Confrontational Pedagogy and Traditional Literary Studies

Abstract

We all know too well the resisting student-even the bright student-who seems to have a mental block when it comes to studying Milton's prosody, or Lacan's psycholinguistic theory. It is an unfair oversimplification to label such a student ignorant, stupid, or insensitive, though the obvious alternative-admitting that we are dull, boring, or insensitive as teachers-is not very pleasant either. But as long as we accept, as given, the privileged inviolability of both the to be imparted (literature or literary theory) and the conventional methods of imparting it (including all of the institutional and personal apparatuses and methods by which authority is vested in and deployed by the teacher), there appears to be no other way to recognize opposition and resistance in the classroom. Fortunately, we don't have to accept the privileged inviolability of the we are teaching or the conventional methods of teaching it. There are at least two currents of recent pedagogical theory which suggest new models of teaching precisely by challenging the traditional assumptions of canonical knowledge and pedagogic authority. Psychoanalytic critics have rethought the traditional opposition of and ignorance, by seeing ignorance as an active form of resistance to knowledge, and by identifying the individual student's resistance to knowledge as analagous to the repression of the unconscious. In a more directly political vein, Marxists and feminists have called for an oppositional pedagogy which can understand the way the concept of knowledge is implicated in the reproduction of the dominant ideology, and which can empower students to resist the neoconservative and corporate-sector demand for an educational system that shapes students to fit the needs of a capitalist and patriarchal society. These theories demand, it seems to me, a radically unconventional orientation for the teacher. The teacher of literature should adopt a confrontational stance toward students, and a critical, skeptical stance toward the subject matter; teachers should avoid posing as mentors to their students and champions of their subjects. In this essay, I will outline a strategy of confrontational pedagogy that uses the key concepts of resistance and opposition as they function in both psyRonald Strickland is an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University. He is currently revising his dissertation as a book exploring the relationship between discourse and subjectivity in Renaissance funeral practices.