Clever, engaging, critically situated title

I agree with Caitlin and Donna that the lit-crit review in WLMA separated out the theories and oversimplified them, but I wasn’t too put off by that. In some ways, the simplicity of the chapter’s summaries of the theories was refreshing, because my problem with theory lately is that I have so many of them bouncing around in my head that I can’t separate them out anymore. Dorothy’s right: we have no “naked eyeballs” when we approach texts; we’re socialized and trained in various approaches long before we recognize them as approaches. The hard part for me is that latter part.

I realized as I read the chapter that I take bits and pieces from many theories. Many of my teachers when I was an undergrad were trained as formalists/structuralists, I think, and so I’ve picked up a lot of that school’s techniques when reading lit. Barthes and the semiotics stuff have been useful as I’ve stepped into reading visual texts (though I was confused by Barthes’ inclusion in the structuralist camp, as his work was pretty historicist, I thought.) Foucault, too, is very much a historian in stuff like Discipline and Punish. Feminism and critical race theory have important places in my thinking, too, as I’m interested in what cultural texts reveal about power. Which brings me to historical criticism, which is probably the most important lens for me, a kind of umbrella under which all of those other ones fit. I think you were right to give me the presentation on Marxism, Barbara, since Marx, from what I understand, was the first theorist to hammer home the point that we’re all influenced by our place and time. The only theoretical approach that I’m not a fan of these days is psychological. I remember liking it when I was an undergrad, but it all strikes me now as a bit too pat, the confident assertions of a bunch of men about what we all think and feel way before we can articulate and remember it. Plus, there’s Freud’s own sexism. And my Victor-influenced skepticism/disdain for scientific discourse, which uses language (inherently ideological/culturally influenced) to objectively describe the mind.

Side note: the rhetoric stuff seems to cut across/through some of these other theories, but I’m not sure how. Gotta figure that out.

Onto my favorite newspaper.

Actually, I have to admit that while I read the Onion every couple of days, and love it intensely, reading all of these articles back to back kind of made me sad. I suppose that’s the danger of satire: that the serious commentary underneath the humor can be serious indeed. Most of these articles made fun of a sad reality in education: that a lot of students just aren’t engaged with literature, and that teachers aren’t engaged with what students write about it. I could go on, but Caitlin, Donna, Dorothy, and Michelle have all noted the same thing, and better than I could right now. Sadness breeds depression breeds Writer’s Block.

Caitlin captured the point of the “Radical Socialist Movement” piece beautifully.

I think Donna’s IDs of the critical lenses that each piece satirizes are really good, and she spots several that I didn’t get. About “Area Girlfriend Still Hasn't Seen Apocalypse Now,” though, I think Donna’s right to claim that feminism’s being lampooned, but I think this piece is more about how historical/cultural criticism claims certain cultural texts as “important,” and smugly derides anyone who doesn’t know them or likes other stuff. Talk to your average indie music aficionado for a taste of this attitude in real life.

I had to admit to myself that I have deconstructed a fair amount of everyday shit, and that the only thing separating me from the grad student deconstructing that menu is that he’s more articulate than I am. My wife and I do it all the time – we casually deconstruct ads, shows, movies, etc., and we have a fun time doing it. What that piece so poignantly illustrates, other than the snobbish academic-ness of this practice, is that we academics get so caught up interpreting everything that it gets hard for us to just function in everyday life. This is all too true.

The Oppression of Pedagogy

Banking vs. problem-posing. Domination vs. liberation. Necrophily vs. biophily. Reading assignments vs. … well, what? I grit my teeth and muster the energy for my last semester of classes, I think back over 25-odd years of school, and I wonder how much of it fell into the kind of educational model that Freire railed against, and how much of it would have passed his muster.

There's been plenty of banking. Plenty of memorization of this and that, taking-in of Important Material. I was always decent at the former, being trained by middle class parents to like being a good student, and thus doing whatever it took. The latter I still find myself doing, and will in fact do a helluva lot more between now and next fall when I take my comps. Does reading stuff that's important to a class/field of study count as the banking method? Surely, the kind of reading I did for the GRE was: I just had to memorize the notion that "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was a hallmark of British Romanticism, that the Shakespearean Sonnet had 12 rhyming lines and a couplet at the end (right? I seem to have forgotten – maybe proof that what I've put in my bank seems to have escaped).

Facing the other side of the educational fence (or, rather, straddling it), I wonder if my own pedagogy qualifies as Freire's liberating kind or not. Surely, I have assigned reading, assessed knowledge, evaluated performance, decided on and focused on Important Material. As a FYC teacher and – more significantly – as a technical/professional communication teacher, I'm supposed to prepare my students for success in writing in their fields. I'm helping them fit into the system. Of course, the training I've received in this composition teaching, behind which I think I see Freire looming, has emphasized the contextual nature of literacy and the political nature of all rhetoric; so thus, I try to help my students see their places and communicative acts as contextual and political. To help them see their places in the system. That sounds like Freire, doesn't it? And yet: how much are they really looking to see and change the system, and how much are they just wanting to fit in, get through my class, get through college, move back to Seattle, and work for Microsoft?

Whatever the answer, Microsoft Word seems to be aware of my dissent, and it's threatening to crash on me and delete this entry. So I think I'll post now.