When I was an undergraduate at Yale University, students flocked to Professor Alvin Kernan's lecture courses on Shakespeare. Kernan's work predated the academy's current infatuation with ideological criticism. Even though it was the late 1960s and we were all living in an atmosphere charged with political suspicion and protest, none of this overtly impinged on Kernan's lectures. Kernan was not a flashy lecturer. What, then, was the draw?
He loved the texts. His teaching method - as I remember it - was simply to engage in reflective close readings of the Shakespeare tragedies and comedies, delineating their rich texture of image and metaphor and opening up their complex central themes - moral, philosophical, and religious. Often, Kernan would devote a significant part of his lecture time to reading the text aloud, not in any highly dramatic manner, but with sensitivity to the text's rhythms and semantic nuances. I would often sit in class thinking, "Oh! ... I hadn't heard that in the text before." And I would leave the class pondering the problems Shakespeare addressed: love, betrayal, fidelity, sacrifice, death, and hope.
Richard B. Hays - The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scriptures; Eerdmans 2005; p.200
Loving the text so that others truly hear the text. That's a good aim for 2007.
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