Mark Bracher

Reader-Response Theory

Reply to Alcorn, Marshall W., Jr.; Bracher, Mark. “Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Re-Formation of the Self: A New Direction for Reader-Response Theory.” PMLA. 1985 May; 100(3): 342-54.

Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method

When the unconventional English teacher who helped her conquer many of her feelings of insecurity is fired, a junior high student uses her new-found courage to campaign for the teachers reinstatement.

Educating for Cosmopolitanism: Lessons from Cognitive Science

In her 2005 MLA Presidential Address, “On Rooted Cosmopolitanism,” Domna Stanton proposed “cosmopolitanism as an educational ideal and a rich literary and cultural mine for our work” (629). She argued that although “we do not typically see ourselves as the heirs of cosmopolitanism, … what we, the teacher-scholars of the MLA, do in our many diverse ways is to exemplify and promote a cosmopolitan education” (629). Specifically, when we read “foreign” texts in the original or in translation, we advocate an encounter with people who are markedly different from and at the same time much like ourselves—a complex encounter made in a sympathetic effort to see the world as they see it and, as a consequence, to denaturalize our own views. Those pedagogical practices involve cosmopolitanism by implicitly rejecting parochial, chauvinistic beliefs in the exclusive value of our language, culture, nation or ethnos and by inherently embracing diversity as fundamental to the construction of the self in—and as—its relation to others. (629) Stanton concluded her speech by calling for a concerted effort on the part of language and literature teacher-scholars to form our students into cosmopolitans: in “teaching the languages and the literatures of the world in the classroom,” she declared, “we must try to form citizens not only of the world but also for the world” (638; first emphasis added; other emphases in original).

What Is Cosmopolitanism, and How Can Education Promote It?

What are the specific learning objectives that will most effectively promote cosmopolitanism, defined as the commitment to reduce suffering throughout the world and promote global justice? This chapter argues that the formation of cosmopolitans requires developing the cognitive capabilities of recognizing, when the facts warrant, the need of distant peoples, understanding how they are not (or at least not primarily) responsible for their need, and apprehending their sameness or intimate connectedness with oneself. When such judgments are made, the result is compassion for the other, which in turn leads to assistance for the other. Developing these cognitive capabilities involves correcting or replacing certain faulty information-processing structures that prevent us from recognizing these truths.

Developing Cosmopolitan Action Scripts with Camus’s “The Guest” and Coetzee’s Disgrace

Thoroughgoing cosmopolitanism includes taking action, and in order to act on their compassion for the Other, individuals must possess plans or scripts for meeting the Other’s needs. Literary study can promote the development of and investment in such scripts. This chapter explains how teachers can employ “The Guest” to help students develop a script of global hospitality that involves providing for needy Others everywhere even at some cost to oneself, and how Disgrace can be taught in a manner that develops the most difficult and thoroughgoing of cosmopolitan action scripts, that of sacrificing one’s own wealth, power, security—and perhaps even one’s very being, identity, self-integrity—for the benefit of needy Others whose beliefs, values, and behaviors one may find antithetical to one’s own.

Correcting Ethnocentric Prototypes of Self and Other with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart promotes Western readers’ recognition of their sameness with Africans by presenting African characters that Western readers can recognize as the same as themselves, along with European characters that possess negative traits that Westerners stereotypically ascribe to Africans but not to themselves. The novel also trains readers in more adequate information processing, by guiding and inducing them to repeatedly expect, attend to, infer, suppose, encode, and recall crucial information about self and Other—namely, negative qualities of Westerners and positive qualities of Africans—that their hegemonic prototypes cause them to routinely overlook, ignore, or discount. Teachers can engage students in specific reading and writing assignments that enhance their development of more the adequate information-processing routines and their acquisition of the more adequate exemplars.

How Cognitive Science Can Help Us Educate for Cosmopolitanism

The key to increasing the defining element of cosmopolitanism—helping distant others who are in need—is to increase people’s recognition of their sameness and overlap with Others. Changing their habitual distorted—and sometimes dehumanizing—perception of Others, however, usually requires much more than evidence and logical argument. It requires replacing faulty cognitive schemas, which comprise not just faulty propositional beliefs about Others but also multiple non-propositional forms of faulty knowledge. Correcting faulty schemas can be accomplished by practices such as the encoding in memory of powerful corrective exemplars of the Other and developing metacognition of one’s cognitive and emotional responses to the Other. Literature can initiate these schema-altering processes in readers, and teachers can enhance them through practices that are explained here.

Developing Metacognition of Ethnocentrism with Lessing’s “The Old Chief Mshlanga” and Voltaire’s Candide

The accurate perception of the Other can also be enhanced through the development of metacognition, the awareness, understanding, and control of one’s own cognitive structures and processes and their consequences. “Mshlanga” is an excellent text for promoting metacognition of ethnocentrism because it models the development of such metacognition and also portrays the causes, operations, consequences, and processes for correcting ethnocentric cognition. Candide provides numerous episodes of ethnocentrism distorting perception of self and Other. With such episodes serving as exemplars of ethnocentric information processing, teachers can help their students learn to recognize the same cognitive processes underlying not only the actual historical realities that Voltaire is alluding to but also current beliefs and practices, including the students’ own.

Correcting Faulty General Person-Schemas with Things Fall Apart, “The Old Chief Mshlanga,” and Candide

In addition to faulty prototypes of specific groups, literary study can also correct faulty general person-schemas that blind us to the Other’s need, blamelessness, and common humanity by obscuring four key truths about human existence: (1) that human behavior and life outcomes are often determined more by external circumstances than by the person; (2) that a person’s character is determined largely by formative experiences and environments outside the person’s control; (3) that all humans possess both good and bad traits—no one is all good or totally bad; and (4) that all humans are interconnected with each other by their common humanity, their mutual interdependence, and innate emotional attunement. Pedagogical practices for correcting the faulty schemas are discussed.