Revista Contracampo (Dec 2017)

The Time of Teaching in the Global South: Networking Pedagogy and the Teaching of Caribbean poetry (with an example from Derek Walcott)

  • Russell West-Pavlov

DOI
https://doi.org/10.22409/contracampo.v36i3.1042
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 36, no. 3

Abstract

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This article asks about the time(-space) of teaching as a creative process. In order to address this issue, it turns to the teaching of a particular poetic form, that of the sonnet, which it reads as an exemplification of creative constraint as an apprenticeship in enabling networks. In order to exemplify that process of spatial constraint revealing itself as enabling creative networking, it turns to a sonnet by the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott in which the natural environment as a network of sites of distributed agency is foregrounded asthe instantiation of creative networking. In all three instances (teaching the sonnet as genre via a specific example from Walcott’s oeuvre), what counts is the network, in which agency is distributed/dispersed, and creativity consists of connectivity with other nodes on the network so as to interact with them.

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