Tuesday, November 06, 2007

athematic informal music

A little more on modernist pedagogy.

I've pointed out here before, in various entries, that the irony of the lecture on modernism has become increasingly obvious and disabling. The problem will be to define or at least describe an alternative.

Although he was not writing about teaching when he wrote this, Bruce Andrews imagines a specific practice when he expresses the hope “for a revived radicalism of constructivist noise or athematic ‘informal music’” in the world of poetry and poetics. In the spirit of this, I wonder if the poetry classroom could be filled such noise. The “use” of new technologies to aid the teaching of poetry is not going to make a bit of difference unless some sort of fundamental pedagogy change accompanies it, and I believe the quality of that changed environment might indeed sound something like Andrews’s athematic informal music.

In modernism's materials must at least implicitly be a meta-pedagogy. The trick is in bringing out that implication.