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At war, with Shakespeare--student development.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

First-year students' causal analysis of the September 11 attacks led to a study of English majors' thinking about war in an undergraduate Shakespeare course. The analysis of their responses to short surveys was based on categories of students' intellectual development and classical ideas of tragic catharsis. From students' definitions of "war" and interpretations of metaphors, a proposed method of relieving anxiety emerged: assess students' thought on a series of rich literary texts and some movement can be fostered along Baxter Magolda's observed continuum of critical thought, from absolute towards contextual.

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On the class day of September 12, 2001 I suspended composition lessons about Huckleberry Finn and turned the attention of my 25 freshmen to a drama different from Huck and Jim's escapades along the Mississippi River. Down on the Hudson and the Potomac, the terrorists' scene was immediate, numbing, and doubtful. No one knew much about who, what, how, or why--only when. We were fortunate to be working with Ann E. Berthoffs Forming/Thinking/Writing, a thoughtful composition book, and her summary of multiple views of "the logic of explanation" provided a framework for asking questions about the catastrophe (183). I asked these affable Midwesterners to help us understand several levels of cause, and I charted some of the bewildered first answers to Aristotle's categories (from his Physics,II.3).

* Material cause--the substance of the event: airplanes turned into gasoline bombs

* Efficient cause--the active agents: the people who hijacked the planes, murdered passengers and crew, re-directed the flights

* Formal cause--the pattern: plans devised by masterminds

* Final cause--the ultimate purpose: terror? revenge?

Although our group came to no conclusions, being on the look-out for multiple explanations of what happened was momentarily helpful in relieving the shock and anger. Mark Twain's novel returned us soon enough to the symbolic violence of the Grangerford/ Shepherdson feud (chapter 18) or the tarring and feathering of the fraudulent King and the Duke (chapter 33), but these literary examples of cruelty were less provocative than the eyewitness news on the national stage.

Three analytical approaches helped me understand my students' responses to unexpected death and national mobilization. Student development theory, developed by Marcia Baxter Magolda from the seminal study of William Perry, suggested a strategy of looking at multiple perspectives in a more complex context than an absolute labeling of heroes and terrorists. Second, metaphor studies, the examination of symbol systems as an essential mediation process in language and literature, stood behind Berthoffs composition book. Third, the categories of Aristotle's account of tragedy in the Poetics loomed on the horizon of my next teaching assignment, Shakespeare. I resolved to pursue the theme of war in my Shakespeare course...