I am currently teaching a course on 20th century American witness literature. As I explore the texts with the class, I am starting to see a larger pattern in my teaching. Specifically, I am drawn to teaching the conflicts and to bringing the urgency of texts out in my courses. I’ll try to clarify, as I am writing to find out my own mind right now. Since I started teaching Native American lit and 20th Century American lit here at the college seven years ago, I’ve tended to create classes that zero in on topics that are emotionally as well as critically engaging to me and, I hope, to my students. I’ve taught about contact literature in the Americas, Native American genocide, the Red Power movement of the seventies, prison writing, and now witness narratives. At various times in these courses, I’ve found myself conflicted over how to present texts to students that allow them to respond critically and emotionally. This is difficult for anyone, as the emotional response tends to overpower the critical faculty somewhat, and then judgement gets clouded. Students are engaged and feel the urgency of the topic, but they (and I) inevitably reach a saturation point where exhaustion and disconnect threaten. This somewhat draining roller-coaster of a pedagogy sometimes makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just focus on teaching more canonically, covering the basics more solidly, instead of taking students out to these extreme edges.
This morning, though, I found a passage in a book on witness and testimony in literature that took me back to why I started doing this, and it made me see that I’m not just some sort of masochist (or, even worse, sadist) with a taste for literary extremes. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s book, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History examines how the process of testimony and bearing witness in literature is really a process of entering territories of things we don’t know and possibly don’t even have the language for yet. For reader and writer, it is a journey into uncharted and uncertain terrain. Felman relates a story of a graduate class she taught on testimony, psychoanalysis, and literature that reminded me of some things I had experienced as a teacher. She told of a couple of class sessions where they viewed video of testimony from Holocaust survivors. The students’ response to these narratives was a complete surprise to Felman. They were largely silent in the classes, but an urgent extracurricular discourse grew out of the classes, and many of the students become obsessed with their reactions to the testimonies. They felt lost, alone, as if they could not communicate or commiserate with others in order to articulate an adequate response to the testimonials. Felman knew that she had to help the class synthesize their responses through discussion and writing and contextualize these responses with the rest of the course material. Long story short, she was able to do this, but only through an emotional and pedagogical struggle that taught her something very essential about literature and her teaching. She says:
“I would venture to propose, today, that teaching in itself, teaching as such, takes place precisely only through a crisis: if teaching does not hit upon some sort of crisis, if it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension it has perhaps not truly taught: it has perhaps passed on some facts, passed on some information and some documents, with which the students or the audience–the recipients–can for instance do what people during the occurrence of the Holocaust precisely did with information that kept coming forth but that no one could recognize, and that no one could therefore truly learn, read or put to use.
Looking back at the experience of that class, I therefore think that my job as teacher, paradoxical as it may sound, was that of creating in the class the highest state of crisis that it could withstand, without ‘driving the students crazy’–without compromising the students’ bounds” (52-53).
I have a lot more to think about and hopefully say on this, as it seems to crystallize what I am doing right now in my own teaching and research and what I am also seeing emerge in others’ work on campus. More on that in a future post. For now, it feels like a really important, urgent, call. We’ll see what I do with it.
Related articles
- Teaching as Crisis (tryagainfailbetter.wordpress.com)
Dave Rice
