The Erotics of Instruction


A ... provocative, humane, and engaging collection of essays about the personal dynamics that shape the exchange of knowledge. The 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 complex, ritualized relation that, far from being cold and detached, is instead imbued with problematic intimacy and complex passion. 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 thirteen essays offer a range of responses that recognize-- and celebrate--the process of teaching as an act of joint creation and reinvention.