Alienation and Critical Pedagogy: An Unorthodox Approach to Composition Theory

In what has been an important and earnest effort to recognize the wholesale negation of our students’ collective agency vis-à-vis their academic and socioeconomic disenfranchisement, we seem to have likewise ascribed an epidemic of internalized inferiority to them when in reality they are intensely narcissistic. They not only feel confident in their dismissal of primary texts—i.e., “Ginsberg was merely a raving drunk”—they also feel rather confident dismissing any and all secondary scholarship—i.e., “Harold Bloom is an idiot.” A tragic consequence of our efforts to engender intellectual confidence in our students via a barrage of initiatives that displace their accountability is the false notion (on the part of our students) that their personal experiences are somehow relevant to all texts (regardless of national, cultural, and perhaps even disciplinary context). Thus, they are often incapable of engaging with texts critically, because they immediately flee after the first line—of, e.g., a poem or story—immediately citing a seemingly relevant anecdote. For example, when scrutinizing the plight of a child soldier in the Sierra Leone, several of my students gleefully offered what they deemed similarly horrific moments at the local mall, etc. On the contrary, when they feel completely alienated from a text and are thus forced to meaningfully parse sentences, stanzas, whole pages, they seem more apt to really scrutinize said texts while simultaneously employing those same analytical tools that are otherwise so quickly cast aside. While alienation as a basis for pedagogical practice may sound strange, we should remember our first day in a theory class when poststructuralist jargon danced on a chalkboard before our numbed expressions and we quickly sought any and all available references and attempted to keep from drowning. This is precisely what my students do when they arrive at Borges in the fourth unit of my current incarnation of WRT201—they squirm at first, and then suddenly (and rather magically) begin to read, really read…underlining, commenting in the margins, etc. Thus, while it always seemed more logical to assume that familiar topics would be somehow “easier,” this is in fact true only as a means of initiating the writing process, but not as a means of producing critical writing or even cogent exposition.

Likewise, I begin the writing course with a unit on the “self”—or more specifically, rather existentialist notions of the self courtesy of Wislawa Szymborska’s “Negative,” Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” and Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Previously—i.e., this past summer when I had this epiphany about alienation after years of starting with “easier” units—I only used Ginsberg and Camus; honestly, Szymborska was a completely random idea that was the serendipitous consequence of a bookstore fiasco! So, while it may seem that a discussion of post-industrial malaise and existential crises may be a bit much for our first unit, it has been far more productive than former assignments that featured Hughes and Ginsberg, and that basically functioned as a springboard for all sorts of absurd tangents. However ironically, this unit on the “self” has simultaneously catalyzed a discussion in which students are able to celebrate their narcissism and at the same time to meaningfully parse what are somewhat knotty texts, because they are desperately looking for connections! In short, I am (somewhat apologetically) exploiting this narcissism for the higher purpose of teaching literature! For example, in attempting to deconstruct Camus’s notion that the “myth is not tragic [unless] the hero is conscious,” they sought desperately to find like scenarios in their own lives—“selling out” for a position at “the Gap,” etc; but all the while (and perhaps because the language and context are less accessible) they didn’t stray from the text. They were actually doing close readings—a task that I had long since abandoned after successive bouts of depression…I did, however, offer more palpable narratives, which I do believe is a necessary component of teaching our student population, many of whom have been subjected to a paltry secondary curricula that covered virtually nothing in the Humanities! Toward that end, we discussed more popular illustrations of this theme in films like “Office Space” and also in David Foster Wallace’s recent (and completely tragic, albeit hilarious) story “Wiggle Room,” which was featured in The New Yorker last year.

So, my students began with Szymborska’s “Negative,” a poem that interrogates the binary nature of our lives and the ameliorative narratives of life and death—i.e., those embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition—and they were able to use a poem (rife with examples of myriad literary tropes including elaborate uses of imagery) to make sense of the “negative” or inverse realities that delimit our experiences, etc. Anyway, this led to a rich discussion of their perceptions of and perspectives on life and death, which led rather logically into a discussion of Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” a poem that directly antagonizes the deification of industry and beseeches a dying sunflower for an explanation of how “she” let “all that civilization” destroy her “soul.” This, of course, led us back to “Office Space” and again rather logically into a discussion of Sisyphus and his futile rock. The unit was appended with Robert Frost’s “Design,” a poem that conveys Frost’s more pragmatic approach to nature—the antithesis of the rather romantic pastorals that pedestalize and thus render nature a mythical and mysterious place to which we—humanity—have no practical connection. Inclusion of the Frost poem in their first process essay was optional, but many students this semester have opted to try…we’ll see how that goes when they submit final drafts on Friday!