Jon Hauss: Professor of American Literature Provides Students With the Experience of a Lifetime

If one looks on the Website for the English department at California State University, Dominguez Hills, there is a little blurb about each faculty member. Here is the one for associate professor Dr. Jon Hauss:

Jon Hauss teaches American literature and critical theory. He was a Fulbright professor of American literature in the Czech Republic from 1994 to 1996. His work has appeared in Studies in the Novel, New Orleans Review, Literature and Psychology, the Arizona Quarterly, English Language Notes, Western Humanities Review, Thought and Action, and anthologies by Routledge and SUNY Press.

His accomplishments, however, are so much more extensive than this little note implies.

As I watched Dr. Hauss receive the Lyle E. Gibson Distinguished Teacher Award earlier this semester, it didn’t take me long to realize that I was probably the only student at the ceremony in the ballroom of the Loker Student Union.

I sat near the door and watched him up there, on the podium in front of his colleagues. Despite the decorum of the atmosphere, I heard him speak with kindness and compassion of his experience here. When he got to the part about how much he cherishes his students, I was infinitely sorry that more of us weren’t present to hear him speak. When he was finished, I thought to myself, you should stand up and give him a round of applause and let him know that at least one of his students was there and got a chance to hear what he said about them, because we students are always talking about Dr. Hauss.

Dr. Hauss is a young, vibrant English professor who has so much energy and love for literature that it’s contagious. For so many, taking his courses has provided the experience of a lifetime, one that has inspired many students like myself to become teachers so that we can transform lives in the way that Dr. Hauss does, with respect and dignity for the innate intelligence of students of all colors and nationalities.

Last year, he published a novella, “The Faust Book,” which was illustrated by his brother Greg Hauss, who is also a teacher. Recently, he delivered a paper titled, “The Lazy Man’s Gaze: Big Other in The Big Lebowski” at the invitation of Chicago’s Open Court Press, at the American Culture Association Convention in San Francisco and exhibited a new series of collages created in collaboration with his brother

In his classes, we are often exposed to the writings of little- known authors, unsung heroes of the American experience. Dr. Hauss works very hard to ensure that our student population gets the very best, cutting edge theories about that work as well. His earlier publications on American authors including Herman Melville, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe, Gerald Vizenor, and Walt Whitman repeatedly question how to theorize American literature in both a non-Eurocentric and post-nationalistic manner.

“It is only in classes at Dominguez Hills, while engaging with a student population that actually looks like America, that I have sought a way of ‘re-telling’ this tradition in more culturally inclusive and politically progressive ways,” Dr. Hauss has noted. Next fall, after nearly two decades of teaching, Hauss will take his first sabbatical and work on his forthcoming book, “Maelstrom: The American Literature of Failure.”

In addition to working on scholarly, personal, and collaborative projects, Dr. Hauss reserves time in his busy schedule for giving back to the university. He utilizes his energy to serve his colleagues on the faculty in a vast number of ways, including serving as a member if the English department’s RTP (Retention, Tenure and Promotion) and curriculum committees. Additionally, he serves as a member of the University Task Force on Freshman Success.

I had the opportunity recently to interview Dr. Hauss, who after seven years, shares the following candid remarks which shed some light on how he feels about teaching at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Georgia Moten: How did you become interested in teaching literature?

Jon Hauss: Even as a kid, I recognized reading as an excellent method of escape from human beings. The beautiful thing about it, of course, is that it brings you right back again through a kind of detour.

GM: How do you feel about teaching an inner-city population?

JH: From the first class I met at Dominguez Hills—on the campus visit portion of my interview—I felt a perfect fit with students. I think the working class and lower middle class experience in America produces a sharable sensibility—even across color and gender lines—a latent mutual knowledge of the peculiar threats this country offers to the material life and esteem of ordinary working people. I can honestly say that, since first encountering Dominguez Hills students in 2002, I’ve never wanted to teach anywhere else.

GM: How did you decide to focus on the specific topics that you teach with special regard to the literatures of ethnicity, diversity, history, culture, and immigrant populations?

JH: My study of North American writing has always been cross-class, cross-gender, cross-culture. My dissertation, “Masquerades in Black: Narratives of Slavery and Resistance in Pre-Civil War America,” includes chapters on Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as (Harriet Beecher Stowe, (Herman) Melville, and (Edgar Allen) Poe. Nonetheless I was given a special crash course in American polyphony in my first jobs on the East Coast. My dissertation identified me, not only as that relatively new specimen, a “theory person,” but also as a scholar of literatures by people of color. So I was asked to teach histories of African-American literature as well as courses on so-called “Ethnic American” literature. To me, these were all American literature courses. So it was my great good fortune to be hired explicitly as an Americanist here, where I am now able to mainstream the kinds of literature I had been teaching anyway under different names.

GM: How do you manage to inspire your students to work so hard and get so involved in discussions when they are so shy and reserved in other classes?

JH: Thanks for the flattery of your question. If it’s true, if I do, I would hope it’s because of something students often mention in their evaluations of me: that I treat them with simple respect. I despise—I mean despise—shaming [students] in the classroom.

GM: What are some of the hopes that you have for Dominguez as an institution of higher learning?

JH: That it will be recognized by the state as a college with both a special mission and a special claim on state support.

GM: How do you feel that its students will be able to positively impact the communities that they live in?

JH: Dominguez Hills graduates pour out of this place bent on such service. It's what they do, reporting back at regular intervals, to their former teachers’ delight.

GM: One thing that is especially significant for me as I leave CSU Dominguez Hills and attempt to become the teacher you have inspired me to become, is your teaching philosophy.

JH: My teaching philosophy has, I think, borne especially good fruit here. That philosophy involves a conscious commitment to four aims: animation, deference, dissemination, and simple humor. By animation, I mean a demonstrative passion in the classroom, for intellectual connections for and with students. By deference, I mean an equally demonstrative respect for the intelligence, the independence of mind and heart and experience in the people I teach—a respectful listening to what students say, or work to say, beyond my own notions of what discussion should elicit. The third aim, dissemination, I explained in the Fall 2004 issue of the National Education Association journal, Thought & Action. In an article titled “The Empty Cabinet: Democratic Teaching and the Czech Republic,” I define such teaching as involving ‘the active dissemination of as many unrepresented discourses as you know, within and against the particular institutional monologues you happen to enter.’ Today these discourses include texts by women, by minority, post-colonial, and post-communist writers, and by a range of contending theorists on the interactions of language, text, subjectivity, and power.

Finally, by humor, I mean simply an enlivening openness to the everyday comedies of the classroom—to the lapses of sense, coherence, and communication to which we are always subject.

GM: Do you feel that your students have taught you anything? If so, what is it?

JH: Too much to say, and different things from different students, and from different sorts of students. I’ve taught American literature for many years and in many places, but here it acquired an altogether new urgency for me. I believe it is because these students bring to our classrooms such drive, such heart, such rare faith in the significance of intellectual and artistic pursuits, and finally such wisdom, often hard-won, regarding the pitfalls and the promises of American life.

Look around. There is not one story here but ... dozens. Every day someone teaches me something new about resilience, the meaning of respect and courage. My students have taught me that others have been cynical as I have been cynical, and sometimes as idiotically hopeful too.

- Reported by Georgia Moten
Class of 2009
Master of Arts, English literature