Knots in a Scandal: Educational Desire, Institutional Fantasy, and the Revenge of the Real in Contemporary Film

• In Event: Roundtable Session 58
  In Roundtable Session: Sex, Scandal, and Pop Culture: Considering Technology in Curriculum Theory

Abstract

From Socrates to Jean Brodie, we have become accustomed to teachers serving as placeholders for desire in our cultural imaginary forms. Evidenced by recent scholarship on teachers in film, however, as well as by the film Notes on a Scandal, the way we ought to feel about teachers in transgressive roles, acting out the fantasies that shadow desire and break from social norms, is less clear. This paper employs Lacanian scholarship on teacher and student desires, the fantasy of the subject who knows, and the transgressive bliss of jouissance in analyzing Notes on a Scandal in relation to the tradition of school films to which it is indebted and toward an understanding of the cultural attitudes that shape teaching.

Authors

• James Stillwaggon, Iona College

• David F. Jelinek, The Collegiate School