CONCEPTUALISING THE PEDAGOGUE AS WANDERER: WILHELM GENAZINO'S WENN WIR TIERE WÄREN (2011) AND FELICITAS HOPPE'S PIGAFETTA (1999)

Abstract

Our paper contemplates wanderer figures in literature as inspiration for rethinking the academic as pedagogue and the practice of reading in the context of ongoing ecological uncertainties. Academia is permeated by performance pressure in teaching and research. By prioritising productivity, growth and speed, universities are complicit with the anthropocentric values of fossil-fuel culture. Against this we reimagine the pedagogue as a wild/rewilding wanderer who deviates from institutional norms and reads their environment differently by moving through space. For the ‘wild’ pedagogue, the seminar room becomes a mobile space where minds can wander, fostering creativity and new insights. The wanderers we discuss in texts by Wilhelm Genazino — Wenn wir Tiere wären (2011) — and Felicitas Hoppe — Pigafetta (1999) — move through space in this way. Genazino explores human/non-human relationships from a resisting space of deliberately unproductive perambulation, while Pigafetta attempts to re-mystify the planet in the era of globalisation. Both texts model close, attentive reading through the looking practices of their protagonists. By means of radical philology, which fuses poetological and hermeneutic approaches to literature, and the close reading it necessitates, we trace an imaginary path from text to reimagined pedagogical practice.