Reinventing the Teaching Machine: Looking for a Text in an Indian Classroom
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Published:November 2016
How can we reinvent the teaching machine? Can we introduce disciplinary eros into our ways of teaching literature? What happens when transcultural envy is imported into the classroom? How does that change the desire lines, introduce a sense of loss and limit, create problems in the identification of paradigms of understanding, schadenfreude, the pleasure at the expense of someone’s discomfort and unease? So what gain does this unease bring? This chapter introduces a whole new reading of Beckett’s Endgame in an Indian postgraduate classroom with students of varying cultures and linguistic backgrounds, a performative classroom that looks into the play within certain paradigms of Hindu ethics and religious philosophy. Within such a restless aesthetic, a kind of revenge of the aesthetic, Beckett’s Endgame builds a disquiet that beckons transcultural momentum and movement, provocatively dislocating the play from its Eurocentric anchorage by relating it uncannily to a world with which its apparent relation looks contradictious and ambiguous. An elaborate exegesis of the play shows how a classroom must encourage aesthetic and reflective judgments that stay circumscribed by cultural difference and the denationalization of literature. The chapter also demonstrates how effective teaching is about finding surplus and also encountering deficit.