David Lewkowich

The problem of endings in teacher education: interpreting narratives of fictional adolescence

Abstract This article explores how a reading group of pre-service teachers responded to the endings of three contemporary young adult texts and what such responses may imply about the interpretive preferences of teacher education. Set in the context of a Faculty of Education at a Canadian university, and using the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this article considers the kinds of thoughts that pre-service teachers appear to privilege, and what such privileging – here symbolized through feelings of frustration and satisfaction in the creation of literary meaning – may imply about the structures and desires for authority and certainty in teacher education.

Teacher Education in Memory's Light and Shadow: Autobiographical Reflection and Multimodalities of Remembering and Forgetting

Though we are all inevitably familiar with the everyday effects of forgetting, we generally fail to ask about what its internal movements look like, or how we can talk about what they reveal. Despite its necessity as a structuring process of autobiographical inquiry, forgettings invisible moves are always obscured by that which remains: the typically unquestioned and seemingly permanent products of remembrance. In this article, I think about how we may conceptualize the status of forgetting in the context of teacher education, and how we may encourage preservice teachers to acknowledge the enigmatic and incomplete status of their autobiographical texts. I begin by looking to theories of autobiography, memory and forgetting (with a particular emphasis on teacher education), and I then look closely at a number of psychoanalytic considerations of the mind and its inner workings, which help to conceptualize forgetting and remembering as in a psychically productive, dialectical relationship. I then turn my attention to 2 multimodal, textual examples, which emphasize the problems of representation in relation to remembering and narrative: a collage from Lynda Barrys One! Hundred! Demons!, and an autobiographical comic authored by an undergraduate student in teacher education. In the final section of this article, I argue that thinking about forgetting in relation to autobiographical remembrance can lead to an ethical stance of mutual opacity and shared ignorance in teacher education.

Concealments and Revealments of Metaphor, Love, and Aggression: Psychoanalytic Notes on the Emotional Life of Teacher Education

When educating preservice teachers, I often describe how on certain days the feelings they will have toward their students can be called nothing other than hatred,1 which runs against the assumed obligation in teaching to love at all costs, and to likewise overcome those feelings that may be perceived as antithetical to such a pursuit. For psychoanalytic theory, however (which I reference throughout this article), our emotional lives are structured by an utter, irresolvable ambivalence: “The simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings,” which implies “the coexistence of love and hate” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 26). Though we may hope to hold hate in abeyance and only allow for loving conditions, such states of absolute suspension are simply unachievable; for wherever there is love—and the profession of teaching is certainly filled with love—there is also always the possibility of its opposite. In this article, I explore the symbolization of such ambivalence, interpreting the play of words employed by a group of preservice teachers. Following Taubman (2012), I take up psychoanalytic theory as a way to “work on the border between the socio/cultural and the intrapsychic, [to] explore the mysteries of subjectivity, and [to] illuminate the dreams, desires, ideals, and terrors that shape our understanding of education” (p. 2). Most importantly, however, I turn to the interpretive language of psychoanalysis for the ways it interrupts “education’s dream of mastery” (Britzman, 1998, p. 10), and to help us understand those secret places where the borderlines of conscious intention and unconscious desire are never so easily secured. In my readings of the words of others, I also acknowledge the impossibility and interminability of final interpretations; as Felman (1987) describes, for psychoanalytic theory, there is always an awareness “that the last word . . . has

‘A joy tinged with sadness’: reading comics about adolescence and theorizing nostalgic encounters in teacher education

ABSTRACT In this paper, I discuss the nostalgic encounters that a group of preservice teachers experienced while reading two graphic novels about adolescent life: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer and Lynda Barry’s My Perfect Life. Using the conceptual touchstones of psychoanalytic theory, I pay close attention to the psychic uses (those that deal with unconscious processes) these readers make of nostalgia about adolescence, asking: How do these readers/preservice teachers use their feelings of nostalgia to guide their understandings of adolescent experience? In this exploration, I question how the nostalgic past may help to reveal the latent anxieties of the present. Nostalgia is theorised as a complex, undetermined and ambivalent affective category, where instances of bitter and sweet emotion interact in the various uses that readers make of their memories and imaginings of childhood and adolescence.

The Slippery Simultaneities of Remembering and Forgetting: Memory, Autobiographical Narrative, and the Case of Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance

ABSTRACT Considering the question of how to represent the concealments and disintegrations of forgetting, this article theorizes the inextricable play of memory in Nathalie Sarrautes Enfance, whose fragmented descriptions of childhood experience work to emphasize the problems of representation in relation to narrative acts of autobiographical remembering.

Comics and the structure of childhood feeling: Sublimation and the play of pretending in Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season

ABSTRACT In this paper, I study the narrative structure of comics as a means to describe the ways that indeterminate modes of representation can allow the reader to imagine that which in childhood can never be fully expressed. Analyzing a number of panels from Gilbert Hernandezs graphic novel, Marble Season, I describe a conceptual link between the psychoanalytic idea of sublimation (referencing the theories of Freud, Loewald, and Winnicott), and Raymond Williams’ notion of a “structure of feeling.” In particular, I examine the latency stage of childhood as a time where the challenges of individual development involve a struggle to channel into the social world, in potentially productive ways, the internalizations of lost love. I also explore how the gutter, the space between the panels in comics, may function as a zone of sublimatory reconciliation between the self and the object world, and where, in their interactions with the space in the middle, the reader invariably engages with the structure of childhood feeling as a product of their own reading.