ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the conversation Ms. McClure and her students had prompted by their reading of Inside the Hotel Rwanda. One of the keys to how Inside the Hotel Rwanda is framed is in Ms. McClure’s characterization of the various sources they are reading as “stories”. One of the ways that Ms. McClure and her class construct personhood is through nominalization: naming kinds of persons and naming qualities that a person has. Personhood is promulgated not only in nominalizations and in narratives explicitly focused on types of persons and components and qualities of personhood but also through the chronotopes of the narratives constructed. The exchange of narratives regarding forgiveness, with their implied chronotopes, can be viewed as an initial dialogue in which the students are arguing to learn about the nature of forgiveness and how it may be a quality of personhood.
