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You’re studying a recap of Episode 6 of the Netflix sequence The Chair with the writers Alison Kinney, Grace Lavery, Dan Sinykin, and Rebecca Wanzo. Discover our different episode recaps right here.
The next has been edited for size and readability.
Rebecca: I’m truly shocked by how a lot I loved this sequence. One of many issues I appreciated most about it’s that it ends with Ji-Yoon within the classroom giving us only a little bit of shut studying — this isn’t Barbra Streisand in The Mirror Has Two Faces pontificating on love. There’s an precise textual content on this class. We get to see that she loves instructing, that even after what she’s misplaced, literature, language, and pedagogy middle her. I really like Emily Dickinson, however the alternative of this specific poem and the interpretative work feels deeply clichéd. That mentioned, it’s a rarity to see depictions of instructing through which each college and college students take pleasure within the precise content material of the texts.
An ongoing query Grace has been asking is “What does The Chair need?” It’s a sitcom, so on one degree it needs folks to chortle. However on one other degree, it’s an old style protection of the worth of English departments and the college as areas of mental engagement. That protection occurs in a short time on the finish of the episode. Ji-Yoon defends the scholars, she returns fortunately to the classroom, and Invoice demonstrates a deep funding in his college students’ work. The everydayness of what’s good concerning the career is a coda, however in fact mundane joys gained’t produce an attention-grabbing comedy.
Dan: Earlier I nervous that The Chair is likely to be bidding farewell to English, depicting us as insufficient to our second. I used to be flawed. And I used to be proper. I used to be flawed for the rationale you level out, Rebecca. I, too, delighted within the alternative to see Ji-Yoon in motion. She is passionate, at residence in herself. Her college students — not like in lots of different classroom scenes on this present — are engaged and alert to Emily Dickinson’s language.
It’s a scene of “refuge” — the phrase Ji-Yoon makes use of when, throughout Invoice’s listening to, she alters her thoughts and decides to defend him. She says the college is meant to be “refuge from the bullshit.” Her speech to the dean is the present’s structural flip. She observes that the scholars’ protests towards Invoice aren’t about Invoice. They’re concerning the faculty’s failure to retain college of colour, to function a refuge for its college students of colour, and to think about itself as something however an alibi for the bullshit. Pembroke operates as if its job is, in Ji-Yoon’s phrases, to “trick them or handle them or make them fall in line.” It’s a truism everyone knows: The college regards college students as shoppers to be happy.
So Dickinson is refuge — and it’s lovely. However it’s additionally not sufficient. That is why I wasn’t flawed once I nervous the present would depict us as insufficient to our second. Pembroke is a sure sort of faculty. It’s not an Ivy, however it’s shut. For all its troubles, it has sufficient status, and sufficient of an endowment, that it could actually afford to be a refuge: to occlude the truth that most individuals who educate at establishments of upper ed on this nation are adjuncts, with out workplaces, or medical health insurance, or job stability — fortunate in the event that they scrabble collectively $30,000 in a 12 months.
Pembroke can hearth Invoice, Ji-Yoon says, however except it basically modifications, its college students gained’t relaxation. We additionally don’t have any indication that Pembroke will change — nor, in truth, that the college will do something to advocate for change. Refuge in Dickinson is gorgeous fatalism.
And so the hope with which the present ends, the factor with feathers, seems like a false promise. It feels as if the present is a benediction in any case, a bittersweet one, one which believes in us and what we do as we sink.
Alison: What you’re saying concerning the false promise of hope in an — irreparably? — flawed establishment feels proper. Ji-Yoon’s speech right here acts as not solely a conclusion to the present, not solely a (true and insufficient) reply to the questions we’ve all been asking, but additionally, maybe, a corollary to Ji-Yoon’s (failed) lecture on “The Grasp’s Instruments Will By no means Dismantle the Grasp’s Home.” Audre Lorde writes, “Distinction have to be not merely tolerated, however seen as a fund of obligatory polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic … solely inside that interdependency of various strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the facility to hunt new methods of being on this planet generate, in addition to the braveness and sustenance to behave the place there aren’t any charters.” “Hope” is simply too reductive a phrase to use to what Lorde was looking for, however possibly there’s something like hope within the juxtaposition of those texts and beliefs and calls for for a greater establishment. Or, as Invoice recommended in his (failed) lecture in Episode 1: hope as continued motion, even within the absence of conviction or perception that motion can change something.
We rounded up 4 students to talk concerning the present’s portrayal of academe, and they didn’t maintain again. Learn the recaps:
Grace: I feel “shut studying” means various things to completely different folks, which might be an issue if it’s going to be the lingua franca of our self-discipline. I do know what it feels like: It feels considerate, attentive, put aside from the frenzy of on a regular basis life. For which motive, I can’t agree with Yaz that posting brief excerpts of Moby-Dick on Twitter has a lot to do with it.
Now we have another notions of shut studying on supply. Dan writes superbly about Ji-Yoon’s “refuge” mannequin, and I’m completely seduced by it too (and charmed by Sandra Oh because the supply vessel). The second a part of the phrase that Ji-Yoon makes use of — ”a refuge from the bullshit” — offers me extra pause. What’s “the bullshit,” precisely? She’s gesturing out of the window on the youngsters protesting: Maybe the bullshit is the virtue-signaling, culture-canceling pseudo-politics that, as we’ve principally agreed, has been a straw man for The Chair all alongside. However I’m additionally involved that Dickinson is kind of bullshit, and so is love; the humanities may, in any case, be construed not merely as a refuge from the bullshit, however a refuge for the bullshit. Jonathan Eburne has argued that one of many principal virtues of our career is that, even when we now have a very unhealthy day at work, no person dies.
Rebecca: I might additionally like to speak about Joan’s new standing as chair. It ought to really feel like a Pyrrhic victory, however the present treats it as an precise win.
Grace: It’s as if Joan was the key protagonist all alongside. After watching the primary episode, I used to be involved that the ladies of colour would develop into ciphers for white ladies. I don’t suppose that’s true, however I agree that the present treats Joan’s election after ousting Ji-Yoon as a win, slightly than as a coup enacted by the white college.
Rebecca: We’ve talked about who The Chair is for, and clearly teachers are too small an viewers for it to be for us. The present acknowledges that educational life is ripe for state of affairs comedy, however it should stay basic sufficient that the humor doesn’t require insider information. The present additionally understands the generic pleasure of the triumphant ladies’s narrative — even because it offers us the worst model of it. (It’s not clear to me that Joan might be a superb chair, just because her skill to suppose exterior of her personal self-interest appears restricted.) Joan’s triumph comes from scapegoating Ji-Yoon as the college attempt to think about a manner out of their basic precarity. A lot for cross-generational amity. And Joan’s success, as a lot as it’s coded as transferring ahead, maintains the acquainted — largely ineffectual and filled with symbolic gestures. However we are able to really feel good that she has the massive workplace!
Grace: My final thought: Twitter and Netflix are additionally each the grasp’s home.
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