Eyeballs, Critical Lenses, and Cutting Onions

Like Caitlin, my earliest introduction to literary criticism also made use of the lens metaphor. Looking at a piece of literature through a specific critical lens allowed a reader to see things that were otherwise obscured. I find the metaphor helpful, but, as Caitlin pointed out with her comments on using multiple lenses, it does raise some false expectations about the nature of literary criticism. First, and I think most obviously, it gives the impression that before you put on a critical lens it is just you and your naked eyeballs encountering a text. Of course this is ridiculous. We are never unlensed readers. We always approach literature with some sort of interpretive framework. When we introduce our students to literary criticism I think that an ideal place to start is to talk about the critical lenses they already use when they approach a piece of literature. When you approach critical lenses with the understanding that we all are already wearing them, it becomes obvious that our critical lenses are always layered. If I put on a postmodern lens to look at a piece of literature I am really seeing it through both my own personal lens and through postmodernism.

Do any of you remember those “secret code” puzzles with the different colored letters? They used to be on the backs of cereal boxes. If you look at them with just your eyes it looks like a meaningless bunch of blue and red letters. When you put on the included red-lensed glasses, however, the red letters disappear and the blue letters turn into words. Critical lenses do the same thing. They let you see one element more clearly. What we don’t often recognize is that they clarify one element at the expense of another. There is too much going on in literature for us to notice it all at once. By noticing one element we are forced to ignore others. That’s why there are different schools of literary criticism: to draw attention to what other views are filtering out. When our students worry that “approaching literature with too critical an eye can ruin our appreciation of it” I think that they have a legitimate point (Anderson 346). If their appreciation of literature relies on noticing the red and we ask them to focus on the blue, of course that will change their enjoyment. A critical approach offers its own kind of enjoyment and some scholars are able to separate their criticism of literature from their enjoyment, but putting on a critical lens is not always strictly a matter of will and, as in “Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu” once on, a critical lens can be hard to take off again.

Which brings me to The Onion and what is so funny. As I read through the articles, I tried (in between the pain and laughter) to see patterns in the satire. I think a common thread is found in the disconnect between the values of students and the values of teachers and academics. They don’t speak the same languages. They don’t notice and value the same things in literature. The literature people are interested in themes of humanity and grammatical correctness and seeing cultural oppression in Burrito Bandito menus. Students are interested in burritos and steamy sex scenes and a quick emotional pay off and the grade. When a teacher tries to speak the student’s language as in “Shakespeare was, like, the ultimate rapper” or the student tries to speak the teacher’s language as in “Hilarious Hamlet Essay Circulated in Teacher’s Lounge” they fail miserably and face ridicule.

I don’t know quite how to respond to The Onion articles other than despair. After all, I not so secretly have thought some of the same things about the Academy and the discipline of literature in particular. It’s insular, jargony, designed to impress a very small in-crowd, and way to concerned with the minutia of language. Despite all these criticisms (which have some validity) I can’t dismiss literature or bring myself to say that it is irrelevant. It’s been incredibly relevant to me.

Response to Freire

It’s an idea that I’ve heard so much it has acquired a tinny hallmark greeting card ring to it. “Education must begin with the solution to the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (Freire 55). Teachers learn just as much from their students as the students themselves learn. I can see the pastel rose petals now. My cynicism for the popular incantations of this phrase stems, I think, from the inherent inequality of the teaching we think of students providing teachers. In its popular context, I think that most of the time we imagine students teaching teachers values or some kind of life lesson. Students learn biology from their teachers. Teachers learn patience from their students. This kind of ‘learning’ is still unequal but we mask it with the repetition of a revolutionary idea as a platitude. I think that Freire meant more.

If we want the learning that teachers and students glean from each other it can’t be hard-edged on the student’s side and soft and fuzzy on the teacher’s. It has to be full-bodied learning for both.

I can think of one of my former teachers who, I believe, lived this concept out. Jamie was an adjunct lecturer in the English department at my undergrad institution. She taught one of the required courses—an introduction to literary theory—along with filling in for the medieval literature professor who was on sabbatical. I took literary theory with her. It’s hard to figure out what to say about Jamie save that she was awesome. I think, though, that she really did learn as much in the course as we did. It’s not as though she learned the material in the course. There is no question that she knew far more about literary criticism than we did. Incidentally, I think Freire wouldn’t ask for teachers to not know the subject they were teaching. His own classroom practices still involved research and planning and some explicit teaching. Jamie did teach us material, but she struggled with the ideas right along with us. She was very open about those struggles with us. I remember after reading about feminist literary criticism Jamie questioning what a commitment to feminism meant to her and how could she reconcile that belief with the circumstances of her life. The whole reason she was teaching that class was because she dropped out of graduate school to have a baby. How could she reconcile her life to her ideas?

I think that what Jamie did created solidarity with us her students. As Freire wrote, “The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity” (57). Jamie achieved this not by being patronizing or trying to claim that she “got” us but by honestly grappling with the same ideas that we were starting to grapple with ourselves.