The other day I was in a meeting with a student during my office hours. It’s normally fairly pleasant and somewhat interesting to lead these meetings. Students stop by with questions about literature, critical thinking and writing, and what not, and we try to formulate a response over a brownie or cookie that I’ve made for them (it’s a great way to break the tension if they’re nervous).
This academic year (2023-24), I’m teaching an introductory literature class which is mostly composed of freshmen. We’re doing poetry, short stories, a novel and a play (with some poetry writing along the way) all chosen by yours truly and green-lighted by the English Department. It’s a true lesson in the humanities with a solid dose of critical thinking and writing thrown in. (It’s the kind of class everyone would benefit from taking once in their lives if they’re fortunate enough to do so.)
One of the nerve wracking things about being a white professor is the fear that you’ll create a syllabus that’s “too white.” This is drummed into teachers not just at UC Davis, but across many, if not all, left-leaning university institutions in the US. Instructions given to us in our training classes produce guidance like (I paraphrase), “avoid old white men as much as possible.”
While the wording of these “training” sessions is problematic at best, they do prompt a larger and more important discussion about meaningful diversity in a literature class: who are you including in your reading list and why? What does their poetry tell us? What larger conversations does their novel prompt? How valuable are those conversations in the present day?
During the office hour meeting with my student last week, we touched upon these questions albeit briefly. After getting the class to read through Dictée by the late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (a true multimedia poet who wrote so well it makes me joyfully jealous), the student said that they appreciated me picking Cha because Cha was, like her grandmother, Korean. The student went on to say that she’d never read anything in a classroom with the Korean language (Cha intermittently writes in Korean, as well as English and French, in Dictée). The student seemed excited to see this part of her culture explored in a classroom setting. They tentatively implied the sentiment that they “felt seen.”
In response to the student’s delight, I immediately responded with something like, “I’m so happy to hear that you appreciated Cha.” I paused for a moment to try and get my thoughts straight and then said, “Cha was an innovative poet. She prompts big questions about what poetry can look like – she totally expanded the possibilities of its definition.” Then I said something to the effect of, “Cha also explores some of the most universal and timeless human experiences: diaspora, learning a new language, the issues of translation, and how these obstacles shape one’s identity.” The conversation came to a natural end, and off the student went with her next homework instructions in hand.
In the days since the interaction, I have flip flopped on the larger issue that the student and I briefly engaged with: representation in literature and its ability to make us “feel seen.”
I have, of course, dabbled in this conversation and problem(?) before. I remember in graduate school hearing a Hispanic student talk about how it made them feel “gross” to never see or read about characters “like them” in books taught in high school. I felt for this student. They seemed infuriated and disappointed that only in a college class (it was a “postcolonial” literature course) were they finally reading books about people who were not white.
I understood the student’s frustration. Being a white person who grew up in the west, I am obviously accustomed to seeing another people with skin like mine in movies, television, literature, and so on.
But how many times have I engaged with a character who is like me that goes beyond mere skin color? I can only think of startlingly few number of instances.
I am Scottish — a Glaswegian or, as they call us at home, a “Weegie”. I was born in Annan, a wee Scottish town near the border, and raised in Glasgow. What art did I mediate that ever told the story of a character “like me?”
For starters, we studied English literature in school, not Scottish. Apart for Burns Day (look it up), and studying two Scottish authors in my last year of high school, I never read a single book, poem, or short story, about a Scottish person. Everything was about folks south of the border. We read in English (not Gaelic, our indigenous language which was stamped out by the legal system in the late 1800s), learnt about English history, the “union” of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, and that was about it. Even the music I played on my violin was all by English, German and Italian composers until my mother rightly told me at 10 years old to go and learn some Scottish fiddle music that her father taught her — thank goodness she did.
No, I did not ever engage with representations of myself growing up. And, truth be told, I am only just beginning to do so at the age of 32. It feels embarrassing and a failure in my mind as a Scot.
But even as I start putting together a canon of books by Scottish authors and books about Scotland, I do not think it is literature’s job to make me “feel seen.”
For starters, what does that phrase mean exactly? It seems to me that it comes from a painfully insecure corner of the heart and mind, from the type of person who needs validation and praise more broadly speaking. This is obviously a common human shortcoming and one that I see time and time again across the student population which is full of folks who are young and simply growing into themselves.
But I think that we are telling these young people a lie that if they read stories “about themselves”, that they’ll suddenly… feel good about themselves. This seems to be the implication: see a character that looks like you, read a language you heard growing up, read about a hero who is also female, and you’ll finally feel like you exist in the world.
I fully agree with the notion that literature in the classroom, and education more broadly, should reflect a well-rounded sense of the world and the current moment. America is changing — it always has been — so it makes sense to continuously alter your syllabus so that current and timeless conversations can evolve in the classroom thanks to a book. This is surely why diverse education matters.
However, what I do not believe is that reading a text that supposedly reflects one’s life experience will make one feel like they matter. No character or storyline or poem will ever truly reflect you and your life. There will always be supposed shortcomings in artistic representation. No matter how many books by Scottish authors I read, I am not going to find “me” in them. That is impossible.
If one wishes to “feel seen,” I would argue that one needs to reflect on why they need to feel seen at all. Reading is important, it can shape your life for the better, but seeing what will only ever be a shadow of yourself in the pages of a novel will not tackle what I can only armchair diagnose as a lack of self confidence that might better remedy itself through the blessing of aging and taking responsibility for one’s life.