ROBERT ALTER
513
with a false sense of profundity. But not every late adolescent is inclined
to succumb to these seductions, and my own experience is that there is
more of a saving remnant among the young than is allowed for in the
standard apocalyptic accounts.
Last year at Berkeley, after a hiatus of seventeen years, I offered an
undergraduate lecture course on modernist fiction - Biely's
Petersburg,
Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway,
the first volume of Proust,
The Castle,
and
The
Sound and the Fury.
(I had given up on this course in the mid-seventies,
after a paltry student turnout led me to conclude that these works,
which had been riveting for my own generation, were simply of no in–
terest to the young.) To my surprise, about sixty students showed up for
the course, a relatively large group for any offering in comparative litera–
ture on our campus. What was more surprising was how keenly engaged
in the readings the students proved to be. Most of them, as far as I could
tell from class discussion and papers, were making their way through
these long and challenging works with scrupulous attentiveness and a
sense of intellectual excitement over what they were discovering in the
books. We spent a good deal of time on issues of historical context as
well as on the formally innovative aspects of the novels, but none of the
students tried to make the case that gender, or imperialism, or the evils
of Eurocentrism, was the crucial consideration for any of these texts. In
an open-ended discussion of Virginia Woolf, whom we read immediately
after Joyce, no one in the class was impelled to argue that Woolf had
suffered in reputation because of the prejudices of "masculinist" criticism;
and, in fact, though students were quite responsive to the magical quali–
ties of her prose, several volunteered the opinion that her range and res–
onance looked a little limited alongside Joyce's.
In
moments of discouragement, to which anyone in college teaching
these days is prone, [ had begun to worry that students like these no
longer existed. On reflection, I realized that this was after all a self-se–
lected group: only someone with a passion for literature and an appetite
for arduous works would be inclined to sign up for a course with a
reading list like this one. It would be foolish, then, to imagine that my
sixty eager readers were an image of the academic future. Serious reading
is no doubt a skill exercised by dwindling numbers in our culture, and
on the campuses reading for motives that are not ideologically tenden–
tious is surely less common than it ought to be. It is nevertheless hearten–
ing, and also instructive, that one can find a whole group of students
like these on a politically superheated American campus in the 1990s. The
construction of imaginative realities - narrative, lyric, and dramatic -
through the evocative power of language remains a central activity of
human culture, even in an age of high technology and electronic dis-
