Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Literary study means attending to forms of expression that bring to light the often-elusive structures and processes—socioeconomic, political, and aesthetic—that shape our material realities and the possibilities that exist for living within them. By extension, literary study enables us to identify the narrative structures already informing our actions and beliefs and thereby articulate new narratives. In this way, I teach reading as fundamentally co-creative in that, first, it is an act of sharing in authorship with the text, that is, students practice making meaning with the text rather than merely recovering meaning and, second, it is social: by calling attention to the elements that form (or deform) a text, I aim to have my students expand what they find to be legible—that is, what they’re able to hear and to say.

When I teach literature, I begin by asking my students to think critically about what narrative is; and when its familiar forms break down, to rearticulate their understanding of the properties and functions of narrative form. Toward this end, I include texts in my course syllabi that upset students’ generic expectations—texts, for example, that lack a familiar plot structure or introduce experimental literary elements. In my Literature from the Margins course, students read contemporary American fiction such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, as well as nonfiction such as Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians. Most students in this course, despite their diverse backgrounds, read for a familiar narrative arc and recognizable tropes, and express vexation by these text’s fragmented and nonlinear forms. In response, I have asked my students to identify and briefly describe on sticky notes three moments in Love Medicine that struck them, for whatever reason, and to work collaboratively to group their notes on the classroom wall. They then visualize and name connections between them, using string or a dry erase marker. Following this exercise and after students have carefully studied the wall, I lead a class discussion in which they consider how and why they identify meaningful events and, more importantly, how their discomfort at the disruption of their usual process of identification might itself be constructive, allowing them to up-anchor their cultural expectations of the shape that stories take. Reflecting on Erdrich, my students have discovered that the novel’s shifting narrative viewpoints and at times confusing temporality help them to see a connection between their narrative expectations and how they conceive of identity. Erdrich, some students have construed, stages the negotiation of intersectional identity as relational rather than individualistic or teleological. Others have grappled with their inclination to make the fragmented narrative whole, to essentially settle the story by imposing transparency rather than acceding to opacity. More broadly, these lessons have offered the opportunity for the class to think about how form can reproduce or resist the settler colonial stance and how amplifying marginalized experiences and perspectives is a matter of from as well as content. 

The question of legibility that narrative, as I teach it, underscores is furthermore central to practicing a pedagogy informed by queer, feminist, and anti-racist thought. Lauren Berlant reminds us that gender is a genre on which people place the demand for intelligibility. Stories that challenge generic expectations can, then, surely remediate expectations surrounding identity categories. I therefore employ a pedagogy that seeks to challenge standards of legibility historically determined along gender, racial, and class lines. In an English major capstone course, I introduced my students to Leslie Fiedler’s “Amateur Criticism,” an essay that calls on critics to write in the same spirit as the literary rather than in the objective voice of the sciences. Alongside Fiedler’s essay, I taught scholarship that has revised the model of amateur criticism, which lays bare the prohibitive criteria of legitimacy, to bring the ideas of women, people of color, and the LGTBQ community to the forefront. These readings set the foundation for the second half of the course, which surveyed autotheory, including Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. These texts serve as models for the possibilities of criticism to bridge experiential knowledge and intellectual engagement, possibilities that English majors explored in their capstone projects. One student wrote on colorism in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” interrupting her analysis with footnoted autotheoretical reflections on her identity as a light-skinned black woman to disclose how the novel shaped her insight into her own relative privilege. Another student, writing about Turkish censorship of stories of the Armenian genocide, punctuated her scholarly research with audio recorded oral histories from family members who had survived it, illustrating the need for scholarship on buried histories to create its own archive. When teaching academic research and writing, I bid my students to consider their scholarship as also a form of play—even where the stakes are high—that enlists them in intellectual community, one in which they can begin collectively remaking the structures they inherit.

The above assignments and activities are examples of the creative and collaborative learning environment I work to foster as a teacher. Through such creative collaboration, I aim to bring the ethical stakes of literary studies to the foreground by asking students both to engage with what is not immediately intelligible to them and to push past safe readings by instead taking informed and thoughtful risks in how they read, write, and think.