Chapter 4: Translating Curriculum with Literature and Cultural Studies

Stories are survival material, by which we create and re-create our lives, or heal, and tools for good teaching. Yet stories do not occupy the status of authority. "Our knowledge does not know what it knows."

Love and learning are two organizing themes for Edgerton's approach to reading. The search for voice impels much of the "literature of the margins" to proceed through a pedagogical imperative.

Intertextual Literary Readings

The rest of the chapter contains literary criticism...

Edgerton analyzez Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man from a perspective of the common marginality of women and African Americans. She discusses her themes of love and translation in the novel, comparing it to Toni Morrison's Beloved in terms of "Fusion Love" or eros. The duality of marginalization is evident in Invisibe Man because invisibility can be useful...the paradox of marginality. Negotiated, "deconstructed" love provides the turning-around place for a more autonomous, yet connected, life in both novels.

She posits similarities between Beloved and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, comparing Sethe and Amy Denver to Jim and Huck. She discusses the term "Signifyin'" as a repetition and reversal of a sentence, phrase or idea in orde to retain instability of meaning. (Example of Coltrane performing "My Favorite Things" resemblance through dissemblance.)

Discussion of Ellison and black critics' responses to Huck Finn. Are Invisible Man's allusions to Huck Finn signifyin' or translation? Signifyin' is an African American literary technique, not necessary to compare to any European literary techniques.

The south needs a social psychoanalysis and novelists are an important part of that analysis. "Lines of flight" of marginalized characters only possible through inner searching and community help can lead to wisdom...not repressing the past. When love and historical consciousness become overwhelmed by guilt (like Sethe in Beloved and like the South obsessing over the past, growth is not possible.

Ellison's novel trabslates and "converses" with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Rosa, the main character, a "hysterical male identification. Could Faulkner write her otherwise than male?"

Richard Wright thought Their Eyes Were Watching God was counter-revolutionary, partly because of her writing in dialect. No direct references to oppression. Self-division can be against or for the self, unhealthy or creative.

Janie, narrator or Their Eyes Were Watching God ends in "accomplished solitude," a choice of communal marginality.

Jamaica Kincaid's technique in Lucy is metissage, "initiating a genuine dialogue with the dominnt discourses they hope to transform, thus ultimately favoring exchange rather than provoking conflict." She reverses colonizer/colonized and tourist/native hierarchies. Only by being neither master nor slave does one become merely human. Lucy and Mariah develop a mutually pedagogical relationship.

Absurdity of West Indian children having to memorize and write about poems describing English countrysides rather than their own. Kincaid's method of studying history to is to study domination.