On another level

Last Friday my HL students took the analysis to a whole new level when discussing Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. They navigated effortlessly in the identity mazes of the book and followed the characters around in the streets of New York. The predicament of the author did not seem like an unfamiliar topic to them. In fact, one of them said that this, i.e. The New York Trilogy, is their kind of book. Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia was also voted as their kind of book. The book that got the most rotten tomatoes was Virgina Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The discussion that was triggered by (only) three open-ended questions; identity, chance and spaces, gave me a lot to think about. It is possible that The New York Trilogy is 'their kind of work' because they can relate to the proximity/exclusion contradiction of the cityscape. Unlike A Room of One's Own that focuses on an argument very much obsolete to them (whether i can prove to them that in reality it may be far from obsolete is another story). I did not find it surprising that two of the novels they described as 'theirs' are concerned with the individual's identity albeit from very different perspectives and in very different settings. What struck me as surprising is the ease with which they discussed concepts such as author's experience of writing, his/her intentionality and his/her death. In fact, most of them seemed to have a formed opinion about these. When did this happen? Ideally, i would like to give myself credit for such a development, but i can't. Because it did not happen in my classroom. What happened in my classroom was that i witnessed the demise of Virginia Woolf, an authority on authorship. My students reacted to this kind of authority; instead, they responded to Auster in a way that included their experience of the new authorship, observer and observed at the same time, emerging from the new media, validating each one of us as a creator of personae.
This took place on Friday. That same evening an SL student posted the sign in the picture on her window across the alley from my house: "Is English tomorrow HL only?" Yes, we would continue our discussion of The New York Trilogy and i am sure she felt as much gratitude for the free periods as i did for her being thoughtful and sending me a window message instead of knocking on my door. On Saturday morning, however, the students seemed to have run out of profound and significant comments. I am sure Auster would understand why that was so.