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I can listen to you. I can hear you. I know I can never be you.
-Connie Krontz, Seattle University School of Law
Strategic idealism implies a conscious identification among people that is based on a desire for an intersubjective receptivity, not mastery, and on a simultaneous recognition of similarities and differences, not merely one or the other.
-Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (28)
Innstructors of global literature in undergraduate courses find pedagogical opportunity in the emotional turn in rhetoric and literary studies that valorizes teaching students "respect for freedom and human dignity, empathy, open-mindedness, tolerance, justice, equality, ethical integrity, [and] responsibility to a larger good" as preparation for global citizenship (The National Task Force 4). To promote cross-cultural understanding, literature that portrays transnational groups such as uprooted immigrants and refugees, their dangerous journeys, and integration in the United States seems eminently appropriate. Our belief in the power of this literature to expand understanding of others finds support in the tenets of moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions: Emotions are part of ethical reasoning, and literature is a means to educate those emotions because "certain truths about the human being can be told only in literary form" (3). In his essay "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," neopragmatist Richard Rorty asks, "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?" (133) and proposes that we overcome this negativity by reading "sad and sentimental stories" about people who differ from us "in appearance and habits and beliefs" to increase perceptions of similarities in suffering (134). Further, narrative empathy scholar Suzanne Keen posits the theory of "protective fictionality" (220) confirmed by recent cognitive psychology studies. These studies have empirically shown that "narrative fiction should provide a safe haven from [readers'] outgroup anxiety" through indirect perspective-taking experiences that evoke empathy and diminish prejudice (Johnson et al. 581).1 However, how well does global literature that resists clear-cut fiction/nonfiction categories, that bears witness to the extreme suffering of other cultural groups, and that advocates for human rights serve to "educate the emotions" of comfortable American readers?
Teaching this literature in fact involves significant pedagogical complications. As my epigraphs suggest, the...