The group—a professor, a psychologist, and three students—gathered in a classroom in Duane Library on Feb. 14, where they spoke to members of the Fordham community about how love appears in their professional work.  

Literature on Love

Some of them shared their favorite literature on love. Thomas O’Donnell, Ph.D., associate professor of English and medieval studies, printed out three poems and passed out copies to the audience: a joyful poem written by Comtessa de Dia, a 12th-century French noblewoman; a mournful poem by Umm Khalid, an Arabic poet from the 8th or 9th century; and a funny poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, a 14th-century English poet. 

“[Chaucer] says he is so in love that he feels like a piece of roasted fish in jam sauce,” O’Donnell said, to laughter from the audience. 

Asher Harris, a Ph.D. student in theology, talked about American jazz musician John Coltrane, who expressed love and gratitude to God for saving him from his heroin addiction. The most open expression of this love appeared in his album A Love Supreme, particularly in the song “Psalm,” said Harris, who played a recording for the audience. 

Another scholar, Christopher Supplee, FCRH ’25, a creative writing major, shared a poem he wrote and recited in honor of the event: “A World Without Love.” 

“There are matters that cannot be mended by mortal hands alone,” he said to the audience, reading from his poem. “That only miracles may fix, assuming they still exist.” 

Supplee said that when he was writing his poem, he was inspired by the question “What is love?” 

“It made me want to sit down and think about what love means to me—what are my experiences, what I’ve read, what I’ve been taught from scholars, writers, and entertainment,” Supplee said. “Love can be expressed in many different ways, whether it be through justice, romance, or friendship.” 

Queer Love at Fordham

Other scholars shared their own research on love. Benedict Reilly, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who studies theology, discussed the theme of love from his book Queer Prayer at Fordham. He started the book project two years ago, interviewing LGBTQ+ members of the Fordham community about how they pray. During those conversations, he learned about the connection between prayer and love. One interviewee said that she learned to love herself through prayer. Another interviewee—an asexual and aromantic woman who longed to have a child of her own—spoke about how she found love and comfort through a Hail Mary. 

“I’m sharing all of these with you because I want you to think about different prayers or songs that might be helpful to you all as you fall in love,” Reilly said. 

The final invited speaker, Sarika Persaud, Ph.D., a supervising psychologist in Counseling and Psychological Services who specializes in love and relationships, spoke about what her work has taught her about love. 

“When I’m sitting with a person and helping them heal, I’m not only opening them up to love as a feeling, to feel love again, but to love as who you are—to exist in the world as love,” said Persaud, who added that her Hinduism philosophy informs her work. “All of your desires, whatever relationships you enter into, whatever relationships come your way, whatever challenges come your way, they’re all opportunities … to love more.”

What Love Means to a Jesuit

After each guest spoke, event host and theology professor Brenna Moore invited the audience to reflect on what love means to them. 

Among them was Timothy Perron, S.J., a Jesuit in formation and doctoral student in theology. 

“As somebody who has taken a vow of celibacy, a lot of times, people think, ‘What could that person know about love, especially romantic love?’” Perron said. “But actually, I’ve thought about it a lot.” 

Before he decided to become a priest, he wondered if he could commit to that vow. After much thought, he said he realized that every human has the same needs and desires, but they appear in different ways. 

“I still have a need for close friendship, intimacy, love, and care for others … [but there are]all of these different ways that love could be understood,” Perron said. “If I see somebody who is looking for money or something, I’ll often stop and talk to them or take them to the nearest deli … Just stuff like that, where you feel that love and that connection … intentionally developing close relationships with people, keeping in close touch, calling them—all of those sorts of things, I think, are part of what love means.” 

In her novel, Garcia tells the intertwined, intergenerational stories of a group of women, starting in 1866 with María Isabel, a cigar factory worker affected by the bloody stirrings of Cuban nationalists’ fight for independence from Spain, and ending with two of María Isabel’s descendants whose fates converge with those of a Salvadoran mother and daughter in present-day Miami.

As the women’s stories progress, Garcia, who studied sociology and communications at Fordham College at Rose Hill, tackles opioid addiction, migrant women in detention, and the stories told and untold that shape their lives and legacies.

Hispanic Women uses both social science and literature to examine the changing roles of Latina women in society with regard to Latino men, motherhood, the labor force, sexual awareness, media, political and economic power, and women’s liberation. Using literature as a lens, students in Rodríguez’s course examine the structural position and changing concepts of Hispanic women in the Americas.

And visiting authors like Garcia help with this exploration. A few weeks before her visit, students also heard from Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, the author of Daughters of the Stone and Woman of Endurance.

During November’s hourlong Zoom session, Garcia, who has her own fond memories of taking a class with Rodríguez before graduating in 2007, shared how Fordham helped shape who she is today, her favorite part of the writing process, and why women figure so prominently in her work.

She also delved into the meaning of “salt” in the novel’s title. Though she was drawn to the word’s versatility and varied connotations, Garcia said she “looked at elements that kept coming up multiple times [as she was writing the novel], and salt was one of those. And it can mean so many things,” from the salt of the ocean and sweat and tears to biblical references.

Liliana Gutierrez, a senior in the Fordham Theatre program, asked Garcia about the nature of history and why she adopted a nonlinear, vignette style for the novel.

Garcia explained that such a structure ensures that the book has “that feeling of stories.”

“When I think about history, I think it’s important to always realize that we’re talking about a story. It’s in the word,” she said. “I knew that I didn’t want to write a sweeping saga that went into all the details of these past characters fully: I wanted glimpses,” like those you have of your own history.

Hannah Berggren, a sophomore majoring in urban studies and sociology, wondered how extensive the research process was for the novel, particularly regarding the intimate details that emerge regarding migrant detention centers and the experiences of the women held there. Garcia drew from her own experiences to fuel those passages, she said: Prior to enrolling in an MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University, she did some organizing work with women in deportation and detention centers.

Rodríguez said she felt that the “section on detention was one of the best” in the book “because you see this coverage in the media where people, or politicians essentially” drop in with platitudes, “but it’s only when you read your descriptions from the women’s perspective that you really get the full picture,” she told Garcia and the class.

Garcia, who also writes poetry and short stories, is at work on her next novel. Though it’s early stages yet, and she’s “still figuring out the meat of it,” she knows one thing for sure: It will center on women characters.

As such, Fordham University in London will be offering a series of virtual lectures and classes next semester that will reflect both traditional and contemporary aspects of the city, the U.K., and Europe, said Mark Simmons, interim head and director of academic affairs there. The offerings will be available to all full-time Fordham undergraduates.

“We will be creating an immersive experience, a multidisciplinary approach to what London is about today, one that ranges from subjects on gender and identity in modern Britain to a Bollywood take on Shakespeare to parallels of Brexit in U.S. politics,” he said.

The array of 3-credit courses includes several English courses that delve into the Romantics as well as the Modernists; a history course on 20th-century Europe; a political science course on European politics; and business courses on ethics, legal frameworks, and global investments, as well as a marketing class on global sustainability. There will be virtual tours of the city’s modern and contemporary architecture, and another tour that looks back at the Victorian era. Virtual internships will continue to be on offer next semester.

In addition, two learning series will give students a taste of what Fordham London has to offer.

A one-credit weekly seminar titled Britain Today will feature an ensemble Fordham London faculty on subjects that range from modern UK history and government, media’s role in the U.K., London’s arts and theater scene, the landscape of religion in today’s Britain, and London’s role as a world financial capital.

Simmons said that the seminar provides a sampling of courses on offer at Fordham London but would be interesting to others as well.

“For students who wanted to learn about London this would give you a flavor of British society,” said Simons.

The London Business Speaker Series is a certificate program curated by Meghann L. Drury-Grogan, Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media management at the Gabelli School of Business. The program will run weekly from Feb. 8, to be held every Thursday around lunchtime in New York. The series will tap into established Gabelli School partnerships, including the London offices of Ernst and Young, Bloomberg, and Accenture.

“The program will showcase the relationships we’ve been able to build here in London with various alumni and other established ties that will give students a global experience,” she said. “There will be a plethora of different perspectives that give students who can’t study abroad, for whatever the reason, a chance to learn about the U.K. Now that we have the opportunity of putting on these virtual events, we hope to continue this into the future.”

Geoff Snell, who teaches the architecture courses, said he plans to prerecord his tours during daylight hours and deliver the lectures live.

“When we had to go live this past spring we learned what worked and what didn’t work,” timing-wise, he said. “We want everyone to be engaged with the material.”

Snell’s course, like those in all the disciplines, includes a healthy dose of the contemporary juxtaposed with the modern. The skyscrapers of London’s business district, such as the Shard and the Walkie Talkie, are featured alongside St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Pancreas Station, and other Victorian masterpieces.

“We’ll be jumping from art deco to Christopher Wren to the Gherkin, all different styles, but like so much else in London, every architectural style has something to do with what went before,” he said. 

Students should register for classes by Dec. 4; those who had applied to study abroad for the Spring 2021 semester have priority for registration.

“Instead of, ‘Oh, I see from your chart that you have congestive heart failure, so tell me how your breathing is,’ I started by rolling my chair away from the computer, putting my hands in my lap, not writing, not typing, and said: ‘I will be your doctor, so I need to know a lot about you. Tell me what you think I should know about your situation,’” Charon recalls.

“One woman replied, ‘You mean you want me to talk?’ That tells you something about her prior experience with doctors.”

Charon, a 1970 Fordham graduate, is the founder of narrative medicine, which calls for listening to patients’ personal stories and responding in ways that enhance their care. A Harvard-trained physician and a literary scholar, she is a professor of medicine and the founding chair of medical humanities and ethics at Columbia University.

When patients are invited to share their stories, they often provide a lot of information and context. “One woman said, ‘Well, I didn’t tell you about the fire in our house in Panama,’ which turned out to be really pivotal for this patient. Or, ‘I didn’t tell you that my daughter is in prison,’ or ‘I didn’t tell you that I was in prison, but here, I brought you a book of poems that I wrote while I was in prison,’” Charon says.

Nonverbal cues are also important, she adds. “As I’m gathering everything I might come to know about this person, I’m listening to her words. I’m looking at her face. I’m noticing her gestures. I’m noticing the smell of her body. I’m reacting to any kind of emotional cues that may or may not be said, all that stuff.”

Charon quickly realized that having the doctor and patient work together to better understand the patient’s condition added value to the typical topline diagnosis. “Some physicians, especially those in the surgical specialties, will say to me, ‘Rita, I leave that for the social workers. I need to find out if the patient can bear weight on the new hip.’ Well, do that, but let’s also address the problem that the patient came to us for help with. And sometimes it’s a social problem. Sometimes they can’t afford the medicine, so they don’t take it. Sometimes it’s, ‘I didn’t want to tell you how much alcohol I drink.’

“With this approach,” she says, “we have a better shot from the start in addressing the problems that the patient herself considers problems, and not restricting that to things that have diagnostic codes.”

‘A Person Who Questions How Things Are Done’

While medicine ran in her family—Charon’s father was a family doctor, and one of her grandfathers was a physician as well—she didn’t plan to follow the same path. She describes her college-age self as a young Catholic kid from Providence, Rhode Island. “My parents let me come to New York only if I’d study with the Jesuits,” she recalls. She began her undergraduate studies at Thomas More College, Fordham’s liberal arts college for women at the time, but switched to the University’s experimental Bensalem College and was part of its inaugural class in 1967. (The college closed in 1974.)

At Bensalem, she says, “we took very seriously questions like, how do you learn, and what is learning? It helped me to become a person who questions how things are done, especially in terms of how we learn and how we grow.”

Charon went on to medical school at Harvard, but returned to New York City for her residency at Montefiore Hospital and became interested in the ideas of the bioethicists, historians, and other scholars working in what came to be known as the medical humanities.

During her residency, the work of Henry James captivated Charon so much that what began as a side interest turned into a doctorate at Columbia University. “I became a literary scholar and an internist at the same time,” Charon says. “My study of literature made me a different kind of doctor, and I realized also that what I knew about medicine contributed to the study of literature.”

‘Letting People’s Voices Be Heard’

In the 20 years since Charon coined the term, narrative medicine has been adopted more and more widely; Columbia, Temple University, Ohio State, and other institutions have begun narrative medicine programs. Charon’s research has won funding from both the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and she is the author of the book Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006). Her workshops attract people from across disciplines.

“I’ve found that when I’m able to enact these narrative techniques with patients and families, I feel a stronger bond with them,” says Dr. Daniel Eison, an oncology hospitalist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who studied narrative medicine with Charon. “Narrative medicine is even more important for patients from a racial, religious, or socioeconomic minority. They’re very disempowered in these settings, and narrative medicine seeks to acknowledge the power differentials and level the field a little bit by letting people’s voices be heard.”

As part of the fight against the novel coronavirus, Charon has been making more narrative medicine resources available to caregivers and working to help clinicians and medical students reduce their social isolation using online tools.

“We’ve had a robust international response to these training sessions,” Charon says. “The creative work they are able to do and the responses they receive from their writing is soul-building, and led one emergency department physician to tell us, ‘I was able to breathe for the first time all week at your session.’”

—Chris Quirk is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.

“This is such an unexpected and exciting honor, especially since this was Fordham’s first year having students submit to the awards,” said Fisher, who is studying at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, and working part-time as an English teaching assistant in Seville.

Fisher, who studied comparative literature and behavioral development, originally wrote her paper as part of a semester-long capstone project in an honors seminar taught by English professor Shoshana Enelow. The course, Person, Place, or Thing, explored human beings’ relationships with the environment. With guidance from Enelow, the winner of the 2015-2016 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, Fisher said she was able to explore new ways of reading literature, criticism, and the world.

“In every class session, Professor Enelow manages to create the ideal space for creative thought and discussion, fostering an environment of exciting possibilities and potential connections,” she said.

UA, a leading undergraduate awards program celebrating outstanding undergraduate coursework, received 6,472 entries from applicants around the world. The top 10 percent of papers in each of the 25 categories, which includes history, economics, philosophy, and literature, was recognized as “Highly Commended.” Fisher and others at that level have been invited to attend this year’s UA Global Summit, a four-day networking and personal development event in Dublin, Ireland in November.

Marilynne Robinson’s classic 1980 novel, Housekeeping, the focus of Fisher’s paper, tells the story of Ruth and Lucille, two orphaned sisters who are raised by a series of relatives in Fingerbone, Idaho. Among their many caretakers is their unconventional aunt, Sylvie.

In her thesis, Fisher drew on writings by French philosopher Jacques Derrida and American scholar Donna Haraway to examine how Sylvie’s “boundary-less existence” challenges and shapes each girl’s personal identity.

“I argue that Sylvie occupies one extreme on a spectrum of transient existence,” said Fisher. “She eschews all conventional human connection for the sake of forming new, surprising connections with nature and the non-human specters that haunt Fingerbone. She stands in direct opposition to Lucille and the rest of the townspeople, who hold fast to their concrete human world and ignore the possibility that the non-human and spectral have a legitimate place in their lives.”

Fisher, a recipient of FCLC Dean’s 2016 Undergraduate Research Grant Awards, said she believes that those who are open to “boundary-less love” often find themselves caught between two worlds. In this instance, while the character Ruth is naturally drawn to her aunt’s eccentricity, she also craves the familial intimacy she finds in her sister Lucille.

“As the novel’s narrator, [Ruth] engages in deeper self-examination than any other character and is able to face her most painful desires and failings,” she said.

Fisher found Haraway’s concept of “making kin,” or connections, particularly influential. She said she circles back to Haraway’s philosophy whenever she encounters a relationship that seems rigidly fixed—whether in literature or in life.

“In this paper and in others, I try to convey that life is much less fixed than we often wish it to be and much of what separates us from other people, non-humans, [and our]environment, we construct for our own comfort,” she said.

The grant will allow Lise Schreier, PhD, an associate professor of French, to devote the 2016-17 academic year to completing research on her forthcoming book, The Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

“A grant such as this is significant for the Department of Modern Languages and Literature because it makes us visible as strong researchers,” said Schreier, whose specializations include 19th-century French literature, French colonialism, and race and racism.

“We are a research-oriented department with a variety of courses. Teaching language is a pathway to understanding various cultures.”

Schreier, a native of Saint-Étienne, France, is studying the 18th-century phenomenon of child-gifting, the practice of purchasing or kidnapping dark-skinned children in Senegal, Algeria, India, and the Ottoman Empire as travel souvenirs and fashion accessories for upper-class French women.

Archival material about child-gifting is scant, and few scholars have undertaken research on the practice. Schreier’s own investigation has required some creative thinking as she shifted from letters to literature to artwork searching for clues of these children’s existence.

Some evidence came from mentions of the children in letters between wealthy French women. “Other information comes up in places like letters to tailors, which shows how these children were dressed, where they lived in the castles, how much money was spent on them,” she said.

Schreier is also interested in later references to child-gifting that appear in books assigned to French schoolchildren, which often involved a young character who was given a dark-skinned child as a gift. She argues that even after the abolition of slavery in France, when the actual practice of child-gifting ended, these stories served to inculcate colonial ideals in young French citizens.

The message of the books, Schreier said, was that “the French had to raise their children in such a way as to make them good, strong colonial citizens. This started in schools—particularly with girls, who were used to reading books about dolls, reading how to interact with a doll, raise a doll, educate a doll.

“These young readers, already used to being responsible for a doll, would be given a book in which an African boy was gifted to a French child in place of a doll. The inference they were expected to make was that it was normal to take care of a black child, just like a doll. When they’re older, it was hoped, they’d already be used to thinking of colonial subjects as their responsibility.”

This also points to the significant role that women played in advancing French colonialism, Schreier contends.

“From paintings of Old Regime noblewomen adorned with flattering attestations to their wealth, to 1870s moralistic novels featuring women advancing the Third Republic’s ‘civilizing mission’ with the loyal help of their dark-skinned charges, the child-gift motif articulated evolving models of femininity in a trans-national France,” she wrote in the grant narrative.

The NEH is an independent federal agency created as a result of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Of the more than 1,200 applications each year, less than 7 percent of applicants receive one of the coveted grants.

Practically speaking, this statement represents an ill-mannered remark indicating one’s dislike of a particular aunt. Grammatically, the statement offers an example of the linguistic term “deixis.”

A new book by English Professor Heather Dubrow, PhD, the Rev. John Boyd, SJ Chair in the Poetic Imagination, focuses on deictic, or “pointing” words—for instance, this/that, here/there, come/go, or now/then. These words point to particular people, places, or time, but their meanings depend on the context in which they are used.

“Despite how technical and narrow the term makes it sound, it is really central to many texts and to everyday life,” said Dubrow, who is also the director of Fordham’s Poets Out Loud reading series. “People use deixis all the time whether or not they know the term.”

In Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “Here,” “This,” “Come” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dubrow examines how 16th- and 17th-century authors such as Donne and Shakespeare used deictic words. In one respect, deixis could help establish binaries—“here” versus “there,” “now” versus “then.” However, deixis could also serve to interrupt those binaries.

“‘Here’ is not only contrasted to ‘there,’ but also may be part of a spectrum that runs from right here, to a little closer, to further away but still relatively close, etc.,” Dubrow said.

Because of this, deictic words had important functions in the texts, she said, such as negotiating “cultural pressures, possibilities, and tensions” within topics ranging from English attitudes to theological debates.

One chapter discusses deixis as it pertains to religion and spirituality. Pointing words can be problematic when talking about a spiritual dimension. One might say that heaven is “here” or “there,” but what is meant by that? Does that mean heaven is a physical location situated in a particular place?

“Critics often talk about how deixis embodies or reflects preexisting attitudes,” Dubrow said. “I’m also interested in how it creates attitudes.”

Dubrow’s book is part of Palgrave’s Pivot series, an initiative that quickly disseminates academic research via digital publishing, as well as offering the customary hardcover edition. The series publishes works between 25,000 and 50,000 words—longer than a journal article, but shorter than most full-length books—within three months of a manuscript’s completion, allowing for new research to reach the public as swiftly as possible.

Less known about the Russian novelist is his fascination—as well as his criticism—of Catholicism.

At a Nov. 10 lecture sponsored by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Dostoevsky scholar Elizabeth Blake, PhD, assistant professor of Russian at Saint Louis University, spoke with undergraduates and faculty at the Rose Hill campus about Dostoevsky’s strong opinions about religion. The author, who yesterday would have celebrated his 194th birthday, was deeply critical of Catholics and especially of the Society of Jesus.

In her book Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground (Northwestern University Press, 2014), Blake traces Dostoevsky’s disapproval back to his experience as a political prisoner in Siberia. For four years he was imprisoned with a group of Polish Catholic political activists and revolutionaries.

Besides resenting the Poles for their contempt of the Russian prisoners, Dostoevsky, a Russian Orthodox Christian, was wary of the Poles’ allegiance to the Jesuits, whose organizational structure was likened by Dostoevsky’s co-conspirators to communism. It didn’t help matters that the Jesuits vowed obedience to the pope—Pius IX at the time—whom Dostoevsky considered to be a spiritually manipulative figure.

Dostoevsky continued to harbor this mistrust when, decades later, as a member of the Society for Lovers of Spiritual Enlightenment (OLDP), he participated in discussions regarding the possibility of reuniting the long-divided Eastern Orthodox Church and the Western Catholic Church.

Needless to say, he was not in favor of the union.

“[He] indicates that such a union requires coercion, which Dostoevsky finds at the heart of the ‘Roman idea’ of ‘forced unity of humanity,’” Blake said. Dostoevsky described this coercion on the part of the Catholic Church with the sentiment: “Be my brother, or off with your head.”

This obsession with Catholicism, which Blake said vacillated between fascination and repulsion, inevitably colored Dostoevsky’s writings. According to Blake, it underlies one of the best-known passages in literature, the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, told by the character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov.

“It reinforces [the church’s]image as a feudal institution,” Blake said. “The Grand Inquisitor’s theological justification for the use of the auto-da-fé [a type of punitive torture used during the Inquisition]on his flock for their own protection . . . [and his]manipulation of the sacred mysteries to maintain control over his flock parallels the measures of political repression . . . adopted by the Catholic Church.”

Indeed, Blake said, Dostoevsky could be bold in his characterization of Catholicism.

Then again, “If he were cautious, he wouldn’t have written these great novels,” she said.

Founded in 2012, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is the first university-based center for Orthodox Christian Studies in the western hemisphere. The center supports scholarship and teaching that is critical to the ecclesial community, public discourse, and the promotion of Christian unity.

When she had signed up for Susan Greenfield’s course on homelessness this semester—an English course with 30 required hours of service learning—she was as ready and willing as any Jesuit-educated student to serve the community.

But when she showed up to volunteer at a Bronx shelter for women and children and was told that there was no need for her, Shilo was at a loss.

“When we fulfill a need, we feel important, we feel irreplaceable, and we feel satisfied,” Shilo, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said during Greenfield’s Friday morning class. “When . . . this need-based satisfaction was taken out of the [equation], I began to question what my motive was in doing service.

“Am I serving simply to feel good about myself, and is it okay if I am, as long as the result is the same? Am I doing it as a type of ‘humble brag,’ making sure everyone knows that I am a socially conscious, ‘good,’ and caring individual?”

Feeling conflicted about service

These are the tough questions that Greenfield, PhD, a professor of English, wants her undergraduate students to be bothered by. Her course, Homelessness: Literary Representation and Historical Reality, uses a literary approach to examine the complex issues surrounding homelessness. On the reading list are texts ranging from classics such as The Grapes of Wrath to contemporary memoirs such as Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street.

On the experiential side, students have heard stories firsthand from formerly homeless individuals who spoke to the class. In addition, the students are required to complete 30 hours of service in an organization that serves the homeless—a fairly easy quota to fulfill when you live in a city of more than 59,000 homeless men, women, and children. (In fact, this estimate is extremely low, because it does not include the number of people living on the street, nor the number of women and children in domestic violence shelters.)

The service component, it turns out, has prompted a healthy amount of internal conflict.

In response to Shilo’s predicament, another student in the class shared her ambivalence about the idea that volunteering helps the privileged become more aware of and sympathetic to those in need. “It’s service, but you’re just ultimately serving yourself,” she said. “I don’t have an answer to that dilemma.”

That may be, but educating and inspiring those who do service can still be useful, suggested another student. “Look at an organization like Part Of The Solution (POTS),” he said. “That’s how POTS began—[the founders]had an initial experience of service and then began that organization, which really does make a difference.”

The desire to “make a difference” is often what draws students to service, Greenfield said. In class, however, as they’ve begun to consider that desire, the students are learning that “making a difference” is a nebulous goal. Moreover, there seems to be a tacit power dynamic beneath their good intentions.

“Someone needs and someone is needed. Being needed feels good; being in need doesn’t feel so good,” Greenfield said. “That idea, to me, is important. Is there a way to do service that fosters equality rather than replicating the power problem that created the situation in the first place?”

One way to achieve that is to respect the autonomy of whoever is being served, she said. “Even a simple gesture [such as]saying ‘Can I help you?’ rather than ‘Let me help you,’ is a political change. It’s a move from ‘I’m going to do this’ to ‘Do you want me to do this?’ That’s how you can make a difference on the local level.”

Heroism and homelessness

Literature is an entryway into these kinds of conversations, Greenfield said. Many texts, such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exalt homelessness rather than view it as a social failing.

“The characters who fall socioeconomically ultimately rise as human beings. They become even better people,” Greenfield said. “There’s a certain nobility and integrity that comes from ending up at the bottom. It becomes a kind of heroic act to have fallen.”

And yet, that hardly serves as solace for someone living the trauma of homelessness. It still overlooks the question of whether one can ever alter the power struggle in the service dynamic—or, as Shilo wondered, whether it even matters if the end result still benefits the person being served (or at least does not cause harm).

“I always find when I teach this course that there’s a place at which my brain just stops. I can’t get beyond some of these questions,” Greenfield said. “It’s not like reading literature and discussing, where you have a eureka moment and reach some kind of conclusion.”

There’s no clear-cut answer, unfortunately. Greenfield cautions her students about this upfront: “Unless we ourselves have been homeless, we cannot presume to understand the trauma,” she wrote in the course syllabus. “But we can open ourselves up to learn about it and to work toward social justice.”

Sometimes, forming relationships are the only option available. To that end, stories are a good start.

“Literature is an exercise in imagining another person’s experience and being open to it,” Greenfield said. “To bring that kind of awareness and openness to people who you might normally just pass by and not even notice, it does change things.”

But there’s much more to the term than that, as shown in a new book by Shonni Enelow, a professor of drama and performance studies in the English department at Fordham. In Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama (Northwestern University Press, 2015), she shows how method acting became bound up with ideas about identity, psychology, race relations, and the growing dominance of mass media in the 1950s and 60s.

It was sometimes found wanting, she said. “What we now think of as the 60s avant-garde … really rejected many of the central tenets of method acting. That’s the hinge that I’m looking at,” Enelow said. “Method acting also has a contentious and ambivalent relationship to the dramatic texts which I talk about at length.”

Method acting—as opposed to, say, more presentational acting, with its “sense of display, or spectacle”—includes various techniques (methods) for portraying characters realistically, Enelow said. Her book’s focus is Lee Strasberg, artistic director of The Actors Studio in New York, who believed in drawing on one’s own memories of emotions and physical sensations.

Some artists implicitly criticized method acting in their work because of its focus on psychological identification. Writer/playwright James Baldwin, for instance, felt that the type of theater that incorporated method acting “was not going to be capable of representing his politics,” and, therefore, would lack the political force he wanted to convey.

An example is Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie, in which one character echoes the idea that “if we could just identify with the other and understand his motivations then we could come together,” Enelow said. “By the end of the play, the white characters have sort of been frozen” in vignettes that explain their actions, while “the black characters have traded that kind of psychologizing in for direct political action,” she said.

Baldwin also faulted method acting’s universalism, the idea that “if you do this sequence of exercises you can actually become all these different people, enter into all these different characters,” she said. “Baldwin came to see that that only worked if you were white, and that was actually a very exclusionary practice that allowed white actors a mobility that was denied to black actors.”

She also examines a seminal work by French dramatist Jean Genet, Les Nègres, clownerie, or The Blacks: A Clown Show. The play “catalyzed a kind of avant-garde rejection of method acting” with its attack on the idea of achieving justice and goodness through identification with other people, she said. In the play, the actors—all of them black—perform a ritual onstage as a distraction from the revolution taking place offstage.

She ends the book with a look at William Greaves’s documentary, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which emphasized improvisation, and relates the film to method acting and to larger concerns about conformity, and what she calls scriptedness, in the nascent age of mass media.

“For Greaves, method acting actually is a sophisticated tool for negotiating this problem of scriptedness, the problem that the script, the social script and the dramatic text, has suddenly become somehow inadequate for representing what artists want to represent,” she said.

Relating acting methods to their historical periods offers a unique sort of insight, she said.

“In acting, unlike other art forms, the material is your body and mind,” she said. “That’s why acting theories often have a lot to do with contemporaneous historical models of selfhood, [or]what it means to be a person. So that’s why I think it’s quite interesting to think about acting methods in their historical contexts.”

Scholars have linked this anti-intellectual bent to a variety of influences—for instance, the growing insularity of the Evangelical community, or the sway of charismatic church and political leaders. However, James Van Wyck, an English doctoral student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, believes that it in fact stems from something seemingly innocuous: the last century-and-a-half of fictions that Evangelicals have been reading and writing.

To prove his point, Van Wyck has taken a daunting plunge into the archives to chronicle Evangelical literary trends and how these have influenced contemporary Evangelical thought. He argues in his doctoral dissertation that 19th-century Evangelical texts relied heavily on an appeal to readers’ emotions, a technique born from a sentimentalist ethos that continues to inform Evangelical reading habits today.

Emotional value

According to Van Wyck, 19th century religious fiction was used to evangelize to “unsaved” readers and push a particular Christian social and moral agenda. To do so, Evangelical writers tended to emphasize “emotional utility over intellectual stimulation,” Van Wyck said. Books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin were written to make people “feel right,” as Harriet Beecher Stowe herself put it.

“Evangelicals retain an old, mid-19th-century understanding of fiction as a utilitarian instrument,” said Van Wyck. “A work of fiction does something to you. They want fiction to make you think right, feel right, and act right—to guide you on your pilgrimage to heaven.”

Contemporary Evangelical authors such as Janette Oak, Beverly Lewis, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins—co-authors of the popular end-of-times book and movie series, Left Behind—carry on this sentimentalist tradition. What separates them from their predecessors, though, is that contemporary Evangelical fiction is produced and consumed by an insular audience. Consequently, these authors aim to provide an emotionally gratifying experience for Evangelical readers, rather than to explicitly convert non-Evangelicals.

Topping the bestsellers lists

However, there is more to this story than simply illuminating the sentimentalist roots of Evangelical anti-intellectualism, Van Wyck said. Novels written by Evangelicals dominated the literary marketplace in the mid-19th century. The sheer numbers warrant a closer look, as Evangelical fictions have distinguished themselves as some of the most strikingly popular works in the American literary canon. In 19th-century terms, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was as popular as Harry Potter. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World was acclaimed by author Henry James and artist Vincent van Gogh.

And today, though they tend to no longer attract non-Evangelical readers, these fictions boast sales in the hundreds of millions of copies and consistently top the bestsellers lists—seven of the Left Behind series reached #1 on New York Times bestsellers lists.

“Most of us in the literary criticism business got into it by reading the classics, which don’t generally encompass these religious bestsellers,” said Van Wyck’s dissertation adviser, English Professor Leonard Cassuto. “But there was a moment when I realized that the American literary tradition as it was presented to me is bigger than I thought it was.

“For me, and other critics too, there is an evolving realization that we can’t understand the book markets of the 19th century unless we also widen our view to encompass the role of religious fiction,” Cassuto said. “James Van Wyck has taken a remarkable route into the archives to do this.  Nobody has ever looked so closely at how Evangelicals actually read, and at what they were taking into account when they did so.”

But do they have an impact on anyone outside of religious circles? Van Wyck thinks so.

“Ronald Reagan, who charted much of the course of international and American identity in the 20th century, ascribed his conversion to Christianity to the book That Printer of Udell’s, which he read as a young boy,” Van Wyck said. “His whole worldview was essentially informed by a book that is all about the individual’s relationship to God and how that changes after a conversion experience.

“[To that end, one could say] Evangelical fiction has altered the course of history.”

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