What do you do for ecstasy?

What if we were to take seriously the possibility that our students have a rich and authoritative inner life and tried to nourish it rather than negate it?

Teaching English is an intrinsically radical act. Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?

The economy of gift, of art, is fundamentally opposed to the economy of war.

What do you do for ecstasy?

Whatever your eye falls on. For it will fall on what you love - will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.

I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.