Implication by Indirection

• In Event: Complacency Unsettled: Sebaldian Approaches to Injustice

Abstract

Sebald was reputed to wear two watches, one on each wrist: a cheap digital watch, turned face-up, and an analogue one, turned face-down (Williams, 2011). By Sebald’s own admission, the past exerted a greater pull on his time and thought, even as the digital watch may have reminded him of time pressing: the past in, or on, the present. As educational directives (curriculum-as-assessment) pummel us, trying to force education in pre-determined, instrumental directions (Au, 2011; Spector, 2016), I focus on the contribution of Sebald’s indirect approach to pursuing curriculum’s “double-consciousness”: curriculum as critical study of a subject and subjective engagement with it by a learner (Pinar, 2011).
Long drawn to indirectness as method, as an educator I have regularly turned to Sebald’s writings since 2011 in a curriculum course on autobiography in education, while also thinking and writing about Sebald and curriculum since 2009. An indirect approach depends on juxtaposition, often of stories, implicating others’ and one’s own. Juxtaposition remains a main vehicle for subjective reconstruction (currere) in curriculum studies. Madeleine Grumet (1981) depends on it for the “illumination” glimpsed through the cracks when students lie written accounts of educational experiences side by side and critically scrutinize them. Grumet’s narrative approach depends on Pinar’s (1975) four-fold “method of currere” in which multiple regressive-phase (past) and progressive-phase (future-oriented) ‘snapshots’ are studied in relation to one another in analytical and synthetical phases. In Sebald’s nested approach (which has been likened to egg boxes stacked in a crate—Hutchison, 2006), meaning accumulates, ambushing the reader, who cannot help but feel, and feel freighted by, a brooding preoccupation with an invisible yet important subject conveyed through juxtaposed stories told by a self-reflexive narrator who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sebald. Sebald’s texts implicate learners (teachers and students) in “an elaborate detour that travels through once upon a time in order to reach now,” which is Madeleine Grumet’s (2015) description of curriculum as autobiographical text (p. 73).
Michael Rothberg, who studies trauma and representation and who has also written on Sebald, alerts us to the growing importance of the “implicated subject”. In one of his early poems, Sebald wrote about 1944, the year of his birth in Germany as the same year in which Kafka’s sister was deported (and died). Rothberg (2014) explains: “implication draws attention to how we are entwined with and folded into (“im-pli-cated in”) histories and situations that surpass our agency as individual subjects.” The term calls attention to the “complex and uncertain moral and ethical terrain” in which we live (Rothberg, 2013, p. 40). Sebald’s indirect approach provides an important needed exemplar for curriculum studies of what subjective reconstruction entails in engaging learners (students, teachers, scholars) in “the historical arcs that shape our present(s), and the roles we can play in the fight for justice”, to echo this year’s AERA theme. Drawing on narrative, poetry, photographs and film, I will explore the curricular applications and implications of Sebald’s work in unsettling understandings and provoking us to look, see, and think.

Author

• Teresa Jean Strong-Wilson, McGill University