By Jessica Maucione, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies
Classrooms comprising first-year college students are transformative spaces. People in transition to college collectively engaging writers, texts and ideas have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to discover new landscapes of meaning. For most students, this approach signals a departure from high-school-style learning. Some are initially reluctant to become accountable in this way, but as they begin to trust that I sincerely wish them to take risks and explore uncharted grounds, there is a palpable sense of collective exhilaration in the classroom. To borrow from the words of Toni Morrison, students are mystifying that which was quite recently reassuringly familiar and familiarizing that which once seemed impossibly strange. They grow powerful, then, much as writers do — in large part by following a foundational Jesuit educational principle: question everything.
Good fiction combined with open-ended classroom discussions provides myriad opportunities to challenge assumptions and beliefs by making concrete many abstractions we might otherwise keep at bay. Literary representations of elitism, classism, racism, sexism, materialism and the like create room for self-scrutiny.
Edward P. Jones’ short story “Good Neighbors,” for example, implicates readers in de-familiarizing popular notions of “goodness.” My students and I discuss the ways in which the story invites readers to identify with characters whose behaviors seem most familiar and oftentimes most appropriate, only to lead us to question not only those characters and their motives, but the parts of ourselves that identified with them in the first place.
This thrusts the class into an age-old inquiry: What is a “good neighbor”? The follow-up question for many of my students is: “Am I one?” In other words: Does my own increasingly nuanced understanding of what holds real value correspond with the identity I am constructing for myself?
What makes a mission-driven liberal arts university unique is that this line of inquiry remains central. Becoming educated and becoming “men and women for others” are correlative, if not synonymous, within this tradition.
Literature as a Vehicle for campus change
It is a humbling discovery process, particularly when students begin the semester quite aloof to questions we pursue. One student made it clear that he felt disengaged specifically as a German. He felt that Europe had managed to get past race issues in which the U.S. remained mired. Later, he did a presentation on representations of race in German commercials. Half black himself, he became emotional in front of the class as he provided an analysis of the ways in which mainstream German media uphold white supremacist ideologies that divide what is good or normal versus what is bad, deviant or violent along racial lines.
To have him come to this realization publicly benefited the class enormously. For the next four years, this student suggested to others that they take my class. During his graduation week, he wrote me a thank you, telling me how important it was that I keep taking on questions of race in the classroom.
In another case, a young woman was reluctant to engage race and racism because she felt that her family’s working-class background made her a target of reverse racism. That was in January. In February, this young woman petitioned for changes in the campus food service’s approach to Black History Month to align with its intention to honor African Americans rather than perpetuate stereotypes. She approached the situation with diplomacy and tenacity, involved the class in her project, and was successful in bringing about a needed change.
I teach two versions of English 105: Introduction to Literature, one titled Race and Ethnicity and the other, House and Home. Questions connected to these topics intersect and resonate in myriad ways because both require the cutting through and collapsing of binaries that separate the seemingly familiar from the apparently strange: self/other; good/bad; black/white; man/woman; normal/abnormal.
Some GU students feel immediately at home upon arrival — experiencing a bolstered sense of self — while others experience an otherness or marginalization that sometimes deepens rather than wanes with time on campus. There is often, though not always, an element of race or racialization in the line of demarcation between the first group and the second group. If incoming freshmen address this in their first year at the university, there is hope of transforming the campus community into one that is increasingly open and diverse.
As I write this, my English 105: House and Home students are preparing literary analyses of selected passages from Kerri Sakamoto’s “Electrical Field.” Sakamoto’s novel involves readers in multiple layers of mysteries, ultimately uncovering some of the contemporary psychosocial effects of the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. First-semester freshmen may not know what it is like to grow up as a member of a group suffering under state-sanctioned violence. But it is important to me that they come closer to understanding what it might have been like to be interned during World War II because it may provide a gateway to understanding what it feels like to face systemic discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or class.
To “familiarize the strange” is to cultivate the power to imagine whole worlds beyond one’s own experience. We thereby gain access to conversations and communities that may have previously seemed inaccessible. My great fortune is that I get continuous access to dynamic groups of evolving students whose willingness to question everything brings me constant renewal.
More than Mechanics
What do you remember about your freshman lit course? Does a particular novel, conversation or discovery stand out? Share with us on Gonzaga’s Facebook page, or send an email to editor@gonzaga.edu.
First-year college English is about so much more than mechanics. Academic analysis provides only the foundation to boundless possibilities for intellectual inquiry, which challenges students to face the notion that human beings are accountable to one another. Recent studies out of the New School for Social Research in New York validate what English teachers have long intuited — there is a distinct link between reading and empathy. Reading and empathizing are exercises of imagination. Close examination of words and ideas — the daily undertaking of the 100-level college English course — thus opens portals to once-foreign terrains.