U N I V E R S I T Y  O F  P I T T S B U R G H

Volume XI, Number 2

David Brumble, English

Photo by Jim Burke, CIDDE

I most like to teach the introductory literature courses, courses that are likely to include engineers and pre-med students as well as English majors. I love to watch these students coming to realize that other people have understood the world in fundamentally different ways. And this is the chief glory of literature, I think, that it allows us to inhabit other minds in other times, other places.

But if literature is to work its wonders, we must give up our culture-bound selves. We have all been in the awkward position of hearing a joke—but missing the point. Often this happens because we lack some bit of background information. “A guy gets into his Dodge Grand Caravan….” If we don’t know that the Grand Caravan is the quintessential family mini-van, we are probably not going to get the joke. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has explained the whole purpose of anthropology in just this way. “Understanding the form and the pressure of...natives' inner lives,” he wrote, “is like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke.” Geertz is convinced that it is possible to achieve this kind of understanding of other peoples. Once we pick up the necessary cultural baggage, we can see the point .

I have for thirty-four years here at Pitt devoted myself to providing this kind of cultural baggage. When I teach Shakespeare, I want my students to understand his plays in something like the way Elizabethan audiences might have understood them. And so I bring in lots of material to provide a cultural context. Many of the plays, for example, have to do with honor. But honor was a disputed issue in Shakespeare’s day—and honor had a range of important meanings now lost to us. I have collected texts and pictures over the years that can bring honor into something like Elizabethan focus. And so, when we talk about whether or not Hamlet ought to kill Claudius, we do so with an approximation of Elizabethan assumptions and vocabulary.

Let me provide a more specific example. In 1 Corinthians Paul writes at some length about Christian meetings in Corinth. This makes fascinating reading because it provides a frank and vivid account of what Christians did in these meetings: they sang hymns, they preached, they prophesied—and they spoke in tongues. It was all quite disorderly. Paul complains that there are too many people speaking in tongues all at the same time: “If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind?”

Now, as it happens, linguists have discovered interesting regularities in “glossolalia”—speaking in tongues. And they have discovered that these regularities persist across cultural and linguistic boundaries. This, in turn, suggests that 20th-century Arkansas glossolalia is going to be very much like the glossolalia of ancient Corinth. And so, it occurred to me to print out four transcriptions of actual, modern glossolalia. Here is one example: kelalaiyanano. kelalaiyenayeno. kelalayeyino. kelalaiyankelayaano.

I had several students stand and read the four transcriptions, all at the same time. And so, that class of 100 students not only knew about early Christian glossolalia—they actually heard something eerily like what Paul had heard in Corinth. There was an unusual stillness among those 100 students after this.

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