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"I want to lead you into the Divine Comedy and leave you there": Charles Singleton's Approach to Literature

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 137; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2022.0008

1080-6598

Robert E. Proctor,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

"I want to lead you into the Divine Comedy and leave you there":Charles Singleton's Approach to Literature Robert E. Proctor (bio) From 1967–1971, I was a graduate student in the Department of Romance Languages at the Johns Hopkins University. My major was Italian, my minor French. I took Charles Singleton's graduate seminars on Boccaccio's Decameron and Dante's Commedia and was a teaching assistant in his undergraduate "Dante" and "The Spirit of the Renaissance" courses. I had been an English major at the University of San Francisco, where I started out as a psychology major, but switched after I realized that artists and writers know more about—and express better—the human condition than people who concoct theories about it (like Sigmund Freud). I've never lost this belief. Singleton's approach to literature reinforced it, because it was motivated by a desire to see a work of art from the artist's point of view, not the critic's, and in the context of the values and beliefs of the artist's time. This goal was implicitly called into question by a momentous change in literary studies then taking place at Hopkins. When I arrived at Hopkins in the fall of 1967, everyone was talking about "The Languages of Criticism & the Sciences of Man," the conference on French structuralism that had been held there in October 1966, funded by the Ford Foundation and hosted by Hopkins's new Humanities Center. As a French minor I experienced first-hand [End Page 160] what Mark Bauerlein calls "the French invasion."1 From the start I thought French literary theory was moonshine. I remember thinking that it would be interesting to research why American scholars were so attracted to French thought. The European "stars" were all nice people, or so I found them. I sat in on Roland Barthes's seminar on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola and had beer with him at the Hopkins Graduate Club. Paul de Man appeared to be a shy, soft-spoken, somewhat gentle soul. Derrida came to Hopkins after I had finished my French minor, so I never took a class with him. But the Hopkins graduate students who took his class thought they were the cat's meow. I asked one of them to tell me what Derrida said. He couldn't. He just held his thumb and forefinger together, waved his hand, rolled his eyes and said, "You just have to be there." I could never understand how you could be attracted to something you couldn't explain! The graduate students in French laughed at those of us who were studying Italian with Charles Singleton because they said Singleton still believed in "meaning." One day in class Singleton remarked that the goal of most of his colleagues at Hopkins was to begin with a theory, lead you into a work of literature, and then pull you out at the other end in order to confirm your theory. Singleton's goal was to lead us into the Commedia and leave us there. I liked that. But it was to be an exception to how literature was studied and taught. At Hopkins, Critical Theory and its progeny, which Helen Pluckrose has renamed "Cynical Theories," had now begun its long march through the institutions of American higher education.2 I'm retired now. I've been blessed with an academic career that let me teach Dante Alighieri's Commedia to undergraduates almost every year for over forty years. I've tried to do what Singleton did: ask the students to assume a willing suspension of disbelief, lead them into Dante's medieval Christian journey and leave them there. In my teaching I've always used John Sinclair's prose translation in his affordable bilingual paperback edition of Dante's Commedia. Singleton believed that a prose translation can be more accurate than verse and, if you have the original Italian text on facing pages and know Italian yourself or have a teacher who does, you can easily go to the original for [End Page 161] any line that interests you. I mention cost because Singleton told us that he wanted his...