Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

you can eliminate compulsory science courses too, since it's possible that students will have reactions to material on e.g. creation or global warming that they're not in rational control of, and that they would choose not to engage if they could

Basically everyone otm here. Feel like post-internet culture raises kids that go through the teenage/student self-definition period using ideology rather than material goods as signifiers.

Most interactions take place virtually, so material culture is not the social measuring stick it once was. Students going through the process of post-adolescent self-definition can use ideology in its place.

when haven't they?

Serious question. If you're a woman, gay, black, when hasn't ideology been a prism?

I'm not any of those, so I don't want to speak for them.

I don't know if I fully understand what's meant by that question in this thread tbh and I'm only one of those things.

I didn't quite understand Adam's binary either. I think teens have always used material goods and ideology! My mistake in my response was conflating sexuality and ideology.

Eh my point was it's even moreso, comparing my non-internet adolescence w an adolescence that is living w instant communication.

Intellectual one-upsmanship being a new social currency.

oh I see

i think kids just want iphones?

If you're saying these are bad reasons to read, or bad ways to read, you're excluding most of the reasons that people read. Maybe not in lit study okay fine, but still...this discussion is dumb.

mordy otm re my view. of course those reasons & ways to read are valid & important (& always part of reading, which one never leaves behind or should); my point was, as you say in orbit, “Maybe not in lit study”— that should not be the focus of academic study

i.e. those reasons & ways are not appropriate criteria for texts as object of study & analysis at university level

don’t mean to disparage book club reading (let along personal pleasure reading!) per se. i myself get v involved, personally, emotionally, with texts i read & love. and oft when you read a text, a text reads you

but as ryan & alfred point out, among university instructor’s primary challenges & goals is to teach ways of reading & writing which transcend and sublimate (without extinguishing) the ‘personal’

you don’t read homer or dante (or example at issue, ovid) at university looking for wisdom, truth, therapeutic self-insight, guide to life, or ways to make a better world

nb learning to read in ways which transcend the personal doesn’t necessarily mean New Critical formalist detachment, it’s also essential for work of (rhetorical, sociopolitical) critique

imo it’s more ‘empowering’ for university students to learn to read/ analyze texts (as rhetorical objects)— even & maybe especially texts alien to their own values— than to read texts to which they can personally relate & derive personal validation

(which is not deny importance of the latter! but again, imo that should not be primary focus or criteria of lit study)

ps by ‘sublimate’ mean something like german ‘aufheben’— at once preserve, cancel, suspend, transcend (maybe better translated 'sublate')

Intellectual one-upsmanship being a new social currency.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Saturday, May 9, 2015 11:48 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this always existed

i mean i think this does relate to what we expect kids to derive from ovid, and that isn't clear to me at all tbh

imo it’s more ‘empowering’ for university students to learn to read/ analyze texts (as rhetorical objects)—

I mean, the advocates of trigger warnings and pre-emptively making sure no-one reads anything horrible won't even let the most dull and worthy 'deconstruction of Ovid's ideology' take place.

Which is to say I thoroughly get that people might not want to enter into conversation with some actual person who goes around defending rape; that you might not want to engage with someone you think is a rotter, even if they're a reasonable rotter looking for 'open discussion'; etc; we all blank out certain people, such as ILX user Cardamon for example

Those interactions with those people tend to just be aggravating

But a text is not like a person - you can, with great profit, sit down and read a horrible book that you totally disagree with, from cover to cover, several times, and really broaden your horizons by writing down in fine detail exactly how horrible it is

TBH though - and here I'm thinking about things like the recent protests over the 'Are You Beach Body Ready' adverts for weightlifting supplements on the London underground - I think a lot of these, on one level obvious over-reactions from the left are to do with the omnipresence of thumping idiot ideology on all channels

I.E. I'm a bit of an idiot to sit here scratching my head saying 'Whhyyy can't they just rrread and crrrriticise the rapey ancient poemmmmmsss?' when what's really going on is people looking for some way, any way, to carve out a space that isn't just boom boom we're big men in suits fuck you lose weight guns guns money money

^ This is not my clearest ILX post ever but dunno, what do you lot think

invigorating use of vernacular idioms

it's empowering for students to learn to articulate their points of disagreement with the canon, and to do this in the context of a classroom environment that lets them know that their voices are just as legitimate as the voices of the authors they study. if students come away from a literature class feeling dominated by the texts that is a failure of the teacher.

their voices are just as legitimate as the voices of the authors they study.

lol what earth are you from?

?

maybe columbia is mad backwards, but when i studied english and art history students were literally never encouraged to examine texts from a totally uncritical standpoint. in fact, when it came to the classics, postcolonial and feminist critiques were de rigeur assigned supplemental readings.

Achebe's Heart of Darkness essay is a perennial favorite.

And Edward Said on Conrad generally.

The only way I know of to read anything with pleasure and profit is to read in the light of my personal experience and my borrowed knowledge of the world. You could call this "reading critically" or just reading mindfully, but it shouldn't be something one needs to be reminded or encouraged to do. It should just be how one lives one's life. The alternative is just too depressing to contemplate.

if students come away from a literature class feeling dominated by the texts that is a failure of the teacher.

Depends. There's a great deal of context one needs to supply in order to interpret that statement fully.

I would agree that a student must feel adequate to the task of engaging an author and finding the source of their authority in the text, rather than in their reputation, if they are going to derive any lasting good from it. But most undergraduate students are still too impoverished in life experience to justify anything beyond a tentative judgment on most classic texts. The purpose of introducing them to such classic texts isn't to 'teach' them the texts, so much as to introduce them to the authors and begin the possibility of an enduring conversation with a few of them.

most undergraduate students are still too impoverished in life experience to justify anything beyond a tentative judgment on most classic texts.

i don't think this is true. their judgment is going to be different than what it will be later on, it will come from a narrower perspective, but i don't think this means it's worse. it's like the de man essay, "blindness and insight." sometimes you can see more by not seeing everything, and young people are really good at that if they are bold enough. i even find this with the high school students i teach.

but like, you're right: their views need to have basis in the text. they shouldn't feel dominated by the text but they also shouldn't feel empowered to make dictatorial judgments about stuff they haven't really thought about much. I saw more of the latter than the former when I was an undergrad

their judgment is going to be different than what it will be later on

that sounds like a tentative judgment to me

idk. i think it's authentic for who they are at that point. who they are later will be different.

it's not like they are moving closer or further away from some sort of unassailable truth. the truth of a text lies, at least in part, in the polyvocality of the discourse it generates. imo.

sending a prayer of thanks that I was an undergrad no later than the 80s

Visiting the past is like visiting another country, and you know who I really don't want to go visit another country with? Tourists whose first response to every cultural difference is "YOU PEOPLE ARE DOING IT WRONG."

i think it's authentic for who they are at that point.

authenticity is not exactly in question here. an opinion, whatever it is, is an 100%authentic personal opinion. nor is whether any later judgment on a text could achieve some unassailable truth my point.

I think it is worth noting that one's appreciation of a work will change in light one's changing experience only if one revisits that work. if one believes one's initial judgment is unassailable as an undergrad, the chances one will revisit a work later in life are very slender.

http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/politics/ottawa-considering-hate-charges-against-those-who-boycott-israel-1.3067497

hate speech laws: what could go wrong?

i think this whole discussion is missing the point, reading ovid is probably fine for the great majority of people.

Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities ~*~*~in the classroom~*~*~. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read ~*~*~and discuss~*~*~ as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.

the problem instructors are trying to solve with warnings like these is NOT the hypothetical student who can't bear to make her eye continue down the page. it's the very real, observed phenomenon of students who can't talk about... well, anything, but especially rape and other kinds of trauma w/o dominating the discussion with bullshit hypotheticals and justifications. it's not about the homework, it's about the class discussion the next day.

frankly instead of trigger warnings they should issue a direct admonition to the #actually brigade that these issues are not imaginary for people sitting in the room with them. but that would get the academy in more trouble, wouldn't it.

http://www.10news.com/news/mom-outraged-her-daughter-is-asked-to-perform-naked-for-ucsd-art-class-final-050915

TRIGGER WARNING!!!!

http://www.theonion.com/article/college-encourages-lively-exchange-of-idea-38496

nice

frankly instead of trigger warnings they should issue a direct admonition to the #actually brigade that these issues are not imaginary for people sitting in the room with them. but that would get the academy in more trouble, wouldn't it.

― goole, Monday, May 11, 2015 10:48 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm pretty cool with this

goole, you redescribed the quote to isolate its most reasonable strand & mitigate what was most objectionable (imo). if the issue isn’t ovid so much but problematic classroom discussion of certain topics, why bring ovid into it? nb problematic discussion of certain topics is just as likely to occur when dealing with texts which do not “marginalize” but focus on historically excluded/ oppressed identities

fair enough though (always better to deal with most reasonable articulation of the problem)

don’t know what “#actually brigade” is (think i can guess though). i’m sympathetic to what you’re saying, but wonder what such an admonition would look like in practice. take care not to be insensitive assholes?

problem imo is it’s too easy for problem (which trigger warnings are meant to address) to slip from “speech which may cause post-traumatic (di)stress in some students” to “speech which some students may find ideologically obnoxious”

not same thing and imo that conflation is harmful to education

at the end of the day, such classroom issues have to be handled with instructor’s discretion on case-by-case basis, i guess

inevitable right wing exploitation waits in the wings....so many things to be traumatized about in higher ed.

http://www.racialmicroaggressions.illinois.edu/files/2015/03/RMA-Classroom-Report.pdf

students v. racist of course, but hella clueless professors in this thing too

possibly a personal bugbear, but i think a lot of lit professors are so needy of "classroom discussion" that they aren't really able to tell the difference between a productive one and non-productive one. students "expressing" themselves becomes a value in itself. ruthlessly confining discussion to textual and literary matters in no way avoids these problems but it does help contain it. if a student is soapboxing in a way that doesn't explicitly refer to the qualities of the text under discussion then my inclination is to shut it down. my other feeling is that explicitly engaging hot-button ideological questions is a reductive and even harmful way to read literature in an academic environment (you can read however you want elsewhere). literature can inform and influence politics and community making (poor words for how this actually works) but it's also something else, worthy of analysis and study in its own right. if you don't believe this then there's a political science class down the hall.

there's no possibly of productively having any kind of classroom in any subject if some voices are not excluded. every single discussion will exclude someone and be partial, limited, even "biased." the solution isn't to avoid exclusion--there is no solution. you have to define the parameters of what you're doing as best you can and move forward. the best way to do this is to focus on the narrow confines of your discipline and be conscious that because of this focus it's not for everyone and its applicability is not universal.

no classroom discussions are productive

that too. bring back the lecture! some of my favorites classes as an undergrad were lecture focused.

me too

not gonna comment much on j's link for what are by now probably obvious reasons, but I will say: the campus is heavily populated by students from the suburbs of Chicago, and race is the central story to tell about the identity of those suburbs.

also fwiw the advisors they're talking about aren't in general profs

ryan otm re parameters of class discussion

it's hard to ensure that everyone is involved in the material, and assess understanding as you go, if you don't find ways to open discussion to as many students as possible. this might be less important in college than in high school

possibly a personal bugbear, but i think a lot of lit professors are so needy of "classroom discussion" that they aren't really able to tell the difference between a productive one and non-productive one.

otm