Developing a Confluence of Identity: A Reflexive Ethnography of Reading Literature as Rhetoric

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Abstract

Summary:
In the modern culture of concern around what literature is taught, as well as the political, social, and religious ideologies which shape those concerns, students and teachers have been affected by the complex environments which permeate English classroom culture in conservative states. Situated in this environment of literary tensions around who, what, and how the stories of life can be shared as experiences that invite the questioning of hegemonic power structures, the semiosis of texts in action as dialogic items of discovery invites this inquiry: How does reading literature as rhetoric of the lived experience allow for meaning-making and cultural identity development of advanced English students and teachers?
The problem conservative America has with literary freedom is its possibilities for bridging the space between private and public lives, as a means to “being, Dasein, and being-in-the-world” (Suddick et al., 2020, p. 2). Reading literature as the rhetoric of lived experience is a way “the reader seeks to participate in another’s vision—to reap knowledge of the world, to fathom the resources of the human spirit, to gain insights that will make his [and her] own life more comprehensible” (Rosenblatt, 1995, p. 7). Teaching reading and offering texts disconnected from readers lives has implications for philosophies of power such as Marx’s (1967) labor theory, because when students read as an exercise for the teacher and produce thinking through writing on that literature that is for the teacher the learning is never theirs. Feminist hermeneutical phenomenology allows for an examination of the injustices suffered when the canon of literature is limited, and while an examination through multiple critical lenses of oppressive power may encompass feminism as one of multiple lenses, feminism as a theory, Ahmed (2017) argues, is way to challenge universal truths determined by a positivist epistemology seated in masculine dictates, and “questioning sexism is one of the most profound ways of disrupting what we take to be given and thus learning about how the given is given” (p. 28).
This paper explores how the transactional theory of reading literature as rhetoric, and critical theories of feminism, race, and labor, may disrupt the white, male hegemonies perpetuated and potentially disrupted through literacy instruction. I conducted a critical ethnographic study comprised of observations, in a school where Gifted and Talented students are served through honors and AP courses, of Advanced Placement English students interacting with literature in class discussions and interviews with a female teacher of literature in an honors course, in a primarily white, middle- and-working-class, conservative high school in Texas.
Reflections from my positionality as a high school English teacher allowed me to see implications for the teaching of literature as a tool for student and teacher identity development that rejects the domination of Southern white patriarchal governance of being in the democratic sense. This study reveals the effects of literature selection on the students who read it and the teachers who teach it: the hegemonic powers which access to the diverse world views befitting students in advanced English courses.

Author

• Staci Lynne Tharp, Texas Tech University