What Can I Get Out of This?: A Review
On a gray afternoon in January 2020, 33 first-year Boston College students shuffled into their seats for a required literature course, clutching laptops and coffee cups as Professor Carlo Rotella ’86 adjusted his notes and tried to read the mood, a mix of skepticism, anxiety, and quiet hope. No one in the room knew that this ordinary semester—one of novels, essays, and awkward silences—would soon fracture into Zoom grids and isolation, or that it would inadvertently illuminate what makes the classroom irreplaceable.
In Rotella’s What Can I Get Out of This? (University of California Press), the distance-learning disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic honed how he thought about the nature and purpose of the humanities as well as the subtler values of in-person learning. “That experience really sharpened my appreciation of just how special and meaningful the face-to-face classroom is, that it’s a precious thing we shouldn’t take for granted,” he says.
It also gave him an urgent reason to chronicle the unique alchemy of a literature class. Rotella describes literature interpretation as a “craft, like cabinetmaking”—that is, a practical skill, not an esoteric academic exercise. He frames close reading as “basic equipment for living for any citizen, any worker, any thinking person,” a method of making sense of the world’s symbols and contradictions—from political speeches to family conversations. Rotella’s project, then, is not merely a memoir of teaching but a defense of why literature still matters.
The book’s narrative focus on those 33 individual students underscores this vision. Readers meet young people navigating impostor syndrome, cultural differences, and financial strain, alongside those who excel at jumping into debate. By the semester’s midpoint, the students’ anxieties and hesitations transform into a collective exercise in pattern recognition and argument-building, showing that interpretation is not only learnable, but also empowering.
Rotella emphasizes that his goal was to “open the black box” of college classrooms for readers inside and outside academia. “There’s no lack of strong opinions about what happens there . . . and yet many people who are very sure that they know what’s going on in the classroom don’t spend any time there at all. So I thought it would be useful to. . . show some humans actually doing the humanities.”
The book doesn’t shy away from situating classroom life in a larger cultural context. Rotella reflects on the decline in humanities majors, inequities in admissions, and the rise of technology like AI, but these themes never overshadow the central drama of students grappling with literature together. Instead, they amplify the classroom’s significance as “timelessly special and separate from everything else in life and, on the other hand, deeply connected to everything else in life.”
By spotlighting students’ evolving voices, What Can I Get Out of This? offers an antidote to clichéd debates about higher education, a ground-level account of how intellectual growth happens, and why reading closely—and reading together—remains essential. When a room full of people are listening to one another as texts open up to argument and surprise, something vital happens. As Rotella’s book demonstrates, that something is worth preserving.
