I'll make a comment on the Comments

A response to the truly "Anonymous":

I think it's quite a keen observation, about students feeding on ignorance -- like vultures you say -- an image that does imply that their quarry (would you even call it that since vultures don't hunt) is already dead and, well, rotting. The image is "productive" (a word I'll come back to later) in that it proposes that ignorance alone is not that which students will pounce upon and have for lunch ... It's ignorance that possesses stale, rotting air about it. It is an ignorance that refuses to budge from its position of not knowing, that refuses to move from the assumption of its "rightness", in spite of its incomplete knowledge, that students sense in teachers and love to tear apart. Then again, like vultures, I don't think many students actively engage most teachers about their own ignorance. Instead, they take a nibble here and a bite there whenever they can, rather opportunistically. In fact, an out and out showdown in the open, that would actually be healthy, I think for classrooms where the students are less than satisfied with the quality of the teaching / teacher.

Second, "hunk!?!?!" As Harris would point out, "hunk" is significant, not because of what it means denotatively but because of its contextual significance. Here, one finds the opposition between a "paragidmatic" versus a "syntagmatic" view of language. After more than one year of playing out the "hunk" ritual while morning announcements take place ... hey "hunk" comes to represent a lot more.

Third, "ewww how proletarian." "Proletarian" followed by "ewww", what does one make of that? A certain disgust? A mocking, screwed up face? The danger of the following comments is that they may romanticise poverty and the working class but I firmly believe that to use the "proletariat" as a marker of derogation, designating the working class as a demonised and impoverished "Other", is an indication of the commodity culture that has infected our societies. To think of the "proletariat" as the lower classes, is indicative of a class consciousness that is a product of affluence. Not a revolutionary class consciousness as Marx would have, but a lackadaisical assumption that the working class and their concerns can be readily dismissed. "Ewww how bourgeois" would be my response. Now if the comment had said "Ewww how 'village people' " ...

Last - to tie it all up (through an amazing stretching of ideas / boundaries). The students where I'm teaching at, BMCC, ARE the proletariat. They don't have nice cushy backgrounds. They come to school for an hour in the morning, work a normal work day, then come back for another lesson at night. I don't know how much "passion" one can have for ideas / abstractions given that kind of challenge. It's a real challenge for me, coming from a background of immense academic privilege, to locate myself in that kind of classroom, not in a condescending manner, but in a manner where I can help these students achieve their goals (which is a college degree so that they can get a better job ...) To push the argument further, the question of whether Lit is at all relevant to the concerns of the "proletariat", is fundemental, in helping these students see that the knowledge they acquire in the classroom is worth their commute, is worth the baby-sitter that they had to employ, is worth the overtime pay they they're missing out on. Lit Crit has, for too long (in the Singapore school system at least), been confined to the narrow formalist modes of the New Critics who believed in texts as "Artistic works, complete, whole objects" to be appreciated, mixed in a little with some reader response theory -- "what does this wonderful work of art say to your emotions". But very little has focussed on an ideological- productive view of the literary ie, how literary works, in their production, consumption and intepretation, demonstrate the class biases of a society or indicate ways that might abolish inequalities. Does thinking about "Hamlet" force one to think about the patriarchial systems that dominate modern society are a product of inbreeding and incest (culturally speaking)? A critical reading framework that takes into account Marxist theory and cultural materialism is needed to unmask some of the hegemonic ideological illusions that bourgeois readings have promulgated.

Is it all worth it, these intellectual acrobatics? Or as the pencilled margin notes in this book that I just borrowed "The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World" put it, is it all "meaningless mumbo jumbo" ...?

To Harris and Andrew (who also posted comments) -- don't feel left out ok?