Greene-asserted and Greene-realized

My scanning thus far has actually only accounted for maybe a dozen, at most, instances of lived life/lives in Maxine Greene's writings. One of my earliest hunches in this inquiry was that the term only begins to become part of the Greene vernacular in her later writings. So far, this hunch is playing itself out.

I'm conceiving a series of turning points that each book seems to represent. My focus on Teacher as Stranger (1973), Landscapes of Learning (1978), The Dialectic of Freedom (1988), Releasing the Imagination (1995), and Variations on a Blue Guitar (2001) for this inquiry was borne out of an early notion that these books represent Greene's own voice. Her earlier works, Existential Encounters for Teachers (1965) and The Public School and the Private Vision (1968), struck me as primarily commentaries on other thinkers and writers. While Greene continues to cite and reference other writers and artists in the canon that starts in 1973, her own voice is pronounced in these later works. Perhaps one could perceive of this voice as a recitative; in effect, forwarding the ideas of these other writers and thinkers in a solo voice.
But the voice becomes stronger with subsequent works. Teacher as Stranger and Landscapes of Learning may indeed be a recitative of the works of Camus, Dewey, Kant, Kierkegaard, Melville, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others. But in her final section of Landscapes titled "Predicaments of Women," I sense a turning point in this coda to the book. Her chapter "Lived Worlds" is focused on the need for women to assert their own interpreted reality in a world that is largely reliant on a male perspective of reality.

My concern is for the release of individual capacities now suppressed, for the development of free and autonomous personalities. It seems to me that these require an intensified critical awareness of our relation to ourselves and to our culture, a clarified sense of our own realities (1978, p. 213).

It is a call to self-hood. As I conjectured in my 7/9 post, this "clarified sense of our own realities" is consciousness. This is a call to consciousness. The lived aspect of the lived world is consciousness. This final section of Landscapes represents, to me, a thrusting outward of Greene's push for social justice. It is Greene-assertive. It is the opening thrust of her voice.

Later, in Dialectic, the recitative is pianissimo. Greene comes back to the predicaments of women, calling  upon the unique, social, intertwined and situated realities of women as a just and valid point of view and source of knowledge:

A free act, after all, is a particularized one. It is undertaken from the standpoint of a particular, situated person trying to bring into existence something contingent on his/her hopes, expectations, and capacities. The world in which the person creates and works through a future project cannot but be a social world; and the nature of the project cannot but be affected by shared meanings and interpretations of existing social realities. John Dewey wrote, for example, that "while singular beings in their singularity think, want, and decide, what they think and strive for, the content of their beliefs and intentions is a subject matter provided by association” (1927/1954, p. 25).  If that association is conceived of as one among autonomous, rational beings who are convinced that reliable knowledge (being largely formal and rule-governed) does not vary among them, the very notion of singularity summons up a troubling relativism that makes suspect situated knowledge claims. This may partly explain, not only the lack of respect for women's thought processes on the part of men, but the efforts of certain women to suppress their own lived experiences in order to claim an equality in the domain of formal reason identified with the public sphere.

Dialectic represents a turning point, for me, of Greene-realized. My interpretation is finding the use of the qualifier lived in Greene's writing to be in direct correlation to an assertion of a distinct, political voice. In Markie Hancock's documentary, Exclusions and Awakenings (2001), Greene talks about the perils of of a Jewish woman finding a teaching job in higher education. She was told she was "too literary" which for her was code for "female." In Dialectic she writes about the struggle she experienced in how she pursued understanding:

From the beginning of my career, trying with some difficulty to be accepted as a philosopher of education, I found myself moving back and forth between imaginative literature and philosophy. Troubled by the kinds of positivism that identified existential questions (about birth and death and commitment and anxiety and freedom) with "pseudo-questions," with a domain of meaninglessness, I kept on stubbornly seeking out those questions in fictive and poetic worlds, in personal narratives. Troubled by impersonality, by abstract vantage points, I wanted people to name themselves and tell their stories when they made their statements. I came to believe (or I was taught) that "reality" referred, after all, to interpreted experience (1988, pp. xi-xii). 

 There might be a linkage between this practice of interpreted experience and the particularization/situatedness of women. It might be that the qualifier of lived is particular to the female experience. I'm not ready to affirm this as Dewey's influence in his accounting for experience is reflected in Greene's reading and writing. Yet experience, for Greene, takes into account the gaps/lacks/deficiencies that can only be recognized through reflection. The reflected life isn't always optimistic, and neither is Greene (Hancock, 2001). Wendy Kohli and others see this as a distinction between Greene and Dewey (Hancock, 2001). Greene's pessimism is situated to her own lived life as a woman in a man's world.