Corinne Bancroft

We are flattered by the responses we've received to "Euclid at the Core"--by the resonances our article has found even with people who do not share our basic starting points, by the way our colleagues (some long-time friends, others we've never met) have amplified and refined and questioned our ideas, and by the insightful pedagogical suggestions that, in Sheridan Blau's words, "extend the reach" of our initial essay. We don't have space, unfortunately, to honor everything that's been said in these eleven brief but rich essays. We'd therefore like to focus on two areas. First, we'll address three stubborn and significant challenges to our argument. These issues interlock in many ways, but we'll try to separate them for clarity's sake. Then, we'll turn to some practical consequences we did not have space to address in our initial article. "Our Warranted Quarrel": Challenges 1. "To Find the Heart's Construc...

In September 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich d’Arrest first observed the planet later called Neptune. Except among astronomers, this event barely registered at the time, and even now, it has had no impact on literary studies. It was surely not in Chekhov’s mind when he introduced a curious non-event a quarter of the way through ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (1899). After a week’s suave flirtation, Gurov, a practised ladies’ man, finally makes it into the hotel room of the inexperienced Anna Sergeyevna; but he finds her response to their sexual encounter ‘odd and disconcerting’. Anna pulls out the cliche, ‘You will never respect me anymore’; Gurov finds himself at a loss. ‘On the table was a watermelon. Gurov cut himself a slice from it and began slowly eating it. At least half an hour passed in silence’ (1979: 225).

abstract:Many contemporary novels feature multiple narrators who tell distinct, sometimes incommensurate, stories. While this narrative strategy is often viewed as a relic of the short story cycle tradition, I argue that this technique actually constitutes a new subtype of the novel that I call the braided narrative. In braided narratives, novelists plait together different narrative threads, distinct in terms of both narrator and story, to grapple with both the poignant fissure that fractures the most intimate attachments between individuals and the chasm that historical violences carve between social groups. Here, I focus on Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves (2008) to detail the way the braided narrative’s formal features facilitate ethical work that requires the recognition of different, often opposing, experiences. By pairing narrative theory with cognitive approaches to literature, especially the psychoanalytic concept of inters...

Author(s): Bancroft, Corinne | Advisor(s): Young, Kay | Abstract: “Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” Scout Finch calls to the single familiar face in a crowd of white men as she stands at the door of a jail that wrongly incarcerates a Black man for a crime that she does not understand. This famous scene from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) where an eight-year-old stops a lynch mob is both object and emblem of my dissertation project. “A Child’s Call: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence” draws on critical race theory and cognitive approaches to literature to show how contemporary American writers focus on child characters as instruments for narrating violence and violation, and how these children’s voices call adult characters and actual readers toward a heightened sense of social responsibility. While Scout’s pleasantries move the adult characters toward an everyday responsibility of caregiving, other such child protagonists face insurmountable barriers: in Toni Morriso...

Given how vividly Alan Palmer's essay describes our experiences as co-authors--and given how we found ourselves "of one mind" in our appreciation of it--we couldn't resist co-authoring a response. What strikes us most is the scope of its application. The social mind is, on one level, a simple concept. But it's a bold one that promotes a cognitive shift in our literary understanding; and once you've taken the leap, the concept provides illumination along many axes well beyond the practice of co-authorship. Granted, Palmer sometimes pushes universality further than we would. He says, for instance, "the concept of action necessarily requires the presence of thought." Yet there are cases--Nawal El Saadawi's God Dies by the Nile is rich in examples--where characters' needs are so fundamental that their actions seem detached from thought. Still, Palmer's contributions to our understanding outweigh any quarrels. We'd like to touch briefly...

"Maybe it's not really New Criticism; maybe it's just called that because it's not anything else." --Emily Rohrbach Introduction: The Aims of Education We have written this essay with some trepidation. The project began when John V. Knapp invited Peter to revisit some of the arguments he had made about the role of literary theory in secondary education in Authorizing Readers, which he had co-authored with Michael W. Smith back in 1998. Peter was wary: did he have anything new to add, especially after the introduction of the Common Core and its bright vision of a revamped educational system? But he was also intrigued: he'd been working, at a distance, with Corinne, a former student, as she tried to adapt her theoretical knowledge to the day-to-day activities in her middle- school classroom. We wondered: working together, might we in fact be able to think in new ways about how students, both secondary and early college levels, learn--or should be taught--to read literature? Perhaps: but Peter is a college teacher, with a few months of high-school teaching during Freedom Summer, and Corinne has taught for three years in an independent school. What could we really contribute to a national debate dominated by people with far more knowledge and experience than both of us together? Still, neither of us is exactly diffident, and we figured we'd barge ahead. Offering what? Let us begin with a few caveats. We're not going to be proposing a model curriculum, nor a pedagogical guide. Nor will we be intervening in the debates about literary reading lists--for instance about the role of young adult literature in classrooms. What we're hoping to do, rather, is offer a few general ideas about how literary education might be more profitably grounded (as you'll see when we get to the issue of abstraction, there's something paradoxical in that generality); and our arguments will be utopian in the specific sense that we'll skip over such questions as how someone might go about putting some of our ideas into practice in a particular classroom. While we'll be offering some specific interpretations, too, our goal is not to convince you of our readings and evaluations (say, of Hunger Games), but to convince you that we're offering fertile grounds on which to discuss them. Simply put, we argue that if education doesn't give students the tools to discuss important literary questions (including questions about literature's relationship to the larger world) intelligently, then their education is flawed. Our basic aim is hardly controversial: to develop students who can be flexible, self-conscious readers. (1) We also want them to be theoretically informed. This might seem a bit more treacherous, since teaching theory to high school students may, at first, raise the specter of replacing Hawthorne with Derrida in our schools. Nothing could be further from our minds. Over the past thirty or forty years (can it really have been that long?), the word "theory" has been hijacked--at least at the college and university level--by post-structuralists and post-modernists (loosely considered) so that it has come more and more to mean a particular kind (or at least a cluster of particular kinds) of theory. (2) We are not interested in giving our students High Theory, either directly or indirectly (for an interesting discussion, see Mohanty "Radical"). Our notion of theory is less grand, and certainly less overtly ideological. We're not proposing something rigorously systematic; what we're looking for is a set of comprehensible, pragmatic, and coherent principles about literature, readers, and the act of reading, principles on which readers can rely as they build literary interpretations. Theory in this sense need not be threatening, even in a middle-school classroom. In fact, theory in our sense is, to a large extent, working with what our students already know--providing a framework and a vocabulary that allow them to express and build on that knowledge. …