The hottest class for the 2012 spring semester at the University of Missouri – St. Louis seems to be Language, Ethnicity, and Inequality in The Wire. Instructed by Benjamin Torbert, assistant professor, english, linguistics, the course which focuses of the 2002-2008 HBO DVD phenomenon, has gained some attention. Nine guys, eight girls, one class.
The Current: The question that everybody wants to know…did you have any problems pitching this course to the university?
Benjamin Torbert: No… not really… the way that I pitched the course, I ran it through honors because if you really want to do a topical course the easiest way to do that without having to go through curriculum committees and things like that is to pitch it to Dr. Gleason. She is the Associate Dean of the Honors College and if you can convince her that the course has value usually they will pick it up and they have a budget to buy you out of your department. It is kind of a strange course in that it does present some issues that you usually do not have to deal with.
TC: How are you able to fit an entire curriculum around one show?
BT: It was very difficult to come up with a syllabus for this course because first of all, “The Wire” deals with absolutely everything in Baltimore so if you talk about language, urbanism, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity…I have only fourteen classes. So, I decided to divide class in two parts and the first half of class we do post game analysis on the last four episodes that we saw and the other half of class deals with the topic of the day.
The first three classes we dealt with language and that is my actual qualification to teach the course. I am a socio linguist and we work on dialect. Language variation is just a huge part of “The Wire.” We are going to read a little bit of a book by Kelvin Sewell “Why do we Kill: the Pathology of Murder in Baltimore.” I included that because some other criticisms of the show have dealt with Simon writing this cast that is predominately African American. So, I wanted to bring in somebody who deals with homicide and the drug culture in West Baltimore. I wanted a writer who is African American to counter balance David Simon.
TC: What inspired you to focus on this particular television series?
BT: It is just so good. It is so well written and it deals with so many topics. People are always comparing it to Dickens, but one of my students also compared it to Tolstoy, in being concerned with all socio economical statuses, people from all walks of society.
TC: How have your students been responding to the course? Does it have a future?
BT: Students have acted very positive towards it. I have been extremely impressed with the group that I have in this class. They are extremely thoughtful. This is a seminar, so, the discussions in class have been fantastic. They notice things that I have not noticed. One of my students noticed a reference to the Tennyson poem “The Lady of Shalott” that I had missed and I thought that was just wonderful. My superiors in my department have actually asked me if I want to offer it as a special topic in the department some time in the future.
TC: What do you expect a student to take away from this course?
BT: This show deals with topics that are extremely sensitive in an extremely intelligent fashion that have to do with why we have persistent problems with poverty in this country, why the drug war is accentually un winnable, why we have problems in public education, why the media tells certain stories, but not other stories, and why our politics are broken. I want students to come away from this course with a greater sensitivity to all of these issues that they might have had before.
by Ashley Atkins, news editor for The Current.
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