"In a seminal essay on psychoanalysis and pedagogy, Shoshana Felman has argued that the single most important contribution of psychoanalysis to education is that psychoanalysis reveals "the radical impossibility of teaching" (21). The "teaching" Felman refers to is the conventional notion of teaching as the transmission of existing knowledge from an authoritative, "knowing" teacher to an "ignorant" student who desires to know. What psychoanalysis calls for, instead, is a radical rethinking of the concepts of knowledge and ignorance. Traditional theories of pedagogy implicitly assume the existence of a substantial, fixed, and absolute body of knowledge which can be mastered by the student. But, when knowledge is conceived as an absolute category, teaching can only be indoctrination; there is no discursive space in which new knowledge can be produced." (Strickland;College English 292)