ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to provide a justification and articulate some methods for teaching literature in the service of democracy and civil rights. Literature has often been characterized, on the one hand, as a vaunted class of aesthetic texts isolated from the vulgar materialism of daily life, or on the other hand, as little more than crass political propaganda. This chapter argues that we need a different way of understanding literature’s functions in daily life, as well as a pedagogy for helping students connect poetics and politics in productive, but not reductive, ways. Drawing on scholarship in rhetoric, writing studies, and literary studies, this chapter recommends Kenneth Burke’s “literature as equipment for living” as a method around which a pedagogy can be constructed toward democratic, socially just ends. Considered in these terms, and directed toward pedagogical ends articulated by James Baldwin, teaching literature toward democratic ends means students must learn that multiple, even competing, perspectives can be legitimate, that they must read stories that are different from theirs to understand their own, and that literature can illuminate situations and strategies that can help them live their daily lives.
