Pulled up Short – Pedagogical Dilemmas in the Middle East

mascettiBy Yaacov Mascetti*

Teaching literature in general is not an easy task – teaching literature in the Middle East is close to impossible. Every year I invest a gargantuan amount of physical (in class I walk around a lot, yell, gesticulate, drink, stand on tables, etc.) and psychological energy to challenge my very bright students at Bar-Ilan University. What I want to do in this piece is to address what motivates me to stand there, year after year, and teach courses in a field that is certainly going through rough times all over the world. This piece is also an acknowledgment to my teacher and friend, Prof. William D. Kolbrener of the Department of English Literature at BIU, and to my father, Paolo Mascetti, who has always been and still is an example of intellectual engagement and omnivorous curiosity. Now that I’ve got the oedipal stuff out, I can get to the point…

When I came back in 2004 from my post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, I applied to positions in Israel, and as part of the material requested by the various deans of Humanities, I was asked to put together what is commonly known as a “Teaching Statement.” This of course is not a mere formality – it is a very important part of the academic profession and, with all due respect to the quantity and quality of research we produce throughout our careers, probably the most important aspect due to the influence one can have on other people. What one is required to write is a short two to three page document on the pillars of his or her teaching methods, a presentation of one’s pedagogical tools. So, allow me to reiterate the question: why on earth would a mentally healthy person want to teach literature at all, and more so teach it in the Middle East?

Literature, in the utilitarian paradigm we live in, and against the background of a globalized market in which the useful survives and the useless doesn’t, is supposedly doomed to wither away together with its nostalgic supporters and staunch consumers. But this anxiety over the role of literature (and maybe also of words in general) in the lives of human beings has always been a challenge for authors, and then later for researchers like myself. Politically and philosophically, people who deal with words and not with things have always been problematic – as Nuccio Ordine said in an interview to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, schools and universities must not provide a service to customers, but produce thinking citizens and, possibly, heretics, people who are capable of choosing, those who unhinge the passiveness of socially imposed mind-sets by means of words. The dangers of intellectually empowered individuals are obvious, and Western tradition has produced innumerable expressions of anxiety with regard to the work and thought of these literates, these word-adoring heretics: we may, in a sense, even come to understand Plato’s definitive refusal to accept these poets in his utopic republic, stating that they are of no use to the proper formation of the philosopher king. For Plato the anxiety was due to the fact that most poetry deals with mimesis, with representing the world, which is, in and of itself, a copy of the ideas. Poetry as the copy of the copy was unnecessary.

The dismissal of literature is as old as the dichotomy between essence and accident, between truth and appearance, and pretty much corresponds today with the division of knowledge into useful and useless. Shakespeare’s Hamlet hides for five interminable acts behind what he describes as “words, words, words,” trying to fish out truth from a sea of confusion and lies, using the “bait of falsehood” to take “this carp of truth.” The dichotomy between word and thing is reassuring, and it helps us know and keep under control a world which would otherwise be chaotic and out of control. Truth thus lies, as Francis Bacon put it in the seventeenth century, hidden in the “inner chamber of nature,” and all we have to do is develop the scientific means to aggressively violate this secrecy and extract that truth. Against this background, literature has little or nothing to contribute to the world.

So yes, I am a useless member of society, in the sense that I do not produce anything specific. I am useless and proud of being so. Western education is more and more conceived as part of the industrial assembly line of new technocrats, individuals with a clear-cut professional preparation, a very specific niche within the larger picture of global economy. This industrial culture sacrifices the traditional sanctity of “qualitas” in the name of a market-based “quantitas” – we are educated and continue to educate our children to yearn for more of the world’s thingness, and to care less for the quality of the things / ideas acquired. Schools and universities are slowly and painfully turning into the place where homogeneity is not merely encouraged, but enforced. This process has not made the world a better place, but has actually turned truth-claims into justifiable elements of religious and political discourses. What if we could change this? What if there were an alternative way to relate to education, to people, to the formation of generations of new citizens?

Literature may have, I think, a central role in the formation of an alternative mindset, in the definition of a different reality. Pedagogy is of critical importance within the framework of the undermining of this technocratic assembly line – teaching differently, teaching different material may, ultimately force us to see reality in a different way. And this is, needless to say, of critical importance for the Israeli society and its role within the Middle East. Literary texts can be used as the means by which students can be brought into a process of self-questioning that, when successful, culminates in what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls “being pulled up short.” In Gadamer’s definition, a person is pulled up short when events that he neither wants nor can foresee and to which he believes he is immune, interrupt his life and challenge his self-understanding in ways that are painful, and to understand that they come to transform, revolutionize. John Milton wrote in 1644:

Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compar’d in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie.

His use of the term heretic here is not etymological at all, but that’s beyond the point. And the point is that knowledge is like water – it must move, flow, change location. When it does not, it sickens, it turns into a locus of unhealthy conceptions, into the swamp-like static certainty of foundationalism. Pulling up short oneself and others is the healthy moment in which this state of semi-consciousness is vigorously turned into a whirlpool of thoughts, questions, doubts and new ideas. So doing this with literature in a class is a bit like encouraging students to knock down and rebuild their own selves, to see their certainties and foundations fall apart, and then to encourage them to rebuild them, and then have them tear everything apart, over and over again.

Getting lost cognitively, losing control of one’s fixed points, and finding that our grip on reality was actually quite slippery: these some of the aspects that characterize what is probably one of the scariest things a persona can experience. And yes, I am clearly placing myself within the category of those who think that this chaotic confusion and almost traumatic change of perspectives is a positive thing. Now, because of the characteristic of the local school program and pedagogical skills, Israeli students have always seemed to me rather prone to thinking of education as a matter of assimilating given facts and truths. In fact, two of my three children are presently within the Israeli educational system, and it is obvious to me that they are encouraged to think in terms of accomplishments, results, and movement from absence of knowledge to excellence. Those who eventually reach my classes find it particularly difficult to imagine what being pulled up short entails, or why this experience might be worthwhile or even a prerequisite to becoming educated. My dear students, teaching is not building, but quite on the opposite undermining, deconstructing your certainties in order to show you the overwhelming complexity of things, so that you may see your reality from a different perspective.

Literature classes should be more communities of inquiry than groups of note-taking listeners, a sub-social milieu in which students are made part of an ongoing scholarly discussion on literary texts, and in which the “success” of the classes is accompanied by the radical complication of reality and the challenging of accepted pre-judgments. This pedagogical method employs literary texts as the means to bring the students into a process of self-questioning. Given that educational aims typically stress the importance of learning to regulate oneself and one’s thinking, it may be difficult to imagine what “being pulled up short” entails, or what this experience might suggest for teaching and learning. But as Gadamer argues, the way in which one sees the world and what one does within it is bound up with who one is and where one is headed. This process of ongoing moral negotiation with oneself is defined as one of “application or self-understanding.” In his words: “all such understanding [of the world] is ultimately self-understanding.” Every case in which a person understands, an act of self-understanding is performed, in which the individual projects himself upon his possibilities. My work as a teacher is to use a set of Renaissance texts in order to pull up short a closed community of students in a class, bringing them to experience the difference between each observing individual and the world he inhabits: the moment is cathartic, and takes place whenever assumptions, expectations, and desires fail to materialize, are thwarted, or reversed. Such disappointments of expectation, which Gadamer originally defined in relation to the reading of texts, can lead to a more significant pedagogical experience, pushing students to acknowledge complexity, and to relinquish foundational beliefs. Being pulled up short disrupts self-inflation, uncovers the comfort of false pride, the illusion of invincibility, or the exaggerated, though natural, desire for control.

This Gadamerian moment, in which students are pulled up short by the teacher, and lose their beliefs, allows the lecturer to bring his students to a humbling acknowledgment of fallibility, to see their condition as a frail and contingent one. Through careful, powerful and entertaining sessions of close-reading and in-class discussion of Shakespearean plays, metaphysical poetry, Renaissance masterpieces and other works published throughout the seventeenth century, what I try to do (not always successfully I must admit…) is to create the conditions for dialogue and “common knowledge,” leading to a realization that ‘finitude’, as Gadamer says, is the inescapable condition of being human. The unethical and aggressive denial of human limitation, motivates what Roberto Calasso has called the efforts to “convince [oneself]… of the importance of what [one does, and] stops at nothing.” Teaching literature in what is at once an interesting, constructive and destabilizing way to bring students to a blurred acceptance of finitude, and to accept that “every gain in self-understanding entails loss.”

An anecdotal account of what it means to teach literature in the Middle East with this Gadamerian pedagogical method is at this point necessary. In 2006 the English department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem invited me to teach a semester-long course on selected plays by William Shakespeare. The objective was rather ambitious: five plays in 28 classes, including the two fundamental tragedies of King Lear and Hamlet. The difficulty was obvious: text over time, times boredom squared. What wasn’t obvious or given for granted was the extremely variegated nature of the student body at Hebrew U, a representative cross-section of Israeli society. The first day of classes I read out names to take attendance: the groups sitting in front of me was composed of Mahmud, Venus, Ilya, Dima, Amir and Merav and others – there were Jewish Russians, Non-Jewish Russians, Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, Israelis before and after the army, religious and secular, and some very young Americans from a one-year-program. What I had in one class was the country’s variety, and I immediately began to wonder what I could do to bridge the abyssal cultural differences and to get some work done. When you live in Israel, where there is still military administration in some parts of Trans-Jordan, where the Six-Day War has not yet ended, where the strife between Jews and Arabs is a daily reality, where there is much strife between the different sub-groups within the Israeli Jewish society, anything, and I mean anything, could trigger dispute, arguments and animosity. Dispute was not what I wanted: dialogue and constructive discussion on literary texts was the healthier alternative I aimed for. Upon the interpretation of canonical texts of English literature students could understand how the latter can be relevant to their lives.

Hamlet was the tragedy I used to initiate the pulling up short of my students and the chipping of their own socially-informed truth claims. The play has a disruptive effect upon the students, who are forced to inquire on “what is wrong in the State.” In a way one could argue that Hamlet himself is a man in a perpetual “pulled up short” state of mind and being. From the very first scene of the play, the audience (readers / students) is left naked, hopeless, divested, in a state where nothing is acquired, nothing is grasped or objectified in its essence, and in which everything is taken away. In Hamlet’s “disjointed” state, verbal expression of thoughts is at best but a senseless mound of “words, words, words,” where the semantics of woe become but “trappings,” the clothing “suit” which barely refers to the truth of one’s feelings. Hamlet knows not “seeming,” he knows not the mechanisms of representation because he is displaced, he is lost in a void of sorrow and skepticism where nothing can “denote him truly.” Every time I teach the first two scenes of Hamlet’s first act, I find myself going into tirades on how we are all trapped in a prison-house of language, and on how the truth of reality as we know it is really the result of a mechanism of signification and interpretation in which we are all forced to operate, and of which we are the offspring. Hamlet, like his father’s ghost, is a displaced individual, displaced into a purgatory of doubts, and is presented to the audience as a disturbingly deforming mirror that reflects reality back at us not as it is, but as Hamlet sees it – the resulting image unnerves the viewer, undermines the tranquil perception of things as we knew them, and ultimately forces us to see things from his displaced perspective. Hamlet senses at first, and gradually understands, that events are always “disjoint[ed]” and “out of frame.” All is not well, even when we convince ourselves that it is.


As my students cut their teeth with the expressional complexities of Shakespearean theater, they began to realize how one may describe a univocal quality or truth from two different perspectives at once. Class discussions then naturally spring out of this displacement and pull in everyone, regardless of how much he or she served in the army, if he or she were in combat units, from which Arab village one comes from, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. By the time students are pulled up short by Hamlet, the “uses of this world” seem to them “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.” And as our world-view is frustrated, things are no longer perceived objectively but solely from the perspective of an inescapable subjectivism, what Shakespeare calls the “the mind’s eye”: caught in solipsism, and in a state of fertile confusion, all one can do is “hold” his or her tongue, and with silent humility re-interpret reality. The glove is “distracted,” love and loyalty are nothing but “seeming virtues,” and brothers are but “adulterate beasts.” What I ask my students at this point in the discussion is: whose fault is it? Why are we forced to see things this way? And why did we not see it coming? The answer is simple and is provided by the play’s text: just like Hamlet’s father when poisoned by his brother, we too were sleeping, slumbering in a state of apparent cognitive tranquility and certainty, resting on the intoxicating calm of false-pride. But it is now too late. All we can do in this displaced state is to acknowledge the fact that we are lost, and as such we are called to show some humility and empathy with the suffering of our fellow humans. For, to use the words of the prince of Denmark, it is not only clear that “one may smile, smile and smile and be a villain,” but can also know, know and still be a lost individual.

To be pulled up short means, to conclude, to find oneself thrust into a state of liminality, in which no truth is true in and of itself, and where all of our actions, once comfortably clear and definite, become blurred and fuzzy (to use Rorty’s words), the outcome of an “antic disposition.” In this state, no cultural difference has any meaning in and of itself: no past, no present. No violence can come from an individual who is not a persona, but a ghost, wandering in void and perpetually doomed to force meaning out of an existence he or she is never part of. Once we acknowledge this state of being, we may begin, from a more unstable though very fertile meta-position, to build a society where differences are not obstacles but enrichments; where weakness is not a defect, but a condition of displacement; and where the Other is, ultimately, he who will place before our eyes a mirror, and show us our most hidden spots, things we are unwilling or simply unable to see.

*Ph.D., Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University