philoSOPHIA

Following the late Iris Marion Young’s usage of the term, I take pedagogical questions to be essentially pragmatic questions. As she puts it, “By being pragmatic I mean categorizing, explaining, developing accounts and arguments that are tied to specific practical and political problems, where the purpose of this theoretical activity is clearly related to these problems” (Young 1994, 717–18). When thinking about the importance of feminist and continental pedagogical questions, I want to therefore locate my thoughts in specific political and practical problems faced by teachers.

The specific political problem that I am concerned with here is the notion of the canon as it shapes the courses many of us teach. The specific practical manifestation of the problem of the canon is the question of how to teach such courses when one is assigned a syllabus, or constrained by the requirements of set curricula. My immediate concern is to focus on the position of the graduate instructor, adjunct lecturer, teaching assistant, and junior faculty member who lacks the institutional power and employment security to challenge the notion of the canon whether wholesale or only in part. I want to insist that teaching the canon as a practical and political problem, turns out to be an exemplary way to practice feminist, continental, radical, queer, and transgressive pedagogies. Teaching a canon is potentially radical because its (re)production is always also dangerous.

I turn to feminist and continental approaches to teaching in particular because they are especially well suited to this practical and political problem. First, feminist philosophy has demonstrated the omission of women from the [End Page 78] canon while also emphasizing that women are central and crucial figures within canonical texts. Second, if continental philosophy distinguishes itself from those strains of the analytic tradition that conceive of themselves as timeless, ahistorical, and geographically universal, it does so in part by pointing to a historical and geographical referent: the “continent.” By taking the canon as an object of analysis, both perspectives can ground a pedagogical approach to a canonical course that provisionally embraces the canon precisely as a question, reflecting rather than refusing its contingency. Feminist and continental commitments to close reading, critical analysis, and sympathetic interpretation can promote a self-conscious and repeated practice of grappling over foundations. Such a practice would not be for the sake of preserving disciplines and normalizing canons, but rather for the sake of understanding the disciplined and normalized subjects that we are as teachers and student. A contingent and self-conscious stance toward canonical teaching, one that attends especially to the danger of pedagogical power, might moreover help us to situate our classrooms as spaces in which we, teachers and students, exercise something like collective agency.

Let me make this more concrete with a symposium of two practices and one organizing principle. First, canonical courses must confront the question of the canon itself. The persistent questions of any survey, “classics,” or “foundations” course should be to ask what exactly makes the subject surveyable? What makes a classic a classic? What is built on a foundation and what makes something foundational? I first pose these questions by taking the course title itself as our first shared “text” for analysis, and by asking students what they think the class will be about and how exactly they have came to think that. It is usually striking to see just how confident many students are in what they’ve signed up for, and how sure they are in their knowledge of what counts as “classical” thought. Yet they have seldom thought about where this knowledge comes from. Such first questions of the course are thus self-reflective and critical questions: How did they know that Plato or Aristotle would be on the syllabus? This is the very first step in helping the students to recognize themselves as being active participants in the canon themselves, right along with me at the front of the room, actively investing their time in the production and reproduction of the canon.

Our course will necessarily maintain some notions of classics, foundations, and canons. We...