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Subversion: teaching a blue novel in a red state.

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Abstract

In an increasingly conservative climate, teachers may need to recognize that the potentially objectionable language and possibility of moral uncertainty in some novels contradict the clarity and conviction that some students expect from novels. This essay focuses on the lessons that both I and my students learned about expectations, ethos, and ambiguity when we discussed and analyzed several contentious novels in a recent Honors course.

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In the 1950s, when the State Department was investigated for closet "subversives," the word suggested not just rebellion but sedition. Today, English Departments also look for closet subversives, although the word's connotation has been, perhaps appropriately, subverted--from high crime to high praise. From stalwarts of subversion like J.D. Salinger and to secret subversives like Jane Austen, any author can---indeed, should--be read as subversive. If it's worth reading, it must be subversive. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing subversively. But subversion can be complicated.

In 2000, as a doctoral candidate in English at a research institution in New York City, I taught my first course for literature majors, "Fiction: 1940-Present," which I subtitled "Literature, Culture, Technology." "Technology" was used loosely, anything from bombs to the media, techno-consumer capitalism, and Western reason. This was all exciting, heady, and of course, subversive stuff, with fiction ranging from Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo to Octavia Butler and Kathy Acker. We watched the films Blade Runner and the still-recent Fight Club, read Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson, and Donna Haraway, and a charmingly subversive time was had by all. In 2005, beginning a new job at a small, private school in a conservative Midwestern suburb, I got the chance to teach the course for a second time. Five years later and a thousand miles over, despite the friendlier faces and warmer weather, I found that the political and academic climate far chillier.

Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle, paired...

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