Combatting Assumption in a Fluid Myth Classroom

The need to draw a more explicit connection between literature and the daily lives of students has become an increasingly pressing issue. Preeminent literary scholars have long argued that the design of many undergraduate classrooms only engages the student with literature to a degree that, long term, does not produce habits of criticism that engage students with wider contexts of conflict. The yield instead primarily takes place in a classroom. Leading scholars tend to draw connections of value between the work they are teaching and the lives of students by focusing on how they negotiate specific power discourses. However, placing an emphasis on having habits of criticism function regarding specific biases in contexts restricts the kinds of conflict students are prepared to negotiate. To encourage a habit of critical thinking in undergraduate students that can be applied to any context of conflict and bias, a vocabulary on language failure should be taught and analyzed through its implications in origin myths that explain and justify division. Language failure, or the failure of symbols to represent subjects in their full capacity, is a concept and theory introduced by Kenneth Burke to examine conflict at a conceivable root. Burke suggests that language failure is the core of misrepresentation and conflict and is inevitably the result of any ‘identification’, or selection of meaning that is assigned to symbols. Identifications are selections of meaning and conceptions of value that organize bodies towards a social purpose, under a limited perspective. The danger of language failure is present when it goes unacknowledged. In identifications, the repercussions of language failure continually complicate, divide and propagate in discourse; assumptions about the validity of identifications encourage more complex ‘blind-spots’ and misrepresentations that exclude populations and have violent potentials. The more complex the layering of association between identifications becomes, the more obscured their foundational failure, their nature of non-innateness, is, faced as truth, affective as justice. The ‘affective’ foundation behind these powerful associations and assumptions is myth. Origin myth, or a narrative that explains the beginning of some worldly phenomena, founds, and adapts to the needs of culture and society. Teaching students to regard risks of language use as being foundational in their cultural thought, their criticism, and their communication, enriches their capability to negotiate and participate ambivalently in conflicts faced during their daily lives.