Instructor Spotlight: Carl Lavigne
Tell us about your background and what inspired you to teach this course
I am an English teacher by trade, and love to close-read everything I encounter. More and more I find myself noticing media, advertising, and politics that make overt appeals to a nostalgic vision of the past. I had a happy enough childhood, but enough education to know growing up in the Bush Years wasn’t a time I wished to return to. What pasts were all these people trying to escape into?
What makes you feel the most nostalgic?
I feel most nostalgic looking at photographs of people who have passed away. I don’t even need to have known them personally to feel a great sorrow. Photos give us the illusion that the past can be preserved, seen, and understood. And boy, is that illusion powerful.
What shouldn’t we be nostalgic for?
Low-rise jeans. U2. Measles. The Closet.
Gen Z seems to have a bit of an obsession with nostalgia. Why do you think that is?
When I returned to in-person teaching, many of my students described anything they liked as nostalgic. It drove me nuts! You’re 18, what do you have to be nostalgic for? All the best is yet to come! They couldn’t believe I didn’t get it: they all shared the same dividing line of The Before and The After: the COVID-19 Lockdowns. While every adolescent gets to “come of age,” it’s often a personal, private moment. Maybe when you first move away from your parents, or when someone close to you dies, or you simply leave something else behind. For many in Gen Z, that moment was March 15, 2020. We also have unprecedented access to preservation (or the illusion of it). We can record, and store media and memory by the terabyte. Everything we’ve moved beyond is always in reach, and that safety blanket can make us all the more fearful of its potential loss.
What do you hope that students will take away from your course?
I hope students will be able to identify appeals to nostalgia and unpack the implications of those appeals.
What is something coming up in your course that you are excited about?
We are going to plug in my old Wii and Gamecube and Nintendo DS to reflect on the physical ritual of playing games in close proximity to others. “Couch co-op” has given way to online gaming in the last decade, and I wonder what we can learn from revisiting that “old way” of shared play.