Teaching for Social Justice: Reeducating the Emotions Through Literary Study

Abstract

Many literature teachers and scholars today are committed to promoting social justice through both their teaching and their scholarship. Some of the most prominent critical approaches to literature in recent decades-Marxism, feminism, gayllesbian/ queer criticism, and postcolonialism-originated as efforts to com­ bat injustices suffered by specific groups, while other approaches, such as psychoanalysis, semiotics, and deconstruction, have been given political and/or ethical inflections and recruited to assist in a more general struggle for social justice. During the 1990s, criticism was seen as taking a decidedly ethical turn (see Parker; Buell). Indeed, as Wayne Booth and others have observed, virtually all postmodernists and most other sorts of critics as well are con­ cerned ultimately with questions of ethics and justice (see Booth 41--42; Siebers 5; Clausen 22). But despite this commitment of critical and pedagog ical activity to political and ethical ends, there is little evidence that literary study has made much difference in the injustice that permeates our world, and there is good reason to believe that literary study as it is currently being pursued is incapable of doing so. The reason is not, as common sense might suggest, that the academic activity of literary study, pursued only by a very small and effete minority, is simply powerless against the massive evils of the world at large. For while it is true that literary professionals are small in number and slight in status, the fact that we teach-and/or teach others to