War Stories
January 12, 2011|Academics
Every once in a while, one of Lance Wilcox’s students will tell him that Wilcox’s January Term class on the Civil War is the best history class he has ever had.
Wilcox is grateful for the compliment, but there is just one problem: His class is not a history class.
Wilcox, a professor of English, teaches “Literature of the Civil War,” a course that looks at the ways masters of the American literary canon like Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, as well as ordinary foot soldiers like Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee Infantry, treated the war in poems, stories and memoirs. The class is offered out of the English Department, but the students can be forgiven for their confusion. It turns out that Melville and other writers inspired by the war make pretty good history teachers, too.
“You’ve come on a good day,” Wilcox told me when I intercepted him in a Hammerschmidt Chapel corridor on his way to class one afternoon. “We’re reading Whitman.” It was the second day of January Term, and waiting for him in HC 008 were 30 students, some of them still a little bleary-eyed from their holiday hibernation.
Wilcox, a specialist in 18th century British literature who is also known around campus for his Civil War expertise, has been teaching “Literature of the Civil War” every January since 1998, placing it among the longest-running January Term classes at the College. The class is routinely filled to capacity. That might be a testament to our ongoing national fascination with the war, which will be on full display in the months ahead, as its 150th anniversary is marked by battle reenactments, TV specials, and museum exhibits. More likely, though, Wilcox says the class’ popularity has to do with more practical concerns: It counts toward the literature requirement in the College’s general education program.
Indeed, before they get a taste of some of the remarkable literature the Civil War produced, the war registers for some of Wilcox’s students as little more than a series of dates that had to be memorized for a high-school history class. Wilcox can’t really blame them for not matching his passion for the topic.
“Part of the problem is that the textbooks they’ve used in grade school and high school are dreadful examples of writing,” he said. “They present the war in a dreary, lead-footed way. That’s no way to get students interested in something that happened 150 years ago.”
On the other hand, there’s a poem like Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser,” one of the day’s topics of discussion in Wilcox’s class. Inspired by Whitman’s wartime service as an aide in hospitals around Washington, D.C, “The Wound Dresser” offers a grim lesson in the odds facing combatants who fell in battle: Disease and the crude medical practices of the time were often more deadly than the enemy. But the class’ interest in the poem was mainly aesthetic. Wilcox asked his students what they made of a rapid-fire series of awful images (“the stump of the arm…the perforated shoulder. . .[the] gnawing and putrid gangrene”) encountered by the poem’s speaker as he makes his way his along “the long rows of cots up and down each side” of his ward. After a few seconds of silence, one student raised a hand to wonder if Whitman’s stop-action imagery wasn’t influenced by the then-emerging technology of photography. At the front of the room, Wilcox looked pleased. The discussion was off and running.
“We’re trying to really get at these literary works. We’re asking not just, ‘What does it mean?’ but also, ‘How is it done?’” Wilcox said later in his office just off the chapel sanctuary. “Whitman is the most intense of the poets we’re reading, and in some ways the most accessible. Some of the poems are almost like brilliant one-page short stories.”
For students and professors alike, January Term classes like “Literature of the Civil War” are an opportunity to indulge an intellectual passion or two, even if it takes them into unfamiliar corners of the course catalog. For his class, Wilcox draws on a long-held personal fascination. He became interested in the Civil War after taking an undergraduate history course at the University of Texas. He found out later that his great-grandfather, Thomas Melvyn Wilcox, fought in a New York light artillery unit and saw action at Port Hudson, Louisiana—though he also seems to have “spent a lot of time in hospitals suffering from dysentery,” Wilcox said.
Wilcox, who sports a beard worthy of a Civil War cavalryman, will lecture on Whitman’s war poetry at the Elmhurst Public Library on March 2 as part of “Elmhurst Reads the Civil War,” a series of public events marking the war’s 150th anniversary. On April 7, he will lead a discussion and screening of the film Glory at Elmhurst’s York Theatre.
For most of the year, Wilcox teaches classes on Shakespeare and the 18th century British novel. If his annual midwinter foray into Civil War literature is a bit of an intellectual detour, it is the kind of journey he encourages students to take, too.
“Every time the College publishes a new class list, I find myself looking it over and saying, ‘That would be fun,” and ‘That would be fun,’” he said. “January Term has been and should be a place to experiment. It’s where you find the classes you wouldn’t ordinarily take.”
