The figure of the solitary thinker comprises a most powerful and enduring representation of scholarly life. This is the figure of the autonomous scholar-teacher, whose intellectual sovereignty and productivity, both in and out of the classroom, seemingly rests as much if not more upon untold hours of secluded reading and writing as it does upon building relationships with others—even those others who eventually may comprise important audiences for the scholar’s writing and teaching.

Those of us whose experiences inside the institution readily challenge the usefulness of unqualified autonomy as an ideal, simultaneously recognize its appeal. Despite (or, ironically, perhaps...

In the past quarter of a century in America, personal accounts have multiplied like Mandelbrot fractals, spreading into spaces formerly inhospitable to them. David Simpson, examining the new primacy of autobiography in The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature, notes that personal stories now “pour off the presses, in literary criticism, ethnography, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy” (23). Two of these areas in particular, cultural studies and literary criticism, might seem unlikely hosts to such incursions. The twentieth century’s two chief modes of reading, after all, have had little truck with the personal: the New Criticism studiously ignored subjectivity,...

My best teaching takes place when I am most attentive to students, when I am fully engaged in listening to and learning from them, when I am talking with them, not at them. Unfortunately, I am not always capable of such deep listening. Students sense this immediately. They may not accuse me directly, as my son has on occasion—“Mom, you’re not paying attention!”—but their demeanor changes. It’s a subtle thing, but palpable. Over the years, I have come to understand, primarily through the introspective practice of personal scholarship, that I am most attentive to students after first attending...

Anne Sexton was an inspiring, conscientious teacher, a fact that often goes noticed. In addition to her teaching appointment at Boston University, Sexton taught poetry at Mclean Psychiatric Hospital, Colgate University, Oberlin College and Wayland High School in Wayland, Massachusetts. Her collaboration with Herbert Kohl and the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in the 1960s made substantive contributions to revitalizing English education, in part by initiating teaching partnerships among writers, artists and teachers. Sexton is rarely thought of as a dedicated teacher, nor is she immediately associated with the significant contributions she made to Teachers and Writers. Rather, she is most...

I am not quite sure know how to begin this essay. A book whose subject is “the place of the personal in the academy” is bound to raise so many rhetorical expectations. I imagine my readers eagerly anticipating liberation from dry impersonal, academic prose, and wondering what secrets might be revealed. So I ask myself: Which rhetorical form should I use in this piece? Must it be a monologic narrative? Could I write it as a dialogue or letter? But which “I” do I present here? What will be my persona ?

I am comforted to learn that the word...

To what extent and in what ways is academic editing personal? It might look objective. Since 1980, PMLA has had a policy of author-anonymous and referee-anonymous (or “blind”) review of manuscripts. Submissions must exclude internal tip-offs as to their authors’ identities, so that referees can focus on what’s said rather than on who (or whose protegé) said it. Referees’ identities, too, are withheld from authors: no rewards, no reprisals. The object is fairness. Recently, though, PMLA’s editorial board considered doing away with anonymity. With signed submissions, so goes the argument, established authors will not have to bother with the long,...

As the social structures of affiliation become more abstract, more diverse, or distant, we find ourselves dashing headlong in retreat to symbols of connection that are increasingly familial–and defensive. Baseball, that great repository of nostalgia, has, for a long time stood as an icon for the intimate and enduring relations of small town life. Bring the Dodgers back to Brooklyn! And even I, who forswore the sport after the Dodgers left, worry that the Yankees will move to New Jersey. If the Marlins could move from obscurity to the playoffs through the purchase of “free” agent Livan Hernandez for...

In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, a nearly eight hundred page anthology from the classical to the contemporary era, Phillip Lopate writes, “The personal essay is the reverse of that Chinese set of boxes that you keep opening, only to find a smaller one within. Here you start with the small … and suddenly find a slightly larger container, insinuated by the essay’s successful articulation and the writer’s self-knowledge” (xxviii). This capacity of the personal essay to open itself up, the way it relies on an implied induction to be realized in the mind of the...

One appeal of the personal voice in academic writing is its flexibility, its accessibility, and potential literariness—that is, its reliance on rhythms and word music, imagery, specificity, allusions. Another is its capacity for principled disclosure—of research goals and practices, of researcher stakes, of implications for problem, field, and author. That is the aspect I am interested in as a researcher, as a writer, and in my graduate courses in autobiographical scholarship. But the aspect on which I will focus here is the capacity of personal classroom writing—personal responses to course readings and disciplinary issues and the use...

Keith says he thinks Jane Austen is “naughty”; Sarah purses her lips. He draws big gay quotation marks around the word with his gay voice, reminding the class that nice as pie though he is he’s also naughty and knowing; she looks demurely down through the bottoms of her bifocals, quietly amused, refusing to meet his campily candid blue gaze. There is a sense, in the room, that the bartender and the schoolteacher—members, this semester, of my graduate seminar—are playing themselves to an audience of intimates, like the amateur actors at Mansfield Park. Both of them are sure...

In my Cape Town diary, I wrote:

7:39 a.m. Thursday 5-18-00

Woke up in great anger: last night I finished grading the papers on Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks. Two students of color—Mimi and José—never even turned in their papers. Mimi said she’d turn her paper in to me on Tues. night, but then she went to the movies w/Dagni! This is the hazard of living with one’s students! But I know she decided not to submit it—or shit, to write it—after I spat out at her, “Not without a penalty—but do turn it in,” when...

There’s not much about academic life that’s personal. At least, no professional academic is supposed to take any of the activities that make up an academic life personally. The trajectories of our careers—getting hired, published, tenured, promoted, reviewed—are documented in terms of qualifications, criteria, standards. These words feel scientific; they carry with them the respectable aura of observation and impartiality, and academics are encouraged to take comfort in the procedures that determine how—and whether—they will live their professional lives.

Yet of course all academics know how personal a professional life in a university is. What could...

A Memory. Seattle, 1979.

She is a contradiction in stereotypes, not to be pegged. He likes her right off. She wants to go to Belltown, the Denny Regrade, to take photos. He wants to go along. He does, feeling insecure and full of bravado, slipping into the walk of bravado he had perfected as a child in Brooklyn. Stop into a small café at the outskirts of downtown, at the entry to the Regrade. It’s a French-style café, the Boulangerie, or some such. To impress her, he speaks French.

“Un tas de café, s’il vous plais. Et croissants pour les...

In order to reflect on my pedagogical orientation and scholarly interests I will begin and conclude with my book, Black, Jewish and Interracial: Its Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin and Other Myths of Identity (1997). This work represents the culmination of a forty-three year work in progress which divide into two formative periods: childhood and adolescence in the United States and adulthood in Israel. I write this essay from a third moment – an unfolding set of middles: middle-age in the middle of Iowa in the middle of the U.S. In Black, Jewish...

I look up from my chair at the stranger who has come to take me to an unfamiliar classroom. My legs dangle over the chair seat, feet not reaching the floor as I prepare to hop off. The building this classroom is in is different from my school—more sterile and hospital-like with the long corridors and chairs placed outside doors along the hall. In the yard there are no swings or jungle gyms to play on, a strange absence if this was indeed another school. As we enter the classroom, I notice the walls are not covered with kiddy...

My father didn’t finish high school and my grandfather, a first-generation Sicilian immigrant, left school even sooner. Very little prepared me for my life as not only a college graduate but a college professor, except my sense that my passage through higher education somehow finished a journey started almost a century earlier by my grandfather. In my family, the worst insult was “caffon” (“greenhorn”), a label that summed up a state of ignorance, at once academic (awkward grammar, bad spelling) and national (an inability to adapt to pot-melted “American” culture, a habitual repetition of “Old World” practices and beliefs). By...

When I summon up remembrance of my early teaching years, lively courses and fine students swim to the surface, but chiefly a feeling of inadequacy bordering on desperation. A 23-year-old standing in coat and tie before privileged 18-year-olds, I took attendance with gravity, carefully announced that papers would be due or would be returned at the end of the hour, passed around a list of conference times, said OK, please turn to Orwell’s essay, and withal sought to prolong the safe time during which there could be no question who was in charge. I knew the script. They knew the...