In When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning, Deborah Britzman contends with the difficulty of learning collectively from history, of the precarious difference between repeating and working through. In this post-pandemic era of war, media censorship, digital distraction, social withdrawal, AI-induced indifference at best, psychosis at worst, and mental health crises across the university, this panel considers where and how we can cultivate the capacity to think, divest from narratives of ideality, soften psychical splitting, and parry the immobilizing shocks of contemporary life. Keeping in mind, in addition to Britzman, Hannah Arendt’s conclusion in Origins of Totalitarianism, that fascism and tyranny depend on our inability to turn loneliness into solitude, our contribution considers holistically the role of the humanities in the current milieu. In particular, we reflect on how we hold literary objects in the classroom and what collective learning can be in light of economic, political, environmental, and psychological disaster. This panel brings together three scenes of impasse in the classroom and in literary studies, from a diversity of voices in teacher education, creative writing, literary studies, as well as clinical psychotherapy. We argue that these scenes of friction are fundamental in working against stasis of mind.

The first panelist, Angela Facundo, PhD, RP, discusses the split in literary studies between postcritical reading and the resurgence of critique. Drawing from each side of the debate (Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus, Steven Best on the one hand, and Patricia Stuelke and Bruce Robbins), Facundo formulates a “Postcritical Psychoanalysis as an Interpretive Strategy” when teaching and writing about Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novels posit creative life in impoverished lands. On the heels of a publication in Modern Fiction Studies about working through this critical impasse with a close reading of Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, Facundo provides an initial analysis of Ishiguro’s newer novel, Klara and the Sun. The latter introduces a tension between the fantasy and reality of AI in authoritarian landscapes.

The second panelist, Dr. Denise Handlarski, considers the role of teacher education and the transference of pedagogical practices through the education system as an activist strategy. In her paper, “Insulationist and Insurrectionist Pedagogies: Internal and External Resistances,” she acknowledges that underscoring teacher education are existential questions: how do we prepare students for their future when the future is so uncertain? What is education for in times of tyranny? As a teacher educator, Handlarski’s role is to insulate against the worst of authoritarian governments, oppressive education policies and systems, and a rise in the expression of hate. She asks how pedagogy can facilitate this engagement at scale. Considering both what we teach and how we teach it, Handlarski argues that good-enough educators provide insulation, cushioning, a barrier between the worst of the world and the best of each student. Simultaneously, she fosters resistance to conformity, uniformity, and the enormity of challenges for facing students. This two-directional work – internal and external – a focus on the self in relation to the world, is informed by approaches to systems of grading, the use of AI, and climate conversations in classrooms. This session will address how insulation and insurrection are two sides of the same protective/resistive coin.

Our third panelist, Dr. Samantha Bernstein, will present “Fantasy as Reality: Creative Writing and the Ethics of Imagination.” As Shelley famously asserts in the Defence of Poetry “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” Reading this text in Bernstein’s third-year Poetry Workshop following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the class became an opportunity to discuss the ways in which imagination works both to resist and to engender totalizing ideologies. In this moment, polarized belief systems and increasing efforts to deny the experiences of marginalized groups, as well as the homogenizing and fantastical worldviews perpetuated by AIs, ask us to consider the role of imagination in generating the real. She argues that authoritarianism relies upon the dissemination and espousal as truth of fables of good and evil. The ascendant far right coheres through narrative and exegetical practices which are deeply meaningful and reified to those who adopt them but do not accord with events in the material world. Fascistic endeavours require invented narratives – but so too do efforts towards more just societies, which envision and work to enact radically new futures. Discussing pedagogical approaches to Shelley’s Defence and writing by Hanif Abdurraquib, Joshua Bennett, and Dennis Saddleman, this paper considers Creative Writing classrooms as loci of personal and collective imagination that can help us understand and resist dangerous fabrications and totalizing discourses.