Bridges to Nowhere

AIA-FL Blog ^ | January 14, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Bridges To Nowhere

Malcolm A. Kline, January 14, 2010

Before reading between the lines, you should learn to read the actual sentences that make up those bridges. Unfortunately, too often they are bridges to nowhere.

“How do we make class issues relevant for literature students in a way that is not just about what is inside a text, and thus conveniently distanced from their own lives and influences and choices?” Janet Galligani Casey asks in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.”

“This question has long troubled me, especially since I teach at a selective liberal arts college, Skidmore, where the majority of students—the children of educated parents from relatively affluent communities, with an established interest in the arts—would be considered privileged,” Casey explains. “While these students are eager to study literature and earnest in their desire to consider texts that focus on socioeconomic conditions different from their own, they too often seem safely removed from any of the class tensions represented.”

“How might I engage their class positions more fully within the parameters of a literary studies course?”...