From the three volumes of essays on “vocation and higher education” published since 2016 by Oxford University Press to an opinion piece in The New York Times on “making college meaningful” through vocational exploration (February 2019), the consideration of vocation as calling has moved beyond theological circles to the wider academy. Rather than defined solely as one’s profession or job, the concept of vocation (from the Latin vocare) has a long history of signifying both one’s work and one’s socio-political responsibilities in multiple contexts—civic society, the workplace, the family. Increasingly, the concept of vocation has come to mean purposeful living, which has current appeal for many in higher education for its philosophical and political rather than theological resonances, and which converges with the broader tenets and goals of liberal education. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines and institutions have recently identified the potential in this concept for enabling a new dialogue among various academic factions, a dialogue that can provide a measure of common purpose—a vocation, so to speak—for our work with undergraduates despite the prevailing tensions and fragmentation within the academy.

Recurring throughout this new dialogue about vocation has been an interest in the subjects of literary studies, especially in narrative and the act of storytelling. Such interest, however, has most often been expressed by those outside the discipline, oftentimes for utilitarian ends in their use of literary texts as case studies. This panel seeks to examine the particular contributions that literary scholars can make to the study of vocation and higher education, to the vocabulary and theory of vocation, and to the teaching of vocational discernment and reflection in the undergraduate classroom. It pursues several inquiries: How might the varied fields within literary studies provide means for students to consider purposeful living? How might the pedagogical commitments and innovations of this discipline encourage students to respond to the world beyond our syllabi and beyond our common texts? How might our theories of interpretation inform new understandings of meaning in lived experience? As the panel explores the effects of contextualized reading, it suggests the possibility of a “pedagogy of care” that will bear on students and instructors alike. Ultimately, this panel seeks to position literary studies as vital to the conversation about value, civic engagement, and purpose not only as it shapes the lives of students but also as it shapes the future of higher education.

This panel includes three presentations of 17-18 minutes each. The first presentation will focus on the aptness of literary studies for addressing questions about meaningful living with students as well as for enriching the existing scholarship on the role of vocation within higher education. The second and third presentations will focus on genre studies as means to extend conversations about value and purpose beyond the confines of specific texts and as representative of how literary forms suggest methodologies for reading the world.

Sheila Bauer-Gatsos’s “Frameworks for English and Literary Studies” opens the panel by considering the central place of literary studies within a liberal arts education. The core activities of the discipline—reading, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and writing—are processes of critical, creative, and reflective thinking. The discipline demands ongoing interaction with a variety of texts, authors, ideas, and cultures, and this interaction invites regular reimagining of the field within which we study. Thus, Bauer-Gatsos suggests that the field of English provides a site for negotiating questions about vocation within literary texts and about vocational exploration within the discipline itself. In what ways do texts engage questions of purpose? What role does narrative play in vocational exploration? What purposes has the discipline of English served, and how has the discipline responded over time? How might we use the study of English and literature to help students begin to understand their own calling within the field and beyond it? Bauer-Gatsos argues that the very work of literary study informs discussions of vocational exploration (and vice versa).

Erin VanLaningham’s “Widening Perspectives: Novels and the Challenge of Community” turns to narrative, specifically the novel, to examine the ways the genre presents the individual voice in dialogue with competing ideologies and social expectations. VanLaningham shows how the novel’s presentation of multiple life choices extends the embedded narrative’s vocational reflections to current events, as well as local or global concerns. The novel unfolds the particular influence of community needs, family structures, and social context, where readers come to understand that individuals must necessarily (re)consider their lives in relation to others. Using George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a web of unfolding vocational journeys, as well as examples from social conflict novels and the bildungsroman, we can see how novels position interiority and reflective thinking so that characters (and readers) can engage and transform in part to serve the common good.

Stephanie L. Johnson’s “Polysemy and Poetry’s Possibility” focuses on modern poetry’s potential to inspire conversations about purposeful living because it so often exploits indeterminacy. Johnson argues that poetry’s display of polysemy and thus its resistance to the instrumentalization of language opens up rich possibilities for the self and the world. By embracing poetry’s polysemic language in the classroom, we can introduce students to the creative capacity of language, to its signaling of a “reality in the making,” and to the value of considering their own lives as “potentiality,” to use Paul Ricoeur’s terms. In William Stafford’s “Ask Me,” for example, the speaker suggests the value of considering questions about purposeful living while at the same time subverting any singular claim to truth. An encounter with such a poem can offer students means for interpreting their multiple, sometimes competing vocational commitments as polysemic and valuable. It can also offer instructors a pedagogical model that emphasizes care for both their students and for the intellectual breadth at the heart of liberal education.