Dr. Louise Cowan passed away on Monday. I was blessed to count myself as one of her students at the University of Dallas where I attended graduate school. (Her obituary in the Dallas Morning News. Simcha Fisher also posted a tribute.) I took her Southern literature class. To listen to her lecture was to sit hypnotized, enthralled in the literal sense by her voice and her profundity, completely unaware of the passing of time. As Jo Brans wrote in D Magazine in 1979, "Whenever I hear Louise Cowan talk, I want to be Louise Cowan." She captured such deep ideas with such clarity and apparent simplicity. Of course, that love affair in Their Eyes Were Watching God is symbolic of the cosmic union of earth and sky, soul and body, God and Man, divine and human, eternal and temporal! She had a way of explicating a text that made you see patterns you never saw before and realize that all images, all the arts, lead the mind to ruminate on transcendent things. She even gave a lecture once on Pulp Fiction that made it seem like the film makers had created another Divine Comedy.
Not only was she an incredible teacher who made her students feel that the truth and beauty of good literature could lead them toward salvation, she also was a lady of manners, grace, and fortitude. She was in her eighties and still teaching when I was in grad school. And she still had style and great legs. I think she didn't finish her Ph.D. until she was forty, so her career began late. She seemed ageless. And she made her students believe that they, too, could do what she did - find joy and connection in sharing the beauty of poetry and literature.
Not long ago, Dr. Cowan contributed an essay to a collection entitled What is a Teacher. She wrote: “Teachers are consecrated persons who have made the choice to lead others into learning. If they are to lead others into learning, they must continue themselves to be learners.”
She certainly embodied this herself. May she continue to inspire future teachers. She may become a patron saint of those who love literature.
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| Photo from http://porterbriggs.com/teaching-good-poetry/ |
