Whenever I teach an early American literature survey course, I know that most students didn’t choose to take the course because they wanted to read American literature before 1865. Most students took the course because it filled their general education requirement and fit the time slot that they wanted for a course. It’s as simple as that. However, almost every time I teach the course, students responds to the texts that read, and they come away with a heightened connection to the past and their own place in the present. For me, this moment, where students connect with the material and relate to their own lives sits at the core of education.

Typically on the final in a survey course I’ll ask students what text or texts stood out to them over the course of the semester and how those texts help them think about themselves and the world around them. This semester, when I asked that question, multiple students responded by pointing out that before reading writers such as Judith Sargent Murray, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Jacobs, they had not thought about the women who came before them and the ways that those women fought for the rights that the students experience today. They came to realize, as they did when reading Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, their place within the continuum of existence, and that their place had a before and after which impacts them and the world they inhabit. I know that most of these students won’t go into literary studies, but having them exposed to individuals who impact them today is important and hopefully something that will inspire them to continue reading and learning long after they finish their education.

As I finished up the semester, I read Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, a novel that, from the beginning, highlights the power of education, and specifically a liberal arts education with literature and questions about our own existence at the center. The novel, told from the perspective of Roland as he prepares to retire from his own educational career, details the mentor who impacted Roland the most, the mentor who did not make it into the commemorations or recollections of his peers at his retirement. Roland met this unnamed mentor when his father, after catching him with a woman in bed, took him out of the Berlin university he was attended and sent him to a provincial university.

At the start of his educational career, Roland could care less about his education, and “anything in the way of humanist studies represented coercion which [he] could barely endure.” Roland barely passed his examinations, and he wanted to join the military. He frowned upon academy, but his father, “with his fanatical veneration for universities and everything to do with them,” insisted that Roland attend university. Roland agreed to do go to university as long as he could study English instead of classics, to which his father acquiesed. However, at the university in Berlin, Roland merely partied, neglecting his studies, and when his father found out, he moved Roland to another university.

At the provincial university, Roland comes alive after hearing the English professor lecture to a group of students. Upon initially hearing the professor, Roland “experienced what Latin scholars call a raptus, when one is taken right out of oneself.” The professor seizes Roland and those students gathered around him, certain a feeling of ecstasy within the room that entrances all of the listeners. Roland proclaims, “I had never before known language as ectasy, the passion of discourse as an elemental act, and the unexpected shock of it drew me closer.” The professor entranced Roland and the others, drawing them ever closer to himself and to his subject matter, making them engaged in the learning taking place within the lecture hall.

This moment leads Roland to become studious, relentlessly studying Shakespeare, Marlow, Johnson, and other Elizabethan artists. He talks about his own awakening in relation to the Elizabethan period when it generated “that single moment of ecstasy which can come unexpectadly in the life of every nation, as in the life of every human being, a moment when all forces work together to forge a way strongly forward into eternity.” The professor’s passion draws Roland into the circle, and there Roland experiences a raptus ecstasy that transcends his very being, leading him towards a path of intellectual discovery.

Just as Roland describes his intellectual awakening, we see a similar moment in Dorthy Strachey’s semi-autobiographical Olivia. When Olivia attends a girls’ school in France, she encounters, in a similar manner to Roland, a teacher who opens the world of literature and art to her. Olivia sits next to Mlle Julie as the teacher reads from Racine’s Andromaque. As Mlle Julie reads, Olivia remains enraptured as Mlle Julie’s “voice transported [Olivia] at once into he courts of princes and the presence of great emotions.” After the lesson, Olivia returned to her room and, “in a kind of daze, slept as if [she] had been drugged.” When she awoke, she arose to new “world in which everything was fierce and piercing, everything charged with strange emotions, clothed with extraordinary mysteries, and in which [she] seemed to exist only as an inner core of palpitating fire.”

Mlle Julie opens a whole new world for Olivia, one where words carry more meaning and weight, where words become real and tangible. Olivia states, “Words! How astonishing they were! The simplest bore with it such an aura of music and romance as wafted me into fairy-land.” The world, through words, becomes beautiful and intoxicating, leading Olivia to see it and engage with it in a new manner. Concrete words that describe people and places became clearer, and abstract words such as “[f]aith, liberty, truth, humanity,” called upon her to discover their true meaning and core. The world opened up for Olivia, and she paid attention. She connected the world around her to her own inner being.

I know that the majority of my students will not have an enrapturing moment where they suddenly exclaim that they lover literature and understand its importance in their lives, even if it isn’t part of their career. I know that the majority of my students will finish the course, thankful they got out of it with minimal discomfort. I know all of this; however, I also hope, and I see occasionally, the ways that literature opens up the world for students, causing them to see the world anew, to see history anew, to see themselves anew. It opens up the world in such a way that shows them that they exist as part of something larger than themselves. They exist as connective tissue to the multitudes and the ages, linking us all across time and space. It is these moments when students see that people before them felt the same things they feel and that people endured similar hardhsips that make these classes worthwhile. It is these moments that highlight the power and importance of literature, not as a hobby or as a leisure activity, but as an active part of our daily lives.

What are some of your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.