The Use of Literature in a Beautifully Riskful Education
Submitted by:
Ingrid A M Lindell
Abstract:
In The Beautiful Risk of Education (2013) Gert J. J. Biesta describes contemporary Western educational systems as a landscape of control and assessment produced by "a desire to make education strong, secure, predictable, and risk-free”. Against this ”strong” view, Biesta argues for a ”weak” one, focusing on the unpredictable, the unknown – i.e. the risk – as a primary feature of an education worthy of its name. Education, says Biesta, isn’t just qualification and socialisation, but also subjectification, which is a social event of recognition and responsibility. Such events, which according to Biesta are crucial to a democratic society, are suppressed in the dominant, strong views and practices of today’s learning industry, but can be promoted by a weaker attitude, where the risk of education is embraced as a beautiful one.
What part, then, can the reading of literature in education play if we accept Biesta’s argument? Or, to put it in another way, what is the use of literature in a beautifully riskful education? In our paper we will discuss this question in dialogue with Rita Felski’s much debated manifesto Uses of Literature (2008), which – on the basis of a problematizing description of how literature is commonly conceptualised in literary studies and education, with a suspicious, critical eye – focuses on how and why literature ’actually’ is read. What can be said about the uses of literature put to the fore by Felski (recognition, enchantment, knowledge, shock) in relation to “weak” education and subjectification? And what more needs to be said to counter the instrumentalisation of literature studies?
References:
Biesta, Giert J.J. (2013). The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder & London: Paradigm
Felski, Rita (2008). Uses of Literature. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell