I hadn’t realized how busy I’ve been, but looking back and seeing that I haven’t posted in a week — well, I guess I’ve been busy. I’ve kept meaning to respond to the excellent things Clancy and Jenn have had to say about Kelly Ritter’s CCC plagiarism article, but revisions to dissertation chapters, getting the class weblogs going, gearing up for the job search, and prepping two pieces for publication have kinda gotten in the way.
So a quick thought tonight while I’m working on one of those pieces for publication: in his response to my three posts on the Wayne Booth rhetoric carnival Collin Brooke hosted (could that really have been only seven months ago, with John’s comments there and him now gone?), the Happy Tutor scolded me (in his generous and inimitable manner) for suggesting that a rhetoric that said different things to different people could be useful or ethical. My comment was in response to Booth’s caution “that one form of careful listening can produce one of the worst forms of deception. Really skillful rhetors can invent language that is intended to mean one thing to ‘insiders’ while appeasing ‘outsiders’” (121), and I offered in response Shadi Bartsch’s suggestion that “the discourse used before powerful figures, especially on occasions when it had an audience ready and willing to find unstated meanings, could undermine its own contents and the authority of the addressee. The meaning granted a given act, in interactions with emperors or their agents, was not always and not necessarily the sole province of the powerholder” (Actors in the Audience 65). The Happy Tutor wondered whether that wasn’t rather Straussian of me, to suggest that texts could or should be simultaneously (to use Strauss’s terms) esoteric and exoteric; that texts could communicate radically different or even opposite things to different audiences. (My favorite example is Cicero’s Pro Ligario, but Bartsch invokes the Dialogus de Oratoribus of Tacitus as another excellent example, as well as Quintilian’s borrowing from Cato the Elder of the ideal rhetor figured as a vir bonus dicendi peritus.)
And that made me think: Bartsch, Booth, and Strauss. All University of Chicago professors. Is there some institutional habit of thought that turns people at the U of Chicago towards problems of hermeneusis? But more significantly: isn’t this attention to the meaning-behind-the-meaning and the complexities of the hermeneutic unveil — isn’t this exactly the same thing that critical pedagogues purport to do? To show the text-behind-the-text, to help students see how ideology and interpellation truly function in today’s popular texts of advertising and mass media? Doesn’t critical pedagogy necessarily construct an excluded preterite proletariat who may never see the truth of how they are constructed/oppressed by discursive forces, as well as an elite who (having been coached by the insightful academic) speaks the shibboleth and “gets it”? Have left intellectuals like Giroux and Shor made the cultural-studies inheritors of Freire into the inheritors of the arch-conservative Strauss, as well? In sum: has Freire’s ideal of critical pedagogy, through a conception of texts simultaneously esoteric and exoteric, been co-opted into yet another instrument of domination?
I wish Booth would have had more to say on the topic.
Wellllllll. . . . . .on a related but pragmatic note, go over to Confessions of a Community College Dean. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the discussion on textbooks.
Here’s the link:
http://www.suburbdad.blogspot.com/
In answer to your questions:
But more significantly: isn’t this attention to the meaning-behind-the-meaning and the complexities of the hermeneutic unveil — isn’t this exactly the same thing that critical pedagogues purport to do? To show the text-behind-the-text, to help students see how ideology and interpellation truly function in today’s popular texts of advertising and mass media? Doesn’t critical pedagogy necessarily construct an excluded preterite proletariat who may never see the truth of how they are constructed/oppressed by discursive forces, as well as an elite who (having been coached by the insightful academic) speaks the shibboleth and “gets it� Have left intellectuals like Giroux and Shor made the cultural-studies inheritors of Freire into the inheritors of the arch-conservative Strauss, as well? In sum: has Freire’s ideal of critical pedagogy, through a conception of texts simultaneously esoteric and exoteric, been co-opted into yet another instrument of domination?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes, unfortunately. This idea bums me out though, because the idea of critical pedagogy still remains so alluring. But those are such important questions to address. William Thelin has the article, “Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms” in the latest CCC, and I think that his article misses those questions entirely. The problem with critical pedagogy as it most often is read, practiced, disseminated today is not that it sometimes seems to fail in the classroom (as Thelin argues), but that we are so often ignoring “the instrument of domination” that it has become. Are we ready for our own “unveiling”?
Jenn, I’m totally with you on both the allure and the problematic potential of critical pedagogy. Did you see Sharon O’Dair’s recent blistering critique a while back in CE? I don’t agree with all her conclusions, mostly because — like you, I think — I’m hopeful about what might be done in the classroom. I do think that Bill Thelin has a lot of smart things to say, and I’m not sure his piece so much misses the questions as it does shift the terrain where the question gets asked. Bill’s piece seems to imply (with the “bungling” focus) a need for a more adequately theorized pedagogy and a more carefully attuned teacher (which certainly follows from his reliance on Shor’s focus on the teacher as prime actor in the classroom); I wonder if what critical pedagogy requires instead is a more adequate theory of reading on the part of students. And that, in a strange way, brings me back to Strauss.
I Stumbled across this site while searching for information on the meaning of the KAL preterite in Hebrew. My first impression was that their were distinctions being imputed for the sake of sounding erudite. However as I read more, it downed upon me that I probably am a member of preterite proletariat. I have always considered myself to be a critical reader, but after reading this article, I began to wonder if I am indeed a stranger in astrange land understanding what I mean by what you said.
Thanks for the insight expressed in these articles.