ABSTRACT
The aim of reading genocide literature is not to just open students to the spectacle of atrocities in the classroom or to draw out sympathies. This chapter explores how people worked together to uncover the ethical, emotional, and rational appeals of the text, which prompted a multigenre inquiry project, a presentation at a city youth summit, and a community fundraising campaign. In the early 1980s, the Guatemalan army instituted Operation Sophia, a military program aimed at stopping guerrillas by destroying the civilian bases in which they hid. The sympathy-eliciting function of narrative might mean the reader projects something out of her experiences that was only vaguely suggested by text. Students are reading in a classroom; they are part of a community of readers. The benefits from reading in a social context like the English classroom is that a reader can discover how her personal experiences and emotions potentially bias or distort understanding.
