Catastrophe Pedagogy

As writing and language teachers, we recognize the difference immediately; an event has occurred, and a new subject has appeared in the classroom. Increasingly our students struggle to pay attention, to dissociate from their cell phones, to complete work, to show up to class, to formulate their own ideas in long chains of reason. Indeed, in new ways, they are struggling to live and to learn. These are the individuals neuro-philosopher Catherine Malabou calls the "new wounded" - subjects characterized paradoxically by their inability to be wounded, to fail, or to feel. This book explores this emergent catastrophe through empirical, rhetorical, and philosophical analysis. Bringing together Hegelian philosophers Catherine Malabou and Slavoj Žižek, as well as affect theorists from the fields of rhetoric and writing studies, the book argues that contemporary writing pedagogies - including rubrics, scaffolding, and standardized instruction - have made authentic learning's necessary failures insufferable for many students, contributing to widespread disaffection and emotional divestment from education. While arguing that there is no return to earlier forms of student subjectivity, this book will offer pedagogical strategies for writing classrooms - and classrooms that feature writing - to begin addressing this situation.

Edward J. Comstock is Hurst Senior Lecturer in the College Writing Program in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC, where he began teaching in 2006. His research focuses on writing pedagogy and rhetorical theory. Edward’s most recent book Connections Between Neuroscience, Rhetoric, and Writing: A Plastic Pedagogy for the Digital Age (2018), argues that plasticity in contemporary neuroscience compliments, extends, and challenges recent and influential posthuman and new materialist accounts of the relations between rhetoric, affect, and writing pedagogy. Other works explore constructions of power and subjectivity as they relate to writing pedagogy and education more generally