Can You Break Rules You Haven't Learned?

Bourgeois Cat

Love this:

"What does it mean," she asks, "when primarily white men and women are producing the discourse around Otherness?"

Nothing is more gratifying than to know that someone else gets it. The excerpt above is from a differnt paper of hooks', but it is about the racism of postmodernism, something allegedly all-embracing. Really, it is a projection of relativism onto cultures that have been not relativistic (can I say "relativistic-in-a-different-way"?) since time immemorial.

But I have some problems. hooks was writing pre-2000. Much of her complaints aren't translatable to our time.

"Loudness, anger, emotional outbursts, and even something as seemingly innocent as unrestrained laughter were deemed unacceptable, vulgar disruptions of classroom social order.  These traits were also associated with being a member of the lower classes" (hooks 4).

Obviously we want students to engage passionately, but if a chair gets thrown... well, I suppose pain is rhetorical. Note that she states silence in the classroom is

"a by-product of progressive efforts to question canonical knowledge, critique relations of domination, or subvert bourgeois class biases."

But once you learn the canon you can subvert it. I remember a "colleague" of mine, a professional in film archiving and restoration, who was returning to school to get a PhD, switching from film studies to English. He said "it's all about the canon and that's everything I'm against...". In the same conversation I brought up Shakespeare, even Pynchon. He didn't read either. Most of the people who bash the Canon aren't familiar with its liberatory force. Admittedly I drilled into a self-education with the "great books," but did so in order to undermine Western Civilization and Science, ideas which I (a freshman in college) disliked passionately. I hated everything it stood for, yet the more I delved into it the more I realized Western Civilization and The Canon are infused with so much contrary undercurrent that I began to access these distant, subconscious forces underlying the tradition.

As for the feminist critique, I agree. However, in spite of the issues of publication still weighted against females, we can't ignore how bad readership has gotten amongst young males. And English Majors are more female than male.

I agree with this deeply:

"pedagogical strategies that create ruptures in the established order, that promote modes of learning which challenge bourgeois hegemony."

But woah! a string 90's buzzwords! I simply can't read writing this bad... regardless of the ideas conveyed.

"Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind.

 Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body"

What? Metaphysical dualism is very present in non-Western Cultures: buddhism, modes of hinduism, jainism, Zen, even (I would argue) certain shamanic practices do this. Also, I simply don't think the people who lamented this dualism have engaged the literature related to the problem, the mind/body problem. If they did they'd have a better handle on what they are arguing. When I see a person as a mind, which is to say, as a person, and not a mass of meat, I have all the more respect for them, regardless of their race, class, or gender (not to mention appearance). Further, I find it odd to critique Western Culture and its legacies, yet to cite "Eros"  (originally a Western god at that) as a pedagogical tool in the classroom.

Do you want to be loved by your students? Are you a composition teacher or their eternal guru? Their angelic savior, liberating them from Capitalism one comma at a time?