Hospitality happens, even in English courses. But take care. Hospitality here is not necessarily the same as hospitality there.

In March 2013, Rich signed up for a massive open online course (MOOC), mildly hyped by Duke University as English Composition I: Achieving Expertise. The first assignment was to write a 300-word essay called “I Am a Writer.” Two days later, before Rich had started that oddly redundant task, he received an even odder e-mail from Denise Comer, the coordinator of the course. It begins,

Dear Richard H. Haswell,

I am so very much enjoying reading through the “I am a...

A hospitable site with room to learn is neither alchemy nor futuristic vision. It is a reality of the past still alive. For millennia, in every country around the world, hospitality customs have taken root. Over and over in every culture’s literature, the customs have supplied staple, central scenes. This chapter would have been superfluous for any but the last three generations of the Western world. In redrawing the professionally established dynamic between student and teacher according to an ethic of hospitality, we turn to a long and rich tradition that, today, happens to need retelling.

The definition ofhospitality...

Emmanuel Levinas (1969) beginsTotality and Infinity: An Essay on Exterioritywith possibly the two most startling sentences to open any major work of philosophy.

Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.

Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? (21)

How does epistemology (“to know”) inquire into ethics (“morality”), and why is war so central in this inquiry? And what are morality and war doing at the start of a dense, 300-page phenomenological study of...

It is inJust Hospitality, published after her death in 2007, where Letty Russell (2009) writes that God “created a world of riotous difference in which creation and creature alike show forth a rainbow variety of God’s goodness” (71). The only way to welcome and respect this difference, says Russell, is through hospitality, which she describes as “an expression of unity without uniformity” (80). Her phrase recalls the African concept of ubuntu, as we will see, which imagines “a person through other persons.” The phrase also parallels Levinas’s notion of the face first appearing to the self “beyond rhetoric” (1969,...

One of Jan’s students, struggling with the prospect of leaving coastal Texas for graduate school, explained why moving was so unappealing to him. “Outside of South Texas,” Adrian said, “I am not brown enough.”

How can a person be not brown enough? Adrian wasn’t innocent of the plight of the marginalized in Texas. Growing up in Corpus Christi barrios, he had experienced racism, injustice, poverty. He had dealt with gangs of white teenagers on the prowl to teach “Mexicans” their place because they weren’t white enough. But he had managed to develop a clear sense of his own unique personhood...

There is a riddle hidden in the title of this chapter. How does reading getinwriting? For that matter, how does writing get in reading? How do writing and reading get inside each other? The “in” is like the “in” of the old joke about the boy who discovers that he is locked out of his house, so he runs around and around it until he is all in. We English teachers run around and around the problematic of the reading-writing connection until we are all in—either exhausted by the topic or mysteriously inside it. Either way, we...

In the fall of 2010 we arranged to have ten student authors interviewed. These were students distinguished by the fact that they habitually wrote on their own in ways unconnected with academic courses. Six undergraduate English majors, one undergraduate history major, and three English master’s candidates—what was there to know about their independent composing lives? What motivates them, what fulfills them, what frustrates them as writers? We also wanted to know if at any point in the composing process they envision a recipient of their authoring—someone who would engage with them in the shared undertaking of reading their...

If an ethic of hospitality allows a more conscious reciprocity in the writer-reader bond, it is because in a true hospitable relationship, the host-guest function changes hands. When an author is intellectually hospitable, he or she is open to mutual and constant exchanges of views, perspectives, and experiences, and so functions both as host (of the text) and guest (of readers’ reception, perspectives, and insights upon engaging with the text). As we have noted in chapter 3, intellectual hospitality is not simple courtesy or civility but a refusal to remain isolated from other learners or to assimilate others into our...

Some places do not fit print very well. Nor do they fit hospitality very well. It’s a truth that people commissioned to write official tourist guides may not convey. TheDocumentalfor the Peruvian department of Ayacucho actually says about its chief urban center, “Ayacucho, once the ancient Incan town of Huamanga, is one of the most pleasant and beautiful cities in Peru.” Maybe the authors of thisDocumentalhad never visited Ayacucho, or maybe they had lived there all of their lives. Maybe they knew of a hospitality that I did not find.

When I visited Ayacucho in the...

In chapter 2 we examined Levinas’s understanding of hospitality, which emphasized that the self desires rather than needs the Other. A relationship with the Other doesn’t satisfy the self, as does a nutritious meal, for instance. Indeed, the self doesn’t use the Other for his or her own purposes but instead must “let be” what is infinite and radically exterior. Thus the act of welcome is “peaceable from the first” because it marks the self’s “unquenchable Desire for Infinity” (Levinas 1969, 150). Paradoxically, in desiring yet letting be, “I attend to myself” (178).

Levinas captures the weighty potential of what...

In his 2006 Nobel lecture, novelist Orhan Pamuk (2006) offers a mixture of reasons why he writes. At first reading, one of his motives is a touch startling: “I write because I like to be read.” Well, who doesn’t? Yet imagine the range of ways this motive can be appeased: showing your draft to a friend, sending copies of your poem around a writers’ group, e-mailing your article to a colleague, checking how many libraries have bought your book, looking for marks that your teacher has put on your paper. Writing this paragraph?

In these final two chapters we reaffirm...

Events, even learning events, don’t just take place in thin air. They takeplace. They happen in a physical surround, rife with its own meaning and poised with its own influence.

Any trope of learning change worth its salt, then, will inscribe location as well as temporality, and the location will be appropriate for the aspect of learning that is stressed. Soclearing the hurdlessuggests a track meet, befitting an emphasis on testing;crossing the bordera transit noman’s-land between countries, where ceremony reigns;climbing the laddera building under repair, where scaffolding and other sequential structurings function;marking...