Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15314200-10640073

1533-6255

Matthew Dischinger,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

When we enter an empty classroom, what do we see? Desks, a board, and, if we're lucky, some collection of functional technology (and if we're luckier, windows). The classroom space operates through standardization, each element of the classroom designed to regulate the transfer of knowledge. When we enter a classroom full of students, what we see might subordinate to another question: what do we feel? Those quiet moments before class begins, as we mentally prepare, are ones dominated by feeling. (In my case, these are often the most uncomfortable moments of my teaching days.) They are moments of affective uncertainty in which a variety of feelings—chief among them, anxiety—enter the classroom along with us, through the many operating screens, and even as we look through doors and windows.1We may find ourselves at odds with the space's arrangement. Often to the criticism of contemporary pedagogical theory, the traditional classroom installs clear hierarchies of power that teachers decide either to work within or, in a now well-established attempt to subvert these hierarchies, to “flip.” Placing students in a circle, grouping them into pods, inviting them to the front of the room—these are all practices that defamiliarize what can become a practiced (and tired) method of knowledge transfer for students and teachers alike and engender a more dynamic and fruitful experience for all. Rather than allowing students to sit back and receive knowledge that they will apply somewhere else, flipping the classroom originated to encourage students to apply concepts immediately and see teaching and learning as reciprocal activities that require their participation on both sides (Brewer, McCook, and Halasek 2018: 484). If classroom structures exist to make learning more predictable, then flipping the classroom is an action that allows us to remain open to surprises.What is affect if not something that arrives to our surprise and, potentially, our transformation? Affect “arises in the midst of in between-ness,” demanding of us that we remain open to its grip and potentially allow it to “drive us toward movement . . . that can likewise suspend us” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1). Understanding affective meaning is curious in that it requires us to be attuned to the background of experience. While it might seem strange to suggest that the classroom should be remade through the affects that undergird our experience, it is just as strange to turn to models that presuppose that we are never surprised, interrupted, or moved by affect.The humanities classroom, furthermore, is a space particularly well suited to unpack moments of affective rupture because our pedagogical goals—to reshape students’ understanding of the textual, political, and mental worlds through which they move—depend on being moved in unexpected ways. Noticing and reading the affective material of the classroom pushes us down fascinating paths, and it can dramatically and helpfully expand our pedagogical methods. Indeed, deriving meaning from the seeming interruption of affect allows us to reassess the very foundations of what Lynn Worsham (1998) calls “dominant pedagogy,” or the structures of the classroom setting that themselves produce the very notion of a “legitimate point of view” (221). Worsham's definition of legitimacy evinces how dominant pedagogy is inseparable from hegemonic structures of power, and she proposes that we turn to what she suspects “we already know but have learned to forget”: that our pedagogical commitments to social change “must occur at the affective level” (216). To fail to recognize our affective experience in the classroom is to prohibit the project of social change. Recognizing the place of “the tight braid of affect and judgement” places teacher and student in a collaborative project of reimagining social relations (216).In an effort to examine what it looks like to teach through feeling, we seek to better understand how affect shapes our encounters with not only our students but also our objects of inquiry. While there is a large and diverse body of work examining how affect relates to reading practices (Sedgwick 2002; Felski 2008, 2015; Anker and Felski 2017; Best and Marcus 2009; Love 2010) as well as how the act of reading might buttress empathetic feelings (Keen 2007; Hogan 2016), we redirect these differing but linked conversations toward different inquiries. Some essays in this cluster explore how our embodiment in the classroom creates moments of rupture that reshape our textual encounters and methodologies. Embodiment is a capacious concept, and we consider what it means when we and our students cannot find a full reckoning with our own embodiment in critical theory. Other essays explore how nonhuman beings and objects themselves shape our affective experience in the classroom. In both cases, the intersection of affect and embodiment raises questions about how we see and treat one another. Likewise, some contributors examine how the political worlds that surround the classroom shift the affective direction of our teaching by putting undue pressure on students and teachers, a lesson that has only become clearer since the spread of COVID-19. Increasingly, those political worlds enforce censorship and surveillance, influencing what students and teachers can do in classroom spaces that are either entirely virtual or shaped by their potential digital afterlives. As pedagogy continues to shift toward digital models that archive and preserve the classroom far beyond the ephemerality of class discussion, we must begin addressing how those models shape our pedagogic affects. Finally, while scholarship on the affective displacements of critique is well underway, some of the essays here help bridge the divide between critique and postcritique by locating the compatibility of affect and critical reading in our pedagogy. Across these varied approaches and inquiries, essays frequently return to a tension that emerges as a guiding thesis: the seeming disruption of affect is a productive site of learning for faculty and students alike.The concept of affective rupture is central to the work that follows. Even though we do not take rupture as an intrinsically good pedagogical event, we do hold it as one that reveals much about both the conditions in which we teach and learn and the methods of humanistic inquiry on which we most frequently rely. Much has been written about affective rupture by critics in affect studies. Rarely has this work been more compelling and urgent than in Lauren Berlant's (2011) analysis of an untitled John Ashbery poem. Berlant seizes on a moment of rupture to examine how it makes us feel “lost but alive and unvanquished” (25). “Life has been seized . . . by an event that demands fidelity” (25). Anna Ioanes picks up on nonliterary ruptures in the classroom, exploring the importance of other moments of interruption—when a bug floats through the room, a student drops a book, or the weather changes suddenly. Particularly when such moments involve nonhuman things, they offer ways to answer questions about how we treat others, both human and nonhuman, while also bringing into focus the affects circulating in the classroom all the time. In this way, Ioanes reminds us that affect is not merely bound up in interactions between people but also a dynamic part of how we see the nonhuman things that populate the classroom. She argues that we must resituate external forces—a pandemic and political protest, most recently—as sites of learning, action, and civic responsibility.Just as Ioanes insists that we should focus on the affects produced through interruptions, Lauren Silber takes seriously her students’ feelings of discomfort that emerged when discussing affect theory alongside race. Silber examines how the presence of affect theory itself can produce an interruption that shifts our inquiry away from our material and toward institutional structures and even the whiteness of critical theory. Silber explains that, somewhat paradoxically, it is in becoming better interpreters of affect that students were able to critique the limiting structures of education and their discipline, which frequently enjoins them to focus (only) on the text. Just as Silber asserts that the study of affect interrupts models for knowledge production in the humanities, Aaron Colton examines how attention to sincerity helps bridge a similar divide between critique and postcritique. If proponents of postcritical reading hold that a critical hermeneutics obscures superficial or literal readings, others argue that critique might help render “feelings as objective structures (rather) than subjective dispositions” (Rasmussen and Sharma 2017: n.p.). Colton explores how a course examining the New Sincerity movement—a post-1980 amalgam of realist fiction, sentimental film, and indie music emphasizing themes of authenticity, enthusiasm, and vulnerability—primed students to regard texts not only as subjects for suspicious interrogation but also as historical and structural catalysts for affective response. Colton argues that prompting students to identify and interpret the mechanisms by which texts might speak sincerely can help them discern the compatibility of affective and critical reading practices.Silber and Colton explore whether pedagogical models organized around feelings such as empathy and sincerity are suited to break down colonial, heteronormative, neoliberal frameworks in the classroom or whether these feelings might themselves collapse important differences into sameness (Palumbo-Liu 2012; Dischinger 2018). Likewise, Tiffany Diana Ball explores the limits and uses of other structuring feelings—namely, paranoia—when teaching queer theory in China in front of a state-required classroom camera. Ball argues that, strange as it may seem, even paranoia can produce an affective community, however tenuous that practice might feel. Teaching and learning under clear surveillance opened the space for deep investigation into how paranoia feels without placing it into clear opposition with alternative reading practices.The contributors to this cluster represent different segments of an increasingly contingent profession. The teaching of humanities courses has long been shifting toward contingent labor, hybrid teaching, split administrative-faculty positions, and interdisciplinarity—itself an imperative, albeit one that many scholars embrace, to cover ever more terrain. The casualization of labor began long before Marc Bousquet's (2008) landmark book described it through the notion of organizational flexibility or the institution's preference to hire part-time to tenure-track labor. That preference led to a situation in which “the holders of a doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its byproducts” (21). In the thirteen years since Bousquet wrote those words, conditions have consistently worsened. While the contributors to this essay cluster represent far from every type of labor model in the profession, they come from a variety of institutional settings: an assistant professor teaching interdisciplinary writing and literature courses, a scholar-administrator teaching literature and writing at a liberal arts institution, a lecturer teaching multimodal communication at a research institution, and a postdoctoral scholar teaching queer theory in China. These settings help us illustrate how the position in which we teach shapes our pedagogical practices.Different as these essays are, they work backward from the same question: when we encounter affect in the classroom, will we avoid that encounter or be changed by it? While nearly everyone who has taught has had the experience of what they might call an affective interruption, we sometimes think of these moments as obstacles that must be worked around with quick solutions. When we think of affective rupture as an unwelcome and momentary distraction from the task of teaching and learning, that is, we are ill prepared to think through the felt conditions of pedagogy and labor.Having moved through over a year of teaching fully online during a pandemic, we now realize that the affective obstacles of the digital classroom are legion. Far from these ruptures being limited to moments when technology fails us, we spend much of our time lamenting the unrelenting reliability of the digital classroom. As we begin to realize how exhausting it can be to work in exclusively online spaces, the questions of this essay cluster—how we interact with nonhuman elements, how we come up against institutional and disciplinary structures, how paranoia and suspicion can be worked with or against—are more urgent now than ever. If we teach students to interpret the affective materials of the classroom and remain open to working through them ourselves, we preserve the opportunity to teach with humanity and generosity. In doing so, we gain access to an important path for our students, and we redirect our pedagogy as the foundations of higher education continue to shift.