Kahn-Egan, Seth. “Pedagogy of the Pissed: Punk Pedagogy in the First-Year Writing Classroom.“ CCC 49.1 (February 1998): 99-104.
Sirc, Geoffrey. “Never Mind the Sex Pistols, Where’s 2Pac?“ CCC 49 (February 1998): 104-108.
I just finished reading these two essays. As I read Kahn-Egan’s, I liked some of what he was saying, but some things he wrote bothered me (and when I read Sirc’s essay that followed it up, I totally understood what was bothering me). Kahn-Egan is interested in making a classroom that studies punk and in “advocating a classroom where students learn the passion, commitment, and energy that are availabe from and in writing; where they can learn to be critical of themselves, their cultures, and their government—that is, of institutions in general; and, most importantly, where they learn to go beyond finding out what’s wrong with the world and begin making it better” (100). This sounds good, but I worry that Kahn-Egan wants to “maintain some civility” (100). As I read this, it felt that Kahn-Egan was taking what Sirc had written in “Never Mind the Tagmemics” and watered it down to something palatable. Kahn-Egan seems to be advocating a critical classroom by using punk.
Sirc replies that this rubs him wrong in two ways. The minor one is that Kahn-Egan’s class is “sentimental” because it is focusing on what Kahn-Egan enjoys, punk music, which Sirc equates to students having to listen to Mozart because Alan Bloom likes it (105). Sirc uses gangsta rap because it is the music his students enjoy, and, like punk and Malcom X, “is all about using a kind of plainseak grammar and lexicon” (104).
Sirc’s major issue with Kahn-Egan’s perspective is that it rehabilitates “negation.” Sirc asks, “Can the academy really be a site for reform? Then why would the Clash and Too $hort feel the way they do? Is there a meaningful, established cultural site for reform anywhere?…What if the world as it now stands can’t be made better but only undone?” (105). Kahn-Ehan’s pedagogy “rehabilitates” “negation” (105), turning it into social action for change, which the punk aesthetic never did. There is not so much hope in punk and rap perspectives as their is concern that there is “no future.” Sirc writes that he “hate[s] to see negation rehabilitationed” (105).
This is in itself exciting to me, as I think sometimes we just need to be angry for anger’s sake. Sirc writes:
I suppose I should work very hard in my class to teach students effective ways to critique, say, the dominant white media. But too often I can’t stomach the dominant white media enought even to care to do that project. It seems laughable. Is enabling students to do our oh-so-clever cultural critiques—an ad analysis, say—ever going to do anything except reaffirm the media’s top-dog status or the primacy of various race, class, gender, and preference roles? (106)
My god, my students are working on analysis essays at this moment. The critique is great. The critique is academic-self-indulgent.
Sirc expresses the same sense of loss and confusion I feel:
I really don’t know what to do in a writing class anymore, what makes real sense, escept to play 2Pac records, all those songs where he talks about “no future” and hwo “my attitude is shitty”… (106)
Sirc defines “punk” writing as “traumatic writing that explores the wound” (108).
Sirc concludes, “Such writing thrills me, and I’m bugged that it too often happens only accidentally…I still don’t know what I was waiting for, as the song says, but I continue to continue, working to provide a context for this sort of heartfelt pensée, composition not meant to take a stand or fix a problem, but simply to reflect on possibility, to chronicle changes, just changing and having the chance the change” (108).
(pensée means thought)
What I would give for heartfelt thought in all my students’ (and my own) writing!
