Katherine Parrish

I decided to take an online course from The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for the October/November session this year. If I could clone myself, I would take three of their courses for every session. They’re short (four weeks) and intensive (3 hr sessions, with some serious required reading) and no tests or certificates. Just learning for learning’s sake. The instructors, in my experience, have not only had deep and extensive knowledge of the material, but also been really amazing pedagogues. Maybe it’s because of the price of the courses or the intellectual/academic framing of the course descriptions, or because taking these courses doesn’t lead to any kind of accreditation- for whatever reason, I’ve found the other students in the BISR courses to be insightful and interesting and admirably able to engage in potentially fraught discussions with sensitivity and respect. I feel like I’ve learned as much from them as from the instructors.

I have just completed the second week of the course entitled Censorship: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. I chose this course not just because I thought it really relevant to our present moment, or because of the experiences of my students, or my own experiences with internal and external censorship. The novel I have selected from the four options for my Grade 10 students is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which is set during the Cultural Revolution in China. The main protagonists are two 16 year old boys whose parents, because they were among the professional class and therefore “bourgeois,” were publicly humiliated and punished. The boys were sent to a small country village for re-education. But, as fate would have it, they found a suitcase that contained an illicit trove of Western novels. And everything changed.

The readings for the course are fascinating, and I’m delighting so much as I read them, and observe how free I am to agree or challenge or follow a question or train of thought inspired by a sentence or paragraph. And how much I love encountering potent words whose meaning has been hitherto unknown to me.

Two things I didn’t anticipate about the course from its description that have made my choice feel more serendipitous.

1) The instructor is really interested in the literary aesthetics of the censored text- what difference it makes when censored content in a text is blacked out, whited out, replaced with dots or ellipses, etc.

2) He has included, as part of the course, two games/ works of interactive fiction that both engage with the ideas and themes of censorship, and perform it.

When I discovered this, I was, as any of you who know me, VERY F______ EXCITED.
I’ve been playing Blackbar this week, torn between wanting to solve the puzzles on my own, and wanting to read/play through the game so that I could talk about it meaningfully in the class. Of course, I’ve found a walk-through. And, in the context of this week’s readings, especially “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Leo Strauss, using the walk-through, while illicit, (which is its own kind of censorship), felt like an interesting way to proceed through a censored text, because it relied on a communal readership.

The thinking part of me is humming and inspired and challenged!
And I’m so pumped!