My A.R.S.E (IV)

Liberal Art

(not to be collapsed, conflated, or confused with
the liberal arts & their vocational instrumental,
practical and purposeful utilitarian uses/abuses)

Every student I've ever had in class has already
taken years of “English” courses with “English”
teachers: read and talked about literature and
written many papers, research and close readings
and such as—comparing & contrasting & interpreting
& assessing mind-work often characterized as
Critical Thinking if not appreciative.

Many take my classes as requirement to satisfy
an “area” they have already had years of experience
with—though maybe not the COLLEGE version which
amounts to 2-3 sessions a week where before they
met daily, weekly, yearly.

So they are not un-exposed to Literature nor the ways
of Literature teachers. Please, sir: may we meet
outside today? A possibility possibly more likely in
college literature classes than in high school.

The study of literature like the study of chemistry,
or the study of sociology, or the study of history,
psychology, philosophy, religion—these are called
the liberal arts, as (traditionally) seemingly opposed to,
like, community college & voc tech: applied & instrumental
programs which empower one to go out and get a job..

I’m not saying anything anyone doesn’t already know.

Toward an Understanding & Practice of Liberal Art
as I construe it always for the sake of argument, begging
for help, & improvement of my terms and images.



To build an Ice Cream Parlor in Hell
while doing no injustice
to HOT or to COLD.

What is alternative, undoubtedly heretical & seeming
diabolical from “inside the box” ... (brick house, status quo,
inert sustainable practices: however you characterize the
ongoing GIVEN, traditions, habits and habitats of culture,
convention & common sense…)

...about my pedagogy-for-the-oppressed is the effort to split
the atom so to speak: to generate a schism between attention
efficiency normally paid exclusively to:

X) TEXT (traditionally the ostensible topic, content,
subject-matter of any course)

cutting like a knife to bifurcate & include

Z) CONTEXT : the group of readers responding to
text and to each other—a mix of text & contextual
harassment naturally going on, although “normally”
only the TEXT is fore-grounded, as if it alone were
the subject-object matter of the course.

as well as (without confusion):
on another “level of logical type”

Y) RATIO: the nature of relationship between text and
context, sustaining the separation (schism) as
prerequisite for considering the relativities & relations.

These 3: text/context & how-the-2-just-get-along-or-do-not
I was about to say provides an algebraic basis and frame work
for a non-high-school differentiated Collegial Study of Language
and Literary art, but really, more fundamental: it’s this

Y
XZ

algorithmic triadic dynamic that represents the action and
practice of liberal art—sometimes known as dialectic—where
a thesis (any thesis) held in relationship with its antithesis,
generates an outcome (if that inimical relationship is sustained)
that reveals itself in
Y
synthesis: a transformation of the seeming conflict of X & Z
so as to recognize the complementary relationship that
preserves (transforms, without annihilating) the “fight-club”
going on (say: like hot and like cold) in what Blake called a
Marriage of Heaven and Hell: liberal art!

Imagine.

Imagine (if you can) a group of readers inside an almost
windowless room, often at the grim hour of 8 a.m. inside
a curricular structure that competes for time management,
emphasizes rigor, accountability, accuracy, finished product,
covering-ground, get-R-done take the credit and run, except
of course where a student might be engaged, caught-up,
devoted & dedicated in pursuit of knowledge & practice of
one of the liberal arts so that all the talk of rigor & demand
is foreign, moot—inappropriate to any willing disciple,
practitioner and eager player.

For the rest: imagine the benefit of reading and talking about
poetry at 8 am, about fiction--promulgating lively discussion
about the philosophy of composition, the critique of SCIENCE
in Hawthorne's "Birthmark," the notion of grace in Flannery
O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

"Bill, what do you think?"
"Carol, what do you think of what Bill thinks?"

Take notes. You can't tell what'll be on quizzes, exams.
Usually something like "identify the following quotation and
state its significance to the WHOLE from which it is sampled."

Against this over-reduced representation of traditional
TEXT-focused English-Classes (author-minding, too—
shakespear-ization of major writers as well as emerging:
the worship of bones & relics alive and dead mind on a page),
l would juxtapose a dynamic structure for play called
(awkwardly until someone improves my terms):

X) CONTEXT-to-Textual harassment & relationship
on the one hand and on the other hand
Z) MEDIA-to-Message massage & manipulation

Y) RATIOS & relationship: relativities & relays between
any X & Z.

which shifts normal attention efficiency from texts to the
readers reading, from just talking, to talking about the
talking (the media)—an infinite resource and regress.

Look, I say: we've got these texts.
We've got each other: readers reading these texts.
We've got a mostly user-abuser friendly common language
1) to talk about these texts and
2) to talk about each other (context) and
3) to talk about how we're talking about the texts
and Us-the-Context.

Can we juggle all 3?


Text/Context/Media.

Any one might ask how-it-is something like this jocular
juggling, joking structure and practice (assuming it
can be put in play) manifests (embodies) the
LIBERAL ART & how it is different from all
them other courses: “liberal arts”
offerings.

We could argue. See what WE mean by LIBERAL ART,
as opposed to (not to be collapsed, conflated & confused with)
“the liberal arts.”

That could make good ongoing & sustainable conversation—
as productive as the one going on now among the Fine Arts &
Humanities division considering the collective attitude toward
our ARSE (Annual Review and Self Examination), of which
this document is a variation..

(to be continued) xxxooo, Sam