Hello all,
To add another strand to this interesting thread: The undergrad
course I taught last semester was for majors and on contemporary US poetry.
So theyWere almost all committed literature students. I begin it in the 70s
with punk and 2nd gen NY / early L=Poetry. The real expertise in the class,
especially this year was in the 'popular' music of the period; the
curiosity and critical attitude that is lodged in that knowledge is the
greatest resource--there's some exchange of info--I share my texts,
websites, videos, audiotapes with them; they bring me CDs, websites etc.
I try to get them to map their lanugage space in notebooks, which
is in good part the language of the media space they move in but also club
talk etc, to build up a feeling for their word-world as the given of their
reading and writing. There are always one or two poets taking this course
but this year there were half a dozen (our of 35) and the course ended with
their organizing a reading. I enjoyed the teaching greatly, and this group
was as savy and curious as any I have taught.
Wystan
-----Original Message-----
From: Christine Murray [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, 8 December 2003 11:09 a.m.
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: this should brighten your day/media and control
Hi Rebecca, Chris Jones, Nessa, Mark, and All--
Thanks for your response on this, making it even more interesting. My
differing observations about the quality (or general lack) of student
curiosity due to being overwhelmed by media input are influenced, I think,
by these two factors.
First, demographics: that here we are in an immense urban "metroplex" full
of constant rush, including the rush of media in everyday life. I am not
sure where you are (New Mexico, I know that much, and if Albuquerque then
perhaps there is a similar basis for comparison), but it is different than
here, I guess, thus student responses are probably very different.
And second, that my students this past semester are not reading literature;
it's a theory and writing course, so they have been into different reading
materials that require alternative ways of engaging text. In fact, one
reason my current students are not feeling especially curious might just be
that fifty page excerpt of Foucault they had to read--it could tend to
flatten the curiousity meter of the best of us. I am not saying, of course,
that I have not also been a deeply empathic, sensitive and responsive
teacher. I am, perhaps overly so. Thus we made our way through these
readings and the students learned to be more curious than before about
things they knew about and things they had never thought consciously about
at all. In the end, though, even they expressed concerns similar to mine
about media-overwhelm, that it seems to have reached an all time high, or
more apropriately stated, to have reached an even lower low, in terms of
barrage on conciousness, especially of the coming of age learner, and the
very young.
And, incidentally, I will also say that as a parent it is/was not enough to
take the measures recommended ten or so years ago by savvy analysts of media
influence and the most astute analysts of so-called everday life (the work
of Susan Willis, in A Primer for Everyday Life, for example), measures such
as limiting children's TV or time spent with it and/or other media. The
children still grow up under great pressure to perform in tandem with all
kinds of media affectations--in fact they grow up less able to perform, in
some ways, if they are not up-to-the-minute with the same media influences
and affectations by which their peers are performing (I'm talking
subjectivity as performance, critical consciousness as agency & etc., in use
of these terms).
Chris Jones's comments seem to me to be onto something. The students--or to
be more specific, college learners in the age group, late teens-early
twenties (not all students are this age, of course!)--have so little sense
of irresponsibility." The phenomenon seems a subtle point, yes, and hard
to figure. Or perhaps one so immense that it can hardly be perceived. I
dunno! Except to say something there could bear further inquiry, especially
by those in media studies (as Nessa is), and cultural studies/analytics of
critical consciousness.
Best,
Chris Murray
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 12/6/2003 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: this should brighten your day
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
>
|