NEH Distinguished Teaching Professors

Mark Edmundson
Project Summary (2004-2007)

What I'm most interested in doing is getting my fellow teachers to think about moving beyond interpretation. I have the highest regard for all of the interpretive techniques we've develped in the humanities, but I don't think that they're enough. I want to encourage my colleagues to do their interpretive work, sure, but then to pass on from questions of meaning to questions of value and use. Ultimately, I think that a liberal arts education is about connecting great writing to the lives of our students. I think that once we've read a text, we need to ask students if it's true. How would it change your life to live as the work at hand directly commends or (more likely) subtly suggests? Suppose you used it for a while as your secular Bible? What difference would this book make? What I want to do is look at major writing as a form of wisdom literature—then see what happens.

In practical terms, that means doing a good deal of talking and writing to describe and endorse this sort of teaching. I've written a couple of books on the subject, "Teacher" and "Why Read?" as well as many essays, and have given plenty of talks about it, here (at Convocation, the TRC and elsewhere) and at other universities (most recently Georgetown, Yale, Emory, Iowa, Hollins). I'm also developing a new course called Three Teachers: probably it will be about Socrates, Jesus and Nietzsche—maybe Shakespeare will fit in some time in the future. The idea, really, is to look at what some of the really great teachers have done and see how it applies (with all due proportions kept) to our task here and now.