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[ 6 ] dead authors can’t define art he giant blackboard in Critical Inquiry class is rarely used, but it’s there when Amy Eisner needs it. Eisner is a poet and English professor. She turns to the blackboard to start her twenty students on an adventure in “critical thinking,” what she will also call “the young artist as an intellectual.” With a smooth and deft hand, Eisner moves the stick of white chalk on its way, her writing crisp and clear. “Samuel Johnson is indignant.”1 How many questions, Eisner asks her students, can arise out of a simple sentence like this? “Why is he indignant?” comes one quick reply. With this, the students begin to list the ways. Who says he’s indignant ? Indeed, who the heck is Samuel Johnson? A half hour later, Eisner’s students realize that this is the nature of their course, required of every freshman. They will spend a semester of “close reading” of both literature and art. Close reading is all the rage in modern literature, also akin to such approaches as “critical thinking,” postmodern analysis, or “deconstruction” of literature. What they share is the desire to analyze something deeply. At an art school, that something will be both literature and visual art, making Critical Inquiry an integral part of the Foundation Year. Harvard trained, and now with two young children, Eisner is a lively teacher, engaging her students with an easy smile and expressive eyes. “If, by the end of the year, they accept that literature is art, that’s great,” she says. Eisner is the kind of teacher who hands out poetry journals to the students as a gift. “What Critical Inquiry tries to do is to make sure the students have the entire world of culture available to them for their art.”2 At mica, making culture available to art students is the mission of the liberal arts wing of the school.3 That wing has been led by poetry and English professors for the past thirty years, and for good reason. Literature is the world of imagination and fantasy, unimpeded by physics, politics, law, T [ 92 ] f o u n d a t i o n s economics—or conventional morals. As students will learn, in the postmodern milieu that dominates college humanities everywhere, art is not just an object. Now art is treated as a “text,” which is a distinctly literary approach to reality. Like the Elements course, Critical Inquiry with Eisner will be a kind of home room for the twenty students. For all the freshmen at mica, their Elements and Critical Inquiry courses are thus “linked,” part of the unified Foundation Year experience. Critical Inquiry is fairly rigorous. It requires a good deal of reading and writing. The students must also produce artwork for class; granted, rather quickly done artwork, very often lastminute -late-at-night artwork, and it will show. Eisner knows the rhythms of such a class as this. Her goal is to get the students speaking, engaging each other, espousing opinions, all of which means that she stands back. However, if the students are dead in the water—and this is a 9:00 a.m. class—she has to put a fire to their feet. To ignite that fire each week, Eisner has some help. At mica, Critical Inquiry has a standard textbook, Critical Theory Today, a dense but edgy textbook, to be sure. It’s basically about literature. However, the class applies its lessons to artwork as much as possible. For example, one day the students come upon a literary idea present in the textbook, the idea of “the death of the author,” coined by the French cultural critic Roland Barthes in 1967. Soon they will find out that this morbid death watch not only has to do with the “author,” but perhaps with the “artist” as well. According to Critical Theory Today, in the past, students of literature studied the author’s life and motives to understand a novel or other kinds of artwork. Not any more, says the textbook: “We focus, instead, on the reader; on the ideological , rhetorical, or aesthetic structure of the text; or on the culture in which the text was produced, usually without reference to the author. So, for all intents and purposes, the author is ‘dead.’”4 The goal of the textbook, Critical Theory Today, is the same at any contemporary college humanities department. Teachers use it to introduce students to how eleven different...

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