Friday's reading asked us to consider essays by Sally Ledger, James Mussell, and Margart Beetham, Ledger treats Dickens's decreasing optimism over the course of his career. Mussell extolled advantages of using technology to teach Dickens but explored a strange paradox: the act of digitizing and "preserving" a text inevitably changes it. (To paraphrase the Vietnam-era infantryman: we have to destroy the medium to save it.) It's a further muddle that our students--those alleged techno wizards who are able to intuitively program their grandparents' DVD player--may be credulous and infantile in their understanding of the proper use of technology. The last by Beetham deals with pedagogical questions related to the teaching of Dickens via periodicals. Periodicals are, by definition, ephemeral creations. How is it that we are asked to see them as part of a permanent canon?
How, for that matter, are we to view Santa Cruz? The location of our seminar seems an odd place to study Charles Dickens. For one thing, the weather is here is perpetually idyllic. For another, there's the breathtaking natural beauty of the place. Picture-perfect sand, surf, redwoods: this is the climatic and economic antipodes of Dickensian Manchester. Unlike the struggles of XIX century workers, the workers here commute to Silicon Valley, The average house costs $810,000. To study Dickens here is to feel a constant tension of between the beauty of our surroundings and the misery of the oppressed people whose lives we're asked to imagine and inhabit. The crushing material and intellectual poverty of the "hands" in Hard Times foils painfully against the beauty of this experience. This is also an opportunity.
Just beneath the seeming perfection of Santa Cruz lies a series of startling contrasts. For one thing, area crime rates are among the highest in the state. http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_29720206/property-crime-santa-cruz-capitola-among-highest-california. And despite (because of?) some of the priciest real estate in the nation, Santa Cruz has one of the largest per-capita homeless polulations http://www.stabsantacruz.com/santa-cruz-is-about-to-make-a-horrible-mistake/
In short, there are two Santa Cruzes: one each for the haves and the have nots. Santa Cruz is the United States. Santa Cruz is the human experience. Santa Cruz is Dickensian,
What, then, shall we make of our nation? How shall we "coom together more, an get a better unnerstanding in o'one another"? (204),
Alton Sterling's son breaks down (Daily Mail)
The five slain officers (courtesy MGN Online)
(CBS News.com)
In his essay on Hard Times, George Bernard Shaw says "The first half of the XIX century considered itself the greatest of all centuries. The second considered itself the wickedest of all centuries" (Norton 357). We may be living through a similar change in self perception. If so, Dickens will prove useful in finding the way forward.
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