"Dread" in the Garden: The Literature Review
This book that you are now reading follows Joseph Campbell’s ideas about the journey of the mythic hero. In the journey, the individual leaves the everyday world behind and is “swallowed” into a new world, where she finds support, encounters numerous obstacles, a “road of trials.” But she returns to her tribe, society, culture, or world, bringing back something of great value to her people.
Within the myth of the student hero are two opposing forces: scholars call them “the shadow” and “the trickster.” As you read my interpretation of the students’ comics, I will refer to these two archetypes again and again. The students’ comics do not use these terms—“shadow” and “trickster”—but many of the things that the students talk about reflect the ideas of these archetypes. You could say that the shadow and the trickster are images, processes, feelings, that are going on within the students, and get expressed in students’ comics about doing the literature review.
As a place to start, let’s consider the “literature review” as an academic paper the students write. And let’s—at least tentatively—consider students’ “comix” as a story about how students produce the “literature review.”
The “literature review” is a shadow image in the sense that academic writing is disliked, feared, and loathed by many, even those in academia. Academic writing is often considered a point of “shame,” not only by students, but by professors and other academics (see Bartholomae, p. 63). But particularly by students, who feel a “sense of shame” because they often don’t know what they are doing when they are asked to produce “academic writing.” Academic writing is structured, repressive, rigid, restrictive, and has established rules that are the norms to which students must adhere (see Bassil-Morozow, pp. 56-57).
In contrast, the “comic” provides an image that comments on and criticizes the literature review as something that students both accept and resist. When students are assigned to write the literature review, the students are forced to accept the structure and the requirements that I impose upon them. But when students create the comic the students’ stories may resist the social order my power creates by transforming it. These two impulses are, respectively, the “shadow” and the “trickster.” In some ways, the “trickster” opposes the “shadow.” The shadow represents prescribed norms, boundaries, structure, and shame; in opposing the shadow, the trickster represents freedom, creativity, originality, shape-shifting (see Bassil-Morozow, pp. 56-57).
When we look at the students’ comics, we are, in some ways, looking at how the trickster comic looks at the shadow literature review. However, this is too simple. What we shall find is that the “trickster” and the “shadow” are both parts of the same thing: the student, who is trying to tell a story about the work they did in order to complete, get through, pass, my class. In so doing, students are being creative about how they accomplished the literature review, while simultaneously acknowledging the shame, the difficulties they grappled with.
And I am a partner in all this. I am the “instructor” or the “professor.” I am a large part of the context in which both the literature review and the comic are created. I’m the person who tells the student that their literature review needs to cite thirty academic sources; perhaps students link me to the shadow! But I’m also the “wise old professor” who may help them, and who tells the students on the first day of class to take out their phones and to start taking pictures. And then I give the class the finger, that widely-recognized “fuck you” gesture, and by doing so, I suggest that sketchy behavior is acceptable, and students can also be creatively bad-ass and irreverent. So perhaps I’m also a trickster!