Composition and Cornel West

I just finished the text and am floating on a Brother West high.

The interview at the end is outstanding, and I know I'll be on a West kick from it for the rest of the summer. I'm looking at his memoir, Democracy and Race Matters, Prophesy Deliverance!, and Evasion of American Philosophy as texts that I will at least check out, if not read in full. Democracy Matters and Evasion seem like they have the most to say to my work and I want to know more about how West does what he does everyday, and I think that means reading his memoir.

As far as the text goes, I like the fuel that interview gives to the work done in a composition classroom. Coming into the text, that's what I wanted. I want some texts and motivation and philosophy when I step in the class on Monday mornings. The first three chapters and the interview did that for me. Chapters four and five I wanted to be closer to West's ideas and closer to the composition classroom, although they were interesting in their own right.

Did any body find it interesting how West danced around the notion of rhetoric in the interview? It seemed like Gilyard wanted him to speak directly about the traditions of rhetoric and how they affect him, but West has a much broader view, speaking about voice and embodiment, talking about where words are lacking, and talking about the "cerebral song" of academia with its lack of soul (105). West was a fish that couldn't be caught in Gilyrad's net of rhetoric, and they moved on to talk about the classroom where there was much more agreement and excitement.

Teaching here at LMU, high on a bluff over LA and with Hollywood in sight, I was hit hard by what West says with school as this "manicured, deodorized place" that doesn't engage with the world or connect with the tragic (at least in most instances) (109).

West says that deep education has "everything to do with awakening" and that happens through acknowledging the tragic, absurd, and mysterious, and feeling them: "They [students] are part of a whole larger system, too. But that's going to be painful. And the only way that pain is real is when people feel as if those claims are tied to them" (111).

This reminded me of a student coming to class and saying that he and a group of friends at dinner had realized that there was life outside of LMU. They had forgotten in their first semester in college that life existed elsewhere. There was so much to do and think here that they hadn't read the news, or thought of life beyond the bluff. Here, at LMU, the admin privledges social justice and the education of the whole human, but that obviously isn't ingrained or my student wouldn't have come to class this way with all the students agreeing with him.

This made me think of the one moment this year when I really saw LMU engaging with the tragic, and that was in the 20th anniversary of the Jesuit martyrs (november 16, 1989). They dyed the fountain red to represent their blood and they made crosses for each of the martyrs and put those on campus. This felt like a real connection to the tragedy in history and it tied into the United States military empire attacking the Jesuit tradition, and so I think that many students felt it in a real way and they became critical about the history, awakened to the structural violence in our society, and through protests, prayer, and vigils here and at the SOA protest, they acted on new possibilities for the future.

Now, the question always for me is: how do I tie this into the classroom? How do I get students into this critique and into possibilities beyond market ideals?, and how do I do that while justifying my practice to all the stakeholders involved? And, when and if I do this, is it enough? How do I know that that practice in the classroom has importance and relevance once those students hit the streets and life outside the university, down away from the bluff?