Matoussi D.

S 1

Assistanat Defense Speech

At the outset of my speech, a word of immense gratitude to all the members of the jury who undertook the assessment of my scientific file is in order. My presentation branches out into two major sections; the first maps out my research interests as well as the major milestones which have so far been covered in my research career; the second delineates the pedagogical approach I have worked out in teaching literature classes. Seemingly disparate, with the one ranging within the zodiac of theoretical explorations and philosophical questioning, while the other has a leaning towards a far more practical orientation, the two sections are demonstrably co-extensive: the pedagogical frameworks within which literature classes are taught being constantly re-assessed and re-structured in the light of the fresh research explorations and findings which are effected as part of the DEA dissertation, the doctoral research or the conference proceedings to which I have contributed research papers, with some of them seeing their ways to publication. I shall therefore proceed with a panoramic exposition of the defining moments and key stages of my research career. The method through which such an exposition shall be worked out follows a mode of enquiry that goes, however, beyond the mere re-tracing of the landmarks of my research experience. In his Being and Time, Martin Heidegger conceives of inquiry as a cognizant seeking. Every inquiry, he writes,

is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought. Inquiry is a cognizant seeking for an entity both with regard to the fact that it is and with regard to its Being as it is. This cognizant seeking can take the form of investigating [.] in which one lays bare that which the question is about and ascertain its character. Any inquiry, as an inquiry about something, has that which is asked about [Sein Gefrates]. But all inquiry about something is somehow a questioning of something [Anfragen bei ]. So in addition to what is asked about, an inquiry has that which is interrogated [ein Befragtes]. (24)

The exposition of the diacritical stages of my research activities is keyed towards uncovering the underlying critical and theoretical vantage points from which I have, at different moments of my career, conceived of and effected successive research projects. Taking the form of a cognizant seeking, the adumbration of the major features of my research project gains in depth, turning into a questioning of the very premises and notions associated with a research career: Among the major questions to be addressed at this point is the following: is there any sense in which the successive research projects can be conceived of as enacting an allencompassing vision? My DEA dissertation, entitled Shakespeares Anxious Lover in The Glass: A Reading of The Sonnets, consists in a re-assessment of the marginal position the Sonnets occupy in

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Shakespeares canon. Beyond a facile identification of Shakespeares verse as an artful riot of rhetoric, as flights or exercises of fancy, thrown into the form of a personal address, and written, it may be, in some cases at the instance or in compliment of the Poets personal friends. (qtd. in Schoenbaum 314), a close reading of the Sonnets affords an interesting gateway into a revisionary poetics. The all too conventional triangular relationship between the speaker-poet, the 'fair friend' and the dark lady' which has so often made up the bulk of the critical commentaries on the Shakespeare's poems is mined for new insights into the discursive depiction of the love experience. The Sonnets mark a watershed moment in the Bard's personal and artistic development; they most poignantly and in many ways sing of endings, enacting sundry valedictory gestures. Concomitant as they were with the conception and gestation of Hamelt, Shakespeares poems enact the rites of mourning for a deceased son (Hamnet), even as they thwart them, displacing the personal shows of grief into an impersonal charting of the inner sorrows, angst and desires of a wrangling self. Still, there remains one major facet to the Sequence which courts one's attention, its unmistakable Elizabethan echoes. The lovers sighs, feelings of remorse and insecurity are often troped in metaphors that betray the contours of a typical Elizabethan world picture. My PhD thesis, even though it topically appears to be at a remove from my DEA dissertation, takes up the major issues expounded in the DEA, with an additional modernist emphasis. In this section, I shall briefly sketch out the lines of continuity between the DEA dissertation and the doctoral dissertation, while underscoring notable differences in the treatment of thematic and formal issues. My argument is that moving away from the remote culture of the Elizabethan and their courtly ambience into the modern City of Eliots poem might not be a purely whimsical or accidental choice. 1. The Canon: Crisscrossed by personal reminiscences, literary allusions and a variety of macaronic utterances, Eliots The Waste Land brings the issue of canonicity to prominence in a way that harks back to Shakespeares Sonnets. The canon, as Mr. Bloom, he who knows about the lives of literary saints, gospels and prophets more than anybody else, has bits and pieces of drama associated with it. At the center of the literary canon, Harold Bloom contends, Shakespeare rests eternally on his laurels by virtue of the uncanny power of his art which makes us feel at home in an outlandish territory. The speaker-poets selfreflexive experience in the Sonnets may not however evince the ease and comfort of a glorious rest; he is rather in the throes of an aching torment, and for once in his works, we get to catch a rare glimpse of Shakespeare behind the opaque mask of impersonality that he wore so perfectly in his other works: rather than simply resting on his laurels, the speakerpoet in the Sonnets is looking to his laurels. At the fringe of the court, burdened by grief and concerned about the proud full sail of a rival poet, his discourse is agonistic, vividly suffused by the angst of fighting for the best place to gain kleos. In my doctoral thesis, a major concern of mine has been to bring to the fore the central preoccupation with canonicity in Eliots The Waste Land. Thomas Stearns Eliots project to write a modern epic is fraught with impediments and misgivings; if epic is about the enunciation of the spirit of the people, giving voice to the aspirations and values of an entire culture, then in a culture without metaphysics, one which has been reduced to a heap of broken images, writing an epic is akin to an out-of-season narration. An exploration of the diacritical features of the modern epic in The Waste Land makes up one the major issues of my doctoral thesis. Eliots modern epic hinges on the onerous task of redeeming modern cultures waste land by piecing the heirlooms of the broken European civilization. Accordingly, snatches of quotes by the colossi of Western literature, fragments from classical works of art and vividly memorable scenes from the personaes past are summoned up while being inflected

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with the torments of the present. Great writing, Bloom notes in his The Western Canon, is always re-writing; its based on an act of reading which opens up past works to fresh sufferings. My doctoral dissertation thus takes up major issues discussed in my DEA, while attending to the many ways in which Eliot does Shakespeare with modern voices. 2. The Artists Melancholia translated into Art My doctoral thesis explores three major tenets of Eliots criticism; these are his three doctrines of impersonality, of tradition and the objective correlative. In my reading of The Waste Land, I have noted the many ways in which the three doctrines inform the poem. They are interrelated, making proof of the maturity of Eliots artistic vision, but most interestingly of the depth of his reading of Shakespeare. There is a sense in which The Waste Land originates in Eliots emotional and spiritual dryness, a critical stage in his life which overshadowed his reflections and musings during the period in which he drafted what was to become The longest poem in the English language. Feelings of remorse and melancholia get transmuted through the magic of his art into an all-encompassing cultural vision for a Europe in ruins: the progress of an artist, Eliot writes in his The Sacred Wood, is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. (9) The doctrine of impersonality is an epic element; it ushers in the vatic quest in The Waste Land, a quest which has as a target the mending of the maimed culture of Europe via the perfection of an adequate artistic idiom which can help modern man to at least set his lands in order. In working on Eliots The Waste Land, I have come to trace his key conception of artistic impersonality to Shakespeares verse and drama; in the Sonnets, personal grief is vocalized in poetic terms, in the form of a sonnet sequence which betrays the speaker-poets vulnerability in the guise of an anxious lovers discourse. My doctoral thesis presents in this way a furthering of the critical project advanced in my DEA dissertation, making proof of an unmistakable line of continuity asserting that Shakespeare is where Eliot starts from.

My papers/contributions to conference proceedings

My research papers are academic contributions to conference proceedings which took place in Tunisia. I have so far published one paper, Shakespeares Dumb Show of Signification: A Reading of The Sonnets. It was published in a volume presenting a selection of papers which were presented as part of the Proceedings of the English Department & the GRAD International Conference, Sfax, Tunisia, 5-6-7 April 2007 (Mounir Guirat & Mounir Triki (eds.), (2009) Vol. 4, pp. 209-224.).

Teaching Philosophy: Responding to challenges and opening up horizons

In the span of six years, the period over which my career as a teacher of English literature at the University of Manouba has so far extended, the theoretical underpinnings of my teaching philosophy have evolved by drawing on a variety of teaching methods as well as critical reflections culled from the fields of literary criticism, linguistics and cultural studies. I also

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placed a premium over the significance and the value of classroom interactions during classes which were taught in the form of lectures or tutorials. Over the recent decades, researches in the field of Humanities have brought to the fore a learner-oriented model of teaching which was thought mostly appropriate in gauging the learners levels, determining their specific needs and assessing their performances. This methodological orientation towards a leaner-based teaching philosophy in literature classes has, nonetheless, been mostly thought of and worked upon within the parochial preserve of an unconscious mode of reasoning; its theoretical framework (premises, objectives, as well as methodology) not having been made explicit enough to trigger further research interest in the field. In the following sections of this introductory, I shall therefore proceed with a panoramic exposition of the terms of the methodology I have opted for in the preparation of the lectures and the tutorials that I have delivered during my six-year teaching experience at the University of Manouba. My approach cross-cuts a variety of theoretical perspectives derived from fields as varied as literary criticism, sociology, linguistics and cultural theory. My contention in working out an eclectic methodological framework is that only by moving away from the constraining trammels of specialization (that have become too normative to be questioned) that the genuinely human dimension in teaching literature classes can be recovered and buttressed through adequate pedagogical strategies. In the context of a projected learner-centered teaching environment in literature classes, due attention is henceforth to be paid to the multifaceted learning experience. This eclectic approach to teaching literature classes has, however, more to recommend it than a concern with recovering a human dimension which has been subtracted from the teaching of the Humanities, through an undue focus on cumbersome theoretical specializations. The rationale behind adopting different learning theory frameworks in literature classes consists in meeting two major challenges: the first has to do with the specificity of the subject being taught (literature), its inherent foreignnessfor, as Harold Bloom notes in his The Western Canon, literature has to do with a desire to be elsewhere (12)--, and thus its resistance to any attempt at theorizing, let alone teaching; for, if anything, literature is about un-learning, with dogmatic formulations and pre-set modes of reception being anathema to the literary mind. The second challenge is attached to another experience of foreignness pertaining to teaching English literature in the framework of a Tunisian academic context, with attendant problems of cultural accessibility and identification. The framing of the terms of my teaching philosophy shall, therefore, revolve around two major axes: the first is concerned with the feasibility of teaching literature in a classroom context; the second presents itself as a question of cultural remoteness: what is it to teach English literature in a Tunisian context?

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A. Teaching Literature: 1. Epistemological foreignness

Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that investigates the foundation of our knowledge; it questions the optics through which we come know what we know (Goldman 3). In the framework of an outlandish kingdom of literature, the readers perception is often blurred and destabilized by the willed incorporation into the text of a host of technical features that preclude a straightforward way of knowing; thus such aesthetic categories as narrator, voice, point of view and plot often present characteristic irregularities that are in keeping with the freshness that is co-extensive with the advent of the really new work of art. Sensitizing students to a literary texts inherent strangeness which is part and parcel of what Viktor Shlovsky identifies as the operations of the de-familiarizing processes at work in its very texture makes up the objective of an experiment which I have conducted within the framework of a FourthYear US poetry class which I delivered during the academic year: 2006-2007, with Eliots The Waste Land being an item in the syllabus. Given the opaque quality of the poems texture, students were hard put to make sense of the thematic concerns of the text, being laboriously caught up in a dense forest of references, textual and mythological allusions. They consequently backed off, and called on me to drop the poem from the program, a suggestion which, though all too reasonable, I found lamentable, amounting as it does to doing away with a canonical text which I purposefully designed to be part of the students reading materials, as much for the virtuosity of its craftsmanship as for the deep-sounding cultural echoes crisscrossing its lexis. Archibald MacLeishs closing lines in his poem Ars Poetica proved of much help, inspiring me with the an effective strategy through which students access to Eliots poem might be smoothed. The two lines run as follows: A poem should not mean / But be (l. 23-24). A poems structure of signification is a dynamic whole, uniquely unfolding via a variety of textual processes. Making sense of this unique working of the poetic features of a text does therefore afford the best entry to its universe of meaning. In this respect, the first eighteen lines of Eliots The Waste Land proffers the occasion for reflecting upon an interesting phenomenon: the disquietingly confusing aspect of the textual surface in modern poetry: I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

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A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar kine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. (ll. 1-18)

The poems opening, with a variety of reminiscences and multiple references to the natural cycle of seasons and such comely locations as the Starnbergersee and the Hofgarten, suggests a nostalgic intonation of the poem. The text, one is thereby given to understand, is brought forth as part of a reactivation of sweet bygone memories which are stirred up in the mind of the persona through a series of actual incidents. This working assumption which suggests itself upon an early encounter with The Waste Land is backed by an amateurish recording of a reading of the poem which I stumbled upon while browsing through archival documents about T. S. Eliot on the internet. The poems opening is intoned in a way that suggests the speakers yearning for the sweet bygone days. By exposing students to the recorded material and a written copy of the passage, I had in mind gauging their response to the speakers tone. Their reactions centered on the idea that the poem reads like a Romantic text, with the persona expressing his nostalgia to sweet old days, noting the ways in which these reminiscences have marked him for a life-time. During the following session, I had my students listen to the original recording of Eliots own reading of The Waste Land, to their strong amazement. The poets tone labored in the rendition of the stray passages; it lacked the vitality and momentum which characterize the earlier amateurish reading of the poem. Equally noteworthy are likewise the pauses which Eliots observes in the reading of the passage and which I shall here spot with pairs of slashes: I. The Burial of the Dead April// is the cruellest month,// breeding//

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Lilacs// out of the dead land,// mixing// Memory //and desire,// stirring// Dull roots// with spring rain.// Winter// kept us warm,// covering// Earth// in forgetful snow,// feeding// A little life //with dried tubers.// Summer// surprised us,// coming over the Starnbergersee// With a shower of rain;// we stopped in the colonnade,// And went on in sunlight,// into the Hofgarten,// And drank coffee,// and talked for an hour.// (ll. 1-11)

As the pairs of slashes indicate, the pauses which Eliot makes while reading the passage do often coincide with the caesurae, and are therefore technically justified. However, a host of other pauses are not occasioned by caesurae, and may not be accounted for in merely technical terms. They are part of parcel of what John Ciardi terms as the poems performance of its own self (Ciardi 12): Eliots reading of The Waste Land is modulated in such a way as to communicate to the reader a creeping and crippling sense of weariness which is a modern cultural syndrome. The quasi-experiment which I have undertaken in class via exposing students to two recorded versions of the reading of The Waste Land proved of much help in bringing students to an awareness of the peculiarity of modernist poetry. The technical subtlety of modernist verse resides in its experimentation with such conventional aesthetic categories as tone, voice and mood.

2. The subtlety of the Literary Medium As a medium for expressing fine nuances of feelings and thoughts, literature might be said to approximate the paradigm of the rainbow; a rainbow betokens meanings of richness and infinitude, qualities that applies par excellence to literary language. In Virgils Aeneid, there is a defining moment that occurs in Book VI, when Aeneas, accompanied in his journey through Dis (the underworld) with the Cumean Sybil, meets the shade of Dido in the Fields of Mourning. As the shade of Carthaginian queen turns away from himan act that Eliot qualifies as the greatest snub in the history of literature--, Aeneas sheds tears of pity, but also prove a range of subtle feelings that defies Virgils skill of words, passing over the ineffable, in a Wittgensteinian mode, to the empire of silence, as food for thought for a history of exegetical

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endeavors. At issue in Didos response to Aeneas overture is a fine sensibility that translates into a subtle reticence about her feelings and thoughts, leaving the door open to wide-ranging interpretations of the dismissive gesture. Authors do often paint with fine brushes, thereby producing devious texts that make strong demands on the virtuosity of the reader. 3. Towards a constructivist and interactivist method in teaching literature classes: The two major features of literature that have been so far identifiednamely, epistemological foreignness and the subtlety of the literary medium--constitute serious impediments in the way of achieving successful learning/teaching processes. The deviousness of what Roman Jacobsen identifies as the poetic function of the literary discourse is such that the learners competence is put to the test; cases of under-achievement in literature assignments are often imputed to the destabilizing effects of the lexical and semantic deviations to which the learner is exposed in written assignments consisting of a reading of and a commentary on a literary text. In such circumstances, as the learners experience of the literary text comes to a standstill, the mediation of the teacher becomes crucial. The modality of the teachers mediation in the learning process is a highly contentious issue, with a plethora of research input envisaging alternative models of the teachers intervention. My tutorials and lectures are informed by a conceptual grid that is based on a constructivist and interactivist method in teaching literature classes. Constructivism is a pluri-disciplinary theory of knowledge set up by Jean Piaget. It advocates a view of learning process predicated on the self-discovery of the organization of the world through individual experimentation. (Bruno and Munoz 375) The learners active contribution to the production of knowledge is a sine qua non of a constructivist approach to learning. In the context of literature classes, where learners are exposed to literary texts, a constructivist mode of teaching would seek to foster the learners virtuosity though problem-solving tasks that invite his/her reflection on and response to ambiguous textual material. Students are thereby made to reckon with such significant textual strategies as metaphorical constructions, while noting their operation within the texts structure of signification. This is mainly effected through a piecemeal exposition of students to isolated passages of the text under consideration; guiding questions are used to prompt the learner towards responding creatively to the suggested instances of lexical and semantic deviations, as well as the gaps incorporated in the text. Throughout this process, I have sought to bring students to an awareness of the subtlety of the literary medium by capitalizing on the significance of a metaphor derived from the art of painting which a familiarity with Mick Shorts research on stylistics brought to my notice, it is the distinction between background and foreground. Capitalizing on Mick Shorts distinction between linguistic background, the normative structure of language, the commonplace repertoire upon which the artist draws, and the ensuing linguistic foreground, the devious linguistic configuration which the text presentsthe result of a unique work of selection and re-arrangement of the materials derived from the background--, a theory which Short elaborated in detail in his The Language of Poetry, Fiction and Drama, I have worked towards sensitizing students to the subtle textual processes at work in a literary text. The textual dynamics of which they gradually become conscious proved of much help in

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poetry classes dealing with such devious verse as the poems of e. e. Cummings (E. E. Cummings Textual Acrobatics is the title of a third-year poetry class), or T. S. Eliots The Wasteland (Eliots poem was part of the syllabus of a Fourth-Year US poetry class taught in the framework of the former Matrise System) Modern and post-modern literary texts proffer thought-provoking illustrations of the foregrounding momentum inherent in the work of art, thereby presenting significant challenges to undergraduate students of literature (my observations at this point are restricted to the undergraduate classes which I have taught during my six-year teaching experience). A measure of the difficulties experienced by students in reading modern and post-modern literary texts

B. Teaching English Literature in a Tunisian context Teaching English literature in a Tunisian context presents several challenges, chief among which are ones related to notions of cultural identification and accessibility. Literature classes are often taught in the implicit assumption that students are first-language learners with the ability to identify with the cultural elements associated with the text. As a consequence, several cases of failure in literary subjects are the outcome of a lack of identification with the culture of the text being taught. The simplistic, and too often reductive, views of the vexed question of culture in TESOL make up the subject matter of Dwight Atkinsons article TESOL and Culture. He interestingly concludes that the conceptions of culture in TESOL are underdeveloped and based on received views, something that hampered further progress in the field. (12) My classes have always been informed by a view of culture that is pluralist, parasitic on variety of disciplines (7), to borrow the words of Jim MacGuigan. This inherently wellrounded notion of culture has framed my teaching approach to texts which necessitated presenting students with an overview on the specificity of the socio-cultural matrix with which the text is affiliated. In teaching Shakespeares Sonnets, for instance, a preliminary view on issues of the Elizabethan monarchy and the Anglican Church is essential. The Elizabethan conception of the universe and the heavenly bodies is also in order; for a fair number of metaphors which are used by the poet are drawn from cosmology. Two key areas of culture make up additionally the subject of my methodological focus and syllabus design: politics and religion, for these two arenas encompass the major underpinnings of the main reflections on English and American cultures, feeding into the poetic texts to which students are frequently exposed during literature classes.