Resistance and the Pedagogy of Ethnic Literature

Abstract

whole sobby immigrant thing is starting to get a little old and am having trouble feeling compasion [sic] for every story.... would enjoy a story of success, or something completely off personal level. These words are taken from a student journal entry made about three weeks into a course titled Literature and Moral Imagination: Fiction of Immigrant Experience in response to short story Eileen by Mary Gordon. We discuss moral, political, social, and economic issues raised by immigration in United States and examine fictional representations of that experience. Additionally, we consider question of why fiction is an appropriate vehicle for such content--that is, as opposed to reading other nonfictional genres such as memoir, biography, or history. While teaching this course, found myself puzzling over resistant, even hostile, responses, such as one quoted above, to a number of works we read for course; equally troubling to me as a teacher were my own resistance to and impatience with such responses. think of Flannery O'Connor's The Teaching of Literature, in which she cites response of a frustrated reader communicating a critique via O'Connor's uncle: Tell that girl to quit writing about poor folks.... see poor folks every day and get mighty tired of them, and when read, don't want to see any more of (131, my emphasis). As a serious teacher (in a nod to another of O'Connor's essays, The Tired Reader and Serious Writer), how should respond to this emotional and intellectual fatigue? In Empowering Reader: Literary Response and Classroom Learning, David S. Miail explores teaching methods that inhibit rather than encourage meaningful literary experiences. He concludes by speculating on benefits of negative response in literature classroom: Perhaps a part of function of literature is to arouse our negative emotions. It is obvious that negative emotions we feel in everyday life are much more likely to be suppressed than positive; they are socially less acceptable, and to express them might result in socially disruptive or damaging consequences ... [thus,] literature induces us to reflect on nature of such emotions, to explore their implications, and perhaps to rethink them in productive ways, within a symbolic context that is one remove from actual world.... If we thwart this process by clumsy methods ... perhaps we do so at our own peril. (476) Thus, in this paper present a number of speculations about both kinds of resistance (student's and reader's), as well as, hope, a number of workable, practical solutions to making resistance a useful tool in teaching ethnic literature. So, back to the whole sobby immigrant thing. When built journal requirement into course, set out very general guidelines, and told students to respond to whatever struck them about day's assigned reading. expressly encouraged them to explore their responses, even if negative--the only rule was that they had to examine reasons for that reaction. I really liked this story, or I hated this assignment, or This was so boring would not be acceptable. wanted them to get more critically involved with exploring their response to text, to uncover expectations, values, and assumptions that inform their reading process. resistance encountered to this requirement took several forms: outright but unexamined negative response, refusal to respond at all (this form saw also, as most of us do, in averted gazes and roaring silence during class discussion), or use of plot summary as a substitute for reflection and analysis. One rare exception to these forms of resistance was a young woman responding to Grace Paley's The Loudest Voice: OK, have to admit, this girl [Shirley, story's narrator/ protagonist, a six-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant who has been chosen to star in her school's Christmas pageant] was getting on my nerves by end of story. …