed in God at all. To me, she was God’s masterpiece, not only for her natural beauty, but for her soul and how it stood out from the others.

What drove me mad, though, was imagining the inside of her mind, how it made connections and conjured scenarios to turn into art. Yes, Violet was an artist—but not in the typical sense. She lived each day as if it were an empty canvas in front of her, or a ball of clay in her hands. She recognized her inherent strength.

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Visiting her apartment felt like heaven. While she was in the kitchen, I thumbed through her video cassettes. She had a collection of classic films.

“What are you doing, love?” she asked from the other room.

I set them back under the television. “Just looking at your movies,” I said.

She walked in the living room. She had poured two cups of tea for us, and she blew away the steam. There were drawings of small white kittens on the saucers, sketches that she created. I stopped to appreciate them.

“I was bored,” she said. As if everything were really that simple.

She had long lashes that I noticed when she blushed, when color engulfed her face.

“Are you afraid of dying, Sam?” she asked me.

Suddenly my entire world came into focus. I took a sip of tea and burned the roof of my mouth, but it didn’t matter because I was here, and I was with her. And I was alive.

We sat on the floor. She said that it helped her feel connected to the earth, to the Source.

“I don’t think so,” I said at last. Although I was thinking about drowning and burning alive and how much those things scared me.

My mother died right after she had me. In fact, the doctors said that giving birth to me took every ounce of life she had left. And my father never let me forget it, that I was the daughter who killed my mother without ever knowing her. Just by being born.

How many times did I long for her presence? I could never fear death if it brought me back to her.

Violet reached out and touched my hand, sensing my change of expression.

“Everything’s okay, Sam,” she said. Then she smiled, and all was right with the world again.

We sipped tea and talked about politics and how scary the world was, how scary the world was becoming. She called it “an active progression of doom.” But Violet promised—pinky promised—that nothing scared her.

Then, holding hands, we went into the living room and danced. We didn’t need music—the rhythm, the chemistry of our bodies was enough. At last, she laid her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes, taking me in, taking in my essence.

Flashbacks flooded my brain. The moment we met. Two strangers who became so much more. All of a sudden, we were sharing our hopes and dreams with each other.

We talked about the things that scared us most. And we shared things we had never told anyone else.

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Her cat, Buster, recognized my scent every time I stepped through the door, and he stopped to acknowledge me. He treated me as if he loved me.

As we danced, I stopped to thank God, because I never knew when this moment would end.

Violet made me want to see more of the world, like the peaks of Machu Picchu and the depths of the Mariana Trench. When I closed my eyes, I saw black holes, bending and morphing at the speed of light.

I stood at the edge of the universe.

What if I jumped in?

Violet clenched my arm.

“What happened?” she asked, her voice a rush. “Are you okay?”

My chest tightened. I tried to take deep breaths, but they folded into each other. I blinked, trying to catch myself. “I don’t know what the hell just happened,” I said, “but I don’t feel good.”

I don’t remember what came next, but I woke up on the floor, Violet lying beside me, frantic. My body was shaking and covered in sweat.

At seventeen, I went to a party and ended up in an ambulance. “How could you be so irresponsible?” my father asked me, disgusted. They told him about the crushed pills and vodka. Never before had I wanted to shrink, to hide away from the world and make myself small. That moment played in my mind over and over—the sirens, the screaming.

Strangers found me on the floor, passed out. They poked and probed at me as if I were a test subject, as if I weren’t human.

“Don’t I matter?” I wanted to scream. Maybe I could convince them, but never myself.

I was sitting on the tan leather sofa—I forget whose sofa it was—and I allowed myself to get lost in my imagination, perhaps a world where my mother never died, and my father treated me like he gave a shit. Where my teachers listened to what I had to say with more than a vague interest. Where every day didn’t feel out of control, yet frozen in time, like a fixed continuum. Getting lost in these fantasies (or what some may call delusions),

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I lost track of time.

I ended up in a hospital room, lights shining in my face, nurses rushing around me. It wouldn’t be the last time. In fact, it was the beginning of a long spell of darkness. I appreciated substances that drowned out the noise. Sometimes I felt like I was swimming, even as I sat and stared at the ceiling. Other times, I felt nothing at all, which I preferred.

Ten years later, I noticed Violet’s touch.

“Oh, thank God,” she said as I opened my eyes, the light flooding in. She set her hand on my forehead. “You have a fever—you’re burning up,” she said.

How does someone recover from something they don’t understand? Violet begged, she pleaded, for me to stay awake, to stay conscious, but I walked a thin tightrope overlooking flames, and my steps were uneven; unsteady. When I tried to breathe, pain ripped through my chest.

“Did you take something?” she asked me. Concern etched her face.

I foamed at the mouth. “Of course not,” I said, wiping my mouth. I didn’t blame her for thinking I had relapsed. But this was something different entirely, the way shapes shifted in my mind. It felt as if I had been carried to another dimension. I felt my soul wrestling my body.

Violet leaned over me, but I could feel the life draining from me. It became harder and harder to stay alive. To stay here. Violet cried. “Sam,” she said, her voice so sad, “please don’t leave me.”

I wanted to stay here with her more than anything, but my soul had other plans.

And then I saw my mom, who held her hand out to me, outstretched.

I had to choose between the woman I loved and the woman I had never met— but missed every moment.

Losing my mother caused a deep void within me that was impossible to fill.

“Sam, this is over,” my mother said. “Your time is up.”

“But why?” I asked, my voice frail and small. I sounded like a child. “Why can’t I stay a little longer?”

“This is the agreement your soul made before you were born,” my mother said. Tears streamed from her eyes. “Your soul wanted your last moment to be with her.”

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Although I tried to fight it, the force was too strong. In fact, it lifted me out of my body, and I could see the entire room.

Warmth spread across my soul, like the sun coming out after so much rain. And that warmth was my mother’s touch, a touch that somehow felt familiar. It marked everything that had been missing my entire life.

It was my mother’s touch that convinced me to leave everything behind. Even Violet, who begged me to stay.

Somewhere in the distance I heard Violet’s sobs, but I was distracted by the songs of birds, the voices of angels. I was among them now.

Still, I tried to comfort Violet by kissing her cheeks, wrapping my arm around her shoulder. It made no difference—she punched the wall, cursed at God. Even cursed at me, at herself.

We were just pieces on an infinite chess board. We had no say in Divine Order.

“She’ll be okay,” my mother said. I could see my mother’s features now, her illuminated blue eyes and light eyelashes. She was crowned with a bright halo.

“How did I die?” I asked her at once.

I was twenty-seven years old and was in pretty good health. Smoked the occasional cigarette, drank whiskey when things got tough. And I dabbled with drugs in high school.

I walked alongside my mother, outside of the apartment building near my elementary school. In another dimension I still played there with my friends, chasing them on the playground and catching grasshoppers in the fields. I could hear my laugh, echoing through space.

Time didn’t exist. It never would.

Our shoulders brushed. We walked, suddenly barefoot, in those vast fields. I looked across them like I did as a child—with so much wonder and amazement. Anything, everything, was possible.

My mother sighed. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“Of course,” I said.

She stooped to pick up a fallen acorn. “I always loved these things,” she said, running her finger over it. “All the nooks and crannies of them. The textures.” Then she dropped it. “It reminds me of the intricacies of life.”

“Mom, please tell me.”

She stopped in her tracks, turned to look at me. Her eyes bore into mine. “You didn’t see Violet make the tea, did you?” she asked.

The truth began to stir inside me. My chest rattled like a caged animal, frantic and panicked, but my mother set me free.

“She poisoned you,” she said, at last.

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article

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PAUL R. PETRIE, SOUTHERN CONNECTICUT STATE UNIVERSITY

The first of the two extended philosophical poems named in the title of this essay, which together comprise approximately a third of Donald Hall’s 1993 volume, The Museum of Clear Ideas, begins with a description of a rather unlikely project: 1. I would like to explain baseball to Kurt Schwitters, Merz-poet and artist, whose work was clothing, office, bedroom, and carapace, who glued together assemblages of ordinary things — cigarette wrappers, bus tickets, ads — first to make collage, and then to inhabit. I would like to linger with Schwitters in the Fenway bleachers, 2. explaining baseball. ... (1.1-2) 1 The poet immediately confronts the great obstacle to his plan: ... But, as poets tell us, the man is dead, and I — call me K.C. — lack his German, much less death’s German. ... (1.2) Together, these lines succinctly announce both the enabling conceit of the paired poems and their primary theme: “Baseball” and “Extra Innings” are poems about the opposition between ordinary life and the processes of art on the one hand and mortality and death on the other. As their stanzas unfold and accumulate, Hall’s explanations of baseball range ever farther afield from their initiating topic to encompass an endlessly proliferating, seemingly random array of references, “glued together” in a linguistic collage like those of his imagined listener,

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the Weimar German collage artist Schwitters. The poems chronicle a world characterized by relentless disintegration, but they simultaneously strive to overcome that disintegration by reconnecting fragments into meaningful wholes. As the poems proceed, the poles of this dialectic become more and more explicitly defined as death and the human desire to overcome it, and the poems comprise an exploration of human engagement with the inevitable dissolution of the things of the material world and of our own persons. This essay explores Hall’s development of this modern philosophy of mortality while offering an exposition of the poems for readers who may not be aware of their brilliance. The essay thus also seeks to promote further scholarly attention to the work of a poet who, despite his reputational eminence, has been largely ignored in the published criticism to date.2 My project begins, as did my interest in these poems, with the rather obvious question posed by those opening lines: why might Hall have initiated his poems with the seemingly absurd gesture of explaining the game of baseball to a dead German multimedia artist? Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), whose art-historical stock began to rise significantly in the wake of a 1985 New York Museum of Modern Art retrospective (curated by John Elderfield, whose book about that exhibition Hall seems to have read, although it is unclear whether he saw the show itself), provided the poet with two of the poems’ defining qualities: the inclusion of a wide variety of “found” materials and a creative technique that refuses to diminish their irreducible particularity.

Schwitters’ aesthetic matches the poems’ thematic investment in reconciling the opposing existential facts of wholeness and dissolution. As the first stanza of the poem explains (seconded by Hall’s amplifying

note in The Museum of Clear Ideas, where both poems first appeared [120]), Schwitters constructed collages, assemblages, and, eventually, a sort of habitable sculpture from the obsessively collected detritus of inter-war Hanover. His works make unified wholes from the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated, “found” items scavenged from the political, economic, and material chaos of Weimar Germany. The nonsense name he gave his work, “merz” (derived from a snippet of advertisement for the Kommerz- und Privatbank that appeared in an early collage, Das Merzbild, or “Merzpicture,” of 19193), gestures toward the principle of radical inclusiveness at the heart of Schwitters’ art. If the world offers nothing but fragmentation and disarray, the artistic response must be to make something of nothing, however arbitrarily, yet without suppressing either the disarray itself or its constituent elements.

An early assemblage, Das Undbild or “The And-Picture” (1919), offers an example of this aesthetic of unified disunion. It includes parts of an envelope, business stationery, ticket stubs, advertising copy, a pencil, a cork, fragments of wood and leather, and any number of not readily identifiable bits and pieces of everyday early-twentieth-century European urban life. Selected without prejudice as to provenance or previous association, the work’s components are glued, stapled, or nailed to the assemblage to make a new whole in which the juxtapositions of found objects create their own internal language even as they evoke the “real world” outside the boundaries of the frame. The impulse to include everything became for Schwitters a quest for Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total artwork,” multigeneric and ultra-expansive, and led as well to his conception that the totality of his artistic activities in multiple media were aspects of a single,

overarching, and ultimately supra-artistic whole.

Thus “Merz” came to refer not only to Schwitters’ collages but also to his paintings, poetry, essays, sculpture, spoken-word performance art—even advertising, conversation, and living space.4 “Merz is Weltanschauung,” Schwitters wrote in Der Sturm in 1927, invoking the quintessentially German conception of art as radically all-inclusive worldview.

“Its nature is an absolute lack of inhibition. ... Merz means creating relationships, preferably between all the different things in the world” (qtd. in Katenhusen 235).

“The madness method / of ‘Baseball,’” the poet asserts, likewise: ... gathers bits and pieces 2. of ordinary things — like bleacher ticket stubs, used Astroturf, Fenway Frank wrappers, yearbooks, and memory— to paste them onto the bonkers grid of the page. (5.1-2) Hall’s invocation of Schwitters, then, is strategic rather than absurd: the opening lines of the poem both describe and replicate Schwitters’ collage aesthetic: a method for fostering broad inclusiveness of widely disparate materials while also pursuing an underlying coherence, a (perhaps temporary) arrest of disintegration. By the time the poem makes this methodological pronouncement, the method itself has already been robustly in action through four complete Innings, within which the poet has juxtaposed everything from Schwitters collages to nuclear physics, sex, depression, condominium developments, cell division, baseball’s balk rule, the death of the poet’s father, Ezra Pound and Robert

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Frost, the nature of language, and the best ballpark hotdogs—among many other things. The remaining 729 lines of “Baseball” and the additional 547 lines plus eight prose paragraphs of “Extra Innings” extend this practice of radical disparateness and all-inclusiveness, continuously expanding the range of reference to include (in no particular order, and certainly not exhaustively): science (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine); Western philosophy (Sartre, Heraclitus, Diogenes); theology (Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism); history (Weimar Germany, Alexander the Great, the Persian Wars, World War II, the Great Hurricane of 1938); art (Henry Moore, John Singer Sargent, De Stijl, and Schwitters himself); poetry (Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop); baseball (Babe Ruth, Pee Wee Reese, Fenway Park, the Danbury, New Hampshire Elementary School softball league); personal and family history (births, deaths, illnesses, work, houses); travel (China, India, England, Kenmore Square); nature (gardening, fall foliage, and wild strawberries); and an array of quotidian activities and events including tv-watching, radio-listening, eating, love-making, urination—and so on. The list seems long even for poems as long as these are and even in this far-fromcomplete catalogue of their content. By adopting Schwitters’ aesthetic of juxtaposition, Hall creates a verbal analogue to the visual artist’s assemblages and collages, enabling the poems to introduce vast quantities of widely variant topics and ideas within comparatively small spaces and to tap the concentrated cross-referential signification and suggestiveness that their close juxtaposition releases.

Hall’s and Schwitters’ shared method in some ways resonates with French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept, developed in La Pensée Sauvage (The Savage Mind), of bricolage: a particular

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sort of creative practice by which the bricoleur (an individual combining some of the qualities of a handyman, a craftsman, and an artist—Lévi-Strauss’s translator notes the absence of any good Englishlanguage equivalent for the term) fuses into a new object a random assortment of near-to-hand materials that are essentially unrelated to the larger purpose of his creation. The resulting objects tend toward the fantastical and occupy a conceptual space somewhere between utility and art. LéviStrauss offers three examples: “architectural follies like the villa of Cheval the postman or the stage sets of Georges Méliès” (17) and “Wemmick’s suburban ‘castle’” (17) in Dickens’ Great Expectations. In each case, otherwise unrelated bits of material are fused into a new whole that does nothing to disguise its humble constituent parts even as it seeks to unite them within a new conceptual purpose; neither the greater whole nor its components gain ascendancy over the other. Lévi-Strauss later asserts that “the intermittent fashion for ‘collages’” represents “the transposition of ‘bricolage’ into the realms of contemplation” (30), and while it is unclear what specific artists or artworks he may have had in mind, connection to Schwitters seems appropriate. Collage, however, is not finally equivalent to bricolage.

Schwitters’ practice offered Hall a model in one other way, however: the combination of superficially incompatible varieties of emotion and tone to create complex, hybrid effects. Hall borrows from Schwitters, in other words, collage’s capacity to create affective engagement: collage is affect. Hilton Kramer, reviewing the 1985 Museum of Modern Art Schwitters retrospective, writes that Schwitters’ work possesses a “special quality of feeling [. . .] unlike that of anyone else,” consisting of an improbable union of “a touch of laughter and even mockery”

with an “atmosphere of tender sorrow and loss” that makes Schwitters “a sort of abstract elegist.” The laughter arises from delight at the frequently absurd juxtapositions of incongruous quotidian objects; the sense of sorrow and loss, on the other hand, proceeds from the recognition, as another art historian puts it, that although these objects “are bursting with the vitality of things that have known human contact” (Schmalenbach 89), they concurrently evoke the transitory nature of the trappings of human life and of the people who have produced and discarded them. Like Schwitters himself, who by all accounts was naturally, exuberantly humorous in his interactions with other people yet claimed that his “basic trait is melancholy” (qtd. in Schmalenbach 28), many of the Merz collages simultaneously convey a celebration of life and a sobering recognition of its ephemerality. Schwitters, writes Kramer, “is a dreamer in the wasteland of the modern metropolis who constructs little elegies to its unacknowledged tristesse” (1). While Hall’s tonalities in “Baseball” and “Extra Innings” do not precisely match Schwitters’, the poems do adopt Schwitters’ unlikely fusion of the humorous with the sorrowful, the exuberant with the elegiac. As Suzanne Keene asserts in her perceptive review of The Museum of Clear Ideas, “the undervalued art of tone” is a key ingredient not only of the “Baseball” poems but of the entire volume in which they appear.

While Hall’s palette of tonalities is ultimately wider-ranging than Schwitters’, the poet recognizably borrows and builds upon the visual artist’s mélange of apparently irreconcilable tones. The poems are founded upon affect.

The lines immediately following those already cited from the beginning of the poem exemplify some of the poems’ affective complexities. Beginning

safely enough in the realm of the quotidian and the colloquial (“Well, there are nine players / on a baseball team, so to speak, and / there are nine innings” [1.2]), the lines proceed immediately along a dizzying train of association away from the comfort and security of the mundane toward the threatening abstract chill of the ultimate and the existential.

Listing the “trivial exceptions” (1.2) to the normal nine-inning duration of a baseball game, the poet moves from extra-inning games and rain-outs to “… riot, hurricane, earthquake, or / 3. the Second Law of Thermodynam- / ics. Rilke feared the death of the sun; / then we exploded the sun” (1.2-3). In less than four lines, the poem travels from a baseball game to the physics of entropy and the specter of nuclear annihilation, and from laughter to terror.

Other instances of such tonally startling juxtapositions abound. Just a few lines later, for instance, there occurs an even more compact example: “6. From home plate to the pitcher’s rubber, as the actress said to the bishop, takes sixty feet and six inches. Of course you will recognize Being: It looks just like Nothingness except that it wears a striped Thai-silk four-in-hand. (1.6) The passage moves fluidly and circularly from its matter-of-fact technical explanation of the distance between pitcher and batter, through the marginally sensical, bawdy sexual witticism inserted in the second line, to an allusion to Jean-Paul Sartre that offhandedly cuts abstract concepts in philosophy down to size by comically personifying them as a pair of overdressed gentlemen. Such tonal-thematic dances are the stock in trade of these poems: rapidly shifting series of juxtapositions of the everyday with

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the larger-than-life, the concrete with the abstract, the expected with the absurd, the colloquial with the erudite, and life with death, all in the service of a complex and variable tone that rapidly oscillates between, and often merges, comic absurdity with metaphysical terror.

The poems’ affect thus reinforces the initiating conceit of explaining baseball to a dead man, bringing the stuff of quotidian living into direct converse with ultimate questions (death and its near neighbor, mortality) while keeping the full range of emotion in play. Form, affect, and content all feed the poems’ central thematic concerns: the relationship between life and death and the ways the living deal with the immovable and final fact of their own and others’ mortality. The poems unfold as a sort of spiraling dialectic between life and death, creation and disintegration, wholeness and chaos, with the movement toward each polarity continually converted into its opposite through phase after phase of onward motion. By proceeding in this way, Hall makes the processes of collage begin to serve some of the functions of myth.

Lévi-Strauss may again be useful here in a more significant way. For him, bricolage partakes of a “mytho-poetical nature” (17) which makes it analogous “on the technical plane” (17) to the operations of myth on an intellectual plane. As in bricolage, “[t]he elements of mythical thought similarly lie half-way between percepts and concepts” (18); that is to say, they are formed and driven by concrete material elements that resist abstract conceptualization, yet their concrete elements are concurrently expressive of idea systems that prevent particularities from remaining wholly random and disparate. Both Schwitters and Hall seek to make their art “live” in that space: to place the opposite ends of Lévi-Strauss’s

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percept-concept spectrum in perpetual dialogue or dialectic with each other. The result is what LéviStrauss describes as “a sort of reversal in the process of understanding” (23), a bypass of the tedious piece-by-piece analysis that leads to knowledge of a natural object and a replacement of that process with the rush of intellectual and sensual pleasure that results from a “knowledge of the whole [that] precedes knowledge of the parts” (24). The point is complicated somewhat by the necessarily linear apprehension of a literary work of art as opposed to the all-at-once perception of the visual works of art that Lévi-Strauss has in mind. Nevertheless, the end result of his description of the process and result of perceiving a work of art is precisely that for which Hall is striving in these poems. For Lévi-Strauss, art’s mediatory position between scientific and mythic ways of knowing—especially in an artistic practice like those of Schwitters and of Hall—is uniquely situated to make the material converse with the mythic, and vice versa. For Hall in particular, adopting (after Schwitters’ example) a bricolage-like aesthetic enables him to employ the everyday particularities of baseball and other mundanities as experiences that, through shared and meaningful repetition, raise the possibility of mythic transcendence of the material and the timebound. That myth, for Hall, is baseball.

Hall’s choice of baseball as primary subject matter and formal principle is uniquely suited to carrying this kind of metaphysical cargo, and we can see him trying out the potential mythic uses of baseball in an earlier work, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball (1976). The book is largely biographical, the results of Hall’s collaboration with the outspoken and controversial early-1970s Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who vocally contended with issues of race

and racism in baseball’s major leagues. But the conceit of an intangible “country of baseball” named in the book’s title introduces a metaphysical leitmotif that anticipates fuller development in “Baseball” and “Extra Innings.” For Hall, “the business of baseball like the business of art is dream” (11), and the opening chapter accordingly posits an imaginary, baseball-centric country where “everything changes, and everything stays the same” (10). There, individual players progress from “Kids playing stickball ... into fierce adults rounding third base in front of fifty thousand people, and change again into old men in their undershirts on front stoops” (9) facing their own mortality. “In the country of baseball,” for players and fans alike, “time is the air we breathe, and the wind swirls us backward and forward, until we seem so reckoned in time and seasons that all time and all seasons become the same” (17). “Seasons and teams shift, blur into each other, change radically or appear to change, and restore themselves to old ways again” (9). Baseball, then, simultaneously registers the recession of the present backwards into the irretrievable past and a kind of immortality inherent in the game’s ongoing availability to participants and spectators, through recurrence and memory. Hall updated Dock Ellis in 1989, just four years before publication of The Museum of Clear Ideas, and it is not hard to discern the fingerprints of the earlier book on the baseball poems’ central concerns with dissolution and wholeness, mortality and immortality, time and transcendence—and with baseball as a mythos uniquely equipped to carry the weight of such weighty topics.

These concerns arise gradually in “Baseball” and “Extra Innings,” emerging incrementally from the chaotic proliferation of topics, allusions, tones, and settings that comprise the poems’ verbal collage.

With each passing “Inning” in “Baseball,” the incidents of disintegration and the variety of human responses to it proliferate and accumulate: the “old cat” displaced by the new kitten “declines / bitterly toward death” (3.8); the poet’s boyhood balsawood model airplane breaks and tears during the act of construction; World Series games are lost by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941 in a ballpark that has long since ceased to exist; illnesses of various kinds and intensities afflict the poet’s mother, his son, his granddaughter; generations of professional ball players struggle in vain to preserve their athletic skills against the effects of aging while being superseded by younger prospects; winter inexorably supplants summer; and time passes so that “We are forever older than our photographs” (8.3), each of which “measures another / sixty seconds fading toward the grave” (8.3). The trajectory of “Baseball” is toward death, toward the breakdown into meaninglessness of all human activity, from the quotidian patterns of family and household life to the grander gestures of public culture, art, literature, and history.

All such actions are presented as attempts to invest our actions with meaning despite the certainty of their eventual failure to stave off the inevitable.

“Baseball” is preoccupied with the sense of loss produced by the irretrievableness of the past and the fear that accompanies recognition of the passage of time toward our own and others’ ultimate dissolution.

Yet despite its ever-lengthening catalogue of disintegration, “Baseball” is just as thoroughly invested in the chaos-thwarting, death-defying, creative acts of culture that seek to resist the inevitable movement toward dissolution and decay. One major arena for this investment is the poem’s meta-discussion of its own poetic form. Hall adopts

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from the game of baseball a rigid formal pattern within which he can fit his disparate materials.

Baseball is a game organized in time and space according to patterns of threes (three strikes per out; three outs per half-inning) and nines (nine players per team; nine innings per game). From this secular numerology Hall builds his formal scheme.

The poems’ syllabic prosody enacts “the enterprise of ongoingness” (1.7)—a key, recurring word in both poems—within a stable “physics of nine times / nine times nine times nine” (1.8). “Baseball” consists of nine “Innings” or sections, each Inning consisting of nine stanzas, each stanza comprising nine lines, each line—unusually for English-language poetry—including nine syllables, paying no regard to stresses. In “Extra Innings,” this formal pattern continues but with strategic variations, each Inning adopting its count of stanzas, lines-per-stanza, and syllables-per-line from its inning number (until late in the 13th Inning; more about that significant formal break later.) This scheme constitutes the aforementioned “grid” of the poem, a system of arbitrary but regularized boundaries that, like the prescribed conformation of any sport’s playing field, impose order on the otherwise random content of the game. The syllabic formal patterning in these poems functions in readers’ perceptions a level below the accentual-syllabic prosody that is the norm in English-language verse, unobtrusively restraining the apparent chaos of the poems’ content via a set of poetic rules that are less obtrusive precisely because they’re apparently arbitrary.5 Or more accurately, not arbitrary but consciously borrowed from the poem’s other game, baseball, wherein their apparent naturalness derives from custom, from the deliberately chosen repetition of rules originally variable and inconsistent. Thus the order of the

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poem, like the order of a baseball game, results from the imposition of creative choices that result, over time, in the perception of stability and permanence.6 In both games, the play that unfolds within those rules may take any path whatsoever, provided it stays within the rules; the content of the poem may well be chaotically disparate, but its form comprises an assertion of wholeness against dissolution.

The poem’s aesthetic metacommentary plays out thematically as well as formally and includes passages inflected by the opposing values in the dialectic between a life-oriented impulse toward creation and order and the deathward pull of dissolution and chaos. After one particularly exuberant demonstration of poetic figuration in the Sixth Inning (6.4), for instance, in which “a coincidence of noises” (6.5) and allusive associations leads the poet from comparing shallow naps to the evaporating puddles left in the cracked sidewalks by summer rainstorms in his Hamden, Connecticut, childhood home, to comparing deeper naps to “the Pacific Ocean, where fathoms / of fault steam from a crack in the deep / floor” (6.4), issuing finally in an exclamation of creative power (“Napoleon!

Napoleon!”), the poet warily, wearily eyes the limitations of his own poetic meaning-making: 5. After fifty years of images and symbols (watch out, kids; here comes a symbol), it is difficult to keep oneself head-bent-down to the language only, as if language were a grid for athletes, Kurt, as in parts of speech. (6.5) After all the image- and symbol-making are done and the poetic process has somehow fused copious disparity into aesthetic unity, “what have we gained,”

the poet asks, “except, perhaps, the / grid’s distracted polymorphous joy / in evasion?” (6.6). Is poetry, after all, nothing but a distraction from the inevitable, a way of temporarily diverting our attention from failure and mortality, another instance of “our efforts to declare the real unreal” that comprise “[t]he entire history of human thought, / Western and Eastern”? (10.7). Can the art of poetry reasonably be expected to fulfill even its more modest goal of communicating the “basics” of reality? (“Kurt, / do you know what a bench is? a bullpen?”

[10.9]). Will there not always and inevitably be in every work of art some degree of failure or inadequacy, as in the poet’s report of the American painter John Singer Sargent’s definition of portraiture as “that / form of painting in which there is always ‘something / a little wrong about the mouth’” (12.9)?

Perhaps, but the act of creation is nonetheless indispensable, compulsory: “disputes over the usefulness / of this method of generation / or that” (6.7) notwithstanding, the poet declares, “I know from experience / that the matter of least import is / what you think you are doing” (6.7). The “Napoleonic” act of putting together into meaningful wholes what the world and the passage of time throw at us piecemeal is simultaneously a willed creative choice and an involuntary, reflexive response that art has in common with virtually all the other activities of quotidian life. Even as they aspire toward transcendence and immortality, moreover, such acts of creation are inevitably saturated in the corporeal materials that guarantee their own transience, their own mortality. The words with which a poet works, for instance, are as fully corporeal and temporal as they are intellectual:

As the moment’s vowel rolls itself out, mind entertains intelligence for body’s sake. Word-skin and muscleshape dance to the corporal music of sententia or anecdote.

Syntax is sinew. In the aroused mouth, sweet juices accumulate verbs, adjectives, and nouns lolling in luxe, calme, et volupté like Miami. (4.1) The poem thus posits a comfort and stability located in the body, whether a body of words or a human form. His response to his own poetic failure (“K.C’s traveling metaphor dies the usual death” [4.5] to embody impossible “conceptual / propositions” [4.5]) is to “go / back to gazing at Jennifer’s shorts” (4.5), continuing a recurring motif of sexuality as another mode, alongside baseball, art, and poetry, of counter-measure to impending mortality.

Sex. Baseball. Art. Nature. All become metonymies for the irrepressible persistence of making—of creation—despite the insuperable fact of ultimate failure and dissolution. “Baseball” ends with a train of images of this perseverance in the face of death.

The late summer “leaves / turn slowly, like someone working to / order — protesting, outraged — and fall as they must do” (9.8). While “asters begin a late pennant drive / in front of the barn,” “pink hollyhocks / wilt and sag like teams out of the race” (9.8). In the last stanza, the poet and his recuperating mother watch a barely visible Red Sox broadcast “— the way we listened, fifty years back — / spritely ghosts playing in heavy snow” (9.9), the image simultaneously evoking the lostness of the past and the ongoingness of the game. The stanza ends with an image that recalls an earlier parallel, borrowed in part from Robert Frost, between the poet’s and the

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pitcher’s respective arts: though both will eventually lose the battle, both are engaged in the ongoing act of tricking and intimidating the adversary in order to buy a temporary dominance. As K.C. and his mother watch their by-now metaphorically jampacked baseball game on television, the poem ends: “the pitcher stared at the batter” (9.9).

If “Baseball” ends with images of the defiance of death, or at least the persistence of efforts to resist it, the sequel poem “Extra Innings” begins by reversing this ratio, moving once again toward the death-and-disintegration end of the poem’s informing dialectic. The Red Sox win the season opener, only to lose the next three games, to which the poet responds: At least, Kurt, the season started, and even losing three out of four is preferable to off-season — as life despite its generic unpleasantness appears under almost all conditions 2. more attractive than its alternative.

Batter up. We know what wins in the end, in “Extra Innings.” (10.1-2) The central dialectic of “Baseball” thus continues in “Extra Innings” but the stakes gradually increase as images and incidents of age, decline, and death accrue and intensify and as the oscillation between death and life, dissolution and creation, becomes more frenetic. The Tenth Inning, for instance, recounts the poet’s fear and anxiety as he grapples with the diagnosis of a malignant growth in the neck of Jennifer (the figure in the poem corresponding to Hall’s wife, the poet Jane Kenyon), and the attempt to reassert life via the resumption of daily

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routines of sex and baseball. The end of the Inning offers a reprieve embodied in the news that Jennifer’s biopsied carcinoma is likely neither to metastasize nor recur. 7 But the relentlessness of mortality immediately reasserts itself as the Eleventh Inning confronts the poet once again with the prospect of death, this time in the form of “a quiet carcinoma at the top of my colon” (11.2). Swiftly the poem takes on the qualities of a roll-call for the dead and dying. Jennifer and K.C. temporarily dodge their own deaths but the poem then takes us to the deathbed of the minister of their church, Jack Jensen, where K.C. withdraws his hand from his dying friend’s grasp in a paroxysm of fear at the prospect of his own mortality. Next, the poet recounts watching televised baseball with his father “in the guest room / where he coughed toward his death on a hospital bed” (12.2). Biographical encounters with mortality are amplified by their symbolic baseball analogues: promising Red Sox seasons begin in sequential defeats (11.1); ballplayers in spring training abruptly age beyond the point of being able to play effectively (11.10); the Pittsburgh Pirates’ “control pitcher” (12.9-10) Steve Blass is rendered unable to throw strikes by the sudden death of his friend and teammate Roberto Clemente in a plane crash during the 1972-73 off-season; and, in the final stanza of the poem, the Red Sox lose late-season games in the final inning until “The season ends. Even if you win the Series, / the season ends, O, and games dwindle to Florida’s / Instructional League where outfielders without wheels / learn to be catchers” (12.12) while the poet and his wife “gather yellow days” and recall the past glory of Carlton Fisk’s “poke over the wall” that “ended Game Six / in the twelfth inning” (12.12) of the 1975 World Series.

In “Extra Innings,” the escalating and intensifying incidence of mortality and loss lead to a conclusion in which death, as the poet had announced at the beginning of the poem, “wins in the end” (10.2), but only, upon closer inspection, somewhat equivocally. The final image of Fisk’s game-winning homerun suggests the unrecoverable pastness of historical events but also the glory of temporary victory eternally remembered. Readers in the know, moreover, will be acutely aware that Boston’s come-from-behind victory in Game 6 was followed by defeat in Game 7 and the loss of the championship, continuing a Boston World Series drought begun in 1919 and ultimately lasting 86 years (11 years after publication of the poem). Fisk’s death-defying moment of triumph led, in the end, to another and greater defeat. But the image of his temporary victory fuses the sense of loss, defeat, and mortality with the ongoingness of memory and of baseball, and the final stanza of the poem almost grudgingly includes the poet and his wife engaged in the ongoing acts of living even during the symbolic death of baseball’s offseason.

Nor, in the event, could Hall let his poem of mortality and immortality die. Three years after publication of The Museum of Clear Ideas, Hall’s 1996 volume entitled The Old Life resurrected “Baseball” and “Extra Innings” with the addition of a “Thirteenth Inning.”8 Written after the death of Jane Kenyon, which would lead to an outpouring of intensively elegiac writing extending from the final poem in The Old Life through Without (1998) and The Painted Bed (2002), the Thirteenth Inning starts where the Twelfth left off, “In darkness and silence” but with “the game continu[ing] itself ” (13.1). Beginning with a passage about the later lives of the young girls pictured in American

portraitist John Singer Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward D. Boit,” the poem descends into an increasingly frenetic series of juxtapositions of the apparently unrelated and unrelatable. Images and allusions, snippets of history, personal memory, and myth amass until the by-now fatally overburdened form of the poem (thirteen sections by thirteen stanzas by thirteen lines by thirteen syllables) at last disintegrates into prose paragraphs roughly inserted into the middle of the eighth stanza and labelled a “rain delay.” “The game is collage, Kurt,” the poet reminds us in the last of these paragraphs: “smells of Calcutta pasted next to shreds of a liver biopsy, Ted Williams wriggling in two dimensions on a nineteen forty-one baseball card thumbtacked with a swatch of red hair swept from Salvatore’s9 floor, catpiss from the Protestant Cemetery, Ganesh pitching with six baseballs at once, Mary Louisa Boit in pigment, and Bill Trout10 drunk as dirt in the empty bleachers as the rain stops.” As the poem staggers onward—through the adult deaths of the illusively forever-young girls in Sargent’s painting; a deathbed scene for Hall’s imagined drunken poet; the Red Sox’s defeat in a one-game playoff with the Cleveland Indians in 1948; and Kurt Schwitters’ own death that same year, exiled in England—“Extra Innings” appears poised to wind down into a simultaneous failure of form, of imagination, and of life. The energy required to resist universal entropy seems, at last, played out: in the thirteenth stanza of the Thirteenth Inning, “the players ... have vanished / into white dawn” (13.13) and the poet, in “dread,” tells Schwitters “that it’s time to stop talking / and leave Fenway ... for your grave in England” (13.13).

Even more definitively, the poem’s last lines (in an unexpected continuation of the thirteenth inning

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into a fourteenth stanza) brutally insist on the insuperability of death, appearing to negate once and for all the efficacy of creation and ongoingness against the inevitability of death. As the poet and his imagined guest exit Hall’s Fenway Park of the mind, they are met by “Manager Zero the cynic philosopher,” who “barks” an abrupt rebuke to the poet’s assertions of the creative powers of life against the finality of death: Everyone dies. Blubbering never deterred a last breath from blurring its elegy on a redundant mirror.

The narcissist believes that his death is the only death, and remorseless self-pity makes music of self-regard.

There is something a little wrong about the sitter’s mouth.

You roll like a dog in the rotted carcass of your death. (13.14) The voice is intrusive and blunt, curtly and contemptuously dismissing the poet’s efforts to assert artistic and memorial creation against the brute fact of mortality as nothing more than a narcissistic and self-pitying refusal to face facts. The brutality of the final image, which reduces the poet’s work to an instinctual, animalistic obsession with his own corporeality, seems like a coup de grace, negating the entire project of “Baseball” and “Extra Innings.”

But despite the fact that Manager Zero’s materialist cynicism gets, literally, the final words, the poem itself offers a number of suggestions that his words are not meant to stand as the final summation on the poem’s dialectical exploration of life and death, creation and dissolution. The real purport

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of the poem’s ending turns, rather, upon recognition that the poems have all along been making the case for a non-linear apprehension of reality. The most direct expression of the poem’s “eternality” principle—its assertion of temporal simultaneity against the chronological linearity of mortality—appears in the Eleventh Inning, in a passage bracketed by K.C.’s recollection of his encounter with colon cancer, and its juxtaposition with historically far-flung instances of death and disaster, but also of recovery and continuance. In the “posthumous” (11.4.9) life of the cancer survivor, newly aware of the value of ongoing life because of its permanent proximity to death, the poet has a moment of insight wherein the game of baseball takes on its full metaphorical and mythic weight: Kurt, I begin to understand what matters in this daily game. Listen: Baseball is types 5. of continuousness, simultaneous hours not consecutive ones, independent temporalities that gather ongoing moments into a perpetual present that invalidates the inexorable business of clocks. (11.4-5) Invalidating chronology invalidates what lies at the end of the ticking of the clock as well. The passage revises and extends an idea presented much earlier, in the Eighth Inning, that “Baseball, like sexual intercourse / and art, stops short, for a moment, the / indecent continuous motion / of time forward, implying our death / and imminent decomposition” (8.4). But where the earlier passage figures baseball and its symbolic creative analogues as a means of momentarily arresting the passage of time, the latter

passage replaces interrupted temporality with temporal simultaneity, with eternality: not the cessation of time but its conversion into trans-historical synchronicity. Despite the inevitable decline of every experience toward its own cessation and of each individual toward death, the continuities between and among experiences and lives, from individual to individual and generation to generation, defy mortality. A kind of immortality inheres in our participation in the “ongoingness” of life that baseball symbolizes in these poems. While there is inevitable loss and sorrow (for instance) in K.C.’s boyhood memory of watching the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field with his father, the poem’s creative, memorial reconstruction of the experience confers upon its participants a type of immortality. And that immortality is not limited to the individual, but is part and parcel with numberless others’ similar experiences, present and past: of ongoing cycles of games, players, and fans unfolding across decades and generations. Like the Jewish experience of Passover or the Christian one of Easter, the occasion is meant to be experienced not merely as commemoration but as communal participation in the original event, bringing the past into simultaneous existence in the present.11 The end of “Extra Innings” offers additional signs that, despite the apparent finality of Manager Zero’s insistence on death as the final reality, the poem does not endorse his garden-variety cynicism.

While Manager Zero speaks with the blunt pessimism and sarcasm that are attached to modern usage of the word “cynic,” the poet’s introduction of him as “the cynic philosopher” obliquely references Diogenes, opening the door to an understanding of cynicism more consonant with its ancient Greek philosophical origins and with the notion of

temporal simultaneity that the poems have actualized. The reference suggests that the virtuous response to the multiplicity and mortality of the things of the world, the key to a life well-lived, is to embrace it in its fullness, to live in harmony with, rather than resistance to, all aspects of its nature.

The last words of the poem thus recall, as well, an earlier reference to Heraclitus, who “affirmed reversals” (4.4), maintaining not only the more familiar Heraclitean principle of perpetual change but also the idea that the very basis of reality is the ultimate interdependency of apparently opposing states of being. Manager Zero’s dismissal of the positive pole of the poems’ central dialectic leads stealthily back to notions of wholeness despite multiplicity, cohesion despite dissolution.

In one other way the end of the poem reinforces Hall’s paradoxical metaphysics of multiplicity and wholeness, time and eternity, mortality and ongoingness. The thirteenth stanza of the Thirteenth Inning, even as it ends the game and sends Kurt Schwitters back to his grave, finds the poet still at work: “Breathing I glue together these anthems and cutouts / of the thirteenth inning although the game is over” (13.13). Despite the fact that the game (of the poem, of baseball, of life) is now over, the poet continues to create, to “glue together” the detritus produced by the relentless passage of time. “[T]he game is over” with the last words of the thirteenth line of the thirteenth stanza of the Thirteenth Inning, “[b]ut not the poem” (13.14), Hall unexpectedly continues. Violating its own formal rules for a final time, “The thirteenth inning goes to fourteen / stanzas” (13.14), affirming the enterprise of ongoingness even when one has reached what had been assumed to be the end. The poem thus signals its final bid for immortality, an assertion of its

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paradoxical continuation beyond the end by way of the creative act of making meaningful order from the raw materials of a relentlessly entropic world.12 In “Baseball” and “Extra Innings,” people, events, and things decay, decline, pass, and die, but the urge to create, to do, to live—to put the particularities of our temporal existence into communion with larger, comprehensive wholes—persists. The game goes nine (or thirteen) innings and ends, but the games and all they symbolize go on, recurring and reinforcing each other like the endless cycles of the Christian liturgical year. What begins in these poems as a possibly arbitrary imposition of meaning and order upon the chaos of the temporal world,

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whether achieved through baseball, collage, or poetry, leads ultimately beyond the temporary arrest of time, beyond Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion,” to intimations, if not of personal immortality, of its communal analogue. The game of baseball, suffused in these two poems with all the symbolic density it can absorb, embodies a conception of life and death that it shares with all the other rehearsals of human culture and creativity that abundantly populate the poems: baseball, like art and poetry, embodies the eternal persistence of creation despite the inevitability of decline into disintegration and death.

NOTES In the absence of line numbers in the extant book publications of these poems, my citations will follow a simplified system of reference based on the poems’ stanzaic organization. Both poems consist of numbered stanzas within numbered groups labeled “Innings.” Citations list Inning followed by stanza. The citation “1.1-2” thus indicates that the quoted lines occur in stanzas 1 and 2 of “The First Inning.” Stanzas are short enough that readers should be able to find the quoted lines without the help of line numbers. All quotations from “Baseball” and “Extra Innings” in this essay refer to the poems as they appear in White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006.

1.

Hall enjoyed a relatively high public profile before his death in 2018. He was, for instance, the subject along with Jane Kenyon of a 1993 Bill Moyers Journal episode on PBS; he served as poet laureate of the United States during 2006-2007; he received the National Medal of the Arts in 2011; and he was a frequent public reader and media presence. The Poetry Foundation’s website anoints him “one of the major American poets of his generation,” words echoed closely by his obituary in The New York Times (Kirby). During his lifetime, his books routinely garnered positive reviews in the poetry world as well as in the mass media; any new publication was likely to be noticed in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, for instance. But apart from a brief 2003 essay by Chidananda Bhattacharya in an anthology of Indian scholarship on American literature and an insightful retrospective by Peter Makuck in the belle-lettristic The Sewanee Review, Hall’s work has thus far received almost no published attention outside the genre of the book review. Nor has the poet’s death led, as might have been expected, to an outpouring of new assessments of his work. As concerns “Baseball” and “Extra Innings,” the lone exception to the rule is an essay by Ron Picard in the journal Aethlon. Picard’s essay includes one major assertion that anticipates part of this essay’s argument: “Hall’s baseball poems illustrate a continuous search for ways to endure emptiness and loss while actively engaging life and its constant companion, death” (157). Picard also notes the role that communal storytelling serves in helping individuals deal with the experience of pain and loss. But for the most part, Picard’s approach to the poems, which concludes that the poems’ primary goal is to elegize “a loss of agency, language, and physical life” in the modern world in order to “[reconstruct] postmodern communities” (153), leads elsewhere from mine.

2.

Das Merzbild, destroyed in World War II, now exists only as a low-resolution black and white photograph. See Werner Schmalenbach (85) or Susanne Meyer-Büser and Karin Orchard (244).

3.

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Schwitters’ Merzbau (Merz house) in Hanover was the first and most extensive of three live-in art installations that the artist created during his lifetime and that Hall registers in the first stanza of “Baseball” in the phrase, “first to make collage, and then to / inhabit.” Between 1923 and 1937, when Schwitters fled to Norway to avoid imminent detention by the Nazi SS, the artist continually remodeled multiple rooms of the family home, creating a proliferating network of columns, grottos, geometric forms, and incorporated sculptures (his own and others’) often constructed of cast-off or appropriated quotidian objects. The Hanover Merzbau did not survive World War II bombing raids; it is documented by a small set of 1933 black-and-white photographs and a reconstruction of one of its rooms, now on permanent display at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. See Karin Orchard for discussion and photographs of both the original and the reconstruction by Peter Bissegger.

4.

One reviewer, Vincent Sherry, charges that Hall’s metrical scheme mechanizes the poems: “If syllabic verse goes against the natural (accentual) grain of English, it is fair to say that this sequence remains mechanical rather than organic—prosody is not poetry, after all; and the speaker seems (inadvertently) contorted to the rococo-baroque of the rules, which do not of themselves generate a voice” (xc). But it seems to me that these poems do indeed have a distinctive voice, and that the syllabic formal scheme does not “go against” the aural norms of spoken English so much as undergird them, providing a sub-aural mode of organization that in no way disrupts the “natural” sound of spoken English. I hear nothing of the “contortion” that Sherry does.

5.

Hall’s thoughts on the perennial popularity of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” (1888), published on the occasion of that poem’s hundredth anniversary, are relevant in this connection: “Casey” offers to modern readers “the template of an unaltered game” (16) still recognizable despite the myriad cosmetic changes—in stadiums, lights, video replay, uniforms, players’ skin colors, and so on— wrought by the passage of time.

6.

Kenyon would succumb to leukemia a few years later, leading Hall to write two elegiac masterpieces: Without (1998) and The Painted Bed (2002). The baseball poems in many ways anticipate the concerns and the achievement of these later works.

7.

In his 2006 selected poems, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Hall added “The Thirteenth Inning” to the end of “Extra Innings” as an extension of the earlier poem. I have followed suit in this essay, treating “The Thirteenth Inning” as the conclusion of “Extra Innings” rather than as a separate work.

8.

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9.

Hall’s father’s barber.

10.

The fictional poet from “Another Elegy,” the first poem in The Museum of Clear Ideas.

Hall’s 1993 memoir, Life Work, written concurrently with the baseball poems in The Museum of Clear Ideas, finds in the individual’s commitment to work (of any sort) a similar transcendence of mortality. The worker’s “absorbedness” in the task at hand comprises for Hall a “defiance of death” (62) that goes beyond a fear-motivated denial of mortality. Rather, work represents a sort of immortality, not merely because (as Hall notes with reference to Henry James) “[t]he work survives the worker” (116) but because the act of working constitutes a kind of spiritual exercise (although Hall, for what he terms “discreditable” (122) reasons, shies away from using the term “spirit”). “[T]o write Life Work as I walk (temporarily) from the tomb” in the aftermath of colon cancer surgery “is my devotion” (122), Hall writes. The spiritual discipline of work is thus closely allied in the memoir with Hall and Kenyon’s contemporaneous church membership: both actions are means of connection with the rhythms and patterns of a communal life shared with others across time and place. In the church, Hall feels himself to have “joined a two thousand year history, full of murder and compassion and grace” (6) that transcends the limits of any individual’s life. “The Christian year enthralled us,” he continues, “and rhymed with the countryside’s year: the birth in cold and snow, Maundy Thursday with its journey toward torture and death, Easter with its sunburst of resurrection” (7). The story of “the historical Jesus” (122), despite Hall’s confessed “materialist skepticism” (122), “is all present or it is nothing” (123), and when he hears, one Easter morning in China, a choir singing “in Chinese, ‘Up from the grave He arose,’ I felt myself melted into two millennia of the round world” (7). In Life Work, both the “devotion” of work and the devotion of religious faith offer access to a trans-historical realm that defeats death by subsuming it within a larger, eternally ongoing reality.

11.

In a further gesture in the same resurrectionary direction, just as Hall had continued “Extra Innings” beyond its ending a year later when he wrote “The Thirteenth Inning” and continued “The Thirteenth Inning” beyond its thirteenth stanza, he returned twice more to the subject matter, central conceit, and form of “Baseball” and “Extra Innings” in “Meatloaf ” (2009) and “Green Farmhouse Chairs” (2011).

12.

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WORKS CITED “A Life Together: Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon.” Bill Moyers’ Journal, 17 Dec. 1993, www.billmoyers.com/content/a-life-together-donald-hall-jane-kenyon/.

Bhattacharya, Chidananda. “Donald Hall's Poetry: Variations as the Only Invariable in Late American Poetry.” Indian Response to American Literature, edited by T.S. Anand, Creative, 2003, pp. 76-83.

“Donald Hall.” Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/donald-hall.

Elderfield, John. Kurt Schwitters. Thames and Hudson, 1987.

Hall, Donald. “Baseball.” The Museum of Clear Ideas. Ticknor and Fields, 1993, pp. 13-39.

Reprinted in White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Houghton Mifflin, 2006, pp. 217-40.

—. Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball. 2nd edition, Touchstone, 1989.

—. “Extra Innings.” The Museum of Clear Ideas. Ticknor and Fields, 1993, pp. 103-15.

Reprinted in White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Houghton Mifflin, 2006, pp. 273-91.

—. “Green Farmhouse Chairs.” The New Yorker. 21 Mar. 2011, pp. 46-47.

—. Life Work. Beacon, 1993.

—. “Meatloaf.” The New Yorker. 20 Jul. 2009, pp. 46-47.

—. “Summer Reading; In Mudville, Hope Springs Eternal: Mighty Casey's 100th Season.”

The New York Times Book Review, 5 June 1988, p. 16.

Katenhusen, Ines. “Kurt Schwitters and Hanover, or of the Trade and the Traffic of the Residents in the Settlement Where Mr Schwitters is Forced to Live.” In the Beginning was Merz: From Kurt Schwitters to the Present Day, edited by Susanne Meyer-Büser and Karin Orchard, translated by Fiona Elliott, Hatje Cantz, 2000, pp. 234-43.

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Keene, Suzanne. “A Poke over the Wall.” Review of The Museum of Clear Ideas by Donald Hall.

Commonweal, 24 Sep. 1993, pp. 21-23.

Kirby, David. “Donald Hall, a Poet Laureate of the Rural Life, Is Dead at 89.” The New York Times, 24 June 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/obituaries/donald-hall-a-poet-laureate-of-the-rurallife-is-dead-at-89.html?searchResultPosition=1.

Kramer, Hilton. “The Sorrows of Kurt Schwitters.” Review of Museum of Modern Art Schwitters exhibition, curated by John Elderfield. The New Criterion, vol. 4, no. 2, Oct. 1985, www. newcriterion.com/issues/1985/10/the-sorrows-of-kurt-schwitters.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. U of Chicago P, 1966.

Makuck, Peter. “Donald Hall: Exile and the Kingdom.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 119, no. 1, 2011, pp. 139-49.

Orchard, Karin. “Kurt Schwitters: Reconstructions of the Merzbau.” Tate Papers, no. 8, Autumn 2007, www.tate.org.uk/file/karin-orchard-kurt-schwitters-reconstructions-merzbau.

Picard, Ron. “Wait ‘Till Next Year: Constructing Postmodern Community at the Site of Loss in Donald Hall’s ‘Baseball’ and ‘Extra Innings.’” Aethlon, vol. 22, no. 1, Fall 2004, pp. 153-60.

Schmalenbach, Werner. Kurt Schwitters. Abrams, 1967.

Schwitters, Kurt. Das Undbild (The And-Picture). 1919. Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, France.

WikiArt, www.wikiart.org/en/kurt-schwitters/the-and-picture-1919.

Sherry, Vincent. “The High Pasture.” Review of Life Work and The Museum of Clear Ideas

by Donald Hall. The Sewanee Review, vol. 102, no. 3, 1994, pp. lxxxix-xc.

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52.1

review

special cluster 129

The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump.

Stanley Fish.

New York: One Signal Publishers/Atria, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2019. vii + 228 pp. $19.76/hardcover.

José Antonio Arellano, United States Air Force Academy.

The subtitle of Stanley Fish’s most recent book on the topic of free speech challenges this reviewer with its breadth, yet two theses unify the listed topics. These theses repeat the claims present in the provocative two-part title of Fish’s older book on free speech There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech...

And It’s a Good Thing Too (1994). The First only slightly rewords these claims his new book. A paraphrase might be There is no such thing as a free speech principle outside of partisan concerns … And that’s okay.

These theses remain relevant for academics, even though The First is inevitably dated as a book published in 2019. The First was written before the era of COVID and the (mis)information surrounding the pandemic, as well as before the events of January 6th and the debates concerning social media’s role in their unfolding. It was published before Frances Haugen blew the whistle on Facebook, highlighting the social media giant’s apparently dangerous effects.

Notice, however, the uncanny resonance of the very first set of examples Fish offers in the book, involving a man (Cesar Sayoc) who sent bombs to several critics of President Donald Trump and another

130 Modern Language Studies 52.1

(Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Paul Hasson) who created a list of high-profile targets to assassinate: Was Trump saying to Sayoc what Henry II said to those who promptly went out and murdered Thomas Becket: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Was his invective more than a dog whistle? Was it, in fact, a marching order? ... If Sayoc and Bowers didn’t have an internet community where their views could be parroted back at them and amplified to the point where every toxic thought they entertained seemed universally shared, would the seeds of hatred perhaps not have flowered in the actions they ultimately took? (2–3) We could replace the names of the principal actors in these incidents with more recent examples, including January 6, to highlight the ongoing debates concerning free speech, social media, censorship, and the dissemination of information. The continued relevance of The First implies the continued significance of his almost thirty-year-old book, suggesting

that the only differences between the texts are the examples Fish invokes.

That said, there is an important distinction between the texts, one that speaks to the reinvigoration of the culture wars of the 1990s and our present sociopolitical moment. In the early 1990s, Fish argued against such figures as Dinesh D’Souza, who opposed multicultural curricula and the political correctness within academia meant to curb offense and exclusion. During a Firing Line Debate in 1991, for example, Fish opposed the resolution that “Freedom of Thought Is in Danger on American Campuses,” a resolution supported by conservative speakers including D’Souza and William F. Buckley Jr. Today, however, The First would be on Buckley’s side, arguing for the protection of academic freedom from assaults on its integrity.

However, where Buckley et al. wanted to protect a particular (yet presented as universal and objective) set of Western values and texts, which they argued cleared the path toward the true, the beautiful, and the good, Fish instead continues to argue for a way of academic life that fosters inquiry free of predetermination. One of Fish’s points during the 1990s was that conservative writers presented certain

values and texts as universal and objective, thereby making partisan decisions about their advantage and utility for achieving what they characterized as intellectual transcendence. Today, he claims that academics and students make a version of this mistake by preemptively shutting down academic inquiry and presenting their values and texts as leading the way to justice. Academics have wrongly blurred the distinction between academic work and activism, Fish argues, and this blurring has ushered in the problems facing academia—issues that are often mistakenly framed as matters involving free speech. “In the academy,” he writes, “free inquiry, not free speech, is the reigning ethic” (64) because freedom of inquiry is a prerequisite for academics to do their job.

The question we must ask, to which I return in this review’s conclusion, is whether the type of academic life Fish wants to protect is itself defensible on the terms he provides. As practical advice, The First might be perceived as disappointing. Readers will be frustrated if they turn to The First to find a secure anchor point to help pull us out of the mire of the perennial debates involving speech, the circulation of information, and censorship. Fish

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instead describes our inevitable embeddedness. In legal matters concerning speech, Fish shows how there must be a series of determinations, including which uses of speech are covered by the First Amendment and which are not (the topic of his first chapter). The relevant legal experts must somehow determine which instances of speech constitute hate speech and, relatedly, which instances of speech constitute an action, such as the incitement of violence. This speech/action distinction remains necessary, even if it is philosophically impossible to maintain rigorously. The identification of hate speech will remain salient, even if we cannot produce a failsafe formula for its identification (the topic of his second chapter). The relevant professionals must somehow determine when some groups are exempt from general law because of their religious beliefs (the topic of his fourth chapter). Such religious exemptions are protected by the Constitution’s free exercise clause even as they run counter to the Constitution’s emphasis on “generally applicable law (a law directed at everyone, not an individual or particular group)” (110).

Fish highlights the paradoxical nature of such determinations not because their philosophical impossibility renders them meaningless. Instead, he argues, such decisions have always been made within established procedures, jurisprudence, and institutional protocols. We cannot settle these paradoxes once and for all in the rarified air of philosophical inquiry. The deliberations concerning the applicability of the First Amendment and the Religious Clause will persist, and those claiming to wield the failsafe solution, one derived from the supposed neutral ground of free speech, simply rehearse and inevitably attempt to advance their political beliefs within the domains of the debates.

132 Modern Language Studies 52.1

Free speech is not a self-evident, independent value outside of our political concerns, perspicuous for all to see and understand neutrally. It is not an unchanging principle that one can apply in different circumstances to help determine the way forward.

Rather, and this is The First’s thesis, the invocation of the value of freedom of speech will always be made within our partisan concerns relative to the given tasks at hand.

Fish does not mean that the Constitution’s First Amendment protects no speech. His first chapter reminds us that, because of the First Amendment, we do not need the state’s permission to speak. Our government cannot suppress our critiques of it, nor can it compel our speech. Within a representative democracy, this legally protected speech remains crucial. Our ability to make informed decisions at the ballot box requires that our electoral choices are not coerced —such choices rest, in turn, on the circulation of ideas and the possibilty of vigorous debate. Fish acknowledges how the inability of our government to suppress minority, dissenting views is a “cornerstone of our democracy” (11).

Yet, he notes, there is a difference between the type of speech protected by the Constitution and the speech we otherwise employ. His third chapter, “Why Freedom of Speech Is Not an Academic Value,” provides an extended elaboration of this difference.

He argues that the democratic promise at the heart of free speech rhetoric does not reside in an academic context. Even as we foster inclusive spaces, our lives as academics are necessarily bound on all sides by the unfortunate but necessary and constant exclusion of voices, as evidenced in our syllabi, reading lists, and tenure criteria. Search committees must exclude the majority of the encountered applicants seeking employment, and scholarly journal editors and peer

" LEGALLY PROTECTED SPEECH IS SO VITAL TO US AS CITIZENS THAT MANY OF US MISTAKENLY ASSUME THAT IT EXTENDS TO ALL ASPECTS OF OUR LIVES." reviewers reject a majority of voices seeking publication.

We are, in short, inextricably bound by the practices and protocols of our disciplines and fields of study.

Extrapolating from Fish’s account, I could note how, as a professor of literature, what I say in my classroom must be bound by rules of professional and social decorum and by my institution’s rules concerning political speech. I could not (nor, as an educator, should I want to) use my classroom as a political stage on which I practice my supposed freedom of speech and exhort students to vote a certain way. If I did, I could (and would) be fired, and the matter would not be one of the suppression of my free speech. If a student decides to ignore an essay prompt for an assignment because she wants to exercise her free speech to write about something else, I could assign her a failing grade. I would not be suppressing her freedom of speech so much as

indicating the irrelevance of this freedom for the purpose of our academic course.

Legally protected speech is so vital to us as citizens that many of us mistakenly assume that it extends to all aspects of our lives. This common assumption posits free speech as the rightful, normal condition while acts of censorship are unfortunate exceptions. But speech understood as entirely unhampered would be speech without a purpose, argues Fish. “Censorship,” as the title of his first chapter puts it, “Is a Precondition of Free Speech.”

It may appear as if he justifies the conditions of an authoritarian state. However, his pragmatic point simply highlights that when we identify what speech is for (say, the search for truth), we have already excluded that which impedes these goals (the spread of lies; 19).

Indeed, we could extend Fish’s analysis here and recall how meaningful speech as such requires excluding various preconditions of meaning, exclusions that we could liken to censorship. Take the word “word” itself, which can only mean what it does when it does not mean everything else it could.

“Word,” used here to refer to a basic unit of language, can refer to at least a dozen potential uses evident in examples including, “I give you my word,” “I want to have a word with you,” “the word on the street,” “the Word of the Lord,” and “her word is law.” In the movie Lethal Weapon 3, Detective Murtaugh does not understand his son when he raises his fist and exclaims, “Word!” When Murtaugh asks his partner, “What are we talking about?” his partner’s sarcastic response does not help: “Word. Four letters.

Starts with a ‘W,’ ‘O’ in the middle, ‘D’ at the end.”

Murtaugh’s response to his partner—“Oh, yeah, that word”—reveals his continued confusion while also indicating how his son’s exclamation, “Word!” is a

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134 Modern Language Studies 52.1

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different word from the word “word.” For the word “word” to mean “Word!” its user must exclude (“censor”) other potential meanings. Connecting this example back to Fish’s analysis, when we identify the goal of speech as the identification of truth, by necessity, we must exclude/censor the spread of lies.

Fish cites John Milton’s Arepagitica as the classic exemplar of this point. Even as Milton argues for the circulation of unlicensed publications, he excludes texts advocating for “Popery” because, in Milton’s view, Catholicism’s dogmatism runs counter to “the search for truth” (34).

The boundary between what is true and what is not will inevitably become the subject of political debate, as it has in matters involving news outlets and information. In his fifth chapter, “Why Transparency is the Mother of Fake News,” Fish notes how advocates of transparency and the unhampered circulation of information argue that an informed citizenry needs access to as much information as possible—information that remains unfiltered, thereby unskewed, by biased, partisan concerns. These advocates of the free flow of information want to avoid politics by invoking an Edenic world free of manipulation and political spin.

Information, in this world, could shine forth for all to see and understand neutrally. In this view, the solution to the fake news of CNN or Fox (depending on one’s politics) is the removal of gatekeepers to let information appear transparently and unadulterated. Yet this free flow of a seemingly infinite amount of information, Fish argues, could lead to paralysis (too much information to process meaningfully), and it would inevitably provide political actors with a grab bag of information to be used for their (necessarily) biased ends. This information “just sitting there unattached to any perspective but

floating freely in the frictionless air” would remain “sitting there” until it is used by those who sort through it, organize it, and present it meaningfully (158). The desire to avoid gatekeeping and monitoring produces the very need for gatekeeping.

Stated differently, the demand for the free flow of information would lead to the very condition its advocates want to avoid.

Fish, a Milton scholar, highlights how the support of unhampered information and the celebration of the internet’s emancipatory potential by “techno-utopians” (165) involves a linguistic fantasy: that language could disclose facts without artifice and manipulation. He contends that this would be the language of Eden before the Fall, where words corresponded directly with nature without metaphor, where words named their referents directly (28).

The term “post-truth” implies nostalgia for an Edenic moment we have never witnessed. According to Fish, we have never been in a “truth” moment, so we are not today suffering within a post-truth era.

This is not to say that there is “no truth”; rather, the truth has always been determined within the institutions we have established. In the absence of a mythic, unbiased standard, he writes, “What can, and should, be invoked are the authoritative (although not God-sponsored) institutions we have painfully built through the centuries, the institutions of philosophy, morality, science, higher education, record-keeping, journalism, etc.” (183). We should, in short, continue to do what we have always done: rely on the time-tested standards humans have painstakingly created and continue to revise.

This last point articulates a version of The First’s second thesis: “there is nothing wrong” with Fish’s account of the paradoxes involved in deliberations concerning the applicability of the First Amendment,

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the impossibility of rigorously distinguishing speech from action, or the impossibility of establishing transcendent, failsafe procedures (4). It has always been the case that we cannot develop neutral terms and standards outside of human domains, yet we have always been able to get things done. Fish’s defense of institutions and their efficacy thus depends on his unwavering insistence on professionalism.

We lose faith in institutions and established procedures when their professional caretakers try to perform jobs that are not theirs. So, although journalists cannot inhabit an unbiased position when reporting the news, such impossible objectivity should remain their goal. Journalists should not be activists. Rather, they should report the news by following the long-established professional protocols of journalism.

Relatedly, academics should remain professionals by adhering to the goal and mission of their profession. Ironically, the chapter where he specifies the profession’s goals will appear to academics as the most dated. He argues that the “goal of university activity” should be “the maintenance of a way of life—the life of disinterested contemplation” (77), and the mission of such an institution should be founded on “the principle of pursuing inquiry in the absence of any pre-decision about the worthiness or unworthiness of particular ideas” (66). In a book about the impossibility of creating an Edenic space free from politics—politics being the very condition of perspectival human beings—he seems confident about establishing a space between the electoral politics responsible for policies and legislation and the quotidian politics of maintaining the life of academic institutions. He describes how “the university that rigorously distances itself from politics will be at once true to its mission and more likely

136 Modern Language Studies 52.1

to prosper politically” (87). It is unclear, though, how established academic protocols will somehow keep out the politics of Washington D.C. from within academia’s hallowed walls. That is, on what ground could “disinterested contemplation” exist? And what could he possibly mean by “the absence” of “pre-decisions” when describing the “worthiness” of our research interests? Surely our academic pursuits are historically inscribed, our interests are not themselves neutral, and our search for truth is always motivated. We make decisions about the value of our academic pursuits relative to the disciplinary histories that give our decisions their contours. Yet Fish appears to describe such academic pursuits as the results of something like acts of randomness (no pre-decision) that befall disinterested agents.

And he presents the “principle” of pursuing inquiry as if it were not one of those liberal principles he has spent his career exposing as empty of content even as it is presented as neutral and objective.

Although it is not apparent from The First, Fish is aware of this line of questioning. He develops book-length responses to such criticisms in Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995) and Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (2014). In Versions of Academic Freedom, he offers a more nuanced defense of the academic profession and its need for academic freedom. In Professional Correctness, he demonstrates the specificity of academic work like literary criticism and shows how this work differs fundamentally from political activism. In The First, though, he merely chastises activist professors for not doing their job and castigates student protesters for not wanting “to learn anything” (77). He does not analyze students’ protests as carefully as he does the work of Jeremy Waldron and Catharine

MacKinnon in his chapter on hate speech—writers who would defend the students’ concerns.

The First instead abruptly performs what Fish’s account of higher education demands: an assertive defense of academia as a unique space where a certain kind of work (the advancement of knowledge) takes place. Fish simply stipulates the existence of the boundaries separating academia because he cannot defend them from outside the very enterprise he wants to maintain. Fish’s critics, of course, will readily highlight this enforced stipulation, and they will lay bare the attempt to police and buttress the boundaries. They will see the buttressing of academia’s walls as an attempt to conserve a status quo that benefits some at the expense of others. They will say that what Fish characterizes as education is colonization. This type of critic will seek to erase the distinction between the academic ivory tower and the neighborhoods surrounding it as a way of ushering in a better world.

Readers will not find a developed response to these objections in The First. For that, they will have to turn to the other books I have mentioned and Save the World on Your Own Time (2008). Nor will readers find any mention of critical race theory in The First, which from our vantage in 2021 will appear as an especially glaring omission. In a book by a theorist who now teaches law and publishes as a legal scholar, the lack of mention of critical race theory, developed by legal scholars during the 1970s and 1980s, is conspicuous. We can surmise that Fish would not want professors actively endorsing policy recommendations within the classroom. But we are left to wonder whether he thinks such a theory’s policy recommendations surpass their role as the researched expressions of scholars engaged in academic freedom.

Despite The First’s lack of development, it remains highly relevant. Fish is right to insist that the freedom of academic inquiry must be vigorously defended from outside pressures, “from churches, politicians, parents, donors, or corporate interests” (66). And he is correct to argue that this defense will be aided by our professionalism, the insistence that we do our jobs as professionally as we can with a developed understanding of what the job is and what it is not. Following Fish’s conclusions, pedagogues must be able to explain to their students, not endorse or repudiate, the theories that currently circulate in academic discourse, and students must be able to learn and understand, not simply reject or protest against, such theories. Critics of Fish will characterize this description of teaching as fundamentally conservative and his description of learning as fundamentally restrictive. Other critics of Fish will say that he is an apologist for propaganda by failing to condemn overtly radical theories, including critical race theory and Marxism, whose goal is not the mere understanding of the world but its fundamental upheaval.

The First teaches us that such criticisms and debates will persist, and what will always be at stake is the protection of academic freedom, not the suppression of free speech. By reading The First, we can understand that what we are witnessing in 2021 is the inevitable political clash that will ensue when academics insist on marching toward a utopian horizon and treating their job as a political calling bolstered by something like theological conviction.

Fish reminds us that when we willfully blur the distinction between teaching and activism, we court outside criticism. We usher the politics of Washington D.C. into the space of academia but vociferously complain when these politics do not go our way.

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contributors Jennifer Cho is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston University, where she teaches at the intersections of Asian American literature, film and culture, gender studies, social justice, and affect theory. She received her Ph.D. in English from the George Washington University and B.A. and M.A. degrees from New York University. Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. (MELUS) and Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism.

Kim Coates is an Assistant Professor of English at Bristol Community College in Fall River, MA, where she teaches courses in literature, writing, and the humanities. Her research interests include contemporary queer-feminist autotheory, feminist performance in literature, and mindfulness pedagogies. She is the founder and editor of Evocations Review, a digital literary and art journal.

Natalie Mera Ford is Assistant Professor of English and Multilingual Writing Specialist at Swarthmore College, where she teaches courses on academic composition, medical writing and rhetoric, and style. Her research interests include trancelike states in nineteenth-century British literature and psychology, translingual writing, and contemplative pedagogy. She has creative work forthcoming in Reader, and her critical work has previously appeared in Humanities, The Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, and a number of other publications.

Jim Goar is the author of The Dustbowl, The Louisiana Purchase, and Seoul Bus Poems. An article on the poetry of Jack Spicer was recently published in Criticism. He is an Associate Professor of English at Elizabeth City State University.

Donetta Hines, coordinates the graduate student Thesis Writing Program at McGill University where she conducts writing workshops, works as a writing coach for graduate students, post-docs, and faculty, convenes peer writing groups for graduate students and post-docs, and teaches academic and research writing to graduate and undergraduate students across the disciplines. She earned her Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from Cornell University, and her essays and reviews have appeared in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Cinéfilo, Chasqui, Letras femeninas, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and Teaching for Learning @ McGill University. Her research and teaching now encompass academic and research writing, mindfulness, and scholarship of teaching and learning.

She was the recipient of her faculty’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2020.

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Elizabeth Laughlin is a graduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is a graduate assistant who writes for the department newsletter and runs a public humanities project. Her research interests include Romanticism, Gothic literature, Modernism, and Renaissance literature.

In her free time, she enjoys reading novels and watching football. She also loves to write short stories and write creatively.

Matthew Leporati is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, where he serves as Writing Specialist. His research interests include writing pedagogy and mindfulness, British Romanticism, epic poetry, and British literature and empire. His essays and reviews have appeared in European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Humanities, The CEA Critic, The CEA Forum, and Studies in Romanticism, as well as in the collection Isn’t It Ironic? Irony in Contemporary Popular Culture (Routledge, 2021).

Paul R. Petrie is professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University where he teaches a wide range of courses in American literature. His scholarship centers primarily on late-19th and early-20th-century writers, with a particular focus on W.D. Howells. He is the author of Conscience and Purpose: Fiction and Social Consciousness in Howells, Jewett, Cather, and Chesnutt, and the editor of the Broadview edition of Howells’s An Imperative Duty and the Norton Critical Edition of The Rise of Silas Lapham.

Beth Sherman is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She received an M.F.A. in creative writing and an M.A. in English from Queens College where she teaches in the English department. Her work has been published in Dickens Studies Annual, James Joyce Quarterly, Newsday and The New York Times. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has written five mystery novels.

Angel Trazo is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her scholarship and artwork have appeared in Amerasia Journal, Intersections: Critical Issues in Education, and ASAP/Journal. She is also the illustrator of two children's books, We Are Inspiring: The Stories of 32 Inspirational Asian American Women (2019) and Vanessa Unmuted (2021).

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Executive Editor: Timothy Yu ISSN: 0010-7484, e-ISSN: 1548-9949 Published four times per year Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, Contemporary Literature features the full diversity of critical practices. The editors seek articles that frame their analysis of texts within larger literary historical, theoretical, or cultural debates.

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