[Paper for Class] Conversations that Deserve a Lifetime: On the Possibilities of a Humanities-Centered Critical English Language Arts Curriculum

Toward an Appropriate Contemporary English Education

The impetus for this paper begins with the realization that “English education has reached a crucial moment in its history,” and that the “moment is contingent upon the changing demographics, cultural knowledges, and practices of economic globalization” (Luke, 2004, p. 85). As the title indicates, the focus of this paper assumes that the identity crisis of secondary English Language Arts (ELA) – and indeed, perhaps, in upper education – is best addressed through a unified and unifying critical pedagogy: focused both broadly on the changing globalized world, and more narrowly on the changing individuals composing each class being taught. This paper contends that to meet this moment in history, ELA must teach to the revolution and change of the present and future through the unified wholes and cohesive movements of a wider, dialogue-centered curriculum—enriched by the teaching of a solid Humanities literacy.

Whiteness Redux

I’m hoping to have time to sit down and write a real post again. This post is a recap of my thought progression about Whiteness from last summer (summarized here for a friend, but perhaps others will benefit too). The following is the progression, but there are side-issues that come in and out, too. The center of everything is race, and eventually,Whiteness. Most of them are quote-heavy (from my class readings), but there is also a lot of commentary from me as well.

1. Lost Responsibilities of the Majority 
2. Lost Responsibilities of the Majority, Part 2
3. Dumbing Down is Dumb
4. An Addendum Politicized
5. An Addendum Politicized, Part 2
6. More White Thoughts (on Being White)
7. Thoughts on White Thoughts: Cautions and Further Considerations
8. Lost Responsibilities of the Majority, Part 3
9. It Takes a Village to Raise a Child
10. Summer Semester Closing Thoughts on Whiteness
11. Having it in Your Home

For me there were a lot of other things going on at the same time as processing these things (as evidenced by the existence of other posts not about this topic), but I think those capture the core of my thoughts.

Call It the Honeymoon Period…

…but there is something extremely satisfying about a day’s labor for the Lord (in spite of the shortcomings we bring to it).

HyperModernism!!

The following could have been grounds for a critical-literary analysis thesis (or dissertation section), so please feel free to skip it or dive in deep with me. Please also note that this is a secularized reading of Art and reasons for Art. I do believe there is a greater purpose underneath it all, but I am trying to engage with culture at culture’s level.

The basic premise is that the same anxieties and rebellions governing Modernism are at play in today’s world, just at a frantic (schizophrenic?) pace/level. For example, I read the following:

A European era like ours, which carries with it the enormous weight of infinite civilizations and the maturity of many spiritual and fateful periods, produces an art that in certain aspects resembles that of the restlessness of myth. Such an art arises through the efforts of the few men endowed with particular clearsightedness and sensibility.

– Giorgio de Chirico (Valori Plastici, April-May 1919)

…and I can’t help but think of America’s current decadence.

I cannot emphasize enough that the sources of the modernist rebellion in the arts rose from all quarters of the political, intellectual, and emotional world. What they did share was a powerful sense of opposition to that world as it was, and a hunger for spirituality.

One of [Edvard] Munch’s most impassioned supporters, the eccentric Polish novelist Stanislaw Przybyszewski, illuminated the hidden grounds for the resistance to Munch: his art, he wrote, represented the direct expression of the painter’s unconscious, his “naked individuality,” an assault on bourgeois propriety. The display of inner self could, it seems, go too far.

- Peter Gay (Modernism: The Lure of Heresy)

And speaking of the era between the two world wars, I hear the same echoes of today:

This was what W.H. Auden baptized the Age of Anxiety, a time of resentment, rearmament, irreparable and unappeasable social tensions, the easy turn to violence in international fascism and communism, and worldwide Depression.

- Peter Gay (Modernism: The Lure of Heresy)

Pop art sounds a lot like the endless stream of, and search for cleverness on the internet today. Code-name, memes:

For Greenberg, Pop Art…was merely “Novelty art,” no doubt “diverting” but not “really fresh,” an art that raised more difficulties than it settled. Its displays of sheer ingenuity were, Greenberg argued, essentially shallow, mere fun. The charge was that influential artists were throwing all painting into a single pot, not taking it seriously but presenting their work as simply amusing and wanting it to be enjoyable for everyone.

- Peter Gay (Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, quoting Clement Greenberg’s “Post-Painterly Abstraction”)

“Art” like this (and like the memes) continue to endure as legitimate forms of artistic expression for the mere fact that they are recognized and claimed by academy and media: “…the commercial manufacture of culture has become ever more influential an activity.”  (Peter Gay, again, speaking of Pop Art). It is self-perpetuating just like advertising; advertising is lucrative because it is a system created to tell us what we like, and then what we like tailors what is made and advertised.

Now companies commission things just like church/aristocracy did before the emergent middle class started demanding art, too. I don’t see why similar methods/channels can’t be put in place digitally for an age of digital media. If there were people that mediated and curated on behalf of an overstimulated digital audience, I think there could actually be a chance of keeping things Art instead of the vast sea of mere amusement. [Insert Amusing Ourselves to Death and other gigantic Neil Postman arguments here]

Thus, in my theory, the other reason for the continuation of Modernism into HyperModernism, rather than a move elsewhere, is the lack of “cultural mediators”—be it those who truly commission art, or those vendors who helped Modernists sell their work to the middle class:

They, and other middlemen of culture, intervened in the making of taste, trying to entice lovers of art, music, and literature, many of them new to the culture market, to rise above easy entertainments and learn to appreciate the sophisticated, the difficult, the unconventional.

- Peter Gay (Modernism: The Lure of Heresy)

Our (as I elsewhere called it) meme-whoring is most definitely an “easy entertainment”…there should be other places to find experience difficult/unconventional entertainment. For example, this post doesn’t really fit the ‘feel’ of tumblr, and I struggle to put these thoughts in a medium that is more accessible. Maybe that’s not possible? I just fear (and see/know) that we don’t really say anything with even the deepest of these easily accessible thoughts. Van Gogh feared much the same of the camera, and I believe that he has been proven wrong…I only hope that we can avoid scratching mere surfaces today:

“[Portrait painting] is not banal, and seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photographer’s.” The democratic lens, an invention that van Gogh despised, was to his mind doomed to register mere surfaces.

- Peter Gay (Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, quoting from Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh)

Engendered, Part 2

There is something very fundamental that we neglect when we say that gender itself can be deconstructed. I do believe that the portrayals of gender can be, but as the previous post and the quote that follow so beautifully portray, there is something deeper and more universally fundamental at work.

The two white creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earth-ward horizon whence his danger came long ago. “A sailor’s look,” Ransom once said to me; “you know . . . eyes that are impregnated with distance.” But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist. On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim.

- C.S. Lewis (Perelandra)

[incomplete thoughts...]

Outward/Inward; A lighter form of Paglia’s thesis dissertation…

That deeper thing crying out is your soul.

(Don’t?) Look Around You

After Shakespeare and Chaucer, Dickens vies with Jane Austen as the peopler of a world. It is all the better that so many of the Dickens people are grotesques: look around you.

- Harold Bloom (Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds)

The inferno of the living is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

- Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver)

haha how joyful…

Vague Inklings of a Manifesto Against Labels and Ruts

you have constructed for yourselves a black hole of imitation

you shall not thus break free

we have all of us settled

I refuse to do what everyone else is doing in the movement of the moment;

not to be different, but to listen to who I am on my way to becoming

Lull-a-Bye

So be motherly to me, O tranquil night…
You who remove the world from the world, you who are peace,
You who don’t exist, who are only the absence of light,
You who aren’t a thing, a place, an essence or a life,
Penelope who weaves darkness that tomorrow will be unraveled,
Unreal Circe of the fevered, of the anguished without cause,
Come to me, O night, reach out your hands,
And be coolness and relief, O night, on my forehead…
You, whose coming is so gentle you seem to be drawing away,
Whose ebb and flow of darkness, as the moon softly breathes,
Has waves of dead tenderness, the cold of vast oceans of dream,
Breezes of imagined landscapes for our inordinate anguish…
You, pallidly, you, faintly, you, liquidly,
Scent of death among flowers, breath of fever along riverbanks,
You, queen, you, chatelaine, you, pale lady, come…

- Álvaro de Campos, aka Fernando Pessoa (from Fernando Pessoa & Co. translated by Richard Zenith)

The Art of Recollection

But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia–for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some sort of fulfillment, but an indirect one–the fulfillment of art.

One may be born with the potential for a prodigious memory, but one is not born with a disposition to recollect; this comes only with changes and separations in life–separations from people, from places, from events and situations, especially if they have been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved. It is, thus, discontinuities, the great discontinuities of life, that we seek to bridge, or reconcile, or integrate, by recollection and, beyond this, by myth and art….All of us, finally, are exiles from the past.

- Oliver Sacks (“The Landscape of His Dreams” in An Anthropologist on Mars)

And a nostalgia for Festival. But Festival is a manifestation of the cyclical time of myth; it is a present that return, whereas we live in the linear and profane time of progress and history. Perhaps the revolt of youth is an empty festival, the summons, the invocation of an event that will always be a future event and never a present one, that never will simply be. Or perhaps it is a commemoration: the revolution no longer appears to be the elusive imminence of the future but rather something like a past to which we cannot return–yet which we cannot abandon either. In either case, it is not here, but there, always beyond our reach. Possessed by the memory of its future or of its past, by what it was or what it could have been–no, not possessed by rather deserted, empty, the orphan of its origin and future–society mimics them. And by mimicking them it exorcises them: for a few weeks it denies itself through the blasphemies and the sacrilege of its young people and then affirms itself more completely and more perfectly in the ensuing repression. A mimetic magic.

- Octavio Paz (Conjunctions and Disjunctions)

Throw Away Your Assumptions, Part 2

Though most of us have all sort of grudgingly agreed to “hate the sin and love the sinner,” the actual implementation of Gandhi’s admonition hasn’t always been pretty. Some more liberal Christians are not comfortable with the “hate the sin” part and some more conservative Christians are not willing to admit that Jesus ever entertained the presence of sinners. This, of course, has put a crimp in the love part.

- Margot Starbuck (“To What KIND of Sinners Was Jesus a Friend?“)