Brady, Alison;
(2024)
Experimental Literature and Post-Critique: Reflections on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Journal of Philosophy of Education
, 58
(6)
pp. 973-995.
10.1093/jopedu/qhae082.
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Abstract
In this article, I begin with Felski and Sedgwick’s diagnosis of the overabundance of critique in education, connecting this to Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski’s calls for a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. Rather than offering a critique of critique, I aim to think differently about the ‘uses’ of reading, taking my cue from post-critical scholarship as well as from Calvino’s experimental novel, Invisible Cities. First, I discuss how critique and post-critique differ in their orientations when engaging with a text. I argue that, instead of ‘shutting down’ a text to point to its latent assumptions, post-critique opens the text up to the world by cultivating new perceptual and imaginative dimensions in our experience. This partly involves the reader being oriented towards what is worth preserving in a text—an approach that is also central to post-critical pedagogy. Second, I reflect on my own failures with respect to putting a post-critical analysis into words, since it seems that in the context of academic writing, it is difficult to avoid critique. Given this, I argue that it is more fruitful to explore three post-critical pedagogical gestures in Invisible Cities: namely, its tensions (which encourage and resist linear explanations), its fundamental but playful ambiguity (which invites both puzzlement and curiosity), and its transformative potential in relation to the everyday understandings of the cities we inhabit. These gestures encourage readers to surrender themselves to the text in a mood characterized by enchantment rather than suspicion and demonstrate to the educative potential of literature beyond critique.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Experimental Literature and Post-Critique: Reflections on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/jopedu/qhae082 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhae082 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Critique, Post-Critique, Calvino, (Experimental) Literature, Philosophy of Education |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10183144 |
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