Subversion: Teaching a Blue Novel in a Red State
2006; Rapid Intellect Group; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1096-1453
Autores Tópico(s)American Political and Social Dynamics
ResumoAbstract In an increasingly conservative climate, teachers may need to recognize that the potentially objectionable language and possibility of moral uncertainty in some novels contradict the clarity and conviction that some students expect from novels. This essay focuses on the lessons that both I and my students learned about expectations, ethos, and ambiguity when we discussed and analyzed several contentious novels in a recent Honors course. ********** In the 1950s, when the State Department was investigated for closet the word suggested not just rebellion but sedition. Today, English Departments also look for closet subversives, although the word's connotation has been, perhaps appropriately, subverted--from high crime to high praise. From stalwarts of subversion like J.D. Salinger and to secret subversives like Jane Austen, any author can---indeed, should--be read as subversive. If it's worth reading, it must be subversive. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing subversively. But subversion can be complicated. In 2000, as a doctoral candidate in English at a research institution in New York City, I taught my first course for literature majors, Fiction: 1940-Present, which I subtitled Literature, Culture, Technology. Technology was used loosely, anything from bombs to the media, techno-consumer capitalism, and Western reason. This was all exciting, heady, and of course, subversive stuff, with fiction ranging from Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo to Octavia Butler and Kathy Acker. We watched the films Blade Runner and the still-recent Fight Club, read Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson, and Donna Haraway, and a charmingly subversive time was had by all. In 2005, beginning a new job at a small, private school in a conservative Midwestern suburb, I got the chance to teach the course for a second time. Five years later and a thousand miles over, despite the friendlier faces and warmer weather, I found that the political and academic climate far chillier. Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle, paired with the film Dr. Strangelove, went well enough, although a few students noted anti-American--did they mean subversive?-sentiments. It wasn't a compliment. Instead of pursuing the point, though, we moved on to Vonnegut's own witness of the firebombing of Dresden, the book's Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis context, the remarkable and ironic invention of a lexicon, religion, history, and people, the Judeo-Christian imagery (coupled with a reading of the biblical Book of Jonah), the unreliable narration, and the original prose style and organization. All in all, a job well done, I congratulated myself. But then we read J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel Crash, which turned out to be an apt description of where the course went. After the questions about Cat's Cradle, I began with preemptive criticism, reading Martin Amis's denunciation that Crash is possibly the most extreme example in modern fiction of how beautifully and lovingly someone can write 70,000 words of vicious nonsense (101). But even if many students appreciated Ballard's linguistic manipulations, his syntax as exquisite as his characters and conditions ugly, clearly some were upset. In a response paper, one wrote that she could not finish the book and that it had affected her relationship with her husband. Another could not read the book at all because he found it morally offensive--did he mean subversive?--but also because a relative had died in a head-on collision a few weeks earlier.[1] Still, much of our discussion was, in fact, riveting, maybe even more so than the first time I taught the course to like-minded, tough-minded urban sophisticates such as myself. This time, I didn't move on. Instead, the book forced us to confront the uncomfortable, to ask questions that have grown remarkably unfashionable in our subversive literary culture, even more so than when Amis and others dismissed Crash upon publication: is the book immoral? …
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