From my journal this morning:
If literature and the humanities are about exploring the human condition, then teaching, learning, and writing are about becoming more human.
If we are engaged in an ongoing soft revolution (Zizek), our societal changes cannot just happen in the head, but must also happen in the heart. We must begin to see each other as fully human, as a whole whose self is greater than the sum of hir parts. We must have a gradual paradigm shift in the way we feel towards each other and about ourselves. We must have permission to feel our emotions, for to shy away from these emotions is to continue to prescribe to enlightenment reason that has alienated us from ourselves and to put off even longer an attempt at being fully human.
There is a fear in composition to ask students to do personal writing. There is a concern that the classroom will become a therapy session, the teacher a therapist that is ill-equipped to provide therapy to a group of twenty-five young adults.
Composition has tended to focus on positive emotions, averting our gaze from the “negative“ ones. This is especially true in critical pedagogy, which as emphasized at times hope, belief, faith, and love, but has left out discussing the pain and anger that will comes with oppression and will come with liberation. How does one deal with the anger inside the self? How does one deal with the pain? Too much we avoid these, letting them fester inside of ourselves, sometimes ignored, sometimes suppressed, sometimes welling up until they are forgotten and we die a little, or until they explode out of us in tantrums, screams, and breakdowns.
When we are young, for girls especially, we are often told, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,“ in an attempt to make us polite, to control our negative reactions (thanks Sara Jameson for reminding me of this dictum) — to, in effect, communicate that you have two options: Be angry, hurt, and rude, or be polite and silent. We live in a society that silences us, and as much feminist thought has shown, this serves to limit voices and ways of seeing and speaking of the world. For women, the silencing of this rudeness and anger is a continuation of the silencing of their voices in the public sphere (and often in the private, personal sphere). For men, it is a shutting off of part of the self in a system where they are told the emotional is taboo.
As for asking / letting students do personal writing in a composition class – in a free write or in an essay — well, the fear indeed can be that students will unburden themselves and embarrass themselves and unnerve the instructor. But, if we ask students to respond to pieces, what they like, what surprised them, if we let students choose which essays to respond to or incorporate into an essay, they are getting a chance to work with “their stuff” while at the same time learning to integrate their ideas with those of others. One Hispanic student in my summer WR 121 class responded strongly and positively to Richard Rodriguez’s “Aria” about bilingual education and has brought out many details of his personal struggls in the classroom. He is also reading Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue.” So the personal comes out, the personal becomes political or rather, the student sees how the personal is already political.
Dear Michael,
I really enjoyed reading this page on anger. I too have been asking why there is no public place for the expression of it–why it’s considered taboo…initially because I saw that I scared people away by using anger to articulate my ideas and positions on certain topics. sigh.
I’m working on a paper right now which discusses the disarticulation of the subaltern via Native Son. It’s for a graduate course on African American lit., and taking little breaks for inspiration, I’ve found your writing a motivation for returning to my work. Thanks!
I’ve recently been thinking about finding collaborators for my projects and wonder if you have any plans to write longer works or conduct more research on the topics of anger and class mobility. I’d love to start a dialogue, as I think we are pursuing a lot of the same questions. I studied Classics and Anthro as an undergrad student, have been working toward an English Teaching MA for a year (all at Brooklyn College), and I hope to enter an arts-in-ed Ed.M. program next fall. Anger is one of the topics I’m looking at but also neo-missionarism and the exoticization of poverty through secular philanthropic activity in the US, primarily arts organizations.
Hope to hear back from you…
Cheers,
Tina Green (tina.green@att.net)
Thanks Tina for your comments here and elsewhere! It seems like you’re doing exciting work, and I’ll definitely get into contact with you via email.