5/22/2023 0 Comments Ben lerner atocha![]() ![]() We were all, it was soon evident, not receiving knowledge from a teacher but collectively thinking through strategies to process the culture around us, one where the shouts of spill-over protestors from Occupy Wall Street and those fighting tuition increases in the CUNY system echoed through our windows. We did not, as in other classes, catalogue literary epochs like distant names on a map, but asked how national, social and personal crises inflected literary innovations within the tradition. That was what made his class so captivating to a young writer like myself: he grounded the discussion with stakes rooted in our lived world. Although Hurricane Irene (category 3) was set to make landfall in a week, the crisis, Ben made clear, was language. ![]() ![]() Ben spoke to us as if we were his peers, a portion of the campus citizenry assembled to assess a crisis ahead of us-not his subordinate charges. Ten minutes into our first class I flipped open my schedule to double check that I had not, in fact, accidently stepped into a graduate course. I first encountered Ben Lerner as an undergraduate in one of his poetry workshops at Brooklyn College. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |