March 8, 2004
Uncanny Teaching
I'm reviewing Nicholas Royle 's surprisingly playful study of Freud's "Das Unheimliche," -- The Uncanny: An Introduction, for Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres. Freud's essay is also the essay I'm teaching tonight in my Literary Criticism course.
Such synchronicity is uncanny, no? One might even say it reflects an uncanny "compulsion to repeat"...particularly since I took a marvelous course with Ken Calhoon (U Oregon) in "The Uncanny" as a graduate student -- and even wrote my doctoral dissertation on manifestations of The Uncanny in Popular Culture!
Repetition compulsion indeed. As I was enjoying Royle's book this morning, I read his chapter on the uncanniness of teaching and wanted to share some excerpts here.
There is something disgusting, incipiently uncanny perhaps, about the experience of repetition in talking to students, in memorizing or trying to memorize their names, in finding oneself seeming to say or being on the verge of saying exactly the same thing as one did an hour, or a day, or a year before...[citing Barbara Johnson,] teaching is a compulsion: a compulsion to repeat what one has not yet understood....(62)
When teachers recognize in their work the mechanical reproduction of ideas -- when "we bcome mere mechanico-pedagogical dolls, marionettes of the lecture theatre, plastic components in the teaching machine" (Royle) -- it is felt as uncanny.
The issue it raises for me is one of originality. I know that when I write, I often struggle against the anxiety of influence -- I don't want to repeat an idea that another author has already had or sound like anybody else. To the degree that I do that, I am writing in a reactionary way and that often leads to block. If I were to read a story that was "just like mine" in another book, written by someone else with my initials, then it would be "uncanny."
The issue of originality in teaching is different. There are times when I feel I actually am teaching just as I have been taught, echoing the voice of my influences, giving similar assignments as my past teachers. The uncanny is encountered instead in the desire to not become a "mechanico-pedagogical doll" -- a lecturing robot, in other words, who repeats the same material over and over again as if playing out some programmed script. Yet students often want that script and there is a tacit agreement always already in place that I am to teach it. That script is the course "content" ... but beyond that is some originality, some personalization and individuation, some unique aspects to the learning experience that I bring to the course and which prevent me from becoming robotic. The way I model inquiry, the style of my lecture delivery, my methods in proctoring tests, my facilitation of group work, my offbeat homework prompts, the questions I raise in lecture....there are more ways in which a teacher can individuate a course than standardize it. But at the core lies the standardization: the shared discourse, the "vocabulary" of the subject matter, the "facts" that one must learn about a topic, etc. When the human part of teaching is dehumanized out of the process, the uncanny is unleashed.
Confused? Read up on The Uncanny, or "The Uncanny and the Fantastic" from other college class projects. You can still catch my introduction to the special issue on The Return of the Uncanny (which I was lucky enough to guest edit) on Paradoxa's website.
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Edgar Allen Poe and Friday the thirteenth of October when my lover dumped me and I got the fever blister from hell, you know the one that wouldn’t go away. This was the year to really understand death. I lived through three near deaths on October 15th, at 15, at 25 and again at 35. Three times and still living and so I suppose that there is no excuse not to confront death head on, after all, I am working with the children that kill and see death. So I will work hard to really get the issue of death before I hit forty five. Really, it most likely isn’t such a big deal if you would believe that “three is a charm.”
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is the tale I chose to use. The text is full of ridiculously difficult vocabulary. Perhaps it is the unit of absurdity and not as I imagine, the unit of discovering the uncanny. One major objective of this unit is to teach that it is possible to garnish some meaning from a text that is obscure and difficult. A component part of that objective is the goal of developing the strength of endurance for uncertainty among my students.
I chose to assign a creative writing task to assess knowledge of the uncanny which is also a vital component of this unit. I felt that the reading was so difficult that I should cut the kids some slack in the writing and grades department on this one. I assigned the residents the task of writing their own stories in the Gothic horror tradition. The short story assignment was to write an uncanny tale with a developed character and most importantly to use imagery (visual, auditory, olafactory and sensory) to show your reader what is happening rather than to simply tell your reader the underlying emotional realities.
I tried to explain the concept of the uncanny to the residents. The uncanny is a bit over the edge of the typical high school curriculum, but I felt that I could work with this complexity, perhaps I would learn more. After all didn’t refrain from introducing syzygy when I did the James Joyce short story, so couldn't push the envelope a bit on this one?
One kid wrote about an old man that came and raped children. He received a level three violation. This may influence the amount of time that he remains incarcerated. Several supervisors spoke with me concerning the severity of writing about criminal behavior. I suppose that the boy has a lot to work through.
How can he come to terms with what he has seen, what he has done, what has been done to him? Many of the boys to men can’t seem to get their heads out of the hood. It is who they are; it is what they know. The important question for the educator is what their understanding includes. One thing that is certain is that they do have understanding and that those understandings are momentarily beyond me or possibly eternally beyond me. I don’t suppose that many of them truly get it. Do I truly get it, the uncanny that is? How would I go about showing evidence of understanding?
I think to myself that I should tell them that they must teach themselves, for I truly can not teach them otherwise. Sometimes I do not know what to teach them. I am setting myself the task of sorting through the stories this weekend and compiling the best of them into a book entitled “Twisted Tales from Spook Rock Road.” I will be editing and formatting the texts. It should be quite the task.
I hope that the book proves to be evidence of rigor and relevance.
Your next essay should be "The Uncanny in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." It seems that with the proliferation of media since Gutenberg the likelihood of not being original, ever, must have rise beyond where we can escape it. No wonder there seem now to be endemic controversies in my field, history, over what looks like close paraphrases of the work of other historians. We all, apparently, partake of a parallel consciousness, one created by media, and in this case teaching has become one more medium.