Novel Graphics: Graffiti in the Classroom

By Dennis Allen

It’s probably more of a coincidence than a trend, but this past semester a colleague and I both experienced something new in our classes. She would walk into her Shakespeare course to find a drawing on the blackboard that succinctly summarized the play they were going to discuss that day. Similarly, about the middle of the term, Jennifer, one of the students in my undergraduate literary theory survey, started putting graphic responses to the day’s reading on the blackboard at the back of the room. Since, uncharacteristically, the custodial staff failed to erase these, they grew over the course of the semester into an increasingly elaborate mural that eventually covered two thirds of the back blackboard, ultimately providing a summary of the entire second half of the course. Like a Delacroix painting, this is best presented by showing a detail:  

Here, the exploitation of natural resources in colonized countries that was a recurrent motif in our readings in postcolonial theory is represented by a drawing of a rather self-satisfied Lorax, with a nice intertextual reference back to the picture of the tree that is part of Ferdinand de Saussure’s classic discussion of the nature of the sign.

There’s some interesting speculation that could be done here about whether the Millennials are a generation that really does prefer the visual to the verbal, and, given access to a CAT scanner and enough time, I might also have conducted a cognitivist study that used Jennifer’s fresco to investigate different learning styles among contemporary undergraduates, but what interested me most in the pedagogical moment was the mural’s function within the class itself. Not only was it often a useful point of departure for discussion of the day’s readings and an enduring reminder of those discussions later on, it also became part of the class’s corporate identity, a graphic representation of a certain esprit de corps.

Thus, on the day that Travis disagreed with Alan Sinfield’s assertion that collective resistance to institutional power is always possible, pessimistically asserting that we were all on “the sliding slide of doom,” everyone decided that the point was important enough to be added to the class’s “permanent record.”

And then, one day, it was gone, the graphic distillation of half a semester’s thought wiped out literally overnight, presumably in a moment of custodial zeal rather than as an act of institutional repression. There was, however, one consolation. This happened just as we began discussing Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and the students, raised in an era of digital reproducibility that Benjamin could not even have imagined, were having trouble with his argument that the individual work of art is unique.  All I had to do was mention the lost mural, that irreplaceable original, subject to the depredations of time and janitors, for them to instantly grasp what Benjamin mean by “aura.”