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From inquiry and historical research in the literature classroom:

Thanks, Dave, for noticing my review of Taleb’s The Black Swan, and thanks for using it as a stepping-off-point to further exploration/ meditation about what-it-is-and-how-it-is that we might teach. Linking together your & Paul’s agreement about the need to keep in play the “unending loop between observations and interpretations,” with the lament of Professor X, who teaches so ineffectively, so destructively, @ a “college of last resort” nudges me to “loop” back again to Taleb, who warns us so strongly to beware the dangers of the storytelling impulse.

Taleb pushes his readers very hard to re-think the tendency of our storytelling brains to over-value presumptions about cause and effect, to misjudge our capacity to predict the future based on the past. The keynote of his book is what he calls “the narrative fallacy”: how, in this so-unpredictable world, we fool ourselves w/ stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns.

I think I’m tasting that Platonicity, when I hear you describe the “unseen yet undeniable historical pressure upon our understanding” that can so easily kill off our students’ engagement, or say that “teaching literary history…depends on all sorts of specialist understandings,” or acknowledge that “graduate education, faculty hires, curricula” are all explicitly organized on “the basis of a foundational content.” In Taleb’s terms, I’d hazard the claim that that historical pressure, those specialist understandings, and those organizational structures are all “narrative fallacies,” our attempt to fix-and-make “foundational” what is emergent, contingent and random.

Taleb’s book is also full of advice about how to do something different–not to contain, but rather to take advantage of and benefit from the unpredictable nature of the world: “focus makes you a sucker; it translates into prediction problems”; learn to “avoid ‘tunneling’” (”the neglect of sources of uncertainty outside the plan itself”); “train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical”; and remember that “we are not natural skeptics,” that “not believing” requires an “expenditure of mental effort.”

I see that you’ve got a book out on skepticism gone awry, that The Making of Modern Cynicism traces the ascetic’s evolution into misanthropy. That also seems a process analogous to the disciplining of the academy, from useful focusing into crabby gatekeeping. I’d say that the bad teaching of Professor X is overdetermined by the gatekeeping habits of the academy overall; his insistence that cops and health care workers learn to “Write about Literature” (and his insistence on failing them when they can’t fit the conventional conventions to do so) seems only a particularly egregious example of what we all do when we try to discipline our students into habits of our disciplines.

You asked “how far this predisciplinary notion of ‘observation’ really gets us when we think about teaching literary history, which depends on all sorts of specialist understandings of terms like genre.” I tried out one answer to that question just this past semester, in a new course on “Emerging Genres” that tried to hook the kids on thinking generically by focusing a portion of the course on the emergence of the new genre of blogs, with which they had had far more experience than I; then I interwove that with contemporary emergence theory, contemporary genre theory, and some hefty examples of the nineteenth-century American novel. I tried to begin and end, in other words, with the students’ own observations about and experiences of the world, inbetween leading them into and out others with which they were less familiar….to “discipline” their pre-disciplinary encounters with the world of genre, and also help ‘em see how they are helping to revise it as they write (rather than trying to make ‘em fit into the mold.). For one particularly nice comment on the process, see The Practice of Blogging: A Personal and Academic Perspective.

Back to you….