What can literature do? In response to this question, the feminist and existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir answered: “Literature’s good fortune is that it allows us to communicate in what separates us. Literature—if it is authentic—is a way of surpassing the separation by affirming it.” For de Beauvoir, literature allows us to reflect on our “situation,” the many factors, including racial, gender, and class identities that shape our orientation to the world. But literature also lets us recognize the situation of those around us. When we read, de Beauvoir suggests, we affirm who we are, never eliding or forgetting our identity, while engaging with those with whom we collectively inhabit this world. “That is the miracle of literature,” de Beauvoir writes, “a truth that is other becomes mine without ceasing to be an other.” Through literature we surpass our differences, but only, paradoxically, by affirming them.

De Beauvoir’s belief in the necessity of literature to a just and open world underwrites my commitment as an instructor of undergraduate and non-traditional students: adult transfers, working parents, and the incarcerated. To admit of a multitude of experiences and forms of life is to address a reality in which lives are differently recognized and unevenly cared for. Each situation has its own history, its own vulnerabilities. Acknowledging this fact lies at the core of my teaching practice, which strives to not only foster a welcoming and inclusive environment for the exchange of ideas; nor only to assign writers from an array of social, racial, and religious backgrounds; but also to help students see how their own beliefs and suppositions shape the way they act—or, as de Beauvoir would put it, “engage”—in the world.

Facilitating conversation and critical engagement through literature can be a difficult task, particularly among students whose interests lie outside the humanities or whose access to higher education has been impeded by the demands of work and family life. My approach in the classroom therefore encourages balanced attention to the form of literature alongside its context. Through patient and deliberative reading, I help students recognize how their own conceptions of modern life are often anticipated, even complicated, in texts that might feel too difficult or distant to warrant their attention.

I have developed my approach across several institutions, including most recently the University of California, Berkeley, and Mount Tamalpais College, formerly the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. At Mount Tamalpais, I taught poetry of various historical and cultural traditions. In Fall 2021, my course “Poetry, Politics, and Society” asked students to imagine poetry as a testament to the complexities of human social and political life. One day, while addressing the topic of poetic sound, my students were discussing “Sonny’s Lettah,” a poem from the Jamaican-born British artist Linton Kwesi Johnson on anti-Black police violence in London, together with Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s “Lines Written at Castle Island, Lake Superior,” a Romantic-era poem written in Schoolcraft’s native Ojibwe language. Although apparently incommensurate, these poems—separated by language, national tradition, and nearly two centuries—reflect the similar ways that poetry uses dialect and the ballad form to record experiences of political injustice. Our discussion was centered on how oral traditions resurface in modern poetry to register protest. But we gradually began to talk about the persistence of white violence against Black and brown peoples, from the first settlement of Europeans in the Americas to the present. As students began to disclose their experiences with and conceptions of racism, my practice as a teacher was challenged by the forceful presence of real suffering in the classroom. The result was an appreciation of poetry’s capacity to resonate powerfully and to generate difficult, though necessary, conversations. 

I am still learning to understand how literature inspires and confronts my students; how it gives them a way to think through the world and aspire to change it. I am eager to continue learning, and to bring my expertise to students whose variety of thought and identity will be enhanced by encountering literature in the classroom. Whether as the instructor of a composition course or an advanced undergraduate seminar, my goal is the same: to help students appreciate not only their own situation, nor only those of others, but a world in which all of us must live and act.