Expansion West

Using West, Gilyard argues for a rhetorical education that promotes democratic values and fosters civic literacy in students. A major component of this education is what West describes as tragicomic hope. I’ve been trying to think of an analogy to explain tragicomic hope. As a mom, a Latina, a grad student, and teacher I know I have it because I would not be able to function under those constraints if I didn’t. But can I explain it?

Since it is much harder to define than tragedy, I’ll start by giving some definitions of comedy. Plato asserts that comedy is a mixture of pleasure and pain. Aristotle sees comedy as a lower art, a ridiculous mode. Freud in The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious claims that when we joke we are releasing a subconscious desire for the taboo (but he did a lot of cocaine). Bakhtin presents us with perhaps the most relevant definition of comedy as it relates to social constructs. Bakhtin’s carnival and the theatre of the grotesque attribute a political power to comedy. Comedy can create chaos and overturn power structures. Tragedy on the other hand, may not hold this power. Tragedy allows the bad guys to win, comedy makes fun of the bad guys, stuffs them into the gym locker, takes their picture, and posts it all over the internet. As soon as those in power become buffoons, they cease to have power. Tragicomic hope then intersects these two meanings. Even in the face of utter despair, racism, hatred, or death, the tragicomic figure continues to hope for a shift a movement into a chaotic upheaval- a revolution.

This concept used in the composition classroom situates the academic environment as always political “ensconced rather tamely in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist norm” (Gilyard 29). Therefore, consciously and transparently addressing the politics at play in the classroom allows for student agency. Gilyard terms this prophetic pragmatism, which is the reliance on the prophetic witness his students bring to the classroom and the application of this witness. Students can give witness to their struggles with issues of race, gender, spirituality, and any other identity that matters to them. This witness may be used in the composition classroom and in rhetorical education as a basis of critical inquiry and application of crucial aspects of civic literacy. By intersecting Marxism, prophetic Christianity, and pragmatism, West is enacting a sort of tragicomic hope that what matters to students will manifest in their work, will give students intellectual power and will foster social activism.