‘Let me be that I am’

Abstract

The teenage self probably garners more attention from MTV than from philosophical inquiry, or indeed from literary theory. The notion of the teenage self as fundamentally apart from mainstream culture is one that is familiar in the media and in our classrooms, generating and supporting the sense that teenagers regard the adult selves around them with suspidon, wondering if this cohort has ‘sold out’, giving away their selfhood and becoming ‘inauthentic’. I want to draw this interest in the authentic, teenage self into conversation with the philosophical interest in the self, in an effort to understand what happens to the teenage self as these young people undertake the study of Shakespeare. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of the self, which says that ‘the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other’ (1992, 3), I aim to draw the teenage self and the Shakespearean text into a conversation with each other. In this hermeneutical way of conceiving the process in an English secondary classroom, we position the reader and the text as self and other, with all the attendant ethical ramifications of those terms. Philosophical reflection on the notion of the self and the text is already a subject well covered by theorists like Wayne Booth (1988) and Gerald Graff (1992), but these college-centric meditations leave the high school teacher short; such interest in pedagogic ‘conversations’ with texts assumes that, when the student approaches the text, they have some sense of what they think and who they are.KeywordsHigh School TeacherMainstream CultureReading CommunityRhetorical NatureElizabethan TheatreThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.