This course was ill-taught by an under-confident instructor

From A Literary Education by Joseph Epstein.

I first came across Epstein more than twenty years, nearing thirty years, ago as a subscriber to American Scholar of which he was the editor at the time. A master essayist, he was droll, erudite, generous. He is also prolific, with some twenty odd books to his name, with most of them still in print.

One of his most distinctive traits is his liberal use of quotations to illustrate his points. Not just Oxford Dictionary of Quotations quotes but I read this in this book and noted this line quotes. As you read, you can feel ideas and literature across time, genres, and styles being knitted together before your eyes.

His deep love and focus is literature. Mine is non-fiction. Perhaps for that simple reason, I usually dip in and out of his books, sampling here, mulling there. But whether read at a gulp or sampled at leisure, I have many of his books and recommend them to others.

I am just beginning A Literary Education. He relates a serendipitous course which helped determine the direction of his education. I think this is one of the better and more succinct articulations of the value of literature.

To give some notion of the randomness, the almost accidental, nature of education, which has always impressed me, I would say that the most significant course I took at the University of Chicago was a badly conceived one that was, in effect, a history of the development of the novel. This course was ill-taught by an under-confident instructor not yet thirty. The reading equivalent of a dance marathon, in ten weeks the course went - at the rate of a novel per week - from The Princess of Cleves through Ulysses, with stops along the way for Jane Austen, Stendahl, Dostoyevksy, Flaubert, Mann and Proust. What do you suppose a boy of twenty gets out of reading Swann's Way? My best guess is somewhere between 15 to 20 percent of what Proust put into it.

Yet still but nonetheless and however, something about this course lit my fire. From it I sensed that, if any inkling about the way the world works and the manner in which human nature is constituted were to be remotely available during my stay on the planet, I should have the best chance of discovering it through literature, and perhaps chiefly through the novel. The endless details set out in novels, the thoughts of imaginary characters, the dramatization of large themes through carefully constructed plots, the portrayals of how the world works, really works - these were among the things that literature, carefully attended to, might one day help me to learn.

Given my love of facts and data and patterns, I am not about to throw over a lifetime's habit of reading nonfiction, but I am certain that had I ever had Epstein as a professor, I would have gotten much more out of literature than the run-of-mill literature classes I have taken.