ABSTRACT
Students must struggle with each other’s ideas without becoming antagonistic and, most importantly, they must struggle with their own ideas. Engaging in such struggles does not come naturally to most people, and since it may be unpleasant at times, some people will try to avoid such struggles. Because of this, the teacher is key and irreplaceable to fostering such classroom conversations and as such is key to the kinds of deep understanding that can only come from these kinds of conversations about personhood prompted by the teaching and reading of literature in classrooms. Challenging a common rationality about personhood can be unsettling. A key aspect of the assignment is that it ties the set of literary texts and classroom discussion texts the students have encountered in the classroom to the students’ lives. Definitions of personhood are not given or inherent.
