What follows are my remarks from today’s webinar, Writing Outside the Academy. I didn’t have time to give the remarks after the second set of three asterisks, reflecting on public writing/public medievalism and yesterday’s events, but referred to them in the discussion.
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My topic this afternoon is audience and how my role as a teacher shapes how I think about writing for the public and how I envision that public — in other words, how the pedagogical part of my job helps to shape my writing outside the academy.
I am currently working on a book-length project for a general audience on the past and present of the Spanish language, a project that has very much grown out of my teaching. It has been shaped by redesigning a class I had inherited from a retired colleague on the history and dialectology of Spanish, and by the ways in which students come into college and into my class thinking about language in very conservative and limiting ways, often shaped by introductory language pedagogy and popularly available resources about language in general and Spanish in particular. My students often come in to my class as strident prescriptivists, because that is how they have been taught Spanish and taught about Spanish, regardless of whether it is a learned language for them or whether they are heritage or native speakers, and so they end up very judgmental about the language as it changes over time and even about their own Spanish.
This course is called Is Spanish One Language?* and it tends to attract students who have bought into the idea, garnered in their American high schools and reinforced by the way we teach language at the college level that that language and literature are separate things, that literature is the reward for learning language, that you do one and then you are allowed to do the other. Among the many problems with this approach is that by the time students come to this “reward phase,” they love the Spanish language and what they can do with it in their daily lives and what they imagine they will be able to do with it in their future, chosen professions, but they range from uninterested in to intimidated by literature and cultural history. Part of my goal in this class is to sneak those things in, a bit like hiding vegetables in a gorgeous lasagna so that by the time the semester is over, they see that there’s not so much of a gulf between language and literature, and that literature is not some lofty thing that they have to earn the right to read with “perfect,” whatever that means, Spanish. And so my reading list includes things like the sixteenth century Juan Valdés’ Diálogo de la lengua (Dialogue on the language) in which a Castilian university student — a peer from hundreds of years ago — explains his language in a surprisingly engaging way to a group of Italian exchange students, as well as translators’ manuals for missionaries and churchmen in the colonial period in Latin America, first-person essays on Lunfardo, Ladino, and Spanglish by speakers of those linguistic varieties and on how their languages shape their identities, and more. There is no shortage of writing by Spanish-speakers about their Spanishes and others’.
(Just as an aside on my use of the word “Spanishes” in the plural: My answer to the central question of the course is that no, Spanish isn’t just one thing — that there are many Spanishes, that it is more a dialect bundle than a language — but regardless of whether my students agree with me or not — and many don’t — they come away with a broader perspective on using and thinking about languages. By the end of the semester they are excited to observe, describe, and analyze, and less quick to prescribe.)
Where I have found challenges is in choosing secondary, scholarly literature for students to read. While there is a good bit of great, historically, sociologically, and anthropologically informed writing about modern and contemporary Spanishes out there, and while there is increasingly good popular writing on language change in general (for example, Gretchen McCollough’s Because Internet) what we have for the medieval and early modern periods is largely not up to date with respect to the current state of those fields, again, reinforcing how pervasive the separation can be between language and linguistics and sociocultural, literary, and historical contexts.
In using works like David Pharies’ Brief History of the Spanish Language, students come in not knowing anything about the Spanish Middle Ages, they learn from their first readings about the evolution of medieval Spanish within the context of the “Reconquista,” which we no longer use as a historical model. I first start out having to “unteach” what they just learned in their first readings. It takes up a lot of time, it’s not a way to draw in students who are already not convinced that they should be learning history or literature, and pitting the professor against the readings is not a trust-building way to start off the semester.
There’s that quip about writing the book you want to read, and so I’m now writing the book I want to teach from, and that’s a single, integrated, unitary exploration of Spanishes in their historical, cultural, and political contexts based on what we know now, not what we knew thirty or forty years ago: up to date both in terms of language and linguistics, and of history and culture.
I feel extraordinarily privileged that I get to talk about these ideas with a group of twelve to fifteen undergraduates each fall who in a lot of ways are representative of the kind of audience I imagine writing for, and the kind of audience that, thanks to them, I know is out there: educated, interested, lay readers who love Spanish and are curious to learn more, but who are bombarded with the messages about language of a very adamantly monolingual and xenophobic society that regularly turns non-English languages, and Spanish in particular, into political footballs. Teaching a course that will become a book gives me huge insight into who I’m writing for and what is of interest and concern to them.
And that’s not a new idea: In 2001, in a wide-ranging essay on disciplinary boundaries and public intellectualism, the late and lamented María Rosa Menocal considered the ways in which bracketing the medieval off from the rest of the humanities and from public discourse at large is fundamentally unhelpful. She draws upon the reception of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories as an example, critiquing the response in major book reviews that treated it like an escapist fantasy for children, a respite for Rushdie after the fallout from the Satanic Verses, a reviewing posture that was seemingly ignorant of the frametale tradition in which Rushdie’s then-new book exists; and she writes:
“These things we would now in a universe in which medieval scholars also played the role of public intellectuals, which of course means ‘writing without footnotes’ in the sense, here, that we write, first of all, cogently and intelligibly for the benefit of non-medievalists, our fellow academics in other areas of literature or cultural history, for those poor Rushdie people who don’t know Petrus Alfonsi and don’t know any of the spectacular Saladin stories in the Decameron or in the Conde Lucanor; and secondly, of course, for that ‘common reader’ out there (who I always imagine are our own undergraduates when they are grown up and have children and vote and pay taxes) who really deserve to know that the Thousand and One Nights, just like Haroun and the Sea of Stories, has a significant existence outside the Disney universe of children’s ‘entertainment.’”
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I’ve spent last night and this morning struggling with how to make my comments responsive to yesterday’s events in Washington, D.C. and the social and political forces that fueled them. I don’t have much except anger and sadness, and I think it would cheapen the horror we saw yesterday — and let me be clear that I am referring not only to the insurrection in the Capitol but also the blatant, fatal hypocrisy in the differing level of policing response to these armed terrorists and the peaceful BLM protesters in the capital this summer — to try to force a connection.
So, sure, thinking about Spanish, making it accessible to a broad public as something beyond a “foreign language,” as this incredible, multifaceted cultural force that I love and that my students are hungry to know more and more about, is absolutely relevant in the broader political environment that produces the kind of xenophobia and racism that has fueled a lot of what has happened in the last four years and the last four hundred, but I’m also not so self-assured as to think that my project right now needs to be the center of any of the discussion or that it can be shoehorned into some direct, point-a-to-point-b solution.
Instead, in keeping with my topic this afternoon, I think back to the first time that I traveled to Spain with students in NYU’s honors program, mere weeks after the shooting at the Bataclan auditorium in Paris in 2015, and I think back to the sense of needing to say something to a group of teenagers — many of whom would be traveling abroad for the first time, and whose safety I was responsible for even before trying to ensure that they would have a good time and learn something about Spain and all of its languages — and really not knowing what to say. In the end I told them that. I actually scripted my remarks pretty tightly for class that week, so I am able to refer back to them directly now, and I would like to share a part of those remarks:
“There’s a sense that the Middle Ages, and the Spanish Middle Ages in particular, ought to have something to say to us at moments like this.
“As a medievalist I can’t help you; and in darker moments I think that maybe nobody can. I can give you a framework in which you can hang your own ideas and aspirations and vision of the world. Sometimes it’s valuable to be able to talk about modern issues from behind the safety of a medieval guise. But conversely, maybe it’s not any better to imagine a medieval world in which coexistence figured differently than it is to imagine a superhero multiverse in which a man of steel will catch you when you fall and vanquish the bad guys who pushed you into the chasm.
“I don’t have answers anymore; maybe I never did. A few months ago, in one of the Republican presidential candidate debates, Carly Fiorina said she was prepared to tackle the ISIS problem because her bachelor’s degree is in medieval history and philosophy. Everyone in my line of work laughed because the Middle Ages cannot fix a world irredeemably changed by the Enlightenment and the rise of the nation-state and the fraternal-twin ideologies of imperialism and colonialism. But it gives us something to do as the world crumbles around us and, more importantly, a way to do it.
Most of you are not going to write your senior honors theses on a medieval topic; a lot of you are not going to write in a humanities discipline at all; but you are all heirs to the Middle Ages by virtue of being here in a university. The idea of gathering together to pursue higher education, to ask great questions, and to hold many contradictory ideas all at once and have that be okay is an invention of thirteenth-century Paris.”
(I look back now at my phrase “an invention of thirteenth-century Paris” and think about all the ways in which my academic colleagues might seize upon it as requiring some historical and geographical qualification, and, while I won’t get into it now in the interest of time, the ways in which we streamline for a general audience and the ways in which our colleagues sometimes seize upon and misunderstand that might be worth talking about in the discussion.)
In any case, perhaps as humanists part of our engagement with the public may be to help create spaces in which the interested lay audience that chooses to read and engage with us, this group of people who in so many ways mirror our students as they go out into the world, to sit and think with and act upon big ideas in a structured and thoughtful way that we can help shape.
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*The syllabus linked above is the one I taught this semester; a pre-pandemic, in-person iteration with a few more topics covered can be found here.