| The rampant eruption of political agendas in our classrooms and the weight of "political correctness" on our private lives suggests the need to adopt an egalitarian pedagogy in which writers confront but do not censor one another's political positions.; While politics has become academically fashionable, theoretical interest has turned via post-structuralism to the subject, the self-conscious agent. While educators may readily defend subjectivity for its dialectic potential or effect, in which case subjectivity is not dismissed out of hand, the issue of subjectivity becomes just another topic on the syllabus when it should be regarded as the critical difference between dialectics and dogma, of which language is merely a sign.; The theory and attending practice of this project introduces writing exercises modeled after the reductio arguments of classic eleatic sophistry in concert with the paradox of Zen Buddhist koan riddles. This project therefore merges occidental sophistry and oriental "emptiness" for the purpose of enhancing the writer's awareness of the reflective, subjectively driven process called critical thinking. I have designed a series of writing exercises, called obstacles, in the spirit of those implemented by Rinzai Zen Patriarchs and in light of the sophistry which underlies our interest in the West in the socratic method of "drawing out" the student through a series of leading questions. |
