Our semesters of death: resisting authority and the politics of disruption.

Sometimes the left hand really doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Or in our case, one left didn't know what the other leftist was doing. In the semesters following the attacks of September 11, 2001, in separate disciplines (Media Studies and English), two teachers at the same institution, Sacred Heart University, an independent Catholic college about a 75 minute drive from New York City, unbeknownst to each other were engaging in similar pedagogical adventures in response to the attacks of 9/11, and the two experienced similar student resistance to their plans to examine intellectually both these watershed events and our country's reaction to them.

This was particularly dicey given Sacred Heart's close proximity to New York City. Many of our students come from the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) and have family and friends who work in lower Manhattan. Most are traditional-aged students from working-class origins (some have family members who are uniformed service workers; some have family members who are Vietnam vets); many are the first in their families to go to college. A number have their tuitions paid by the military. Most have their own cars, cell phones, and computers and are pragmatic about their education: they are in college to further their careerist paths. For the most part, our students lack interest in academics and politics, and whole-heartedly buy into the plain-speaking-brawn-over-brains myths of Hollywood movies.

Both teachers had designed writing-intensive courses (with maximum capacities of fifteen students) that were meant to challenge undergraduates both intellectually and at a deeper, more personal, level. As a result, both teachers tested their own preconceptions of pedagogy as a moral practice and the classroom as an ideological forum. Each of them, separate from the other, sought to examine the current international situation and to create in her students a feeling of social agency. At the same time, each course posed its teachers with different challenges, and these, in turn, resulted in different outcomes.

The Media Studies professor, in a required capstone reading seminar, examined the media and cultural theories underlying representations of both the Holocaust and the recent attacks on the United States. Not that the events were comparable in scale or kind, or that the Holocaust is a template for thinking about other tragic events, but since scholars have already analyzed how the meaning of the Holocaust has developed over time, she felt that students might be able to extract methods to apply to their own analyses of how the meaning of 9/11 was developing. However, students found it difficult to make the intellectual leap the professor was expecting.

In the advanced composition classroom, the English professor had designed a semester of readings and assignments that required students to face head-on and not hide from the assumptions and realities of the current political landscape. The beauty of the composition course is that a variety of texts and topics can be explored. In this class, the English professor's focus was on 9/11 and its aftermath. Composition pedagogy seeks to produce better, more skillful writers. In most composition classrooms, however, students resolutely resist writing. And this class was no different. Yet despite initial resistance to the aim and focus, students rose to the standards of the professor and produced the kind of writing required of advanced students. Each teacher saw her class as an environment that champions, encourages, and respects dissent, talking back to authority, and rigorous debate. But the students saw it differently. To them, both classes were mired in death.

ENGLISH COMPOSITION by Sandra Young

In the fall of 2002, I prepared an advanced composition course, required of English and Media Studies majors, to be offered in the spring of 2003. Advanced composition instruction moves beyond the introductory writing courses as it teaches students to refine rhetorical strategies, understand audience, and use appropriate voice for a particular genre. My plan was to focus on discussing alternative views and opinions of the 9/11 attacks using the South Atlantic Quarterly's special theme issue, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11. (1) This scholarly response to the attacks included essays by priests, an archbishop, a poet; and scholars of sociology, ethics, anthropology, comparative literature, media studies, theater, Judaism, and Islam. This collection of texts touched on issues enmeshed in the aftermath of the attacks: issues that were religious, historical, political, sociological, and geographical. This collection provided an opportunity for students to grapple with the 9/11 attacks in ways that weren't readily available in the popular press; it afforded them alternative ways to approach issues; it invited them to voice their opinions, to develop their own ideas, and to support these opinions and ideas with carefully considered evidence. As a teacher and scholar, I felt my work should be linked to the examination of knowledge, the language of possibility, and the prospect of social transformation, and so the semester I had planned was an ideal way to help students discover their own social, civic, and political consciences.

In that fall of 2002, avenging the 9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism seemed to expand exponentially as a I means to justify any war. In this context of fear, revenge, and war, my plan was to use Dissent from the Homeland as the primary tool to examine the events of 9/11. I wanted dissent, contention, argument. I wanted students to confront the issues involved in the wisdom and justice of going to war--issues that are both political and personal--instead of acquiescing to knee-jerk patriotism. I wanted students to get their blood up. Too often, in writing classes, argument descends predictably into for or against positions, absent any "real knowledge of the issues at hand as anything more than a pointless argument among people who do not care very much about the outcomes." (2) The events of 9/11 offered a topic that students cared about. I chose Dissent from the Homeland to disrupt, not to pacify; to challenge, not to comfort. And my students knew it. September 11 was too recent, they complained. Maybe. But I continued with my planned semester.

Then things got interesting. The Bush administration's contention that Saddam Hussein had a role in the 9/11 attacks and was a threat to Americans triggered a justification for the war on terror to include a war in Iraq. My carefully planned spring semester syllabus gradually became refocused from a concentrated discussion of Dissen from the Homeland to examining and debating the impending war in Iraq. For many students (indeed, many Americans), what began as an understood war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the "smoking out" of Osama bin Laden ceded to a war in Iraq and the confusing connection between Saddam Hussein and his role in the 9/11 attacks.

Now, instead of using Dissent from the Homeland as the course's primary text, I reconstructed the reading and writing assignments for the semester and its four major essay assignments around the rhetoric of and responses to war. The syllabus students received in January 2003 stated the basic requirements of the course: four major essays, readings from texts, frequent short response essays, and a mid- and end-term portfolio. For each of the major writing assignments, I gave students a handout detailing its specific requirements. The four major writing assignments for the course asked students to review a piece of poetry from one of America's past wars and write a literary analysis of it; to read what the American press wrote about the current war and respond to one of the articles I brought to the classroom; to examine what scholars were saying about the 9/11 attacks and "talk back" to one of the essays from Dissent from the Homeland; and to explore why America needs heroes. Each of the essay assignments required research; each was to be approximately 1000-1250 words.

I hoped the course would encourage students to reexamine the consequences of the 9/11 attacks in relation to America's other wars, but I also knew that these were matters that they preferred to ignore. I knew they would resist the political aspects of the course I had created, they would worry about their opinions offending others, and they would especially resist intellectually questioning established positions or challenging traditional values, authority, and the sacred institutions (like marriage, motherhood, and the military) or, the worst scenario, sounding unpatriotic. Indeed, most of them didn't have the experience of being in a class, other than political science, in which their opinions, their learned opinions, would become the basis of the essays they wrote. But I also knew that resistance would generate ideas, discussion, and debate.

My pedagogy always seeks to disrupt and confound students' comfort levels, but as the semester progressed, it became clear that the focus of my course was being perceived as too gloomy. The easy response would have been to dial down the rhetoric. But I soldiered on. After all, when pedagogy does not challenge and confront, isn't it guilty of the same passivity that teachers accuse students of perpetrating? I am educating citizens who live in a world fraught with unequal power relationships, even if those citizens, our students, quite often avoid and disdain an understanding of the inherent political dynamics of those relationships. I believe that my role as an educator and a citizen involves, as Henry A. Giroux recently put it, "efforts to construct a viable relationship between education and democracy on the one hand and politics and pedagogy on the other." (3)

However, I had not really gone into the semester with a well-formulated idea of the consequences of using such a potentially divisive agenda. I reasoned that since this was an advanced composition class--juniors and seniors--students who were almost adults, of voting age---they would be able to handle a challenging semester of studying and writing about difficult issues. After all, in this composition class, nothing will be taboo and no informed opinion will be censored. The rules were clear: informed opinions would be debated and discussed, and the open forum of this classroom would encourage students to work through their positions in classroom conversation and then in discussion of their emerging drafts. I also reminded students that opinions, like essays, are frequently revised.

At the beginning of the semester, many students were disinclined to join in. They held back and waited to see what would happen when others responded. My job was to find "ways to talk, to teach, to listen, and to write that do not suppress the voices of others." (4) As teachers of writing, and indeed all professors teach writing, our responsibility is to engage the larger public discourses and social events that bear on all our lives. I purposefully prefaced my opinions with the fact that they were my opinions--though informed ones--and I reminded students that their learned opinions were theirs--not mine, not the kid's sitting in the next desk, not Time's, not Bill O'Reilly's, not Molly Ivins's. I defended my opinions, and they were required to defend theirs.

Though students have a natural reluctance to question authority, especially if that authority (the teacher) holds the ultimate trump card of the grade, a teacher's responsibility is to create an environment where students feel safe to take risks. And the biggest risk is for students to challenge my opinions. Mary Louise Pratt defines the "contact zones," as "social spaces where cultures meet, dash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power." (5) This definition sounds very much like the classroom to me. The tricky part is to create an environment of trust, where students and teachers can respect differing discourses. Yet why should students believe that my class would be different from their other classes? Why should they believe me? Trust me? They probably shouldn't. Because of that trump card of the grade, I use a portfolio grading system in the composition classroom hoping that the portfolio will lessen the mandate of the grade. Each portfolio is graded at mid-and end-terms only (individual essays aren't graded). Students can revise their essays as often as they choose. Their conferences with me also offer a place for non-judgmental dialogue between us. In their mid- and end-term portfolios, students write a cover letter to me reflecting on their work, its successes and failures, their attitudes about writing, and whatever else they wish to comment on. In this particular class, students used the portfolio process to alter or codify their opinions based on additional research, debate, and discussion.

Still, with portfolio grading, one has to prove to students that one can be trusted, and one way to do this is by creating a "culture of questioning." (6) In the writing class, creating a culture of questioning started with nay fostering challenge and debate based on examining issues, providing opposing positions to the Bush administration's rhetoric of war, and encouraging dialogue about writing and how writing is informed by research. As students began reading and working on their emerging drafts, we discussed those drafts. I told them that in this writing class, their opinions will not judged, though how they write about their opinions and the research that informs their opinions will be subject to criticism. As I explained, it is my responsibility to prove to students that their opinions (when researched) are, like my own opinions, subject to scrutiny. It is my responsibility to show how through readings, discussion, and debate, the character and identity of the writer is revealed, and how each writer's ethos hinges on how well he/she argues and writes.

I did this mindful of C. H. Knoblauch's tenets that the "teacher does not set out to win converts to a personal ideology ... through the manipulation of texts as moral exhortation" and that "teacher and student alike engage in self-scrutiny as joint participants in a process of teaching and learning." (7) I therefore designed the assignments discussed here and hoped they would generate and display students' growing understanding of the various and diverse issues at the heart of the rhetoric of war instead of a willingness to swallow whole a specific viewpoint. I wanted students to critique the position of the reading assignments, and expected them to respond to each other. I tried to create a classroom environment that acknowledged and questioned all opinions. Yet, if our pedagogy seeks to disrupt, challenge, and confront students' assumptions, and talk back to authority, how do we approach the culturally sanctioned and predicated silence of some students?

To break this initial silence, and to provide students with a way into the discussions, my students' first essays were not from Dissent from the Homeland but were in response to a poem of their choice written about war. On reserve in the library was a copy of Modern War, edited by Paul Fussell, (8) that explores American war literature (fiction, poetry, diaries, and letters) from the Spanish American War through Vietnam, including literature that is clearly antiwar. I wanted students, many completely unfamiliar with war literature, to choose one of the poems from Modern War because it touched them in some abstract or concrete way, and to write a literary analysis of it. So from the very beginning, we were dealing with violent death in a way that seemingly didn't threaten who's pro-war? But as they examined the reasons for the wars written about in their chosen poems, we got into the politics of war: Who decides to go to war? What is gained in the war? Land? Power? What is lost? What is the human and economic cost of war? We also got into the emotions of war--fear, hate, revenge, patriotism. We got into the reality of war--the stuff they didn't want to deal with--that war is brutal and death is part of war.

In our current circumstances of war, many of my students had friends or family about to go to war, so the prospect of death became a potent and overarching metaphor for whatever we were talking about. For the second essay, I peppered students with articles mostly opposed to the war. They read Frank Rich's "On 'Fixed Ideas' Since September 11," (9) Rick Reilly's "Where Have All the Young Men Gone?" (10) David Mednicoff's "Will Critical Thinking Help Joe on the Field of War?" (11) Time magazine's opposing pieces, Andrew Sullivan's "Yes, a War Would Be Moral" and Stanley Hauerwas' "No, This War Would Not Be Moral," (12) and Joe Klein's "The Poker Player in Chief." (13)

Most students were--at the onset--reluctant to engage in discussion about these articles. Their resistance was demonstrated in their silence. So I set myself up as the straw-woman whom students could knock down with their own considered positions. By putting myself on the line, I invited them to talk back to my beliefs, theories, politics, and ideological views; to counter-argue their own politics; and to come up with their own learned responses.

When the "flag incident" happened, I knew my straw-woman approach was working. Briefly, a student athlete at a New York college demonstrated her opposition to the war in Iraq by turning her back on the American flag during the National Anthem. A reporter broke the story, and newspaper debates raged about the flag, patriotism, and the First Amendment. Interestingly, I wasn't the one who introduced the "flag incident" in class. A student told the story--I hadn't even heard of it--and the classroom erupted when I opined that the Constitution gave the athlete her First Amendment right to protest. Chairs were not thrown, tempers simmered and settled, and everyone had an opportunity to express an opinion. I was in the minority. The "flag incident" delighted me because I saw democracy in action in both the event and in this classroom.

During our class discussions I would say, here's my evidence for my opinion, show me yours. Most of the time, the first place students searched was the Internet. Fine, I'd say, but let's make certain that the class knows what the source is, and if the source is reliable. I was demanding supporting evidence, solid substantiation, and scholarly argument from them; I wanted them to interrogate what they were doing by elucidating their facts and to examine knowledge by questioning authority. After each discussion, students wrote their one-page responses to either the article or the kind of discussion it generated in class.

Now my students were prepared to tackle Dissent from the Homeland. This text, not surprisingly, touched on issues enmeshed in the Iraqi war; issues that explained or expanded students' questions; and issues of geography, religion, politics. Students here, at Sacred Heart, many of whom had attended Catholic schools most of their lives, were now asked to respond to the essays of an Islamic scholar, a Judaic scholar, and a Catholic priest when they encountered Vincent J. Cornell's "A Muslim to Muslims: Reflections after September 11," (14) Peter Ochs's "September 11 and the Children of Abraham," (15) and Michael J. Baxter's "Dispelling the 'We' Fallacy from the Body of Christ: The Task of Catholics in a Time of War." (16) But like the good Catholic girls and boys they were taught to be, and despite my efforts to instill a more challenging argument, they "respectfully" debated the issues of these essays. It seemed that the authority of these essays occasioned students to return to their unquestioning, comfortable places. So I upped the ante and assigned a "talk back" essay that asked them to respond to any of Dissent from the Homeland's essays. Similar to the Modern War assignment, students could choose the essay they wanted to talk back to.

The Media Studies majors seized on the opportunity to respond to Slavoj Zizeks Welcome to the Desert of the Real" because he notes how the events of 9/11 resemble the Hollywoodization of catastrophes. (17) Susan (18) wrote, "Before 9-11 many Americans lived most of their lives in a materialistic paradise, going day-to-day working, spending, and consuming.... Suddenly Americans were stepping out of their false, superficial or 'hyper' reality into the real reality the rest of the world had been experiencing." Her conclusion: "The truth learned in awakening to the 'real' reality is that the only way to ensure that it will not happen here again is to prevent it going on anywhere else.... " Marissa talked back to Zizek by agreeing: "America has only surface knowledge of the violence of the world. We do not experience what other nations encounter on a daily basis." Her analysis: "Our safe bubble that we had lived in had been punctured ... [and] whether or not you personally believe in this decision, President Bush decided to step out of our safety bubble... [and] this choice changed the nation."

Mary and Katie talked back to essays about the concept of 9/11, war, and the media. Mary's response to "The Dialectics of Disaster" by Frederic Jameson (19) was to agree with his position that the media's coverage of 9/11 was insincere and predicated on attracting viewers. She writes that "Everyday we are bombarded by information from the media about the world and local events. We have opinions forced upon us.... The media's coverage became a way for various news stations and papers to gain more viewers and patrons. The event was transformed into several small stories and continued ... to evoke certain emotions from viewers. Many reports sought to arouse a strong patriotism in Americans." Her conclusion: "The media changed the way the majority of Americans perceived the events and influenced opinions."

Wendell Berry's premise in "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear," (20) that wars are often about victory and not peace, provided Katie with a way to address her own anti-war position. She writes that "A war that is started by violence is going to end with more violence, death, and destruction then [sic] there was before the war began." And she echoes Berry's notion that "We should begin teaching our children ways to be peaceable."

In talking back to Robert N. Bellah's "Seventy-five Years," (21) in which he discusses his life in terms of the wars he's lived through, Jamie is taught a history lesson. She responds to the quote from Cicero: "'To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.'" (22) "Now I realize why American History is taught in all schools across this nation. Americans should be aware of how we came about as a country, and ... our leaders should look at the past events with Iraq when considering a war."

Andrew, responding to Rowan Williams' essay, "End of War," (23) had never encountered the concept of a "just war." (24) He seemed to speak for many students when he wrote: "As a young man growing up in the United States I have my views on the war but they are not so much views but questions.... I sit in my classes safe and sound, and listen to my teacher explain about the 'shock and awe attacks.' The real meaning behind this title should be about the women and children in Iraq watching bombs fall ... seeing this war as a fight for democracy for the people of Iraq and our homeland security is fine, but one cannot turn away from the fact that many innocent Iraqi people and our young soldiers are dying everyday."

As the semester wound down, the students' last essay explored the topic of movie heroes, exploring their concepts of what a hero is and why Americans need heroes. Though this assignment was designed to offer a break from the intensity of our semester, even in this specifically created "fun" assignment, students chose complex characters--Forrest Gump, Indiana Jones, Mildred Pierce, Rocky--characters who were all fighting for something or someone. Is fighting, then, a primary trait of the American hero? Even in this "fun" assignment, the classroom continued to be an arena for discussion about the war in Iraq.

In this semester which began with the war on terror in Afghanistan and ended with talk about the invasion of Iraq, students confronted the real ghosts that prevail in war. The focus of my teaching may have shifted from 9/11 to the war in Iraq, but my students rose to the occasion. We debated and disagreed; some opinions were altered and others were solidified. Karen Fitts and Alan W. France reassure me when they say that creative teachers can overcome student resistance to "(sometimes profound) rhetorical conflict between the teacher's articulation of an oppositional stance--an agenda that moves against the political grain--and the student's resistance to it." My own students confirm this view." (25) Many of them told me that they wrote their best work in that class because they knew that their learned opinions were welcomed.

A year later, students from that class still come up to me to discuss the current situation. More than a year later, we're still at war in Iraq and the attacks of 9/11 continue to be used to promote patriotism. More than a year later, some of those students will find out just how personal politics can become, and how crucial knowledge is to the choices we make.

MEDIA STUDIES by Louise Spence

Soon after September 11, 2001, I noticed a similarity between images of Hiroshima in the wake of the atomic bomb and the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Yet the popular discourses about the tragedy linked the attacks on the twin towers not with the devastation of a civilian population but with the attacks on our military ships in Pearl Harbor.

I was teaching an undergraduate course on Native Americans and the Media that fall. In the post-9/11 climate, amid the calls for solidarity that swept the nation, it turned out to be a very difficult course to teach. I was not really surprised at how steadfastly students ignored any attempt to disturb their patriotic faith in the greatness of America, but I was amazed at how they resisted any discussion of the United States' history of violence. Any criticism of our government, even its 19th-century policies for the containment of Native Americans, appeared unseemly because it jarred their strongly held beliefs in our innocence and their notion of our country as a force for benevolence the world over.

But one particular incident stood out. We were scheduled to visit the National Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan to see a film and a show of still photography. The museum had been closed for a month or so after the towers fell but was scheduled to reopen just before our planned visit. However, the week before our visit one of the students mentioned that her parents were not enthusiastic about her going to New York. I asked students to take out a piece of paper and indicate if they wished to visit the museum. When I reviewed the slips of paper, I realized that the class was divided by race: all the whites voted to cancel the trip; the nonwhites voted to go to the museum. This made me realize that the fears that had surfaced were about more than simply what happened on 9/11, and certainly had evoked unresolved feelings about New York City, its ethnic and racial diversity, and who might be safe there.

The 9/11 attacks on the United States raised important questions that concern all teachers: questions about ethical and moral responses, about the political and ideological implications of both reportage and classroom activities, and about faithful representation and documentary truth. For many, 9/11 inspired a reaching out to others and a spiritual reawakening. For others, 9/11 rekindled old rifts and urban and racial fears. These differences made me realize how important it was to address 9/11 in the classroom and made me wonder about how I could provoke students to fight the centripetal pull of the events. I decided to design a course that would address how the attacks on our country were being represented in the media and in the popular imagination. But dealing with emotionally and politically laden subject matter in the classroom is not always easy. It would be especially difficult while our nation was experiencing such unprecedented anxieties and despair.

I knew it would be important to create an environment where students felt both at ease to express their opinions freely and confident enough to challenge the false abstractions and simple dichotomies they were hearing in the media and from the White House. I wanted to help students resist the presumably hegemonic discourse on terror that flattened the complexity and contradictions in our attitudes toward the rest of the world, which I was seeing in the wider society: the use of moral absolutes (good versus evil; you're either with us or with the terrorists ...) by both the media and the country's militarized diplomacy. However, I didn't realize how tough it would be.

Rather than propose a new course and get the necessary departmental and college approvals, I chose to devote the 2002-2003 senior reading seminar, a required capstone course that I was already scheduled to teach, to the subject. Because of the size of the graduating class, we planned to run sections of the course during the fall and spring of the 2002-2003 academic year. Officially titled "Reading Seminar in Media and Cultural Theory," this one-semester class is an exit course, a culminating experience for undergraduates majoring in media studies, and a bonding opportunity for seniors, especially important to the part-time and returning students. The seminar tackles advanced work in the theoretical and historical context of the mass media and explores specific areas of inquiry, which change nearly every year. It encourages critical and creative thinking about the ways the media, as social phenomena, affect our personal and collective consciousness. The role of the instructor is primarily Socratic: to pose questions that unsettle and challenge, to test orthodoxies, and to suggest routes by which students can discover the theoretical frameworks and practical methods appropriate for their endeavors.

In a small seminar, I knew that I could create a climate of inquiry by admitting my own opinions and my own confusions, and encouraging students to talk back to me. I thought that questioning my authority would help them to question the authority of both government and the media. If media studies is to be a useful discipline, it must prepare students to see themselves as capable critics of how current events are represented and as able to effect change in political and social affairs.

In the past four decades, the discipline has developed sophisticated tools for the analysis of representation, and for exploring the context of texts and audiences. My first challenge was to figure out what models there were for examining the representation of such a frightening and upsetting event. I was looking for strategies that seemed useful for the task of analyzing multifaceted and harrowing matter, and for situating texts and audiences within a newly altered international political landscape and what I saw as impending global war.

Since there is an extensive, recent secondary literature on how the trauma of the Holocaust has been depicted, I felt students could acquire tools from that example and adapt them for their future work on how 9/11 was being portrayed. I did not mean to equate 9/11 and the Holocaust; rather, I wanted students to draw on the substantial body of literature on how the Holocaust has been represented so that they might learn methods that might apply to their own analyses of the representations of 9/11: representations of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, of our traumatic loss, and of our personal and collective grief.

When I first began to teach the seminar, we were close to the one-year anniversary of the disaster, and it was already becoming clear to the students that the history of the event was being written. It already seemed to all of us that stories in the media, journalistic images, and public commemorations were mediating our thoughts on those apocalyptic events. I was hoping we could look at what forms the remembrances were taking and ask ourselves some difficult questions: How, and for what social purposes, were particular versions of the events of 9/11 being produced, installed, and maintained as public memory and as history? How was a national symbolic being produced through objects, images, and representations? How does one, to quote Hayden White, "translate knowing into telling"? (26) In particular, I asked students to examine how the media was influencing what stories were being remembered and the ways history was being formulated in our minds and in our "cultural memory." (27) We began by reading excerpts from essays by Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Hayden White on collective memory and how history is constructed and understood, and discussed the relevant writings by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. This was really a course about historiography-the politics and process of history-making-and the students seemed receptive to that. Then we read a series of essays from Tim Cole's Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (28) and Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List, edited by Yosefa Loshitzky. (29)

In this section of the course, the reading assignments examined and analyzed how the Holocaust has been represented, and students wrote weekly papers on the reading assignment, 750-1500 words each, discussing the most important or interesting points of the assignments and why they felt these points are important or interesting. These essays prepared diem for class discussions and helped them to evaluate what part of the theories they were reading might be useful to their own analyses. Students, or small groups of students, took turns presenting their analyses of the reading assignment for that week. They wrote a paper (approximately 3000-4500 words) exploring the methods they read about in the assignments and testing those methods by using them to analyze a piece of media of their choice. This work was presented in class, and the following week the presenters turned in a self-evaluation of their presentation noting what they felt their grade should be. (30) Then, in the last half of the semester, students, or small groups of students, were to present their own analyses of media representations of 9/11.

A year after the attacks, however, the students still understood the events of 9/11 in affective and emotional terms. That is, when they approached the stories the media were creating about 9/11, the intellectual was replaced by fear, fury, and sorrow-and this caused conceptual and psychic problems for them. I certainly did not expect--or need--a lack of feeling, a separation of emotion and intellection, or an authoritative master narrative, but what I got was a surprising series of flat "truths" described, not analyzed, recited but not examined. When the), discussed 9/11, they seemed to be ignoring the mutability of meaning, which they had dealt with in very perceptive ways while discussing the Holocaust.

I have thought long about why this was so, and I think it is because students conceptualized 9/11 as senseless violence and therefore a meaningless event. The iconic power of the images they "witnessed" on television or the Internet, (31) for many in real time, still seemed inexplicable. It was almost as if meaning were suspended or overwhelmed by the spectacle that assaulted their imagination. Whereas I was asking them to investigate and explore a mediated past that was being carefully created for their viewing in journalistic accounts, films, museums, and memorials, they wanted neat, tied-down meaning and absolute clarity that testified to their presence. When it came to the attacks on the United States, they seemed to have forgotten the lessons they had learned about the cultural and historical lenses through which the Holocaust has been perceived, and how nations and individuals have memorialized the Holocaust according to their own motives, needs, and ideals. Whereas the students had had no problem with the theory that meaning might be shifting, variable, or malleable, they had a problem with the openness of this particular story. To them, the Holocaust was a crisis that has some historical closure; it was securely ensconced in the past. Our tragic story was not so safely contained. Besides, like the news media, my students did not want to ask "Why?" Their stories of 9/11 began with the attack at 8:46 A.M and fizzled into a vague future. All they could visualize was an infinite middle. My students seemed stranded, suspended in a void of space, time, and knowledge.

Because they could not find or impose a satisfactory back-story that would account for the causes of the attack, and because they could not yet imagine the closure needed for coherence and unity, they were powerless to create a significant, meaningful 9/11 narrative. This combination of a weak beginning and the delay or absence of resolution meant that they were unable to give creative shape to the horror. Their larger political, social, and moral sense of uncertainty was displaced onto an anxiety about openness, an anxious uncertainty not only about what may happen next but also about why we are in this situation. To not be subsumed by the abyss, to keep away from the enigmatic and ambiguous, they skirted, they bridged, and they avoided unbreachable discrepancies. They wanted to protect any thread of continuity they could find, to recover their sense of safety. In their scramble for comfort and security, they found solace in facts. Frustrated by their inability to ascribe meaning to the events of 9/11, they avoided the analysis of representation and retreated to uninterrogated, seemingly transparent facts. These, at least, were knowable.

I had not anticipated how entrenched notions of truth and accuracy would be. Because the newly complicated arrangements in international politics seemed like a narrative conundrum, a story with neither beginning nor end, they withdrew to their unquestioning faith in seemingly incontrovertible "truths." Because they were unable to fill in the gaps and absences of the story, and because they were unable to imagine a redemptive myth that would endow the deaths with meaning, they fell back on facts, unassailable facts, facts beyond appeal. Because their "truth" was predicated on a settled and integral object of knowledge, a body of facts, they saw no need to scrutinize the discourses through which that truth had acquired meaning. And in wanting to be faithful to the facts, students drew on a conception of history and representation that is based on making past events objectively present. Although in their writing about the Holocaust they had grappled with the possibility that some events may be unknowable, how the pretence to understand what is impossible to understand is bound to trivialize, and even the incommunicability of some experiences, when it came to 9/11 they wanted certainties and sought the data on which certainties are based. They collected, inventoried, ordered, cataloged, annotated, and labeled media-derived information, images, and memories, but shunned analysis altogether. And interestingly, although they unanimously preferred Steven Spielberg's dramatization, Schindler's List (1993)--and even Alain Resnais's lyrical documentary Night and Fog (1955)--to Claude Lanzmann's talking heads, Shoah (1985), they ended up adopting Lanzmann's archival mode: collecting the traces of the event, rather than representing it.

Paradoxically, the antirealist claims of novelist Elie Wiesel, poet Paul Celan, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, and others about the unrepresentability of events that many consider unimaginable overpowered the realist aesthetic that students loved so dearly. Although it may not have been at all conscious, their deference to the unspeakable was a strategic means of coping. For the students, that day in 2001 had become, or was still, safe from scrutiny. This is not astonishing given how dose they were to the subject geographically, temporally, and psychically. Some students had even been able to see smoke from the World Trade Center from the upper floors of one of the dormitories.

Was I asking too much when I encouraged them to assault the present with intellection, wariness, conscience, and compassion? Was I wrong to encourage them to acknowledge the practical and spiritual value of struggle, or to seek a place of understanding, however tenuous, between mourning and anger on the one hand, and rational skepticism on the other? One thing is sure: I was asking them to unmask the fiction of what they held to be real in their lives, forcing them to consider horror, cruelty, and death squarely, and they were retreating to safe ground.

Although the news coverage (both print and television) of that day was available to them, most of the depictions they chose to "analyze" were the later portraits of heroics and nobility, images of courage on a scale as great as the spectacle of the falling towers. This seemed to be providing a powerful sense of healing and community for them. Despite the fact that there was a variety of political positions being articulated on their attire, from flags on baseball caps to anti-war buttons and peace signs on book bags, the students were united in their feelings that there was a need for healing. Healing was a concept that they apparently wanted to explore, yet they were shocked by my suggestion that the need for healing should not be taken for granted. Without exception, they went wild when I asked them why they thought we needed healing. It was a dead end.

Again, like the media, they had no problem seeing hatred and violence as contemptible and essential to address; it was much more difficult, however, for them to see hatred and violence as a natural part of our social world. That realization was more threatening to their sense of moral order than the now distant Holocaust-and it explains why they needed to see the Holocaust as an aberration, a radical rupture in human history. (32) It also suggests why they needed to see evil as embodied in Osama bin Laden and later Saddam Hussein and, therefore, possible to destroy. In a sense, their fear of terrorists papered over the more existential threat of understanding terrorism. Understanding terrorism would mean that terrorism was not simply sinister and unjustified barbarism, or sheer, unfathomable evil. Understanding terrorism would also make it harder to stave off the violence and fear of violence in each of us.

Perhaps for the same reason, they found it disturbing to continue seeing our nation as a victim. That would have suggested the symbolic collapse of all that holds their world in place. It was unbearably frightening for them to think that the most powerful nation on earth is not the most secure. Rather than face our vulnerability with study and reflection, they, like our nation's leaders, looked for closure. This need for an ending or some sort of redemptive higher purpose also made it difficult for students to question the U. S. attacks on Afghanistan and the approaching war with Iraq.

The idea that the greatest power in the world might not be the greatest country also seemed to be too much for the students to handle. For some, the only way of explaining the "why" of the attacks was that "they" hated "us" because of our freedoms and affluence, because "we" are so great. But of course, the "we" in this consensus-building syntax--a "we" constituted by reports in the press, on television, and on the internet--is, as Annabelle Sreberny points out, a falsely homogeneous non-Muslim "we." (33)

At one point a student blurted out, "The U.S. is the greatest country in the world!" I thanked her and asked what she thought made us great. When she hesitated, I responded with a series of suggestions. Was it universal education? (And I mentioned that Sweden educated a larger percentage of their population than we did.) Or health care? (I pointed out that the World Health Organization had recently ranked France number one and the United States number thirty-seven.) Or life expectancy? (I noted that life expectancy in the United States is well below that in Japan, Australia, and most of Western Europe)? Soon others were making proposals and replying, but not until I had provoked them with my suggestions. They wanted so much to believe in our goodness and innocence that they ignored much of what they had supposedly learned from previous courses, including from discussions about the banality of evil in this very class. (34)

They were seeing patriotism and nationalism being performed on TV, and this patriotism and nationalism celebrated the United States as civilization--the universal civilization--struggling against cruel and unenlightened "others." In a way, the attacks on the United States were being perceived as threats not only to our well-being but also to the modern state, globalism, the privilege of whiteness, and even social Darwinism as a moral philosophy. (35) No wonder the white students in my Native Americans and the Media course didn't want to go into New York City!

We had our moments, the students and I. We cried together and we came together as a community. We had some wonderful discussions. And I learned to say, "I do not know." But by the spring of 2003, my second semester of teaching the seminar, as our national tragedy seemed to be expanding into global warfare, I had begun to wonder if keeping the 9/11 attacks center stage did not serve to aggrandize them, thus supporting the war effort. I had also begun to worry that the course might foster a naive, if heartfelt, identification of the attacks with the Holocaust (although the situations were by no means comparable), thus sentimentalizing 9/11 and contributing to the fetishistic attempt to adorn the meaning of the attacks with an aura of sacred piety.

In the right atmosphere, teaching can be both a joy and a form of political engagement. However, it became clear that what seemed like a well-conceived course in the fall of 2001 felt more like collusion by the spring of 2003. That is a surrender that I as a teacher (and a New Yorker) am not willing to make. (36)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is greatly indebted to our students at Sacred Heart University, the participants in the workshop on "Teaching 9/11" at the 2003 conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Minneapolis, and comments by David Curtis (who as our chair ran interference for us and created an atmosphere where we felt that both our teaching and our writing were respected), Linda Dittmar, Roald Hoffmann, and Michael Ventimiglia. Some of the material in Louise Spence's contribution appeared as "Teaching 9/11 and Why I'm Not Doing it Anymore," in the "Teaching 9/11" special theme section of Cinema Journal, 43:2, Winter 2004. We thank the University of Texas Press for permission to reuse the material.

NOTES

(1) Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, eds., Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11, The South Atlantic Quarterly 101:2, Spring 2002.

(2) Dennis A. Lynch, Diana George, and Marilyn M. Cooper, "Moments of Argument: Agonistic Inquiry and Confrontational Cooperation," College Composition and Communication 48.1, February 1997, p. 61.

(3) Henry Giroux, "Pedagogy, Film, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals: A Response," Cinema Journal 43:2, Winter 2004, p. 122.

(4) C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz, "Resisting Composition," Composition and Resistance (New Hampshire: Heineman, 1991), p. 2.

(5) Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts in the Contact Zone." Profession 91. New York: MLA, 1991, p. 34.

(6) The phrase is Henry Giroux's, "Pedagogy, Film, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals: A Response," Cinema Journal 43:2, Winter 2004, p. 124.

(7) C.H. Knoblauch, "Critical Teaching and Dominant Culture," in Composition and Resistance, p. 17.

(8) Paul Fussell, ed. Modern War, (New York: Norton, 1991).

(9) The New York Times, February 12, 2003, p. 20.

(10) Time, February 17, 2003, p. 104.

(11) The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 28, 2003, p. B20.

(12) Time, March 2, 2003, pgs. 44, 45.

(13) Time, March 17, 2003, p. 19.

(14) Dissent from the Homeland, pp. 325-336.

(15) Dissent from the Homeland, pp. 391-401.

(16) Dissent from the Homeland, pp. 361-373.

(17) Dissent from the Homeland, pp. 385-389.

(18) All of the students quoted here gave permission to use parts of their essays.

(19) Dissent from the Homeland, pp. 297-303.

(20) Dissent from the Homeland, pp. 279-284.

(21) Dissent from the Homeland, pp. 253-265.

(22) Bellah, p. 261.

(23) Williams, p. 266.

(24) Williams, p. 274.

(25) Karen Fitts and Alan France, Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), p. x.

(26) Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990), p. 1.

(27) Marita Sturken defines cultural memory as shared memories that are entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning in Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California, 1997) p. 3.

(28) Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: Roudedge, 1999).

(29) Yosefa Loshitzky, ed. Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).

(30) When they worked in groups, they graded both their own contribution and the performance of the group.

(31) One student, a senior now, but a freshman at the time, mentioned recently that although she could no longer remember her own reaction to the towers falling, she could remember vividly the reactions of people she had viewed on television that day.

(32) The phrase is Alan Mintz's in Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), p. 39.

(33) Annabelle Sreberny, "Trauma Talk: Reconfiguring the Inside and the Outside," in Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, eds., Journalism after September 11 (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 223.

(34) Our discussions were based on Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963).

(35) The recent acts of torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners (and the sharing of digital images of the atrocities) might be seen as a spectacle of power and powerlessness meant to right that wrong and reestablish superiority.