Thanks, Christine, for your interesting post and there's much of it, as an assessment
of the cultural situation, that seems true. However, I think the lack of curiosity is partly
because of the underlying sense in many students that there is nothing different to hear,
that they've "heard it all," for that plethora of billboards says merely the same thing
over and over again. So why would media students be interested in reading or viewing
media, if there's that sense of having heard it all before, The mind is often too full of
this sort of overwhelming info from secondary sources, as if everything were received,
at two or three or more removes, and this has the curious effect of making everything 'opinion'.

For instance, in that sense in which you describe your international students taking great pride
in their possession of Shakespeare as if that were the possession of English literature,
that's due to the mediating influence of some other intervening educational system
which presents it to them as such. So succeeding in terms of that mediating system
means possessing that particular knowledge. One of the difficulties in teaching is
always not what students don't know but what they think they do know, and, much
of that today is the possession of opinion, media noise, various systems which
operate like a kind of lens focussing on a particular narrow range of perception.
But while this makes teaching more difficult, I don't know as it's any more difficult
or more false in its assumptions, than the idea of the mind as a blank slate was
previously. For I've usually found that almost anything outside of that particular
lens with which the student has been monocled/manacled can remind them that they
do, nevertheless, have their own eyes/I's which are as much outside the lens
as everything else.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Christine Murray <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Dec 5, 2003 3:51 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: this should brighten your day

Thanks, Liz. It was Nessa's comment about the lack of curiosity in her
students of media course-work that prompted my comments on that subject. And
I mostly mean the average mid- to working-class student who has enough means
to have been exposed throughout upbringing, to TV, radio, and now movie
theater and online advertising barrages--malls, car dealerships,
brand-products, all marketed mercilessly at every possible moment of waking
life including lunchtime in the public school cafeterias, & etc.

It's like someone posted billboards everywhere possible in the
consciousness, visible and invisible, to appeal to the formative
consciousness of this generation which is now coming of age.  Moreso than
ever before, then.  They are not critically curious about this.  Rather,
they are complacent, sometimes with irony, but not the kind that moves
people to change anything.  It is a little frightening.

On the other hand, maybe it's just a particular difference that I am
noticing and must personally adjust to.  But I have heard many others remark
similarly on this, so I think it more a cultural trend, not  anything I've
personally or ideosyncratically cast.  There is reason for concern about the
students, and the pardigm has shifted in ways we cannot readily identify or
adjust our teaching to--at least not here.

But I do see what you mean, distinguishing from traditional, historical,
conventional or institutionalized subjects to be curious about.  But do you
find that the English-as-a-Second-Language students where you are have been
even more indoctrinated to the literary canon-tradition than so-called
native speakers?  I have for five years now directed the University's
Writing Center here, and I teach upper level courses in literature and
writing, so I supervise about 8,000 student visitors each year for help with
college writing assignments, and I get to know very closely about 50 other
writerly/critical thinkers in the academic year.  The majority of those,
especially in the last three years, are international ESL students, mostly
Asian and African.

Yet prior to that, the majority were urban underclass minority
students--so-called in the U.S.--and really just an easy way for bureaucrats
to smooth over major historical-materialist differences between groups, by
separating them with names that do not signify.  That is, the students I
refer to were mostly African Americans of a generation newly come to upper
levels of literacy and education.  They still comprise a large portion of
the student body, but their needs are no longer emphasized in the way they
were 5 or 6 years ago.  That, too, is a literacy/education chapter no one in
this country has recently been heard very loudly and adequately to deal
with, either analytically or poetically.  Thankfully many teachers are
dedicated to this end and some good work is on the way, I do see and hear.


I find that international students (a large portion of the student
population here, I am happy to say--I mean, given that *it is Texas*) pride
themselves especially on their knowledge of literature.  But literature only
as it was taught here not sooner than 30 years ago--Gayatri Spivak, for one,
could write another whole career on this phenomenon, I suspect. It is what
Walter Benjamine refers to as monumental.  They love Shakespeare (as
everyone should!) but that is all, and they love his work for a very few
things.    That is all that English literature represents for such students,
then, and there is little else to be curious about.  They seem particularly
proud and possessive of this way of knowing.  Do you see the problem,
then?--at least, as it appears from here.  If it is that way, students so
captivated--narrowly curious--only with tradition a la Shakespeare, then
what, for example, can we ever hope for by way of avant or any liberated
views, of say, more recent poetry in English?

In all I guess we have our work cut out, as it were, more than ever before.

Thanks for the engaging dialogue.

chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 12/5/2003 2:34 AM
Subject: Re: this should brighten your day

Hmmmm - but Christine in my experience students doent lack curiosity -
they
just arent interested in the things we think they should be interested
in.
They can be persuaded with a little imagination and enthusiasm but it
isnt
natural to them to read Hedda G or Shakespeare (quite a few of them read
Stephen King though..... watch the most amazing variety of tv and film,
and
listen to quite a range of music - about which they have very developed
opinions)

Liz

> Mark, Liz, Ken, Nessa, & All,
>
> Yes, the lack of curiosity is sometimes astounding.  > Chris Murray
>