Love and work: a reading of John Williams’ Stoner

Abstract

This article offers a close reading of the novel Stoner by John Williams. Stoner, and not the countless reports and jeremiads on teaching, helps us find what we are searching for: a way to live – and talk about – teaching in a dignified and artful way. We need to seek out voices that remind, recall and reveal teaching for the beautifully lovingly difficult work that it is. We need more voices like the one Williams provides in Stoner as we work at teaching, teacher education and educational reform. When we think about educational policy related to teaching, we must remember that philosophical readings of literature have much to offer our thinking. My hope is that this essay turns our attention back to Stoner while encouraging us to see the potential that literature holds for how we think about teaching. Though a more superficially uplifting book may initially feel like the right book to keep teachers excited to teach, I find that Stoner is the work that I keep returning to as a check against demoralization and a reminder of what living teaching means.

Keywords:

• Philosophy of literature
• John Williams
• Stoner
• Philip Jackson
• teacher education

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Paul Smeyers for his editorial work on this paper, and Richard Smith for his very careful and helpful edits. Finally, I want to express deep gratitude to my undergraduate advisor Stanley Bates for showing me what a life of teaching and learning at a liberal arts college could look like and giving me confidence to hope that I might make that life my own.

Notes

1. As I was finishing this essay a found a wonderful exception to this in Fulford (2016).

2. The language of acknowledgment is a direct response to the work of Cavell (1999).

3. There is a renewed push to make teacher education ‘practice-based.’ For an engaging journalistic overview, see Green (2015).

4. There is something interesting about how Emerson (1983) makes a similar point about working and living in ‘The Over-Soul.’ Here also I want to bring to mind Cavell’s (1999) distinction between knowing and acknowledging again. William Stoner’s life stands in acknowledgement of the deep connection between work and life.

5. Here I am reminded of the arresting line from Robert Frost’s ‘Mowing’: ‘The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows’ (Frost 1995, 26). For an excellent gloss of this poem, and the place of work in Frost see Poirier (1990).

6. David Hansen’s moving tribute to Philip Jackson’s life and work – titled Philip W. Jackson and the Meaning of Dedication – at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association helped me think a great deal about how the term dedicate and the art of dedication are central to education.

7. I see something of a similar point made by Wolf (2012) when she discusses meaning in life.

8. For a discussion of understanding (and its relation to love), see Frank (2015).

9. For an excellent discussion of demoralization, see Santoro (2001). For a response to this work, see Frank (2016).