Friday
October 17, 2008
By Jeff Berger-White
For the last two years, I have taught Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. It is a complex and sophisticated drama, strange, harrowing, funny, and political. It is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” and it chronicles several gay men during the first horrifying wave of the AIDS crisis in the mid 80s. Although I had some anxiety about teaching it, the one hundred students who studied the play with me made it a wonderful experience. What made it a difficult experience was that last year, I was attacked by a group from outside the school district called the North Shore Student Advocacy Group, who accused me of teaching to the “activist homosexual agenda.” Although the school Board, administration, student body, and parents at Deerfield High School supported my efforts, the attacks via e-mail, post, and in the news media were nerve-wracking and a distraction.
There’s a seemingly simple moment near the beginning of The Tempest, when Miranda asks her father whether it was a gift or a burden that has brought them to this island: “What foul play had we, that we came from thence? /Or blessed was’t we did?” Prospero answers, “Both, both, my girl,” and in that incredibly compressed line, Shakespeare teaches us how to read him, and literature. For literature lives in paradox, and often aims to show how both sides of a character or an issue can be true. “It was like so, but wasn’t,” begins Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, echoing the tag-line of Persian fables. One of my primary aims as a teacher is to help move students away from simple and easy answers, away from either-or thinking, and toward an approach that is both-and. This is hard, but striving toward that kind of complexity can make us more flexible and agile thinkers—which is not at all the same thing as being easily plied or soft. James Wood says that “[l]iterature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on.” Wood writes here about the art of careful observation, of close reading. As a corollary, I’d add that the study of nuanced, paradoxical characters—and texts—helps us see better our complexity, and that in life.
I’ve never believed that literature should be a pawn, a tool to help advance some social or political agenda. That seems to me wrongheaded. Setting up curriculum this way traps students into thinking simply and reductively—or defensively. Or worse, they shut down completely because they see the way the deck has been stacked, and who wants to wager on a hand when the dealer always hits twenty-one? Designing curriculum with a right set of answers to the problems a text raises does little to engender deep contemplation or genuine change. Our first obligation should be to find works of literature we believe will challenge our students intellectually. It’s foolish to put first in an English classroom any social agenda. When we make a work about a single thing—race, gender, sexuality, politics—it hurts our students and devalues the literature. When we simplify something complex and sophisticated into a message that could be placed on a pamphlet or a placard or even in an op-ed column, we trap our students into believing there are a very limited set of responses. We must ground the discussion in the building blocks of literature—language, style, structure, voice, character, and theme. Naturally, and necessarily I think, our conversations should spill over into the issues a work raises for us—individually and collectively—and how our sense of those issues helps us see meaning, relevance, and value in that particular work. But we cannot put those concerns first, nor can we divorce them from the work itself. In the end, I want my courses to be transformative for my students (and for myself, too), but how students grow intellectually, emotionally, or morally can’t be prescriptive. A deep and thorough understanding of literature almost necessarily evokes empathy, and empathy is the beginning of adulthood, and a lot more, or so I would like to believe. I want my courses to be transformative for my students (and for myself, too), but how students grow intellectually, emotionally, or morally can’t be prescriptive.
I would not have taught Angels if I didn’t think it was a transcendent work of art. The play about something specific, a group of young gay men battling AIDS, but it also speaks the universal language of the heart. This seems to me true of all great works: they are simultaneously grounded in something highly particular, and yet they become something that transcends time and place. My students came to talk about the play as a tale of struggle, illness, love, and forgiveness, and our discussions were as rich and as memorable as any I can remember. It was a challenge for me to stay calm in the face of dozens and dozens of nasty e-mails, but seeing the way my students handled the material with maturity and grace made it wholly worthwhile.
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Good post.
Jeff,
I enjoyed reading your blog. Thank you for taking the time to write about what you experienced while teaching the novel “Angels in America.” We hope your honest reflection will get educators to respond and share some of their stories about teaching.
Gloria
The Chicago Tribune has an interesting story today about teaching more contemporary literature in place of classics like the “Scarlet Letter”. It would seem to me that Jeff has attempted to do just that in the case of “Angels in America”.
You can check out the TRIB story at:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/content/education/chi-uncool-booksoct19,0,5993017.story
