ABSTRACT
In a teacher education classroom in Toronto, teacher candidates and high school students discuss their responses to the young adult novel House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. Through the twentieth century, the emergence of reader-response theory marked a paradigm shift in literacy education. In contrast with formalist and new critical approaches to reading that, in the words of poet Adrienne Rich, observed texts “through a long and protected viewing tube”, reader-response laid groundwork for literacy pedagogy that took seriously readers’ personal and affective responses to literature. The term “cosmopolitics,” coined by Isabel Stengers, emerged in part as a means to complicate common descriptions of “cosmopolitanism” – in particular, those that celebrate the idea of a fluid, world identity that individuals might cultivate and embody. This process of the reconciliation signals the importance of the second component of the “cosmopolitics.”.
