Abstract
This paper primarily aims at conceptualizing a new philosophical approach to literature education, one that we—in the vein of certain pedagogical trends—propose to call “thing-centered”. Point of departure is the ongoing confrontation with a two-sided educational problem: on the one hand, the confrontation with the steady decline of younger generations’ engagements with ‘classical’ literature; on the other hand, that with the unsatisfactory answers which either accept (and even support) this development, in light of the world’s irresistible digitization, or try overcoming it through a more student-centered, ‘biographical’ appropriation of literature. Beyond the more immediate didactical difficulties which this two-fold problem poses, we ask ourselves the question whether it is not time for a more fundamental renewal of our understanding of literature’s contemporary educational significance. In answering this question, for which we turn to such diverse authors as Rousseau, Deleuze and Calvino, it is argued that if education is to continue its care for both classical literacy and literary classics—and not so much against as in relation to ascending digital literacies—a more radically immanent, thing-centered perspective is likely to prove the most sustainable, in the sense of enabling truly new, ‘care-ful’ literary-educational practices to emerge.
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Notes
As will become clear, by “classical” we never refer to Classical Antiquity, but rather to the notion (also used by Calvino [2009]) of ‘canonical’ classics—works of literary fiction that have achieved an exemplary status—and to the traditional literacies required and cultivated by such works (cf. Vlieghe 2015).
To nuance this, our paper principally deals with Western educational contexts. This is of course not to say that in other parts of the world similar problems are not encountered; often, however, important additional factors are still in play there (cf. Cody 2013).
There are even good reasons for surmising an inverted correlation between the two, as does Michel de Certeau (1972) when he names traditional orthographic schooling as a major cause of the loss of literary creativity in his time.
As Bloom (1995) already pointed out (before contesting the legitimacy of this critique), over the years many debates around the strengths and weaknesses of literary canons have been triggered by concerns for social justice, which claimed that most canons insufficiently represented the literary values and contributions of women, ethnic, racial minorities, etc. Given the scope of our paper, however, we will not further engage with this, admittedly important and topical, line of argumentation.
We realize that our review of these answers is somewhat generalizing and oversimplifying, and that many empirical practices that formally espouse the ideas discussed, do not fully coincide with them, as they still tinker with them in ways that try to overcome their possible pitfalls.
Which, in a way, are precisely the focus of the more dominant approaches to literature education: the authority of the educator (viz., the educating generation) to decide a priori what is valuable literature and what is not (that is: a canon), vs. the freedom of the (emancipated) educand to decide this for him/herself—or even to decide that classical literature is not valuable at all.
As used here, the notion of “care” is far removed from its meaning in more personalist care ethics, and bears more affinity with the notions use by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler (2010). Instead of being a protective/normative care for things ‘as they are’ (or should be), it is an experimental care for things as they could be.
Since, as Vlieghe & Zamojski (2019) argue, it inevitably belongs to the expertise of the teacher (viz., a teaching body) to make a final decision with regard to which books are most capable of generating the said interest, attention, and care.
Schildermans’ idea of insistence or urgency remains deliberately inarticulate. On the one hand it regards the starting-point of study: the reasons to materialize some issues into subject matters, rather than others; on the other hand, as such, it also regards an affect emerging within the process of study, in the paradoxical sense that the starting premises only begin to make sense (or not) by being studied themselves, and thus by making sense anew. A teacher can propose to read a novel because of its thematization of sexual emancipation, yet this thematization should be able to acquire a completely new sense (or even get side-tracked) by a truly careful study of the book in all of its literary dimensions.
This immediately connects to certain proto-communist strands of Rousseau’s socio-political thinking, where the idea of “property” is heavily criticized [ref.].
To which, not unimportantly, also the very acts of writing and reading belong. In fact, in line with Rousseau’s reasoning, these constitute the primary means by which Robinson—who salvages a Bible from his shipwreck—tries to humanize Friday’s primitive impulses.
In this regard it is interesting to mention the Letters on the Elements of Botany, in which Rousseau, an amateur botanist, set out to instruct an acquaintance on the basic principles of vegetal life. Apparently Goethe already recommended this work as the logical pedagogical complement to the Émile (Cook 2012).
In fact, in the Logic of Sense, Deleuze indeed also scolds Rousseau for his ‘invention’ of the narcissist I-perspective (Deleuze 1990, 138).
Cf. Michel Foucault’s remarks on the ‘(post)modern’ split of Rousseau’s personality in his Dialogues, translated as Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, where an unnamed narrator is staged to interview both Rousseau and Jean-Jacques, his two alter egos (Foucault 1998).
Not coincidentally, Kafka is also one of the authors whom Deleuze explicitly mentions as ‘heir’ to the Rousseauian legacy of thing-centered literature (Deleuze 2004).
And not represented: this, Deleuze considers, always already implies a hierarchy between depth and surface, in the sense that the latter can only ever be a weaker version of the first.
Deleuze and Guattari consistently speak of “major” versus “minor” literature in this regard. Paradoxically then, great literature is always minor literature: it urges a reading at the precarious surface of the text, where a major tradition can express itself in new, minor voices (Bogue 2003, 91 ff.).
Deleuze is rather averse to speaking about education in terms of learning, since for him this always implies a pre-defined content to be learnt. By contrast his concept of apprenticeship has more to do with processes of un-common becoming-different (cf. Snir 2018).
Best known for his experimental Cosmicomics short stories (1965), and his ‘meta-novels’ Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979).
Interestingly, the Latin elementum would be either derived from a mnemonic acronym combining the letters L-M-N (cf. “alphabet”, “abecedary”) and related to the word alimentum (“nourishment”); or from the Ancient Greek elephas, “elephant”, which in turn would point to the didactical use of ivory letters to teach the alphabet. Cf. https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/Element.
In this earlier essay Why Read the Classics? (2009), Calvino main line of argument is that reading a classic is always a matter of rereading—of reading with a whole (critical) tradition, context etc. Cf. Harold Bloom on the practice of “creative misreading” (Bloom 1995).
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Koopal, W., Vlieghe, J. Caring for Literature that Matters ? Conceptualizing a Thing-centered Perspective on Literature Education with Rousseau, Deleuze, and Calvino. Stud Philos Educ 41, 529–549 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09835-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09835-7