The Disturbing Materiality of Literature Education: An Ethic of Incommensurability in the Classroom
Submitted by:
Maarten Klene
Abstract:
Under globalised conditions, marked by viral connectivity, representational thinking and complex injustices, the discipline of Literature Education struggles to define itself. In Western schooling, the subject appears caught between a tradition of European humanist aestheticism, and the modern instrumentalist logics of human capital and personal development. And especially in former or settler colonial states, literature is haunted by a legacy of cultural devastation. In this context, scholars like Suzanne Choo propose an explicitly ethical cosmopolitan form of literature education. As a pedagogy it appears to sit well with the aspirations of global citizenship as described by the UN: critical engagement, intercultural openness and democratic participation. However, cosmopolitan forms of global citizenship lean toward universalist rational thought and emanate from narrow conceptions of humanity. Choo critiques these underpinnings from within a cosmopolitan tradition. As an alternative, I propose a pedagogy of incommensurability, inspired by the decolonial work of Sharon Stein and Vanessa Andreotti. It embraces the absence of political consensus while pushing toward the limits of rational thought, and is adjacent to pedagogies of discomfort and agonistic pluralism.
I explore the potential of this literature pedagogy, while speaking to the everyday concerns of students and teachers. I draw on Karen Barad’s agential realism to conceptualise a material-discursive literacy situation, which is entangled well beyond the classroom or the experiences of individual readers. The literature classroom thus becomes an ethical forcefield, as Vanessa Andreotti puts it, and reading a profoundly sense-making rather than a primarily meaning-making practice, as Nathan Snaza proposes. Beyond a cultivating, critical or liberatory project, literature can be experienced as a form of resistance in a student’s or reader’s orientation toward the world. This form of pedagogy calls for responsiveness to disruption, attentiveness to haunting absences and openness to unexpected forms of sense-making and human becoming. In this paper, I discuss how these abstract philosophical ideas meet the everyday possibilities and constraints of a Year-11 Literature classroom. I draw on observation experiences, conversations with students and teachers, and creative student artifacts produced during a period of ethnographic fieldwork at a public school in Victoria.