A course’s reading list is the skeleton of a semester’s body of thought, the inventory that you, as a professor, write up for the departmental Web site and the schedule of courses that lists the goods.
Despite the obvious utility of fixed reading lists, we should jettison them when possible. I know that may sound shocking, but for several years now, I’ve been conducting an informal experiment using a flexible, investigatory reading list. The results have been salutary at the least and liberating at best.
Of course, there are many courses for which this idea is not possible—introductions to accounting and economics, for example; courses that cover specific bodies of knowledge; and courses for which your department has assigned a reading list. And if you are a highly surveilled, untenured teacher, this is probably not a practical idea.
Those cautions aside, why would any scholar want to leave the comfortable and predictable protection of a required-reading list to strike out into an open sea of uncertainty? There are advantages to reading lists. Both you and the students know exactly what you are getting into. Ambitious or compulsive students can read ahead. You can order the books in advance from the university bookstore with some reasonable expectation that the books will be there when the semester starts. The pitch, roll, and yaw of the course is predetermined so that there will be steady sailing along the way.
But you lose much more than you gain. If you believe, as I do, that education is a collaborative exploration of ideas, you’ve immediately restricted the class’s ability to explore a subject together. You’ve determined the course in advance, so students will not be able to make any meaningful contributions to its direction. If you stumble onto an interesting detour in your thinking, you might be able to veer off for a while, but the inexorable pull of the fixed list’s itinerary will ineluctably drive you on.
I like to think of classes without fixed reading lists as relaxed laboratories for the generation of ideas. The flexible professor can shape the environment to produce new thoughts and ideas, while the nervous professor must lock down that process so that outcomes are fixed and expected. With a flexible reading list, the class is free to follow whatever byways come up in classroom conversations.
In a graduate course I taught this past spring, on how Foucault and others’ concept of biopower affects identity, I began with a few books I think of as theoretical anchors—in this case, the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Foucault. I told the students that we had about a month’s worth of reading, and after that we would see where things went. Most of them seemed OK with that, but one student was perturbed. He wanted a specific itinerary, and I was giving him only the airport location and takeoff time. I was concerned about him and didn’t want him to feel lost, but I asked him to bear with me.
When you design a course, you presume a certain lack of knowledge on the part of students and you aim to fill them with what you think they need to know. But what happens when you discover, as the course progresses, that students in this particular class already have that knowledge base? The problem with a fixed reading list is that it doesn’t allow for adjustments. It’s a Procrustean bed that has to stretch those who are short of knowledge and truncate those who know too much. In other words, reading lists disregard what is going on in the students’ minds and ensure that everyone marches lock step through the syllabus.
Take this situation that frequently happened in my graduate class: We had finished up our initial readings. The nervous student I mentioned earlier suggested that we read Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. I initially hadn’t included that book because it’s long and I’m not a huge fan of it. But we decided to read it, and I was glad we did because it amplified and clarified the works we’d read earlier. I even got some ideas from reading it this time that made me like the book better.
That’s how flexible reading lists duplicate one of the things I like best about doing research. Sometimes when I’m working on a project and I’ve gone to a library shelf to find a particular book, I’ll see to the left or right of it one that I’m unfamiliar with. I’ll take them both back to my desk, and, after reading the unexpected one, I’m led down a new path of discovery I had no idea I was going to follow. I’ve written entire books based on such serendipitous moments. Why should I remove that kind of serendipity from the intellectual lives of my students?
Because of the interests of my students, this particular class went in a direction I could not have predicted. I didn’t intend to do a lot of reading about gender and sexuality, for example, but the subject came up repeatedly, so we decided to read about it. I happened to have just met the queer theorist Jasbir Puar and to have read a few of her articles on my own, and, coincidentally, one of the students in the class was reading her book. So I decided to have the class read some of her work as well.
One of the reasons we have fixed reading lists is that in the predigital era, books had to be ordered in advance. But given the new world of e-books, online publications, and next-day book deliveries, we are freed from the dull hand of tradition. If you are really daring, you might even try teaching your class using only digital material. I did that last year, asking my students to use, if they could, an e-reader. I made up a reading list in which, if students chose to buy paperbacks, they would end up spending the same amount of money as they would buying an e-reader and downloading the books I had selected.
That format allowed many impromptu changes in the reading list. It also allowed us to look at a poem or a short story right at the moment in class when it occurred to me to refer to that work. Another benefit was that visual material, not included in the course packet or reading list, could be called up at the mention of a specific reference. For example, one day, in an introductory undergrad course, we read Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” and I mentioned the painter J.M.W. Turner and how his view of the sea might match Arnold’s. Most of the students were unfamiliar with Turner, but in a moment they were looking at one of his paintings on the Tate’s Web site and discussing Arnold’s “long line of spray/Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land.”
On the Internet, one link leads to another. You look up Turner, say, on Wikipedia. That site leads you to the National Gallery of Art, which in turn leads you to Romanticism, which in turn takes you to Delacroix, and thus to Rubens, who isn’t a Romantic but whose use of flesh, light, and color influenced that movement. That little stroll was unpredictable, but a fruitful exercise in intellectual curiosity. In the past, we’ve operated with a very different model, conditioned not by the Internet and the intellectual meandering it allows but by a kind of linear thinking reflected by the consecutiveness that we find on the printed page. The fixed reading list is the icon of that linearity.
That linear model served us well, and continues to serve us, but we are now presented with a more three-dimensional model that reaches through time and space in unpredictable and valuable ways. The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called that kind of knowledge “rhizomatic,” after a type of plant. A rhizome, such as a potato, reproduces by sending out underground shoots that form another plant, which in turn does the same thing, producing a network of roots. Deleuze and Guattari contrast that to the “arboreal” model, in which a single set of roots produces a single tree, with all its branches connected to one trunk. Deleuze and Guattari see the arboreal model as the older model of knowing, hierarchical and organized, such as strict taxonomies of organisms. They see the rhizomatic as a newer, more effective scheme for organizing knowledge.
Deleuze and Guattari came up with this concept before the rise of the Internet, but Hardt and Negri built on their idea to describe the world of knowledge modeled on the Internet. They claim that the very nature of society has changed from an industrial model, characterized by the assembly line, to an informational model, characterized by networks and interconnectivity. Through it, the older idea of linearity or taxonomies is made much more supple. Flexible reading lists are a way to veer off from an industrial model of teaching to a knowledge-surfing of networks.
I’m not advocating a complete rethinking of our educational strategy based on these theories, but I am suggesting flexible reading lists as a temporary, tactical measure to see if courses can run smoothly and deeply if they are not linear.
By the end of the semester, I was pleased to see that my experimental class did not land where I thought it might. We ended up reading some novels, seeing some films, even attending a lecture—none of which I had foreseen. Serendipity and design worked together to bring us new knowledge, attained, like all good knowledge, by discovery rather than by simple exposition.
