A Day in the Life of a Literature Professor, or Why I Do What I Do

Several years ago, right after I earned my Ph.D., a friend rather bluntly told me that the only reason people became literature professors was because they had failed at being creative writers. I remember shooting back with something along the lines of, “Not all academics want to be creative writers.” Of course, my friend summarily discounted that statement with, “Yes, they do. If they haven’t tried writing, it’s because they know they’ll probably fail, and they’re cowards.”I’ve had this exchange, or versions of it, often enough to merit giving it serious thought. Since graduate school, I have surrounded myself with writers, many of whom are now my dearest friends (and one of whom is my husband), and they are a boisterous, savvy, messed up, cuh-razy, brilliant, ignorant, frustrating, stupid, arrogant, elitist, humble, generous, kind, and downright weird group. I can’t imagine feeling closer to or happier with any other type of people. But you know what else I can’t imagine? Being a creative writer. Never. Nuh-uh. No frakkin’ way. Going for a swim in an active volcano? Maybe. Writing a novel? Thank you, but . . . no.Now, don’t get me wrong. Some academics probably are failed writers. Or cowards. Or both. A lot of them probably have what they believe to be the next Great American Novel stashed away in a drawer right behind the graded student analyses of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening from that American Fiction class they taught in 1996. Some of them likely went into graduate school because they thought it would be a good “back-up plan,” only now the back-up plan has taken over their lives. Admittedly, that’s a sad – maybe even tragic – story. But it’s hardly the only story to be found in literature departments. I’d go so far as to argue that it’s not even all that common.Of course, I can’t speak for all literature professors, nor would I be so arrogant as to try. I can say, though, that literary academia is too nuanced and complex to define as simply the absence of creative writing. And let’s not forget that my friend’s categorical denouncement also negates the worth of creative writing professors everywhere – a group of professors that includes (or has included) writers as diverse and talented as Toni Cade Bambara, Tim O’Brien, Diana Abu-Jaber, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, and Junot Diaz, to name but a few. For me, though, the biggest problem with my friend’s statement is its presumption that the only valuable means of engaging literature is producing literature, that real literary value can only be found with the author sitting alone, typing away at his or her keyboard, a [insert pet of choice here] curled under the desk. One of my biggest contentions with that presumption is the notion that literary merit (or any type of artistic merit, really) is something that has an absolute and detectable value. That it can be traced to a point of origin and that everything to proceed from that point of origin is secondary in merit or importance. Not to get overly technical with you, Dear Internet, but I think that’s a load of crap.So I guess the question becomes, “What, exactly, is the value of literature, and how do we go about finding it?” I’d be lying, of course, to claim to have a definitive answer to that question. The reason I lack a definitive answer is, I believe, because it is an inherently unanswerable question. Moreover, I think that attaching merit to the author and his or her creative process in isolation of all other factors/people actually does both artist and art a serious disservice. It’s isolationist; it presumes that literature exists in a vacuum. The poverty of this isolationist approach is clear – it strips literature of context and pushes it outside of history. To do this is to devalue the work, to deny it a role in cultural discourse.And that just sucks.Authors, scholars, and critics alike are guilty of having participated (or continuing to participate) in this isolationist approach to literature. A misguided author who cries foul every time he or she hears that a scholar or critic has interpreted a work contrary to his or her opinion is betraying literature in the same way, I would argue, as an ill-advised scholar who argues that art with popular or mass appeal cannot be intellectually contributive. None of these people has the authority to be arbiter of meaning and value. As I tell my students in all my literature classes, the author him- or herself cannot tell you what or how to think about the text, and neither can your professor. Author and professor are but two highly subjective voices in what should, ideally, be a cacophonous discourse of culture, history, and art. In the process following the production and dissemination of literature, the role of author and professor becomes very similar: we are facilitators of sorts, highly trained and talented individuals who can bring together patterns, cultural moments, authorial choices, historical contexts, and questions of form in ways that allow students of literature (not just in university classrooms) to engage in cultural discourse and to add their voices to ongoing exploratory discussions of literature, identity, society, history, etc.Creative writers do not need to protect themselves from literature professors. Literature professors are not in competition with creative writers. Not in the way that my friend suggested when he told me I was a Coward Non-Writer (I’m making up t-shirts RIGHT NOW). If anything, we engage in complementary fields. And while there are some professors who should NEVERNEVERNEVER be allowed to write a novel (or a poem, or a play, or a screenplay, or a short story) and creative writers who should be BANNED from pontificating upon the progression of literary discourse or from standing in front of a classroom to teach, there are many who easily and deftly bridge the gap between the two professions. For that matter, for every literature professor who approaches literature with sanctimony and totalitarianism, there are countless others who believe that the act of learning about literature is communal and that critical reading and writing are exploratory rather than formulaic enterprises. And to quote something my mentor said in one of my first classes as a graduate student, “Writers or scholars, we all know why we’re here. We are the weird kids who sat in the back of the class and thought reading was cool.”I, for one, am happy to be one of those weird kids.

Rima Abunasser is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture at Furman University. She also teaches Contemporary American Popular Culture, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Literature of the Arab World, and the Feminist Literary Tradition. That’s all a very complicated way of saying that she really likes to read. And to think and talk about what she reads. And, you know, to have an audience. She really likes having an audience. It makes her feel special – and somewhat drunk with power.