\u00a0I owe some posts, so this post concerns the first half of Clueless\u00a0in Academe. The second will be posted tomorrow morning. It’s also long, so…sorry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On my first day as a high school senior, my English teacher passed out a poem and asked us to respond to it. All I remember about the poem itself is that I kind of liked it. My response to it, however, I have never forgotten.<\/p>\n
I formulated a proof: incomprehensible poetry, by and large, is afforded a place of reverence in the canon of literary studies by virtue of the Emperor\u2019s Clothes singularity. Nobody understands it; therefore, everyone affects a suitable level of comprehension\/adulation for fear of being exposed as a fraud. Comprehensible poetry, however–and here I referred to the pleasant though forgettable poem assigned–is, to a large extent, marginalized for not living up to the standards of a hypothetically \u201cbrilliant\u201d poem. Namely, not making sense.<\/p>\n
(I was a bit cruder in my verbiage).<\/p>\n
I thought this assertion was exceedingly clever. Brilliant poetry is chosen via mob mentality! Damn the accessible! While a bit smug, it did place the poem in a larger cultural context. At the very least, it was better than saying \u201cI liked it. It was pretty.\u201d<\/p>\n
But since my contention was averred with a younger man\u2019s conceit, my teacher thought I was derisively referring to the poem as an example of the \u201cincomprehensible\u201d poetry he was supposedly under fire for worshipping. I tried to reassure him otherwise–I had<\/em> liked the poem, I had<\/em> understood it; and, as per my argument, this was why I had never<\/em> heard of it before, and probably never<\/em> would again–but he ignored me in favor of demanding evidence as to why I found it incomprehensible.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing worse than being asked to defend a claim you haven\u2019t made by a man who\u2019s not listening to the substance of your answers in the first place.<\/p>\n I changed tactics, pointing to the poetry of Emily Dickinson–which I had never been able to understand–as something that \u201csucked\u201d but was beloved because of its incomprehensibility. At this he almost wept with triumph. Grinning from ear to ear, he told me \u201cAu contraire. I find her poetry to be wonderful,\u201d and then he launched into a rehearsed speech about why poetry was wonderful, and why idiots who didn\u2019t understand it were idiots. Not that he called me an idiot; he just gave me an artificial, condescending smile which made him look like a bloated puppet.<\/p>\n Personally, I would\u2019ve preferred being called an idiot.<\/p>\n Though I didn\u2019t realize it at the time, I\u2019d been played for a patsy. My teacher had laid out a path for discussion, but in order to segue to the next movement he needed a foil, a dupe, someone to play the straw man. He put words in my mouth the very same way that I–and many other students–have often taken sources out of context to support our own contentions in research papers. He was trying to fit me into the exemplary mold of the boy who didn\u2019t like poetry because he didn\u2019t \u201cget\u201d it.<\/p>\n It was a preemptive strike against Graff\u2019s \u201cproblem problem,\u201d the phenomenon by which academics seem to cultivate–or even invent–problems for the simple sake of argument. The student resists this syndrome, opting to disregard subtext–the invention if which is \u201cprofoundly counterintuitive,\u201d since it is a needless complication–in favor of what the perfectly self-explanatory text has to say (45-46).<\/p>\n Or, in my case, what it failed to say.<\/p>\n To extend Graff\u2019s contention, I would argue that, for many students, the very existence<\/em> of certain texts–especially poetry–seems to be a needless complication. If the student is reluctant to read past the most obvious meaning of the text, it stands to reason that, if their superficial reading finds the text to be meaningless, they will presume the act of reading it to be a cultural prank on a worldwide scale. The student does not wonder \u201cwhy can\u2019t the teacher agree with my straightforward reading?\u201d so much as they look at the text and say, \u201cThey can\u2019t be serious.\u201d<\/p>\n In my case, I wasn\u2019t just saying that the meaning of \u201cincomprehensible\u201d poetry was being lost in a sea of specious reasoning; I was insisting that all<\/em> interpretations were nothing more than water in that same sea. In short, difficult poetry was worthless.<\/p>\n But then, I was also being facetious. I was making a slightly tongue-in-cheek observation that most brilliant poetry seemed<\/em> to be incomprehensible, and therefore was automatically deemed \u201cbrilliant!\u2019 as a result, not because of its inherent value. I wasn\u2019t attacking the text, merely the culture which taught it.<\/p>\n Which begs a question: how much of what students resist is the artificiality of rubric as opposed to the artificiality of subtext? I would argue that the student is not entirely rebelling against the need to dress the text up in meaning, but more that they are chafing against the methods by which they are directed to do so. A teacher can play devil\u2019s advocate to a discussion about the \u201cobvious\u201d conflict of a text, and in so doing challenge what the student is saying and by proxy what they think.<\/p>\n But, like my senior English teacher, they aren\u2019t interested in interacting, so much as playing the role they\u2019ve already decided to play. The \u201cproblem problem\u201d is as much a result of teachers wanting to maintain momentum in the lesson plan as it is an inherent natural desire of the student to maintain simplicity in the text.<\/p>\n Graff acknowledges that, \u201cfrom a certain commonsense point of view, academia\u2019s cultivation of problems looks manufactured, perverse, and silly,\u201d so much so that it seems \u201ctedious and pointless, an infinite regress that goes nowhere\u201d (46-47). For students and for casual observers, it would be funny if it weren\u2019t so frustrating. But my point concerns something different than the intrinsic need of academia–specifically within the arts–to justify its own existence. Consider an examples of this frustration that Graff offers; it\u2019s almost droll: \u201cthe only thing overanalyzing leads to is boredom\u201d (44).<\/p>\n If that particular sentiment couldn\u2019t serve as a straight line, I don\u2019t know what could.<\/p>\n To take the metaphor further, the student becomes the straight man, the feed, the stooge, the guy serving up softballs for the other comic\/pundit to hit out of the park. They serve as a kind of collective Bud Abbot, continually trying to assure the professor \u201cWho\u2019s on first.\u201d But they\u2019re not doing so in order to be part of a joke. They\u2019re making a self-consciously facetious statement in anticipation of being informed otherwise. Unfortunately, the teacher seems intent on fulfilling the other side of this vaudeville act, acting so deliberately obtuse that they have no choice other than to reply \u201cthat\u2019s what I\u2019m asking you!\u201d<\/p>\n It’s a verbal dance that, once identified, can be better understood. I’d try and make it make more sense, but I’ve gone on way to long already.<\/p>\n \u00a0– Matt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0I owe some posts, so this post concerns the first half of Clueless\u00a0in Academe. The second will be posted tomorrow morning. It’s also long, so…sorry.\u00a0 On my first day as a high school senior, my English teacher passed out a poem and asked us to respond to it. 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