Consuming Language-based Poetry in Iraqi Academic Classrooms of Post-Protests Era

Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences

Year: 2021

DOI:

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Consuming Language-based Poetry in Iraqi Academic Classrooms of Post-Protests Era

Prof. Areej M.J. Al-Khafaji, Shurooq Fakhir Abdul Zahraa

 

ABSTRACT: 

Since October 1/2019 till now, Iraqi university students participate in protesting publically in the streets South of Iraq. In order not to regard the classroom as part of state oppression, Iraqi academic teachers should consider the potentialities of pedagogical reform in the post-protests era. Teaching poetry should be particularly reconsidered. Instead of the usual passive methods of teaching which are generally based on form-content analysis, new participatory methods should be sought, esp. when a critical module, as language poetry, is approached. This paper is concerned with the new poetics of language poetry which Iraqi teachers and students should consider in academic classrooms. It recommends a reformed pedagogical rationale in response to a form of prose poems composed mainly of sentences that have no clear semantic transitions. The gaps created by ungrammatical and uncommunicative texts invite readers to participate, to bring on their own reading of language poems’ unreadability. This pedagogical democracy, we hypothesize, coincides with the new voice the Iraqi students found in the post-protests era. To examine this hypothesis, we resort to experimental course on teaching language poetry followed by a test to the participants.

keywords: Derrida; language; pedagogy; poetry; sentence; theory.