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Confronting Resistance: Sonny's Blues -- and Mine

Confronting Resistance: Sonny's Blues -- and Mine thinking and with the differences between automatic responses and more critical, more reflective ones. At their “worst,” unexamined feelings appear to manifest “various levels of rage, incomprehension, . . . fear, and prejudice, which together forge innumerable hateful ways of knowing the world that have their own internalized systems, self-sustaining logics, and justifications” (Miller 1994: 405 – 6). Since these students, members of the same fraternity, tended to look to each other for affirmation, I saw more fear than hatred or intractable prejudice in the responses of even the most aggressively hostile among them. However, while recognizing the intensity of emotions and their role in intellectual analysis is sobering, it does not itself lead to more effective teaching. In reflecting on my experience, I will suggest that it is helpful to think more systematically and more self-consciously than the culture of higher education typically demands about how to offer students the freedom to negotiate a space between where they are and where the author of a text is and, by implication, where they might be, both as readers and as citizens of the world. Without claiming to have discovered any protocols for doing so (like Marshall Gregory [2001: http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Duke University Press

Confronting Resistance: Sonny's Blues -- and Mine

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1531-4200
eISSN
1533-6255
DOI
10.1215/15314200-2-2-173
Publisher site
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Abstract

thinking and with the differences between automatic responses and more critical, more reflective ones. At their “worst,” unexamined feelings appear to manifest “various levels of rage, incomprehension, . . . fear, and prejudice, which together forge innumerable hateful ways of knowing the world that have their own internalized systems, self-sustaining logics, and justifications” (Miller 1994: 405 – 6). Since these students, members of the same fraternity, tended to look to each other for affirmation, I saw more fear than hatred or intractable prejudice in the responses of even the most aggressively hostile among them. However, while recognizing the intensity of emotions and their role in intellectual analysis is sobering, it does not itself lead to more effective teaching. In reflecting on my experience, I will suggest that it is helpful to think more systematically and more self-consciously than the culture of higher education typically demands about how to offer students the freedom to negotiate a space between where they are and where the author of a text is and, by implication, where they might be, both as readers and as citizens of the world. Without claiming to have discovered any protocols for doing so (like Marshall Gregory [2001:

Journal

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2002

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