Teaching With and Through Crisis

In Felman's "Story of a Class" in Testimony she tells us that she had two objectives for her literature course:

1) to make the class feel, and progressively discover, how testimony is indeed pervasive, how it is implicated -- sometimes unexpectedly -- in almost every kind of writing; 2) to make the class feel, on the other hand, and -- there again - progressively discover, how the testimony cannot be subsumed by its familiar notion, how the texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter -- and make us encounter - strangeness; how the concept of testimony, speaking from a stance of superimposition of literature, psychoanalysis and history, is in fact quite unfamiliar and estranging, and how, the more we look closely at texts, the more they show us that, unwittingly, we do not even know what testimony is and that, in any case, it is not simply what we thought we knew it was. (7)

 The key question for Felman, and for me as I pursue my work in literature of atrocities is this: "Is the testimony, therefore, a simply medium of historical transmission, or is it, in obscure ways, the unsuspected medium of a healing? If history has clinical dimensions, how can testimony intervene, pragmatically and efficaciously, at once historically (politically) and clinically" (9)?  So here, I am wondering if Felman is asking whether or not literature can be a sort of cognitive intervention of sorts. Can we use literature as something more than art, as a social intervention to raise consciousness? Can we use literature, the "alignment between witnesses," to enact history -- a complex, or thick historicity beyond places and dates?

Felman, in the context of a classroom, discusses the unpredictability of testimony. She says that the class itself "broke out into a crisis" (47).  After screening testimony from Holocaust videotapes, the students were silent, but "what was unusual was that the experience did not end in silence, but instead, fermented into endless and relentless talking in the days and weeks to come" and  outside the walls of the classroom. She notes phone calls from students at odd hours and a need to talk  without knowing quite what to say, and the students turned to each other  and yet "felt they could not reach each other. They felt alone, suddenly deprived of their bonding to the world and to one another" (48).

Pedagogically, the teacher had to support the students as they worked through the crisis. (And Kumsahiro will have more to say about this in Against Common Sense.) What was the significance of the event of witnessing testimony? Language was insufficient in processing the experience. Felman calls it a suspension of the knowledge -- that somehow the access to the knowledge that would help make sense of the content was lost. However, the discovery seems to be that knowledge "does not exist" but can"only happen through the testimony: it cannot be separated from it" (51). Therefore, the students wrote about their own experience of the testimony, of the experience of the class. Felman concludes that teaching takes place only through a crisis:

If it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness  of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught: it has perhaps passed on some facts, passed on some information and some documents, with which the students or the audience -- the recipients -- can for instance do what people during the occurrence  of the Holocaust precisely did with information that kept coming forth but that no one could recognize, and that no one could therefore truly learn, read,  or put to use. (Felman 53)

Teaching has to do more than transmit or bank (as Freire would argue as well). And this text, this book, seeks to make the parallel between teaching and psychoanalysis in that in both, one must "live through a crisis. Both are called upon to be performative, and not just cognitive, insofar as they both strive to produce, and to enable, change. Both this kind of teaching and psychoanalysis are interested not merely in new information, but, primarily, in the capacity of their recipients to transform themselves in function of the newness of that information" (53). Teaching the literature of atrocities offers this transformative experience because students can witness something that may be "cognitively dissonant." It can help us move from "oh, that's so sad" to a much more authentic response that only comes from crisis. The question for the teacher according to Felman (and others like Kumashiro) is how to access the crisis and how much can the class take on?  When we are talking about adolescents and children/young adult literature that question seems that much more essential.