John D. Lyons
Commonwealth Professor of French
Chair, Department of French
354 Cabell Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904
434/924-4636
jdl2f@virginia.edu

Ph.D. Yale (1972).

Spring 2008 Office Hours:

Tuesday & Wednesday 10:00-11:00 and by appointment

 Personal: Seventeenth-Century Literature. All-University Award for Outstanding Teaching (1995-1996); ACLS Contemplative Practice Fellow (2002); J.S. Guggenheim Fellow (2003). Visiting Professor, University of Paris III (Spring 2005).

 Recent and Current Scholarship: Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (2005); “Au seuil du panoptisme général,” in Dix-Septième Siècle, 223 (2004), pp. 277-287; “Self-Knowledge and the Advantages of Concealment: Pierre Nicole’s On Self-Knowledge,” in Culture and Sovereignty in the Baroque, ed. Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in press), pp. 193-207; “La Vérité tyrannique,” in L’Invraisemblance du pouvoir, ed. Jean-Vincent Blanchard and Hélène Visentin (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne, in press), pp. 53-68.

Currently studying chance in tragedy and poetics.

 Courses Recently Taught:

• Seventeenth-Century Tragedy
• Baroque Culture
• The Cinema of the Occupation and Liberation
• "Is there French film noir?"

Reflections on Teaching

For me the greatest paradox of teaching is the apparent contradiction between needing to be there close to the students and leading them ahead, yet needing also to get out of the students' way so that they can throw themselves into the experience of the subject they are discovering. Another way to express this is to speak of the balance between being visible and being transparent. I am tempted by the ideal of the teacher as a transparent medium facilitating the student's discovery and mastery of the subject. Still, I find myself moved more by teachers who are highly present, visible, and remarkably engaged in the subject they teach. I am conscious of not wanting to interpose myself in any distracting way between the students and the texts, since the texts speak so strongly. Yet I also know, from years of reflection on what seems to work, that students coming upon this literature for the first time require a highly personal guide, someone who can point out the blazes in what looks like a tangled wood, maybe even like a wasteland not worth entering. Somehow I have to be highly visible, getting their attention, and pointing to the trails, convincing them that it is all worth the effort to struggle over the unfamiliar terrain. By the end of the course, I hope that the students will have discovered a new set of paths that I have not shown them. I believe my mission as a teacher is to care about the subject and about the students--everything I do in my courses results from these two facets of my concern.

I care enough about French literature to keeping working on it, rereading many texts, discovering "new" ones, changing my mind about interpretations, believing that it is possible to make some statements that are accurate and to reject others as inaccurate. By no means do I pretend to neutrality--I think it's difficult to be neutral about an issue while caring deeply about it. My ongoing attempts to understand better take place in full view of the students, and this position is not always comfortable. I am not infallible and my views are not unchanging. I make my best effort to understand and explain the field. It is the fact of being able to take a position towards something that makes knowledge different from information. I sense that my concern about French tragedy and about the transformation of the novel animates these issues and motivates the students to adopt a position--different from mine in many cases--rather than treat what we are reading as pure information.

It is important not only that I be concerned about the student experience of the literature we are studying but that I make this concern visible. My care expresses itself first of all in listening closely to their thoughts and questions about what we have read. Each student brings something different (including sometimes unique, revealing, and useful misunderstandings) to a literature course, and each takes away something different still. Even if we manage to agree on the interpretation or the historical significance of a passage, the use and influence of that knowledge will differ from student to student and will continue to evolve (if all goes well) long after the course is over. It is important to students to know that I am aware of their work and of the specific difficulties they encounter. This means that they know they cannot come to class unprepared, because I will notice and because I will call on everyone to respond in some way each time we meet. This means that I understand and appreciate the effort that goes into reading complex texts, writing frequent compositions and revisions, and speaking on short notice in a language that is still relatively foreign. If I did not make it clear that I care, they would know, and many students would act accordingly, shifting much of their effort to other courses.

It is almost paralyzing to think about how to get the balance right: not being intrusive and distracting yet being present and visibly engaged. Fortunately, when a course is a success, students, teacher, text, and discussion all fuse. Everyone is active, one idea leads to another, no one's view of the text or its cultural context is the same at the end of class as at the beginning. In practice, it all seems perfectly natural.