2025 Theses Doctoral

Toward Productive Dissonance and Rehearsing Resolutions: Talking about Literature at School

Robb, Audra Kirshbaum

We live in an era of widening rifts: personal, social, and political. Somehow the internet, despite its potential to connect across differences, seems to have mostly served to algorithmically deepen connections that are familiar, that echo our own beliefs and suspicions. Post-COVID, we could have returned to "real life" with renewed energy for crossing thresholds, but this potential has yet to be fulfilled. Schools are microcosms of the wider environment and not immune to fractioning; in fact, intra-school group divides create additional, ever-shifting plate tectonics and guardrails.

How might reading and talking about literature at school create opportunities for people to encounter and respond to other perspectives; to also experience being encountered and responded to? Perhaps by theorizing reading as a chance to hear oneself, others, and our intertwined lives in new ways. I begin by explaining the urgency of this work and how traditional English literature studies often fail to foster transformative conversations.

I then bring several theorists together (Buber, Bakhtin, and Bhabha) to build a conceptual framework for reading literature with others — to rehearse and re-orchestrate our understanding of each other and the world — and apply this theory to a qualitative study of extracurricular reading experiences in an international school setting.

Finally, I consider how some key practices may condition students and adults in schools to use literature to improve their collective soundscape.