A lively exploration of the manifestations of passion and desire in the teacher-student relationship.
"Whether it is perceived as an instrument of dominance or a mode of revelation, the educational process involves an emotionally suffused link between human beings," the editors begin in this provocative, humane, and engaging collection of essays about the personal dynamics that shape the exchange of knowledge and understanding. The thoughtful teachers, writers, and critics represented here contend that the student as intellectual aspirant and the teacher as unattainable object of desire inevitably engage in a dance, a complex, ritualized relation that, far from being cold and detached, is instead imbued with problematic intimacy and complex passion.
In essays that combine serious scholarship with informal and highly revealing anecdotes, these authors confront issues of pedagogy, gender relationships, mentoring, and academic professionalism. They focus on the ways the strong emotions involved in learning and discovery can create "an extraordinary relationship between the possessor of seemingly arcane knowledge and the one who yearns to possess this seeming wisdom." The paradigm, several essays point out, can be found in literary texts from Villette to Middlemarch to The Turn of the Screw to Educating Rita, but it also occurs in real life on both sides of the desk. By examining topics like lesbian themes in literature, student objections to discussing sexuality in texts, the need for reform of pedagogical discourse, and the politics of instruction, these 13 essays offer a range of responses that recognize -- and celebrate -- the process of teaching as an act of joint creation and reinvention.
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Regina Barreca is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her books include Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales (1993) and her edited volumes include The Penguin Book of Women's Humor (1996) and Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (UPNE, 1994). Deborah Denenholz Morse is Associate Professor of English, College of William and Mary, and author of Women in Trollope's Palliser Novels (1987).
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