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INTRODUCTION Mary TEACHING LITERATURE, I often get the complaint from undergraduates, “I just can’t relate to this.” Conversely, they say, “I really liked this because I could relate.” How ordinary, unsophisticated, sophomoric, moronic is this idea that that which is familiar is only that to which I can relate. Something in the equation is so not postmodern. What the relating is about, of course, is usually heteronormativity, Eurocentrism, phallologism, or any other “ism” of any established norm that prevents mind travel. And so I try to introduce texts in the curriculum I design for my literature students with the explicit purpose of jolting complacency and that other “cy” that undergraduates come girded with: normalcy. I continue to be shocked, however, when my art students in a required English elective want fiction to end happily, or, if not, to tie up loose ends. I have to remind myself that today’s art is, more often than not, sequential design, a form of art that requires linearity. Complications are introduced in my students’ story boards for plot development and thrill: emotions that appeal to the satisfaction of reason’s urgings. But I ask, with Derrida, “Is the reason for reason rational?” (1983, p. 9). Art that appeals to reason’s satisfaction with logic, conclusion, and relation is not doing the work that curriculum should be doing. If curriculum is to heed Bill Pinar’s challenge to be a “complicated conversation” (1995, p. 848), then curriculum workers should, at the very least, unseat the ready expectations that students bring to a text. Take them for a ride. Unmoor the anchor. Set sail. 27 TWO Curriculum The problem my students have with good (i.e., complicated) literature is that it refuses their goad. That is, the texts I teach introduce situations that require students to examine biases, walk in the shoes of others, become uncomfortable, get lost, throw away the guide, forego google. Curriculum that fights the “gentle coercions toward normalization” (Gough, 2003, p. 42) meet resistance from those who view art as standpoint theory. If resisters understand clearly a particular point of view, they can say with confidence that they either relate or do not relate with the text. But if curriculum does its job, all texts should work toward introducing contradictory standpoints that defy easy classification. All texts should dispel the tooeasy assumption that there is such a thing as a norm, an ending, a relation to the privilege that grounds “ism” in secure locations. Curriculum should, as Marla Morris (2003) puts it, be undecidable. This casting off from the sure land of normalcy will put students inside the flow of currere, perhaps even encourage an “autobiographics of alterity” (Pinar, 2002, p. 43) instead of relationism. Delese encounters the relation issue with her medical students. Students are supposed to relate to a wide variety of patients from a diverse set of backgrounds. Medical curriculum explicitly sets “competency” as its goal, defining competency as respect for alterity by a series of other-directed knowledges. But while becoming competent is the expressed goal, with neutrality and rationality as the pathways to that goal, nothing in the training of doctors addresses how medical students are supposed to set aside, ignore, or overcome their individual biases when treating people from other cultures . Delese finds that the lack of critical analysis in medical curriculum has allowed the term “competency” to be a mask that can too easily serve as a cover for disrespect. Martha sees the normalizing power of curriculum as downright abusive to the individuality of students. The “No Child Left Behind” doctrine—far from encouraging an autobiographics, or alterity—is a testing movement that clamps down, not opens out. We should ask, with Martha, testing for what? A curriculum that is grounded in theories of Western rationality only is a curriculum that is afraid of possibility for otherness. I propose what could be called a curriculum of hyphens, by offering the figure of the Harlequin as metaphor. Could this be the possibility Martha seeks? With his multicolored patches and antic behaviors, the Harlequin is a single figure whose essence is multiplicity, a mixture of genders, nationalities, and reactions. He/she/it has astounded audiences since medieval times, occurring most recently in the philosophy of Michel Serres. It is time curriculum take notice of what politics, history, and literature celebrate in the Harlequin. I suggest that the Harlequin’s archetypal importance can prod life into the dead ideas that tend to keep curriculum from following...

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