Poetics of Alterity

by Soyoung Lee

Published 3 January 2023

Attending to anxieties inherent in teaching and learning, in school and the wider world, Poetics of Alterity’s powerful rationale for the curriculum provides nothing less than a new grounding for the humanities.

 

  • Shows how education today is commonly oriented towards citizenship and skills for life, with aims of happiness and wellbeing but this benign image harbours surreptitious forms of control, which ultimately undermine the goods it professes to safeguard and stifles education’s very purpose
  • Explores how the release from these constrictions can be found by attending to elements of experience that seem to escape our grip, from challenging aspects of our moral lives to struggles over practicalities of curriculum content
  • The more robust, more outward-turning orientation the author demonstrates emphasises engagement with subject-matter, with problems and forms of narrative, that defy pre-determined formulations and categories
  • The author’s dialogue with Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Celan shows how acknowledgement of the other must condition not only practices of teaching and learning but practicalities of our social and political lives