"I love teaching"
About this Quote
A writer like Harry Mathews saying "I love teaching" lands less as a sentimental confession than as a deliberately plain statement that dares you to underestimate it. Mathews, tied to the Oulipo tradition of constraint and play, made a career out of showing that art isn’t just inspiration; it’s procedure, attention, and craft. Teaching, in that sense, isn’t a side hustle or a fallback. It’s a laboratory where methods get stress-tested in public.
The intent reads as quietly polemical: he’s valuing transmission over mystique. For an avant-garde author, that’s a provocation. The cultural script says the serious novelist guards the “real work” from the classroom’s compromises. Mathews flips that hierarchy. The love is for the act of making thinking visible - turning private technique into shareable tools, watching a room of minds collide with structure, limitation, and possibility.
Subtext: teaching is another form of writing, with an audience that talks back. It offers immediate friction: confusion, resistance, accidental brilliance. That friction is the opposite of the solitary-genius myth, and Mathews spent decades puncturing myths. The sentence’s simplicity is part of the trick. No manifesto, no flourish - just a clean declarative that reads almost like a constraint itself, a reminder that the most radical posture can be to take communal intellectual work seriously.
Context matters, too: late-20th-century literary culture increasingly professionalized through MFA programs, workshop economies, and the idea of literature as a teachable practice. Mathews’s line doesn’t apologize for that world; it claims it as a site of genuine pleasure and serious invention.
The intent reads as quietly polemical: he’s valuing transmission over mystique. For an avant-garde author, that’s a provocation. The cultural script says the serious novelist guards the “real work” from the classroom’s compromises. Mathews flips that hierarchy. The love is for the act of making thinking visible - turning private technique into shareable tools, watching a room of minds collide with structure, limitation, and possibility.
Subtext: teaching is another form of writing, with an audience that talks back. It offers immediate friction: confusion, resistance, accidental brilliance. That friction is the opposite of the solitary-genius myth, and Mathews spent decades puncturing myths. The sentence’s simplicity is part of the trick. No manifesto, no flourish - just a clean declarative that reads almost like a constraint itself, a reminder that the most radical posture can be to take communal intellectual work seriously.
Context matters, too: late-20th-century literary culture increasingly professionalized through MFA programs, workshop economies, and the idea of literature as a teachable practice. Mathews’s line doesn’t apologize for that world; it claims it as a site of genuine pleasure and serious invention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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