Presenting Violence in the Classroom

Michael Roberts — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:22:05 +0000

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Michael Roberts

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I teach a Literature class called “Banned Books and Novel Ideas.” It is one of the most popular courses in English at the University, with eight sections being taught this semester. Undergraduates prefer this course to others, I assume, because the title suggests something controversial, risqué, or explicit about the course material. Or at least it does to me; I think that a course on banned books should explore the history of controversial literature and take the reasons for banning books seriously. To me simply celebrating our “liberal open-mindedness” in the academy seems a worthless and self-congratulatory endeavor. So when developing the syllabus for my version of this course, I decided to seriously pose the question if there are any fictional texts that should be read or seen by no one. This question led me to organizing a course full of texts that have unusually violent or graphic material that was considered too disgusting for various audiences throughout the last 400 years. This question also led me to The Human Centipede 2.

For the blissfully uninitiated, The Human Centipede is a 2010 Dutch horror film that falls in the “torture porn” sub-genre, a term applied to films that have little plot beyond the often methodical and disgusting torture of the victims. The film gained notoriety for its particularly horrific and disgusting take on the genre; you can watch the trailer here. The sequel, like most horror sequels, is more of the same, minus the originality. What led me to this particular film, though, is not just that it was banned by the British ratings board; it was that I didn’t find the banning all that disagreeable. After all, what good can come to anyone of the viewing of ritual violence and mutilation? So while I consider the film itself to be pretty worthless in terms of depth or ambiguity, I find the questions it provokes to be very worthwhile indeed.

Fear not, gentle reader; the rest of the texts in my course are not as empty or sadistic as The Human Centipede 2, but some of them may come close in terms of graphic violence, on both the page and screen. Which brings me to the subject of this blog post: how do you--or how do I--negotiate the presentation of extreme violence and brutality without offending or traumatizing students with (completely justifiable) sensitivities to violence?

I am still working on an answer. And in a way it’s a trick question; the goal of a “Banned Books” course is partially to offend, or to at least seriously consider the effects of offensiveness. What I do not want to do, of course, is bring back past traumas of students who have experienced some sort of significant violence in their lives. With a class of 20+ students, I imagine that the chances are relatively high that at least one student has some traumatic history.

To try to avoid this, I put up several warning signs at the front end of my class. The course description contains a bold Explicit Material warning, explaining the graphic nature of many of the texts we will read. I also try to set the tone on the first day of class by explaining how I was led to The Human Centipede 2 and showing the trailer for the film. Even though the trailer is “Approved for all Audiences,” I warn students of the material and give them the option to leave or look away. Afterwards, I let them know that if they have trouble watching or reading scenes of violence, to come up to me after class. I tell those students that they can have alternate assignments to the particularly explicit readings, but that this might not be the best class for them. All of these warnings are intended to give sensitive or traumatized students the chance to drop the class, or at least to let them know what they are getting into.

Interestingly, about half of the texts that I teach have a less-than-serious tone, despite the violence that they use. This is in part because I teach a unit on genre analysis of horror fiction, which typically takes gruesome pleasure in deaths and murders. I want these texts to be fun, but also want us as a class to explore the varied emotional responses to violence and the desensitizing effects of the genre. To do this I juxtapose the least serious moments of the class—horror film analysis--to the most serious: Night and Fog, a holocaust documentary. The documentary truly horrifies my students (who are, again, warned), but the comparison and contrast with horror films is usually one of the most productive discussions of the semester. The contrast between the different emotional responses forces us as a class to examine our own reactions to violence, realism, and history. It also highlights one of the running themes of the class, which is the diverse ways that literature uses disgust.

Again, I am still working through ways to deal with such graphic content in a sensitive way, but thus far my best strategy has been a general openness in the classroom about the emotional responses that the texts evoke. I want students to feel accepted (or even justified) in feeling horrified, but also for us to be able to examine how and why these reactions are provoked. And while I have had some students who have had to pass on particular videos (it’s always video, which is interesting but worthy of another post), all of them have had fruitful discussions about their own feelings and reactions to the class texts. That seems like a good start.

Communication in the Classroom

Prentice — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:31:10 +0000

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Chris Ortiz y Prentice

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David Sky

This semester I wanted to develop the Mass Effect lesson I devised in the fall. That lesson used the video game as a rhetorical modeling technology, which (I hoped) would have student thinking about how rhetorical decisions afford and foreclose others “down the line.” In my discussions of this lesson with many of you, I was encouraged to develop a writing lesson that would give students a chance to make their own Mass Effect-style modular arguments. The lesson I’ve learned from devising this exercise is the advantage of letting students in on the lesson-making process.

I’ll admit that, when I made the copious materials my lesson required, I wasn’t too sure myself how to turn persuasive articles into the sort of rhetorical prompts given to the player of Mass Effect. The relation between these prompts and what Shepard says is by no means obvious but an interesting rhetorical question in its own right.

So I brought the lesson to class without having mastered (or even fully understood) the skills I was asking the students to practice and develop. This made me nervous. The students perceived that I could not communicate to them precisely what I was looking for them to do. I referenced what we’d learned the previous class playing the game; I told them that I wanted them to take the provided material and make “modular” arguments; I gave them a sense of my thought process, the difficulties I’d encountered, and my ambitions for the lesson. And then I stopped talking, half-expecting insubordination. “You’ve no idea what you’re talking about! How can you ask us to do this when you can’t even do it yourself? What gives you the right to grade us when you can’t model what an A would look like?”

What I got instead was collaboration. “Wouldn’t it also be possible to write the prompts like this?” “Isn’t there another decision going on behind these words?” “Couldn’t we connect these two lines, like this, since they go to the same place from here on out?”

As luck would have it, I recently came upon a young Raymond Williams arguing for the pedagogical superiority of communication over transmission. In some educational contexts, his words (at the end of Culture and Society) might strike one as hopelessly optimistic. But in the rhe306 classroom, and last week, his argument held true:

Communication is not only transmission; it is also reception and response. . . . The very failure of so many of the items of transmission which I have listed is not an accident, but the result of a failure to understand communication. The failure is due to an arrogant preoccupation with transmission, which rests on the assumption that the common answers have been found and need only to be applied. (309, 314)

This may seem like teaching 101 to all of you, but I guess I didn’t fully trust it. I was surprised when my students turned collaborators, but I don’t know why I should’ve been, since working towards an answer is a much more satisfying experience than being told one. (Bo’s April 4^thpost is worth reading for insights into how to devise lessons that purposefully make the learning process communicative and collaborative).

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Presenting Violence in the Classroom

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Communication in the Classroom

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