Passing and Pedagogy: THE DYNAMICS OF RESPONSIBILITY - Softcover

Caughie, Pamela L.

9780252067709: Passing and Pedagogy: THE DYNAMICS OF RESPONSIBILITY

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252067703 ISBN 13: 9780252067709

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1999

The current academic milieu displays a deep ambivalence about the teaching of Western culture and traditional subject matter. This ambivalence, the product of a unique historical convergence of theory and diversity, opens up new opportunities for what Pamela Caughie calls "passing":recognizing and accounting for the subject positions involved in representing both the material being taught and oneself as a teacher.

Caughie's discussion of passing illuminates a recent phenomenon in academic writing and popular culture that revolves around identities and the ways in which they are deployed, both in the arts and in lived experience. Through a wide variety of texts—novels, memoirs, film, drama, theory, museum exhibits, legal cases—she demonstrates the dynamics of passing, presenting it not as the assumption of a fraudulent identity but as the recognition that the assumption of any identity, including for the purposes of teaching, is a form of passing.

Astutely addressing the relevance of passing for pedagogy, Caughie presents the possibility of a dynamic ethics responsive to the often polarizing difficulties inherent in today's culture. Challenging and thought-provoking, Passing and Pedagogy offers insight and inspiration for teachers and scholars as they seek to be responsible and effective in a complex, rapidly changing intellectual and cultural environment.

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About the Author:

Caughie is an associate professor of English and director of women's studies at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches feminist and critical theories, modern and postmodern literatures and African American literature and criticism.

Review:

"This is sophisticated and unsettling work-usefully unsettling. Pamela Caughie makes an original contribution to current thinking on the dilemmas of pedagogy in 'multicultural' or 'cultural studies' classrooms and presents a powerful case for why everyone should feel responsible for confronting the issues she raises."-Mary Loeffelholz, author of Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900-1945 "An extraordinary book. Risky and rigorous, informed and provocative, Caughie's book will speak excitingly to teachers, scholars, and students of cultural, literary, and identity studies."-Robert Dale Parker, author of "Absalom, Absalom!":The Questioning of Fictions

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