"Speaking out may be part of paideia--how,perhaps, we learn the confidence to perform heresy." I think that Prof. Burrow is exactly right in his post, especially the sentence quoted above. I have to note, however, how the current pedagogical fad for "clickers"--devices, for those of you fortunate enough to not know what I am talking about, that electronically record responses to questions--works against learning "the confidence to perform heresy" by replacing voice with a bit or a byte. Even more perversely, "clickers" are valuable, their boosters say, precisely because they allow students to participate anonymously.
Peter C. Herman
Colin Burrow wrote:
> I like this heretical response from J.D. Fleming, but the phrase 'texts as
> texts' does prompt me to wonder if texts are texts, or if critics sometimes
> behave a bit too much as though they are. Unpicking weaves of issues, knots
> of seriousness, is part of criticism; and foregrounding those kinds of
> activity is one of the ways in which humanities departments currently
> present themselves as, in various senses of the word 'serious'. But I
> suppose it might be equally serious to ask students to think about texts as
> sounds or as interpersonal actions and performances, and to think how, as
> they perform them, they can (or can't) convey what they would want to say
> about them if they were to discuss them in whatever critical idiom they
> might favour. I suppose I am reminded also of William Gager's defence of
> university theatricals in response to John Reynolds in 1592: 'we
> contrarywise doe it to recreate owre selves, ower House, and the better
> parte of the Vniversitye, with some learned Poême or other; to practyse owre
> owne style eyther in prose or verse ... honestly to embowlden owre yuthe; to
> trye their voyces, and confirme their memoryes; to frame their speeche; to
> conforme them to convenient action; to try what mettell is in evrye one, and
> of what disposition thay are of'. Speaking out may be part of paideia--how,
> perhaps, we learn the confidence to perform heresy.
>
> Colin Burrow
> Senior Research Fellow
> All Souls College
> High Street
> Oxford OX1 4AL
> 01865 279341 (direct) 01865 279379 (Lodge)
> [log in to unmask]
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> On Behalf Of JD Fleming
> Sent: 01 July 2009 00:03
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Teaching question: memorization or performance?
>
> I fear that my view of these issues is heretical. Nonetheless: in my
> opinion, what matters to criticism (whether teaching or research) is the
> subject-matters -- the issues and problems that present themselves to the
> understanding -- that arise from the attempt to understand the phenomenon of
> textuality: that is, the whole phenomenon of texts as texts. Many, many
> wonderful and diverting experiences of reading, involving purposes of
> pleasure, power and much else, have nothing directly or organically to do
> with criticism in that sense. I would include recitation and performance
> (both otherwise valid) as non-critical activities. JD Fleming
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "andrew zurcher" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Tuesday, 30 June, 2009 15:24:03 GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
> Subject: Re: Teaching question: memorization or performance?
>
> Just to second Dot's point: memorization is a key to understanding. It's
> impossible to understand *the experience of* allusion, for example, unless
> you have memorized Shakespeare as Milton has, or as Keats or Coleridge
> has. But I'd go further and say that it's very hard to practise criticism
> at all unless you let your mind tarry, tease, tickle, and try over
> passages of verse and prose; it's often in the smallest hours, or in the
> first moments of a morning, that I realize something important about a
> line that has been shifting slyly around the corners of my memory; just as
> it is invariably in the discussion of *something else* that I suddenly
> *remember and recognize* the meaning, the effect of some phrase, period,
> or passage. That is, as we all know, insight often takes place through a
> process of collation or confection, to which the memorial assimilation of
> the work of one or another writer is an indispensable first step. When a
> student goes blank in the middle of a supervision, completely drops the
> discussion at hand, and says, 'Oh, *that's why* that stanza in the third
> canot of the fourth book of The Faerie Queene begins with [ .... ] and
> ends with [ .... ]', then I know that that student has crossed the
> threshold and is in the building. Without memorization it can't happen --
> whether that memorization be the result of a concentrated effort to
> assimilate and commit, or the accident of frequent reiteration and long
> converse, it hardly matters.
>
> And so I encourage all my students to memorize as much as they can, of
> everything. If they go on to a career in academia, those passages will
> remain little beating hearts in the circulation of their ideas; and if
> they leave critical reading behind, those passages will remain like still
> pools in the night, refreshing and reminding. And who knows: one day they
> might want to welcome a child into the world with the first few lines of
> the Inferno, and find that their dog-eared Dante has been chucked
> (without ceremony) out of the hospital bag. It happens.
>
>
> az
>
>
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