Towards a Dialogic Ethical Criticism: A Framework for Examining Student Responses to Referent Others and Classroom Interactions of Ethical Meaning-making
Submitted by:
Dominic Nah
Abstract:
Since the late 20th century, Literature educators have adopted dialogic pedagogies that connect aesthetic appreciation and other-centred approaches to literary texts. However, Literature educators have expressed an ambivalence towards teaching with other-centered approaches: on the one hand, they believe in the value of exposing students to issues of inclusivity and injustice through referent others – i.e., imagined fictional constructs of the other that reference and point to real others in the world. On the other hand, teachers are also concerned about managing student resistance, inappropriate responses, and ethically sensitive discussions.
Hitherto, classroom research on students’ ethical meaning-making has rarely been connected with theoretical developments of ethical criticism, or conducted in non-western contexts. How can educators better prepare for the range of student responses towards referent others, as well as understand what opens and closes ethical meaning-making in the Literature classroom?
To this end, I propose a framework of dialogic ethical criticism that synthesises an other-centred ethical criticism influenced by Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of I-Thou relations and hermeneutic conversation, along with existing empirical studies of student responses to other-centered Literature pedagogies.
From here, I establish two areas in this framework. First, I chart a range of student responses to referent others: from receptive and other-centered stances where students orient their responses from the perspective of the other; receptive yet self-centred stances where students are open to the other but take the self as the primary reference; and resistant and self-centred stances where students either objectify or dismiss the other. Secondly, I chart what aspects of classroom discourse open and close, facilitate and inhibit possibilities of ethical meaning-making about the other in classroom interactions.
Developing this framework from both theoretical approaches and empirical data (which also includes both a literature review and my studies of SIngaporean students to other-centered Literature pedagogies), I contend that this theoretical framework has pedagogical implications for how Literature educators can adjust their implicit standards of acceptable discourse and explicit instructional strategies to help motivate and manage students in engaging with ethically complex texts.
[340 words]
References:
Attridge, D. (2015). The work of literature. Oxford University Press.
Choo, S. S. (2021). Teaching ethics through literature: The significance of ethical criticism in a global age. Routledge.
Gadamer, H.-G. (2013). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.
Nah, D. (In press). Intersubjective Interpretations from Ethical Criticism and Student Responses to Ethically Oriented Literature Pedagogies: An Integrative Literature Review. Australian Journal of English Education, 58.