Imaginative literature

One of the themes of Maxine Greene's teaching involves the primacy of questions. She states often that she prefers questions over answers and this is why she uses imaginative literature in her teaching. Literature gives us the questions; for the answers we can go to psychology.

A dissertation committee member chafed at the term "imaginative" literature. He rightly asserted that the imaginative quality of literature is in the encounter. It is the reader who is the trigger for the imaginative. Nevetheless, I continue to use the term because Greene and others do. It seems to be accepted in the field of "Greene studies."

Perhaps the term "imaginative literature" is a description of that encounter between reader and text whereas "literature" is merely the text?

Nevertheless, one of the perks of using imaginative literature in teaching is in the glory of that encounter with fiction, with poetic narrative. I am using Toni Morrison's Sula for a philosophy and ethics course I'm teaching. As compelling as Dewey and Greene may be in their writing, the experience of opening the first page of Sula and engage in the description of a place known as the Bottom is exhilirating:

The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees whter children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene's Palace of Cosemetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothers will pry loose the slats of Reba's Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn't remember the ingredients without it.

This rich description is such a blessed break from the typical academic reading that students and their professors must engage in. This writing compels the reader to enter the world of the Bottom, to turn the page, to learn more. This is what my dissertation writing needs to achieve.

One of the proposed rationales for my dissertation concerns my own teaching practice. The hope is that through my inquiry into Greene's writings that my approach to teaching will transform. The aesthetics of both the inquiry and of teaching will move into a new realm that might create an aesthetic of learning--for both student and teacher.

Reconciliation and disembodiment

I'm trying to reconcile some of what I teach with some of what I have written.

The other day I showed my students a favorite TED talk. It is with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert who speaks with eloquence, ease, humor, and self-deprecation about our post-Renaissance ideas regarding genius. Remarking on the recent--as in post-Renaissance--history of artists who are considered geniuses and their tendency to die at their own hands (or bottles), Gilbert advocates for thinking of genius, and creativity, as something that is sourced outside of our beings. It is the ancient Greek and ancient Roman framework of having genius, a person who is visited upon with genius, as opposed to being a genius. She sees this framework as addressing the need to provide distance between the work and the artist in the interest of preservation.

Gilbert uses a wonderful example of this visiting genius in her description of an

Encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.

It is a marvelous image of inspiration as a "thunderous train of air" barreling down the landscape.

My students and I have been looking at the definitions of creativity and transformation over the last few weeks. Gilbert's talk about the source of creativity and the need to disembody oneself from it follows a similar framework used in the communication and self-help fields (Eckhardt Tolle and the other PBS-pledge-drive ilk). It is a framework that differentiates between being and having. For instance, effective communication can happen when the parties move the sense of being angry to a sense of having anger.

I understand this perceived need for preservation and the drive to create distance between the inspiration and the self. I did it myself when I left acting. But at that moment of inspiration, the genius is embodied. Stone is possessed by it when she races to a paper and pencil. It is the creative act as aesthetic experience. While artists may be made vulnerable in their inability to distance their selves from their work, I think that for others another vulnerability may take hold in the form of Dewey's anaesthetic. In the form of the unlived life.

Of course, the sense of being a genius as opposed to a sense of having genius is a linguistic trick as well. We are how we express our ideas in language. We can preserve our creative livelihood through language while denying ourselves the unlived life.