Many years ago, I spent a day traipsing through Central Delhi with a photographer friend of mine. He had chosen to forego college to concentrate on his aspirations for a career in photography; I was already in awe of the work he produced. Paid work was hard to come by but at that point in time, he was undeterred, producing one dazzling portfolio after another of peoples, places and objects. On that hot summer day, we planned to walk through the center of the city, each of us carrying a camera, and to shoot photos of whatever caught our fancy.
With a twist: whatever I decided to take a photo of would be captured by my friend too, and vice-versa. Our equipment was almost identical in its technical specifications: I was using a spare camera of his, one loaned to me for the day's exercise. There was a lesson brewing in the comparison between our work that would ensue when our prints were developed, but I did not know what it would be. I hoped it wouldn't be a simple exercise in humiliation. The similarity of the cameras had, of course, dispensed with any reliance on the quality of the camera as a crutch.
We both shot a roll of black and white film that day. There was little conversation between us as we did our work; the idea was to shoot first and compare later. When the day's work was finally developed and printed, I was stunned. We had taken photos of the 'same things' but our work was radically dissimilar. It was as if we had not even been present in the same place at the same time.
Some of this dissimilarity was quickly attributed to the technical parameters chosen for each exposure but overwhelmingly, the reason why our work stood apart so distinctly was that we saw different things when we looked through the lens. We framed and cropped differently; the central object in our frames varied sharply. What was chosen for inclusion was important; what was chosen for exclusion even more so. The skill of photography was more developed in one of us but even then, our minds brought with them their own distinct imperatives and priorities, attenuating the selection of those elements of the world that were to make it into our compositions. The world was ordered and ranked and classified differently by us.
So, not Philosophy of Literature, but rather philosophy in literature. The former subject concerns itself with rather more traditional philosophical concerns: the nature of literature, fictional objects, the semantics of fictional works, and so on. The latter seeks to show philosophy may be found in literature, how authors do philosophy via their literary works, how indeed, a coherent philosophical vision can be presented in a variety of literary formats. In reading literature, 'morals' can be drawn; metaphysical and ethical theses uncovered; aesthetic standpoints elicited. The anthology I have chosen as my text for the semester features extracts from novels, short stories, poems and plays; a blurb on the back suggests that as much philosophy may be found in a good novel as in anything written by Kant or Mill. I agree; it's why teaching this class has long been on my short list of 'want-to-take-this-on-at-some-point' items.
If the classroom discussion that took place in the second class meeting is any indicator of how the semester will go, I'm inclined to be cautiously optimistic that my pre-semester enthusiasm for the class was justified: while some students appeared initially reticent about discussing the assigned readings (extracts from Invisible Man, Puberty Blues and Giovanni's Room), yet others were remarkably enthusiastic, and as the class progressed, had pulled in other students with their responses to the material. A provocative reading sometimes generates a provocative response, and then it's off to the races. By the end of the class, we had made interesting connections between the repression of homosexual identity and the internalized self-diminution of the black man in Jim Crow America, between the immigrant's struggles to maintain coherence in his twin identities, the dilemmas of the conscientious objector, and adolescent struggles to adjust to peer group pressure. Among other things.
While the extracts in the textbook are grouped according to philosophical themes–such as self-identity, duty to others etc–and accompanied by little primers to the issues tackled in them, I am inclined to let the initial reading be a trifle unguided so as to be able to elicit slightly unmediated responses to the text. My hope is that this will broaden the scope of our responses to the readings and make the ensuing class discussions even more eclectic. My class is set in Brooklyn; my students are a remarkably diverse group, and they promise to bring to their readings of the classics a singularly unique standpoint.
It promises to be a great semester.