Yet, in the middle of this summer that feels as if the world is coming apart at the seams, I find myself turning towards my turn in the classroom this fall with renewed energy and, importantly, renewed hope.

In a recent essay for The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit returns to the topical terrain of her 2005 book “Hope in the Dark.” Hope, Solnit argues, is “not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative…” Instead, Solnit suggests, we should look for hope in the unknown, the uncertain, the failure and the unpredictable. Hope dwells in “broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act,” offering “an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.”

This account of hope sounds a lot like pedagogy when it is at its best and most vital.

Pedagogy operates in the intersections and interstices between teachers and students, classroom and world, individual and community, public and private, inside and outside. It is both what learn and how we learn. Pedagogy is both an encounter and a process of discovery, praxis and reflection. It calls into question even as it holds us accountable for the questions we ask and the answers we venture.

The kind of pedagogical work we do in the classroom is both profoundly hopeful and deeply political.

But this isn’t the kind of “politics” that centers on government and policy, the kind of political that trades in student learning for standardized tests, polling numbers, and PACs. Rather, I’m talking about what philosopher Hannah Arendt describes as polis – the community forged in the “space [that] lies between people living together for [the purpose of speaking and acting], no matter where they happen to be.”

The classroom is a moment of possibility, an ephemeral potential for polis. But political life, in the Arendtian sense, is also public and plural. The classroom provides a common space and a common world in which we become visible to others as individuals, the sources and vital voices of differing perspectives. This “space of appearance” provides the ground for public engagement and political possibility and offers a model of citizenship built on reciprocity and community.

Solnit writes, “This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It is also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.”

Pedagogy demands that we see the world around us. Politics demands that we see each other.

As we return to the formal and informal classrooms of the world this fall, my hope is that we can build the kinds of pedagogical experiences that open possibilities for action and engagement, that allow us to tell the deep histories of the wounds that continue to fester even as we find new avenues for healing.

When our politics seem to fail, pedagogy gives me hope.

Katie Dyson is a PhD candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago. When she’s not teaching or working on her dissertation, she reads the internet.

The post Politics, Pedagogy, and Hope appeared first on Newfound.

Mrs. Dalloway offers a more complicated portrait of life and love than Molly Bloom’s emphatic yes. In 2016, it seems fitting to celebrate a novel that reflects as much darkness as light.

The novel begins with Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for a party in the evening. We follow her through London as she picks up the flowers but the narrative quickly leaves Clarissa.

Woolf inhabits the perspectives of a wide swath of London, united by the backfiring of a car, an airplane trailing a toffee advertisement, the crowded omnibus. We find the echo of Clarissa’s movement through the city in Septimus Smith, a “shell-shocked” veteran struggling to find a place after the disorienting violence of the First World War.

The novel culminates in a party and a suicide, linking light and dark, Clarissa and Septimus, life and death, in a profound statement about our capacity to connect to the world around us.

In “Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation,” Rebecca Walkowitz describes Woolf’s narrative strategy as evasive, a willingness to divert our attention from the national, political narratives of postwar London to a party in order to give voice and expression to their political and ethical consequences. Woolf, like other modernist, asks readers to

“…accept, if not embrace, the profanity of conflicting sensibilities — beautiful metaphors and ugly events, acts of kindness and scenes of cruelty, suicide in the afternoon and a party in the evening — and they must accept the ethical discomfort that this profanity may evoke.”

But there is a politics in Woolf’s profanity.

Clarissa Dalloway feels “herself everywhere,” offering a “transcendental theory” of community. She speak of “odd affinities . . with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter . . .” Clarissa’s experience of the world is transformed by those she encounters, but she refuses to recruit them for some grand political narrative.

Indeed, Clarissa rejects the conventional stories we tell about the world. Prompted by her husband Richard’s solicitous care, Clarissa reflects on his obligations as a member of Parliament: “She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice . . . no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians?”

She imagines Richard and her friend, Peter Walsh, joining together in a critical refrain, laughing at her (very unjustly, she thinks) for her parties.

Clarissa feels a greater commitment to her parties than the political plight of the Armenians or Albanians because, for her, they offer a more meaningful way to bring people together. She imagines her parties as an offering to life, an offering “to combine, to create.”

While this moment reveals Clarissa’s political ignorance, her desire to throw parties develops out of her recognition of the other, those whose existence she senses in South Kensington, Bayswater, and Mayfair. Clarissa’s concern is not limited to the local and particular, however; her fundamental recognition of the humanity of those around her suggests that a political awareness and responsibility might develop out of the intimate encounter.

It is her early romantic relationship with Sally Seton and not her husband’s political concerns that inspires Clarissa. She reflects, “Sally it was who made her feel, for the first time, how sheltered the life at Bourton was. She knew nothing about sex—nothing about social problems.” While Clarissa’s parties seem trivial and superficial, they provide the opportunity for a political responsibility to develop out of intimacy.

“Mrs. Dalloway” traces the ethical failures of postwar London’s political responsibility in the tragedy of Septimus Smith’s suicide. Septimus reflects on his relationship with Evans, a commanding officer who died in the war. While the narrative never describes their relationship as sexual, the narrative nonetheless suggests a deep intimacy. Woolf writes, “Septimus drew the affection of his officer, Evans by name . . . They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other.”

Rezia, Septimus’ wife, describes Evans as “undemonstrative in the company of women.” As Septimus’ psychological condition deteriorates, he reveals that his grief over the death of Evans is a cause of his “pathology.”

But Septimus repeatedly insists he feels nothing. His absence of feeling suggests a failure to fully express its significance; his experience does not fit into the narrative of the heroic soldier returning home. His overwhelming grief at the loss of Evans locates Septimus’ experience outside the social and political frameworks that determine how the war becomes meaningful. How he becomes meaningful.

The pompous Sir William Bradshaw emerges to diagnose Septimus and engage him in his program of “proportion.” This way of forcing the world into a recognizable shape is so pervasive that it becomes synonymous, in Septimus’ mind, with human nature. The terrible irony is of course that Bradshaw fails to recognize Septimus’ humanity.

At the moment he decides to commit suicide, Septimus tellingly reflects, “It was their idea of tragedy. . .” Even in death, Septimus realizes their failure to recognize his humanity. He asks, “Only human beings—what did they want?” But Bradshaw and the postwar world fail to respond in kind.

In the midst of her party, Clarissa receives news of Septimus’s suicide, uniting the narrative arcs of the novel’s two central characters. She thinks, “Somehow it was her disaster – her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.” Clarissa feels Septimus’ death, the death of a stranger delivered secondhand, deeply.

Like the chance encounters with strangers on the streets of London and old friends at an evening party, Clarissa’s encounter with Septimus is a brief but climactic moment in the narrative. Woolf quickly returns to the party, shifting away from Clarissa’s solitary contemplation. Yet their importance persists, reshaping the world around these character.

The novel’s final lines are given to Peter Walsh. He wonders in a contemplative moment of his own, “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said.” Peter articulates the way in which he owes his being, his ability to experience and contemplate terror, ecstasy, and excitement, to Clarissa. His response is an imperative, an openness to the absolute humanity of the other, because “[i]t is Clarissa” simply “[f]or there she was.”

For Virginia Woolf, the intimate encounter is not merely an aesthetic strategy, a passive means of addressing modernist issues of alienation, isolation, and futility, but an active engagement with humanity.

Dallowayday would give form and shape to a profane politics, a celebration of the light and humanity that emerges from darkness, a way to recognize the tragedy of death amid a celebration of life. A party that might combine and create. In the midst of our own contemporary tragedies, Dallowayday might give us a moment in June to recognize our shared humanity.

Katie Dyson is a PhD candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago. When she’s not teaching or working on her dissertation, she reads the internet.

The post A Day for Dalloway appeared first on Newfound.

As I’ve imagined my own syllabi for the fall, I’ve found the most urgent and radical syllabus-making is taking place elsewhere.

The syllabus has found new and vital form as part of a collaborative, largely digital response to seismic cultural and political events.

Scholars, students, and readers alike turned to Twitter after the events of Ferguson, Charleston, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and, most recently, the release of Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade.

They started as social media hashtags, collecting shared references and referrals. Now these are internet syllabi in various forms: Frank Leon Roberts’ Black Lives Matter syllabus is a public version of the familiar format, the #CharlestonSyllabus was quickly organized by African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and has become a formal book. Nichole Perkins compiled a reading list for Fusion. Candice Benbow published a digital compilation of the sources gathered by her Twitter hashtag #lemonadesyllabus.

Each of these syllabi were born in the unruly spaces of the internet.

It’s not surprising that much of this syllabus-making centers on black lives, black culture, and black communities. Syllabi are a practical shorthand for what is and isn’t canonical, the texts we rely on to shape our sense of self, society, and history and establish whose voices who count in shaping those narratives.

Efforts to diversify the canons have “let in” writers and thinkers of color. Still, gatekeepers (the authors of syllabi) too often operate from comfortable default positions and perspectives. Diversity, Anna Holmes suggests, has become “an end – a box to check off – rather than a starting point from which a more integrated, textured world is brought into being.”

Unmoored from the rhythms, pressures, and spaces of academia, these syllabi embody the best of the genre. They embody new ways of organizing knowledge while commenting the limitations of their form. The popular syllabus allows us to to think through what we circulate as “knowledge” and the worlds we build in the circulating.

We create syllabi for the art and aspects of life that seem the most difficult to comprehend. Operating outside institutional spaces, these syllabi build different kinds of community spaces, spaces that extend outward and beyond the initial experience or encounter with racism and violence (#FergusonSyllabus and #CharlestonSyllabus) or visionary art (#LemonadeSyllabus). These are spaces with porous boundaries.

In “The Art of Cruelty,” Maggie Nelson describes an alternate pedagogy of space. Space, Nelson reminds us, works differently than models of depth: “space offers a horizontal spreading, the possibility of expansion into dimensions no one yet thoroughly understands.”

These spontaneous digital syllabi do a different, horizontal kind of pedagogical work. They bridge the gap between scholars and readers; they build a new kind of public.  As Chad Williams, originator of the #CharlestonSyllabus, writes, this syllabus “is more than a list. It is a community of people committed to critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.”

What the #CharlestonSyllabus, #FergusonSyllabus, and now the #LemonadeSyllabus remind us is that learning itself is unruly. It’s tangential and collaborative, always operating in “dimensions no one yet thoroughly understands.”

Syllabi build possibilities; they build worlds. This new hybrid syllabus offers a way to build better ones.

Katie Dyson is a PhD candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago. When she’s not teaching or working on her dissertation, she reads the internet.

The post Unruly Spaces and the Internet Syllabus appeared first on Newfound.

We’re in the midst of a television storytelling renaissance – enough quality television programming for the industry to wring their hands about “Peak TV” and anticipate the bursting of TV’s bubble. But while we may have more stories than ever playing across our screens (and waiting patiently in our Netflix queues), few manage to find new ways to tell those familiar stories. As Adichie cautioned, when we tell a single story, it risks becoming the only story.

This spring, however, two similarly named television series – ABC’s “American Crime” and FX’s “American Crime Story” – take their time to unravel seemingly monolithic stories of American violence.

Both anthology series find a new way to tell familiar stories, grappling with the perverse pleasures and pressures in retelling singular stories. Both series reveal the failures of the stories we tell and our misplaced faith in their explanatory powers.

Of the two series, the second season of John Ridley’s superb “American Crime” tells the quieter, more intimate story of violence. The season explores how an accusation of rape disrupts the fragile ecosystem of a Midwestern community, revealing the fault lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality that fracture the community’s belief in singular narratives.

Ridley offers a series of twists (though “twist” seems too superficial a term for the gravity of the story) that expose both how easy it is to dismiss the banality of these stories of rape, sports culture, and American masculinity and the complexity we miss in that dismissal.

“American Crime” takes a familiar story of rape – the Steubenville High School case is a clear parallel – and flips the gender.

The season opens with Taylor, a young male student at an elite private school in suburban Indianapolis, discovering that photos of him partially dressed, wasted (and likely drugged) at a party are circulating around the school. The photos land him in trouble with the administration (headed by cruelly calculating headmaster Leslie, played by Felicity Huffman) for violating the school’s code of conduct.

In a series of tense, emotional confrontations between Taylor and his mother, Anne (Lili Taylor), and the headmaster, we discover that “[s]omeone did something to [him].” Language itself fails Taylor and his mother. Anne explains, “It’s what he didn’t say . . . things he couldn’t talk about,” even though it’s the word “rape” that places Taylor and those around him in a recognizable narrative.

“You need to be very careful with that word.”

Leslie’s admonishment reveals the chilly administrative savvy she displays spinning the “issue.” But the show is as attentive to how a rape story is spun, and to how Leslie and others manipulate it.

“American Crime” unravels how the narrative of Taylor’s rape is framed by Taylor, his mother, the rapist, the police, school, and broader community. When Terri (played by Reginia King), the mother of one of the basketball players named in Taylor’s lawsuit, discovers what happened, she voices the disbelief Taylor meets at every turn: “Boys don’t get raped. Boys don’t do that to other boys.” Her incomprehension reveals the ways that deep layers of homophobia, toxic masculinity, and misogyny shape narrative of rape, making it “impossible” for men to be recognized as victims.

This frustrating failure to recognize male rape as a crime – one echoed by the school and the police – brings out in heartbreaking detail the way that rape victims of any gender are silenced and dismissed by the pressures of a singular cultural narrative of what constitutes rape.

“American Crime” explores the pressures a single story exerts, and the stories it erases. Ten episodes give a narrative (too often shortchanged by media packages and popular crime procedurals) room to breathe. We see how economic privilege affords opportunities for influence and control over stories of sexual assault and how race shapes fear, anxiety and fierce defensiveness in the recognition of deep-seated inequality–even amid upper class black families. We see how a singular narrative of masculinity and a narrow definition of male success disadvantages young women but also deeply limits young men.

As Matt Zoller Seitz suggests in his review, the show “is not escapism, it’s confrontation.” “American Crime” pushes its story in multiple directions to confront the palpable undercurrents of racism, classism, homophobia, and sexism that shape sexual violence into a single story.

But if “American Crime” reveals the dangers of a single story in refusing to tell one, it also does so in how it chooses to tell those stories. The superior directing throughout the series displaces our identification with the characters, dislocating the stories being told from the speaker telling the story. A nurse narrates the procedure for the rape kit taken from Taylor but the camera stays tight on his face. The nurse’s voice fades in and out as Taylor reels from the trauma of the rape and the invasive medical procedure. Late in the series, Eric, the accused rapist who himself is a victim of an assault and internalized homophobia (not that it excuses the rape), wonders who “gets to be the victim. . . Somebody screams rape and nobody cares what really happened. How does he get to own the night? How does he get to own me?” Again, the camera follows Taylor as Eric’s voice plays over the scene, fracturing both our attention and our sympathy.

The direction emphasizes the distance between what is being said and its effects on the lives it shapes, culminating in a fascinating eighth episode that frames the fictional school shooting with interviews with the real victims and survivors of school violence, bullying, homophobia, and transphobia. The interviews are jarring. In clumsier hands, they would be melodramatic, but in Ridley’s the testimonies only underline the violence of a single story.

What “American Crime” explores in the contained intimacy of a Midwestern community, its louder, campier counterpart is Ryan Murphy’s new anthology series “American Crime Story.” Here we explore the sprawling expanse of a burgeoning national 24-hour media cycle.

“American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson” opens with the schism between real events (the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the gruesome murders of two people) and the story built in the surrounding media circus.

“American Crime Story” feels disturbingly contemporary and the writers, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, draw clear parallels between the way racism, feminism, and celebrity shaped the trial and continue to shape our cultural landscape. Robert Kardashian (played by David Schwimmer) emerges at key moments to embody the moral conscience of the defense but also to remind us that we have the trial to thank for Kim Kardashian and her family’s reality TV empire.

Racism, feminism, and celebrity shaped the trial and continue to shape our cultural landscape

“American Crime Story” works in large part because OJ Simpson fades from the center of the story. The series instead focuses on the lawyers and the narrative construction of the crime inside and outside the courtroom (and the blurred boundaries between the two). “American Crime Story” humanizes the lawyers by showing their own purism – their faith in a single story of the events of that night (or, in the case of the defense, a larger political narrative) and its self-evidence to the jurors and the public. As Johnnie Cochran (Courtney B. Vance) explains to his team, “Jurors go with the narrative that makes sense. We’re here to tell a story. Our job is to tell that story better than the prosecution tells theirs.”

One story wins out over the other. “American Crime Story” exploits its juridical framing to show how that story gets built, what it exploits and what it misses. Hindsight allows us to find satisfaction and pleasure in judging which stories stick.

But what both stories of American crime – one famous, both infamous – illustrate is how easy it is to fall into comfortable narratives. Without thinking through their consequences for how they shape the world around us, these easy narratives function as confirmation bias. In unraveling the singularity of these all-too-familiar narratives of violence, both “American Crime” and “American Crime Story” bring a more complex form of storytelling to the surface.

Adichie explains that it “is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power . . . How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.”

Power is the ability to make that single story the definitive story. Storytelling has the capacity to sustain or undo its own limits. In showing us the strings, “American Crime” and “American Crime Story” show us our own limits and transcend theirs.

Katie Dyson is a PhD candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago. When she’s not teaching or working on her dissertation, she reads the internet.

The post American Crimes and the Danger of a Single Story appeared first on Newfound.

But this easy dismissal takes on a more sinister cast in the midst of an election year, the kind of year that reveals the worst of our collective cultural tendency to systematize identity, locating and marking boundaries between ourselves and others.

In the media and at the polls, we become demographic statistics and voting blocks, delineated by age, race, gender, class, sexuality, geography, and other categories which seek to place our actions and reactions in predictable narratives. This urge to entrench and delimit identities in easy-to-consume packages becomes the primary interface, a feature of American culture writ large that emerges in its most virulent form in deeply political years.

These impulses are closely linked.

At the end of her essay on the value of reading widely, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we need to take art seriously: “Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”

When you only consume “relatable” art, you make a world that only looks like yourself.

To judge art on whether or not you can relate to it makes the particular universal. When we find something relatable, we find ourselves reflected in it. For Rebecca Mead, relatability becomes a greater “scourge” because of the demands it places on art: “that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer.” Likewise, relatability bothers Rebecca Onion “because it presumes that the speaker’s experiences and tastes are common and normative. . . It’s shorthand that masquerades as description.” Relatability shapes our horizons by limiting them.

But it also ignores what we do when we read. Reading is a deeply vulnerable act. You give yourself over to the words on the page. You lend a book your body. But reading also demands effort and collaboration – a willingness to invest yourself.

In “From Work to Text“, Roland Barthes distinguishes reading-for-consumption and reading-as-collaboration. The text, Barthes argues, “asks the reader for an active collaboration.” It demands “play, task, production, and activity.” You become a co-writer, helping the text come alive. Boredom and disengagement, the inability to relate, becomes a failure of the imagination, an unwillingness to “play it, open it out, make it go.”

When you refuse to relate to literature, film, television, etc., you close yourself to the potential for discomfort, confusion, vulnerability, and failure but also the exhilaration of art.

Reading, really reading, is risky.

Katie Dyson is a PhD candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago. When she’s not teaching or working on her dissertation, she reads the internet.

The post Reading, Relatability, and Risk appeared first on Newfound.

The series follows the trials and convictions of Steven Avery – first, for the sexual assault of Penny Beerntsen in 1985, a crime for which he served 18 years in prison only to be exonerated by DNA evidence and the legal efforts of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Then, for the murder of Teresa Halbach a mere two years after his release and amid a lawsuit against the Manitowoc County Police who had originally put him behind bars.

Like This American Life’s spinoff podcast, “Serial” and HBO’s documentary series, “The Jinx,” “Making a Murderer” repackages deeply compelling violent crimes as deeply compelling narrative. Where “Making a Murderer” departs from its flashier counterparts is its deep entrenchment in place.

The absence of mediating narrator – both Sarah Koenig (“Serial”) and Andrew Jarecki (“The Jinx”) play central roles in their narrative investigations – as well as the reliance on amateur footage, courtroom tape, and aerial shots of the Averys’ property functions much more mimetically than the medium of other true crime narratives. In its rootedness in the particulars of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, “Making a Murderer“‘s sense of place invokes a much older genre: American literary regionalism.

In ways that echo regionalist novels like Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Country of Pointed Firs” or Edith Wharton’s “Ethan Frome,” directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi meticulously record the particulars of Manitowoc County. Viewers experience the local politics, social structures, and class distinctions that initially place Steven Avery in jail and later suffuse the prosecutor’s investigation, trial, and conviction.

But, like the regionalist fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “Making a Murderer” is tasked with navigating both the particularity of the local community it depicts and the features that make it recognizable to those outside the community. Regionalist narratives make the claim that place both does and doesn’t matter.

This contradictory invocation of place becomes central to regionalist narratives’ treatment of broader national or systemic concerns. “Making a Murderer“ offers insight into the insular communal justice of Manitowoc County, but, in explicitly framing the narrative as a product of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, the directors ultimately make an implicit case for a much more sweeping revision of our understanding of justice.

We often think of justice as corrupt in urban places. After all, the counterpart to regionalist fiction is the gritty, urban realist novel explicitly moralizing about the dangers of the city or exposing the corruption of human nature and human justice.[1] But the regionalism at work in Demos’s and Ricciardi’s true crime saga reveal this as a painful fiction.

Ricciardi insists, “We consider this an American story. An American story that happened to play out in Wisconsin.” But it is both places – America and Manitowoc, Wisconsin – that inform how we think about justice in “Making a Murderer.” Regionalism is less about a place than an experience of it and both “Making a Murderer“’s local particularity and broader familiarity suggest that our judicial system is broken everywhere. Unlike other recent true crime narratives, “Making a Murderer”’s regionalism reveals how deeply tied to place our sense of justice really is.

[1] For example, when predicting the future of “Sister Carrie”’s protagonist upon her arrival in Chicago, Theodore Dreiser portentously declares, ““When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

Katie Dyson is a PhD candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago. When she’s not teaching or working on her dissertation, she reads the internet.

The post Regionalism and Justice in “Making a Murderer” appeared first on Newfound.