[joshua]

in reply to: Joshua's Response: Sondra Perl, On Austrian Soil #758

Thank you so much for your responses, Lindsey and Sondra,

Lindsey, as ever, your insight and nuanced readings are always illuminating for me. Your Bertrand Russell quote can be put into dialogue with Sondra’s thoughts about Hannah Arendt and subsequent journal entry in On Austrian Soil, noting that “the banality of evil can be understood as the absence of thought,”: “Now I know why Margret and I must teach our children how make this history their own. It is not to carry the burden of guilt nor to atone for the sins of forebears, but to enable them to walk in the world with their eyes open– full of thought.” (104)
Sondra, I have been contemplating how almost improbably (almost counter-intuitively?) large-hearted and generous you are both in your pedagogy and your communication with students and others outside the classroom. It is so tempting and easy (for me, at least) to condemn and be judgmental of some of the Austrian students you describe, when noting their denial of history, their unwillingness to acknowledge in a clear-eyed way, the horrific events of the relatively recent past to which they and their families are connected. Looking at my original post above, I slouch toward this kind of judgmental critique, pointing to agency and responsibility. Such condemnatory faultfinding, though, only closes dialogic doors, creates walls of defensiveness, stifles discourse. A quote that I keep coming back to offers a courageous and humane alternative: “I want to stress that I did not come here… to challenge you. I did not say to you, ‘I am Jewish. How are you going to handle that?’ I said ‘I have questions about what happened here. If you would like to tell me, I would like to listen.’ This, to me, is the ground of dialogue. One does not accuse. Instead, one invites others to engage in a discussion of meaning. It begins with the kinds of questions that lead to openness, to uncertainty, and when it works, to a real exchange.” (97)
What amazing advice about effective teaching. More importantly, this is a lesson plan on how to empathize and engage with others and otherness, in a way that renders us more human, which seems crucial to me both as an educator and as an alive person in the world.

[joshua]

in reply to: Josh's response to "Felt Sense" #732

Lindsey,

That is amazing. I want to see that play, performed by that ensemble!
The example of Not Bread Alone performed by the Nalaga’at Theater Deaf-Blind Acting Ensemble distills felt sense to a kind of essence, doesn’t it? A translation from Hebrew to English adds a liminal dimension as well, and this “threshold” space is really what felt sense attempts to allude to, right? As ever, Lindsey, thanks for sharing your wonderful ideas and experiences.

[joshua]

in reply to: Daimys – Response to Borkowski Chapters 9-11 #691

Daimys,

You make really great points here. My academic field is composition & rhetoric, so I immediately slid into that chapter, with its various academic referents, fairly painlessly (almost without noticing!). I can definitely see, though, how it could be “jarring,” and almost seem as though you were reading a different book (!) all of a sudden, when Borkowski launches into this comp/rhet discourse in Chapter 10. your pointing out Borkowski’s omission of any consideration of race, gender, and ethnicity is also really spot on. This was another blind spot of my own response to Borkowski’s memoir; the considerations of these omissions can also utterly refashion the ways in which I read this text. I noticed varying degrees of “hard-boiled” toughness to Borkowski’s writing, which makes sense; he mentions in his own literacy narrative that early writers he read were Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and other “hard-boiled” detective novelists. This genre consists of, to a great extent, mostly male, usually white writers. To (completely) generalize, there are often articulations of class consciousness in these novels, but rarely investigations of race and gender issues. In the way that Toni Morrison brilliantly examines in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, race in these novels is “invisible,” and white-by-default, which, given U.S. history, is gigantically problematic. As for gender, the hard-boiled detective novel offers little outside of abject fear of females. The female characters in these novels tend to be “femme fatales”*, less-than-fully dimensional seductresses who sexually tempt and lure protagonists, and then ultimately destroy and devour them. I think Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are great writers, don’t get me wrong. But it is interesting to examine these writings, and Borkowski’s work, through the critical lens of race and gender, and the ways in which their overt absences/silences can “speak” within, and haunt, these texts as well.
Wonderful post, Daimys!

*Femme Fa·tale
ˌfem fəˈtal,fəˈtäl/
noun
an attractive and seductive woman, especially one who will ultimately bring disaster to a man who becomes involved with her.
synonyms: seductress, temptress, siren, enchantress

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