Schooled

Savoy shares his regret of not studying languages more seriously when he was younger. When he began teaching in the Department of Comparative Literature, his French was inadequate, and he began to work closely with a monitrice who began their sessions by informing him that literature professors are the worst language learners because they cannot loosen the grip of perfectionism. He argues that the rite of passage toward otherness ought to begin very early in a literary education with real second (and third) language requirements. Such an initiative would, quite literally, embody difference and render it less conceptual, and it would obviate a certain ground of regret that many academics feel when looking back on their formative years. It would make their students' grasp of literary language, of poetics, far more adept. And in Canada, it would respond to the responsibilities of citizenship.