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A recent themed issue of English Journal on "Ethics in the English Classroom" includes two papers addressing how teachers can ethically engage students in reading literatures of wartime (Glasgow & Baer, 2011; Vaughn, 2011). Kyle Vaughn, for example, describes a course on the literature of war in the non-Western world that he teaches at a private all-girls school. In reflecting on the ethical consequences of students' literary study throughout the course, Vaughn cites the careers of three former students in humanitarian work as possible evidence of students' taking to heart the moral lessons of the course. He goes on to write:
I often sit back after class and hope that . . . more and more students will take what they have learned, go out, and act. I feel quite confident that all of them, regardless of their future vocational paths, will go out and act more ethically in regards to the questions of global conflict, refugees, suffering and need, and cultures that represent different viewpoints. (66)
Vaughn's reflections on the ethical consequences of a specific course he teaches exemplify a broader cultural-historical phenomenon that Deborah Brandt (2004) labels a "moral imperative" for literacy. She describes that moral imperative as "a belief in literacy as a knowledge of right behavior" (p. 488) and locates it historically, for example, in a nineteenth-century Protestant worldview that shaped purposes for reading in primary and secondary U.S. English classrooms (Applebee, 1974; see also Fraser, 1999).
Contemporary transformations of the moral imperative for literacy live on in the popular imagination, sometimes erupting in controversies about text selection and censorship in English classrooms. They also show up in writings by teachers-such as Vaughn (2011)-that assert that reading and studying literature are ethically consequential in students' lives. I believe it is time to subject the belief in the moral consequences of literature study-and especially in the moral consequences of teaching difficult literatures about past events-to closer critical scrutiny.
A set of especially complicated ethical relationships becomes visible in literary study when the unspeakable atrocity of state-sponsored genocide is part of the story, as it is in many wartime texts taught in secondary English classrooms, including some discussed by Vaughn (2011). On the one hand, we want students to relate personally to texts,...