Chaucer's Rape, Southern Racism, and the Pedagogical Ethics of Authorial Malfeasance

Tison Pugh. College English. Urbana: Jul 2005.Vol.67, Iss. 6;  pg. 569, 18 pgs

Abstract (Document Summary)

Pugh asserts that whether authors acted unethically as lone agents, or whether they participated in culturally systemic forms of oppressing others, these ghostly authorial presences often disrupt the pleasure of the text through their anachronistic presence in relation to today's ethical values. Here, he addresses the position of Geoffrey Chaucer within a classroom environment concerned with the creation and nurturing of an ethical consciousness. He then turns to the ways in which an understanding of the author from his perspective encourages an enhanced critical engagement with personal ethos and critical analysis for both the student and the professor.

Full Text (9090   words)

Copyright National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication Jul 2005

I'm glad we don't know whether Chaucer raped her," one of my brightest students exclaimed, "because if he did, I couldn't like him. And I want to like him if I'm going to read him." The student was responding to my lesson on Chaucer's biography. Within the scope of my upper-level undergraduate Chaucer course, I include pertinent information about his participation in fourteenth-century English social and political life, and I thought it worthwhile to mention that, according to court documents, Cecily Chaumpaigne in 1380 "released Geoffrey Chaucer from omnimodas acciones tarn de raptu meo tarn [sic] de aliqua alia re vel causa –“actions of whatever kind either concerning my rape or any other matter'" (Howard 317). I explained to the class that no certain interpretation of this inscrutable event exists. Because "raptus" could refer to either a kidnapping or a rape, medievalists can do little more than conjecture about the events that transpired between Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne.1 My student seized this ambiguity and therein found sufficient wiggle room in her reaction to Chaucer that she could continue to enjoy his literature without having to commit herself to liking the works of a rapist. For her, the potential ethical ramifications of aligning a personal affection for Chaucer and his literature with her contemporary social and political beliefs were alleviated by a welcome gap in historical knowledge.

As happens so frequently in the classroom, we moved beyond this moment, but my student's words stuck with me uncomfortably. What if Chaucer had indeed been a rapist? How would I encourage my students to negotiate the difficult readerly terrain of enjoying great literature written by bad people? Other literature professors face similar uncomfortable moments with, for example, Malory's rape, Spenser's violent diatribes against the Irish, Byron's incest, Yeats's and Pound's Fascist sympathies, Mailer's domestic violence, and Cleaver's rape. (And certainly this potential problem can be much worse for our fellow humanists in history and philosophy.) Whether human authors acted unethically as lone agents, or whether they participated in culturally systemic forms of oppressing the Other, these ghostly authorial presences often disrupt the pleasures of the text through their anachronistic presence in relation to today's ethical values. Poststructuralist theory may have killed the author, but an authorial presence still lurks and lingers within the literature classroom for many of our students. Even students who have studied literary theory before entering a literature classroom, students who should therefore realize that the author has "died" as an object of critical inquiry, often respond to their favorite authors in a very personal way. (Sometimes it seems that I will never teach a class without a somewhat marginalized male student wearing a Jack Kerouac T-shirt.) And if we remember our own development as literary scholars, many of us will somewhat abashedly confess that Romantic notions of authorship influenced our early passion for the field, no matter how far we later learned Romantic conceptions of authorship were from the truth of any given author. The words mattered most, but these words created a sense of camaraderie and kindred spirit with a man or woman, a sense that he or she understood life in a particularly meaningful way. And great pedagogical value surfaces in this idealized relationship: identifying with the author, or even merely liking him or her, lures our students into texts and invites them to communicate imaginatively and critically with the past.

Of course, I have an easy escape lying before me since we do not know for certain that Chaucer raped Cecily Chaumpaigne; my students and I can "hope for the best" in the murkiness of history and just enjoy the literature. Unless additional evidence is discovered, we will never know whether Chaucer was a rapist or not, and so, at least in this instance, we need not face the uncomfortable ethical situation of enjoying the delightful literature of a sexually violent man. Other professors cannot so easily extricate the literature under examination from its association with authors of dubious ethical practices, as we have conclusive evidence that many famous and accomplished authors were not good people, at least by today's standards.2 As a scholar whose research and publications now arise from a poststructuralist theoretical perspective, I do not object to the tensions involved in "killing" authors in my research and bringing them to life in my teaching because I remember how much my sense of personal connections to authors-Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde inspired me to read more when I was an undergraduate. In both my research and my teaching, I now align myself with a poststructuralist theoretical outlook and see multiple perspectives, multiple meanings, and multiple truths, and my primary goal as a teacher is to give my students the critical and analytical tools necessary for them to see multiple perspectives while discerning their relative merits.

At the same time, it would be unwise to overlook the fact that my students are developing as readers, and, as a result, I do not particularly want to kill the author in my class, nor do I see the absolute need to do so. As a medievalist, I rely upon the very lively presence of Chaucer the poet in my classroom: how could we not enjoy the company of someone so outrageously funny, so brilliantly adept at deploying scatological humor in the service of cultural and societal critiques? In my enthusiastic endorsement of Chaucer's literature, I implicitly endorse Chaucer the man, at least in the minds of many of my students. What do we do, then, when our favorite authors and historical figures are irredeemable to our modern values?

As literature professors, we need an ethical understanding of the submerged tensions inherent in teaching literature we love written by people we might not even like; through this process, we take seriously our students' concerns rather than dismissing them out of hand. This issue can be used pedagogically to create a classroom environment sensitive to ethical issues, to model for our students a pedagogical ethos that demonstrates our own difficulties with this complex issue, and to encourage our students to explore their own relationships to the past through an analysis of ethics, ethos, and literature. In the subsequent sections of this essay, I first address the position of the historical author within a classroom environment concerned with the creation and nurturing of an ethical consciousness; I then turn to the ways in which an understanding of the author from this perspective encourages an enhanced critical engagement with personal ethos and critical analysis for both the student and the professor.

DEAD AND/OR ALIVE: THE AUTHOR IN THE ETHICAL CLASSROOM

For many of our students, the author is, one might say, not quite dead yet. Depending upon their academic backgrounds prior to entering our classrooms, they may have gained exposure to sufficient poststructuralist criticism to realize that the author has been killed, but we cannot always rely on their willingness to view a given text as virtually authorless.' My student's words about Chaucer as a rapist, which highlighted potential difficulties she would personally face as a feminist reader of a sexually violent man, brought to me once again with stunning clarity the tautological realization that our students are students, not professional literary critics. Our job is to lead them from naivete and a lack of intellectual sophistication to deeper and more rigorous critical thinking, but we cannot accomplish this goal by derisively snubbing their personal investment in literature. This obvious fact can never be adequately reiterated, as time and time again I have heard fellow professors disparage their students-sometimes humorously, sometimes bitterly-for comments similar to ones I remember making as an undergraduate. (I once eloquently and passionately-and, in hindsight, ridiculously-tried to convince a professor of medieval literature that poststructuralist theory was irrelevant to the study of literature. How ironic that my current research agenda is based upon the intersection of medieval genres and queer theory; how grateful I am that the professor did not treat me as an imbecile, but respected my position while simultaneously demanding that I rigorously engage with the material.) Immersed within our scholarly worlds, we often forget that insights obvious to us need to be stressed to our students. Our job as professors demands that we push students from their current level of intellectual engagement to a deeper and more theoretically complex one, but to accomplish this goal, we must engage with them at their current level and then demand more from them. Dismissing their personal investment in authors because this engagement does not evince sufficient readerly sophistication presupposes, rather than stimulates, the intellectual development at the heart of the educational process.

And although many scholars would argue fervently that literary analysis aimed at the historical author serves no critical purpose, to do so denies the salutary illusion of textual encounter as personal encounter, the delightful delusion that, by reading an author's text, we are communicating with the author as well as the text. Ethical critics such as Lawrence Buell allow authors a place in the critical discussion of their works, as he notes that "[t]he image of textual encounter as personal encounter is not without its perils. [. . .] Yet the model of reading experience as a sense of virtual interpersonality that enacts, activates, or otherwise illuminates ethical responsibility may nonetheless prove one of the most significant innovations of the literature-and-ethics movement" (13). Buell further notes that an interest in ethical criticism returns the author to, if not the forefront of literary analysis, a corollary position beside the culture in which he or she produced: "[T]he new ethical inquiry tends to favor recuperation of authorial agency in the production of texts, without ceasing to acknowledge that texts are also in some sense socially constructed." Within this reconceptualized view of literary study, "the figure of the historical author is directly relevant" (12). Although poststructuralist theory dominates recent critical discussions of literature, new trends in ethical criticism articulate the vibrancy of reading texts through an ethical perspective. (see, for example, the works of Parker; Davis and Womack; and Rainsford and Woods.) And so perhaps "naive" readers who respond emotionally to an author are not so naive after all, as they seek to integrate their understanding of literature with their understanding of the individual's role within a given cultural moment. Does the question of whether Chaucer himself sexually violated a woman really have no bearing on how we view his depiction of women, if not his depiction of rape itself (as in "The Wife of Bath's Tale")? And would the personal experience of reading his works not likely be exponentially more difficult for people who have been raped?

The historical author also builds a context of understanding for the student, and this context, along with contexts of social history, critical knowledge, and a variety of other subjective and objective factors, influences the ways in which our students approach a text. This dynamic is unavoidable: although criticism has historically attempted to remove any subjective bias, all criticism emerges from particular paradigms of thought that cannot be completely disentangled from context.4 "What is wrong with the idea that criticism is based on principles is that it tries to show that there is a general logic of critical words which is independent of context" (117), M. W. Rowe asserts. We must work with our students on the contextual and analytical levels at which we find them if they are to continue to develop as readers. For them, contextual information about the author often influences their subjective reactions to that author, which, in turn, influences their attempts at objective critical analysis.

By restoring the author, at least peripherally, to the field of critical inquiry, we allow our students to analyze the ways in which the ethos of a given author affects an interpretation of his or her literature within the dynamic cultures within which texts are produced, read, and reread. As the shared etymological roots of ethics and ethos suggest, the distinction between ethics and ethos is subtle. Classical rhetoricians, such as Isocrates, describe ethos as a person's character or reputation in a given community, as it is established by a pattern of behavior measured by communally defined ethics (160-77). Michel Foucault similarly suggests that "ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being" (377), and this succinct formulation highlights the ways in which the issue and practice of ethics can be used to explore authorial, pedagogical, and student ethos. This approach accords with contemporary rhetorical criticism, which considers ethos "as deriving from the text itself and, to some degree, from external factors, such as the speaker's history or character" (Bernard-Donals 565). Authorial ethos, as a constituent factor in the communicative act between author and reader, can well play a part in textual, critical, and cultural analysis. Within a classroom that combines inquiry into literary texts with an inquiry into the rhetorical elements of the texts, authors can thus serve as a productive locus to which our students may turn as they develop their analytical and critical abilities.

Through the reconstruction of the historical author as a valid component in literary experience and study, we encourage our students to engage in cultural criticism that seeks to negotiate the tensions between the past and the present. As with most critical tools, literary analysis that includes the author is only as progressive or regressive, only as sophisticated or crude, as the critic who uses it in a given textual interpretation. As Michael Smith declares, "[B]ecause authorial readings are necessary if students are to offer political critiques of texts, to pay an ethical respect to others different from themselves [...], and to engage with each other in common projects, [...] authorial reading can ground truly progressive practice" (47). Through the careful exploration of the nexus of authors, cultures, and texts, professors build avenues for exploring ethical concerns that are congruent with and complementary to literary analysis.

Reading and teaching literature ethically depend upon the realization that ethics itself is not a means to instill a certain set of "correct" values into our students. Ethics constitutes neither a core group of definitive responses to challenging moral questions nor a "static body of foundational principles, laws, and procedures"; it is rather "a mode of questioning and a manner of positioning" (Porter 218). Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunter, in their review of ethical scholarship, similarly conclude that pedagogical ethics "argue [s] for an ethical habit of thought and relationship that is not universalizing" but is "always in process" (7). In this formulation, ethics centers upon a realization of the contingency of conclusion and calls for the openness of inquiry. A delightful confluence arises in the description of ethics as a cultural work continually in progress, as this portrait likewise describes our students. We must work through ethical issues with an eye to the shifting and (one hopes) progressive nature of value systems, as we must also teach students who are themselves in a similar state of flux as they face new ideas and situations. Teaching ethically requires a conception of ethics and of students (and, I would add, of ourselves) as works in progress.

In constructing a classroom sensitive to the ethical dimensions of pedagogy and learning, the professor must inculcate respect for all students and for all student perspectives, while at the same time encouraging a rigorous critique of all ideas expressed. Christy Friend outlines the features of such a classroom: "It would include both students and teachers in an open forum where ethical positions are expressed and discussed. It would acquaint students with accepted value systems, but push them to critique those systems and examine alternative ones. And it would attempt to value all the different voices that comprise the classroom community" (560). Friend describes the ethical classroom as one in which values are taught, scrutinized, and adopted or rejected, and her paradigm should be expanded to include rigorous and wide-ranging critical analysis similarly applied to hermeneutic and theoretical approaches. That is to say, literature professors should teach our students the tenets of poststructuralist theory ("The author is dead"), but we should also encourage them to question this paradigm as well ("Some schools of thought teach that the author is dead, but is the author dead for me as a unique reader?"). I would like to stress that, in arguing for the inclusion of ethical concerns and criticism in the literary classroom, my intention is not to "replace" poststructuralist theory with ethical criticism, but to demonstrate the possibility that the two schools of thought can coexist productively (and peacefully) in the literary classroom. A central tenet of poststructuralism is the engagement with a multiplicity of views, but, ironically, our students who criticize poststructuralism when it does not accord with their own analytical tendencies are often dismissed as insufficiently sophisticated readers. An ethical classroom demands the enfranchisement of these students to resist a critical school productively, as they also learn its utility in terms of textual and cultural analysis. These goals of resistance and acceptance can indeed be addressed simultaneously despite the apparent paradox, if students are provided opportunities to explore the faultlines of a given theoretical approach by documenting their own critical reactions to it.

An ethical literature classroom can accomplish the goal of productively validating student responses by exploring the fruitful intersection of ethics and literary criticism. As Susan Johnston points out, literary scholars need to evaluate ethical arguments for their potential to situate subjective gains within wider considerations of ethical practice:

I want to argue that literary interpretation that is explicit in its appeal to shared ethical and moral bonds-that is, interpretation now frequently dismissed as unsophisticated at best and, at its worst, arbitrary and deeply oppressive-cannot simply be understood as an attempt to reproduce hegemonic interests. I am claiming that even as literary critical practice that is used to make ethical and moral claims can be used to further distasteful and disciplinary ends, to accuse all such claims simply of ideological production is to abrogate any emancipatory dimension such practice may contain. (204)

Johnston's call for ethical and moral claims within the literature classroom skillfully straddles the far right's endorsement of a univocally conservative ideology and the far left's de facto acceptance of a laissez-faire moral code. If ethics is to be a useful critical construction, it must be meaningfully prescriptive-some actions must be agreed upon as morally right and others as morally wrong-without being inhibitingly conscriptive – some actions must be agreed upon as coercive and stifling. Even if ethics is always in process, as I believe it is, it must nonetheless admit to a core utility in assisting us to reach value judgments, for we, as individuals and citizens, are often called upon to reach value judgments on a myriad of topics. Although as twentyfirst-century readers and teachers we can agree that rape is unequivocally wrong today, we do not seem to know how to respond to such authorial malfeasance when it occurred in the past, beyond expressing a bland sense of regret.

In the conflict between past actions and modern values, Gerald Graff's theory of teaching the conflicts provides a useful ethical model for presenting information to our students. For Graff, exposing the conflicts of literary study enables our students to articulate for themselves their reactions to complex social issues surrounding the reading of literature without surrendering to moral relativism: "Teaching the conflicts has nothing to do with relativism or denying the existence of truth. The best way to make relativists of students is to expose them to an endless series of different positions which are not debated before their eyes" (15). As a pedagogical strategy, teaching the conflicts offers an invaluable method of helping students understand the past and their relation to that past, and key to the success of teaching the conflicts is avoiding a descent into relativism. Debate is a crucial strategy for teaching the conflicts and establishing an ethical concern for the expression and consideration of multiple viewpoints, but the professor must moderate this debate. Within the ethical classroom, professors can establish their ethos, and encourage students to examine theirs, through an analysis of the ways in which the past constructs the present. If we grant the historical author a place in the ethical classroom, how does it affect our professorial praxis in terms of the construction of our pedagogical ethos, as well as our students' education?

THE ETHICS OF ETHOS: FLANNERY O'CONNOR, SOUTHERN RACISM, AND TEACHING THE CONFLICTS OF THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

In the ethical classroom in which divergent viewpoints are analyzed, the professor is nonetheless the de facto, if not the de jure, leader. Given these circumstances, students often assume that the professor will implicitly (if not explicitly) advocate the "right" position over the "wrong" one in the ensuing class discussions. In response to our students' assumptions, should we be advocates in the classroom? The debate on this issue swings widely: Jeffrey Wallen declares it to be "a bad idea on both moral and pedagogical grounds" (224); Penny Gold believes a professor "should not so much be an advocate of a position but rather a model of a person who takes a position, which, of course, necessitates voicing that position" (261). I agree with Gold's perspective more than with Wallen's, but I hesitate to endorse it fully. Although I do not shy away from advocating a position in the classroom when necessary, I purposefully limit opportunities to share personal viewpoints with my classes: they are there to learn Chaucer's literature, not to be dazzled by my brilliant social and political commentary.

Lynell Edwards discerns a middle ground in advocacy when she affirms that "it becomes crucial that ethical subjectivity is either modeled or made explicit in discourse practices if students are expected to reflect critically on their ethical commitments" (11). Edwards's call for professors to model an ethical subjectivity offers a critical strategy for negotiating the conflicts of advocacy, and the particular subject of authorial malfeasance offers a unique opportunity to be a particular kind of ethical model. Complementary to Graff's model of "teaching the conflicts," I suggest that we "teach the conflicted" by honestly confronting our own troubled relationships to the past. I am not suggesting a hand-wringing session in which we lament the imperfections of past men and women, but an in-depth analysis of the ways in which we in the present are haunted, if not constructed, by the past. (As William Faulkner observes, "The past is never dead. It's not even past" [92]). Such a praxis would fall within the perimeters of Gregory Jay's "pedagogy of disorientation," which leads students to the realization that "[a] n ethic is precisely a set of principles that is not coincident with the person, but rather something he or she embodies only individually and imperfectly" (628-29). The faultline between ethics and ethos, which is in some ways the distance between theory and practice, illuminates our understanding of the past, as it may also be used to illuminate our understanding of the present.

A brief digression into a more recent author who likewise provided another uncomfortable teaching moment may help to illustrate these issues further. Was Flannery O'Connor a racist? This question generates a storm of controversy when raised near O'Connor enthusiasts, and O'Connor herself denied the charge.5 However, it would be rather remarkable if O'Connor, born in the rural South in 1925, were not at least somewhat racist in her attitudes, as she was raised in an environment where racism was pervasive and naturalized. Certainly, her literature does not address itself sympathetically to readers of African descent, who must endure such punchlines as "Jesus is a trick on niggers" (39). When I was discussing the disturbing humor of this scene with a group of first-year composition students, one asked me whether O'Connor was a racist. I do not know how to answer this question in yesor-no terms, so we analyzed the complexity of her authorial mission and the bewildering levels of Christian confusion her characters display. This student focused on her own ethical belief that such lines as "Jesus is a trick on niggers" do not evince a concern to provide literature that appeals equally to black and white audiences. O'Connor's relationship to racism does not entail KKK rallies and cross burnings, but it nonetheless belongs to the quieter, and thus perhaps more virulent, forms of racism that passively, although no less inexorably, exclude African Americans from full participation in the American democracy and, concomitantly, full enjoyment of their nation's literary heritage. I could not definitively answer the question of O'Connor's racism for my student, as I likewise could not give my other student a definitive answer about whether Chaucer is a rapist. The answer for me, after reading her fiction, is that O'Connor, the author who puts racism on the page in instances of humor, was not as sensitive to racial matters as I wish she had been.6 There is a certain arrogance in my judgment of O'Connor, as who am I to tell her who she should have been and what she should have written, given her particular position in a culture markedly different from my own?

I choose Flannery O'Connor as my example because she speaks directly to the South's conflicted past, and this issue is very much alive at my university. At the University of Central Florida, many students proudly proclaim their southern heritage. Bumper stickers displaying a Confederate flag alongside the slogan "Heritage, Not Hatred" freckle our parking lots. This slogan rankles me with its simplistic view of the past's relationship to the present. One cannot strip the Confederate flag of its symbolism by defiantly stating that, although it may have been used in the past as a symbol of racism, it is now solely a means of honoring a white southern heritage. But I understand sympathetically my students' urge to reconfigure the Confederate flag as a symbol of "innocent" heritage rather than abject racism, as through this process they attempt to rehabilitate their ancestors and themselves. Although some of these students may be hiding their own racist motivations behind such a slogan, many are truly repelled by racist ideology but do not know how to reconcile a familial and cultural heritage of hatred with their current beliefs. Of the thousands of students at UCF, some descend from virulent racists, others descend from milder racists, still others descend from the progressive voices of racial desegregation that predated the civil rights movements of the 1960s, others descend from slaves, and others descend from backgrounds, families, and cultures independent of this specific history but nonetheless interconnected to its present-day ramifications. All students-and all people-are configured by the past in a way they must face if they are ever to understand their place in society.

In the Confederate flag bumper sticker, I see a similar dynamic to my own response to Chaucer if I attempt to deny the force of his authorial malfeasance: my version of the "Heritage, Not Hate" bumper sticker might read "Literature, Not Rape." Both are impossible reconstructions of the past, as the Confederate flag cannot be stripped of its racist connotations any more than Chaucer's literature can be freed from its author. Nor should they be. We need to understand the past on its own terms, but I cringe at the idea that accepting history on its own terms denies the force of ethics to speak against unethical historical actions. Rape and racism, in their brutal denial of basic human dignity, are transhistorically evil, and no amount of historical relativism should deny that fact. This analogy between Chaucer's rape and southern racism, problematic as it may be, amply demonstrates a tendency to ignore the complexities of the past by whitewashing, or just ignoring, their horrors. My student's words about Chaucer as a rapist, however, rightly reminded me that this process needs to be undertaken with care and precision if we are to understand fully our positions as twenty-first-century readers.

We need then an understanding of the past and our relationship to it that creates a dialectical bridge above the waters of moral relativism. Fredric Jameson describes in detail the necessity of dialectic in our attempts to study and to understand the actors, actions, and texts of history:

[I]f [. . .] we decide that Chaucer, say, or a steatopygous Venus, or the narratives of nineteenth-century Russian gentry, are more or less directly or intuitively accessible to us with our own cultural moyens du bord-then we have presupposed in advance what was to have been demonstrated, and our apparent "comprehension" of these alien texts must be haunted by the nagging suspicion that we have all the while remained locked in our own present [. . .] that we have somehow failed to touch the strangeness and the resistance of a reality genuinely different from our own. Yet if, as the result of such hyperbolic doubt, we decide to reverse this initial stance, and to affirm, instead and from the outset, the radical Difference of the alien object from ourselves, then at once the doors of comprehension begin to swing closed and we find ourselves separated by the whole density of our own culture from objects or cultures thus initially defined as Other from ourselves and thus as irremediably inaccessible. (43-44)

Jameson stresses the necessity of dialectic in understanding the past, and his call for an appreciation of both the past's alterity and its similarity to the present invites a critical analysis both engaged in and resistant to the past. This approach certainly helps to build scholarly tools of aesthetic and analytical appreciation of literature, but it does not substantially ameliorate the tension of enjoying literature written by malfeasant authors. We may better understand the social climate in which Chaucer could be a rapist and O'Connor could be a racist through a dialectic vision of their historical reality, but this understanding still leaves the reader with the cold comfort of moral relativism. As always, we can overlook authorial and historical malfeasance because it took place in the past and blame it on past cultural conditions rather than on the author.

Minnie Bruce Pratt provides a deeper model of understanding the dialectical relationship between past and present by analyzing her implication in the past's wrongs. In trying to situate herself vis-à-vis her family and her past, Pratt confronts the conflict between the pains of the past and the promise of the future: "I am my father's daughter in the present, living in a world he and my folks helped to create [...]. I honor the grief of his life by striving to change much of what he believed in: and my own grief by acknowledging that I saw him caught in the grip of racial, sexual, cultural fears that I still am trying to understand myself (53). The strength of this idea, of honoring the past by changing it, of forgiving its multiple malfeasances while not forgetting them, highlights the conflicting positions of all human beings, as no history is blameless. The past engenders the present, and we are all constructed by both its sins and its successes. Throughout Pratt's essay, we also see how she is conflicted by her understanding of this past, and I see this conflict as a powerful vision of a teacherly ethos. Pratt offers no simple solution to the problems of the past but allows her reader the vision of herself in struggle. The topic of authorial malfeasance likewise offers us as teachers the opportunity to analyze our historical construction as present-day subjects who must negotiate the past to realize the future.

Within this construction of professorial ethos, multiple layers of identification and empathy are crucial to building constructively upon the mistakes of history. With the full range of the historic past, it is insufficient to condemn without an intellectual and emotional investment in all of the actors of history. As Gernot Böhme declares in his ethical assessment of the Holocaust's repercussion on the present day:

To do justice to the seriousness conferred on one's own life by Auschwitz it is not enough to be indignant about the fact and to distance oneself from it with a declamatory "Never again." What is at issue is not only the fact of Auschwitz, but the ability to look its possibility in the face. To do this one must be able to imagine what it meant to be a participant or a victim. Only by opening oneself to the possibility of Auschwitz does one become able to shape one's life so that one is forearmed against its becoming a reality. (3 7)7

Böhme's call to imagine the possibility of participating in the Holocaust brutalizes the safety of our subject positions. Empathy, though not sympathy, for outrageous evil is excruciatingly discomforting, and I cannot honestly say that I have succeeded in this practice. In this failure, though, I have increased my understanding of the ways in which history constructs my ethics and my ethos, both as an individual and as a literature professor. Our students often think that we professors are supposed to have all the answers, but this question, this ethical conundrum of situating ourselves in relation to the wrongs of the past, effectively stymies all answers that would promise soothing closure. Through this conflict, a professor's ethos emerges not as the bright light of all knowledge, but as one that embraces and repudiates the past that enables it.

Thus, I encourage my students to honor Chaucer for his successes, and to hold him to account for his transgressions, and I model this reaction for them through a class discussion of the ways in which authorial ethos influences our understandings of his literature. But more than this model of analyzing through an ethical lens, I encourage my students to analyze the ways in which their worlds are constructed by the past, whether through the possibilities of Chaucer's violent male privilege, of O'Connor's muted racism, or of any other historical, literary, or familial figure. Individual introspection on this issue is key to social development, as only when individuals accept and realize their complicity in the past can they change the future. As Jay observes, "[T]he notion of ethos demands that a person be aware of his or her fate and know well the historical circumstances that shape the moment in which a person must respond to what is with an action aimed at what might become" (626). When students are encouraged to examine their ethics and their ethos as readers of particular texts, they face their own participation in the past, the present, and the future.

In terms of classroom praxis, I allow my students the opportunity to write one of their research papers on the topic of their personal and ethical responses to Chaucer and his literature. By allowing students to write personally critical analyses of their reactions to Chaucer's literature through an ethical hermeneutic (and they must document and cite at least five ethical critics or philosophers in their bibliography), the students experience the difficulties of responding to the past, as they simultaneously join an ongoing debate about ethics (rather than merely summarizing the current state of affairs). In this light, personal ethics need not be a digression from the critical fare of Chaucer's literature; rather, ethical analysis can be successfully integrated into the trajectory of a course by our inviting students to analyze critically their positions as readers.

What kind of essays emerge in response to this optional assignment of analyzing one's ethical response and situatedness in relation to Chaucer? Often they are hesitant and confused, yet honest and open. No student solves this problem, nor can this essay itself, or any other. I am quite aware that this essay raises questions it only tentatively answers. Writing it, however, was not without its pedagogical value for my continuing growth as a scholar and as a teacher, as it offered me the opportunity to research outside my specialty of medieval literature into the fields of ethics, history, and pedagogy. As I have grown as a teacher by considering the complexities of this pedagogical question, my students also grow by grappling with a past that refuses to ameliorate its harshness. My students' answers to these questions are imperfect, and their essays are perhaps a bit weaker than if they had offered another literary analysis, a skill they have practiced many times prior to entering my upper-level courses. (Since I allow my students to revise their writing, that these essays are initially weaker than standard literary analyses does not adversely affect their grades.) But I see deep engagement and critical concern as they attempt to negotiate their relationships to the past by reading Chaucer through his life in the past and their own lives in the present. By writing these essays, many students undergo the type of ethical soul-searching reminiscent of a Henry James protagonist; increased self-awareness and ethical understanding, if it avoids the siren song of solipsism, can surely serve as a healthy component of a liberal arts education.

Such an assignment provides students the opportunity to develop their critical thinking skills on themselves and on literature, and this conjoined approach allows them the chance to learn a lesson that is perhaps more applicable to the contours of their lives than another literary analysis paper. Mark Edmundson asks professors to ponder whether works of literature "provide usable truths for ourselves and our students," citing connections between Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next and his own experiences in an authoritarian high school. These connections between the literary and the actual radically altered his outlook on life and provide a compelling instance of the ways in which literature speaks to readers through unique and very personal affinities. The utilitarian is often derided in the academy, but Edmundson's call for students to generate usable truths in their academic writing recognizes the necessity of engaging students intimately with their identities as readers. If the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living is indeed true, then the curricula of English departments should give students the opportunity to examine their lives as they scrutinize literature, as well.

The meticulous consideration of oneself and one's own values arises often in the act of reading, and in many ways we construct our personal identities by our responses to literature. As academics, we intimately know the immediate collegiality available by joining professional organizations dedicated to our favorite authors. The likely potential of such bonhomie among any group of readers-from professional scholars to the many book clubs across the world-shows that, in textual encounters among narratives, authors, and readers, the reader's identity is at stake. As Diana Fuss observes of identity formation, "Identification is a process that keeps identity at a distance, that prevents identity from ever approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure, totalizable" (2). Who we are and who we want to become as readers and as human beings, our very identities-contingent, fungible, and everevolving-are fractured and reborn through the act of reading and the act of positioning ourselves via texts and contexts. Analyzing the construction of our very selves, our embodiments of ethics and ethos, through the process of reading-surely such a process of critical inquiry would build analytical skills as much as a critical analysis of a given Canterbury Tale.

Yet another strength of this approach is that it confronts students with a core truth of ethics that many would rather not face-that ethics is a human construct and, as such, continually evolving. Religious students often invoke the Bible in classroom discussion, and I attempt to move them from knee-jerk appeals to textual authority to an understanding of the ways in which morality and ethics evolve. As Phillip Sipiora argues, "Ethical judgments [. . .] are never static but are always dynamic. The concept of ethics necessarily invokes the meeting of inherited, 'timeless' systems of values with the situational context of the immediate circumstances" (41). By encouraging students to situate themselves within the problematic past, they unearth a better sense of the necessity of a stern empathy that understands, forgives, and honors without failing to condemn when necessary.

If we handle our own ethical confusions about authorial malfeasance in a way that builds connections between our students and ourselves, we will have also created a powerful current of mutual empathy within the classroom. As Kia Richmond argues, "An ethics of empathy revolves around the idea that empathetic communication gives both the speaker [...] and the listener [...] an opportunity to be understood and to understand. The key is that empathy invites connection rather than coercion" (41). Empathy with the past can likewise create empathy within the classroom. From this perspective, as Frederick Antczak points out, "We can teach our students how to be more discerning about the company they keep in discourse" (22). Certainly I want my students to keep Chaucer within this company, whether he was a rapist or not. Through this empathy, they might also see that criminals are often their own victims as well; as ethical systems are virtually useless if we cannot societally agree upon certain standards of behavior, however, such empathy must also be balanced with an ethical responsibility to condemn when necessary. We can also help students to understand the ways in which a discourse with the past depends upon a discourse with the present and that their growth as readers in many ways mirrors their growth as ethical human beings.

"The humanities do not humanize," declares George Steiner (394). I could not agree with this statement more. No matter how brilliant the text, it does not automatically breathe life and compassion into its reader. But if the humanities do not humanize, human beings do. As teachers of the humanities, we model our humanity for our students every day. If we respond seriously, compassionately, and ethically to their "unsophisticated" reactions to issues that may seem unworthy of critical scrutiny to us as professional literary scholars, we can ask them to consider issues of deep ethical relevance to themselves as developing critical thinkers, and we can build a corollary concern for ethical thought within the typical perimeters of the literature classroom. If we model an ethos of conflict, confusion, honor, appreciation, and forgiveness of the past through our relationships to the authors we study, we continue the process of humanizing our students, a process that began long before we met them and will continue long after they leave our classrooms, as it will for us as well.