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Conquering Illusions: Don Quixote and the Educational Significance of the Novel
Abstract
In this paper we want to rethink the educational significance of the novel – and particularly of novel-reading – from the perspective of a ‘meta-novelistic’ reading of Don Quixote, often acclaimed as the “first modern novel”. Our point of departure is double: on the one hand, there is the controversial contemporary phenomenon of “de-reading”, and all the educational discussions which it entails; on the other hand, there is the existing tradition of literary education, which, from different angles, has already extensively reflected upon the (moral, epistemological, ontological) relation between novel-reading, education and subjectification, but which also sometimes seems to have exhausted its means for doing so. To problematize this double starting point in a new way, we propose to revisit the ‘origins’ of the novel and novel-reading, at the dawn of modernity. By exploring the differences between the narratives of subjectification represented by the Cartesian cogito and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which were near-contemporaries, we try to argue for an educational-philosophical rehabilitation of the latter, if not against then at least beyond the former. In a first movement, and in dialogue with novelists Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes, we do so by focusing on the novel as a particular form, or ‘configuration’, of knowledge – one that is by nature experimental and pluralist. In a second movement, we link this to Jean Baudrillard’s famous distinction between “simulation” and “illusion”, claiming that novel-reading qua subjectification always involves a Quixotic practice of adventurous, ‘playful’ and public negotiation between reality and its more or less ‘illusory’ alternatives.
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In this essay, Kip Kline and Kathleen Knight Abowitz use Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer to examine the existential plight of young Americans today who, as they turn the broad and long corner from youth to adulthood, are engaged in a search for self‐knowledge and identity construction. They are particularly interested in the young adult as “college student,” engaged in the work of postsecondary education, autonomous from but often still very closely connected to their family of origin in a culture saturated by late‐capitalist consumerism and commercial media. Kline and Knight Abowitz interpret this novel in order to examine a malaise specific to our current historical moment that may characterize how young people experience institutions such as U.S. colleges and universities as well as the institution of the contemporary American family. They also wish to show that particular themes in existentialism, which can be teased out in novels such as The Moviegoer, can assist our analysis of the contemporary malaise of the college student and provide theorists, educators, and advocates with possible ways of responding to it.
In 2011, a national strategy Literacy and Numeracy for Learning and Life was published in the Republic of Ireland. One key aspect of the strategy was that it placed a renewed focus on reading for pleasure in post-primary classrooms. The researchers involved in this article worked for the Professional Development Service for Teachers, a national, government-funded professional development organisation. In response to the strategy, the researchers worked with teachers from nine post-primary schools across the Republic of Ireland. Through working closely with these English teachers, it was possible to identify assumptions that the teachers made around their students' reading in post-primary education. This article considers and challenges some of these assumptions and demonstrates what happened when the teachers were invited to do the same. In the course of the research, questions were also raised about some of the recommendations made within the national strategy, recommendations which were themselves based on contestable assumptions, assumptions such as the fact that boys prefer to read non-fiction. The need for national policy to be rooted in research was, therefore, also identified. Finally, through feedback from teachers and students involved in the research project, the authors of this article were able to devise a series of recommendations for schools seeking to focus on reading for pleasure in the post-primary English classroom.
In this article, Elizabeth Birr Moje, Melanie Overby, Nicole Tysvaer, and Karen Morris challenge some of the prevailing myths about adolescents and their choices related to reading. The reading practices of youth from one urban community are examined using mixed methods in an effort to define what, how often, and why adolescents choose to read. By focusing on what features of texts youth find motivating, the authors find that reading and writing frequently occur in a range of literacy contexts outside school. However, only reading novels on a regular basis outside of school is shown to have a positive relationship to academic achievement as measured by school grades. This article describes how adolescents read texts that are embedded in social networks, allowing them to build social capital. Conclusions are framed in terms of the mysteries that remain - namely, how to build on what motivates adolescents' literacy practices in order to both promote the building of their social selves and improve their academic outcomes.
In this article, after delineating a Deweyan framework that reclaims the autonomy of education against any instrumentalization, while not curtly writing off the vocabulary of instrumentalism, I will address the question of the “what and what for” of education in reference to schooling and, more particularly, to an emerging emphasis on the fact that new technology should result in an overhaul (if not a demise) of the “scholastic” project. By taking my cue from some ideas of Michel Serres, I will espouse a longue durée perspective and will show how the contemporary discourse on a de-schooling via technology is actually the radicalization of the modern gesture of Descartes. At the same time, though, I aim at deconstructing this conceptual device and at showing how a thinking-through-penmanship is operative there so that we can state that the cogito is predicated upon the gesture of handwriting and, therefore, requires schooling as its pre-condition. In this sense, while bringing to a close the most obsolete forms of modern schooling can represent a horizon for educational theory and practice, it would be calamitous to let the “scholastic” project itself come to a conclusion.
I focus on J.M. Coetzee's contribution to philosophy of education by examining his most recent novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). These novels appear to narrate the formative education of the child, Davíd, together comprising a contemporary bildungsroman. Coetzee's transformation of the genre's characteristic features, however, invites a reading of these novels as an anti‐bildungsroman. This article thus argues that these two novels constitute a revaluation and reclamation of the genre. While they purport to be about childhood—and tell a ‘coming of age’ story— more accurately they are about the stifling effect a certain conception of adulthood has on our erotic nature. I provide a detailed summary of Coetzee's Jesus novels against a background description of the bildungsroman genre in order to demonstrate that these novels conceptualise schooling in terms that subvert the genre that Coetzee employs with deeply ironic intent. The schools in Coetzee's novels are necessary, but not for the numeracy and literacy skills, nor the social advancement and cultural capital that they provide. Rather, they are necessary because they are home to a full range of artistic, intellectual and athletic truth‐seeking activities. The practice of these activities disciplines the soul by inspiring budding poets, mathematicians and athletes to aspire to a perfection that they may glimpse but never reach. Ultimately, I suggest that in the world of the novels—as well as in our own—education is a means to value the intuited promise of transcendent intrinsic value in the midst of the increasingly successful administration of rationally instrumental control and coordination.
In many parts of the world, public schooling is challenged by alternative arrangements thought to improve educational performance. Competition, choice, prescribed curricula, standardized testing, and privatization have become common tactics to fix the shortcomings of ineffective education systems. This chapter suggests that one product of globalization in education is a belief system that guides education policy-making throughout the world called the Global Educational Reform Movement. This chapter explores the origin of this movement and then describes its most common features and how this global movement impacts teaching and learning in schools. This chapter suggests that the impacts of this movement on overall quality of education systems have been negative and argues that international student assessments prove that, instead, alternative education policies succeed in improving quality and equity of education systems. These include enhancing equity in schooling, building teacher professionalism, encouraging collaborative practices, promoting trust-based responsibility, and strengthening public education systems.
It’s a critical cliché that Cervantes’ Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes’ masterpiece as an ‘exemplary novel’, in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt’s discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists’ examinations of Cervantes’s fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.
This essay approaches the topic of the political impact of the novel from an unconventional angle. It argues that this impact, recently discussed by philosophers like Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, should be considered the result of a special feature of this genre, namely that the novel is read solitarily and in silence. Reading a novel unplugs the reader from ordinary life and transports him to a world of the self, an individual world. From this position, which will be compared with the position of the subject in transcendental philosophy, the reader is able to see the world around him in a new, individualist and subjective perspective. This perspective may be regarded as at least one of the conditions of modern democratic citizenship.
This book provides both students and scholars with a critical and historical introduction to the graphic novel. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey explore this exciting form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyse graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago. Several key questions are addressed: what is the graphic novel? How do we read graphic novels as narrative forms? Why is page design and publishing format so significant? What theories are developing to explain the genre? How is this form blurring the categories of high and popular literature? Why are graphic novelists nostalgic for the old comics? The authors address these and many other questions raised by the genre. Through their analysis of the works of many well-known graphic novelists-including Bechdel, Clowes, Spiegelman and Ware-Baetens and Frey offer significant insights for future teaching and research on the graphic novel.
Taking a close look at the forces that affect English education in schoolsat the ways literature, cognitive science, the privileging of the STEM disciplines, and current educational policies are connectedthis timely book counters with a strong argument for the importance of continuing to teach literature in middle and secondary classrooms. The case is made through critical examination of the ongoing "culture wars" between the humanities and the sciences, recent research in cognitive literary studies demonstrating the power of narrative reading, and an analysis of educational trends that have marginalized literature teaching in the U.S., including standards-based and scripted curricula. The book is distinctive in presenting both a synthesis of arguments for literary study in the middle and high school and sample lesson plans from practicing teachers exemplifying how literature can positively influence adolescents intellectual, emotional, and social selves.
Inspired by Hannah Arendt, this contribution offers an exercise of thought as an attempt to distil anew the original spirit of what education means. It tries to articulate the event or happening that the word names, the experiences in which this happening manifests itself and the (material) forms that constitute it or make it find/take (its) place. Starting from the meaning of scholè as ‘free time’ or ‘undestined and unfinished time’ it further explores scholè as the time of attention which is the time of the regard for the world, of being present to it (or being in its presence), attending it, a time of delivery to the experience of the world, of exposure and effacing social subjectivities and orientations, a time filled with encounters. Education, then, relates to forms of profanation, suspension and attention and can be articulated as the art (the doing) and technology that makes scholè happen.
The precipitous decline in book reading in the past 50 years has prompted a question previously considered inconceivable: who still reads books? While this question has to some degree been answered in prior research, this investigation focuses primarily on whether certain bookgenres have been abandoned more rapidly than others as opposed to the characteristics of the public which abandoned books or continued to read books. Dutch time-budget data allow us to depict the extent of “de-reading” over the 1975–2000 period. Since 1990, respondents have been asked about the genres of books they read; this has made possible an investigation of the relation between “de-reading” and type of books read over the 1990–2000 period. From the work of cultural critics (Postman and others), the hypothesis has been derived that more demanding books, i.e. literature, were likely to suffer most from the dominance of television entertainment formulas. Based on a threefold distinction between (1) literature and non-fiction, (2) adolescent books, comics and thrillers, and (3) romantic novels, however, this hypothesis was found to be lacking empirical support. In contrast, the decline in reading, occurring among the three reading publics, was most notable among readers of romantic novels.
This volume complements two highly successful previously published volumes of Richard Rorty's philosophical papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, and Essays on Heidegger and Others. The essays in the volume engage with the work of many of today's most innovative thinkers including Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and Charles Taylor. The collection also touches on problems in contemporary feminism raised by Annette Baier, Marilyn Frye, and Catherine MacKinnon, and considers issues connected with human rights and cultural differences. Anyone with a serious interest in contemporary philosophy and what it can do for us in the modern world will enjoy this invaluable collection.
"I believe," wrote Franz Kafka, "that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?" Almost all of us who read books for a living and/or pleasure have undoubtedly experienced that most delightfully troubling of phenomena: a novel that forces us to think differently about the world and the way that we live. In recent years, literature's capacity to generate in its readers "a rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by" —what Stanley Fish calls its "dialectical" potential—has drawn the attention of a number of liberal-democratic theorists, most notably Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty. By "liberal-democratic" is meant here, of course, that system of government with popular rule, regular elections, a commitment to individual rights and the rule of law; one that draws on a tradition of political thought that includes the work of John Locke, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. Although their exact formulations of the claim differ in important ways, Nussbaum and Rorty are united in the belief that reading can enhance the practice of liberal-democracy by expanding the moral imaginations of a citizenry. Such an expansion will, they believe, promote the values of tolerance, respect for other viewpoints, and a recognition of the contingency of one's own perspective, in short, the values of civil society. Whilst there is undoubtedly something intuitively appealing about their claim, there is much that is philosophically and politically problematic about their respective formulations of it. Both seem to rest for example upon an implausible theory of the impact of literature upon its readers, and an illiberal tendency to treat reader-citizens as means and not as ends. Attempting to capture what is of value whilst jettisoning what is problematic, I will briefly set out their claims; identify the difficulties within them; and offer an account of how their project might be operationalized in a way that is both more philosophically plausible and more politically consistent with liberalism. My aim will not be to offer another detailed account of the connection between literature and democracy—not least because I believe that the current accounts are overly deterministic—but rather to suggest some ways in which we might nevertheless build upon the current work to capture the potential benefits of reading for liberal-democratic societies.
Although Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty hold quite different views about the proper role of literature in philosophy—Nussbaum believes that literature is merely a valuable addition to philosophical Reason traditionally conceived, whereas for the postfoundational Rorty, the literariness goes all the way down—both suggest that reading will promote two values that they regard as essential to liberal-democratic practice. Following Rorty we might label these values contingency and solidarity. Contingency arises from the recognition that even one's most deeply held beliefs are always only a perspective. It is connected to civility in that it serves, Nussbaum and Rorty believe, to undermine the vehemence of individual claims. Although this claim about the partiality of individual perspectives sounds dangerously postmodern for thinker such as Nussbaum—Rorty, who calls his political philosophy "postmodernist bourgeois liberalism," has no such qualms—there are limits to this insight in her thought. Nussbaum is simply concerned to show that an excessive and over-confident reliance on philosophical Reason is likely to generate an incomplete understanding of a given situation. For this reason, she suggests, "storytelling and literary imagining are not opposed to . . . but can provide essential ingredients in a rational argument." She argues, for example, that Hard Times by Charles Dickens will alert its readers—in particular "the person brought up solely on economic texts" who "has not been encouraged to think of workers (or indeed anybody else) as fully human beings, with stories of their own to tell" (PJ, p. 33) —to the condition of the working classes. Similarly, she suggests, Richard Wright's Native Son and E. M. Forster's Maurice will alert their—presumably straight, white and middle-class—readers to the plight of African-Americans and homosexuals. In each instance, Nussbaum believes, literature will...
Educating the gaze is easily understood as becoming conscious about what is ‘really’ happening in the world and becoming aware of the way our gaze is itself bound to a perspective and particular position. However, the paper explores a different idea. It understands educating the gaze not in the sense of ‘educare’ (teaching) but of ‘e-ducere’ as leading out, reaching out. E-ducating the gaze is not about getting at a liberated or critical view, but about liberating or displacing our view. It is not about becoming conscious or aware, but about becoming attentive, about paying attention. E-ducating the gaze, then, is not depending on method, but relying on discipline; it does not require a rich methodology, but asks for a poor pedagogy, i.e. for practices which allow to expose ourselves. One example of such practice is that of walking. Consequently e-ducating the gaze could be about an invitation to go walking. This idea is explored b way of a comment on two quotations, one by Walter Benjamin and one by Michel Foucault.
This article takes up a text that Rancière published shortly after The Ignorant School Master appeared in French, ‘École, production, égalité’[School, Production, Equality] (1988), in which he sketched the school as being preeminently the place of equality. In this vein, and opposed to the story of the school as the place where inequality is reproduced and therefore in need of reform, the article wants to recount the story of the school as the invention of a site of equality and as primordially a public space. Inspired by Rancière, we indicate first how the actual (international and national) policy story about the school and the organizational technologies that accompany it install and legitimate profound inequalities, which consequently can no longer be questioned (and become ‘invisible’). Second, the article recasts and rethinks different manifestations of equality and of ‘public-ness’ in school education and, finally, indicates various ways in which these manifestations are neutralized or immunized in actual discourses and educational technologies.
- Baetens
Don Quixote, Descartes and the Tradition of the Self-Conscious Novel
- Jensen
- Rorty