Rethinking the Role of Aesthetics in Critical ELA Classrooms

• In Event: Cosmopolitical Approaches to Intersectional Readings of Literature

Abstract

Objectives
Rosenblatt’s (1978) differentiation between “efferent” and “aesthetic” reading has bifurcated conceptions of critical literary reading in ELA classrooms (Lewis, 2000; Cai, 2008; Simon et al, 2019). Critical literary pedagogies have largely worked from “efferent” stances: focusing on the narrative and informational content of texts. However there has been less consideration of how “aesthetic reading” in ELA settings may serve critical ends. This paper works in this gap, by examining what an aesthetic attention to language in literature might contribute to scholarship on critical English education (Johnson et al, 2017; Morell, 2008; Sealey-Ruiz, 2016; Winn, 2013).

Framework
I rely upon decolonial literary theorist Sylvia Wynter’s (1992) proposal that we “rethink aesthetics” to reframe aesthetic literary reading in English classrooms. Wynter argues that social hierarchies are maintained through language, and she contends that literary reading offers an opportunity to expose the sociopolitical function of words. She therefore recommends that we conceptualize aesthetics as a “deciphering practice” through which readers unpack not what words can “interpreted to mean but what they can be deciphered to do” (p. 267) within social worlds.

Methods
I draw data for this paper from a year-long ethnographic study of a multi-racial 11th grade English class in a public high school in a large midwestern city. I particularly analyze students’ aesthetic encounters with language in Jesmyn Ward’s (2011) novel, Salvage the Bones. For the purposes of this paper, I use microethnographic discourse analytic (Bloome et al, 2014) techniques to describe one event which best points to the critical potential of aesthetic reading in ELA contexts.

Results
Salvage the Bones describes a Black girl protagonist, Esch who, in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, learns she is pregnant. Students in this classroom initially responded to Esch in sexist ways, calling her a “slut.” Although the teacher and other students countered this reading, they attempted to prove that Esch was not a “slut,” efforts which left the category of “slut” intact. However, midway through the unit, one student, Maya, stepped into Esch’s embodied perspective to propose a reading of her sexual desire as not literal but rather “figurative language.” This aesthetic (re)reading of textual language opened room for students to, in Wynter’s words, “decipher” their initial raced and gendered responses to the text. I argue that interpretative move deconstructed the binary students had been using to discuss Esch, shifting their interpretations of not only this character but also gender, sexuality, and power broadly.


Significance
Although Wynter’s ideas have shaped decolonizing research methodologies (Patel, 2015; Tuck, & Yang, 2018), in this paper, I explore how Wynter’s literary theories may inform how and why we teach literature in school. Following both Wynter and the work of students in this classroom, I suggest that an aesthetic attention to literary language and meaning, often considered a disciplinary “appropriate” (Flores & Rosa, 2015) literary skill, may also function as a sociocritical practice through which students can reconfigure meanings in and of their social worlds.

Author

• Elizabeth Krone, The Ohio State University