Early in my first semester as W. B. Yeats Fellow in Irish Literature at the University of Notre Dame I was invited to audit the graduate seminar Returns of the Aesthetic, taught jointly by my mentor Dr Joseph Rosenberg and Dr Yasmin Solomonescu. A generous interpretation of “auditing” transpired: rather than sitting shtum in the back row, perhaps thoughtfully nodding once in a while, I experienced all the benefits of full participation in class discussions with a small group of highly motivated final-year undergraduates, postgraduates and doctoral candidates. I was, however, spared these colleagues’ requirement to give assessed presentations and submit papers. Bliss.

Those benefits that I mentioned accrue, in the discursive seminar classroom, in an idiosyncratic but potent manner unlike any other form of university learning – individual study, or lectures, or graded assessments, and so forth.  The seminar room is a potent engine of personal intellectual growth, and one which you cannot absorb vicariously any more than you can become stronger by watching others work out, or, despite all my attempts, become a mercurial Premier League footballer by admiring Bukayo Saka on television. Seminar learning exists somewhere in-between input (knowledge accumulation) and output (exercise of critical skill). It is, perhaps, most akin to rehearsal, although compared to an athlete or stage performer’s rehearsal it is less separate from the performance for which the rehearser rehearses (our performance, depending on the critic’s priorities, might be considered to be some weighted combination of: researching, writing, teaching, giving talks and lectures, being a more considered citizen, living the life of the mind more ably, &c.). In this instance, of course, I was spared the need to consider the bluntly instrumental performance of getting a good grade for ENGL 90190: Returns of the Aesthetic. Nonetheless, I rehearsed and grew stronger. To perhaps state the obvious, seminar-room development occurs iteratively, through repeating the combination of pre-seminar reading and in-seminar engagement a dozen or so times over the course of around three months. The pre-seminar reading must be done actively, with note-taking, and then, in the seminar-durée, engagement necessarily comprises undertaking all three of the following activities, again repeatedly: listening; speaking after you have listened; and listening after you have spoken. Skipping any of these steps ruins the alchemy. As such, the returns I accrued from Returns of the Aesthetic were greater and more varied than those I would have experienced as a mute observer.

It is often pointed out – too often with an empty smugness, but I think, I think I have a point here – that the word essay, arriving to us in English from the French essayer, was a verb before it was a noun, meaning to attempt, to sally forth. It is not just the essays my colleagues had to write that will improve them as scholars (writers, citizens, &c.), but also the essays, the sorties we attempted in the seminar room, which tested our convictions and improved them. And though I was spared the former, more formal, type of assessment and feedback, I was delighted to participate in the latter mode, essaying insights or questions raised by each week’s reading to contribute to, or provoke, the communal creation of live assessment and feedback in the room. The opening of one’s mouth is a necessary precondition for having one’s mind changed – or for finding out that one’s prior convictions hold water after all. And this is the process of refinement which trains the critical faculties as effectively as Saka’s magical hamstrings are trained through stretches, rondos and low-stakes practice games.

The Oxford English Dictionary phrasing for this verb form of essay is “to put to the proof,” and among its oldest attestations for the noun form is a quotation from Francis Bacon referring to “essaies or proofes of Nature”, in which the conjunction or makes the claim that the nouns “essaie” and “proofe” are interchangeable.  So, a further etymology may be useful: to prove can mean to “establish as true,” but just as ancient is the meaning of “prove” which is expressed by the OED’s phrase “put to the proof.” Here, to prove means to test, to “make trial of” as the OED also has it. This is the meaning evoked by the title of K. J. Parker’s 2000 novel The Proof House, in which the hero, Bardas Loredan, must establish the worth of plate armour by bashing it around until he determines, by exceeding it, what each piece of armour’s tolerance for destruction is. It is also the meaning of proof evoked in the otherwise nonsensical phrase the exception that proves the rule. The exception does not substantiate the rule; how could it? The exception tests the rule. It provides a proof of it by showing its tolerance, its integrity, its capacity, its response to stress: all adjectives, not coincidentally, that can refer to the resilient qualities of physical materials as well as to conditions of psychological character. The discussion proves the essay; one of the two most important shared understandings of the seminar room is that your colleagues will, with courtesy, let you know when you have gone too far, a courtesy that you extend to them also. This understanding creates the freedom to see how far you can advance before your essay meets its tolerance. This is the way in which the seminar room is most like a rehearsal, although to keep with the vocabulary I have wandered into, of sorties and armour, I should perhaps say not rehearsal but training.

(I once encountered, in a Digital Resources post I held, an online academic journal which stipulated that, out of respect for the military, no rhetorical use of martial language was permitted within its pages. The example given in the editor’s guidelines was that one must not say, for instance, that an argument had been deployed.)

In the Proof House of Joseph and Yasmin’s seminar room, we essayed and proved – or proofed? – our understanding. The reading list took me through re-encounters with old crewmates and adversaries (Kant, Shelley, Adorno, Eagleton), forced confrontations with I-Know-I-Should-Have-Reads (Burke, I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks), first encounters with new-to-me curios (D. A. Miller, Veronica Forrest-Thomson), and a bracing collection of up-to-the-minute readings from Joseph North, Rita Felski, Jonathan Kramnick and many others. For me, and I think for the room (the two, of course, are interlinked: in the seminar one’s focus becomes part of the focus of the room, one’s use of a certain touchpoint makes it grow in importance for the discussion as another supports, refutes or bounces obliquely off from your advance, or returns to it later by way of reference), the crux of the course was the discussion, halfway through the semester, of Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature. This was somewhere between an old-crewmate and a should-have-read for me. I used some of Attridge’s criticism on Ulysses in my PhD, and more recently I had picked up his The Singularity of Literature, which covers much of the same ground as The Work, after peer-reviewing an article that leaned on it engagingly. But it’s the proof that proves the proving (or perhaps it’s the proofing that proves the proof?) and bashing Attridge’s observations around in the Aesthetics seminar showed, to me, its remarkable tensile strength as a device for understanding the literary encounter which happens when a reader reads a book. This encounter, Attridge argues with more common sense and cheerful exception-acknowledging than the argument’s initial appearance of poststructuralist esotericism might suggest, is the Work of Literature itself, with work neatly configured as both noun and verb. This essay, as Attridge essays it, resists reduction into either scholarly scientism (in which the study of literature pretends to be only a subtype of object-oriented historical research where the unique capacities of the artistic imagination hold no particular sway), or into canon-wielding triumphalism (in which the critic tells us for the thousandth time that Shakespeare, Thoreau or Austen expressed themselves with greater beauty than any imitator could hope to capture). Attridge’s generous model is open to both the sublime and the beautiful and to the possibility of difference between the two, and it has also a convincing insistence upon the centrality of otherness/difference/alterity in understanding the unique capacities of art and artistic experience. This insistence, already intuitively appealing to me, stood up with grace to the hammer-blows we aimed at it in the Proof Room. Much of this grace has to do with Attridge’s own amenable prose style. He is a deconstructive reader building upon Derrida and Levinas, tenaciously and generatively, but is simultaneously unafraid of using connotative and evocative language as he goes along. Or, to admire the same finely-engineered bridge from the viewing platform on its opposite bank: although there is a homey accessibility to the way that Attridge writes, one remains, as someone put it in the Proof Room (my notes record the expression but not the speaker) “confident that he’s not BS-ing you.”

One striking aspect of how Attridge’s essay played out in the Proof Room concerns an image he describes to illustrate his concept of idioculture. Idioculture, meaning the great mess of connotations, skill and experience which any individual brings to any artwork they apprehend, is an Attridgism which feels particularly timely to me. It is at home among the contemporary enviro-intellectual focus on ecosystems, whereby creatures, people, texts and concepts are understood through their taking-from-and-giving-to inextricably interconnected systems of support and influence – or, as the science fiction novelist Jeff VanderMeer has it, borrowing a term from winemaking, their terroir. Attridge explains idioculture in his essay in a way that felt entirely comprehensible to me on first reading, and then re-explains it using an image that felt clunky and unnecessary [emphasis mine]:

When a reader engages with a literary work, his idioculture provides the resources – linguistic and cultural knowledge, generic expectations, technical know-how, and so on – that make a literary response possible; likewise, the work is a product of the writer’s idioculture. It’s like two wedges kissing at their sharpest points: behind the touching of tips that takes place in the reading process lies, on each side, an enormous body of cultural materials

These “two wedges kissing” struck me in my pre-seminar reading as an uncharacteristically inelegant knot of prose: when do wedges kiss? What image in my brain is accessed or created by inviting me to think of wedges (of cheese? Perhaps the wedge-shaped chocks that are used to prop open doors or stop a wheel rolling away?) kissing (in exactly the way that cheese and doorstops don’t)? Why did I need an image at all, for a concept already explained? But in the Proof Room, even some weeks later, we could deploy the kissing wedges in a pleasingly offhand fashion: we could essay it as a shorthand for the Attridgean conception of writer-reader idiocultural exchange at the moment of literary encounter – instead of essaying, say, “the Attridgean conception of writer-reader idiocultural exchange at the moment of literary encounter,” which among other things, takes a hell of a lot longer to say in a time-limited space where every second that you are flapping your gums, your colleagues aren’t getting to flap theirs.

This shows how, as a scholar or critic (terms that Returns of the Aesthetic taught me never to use interchangeably, but are here both pertinent), one can write for the seminar room. Two wedges kissing is not a brilliant piece of imagery like “dark Satanic mills” or “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” or “Rage Against the Machine”, which use cadence and connotation to give the reader or listener a thrill of recognition. One knows what type and tone of image these phrases evoke even without ever reading the context from which the phrase emerges. Unlike these, one cannot say “two wedges kissing” in conversation and expect an interlocutor who has not read Attridge to nod and say yes, I understand idioculture now, what a useful literary concept you have taught me, thank you, can I top up your drink? But, thankfully, these are not the terms of engagement of the Proof Room. The second of the two most important shared understandings of the university seminar (or its extracurricular cousins: the book club, the reading group, the post-show Q&A, the fan debate) is that we all work on the assumption that we have all done the reading. And this is where Attridge’s bad metaphor, albeit still inelegant, becomes instrumentally valuable, simply because he has given us a metaphor at all, and it is striking and simple and stands in for an entire essay (in both senses, this time, of the noun). As we hammer away at the armour that we are trying to prove, we do not need to strike the same blow over and over again, because the summarythat Attridge has provided within the theory itself is a tool to communicate, quickly and easily, that we all understand that the blows that we already essayed last week or the week before (when we unpacked Attridge and his wedges in more detail) still obtain, and that this week, when we are working on Caroline Levine or Rita Felski, we can direct our colleagues’ attention to the areas already proved, without derailing our attention on Levine or Felski, to suggest that we might focus on or avoid (depending on the point being made) how Levine or Felski’s work effects those proofings which we have already conducted.

Another example of this – the importance of creating catchy in-text summaries when writing texts to be discussed in seminars – came late in the course, from a recent article by Joseph North which argues for an “aesthetic commons”. This is North’s deliberate linguistic strategy to evoke the image of the “early modern village green” when discussing the work of arts criticism (whether academic, journalistic, “lay” or simply conversational). By speaking of critique as a shared community resource, North reasons, we import the connotations which that village green already has, leaving readers predisposed to defend and promote, not only the prosperity, but also the public ownership of aesthetic critique. At one point in the Proof Room, I referred to this image (itself a “two wedges kissing” image rather than a “dark Satanic mills” one, in that it only makes sense because we’ve all done the reading), as a “fable.” This was not a particularly deeply-considered choice of word, but it was one which Joseph (Rosenberg, not North) repeated back to me shortly after. In that moment of repetition the Proof Room instantaneously had a new shared understanding, that of “the fable”, which we could use to advance our individual and collective understandings. And so, two questions: Firstly, are Attridge’s own “two wedges kissing”, Kant’s Sensus Communis, and Shelley’s Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it, also “fables”? Yes, I think so, at least in the jury-rigged understanding of the word that was sufficient to uphold the shared understandings of the Proof Room. Probably I would not call them so in writing, certainly not without more careful consideration, but I am arguing for the seminar room as an improvisatory space where different standards of precision necessarily apply. Second question: does calling these images “fables” denigrate the intellectual rigour which has gone into their composition? No, I think not. Not if we believe in the value of imaginative fiction at all, which is what the term fable, however inexactly deployed, evokes. That belief is, ultimately, one that I hold, and I hold it all the more fervently for spending a semester testing it in the shared workspace of the Proof Room, watching the value of literature, and of art, and of criticism – and also, more surprisingly to me, the value of the profession of the critic, and of the proposition that ours is the profession of uncertainty, not of providing answers but of clarifying and demystifying the route to answers, half-answers, good-enough moments of belief – emerge stronger, time and again, from the blows which Kant, and Levine, and Attridge and North and the whole gang have struck, and which we struck, at times in their honour and at times against them, in the collegiate not-quite-commons of the Proof Room.

The seams which I have attempted to expose in this reflection are neither a comprehensive nor perfectly distilled review of the experience of “auditing” Returns of the Aesthetic. For one thing, any such review would perforce have investigated the theoretical and professional hostilities concerning, promoting and opposing New Historicism, which a term I have not used at all until this very sentence. But such a review is not my intention: I write this more as a tribute, to a class which I feel sincerely fortunate to have attended, and which I wish powerfully that I had been able to attend earlier in my academic development. During the second year of my part-time Master’s degree would have been about perfect. The colleagues I have referred to throughout this reflection, Joseph and Yasmin aside, are students clustered somewhere around that point in their career, and I would be startled if any of them consider this class uninfluential upon their intellect when they look back on it years from now.

I was sad to learn that this is likely to be the last iteration of Returns of the Aesthetic, a course which is of course an essay in its own right, a sally forth into the field of the University of Notre Dame course catalogue. It seems to me that it deserves the chance to grow into one of those little academic fables, where students of literature either at Notre Dame or elsewhere in the world, who are aspiring to graduate study or even to academic/ac-adjacent careers, start to notice, all by themselves, that This Name and This Name both mention Returns of the Aesthetic in their monograph acknowledgements. Or, maybe, our fabular student discovers through a chance remark at an author’s Q&A that that author took Returns of the Aesthetic at the same time as this other person, who you would have never imagined they share a context with, but hey, now it makes a sort of sense… and all this is more likely to happen, of course, the longer the course is offered. But there is a different joy in catching something fleeting during the moment in time when it happens; and other things will happen hereafter, and our Proof Room already has its afterlife, in the toughness of the armour which its alumni can now choose to don when they think, when they write, when they talk.

Many Happy Returns.