Academic work & reflection thereof

My best academic work is a piece of literary analysis on William Gaddis's short novella Agape Agape and Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" and can be found here: what it's all about.

While a book consisting solely in a hundred pages of unbroken paragraph of a dying man's ranting against the player piano* might not seem useful for teaching, the take-away is one that informs my teaching, and more broadly, my interactions with everyone: that authenticity is hard to come by these days because it is under attack from popular culture. This is a form of critical pedagogy, except instead of being concerned with the power structures of capital and government, it's concerned with the power structures of entertainment-at-all-costs and advertising. Not only in others but in myself, as well, I find a tendency towards irony, backspin, or other redirection. The cause is unapparent, but the effect is that connecting with others on any sort of real level is made unnecessarily uncomfortable and difficult.**

One of my recently-deceased professors had an amazing thing to say about creative work in general once: "art, come on, it's the thing we do that we don't have to do, and so it's a way that we exercise our freedom." I think this is right, that creative work is basically the best we can do as human beings. When my classes are working on fiction or poetry, I try to convey this sense of seriousness and, above all, sincerity. Then, strange things begin to happen. Normally silent students start talking. The "how does this relate to my actual life" line of questioning wanes. All of us, sitting in a circle discussing Shakespeare, are suddenly invested in it enough to share important text-to-self relationships with little fear of ridicule. Works older than our country are made to live by our personal investments in them.

These fleeting moments happened more than I expected during my time student teaching. My awareness of the inauthenticity that most of us deal in on a day to day basis stemmed in large part from the essay I wrote about Gaddis and Benjamin. By being able to recognize it in advertising-inundated, irony-dealing middle school students, I was able to counter by dropping my own facade. Students largely followed suit.

In a world where sincerity is decidedly unhip, I think that teachers can help students counter their own tendencies towards inauthenticity, but only if they themselves are aware of it. This essay was the beginning of my formal knowledge of the insincerity and disconnectedness that most of us feel, if we make ourselves vulnerable enough to admit it.


* This is seriously what the book is about. Go read it immediately.
** Postmodern demigod David Foster Wallace saw this coming.