Resonance and Education

Abstract

This essay addresses the relations between recent reassessments of critique in literary studies and current debates in the field of education. Drawing on the work of Hartmut Rosa, it argues for the relevance of “resonance” as an educational concept. Resonance is not an emotion but a relation: not a positive feeling but an often ambivalent experience of aliveness, excitement, and connectivity. As a sociological as well as phenomenological concept, it encourages us to acknowledge the institutional factors that shape the treatment of education as either resonance or resource. A brief comparison of John Williams’s Stoner and Dionne Brand’s Theory is used to question dichotomies between “love of literature” and “critical detachment”; both literature and critical theory can serve as powerful sources of resonance.