Why We Should Teach Women’s Life Writing in English Class

Abstract

Stories about women’s traumatized childhood and adolescence are often treated as insignificant, dangerous, and thus noncanonical, and are generally omitted from the English literature curriculum. Teachers may resist teaching literary texts, such as Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, that specifically foreground thorny issues of racial conflict, sexuality, class, or disability/illness. However, I claim that the exclusionary historical, social construction of the literary canon should be interrupted, disrupted, and constantly reconfigured to include and represent all angles and aspects of diversity that exist in the world. This paper examines the ongoing debate between traditionalists and multiculturalists about which literary works should constitute the canon, explores various theoretical movements to expand the canon, and finally argues for the pedagogical value of teaching women’s life writings about trauma in English classes.