Toluu

To Delight and to Instruct

If the purpose of art is the same as the purpose of teaching, is teaching therefore an art?

When Good Classes Go...Yesterday

This postmodernism class has been a real blast this semester. For whatever reason, a looser dynamic has emerged, in part because some vocal students have felt comfortable enough to express their frustration, suspicion, and general distaste for the material, which often consists of textual play and literary tricks. A lot of these students haven't felt in on the jokes.

But because they knew that they weren't in on it, and didn't like that fact, we were able to talk really frankly early on about what they were struggling with, and how we could work through that. Without those students who were brave enough to say "I hate this book," I'd now be writing about long lectures to silent, reticent students.

One of the ways that I ended up designing the class was that I knew I was assigning ambitiously, but I left open the possibility that many students would skip something or other. Exams were designed to let them talk about books they engaged with, and ignore others entirely. This has rarely been a problem in terms of the classroom dynamic, since most students have ended up participating in significant ways during the semester. The idea is that they contribute when they're ready. It's not something I do often, but given the level of the class and its comparatively unimportant place in the curriculum, it seems like a good way to go.

Rarely, but occasionally, do I get the kind of moments where people choose not to read en masse. Typically I assi

On the importance of storiesNovember 21

My contemporary literature class (despite its status as a 200-level course) has revolved around postmodern theories of literature and culture. I have asked students in small groups to present on one essay or excerpt on postmodern literary/cultural studies, and then following their presentation, I take the ball and run with it. We've read Barth, Lyotard, McHale, Jameson, Hutcheon, Hayden White, bell hooks, and Baudrillard. They've done remarkably well.

They've been paired with readings from Borges, Calvino, Stoppard, Winterson, Angela Carter, Sexton, Baraka, George Saunders, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, Kundera and Spiegelman. It's been an extraordinarily fun course, and the students are thinking. hard. It's always nice to see the tiny explosions of 27 minds (my own included) being blown at the same moment. (The student who used the electoral projection maps in late October in response to Baudrillard was a nice moment).

One of the conundrums we've been running up against, though, is on the one hand, the necessary fictionality of all discourse, running up against the imperative to tell stories, fictional and historical as vital to human survival. Maus and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting make this crucially clear, but even If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, or Rushdie's "children's" novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, give us variations on this theme. Telling stories in a fictional world will

A BookNovember 19

Just a book...

PainNovember 15

Theorists of performativity, notably Judith Butler, have always had trouble bending the logical extension of the theory around the idea of pain. We are generally in agreement about the performativity of gender, and we have come around to the idea of the performativity of sex. Sadiya Hartman has convinced me eloquently of the performativity of race, and there are a host of other ways that we might then use performativity to theorize the ways that we discusively stylize the body, how we write identity onto ourselves with gesture, language, costume, and contact.

But pain resists this theory. In every theory I've come across, it remains the ineffable. We can talk about the performativity even of disability, but the pain doesn't disappear. Look at the work of Bob Flanagan, or of Susan Miller, or of a host of other performers of illness and pain and these performances often become testimony to the ultimate reassurance of existence. Trent Reznor famously puts it: "I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel / I focus on the pain /the only thing that's real."

I've been teaching

The sign that a hiatus is ending...November 14

is often that I post about the continuing hiatus. It means I've been thinking about the blog again.