Nostalgia

I have been meaning to blog about nostalgia ever since i returned from a wonderful summer holiday, but nostalgia itself kept me from doing so, making the distance between me and the topic minimal and threatening. As a student and speaker of Greek i cannot help associating nostalgia with pain (άλγος), even if it's only due to linguistic reasons. On an emotive level, i find it very close to loss and deprivation.

During several attempts to discuss these issues with my students, they became uncomfortable and nervous, giving me the impression that i was touching a chord that was very close to their intimate emotional space. They, too, were experiencing some kind of nostalgia that they did not or could not express. These experiences and considerations led me to a little reading project (indeed infinitesimal, given the bibliography on the topic in several disciplines) on memory and nostalgia. Meandering through the platonic notion of the ever-reborn soul and the psychoanalytical ideas about memory and forgetting, i came across a different perspective of nostalgia in the Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology (2004, Greenberg, Koole, Pyszczynski eds.) by Sedikides, Wildschut and Baden in the chapter titled Nostalgia: Conceptual Issues and Existential Functions, a perspective that gave me new insight into the world i inhabit, that of middle-aged adults, adolescents and literary characters.
According to Sedikides et al. nostalgia is "a positive emotional and experiential reservoir that people delve into to deal with existential threat." First, by putting together pieces of our past life, we solidify the unification of self. Through resorting to an idealized past, we strengthen our ability to deal with the present and restore our self-worth. Second, the meaningful cultural context that we create with nostalgia makes our life more purposeful and creates better understanding of how we fit into this particular context. Third, nostalgia reestablishes a connection with significant others by bringing them from the past into our present. Significantly enough, nostalgia is seen overall as a universal experience and a stock of positive feelings.

I am hoping to bring all these aspects of nostalgia into my classroom and into real and imaginary discussions with people from the past and characters from books i love. Of course my next entry will be about the present.

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.