18. On Literature and Confession

Every semester I have to come up with some new idea for a literature seminar. Every semester I agonize over this decision--over choosing a topic to spend fifteen weeks with, over finding something that I'll be energized enough by to enjoy and to facilitate, and something that maybe a few students will find interesting enough to want to explore together. I'm not as successful in my choices as I'd like to be, and sometimes I'm surprised by the responses. There have even been times when I've feltl like something wasn't going so well, but it turned out by the end of the semester the students were expressing much more appreciation than I could had sensed throughout the term.

Anyhow, here's a list of seminar topics going back several years.

• Post-modernist literature
• Myth and Archetype in Literature
• Nobel prize winners
• Nietzsche and the novelists
• Clashes of culture
• Survival literature
• Love and friendship
• Literary Friendships
• Bringing life to literature
• Modern European masterpieces
• The Sermon on the Mount and Story
• C.S. Lewis, Samuel Johnson and the Great Conversation

A theme that has run throughout virtually every course I teach has finally surfaced in my mind and now I can't shake it.  This April I'm presenting a paper at a regional conference on Christianity and Literature up at Calvin College during the Festival on Faith and Writing.  The paper's title is "Bringing Life the Text and the Text to Life: Case Studies from the Literature Classroom as Confessional Space."

My own encounters with literature almost inevitably spark "confession."  And for a majority of my students who take the time to really engage the literature I assign for classes like these and others, it tends to have the same effect.  I'm not sure I know exactly why, but I aim to explore this in the paper I will co-write with a colleague. 

Meanwhile, I came up with a topic for the fall seminar in literature.  "Literature and Confession." 

So much for indirection.