Abstract

This special double issue of College English in some ways illustrates what its essays are about, possibly the resistance, as Freud said about analysis, against the uncovering of resistances (Analysis 239). This first issue begins where a Freudian approach to pedagogy necessarily starts, with the Freudian concept of resistance-four essays, by Barbara Johnson and Marjorie Garber, Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl, Patrick McGee, and Robert Brooke, dealing with blockages theoretical and practical to reading and to teaching. The second issue, with essays by Gregory Ulmer, Gregory Jay, and Ronald Schleifer, moves beyond to explore Freud's concept of the as it bears on the role of the teacher (the subject who is supposed to know), the student, learning, teaching, reading, and so on. The essays of both issues argue that the to reading and teaching is also the force that makes them possibleparticularly that reading and teaching must in an important sense fail before they succeed. This claim arises in relation to Freud's discussion of the to therapy and Paul de Man's resistance to and from specific comparisons of the classroom and the therapy session. The course of these essays will move from (1) a consideration of and its place in a Freudian approach to pedagogy, (2) to a theory of the subject for a Freudian account of student/teacher interaction, and (3) to a theory of Freudian discourse as a communication model. All of these essays, but especially those in the second issue, then move toward another consideration-the ideological critique of what teachers teach and how they teach it. These special issues of College English also illustrate the they are talking about in that a few contributors bowed out early-schedules busier than