The academic year is rapidly coming to a close - next week is the last week of the semester! For the lecture course on the Book of Job and the Arts, that meant today was the last class of lecture, since next week's class is given over to a festival of students' remarkable final projects. But I decided to keep the lecturing to minimum. In lieu of the retrospective I usually give at a class's end, I put together a collage* (students have access to my powerpoints, as well as recordings of the class) and offered four very general conclusions:
Some problems cannot be solved but need to be performed.
Nobody hears a story like Job’s for the first time.
More versions are better.
You are part of the tradition.
But most of the class - 50 of our 75 minutes - was devoted to discussion. Discussion in a zoom lecture class, you ask? Yes! I'm getting a better understanding of the constraints and opportunities of being online. A few weeks ago I started asking students to contribute to a class google.doc in lieu of taking attendance, each time with a prompt keyed to the week's reading. Students had two days after lecture to do it. Participation was remarkably serious: students were clearly happy to have a chance to do something, to say something. Their responses were thoughtful, often profound - I'm hoping they took advantage of the chance to read through them all, too. Starting two weeks ago, I incorporated the google.doc in the class time. It's an exciting thing to see a bunch of people working simultaneously on the same document!
Today I decided to include two google doc'ing opportunities. (So 15 minutes of lecture, 10 of google doc, 10 more lecture, 10 more google doc, then 30 minutes for an open discussion spearheaded by the TAs.) I told them I'd decided to cut back my lecturing to make time for a second google doc experience because of what I'd learned from last week's, where students had given a remarkable set of stories of bad experiences which wound up bearing blessings - twelve single-spaced pages' worth! Remarkable - but not quite what I'd asked for. The prompt followed the template of Saiweng:
SAIWENG LOST HIS HORSE
Describe - from art, history, your own experience or your imagination - a series of events like those described in the story of the old frontiersman. It could be a bad thing which turns out to be a good thing, which however turns out to be even worse... or something good which turns out to be something bad, until that leads to something even better...
Their stories all had happy or at least hopeful outcomes! But then, it occurred to me (and I told them this morning), in April 2020, where we are beset by calamities and nobody knows what the future will look like, we don't need to be reminded that bad things can come on unexpectedly. We need to believe that suffering and evil are not the end of the story. To talk about the Book of Job and the arts as if we were not in a moment of general dislocation and fear would be irresponsible. So two in-class google.docs:
JOB IN THE TIME OF COVID-19
In just a few months, the world has been turned on its head by the novel coronavirus. The stories we think powerful and relevant have changed, as have the places we find ourselves within them. How has your take on the story of Job changed?
WHAT STAYED WITH YOU?
Describe one planned and one unplanned thing that will stay with you from this class.
Responses are still coming in but they've amply confirmed my sense that they afforded more significant lessons than anything I could have said. More on these responses, as well as the final projects, next week!
*Georges de la Tour, "Job and his wife"; Anna Ruth Henriques, The Book of Mechtilde; drama students reading Job; old print of Purim players; the different voices of the Book of Job's 42 chapters; Rev. Leslie Callahan; Theater of War's Bryan Doerries; The Tree of Life; Rube Goldberg machine used in a TA's mini-lecture on Dostoevsky; drama student in a production of Steven Adley Guirgis' Last Days of Judas Iscariot; poet Diane Glancy; 19th century print of King Lear on the heath; Alice Walker; you know what; human rights theorist Brian Phillips; old English text of the Matins of the Office of the Dead; Carol Newsom's mapping of the arch of the story of Job; Joni Mitchell; theater director Cecilia Rubino; Groundhog Day; Archibald MacLeish's J. B.; whirlwind from Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job; image from shooting of A Serious Man; Fugui's ox from Yu Hua's To Live.
