Tracing Embodied and Aesthetic Interpretations in Students’ Readings of Salvage the Bones

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Stories on the Move: Tracing the Flows of Student’s Embodied Literacies

Abstract

This paper documents students’ discussions of Jesmyn Ward’s text, Salvage the Bones (2011), in an 11th grade classroom in a public high school in a large Midwestern city. In tracing students’ discussion of this text, I specifically attend students’ aesthetic readings (Rosenblatt, 1978). While aesthetics are often considered as lying solely within textual language, this analysis looks at how students’ aesthetic readings were also bound up with their embodied experiences of language in this text. Rosenblatt describes this duality, writing that in an aesthetic reading, the reader will “pay attention to the broader gamut of what these particular words in this particular order [are] calling forth within him” (p. 26).

To demonstrate how students’ embodied experiences of textual language led to critical readings of this text I draw from decolonial literary theorist Sylvia Wynter (1987, 1992). Through language, Wynter argues we create abstractions that flatten and dehumanize how we see other people. An analysis of aesthetics, she argues, has the potential to unveil the linguistic systems that maintain social systems of othering and marginalization, and allows us to “think outside of the terms in which we are” (Wynter, 2000, p. 206).

Data for this paper is drawn from a year-long ethnographic study of an 11th grade classroom during the 2018-2019 school year. As a participant observer in this classroom, I attended this fifty-minute class four days a week, taking fieldnotes and collecting audio and video recordings. I also conducted exit interviews with the teacher of this class, and each of the 17 students. For this paper, I specifically focus on the 21 days students discussed Ward’s text. To analyze this data, I first identified events where students engaged in aesthetic readings- articulating felt responses to Ward’s words. I then analyzed how each aesthetic reading shifted how students were interpreting the text.

I selected three of these events to illustrate how these aesthetic readings allowed students to critically unsettle the terms through which they were reading the characters in this text. In the first event, students debate how metaphors used to describe the main character, “feel” in their bodies. In the second event, students unpack the dichotomy of “love” and “hate,” describing their own embodied experiences of these words. And in the third, the students humanize the words of the antagonist of this novel, by stepping into his embodied experience. An analysis of these events demonstrates how these aesthetic readings allowed students to contest abstract readings of characters by stepping into their embodied experiences, moving from reading about these characters to reading with them. Interview data suggests this shifted their readings of not only this text but also people and situations in their real world.

Together these events demonstrate the importance of embodied readings in students’ critical interpretations of texts. They underscore the important connection between embodied and linguistic textual responses, and they indicate that an extended attention to words in texts- is both deeply tied to individual felt experiences and necessary for reparative interpretations of both texts and worlds.

Author

• Beth Krone, Kennesaw State University