08/11/2007
Why We Still Teach the Guy
Why we teach Shakespeare: because he's not full of cliches, because his plays don't follow anything resembling Freytag's Pyramid, and because half the time, what happens just doesn't make sense. Hamlet stabs the guy behind the curtain even though he just saw Uncle Dad praying down the hall. Everyone Caesar ever met stabs him and all he can ask -- when he's inexplicably still alive -- is "et tu, Brute?". Cressida goes back home. Hermione is magically resurrected and no one ever asks if it's possible to bring her son back to life too. Valentine says, "ok, take her, she's yours, it's better we should stay friends." Life for most people doesn't work via action-reaction, cause-effect, motivation, or "if you just try harder ..." and neither does Shakespeare.
When Mary Janell Metzger spent a month observing a high school Advanced Placement class, she found that the course's standardization exerted "a pressure that at once excludes ambiguity and reflection and encourages vague generalities" (24). This is what my 'best' students have come to me with: vague generalities. The students Metzger observed, college bound and at the top of their graduating class, read in Shakespeare meaningless self-esteem driven cliches like "imagination is important" and "follow your dreams."
Sure, she concedes, Shakespeare's work encourages students to develop "imagination." But so much more importantly, they call for "a daring capacity to entertain ambiguity and the paradoxes of human life and history" (24). And Shakespeare sure is a great way of teaching them that human history is damn ambiguous.
(At the same time, maybe happiness on a personal level is being in a place where you are able to believe that your life is entirely unparadoxical, explainable, and simultaneously dependent on moments of character-driven motivation and miracles.)
....
Works Cited:
Metzger, Mary Janell. "The villainy you teach me ...": Shakespeare and AP English literature. The English Journal. 92:1 (2002): 22-28.
22:32 Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this | Tags: teaching, motivation, character, self-esteem
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Perhaps if I had not been taught the sententious interpretations of the classics, I would not have to be 're-learning' them on my own during my MA years, when I really should be honing into more specified and deeper areas of research. I draw the unfortunate conclusion that it is not due to the inferiority of favored pedagogical practices, but rather, at the risk of being grotesquely pretentious & elitist, that most who teach literature at pre-college levels are not trained well enough themselves & thus resort to quick-fix "what is the meaning" lectures, which, due to their arbitrariness of assigned 'correct' interpretations, are opaque enough to keep students occupied for the time which they must be present in class. Even in an English graduate program, I regularly see animosity towards the classics of Western literature such as Shakespeare, etc. On my more temperamental days I conclude that this means the person in question is most certainly a blockhead that does not possess the discipline & perceptiveness to appreciate these older works, & that they got into graduate school due to their specialty knowledge of some idiotically specific & contemporary passing fancy of a sub-genre. But when I can look at this with more repose, I realize that these people, though training to be the next generation of scholars, experienced the same reductive migraine lectures about the meaning of Moby Dick. I as well abhorred literature until I finally encountered educators that encouraged us to question rather than answer. I think the Existentialists must have experienced the same reluctance to abandon the belief that life was explainable, but in the face of overwhelming evidence, one is faced with the choice of diving into the abyss or being the one trying to bail water out of the Titanic with a teaspoon. But seriously, who do you think you are? Encouraging ambivalence & paradox? Don't you know how destructive that is? Don't you know that abortion, homosexuality, Mexicans, Arabs, liberalism, multinationalism, socialism, environmentalism, & intellectualism are all extremely wrong & evil? If we all thought like you then our great Christian nation would fall apart into a state of heretical anarchy! P.S. Works cited on a blog entry: nice.
Posted by: Trey | 08/12/2007
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