The Figure of the Teacher in Comics

Reviews / Votes

"In this voluminous archeology of life in comics and its cast of hundreds of hauntings from paper figures of teachers and students, David Lewkowich opens the uncanny experience of education with sharp insights, theoretical sophistication, and capacious psychoanalytic observations. As character studies, the names, motives, and lost causes serve as funhouse mirrors to development's laughing matters. Readers are invited to work through their own educational social unconscious life as met by social constraints, cultural jokes, rude phantasies, and the riotous contingencies of free association. In Lewkowich's adept and courageous analysis, readings of comics become the royal road to education as well as a novel approach to the history and scholarly debates of dreams of education." (Deborah P. Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor, Emeritus, York University, Canada, and author of When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning)

"In this deeply thought, theoretically astute, and page-turning book, David Lewkowich serves up a psychoanalytic delight that dares to examine the under-world of educational life through a study of teacher figures animated in the work and play of comic forms, narratives, and images. Drawing on wide-ranging scholarship in psychoanalysis, curriculum and cultural studies, literary theory, and teacher education, Lewkowich offers a humanizing theory of education by showing how fictional figurations of teachers speak both stark and hidden emotional truths - including difficult emotional truths of anxiety, aggression, and desire - beyond what any technical manual could ever explain. With rigour and good humour, Lewkowich suggests why reading comics is serious business: a radical site in which to transform anxieties of teaching and learning into new and pressing questions about curiosity, responsibility, and humility in education." (Lisa Farley, Professor, Faculty of Education, York University, Canada, and author of Childhood Beyond Pathology: A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis)

"As a comics fan who is also a teacher educator, I was immediately drawn into David Lewkowich's The Figure of the Teacher in Comics . Lewkowich's psychoanalytically informed analysis offers a fascinating examination of the fantasies and aggressions depicted in comic renditions of educators. Lewkowich's analysis is sharp and insightful. The comics' depictions of teachers provoked me to constant and often simultaneous amusement, horror, and outrage. The comics and analysis together made for a vivid, energizing read." (Gail Boldt, Distinguished Professor of Education and Women's Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, USA)