Hostility: our students have never been without it. This realization dawned on me in the middle of a sophomore seminar, when I asked students if they were planning to vote in the 2024 presidential election. What I heard was worrying. The 2020 election was the first in which my students were eligible to vote—a hostile election not just publicly but privately as well, as my students felt distinctly the familial hostility of supporting the candidate of their choice who was not their parents’ choice, or, even more worrying, the hostility they felt toward themselves when they voted for the candidate of their parents’ choice who was not genuinely their own choice. Such turmoil was laid for my students at an early age. In their middle school years, they witnessed the demise of what was then hailed as the “Obama Method” of negotiating with hostile actors through “attempts to find common ground, expressions of respect for the adversary’s core beliefs, and profuse hope for cooperation” (Chait). In their high school years, my students witnessed not only the repeated undermining and weaponizing of this method but also the increasingly public and ugly enthusiasms of those who filibuster reforms, obstruct justice, and idolize brutality. Thus my and many students arrive, from the dinner table to the ballot box, to our classrooms finding entirely normal hostility’s ongoing “judicial mythology of trial and judgment, crime and punishment,” which relishes in “indictment and argument, verdict and sentence” (Solomon 227). Our students are victims of hostility gone mainstream in spheres both political and pedagogical—hostility deployed not to create meaningful change but instead, through muscularity and machismo, to maintain an adversarial stance at any cost (see Felski 10).
Our students have never been without hostility. But we can show them that hostility is not the only way. As experts in the art of reading, we can demonstrate how, as Kevin M. Gannon notes, hostility is sustained by bad reading: a deliberate engineering of “backlash” predicated on intentionally selective misreading, so that the injustices that a more genuine act of reading reveals are obscured through “a bogeyman that exists mostly in their own fevered imaginations” (112).1 Pointing out hostility as a poor way—and not the only way—to read can be revelatory to students for whom hostility has been naturalized as the primary mode of argument and analysis. When I arrived at my current institution, I was surprised by how students in the required literature survey would describe characters as bad or wrong, as if diagnosing the characters’ morality—all the while never probing their own—was the sole goal of interpretation. They mastered the task, witnessed in public life, of reading to invent an unworthy character on whom they could assign blame or fault.
Silvan Tomkins, the pioneer of affect theory, writes that “the primary function of anger is to make bad things worse” (115). Anger demands solutions to bad matters. By contrast, hostility has no solution in mind because it finds satisfaction in its own sustenance. Hostility thrives because its pedagogy is simple: come to a conclusion that those in your in-group would agree with, invent a straw man to represent the out-group, and demonize the straw man as the antithesis of your conclusion. This pedagogy is what hostile leaders model and what their adherents listen for; indeed, it is what “keeps followers hostile . . . and in need of their leadership” (Engels 306). Hostility’s pedagogy requires judges and juries, audiences and executioners; and, above all, hostility requires a demagogue who comes to the conclusions and invents the antithetical straw men for followers to pile on. Hostility is as nondemocratic as it is anti-intellectual: hostility teaches fight or flight, adherence or avoidance.
Our students have never been without hostility. But we can show them that hostility is not the only way.
But hostility’s trenchant presence in public life should remind us of what hostility wants us to forget: there are other ways of looking at bad matters. It is not axiomatic that “without an outrage or an injustice, without a villain to blame, there is simply no cause” (Jasper 46). Causes exist even if we do not resort to a phony pedagogy of villains and heroes, and there are ways to read and arguments to make that do not turn strangers into enemies but rather create new and enriching allies. I call these antihostility pedagogies: approaches to teaching that challenge hostility’s assumptions and ubiquitous presence in public life by cultivating alternative affective investments through careful reading. Here I explore three pedagogies that I rely on in teaching my medical humanities and literature courses. To me, these pedagogies encourage moments of reflection and conversation, of introspection and sharing: positive energies—unlike centrist calls for civility that are easily overwhelmed by hostility’s noise or a both-sides-matter approach that induces apathy and cynicism—that empower students to explore the paradoxes of their values, probe the assumptions of their worldviews, and understand the importance of others as academic and civic neighbors.2 These pedagogies vivify the importance of the humanities in the classroom and in life, for such pedagogies put the principles of the humanities into practice and also bring the humanities to the person; antihostility pedagogies meet students where they are and show students new causes they can affiliate with—causes to which they do not need to be led but rather can be joined by others in new solidarities. The way to begin thriving in a world where hostility is naturalized is to find, and share, new ways of reading.
Humility
Hostility emerges from an ersatz certainty—a conviction that the world should be one way, my way. Under this presumption, everything that is not as I assume it is becomes an obstacle, an enemy. This is why hostile readers rely on cliché and caricature, for they are so certain of themselves that they need not look, probe, or explore. Hostile readers have a sense of conviction which comes with the urge to turn others into convicts, to moralize one’s certainty so that the world is not protean but Manichean. Hostility replaces reading with ego.
This may be why my medical humanities students find so productively unsettling two essays by the physician-writers Atul Gawande and Sayantani DasGupta, for they both caution against the jump to hostile conclusions. Gawande’s “Curiosity and What Equality Really Means,” originally given as a commencement speech at the medical school of the University of California, Los Angeles, explores his treatment of a prisoner who slashed his own wrist and swallowed part of a razor blade. Attempting to get the prisoner to sit still so he can stitch the prisoner’s wrist, Gawande finds that he must first set aside the enormity of the prisoner’s crimes and approach him as one human being to another—not necessarily coming to like the prisoner, but being present as the prisoner explains his own sense of anger and injustice. “For the next hour, I just sewed and listened, trying to hear the feelings behind his words,” Gawande writes. In doing so, he comes to realize that “we are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.”
Gawande’s use of the word we is humility-inducing, destabilizing the pedagogy that hostility relies on, challenging its assumption that people, including our own selves, are purely good or bad. I am struck by how Gawande’s we demands that I revise my sense of me. Gawande’s we requires me to acknowledge that I am not solely my best or my worst, and, further, that I am a person whose self derives from both good and bad, and everything in between. To take such a stance toward myself only genuinely succeeds when I apply the stance to others too, as I work to “think with rather than against, whether the objects of those prepositions are texts or people” (Fitzpatrick 34). In this way, Gawande’s dictum performs an affective stitching of self to other akin to the visceral stitching he performs on the prisoner. Gawande’s speech is a reminder that listening, reading, and interpreting are acts of threading—a way of interlacing oneself with others and, in the process, stitching together something that is healing for all involved. This is another way of saying that humility begins conversation, the intertwining of entanglements, of self and other, critic and text, that go beyond what each offers separately. Humility is a way of threading our voice into another’s—which, if we look at it this way, is exactly what we want our students to do when we ask them to make a critical argument about a text.
We cannot do this if we assume what the other’s story is. Humility asks that once we begin to listen, we continue to listen, just as when we begin a text, we need to finish it, for every person is unique and every tale is distinct. This is why DasGupta, in her Lancet essay “Narrative Humility,” is concerned with a “cultural competency” model to approaching patients, a model that infers that, once they have attained competency, all people are legible. There is something aggressive in this inference, as if “mastering the other, rather than examining the internal cultures, prejudices, fears, or identifications of the self in relation to that other” is a priority hidden within it (981). And a hostile priority, too: DasGupta writes of a colleague’s encounter with another physician who interrupts the colleague’s explanation of their illness, saying, “You don’t have to say any more. I know exactly how your story ends” (980). Such hostility is grandiose, for it arrogantly assumes that an entire conclusion can be derived from an introduction, and in doing so, encourages silence in place of speaking—passivity instead of agency. This hostility is akin to students who read the first chapter of a novel or critics who read the introduction to an article and feel so certain of themselves that they have no unction for what the other says and how the other says it.
Students (or critics) who contort a text so that the text is little more than their paper’s thesis do hostile work. So do critics who read only according to the strictures that professional competency allows. I can think of no better way of keeping hostility at bay in the literature classroom than to affirm that the stories we read are not stories we can assume to know. The patient’s story “entirely belongs to him,” DasGupta reminds us (980). The text always has more to tell than we can see the first time, and just as we learn something new every time we read a text, our relationships with others grow when we return to others with humility and openness.
Empathy
Empathy is often misunderstood as a kind of “Obama Method,” a demonstration of “goodwill and interest in accord” (Chait), the purpose of which is to win over an opponent or establish a common ground for those who have differing perspectives. This misunderstood sense of empathy fails; the hostile have no interest in finding common ground. And, more important, empathy, in this form, becomes a kind of paraphrase—the taking and translating of another’s language or perspective into familiar, more palatable terms. This is what the formalists rightly caution readers against, for such taking and translating deprives us of the uniqueness of another’s meaning and eliminates the fundamental inexactness of our relationship with one another. A better sense of empathy as a pedagogy is one that continually reminds us that empathy is a practice but it is not a panacea.
Leslie Jamison, in her essay “The Empathy Exams,” writes, “Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must be really hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all” (5). Jamison reveals, through this trite phrase, a lazy slide into pity—“that must be really hard”—when empathy is, in practice, a matter of making the difficult visible in its own terms, in its own language. Empathy, like reading, requires us “to pay attention, to extend ourselves” as we encounter the uniqueness of expression (23). Through such extending, we learn what is denotative and what is connotative—the nuances of what is said and how it is said—and, in doing so, we understand what becomes united and what remains divided.
“The Empathy Exams” is more than just an essay about empathy: it is a test of empathy. I assign this essay in my literature and medicine course because it often reveals how readily students will read with empathy or how readily they will read with hostility. In the essay, Jamison undergoes two medical procedures—an abortion and a cardiac ablation—one after the other. The latter procedure often goes without student comment. The first procedure, though, can elicit the fight-or-flight reflex that occurs in the presence of hostility: for students inclined to fight, Jamison becomes a right person or a wrong person for undergoing an abortion; students who are inclined to flee simply stop talking altogether—in the case of one student several years ago, for the remainder of the course.
To stem this reflex, I find myself returning to Jamison’s exploration of empathy as one that is both inspired by and entangled in the complication of her dual medical procedures, which produce, one after the other, what she tries in the essay to bring to light—the problem of empathy itself. If it is true, as Jamison writes, that the word empathy “suggests you enter a person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration, customs” (6), then the essentials of close reading—narrative, form, language—are needed to fully understand the density of the other’s point of view before we can arrive at an interpretation. The essay asks that readers remain cognizant that they are travelers on another’s ground, not invaders seeking to repurpose a foreign country for their benefit. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes, Jamison’s essay is a reminder that empathy calls on us “not just to feel for others but to simultaneously acknowledge their irreconcilable otherness” (42).
Jamison describes empathy as a “border crossing by way of query” (6). Readers can develop an empathetic relationship to a text by asking the questions that Jamison sees as empathy-inducing: “What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze here?” (6). Such questions require readers to closely study the world of a literary work, to feel for the skeleton on which the work hangs, to understand what is sowed and cultivated in its soil, what feeds and nurtures it. These are the types of questions that students and critics should ask before they begin the “digging-down” that Rita Felski critiques, an act that is predicated on a hostile orientation because it assumes that a text is “composed of strata and its meanings are hidden from sight” (56). Jamison’s questions, as questions of reading, oblige us to survey before we burrow, for we are not in an empathetic relationship with a text if we slash and burn its foliage or frack its formations to generate discursive value.
Reciprocity
Antihostility pedagogies have one goal: by changing the relationship between reader and text, to change the way people relate to one another. To do so, antihostility pedagogies provide alternative pleasures to “the excitement and enjoyment of fighting” that hostility offers (Tomkins 184). A pedagogy based on reciprocity is a teaching practice based on mutual learning, changing the normative vertical relationship between professor and student, and among students as well, into a relationship that is horizontal, mutual, and reciprocal. Reciprocity expands the horizon of the classroom so that students and professors can mutually recognize that we are not only taught but are forever teaching.
Nicci Gerrard, in her study of patients diagnosed with dementia and their loved ones, writes repeatedly about the importance of reciprocity. “We are often told we have to enter the world of people with dementia,” Gerrard notes, “and that is useful advice. . . . [B]ut we should also remember that they have something to teach us . . . these people have lived longer than most and they have the best stories, the most knowledge” (170). What may be of most importance to literary critics is Gerrard’s emphasis on stories and their sharing, whether it is a daughter going through the family scrapbook with her mother or a son singing along with his father as a dusty shellac record spins in the background. At home or at school, in moments of reciprocity, self and other collaborate to negotiate—if not construct—a text, each supplying the other with insight and expertise. In a reciprocal relationship, “[b]oth are agents; both are influenced by the other’s agency” in a mutually affirming way (Charon and Marcus 285). Meaning comes from what is shared, and the sum of what is shared is what keeps self and other, student and teacher, critic and text, together.
One of the many pleasures of teaching interdisciplinary humanities is its ripeness for reciprocity. There are so many stories and knowledges—so many ways in which our disciplines are entangled in understanding even the simplest of terms, so many discourses in the interdisciplinary classroom ready to be threaded—that the success of the course ultimately depends on the extent to which students are willing to enter one another’s worlds. As students in my literature and medicine class worked through Margaret Edson’s play Wit, a student in the premedical program sailed through reading the inventory of agents that constitute the main character’s chemotherapy regimen, and a literature major just as smartly traversed the poems of John Donne, the main character’s focus of study. The students were reading so confidently—and so loudly—that I worried they would soon shout one another down. At first what I feared were two camps staking out favored turf suddenly shifted when the literature major extemporized, “Hamlet, act 5, scene 2.” Indeed, Edson’s play borrows from Shakespeare the famous line “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” Turning to face the literature major, the premed student asked, “How did you know that?” Before the literature major could answer, the premed student said, in earnest, “It’s so cool you know that!”
At that moment, two students entered each other’s world, and, in doing so, they changed the arc of the course. The students were surprised by each other’s acumen, by their ability to be experts, to have reservoirs of knowledge that furthered each other’s understanding of the play. They had, in this moment, done what the main characters of the play cannot do. In Wit, Vivian Bearing, a professor of English and specialist in John Donne, has earned her campus reputation for the exactness of her research and the coldness of her teaching. She sees her students as never being able to exhibit the same enthusiasm or intelligence that she does toward Donne, and it can be seen as poetic justice that once she is diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer, she is assigned a medical fellow who is a former student of hers, and who is equally fascinated by research and cold in demeanor. Both characters possess an awesome understanding of their disciplines, but given their hostility toward people, neither can use their knowledge for the purpose of care. The play is a warning that, without reciprocity, hostility is always near, especially in the fellow’s blatant ignoring, at the play’s conclusion, of Vivian’s do-not-resuscitate order, and the violence that ensues. My two students, by contrast, taught each other—and something more than disciplinary knowledge, too: a regard for expertise and an appreciation of the other, an intellectual and interpersonal act of care. This is what antihostility pedagogies do: they strive to reaffirm what is greater than ourselves and, by doing so, keep “human value intact” (Gerrard 170).
Humility, empathy, reciprocity: these pedagogies offer alternative ways of approaching texts—and alternative ways of approaching one another—than through the hostility that saturates daily life. Antihostility pedagogies create new infrastructures for criticism, infrastructures that model more equal, thorough, and ultimately caring varieties of inquiry. They remind us, as Catherine J. Denial writes, that “we should believe students, and we should believe in students” (11). And antihostility pedagogies remind us, as scholars and as educators, to avoid perpetuating hostility in our own work. They ask us to model a criticism that balances our desire to “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize” with an equal desire to “recontextualize, reconfigure, recharge” (Felski 17). I would not underestimate the radicality of such work, especially as hostility comes nearer and nearer to the classroom through the efforts of “warrior military classes, adversarial economic classes who exult in hostile takeovers” and “politicians who exult in defeating their opponents” to appropriate the university for their own purposes (Tomkins 184). As the practitioners of hostile pedagogies continue to make bad matters worse, we must seek ways to make bad matters better, through what we teach and how we teach it, through a pedagogy that is not only relevant to the classroom but to the practice—and future—of contemporary life.
Notes
1 As I was preparing this essay, the American Association of University Professors published a report that details the deliberateness of “wealthy donors and political partisans” who have “turned to their well-funded think tanks to wage a relentless political attack on scholarship with which they disagreed. Rather than engaging the scholarship on its merit and in good faith, they mischaracterized, polemicized, and weaponized whole fields of academic study” to suit their purposes. The report details how “[t]he highly partisan think-tank echo chamber has manufactured a narrative that universities are out-of-control, ‘woke,’ and partisan institutions” that can only be saved through demagogic means (Kamola 8).
2 “Civility is not care, but it pretends to be” (Nyong’o and Tompkins). Those who plead for civility often engage in a rhetorical hand-wringing that, while sounding like care, is deliberate in its failure to distinguish between the justifiability of anger and the unjustifiability of hostility. The goal of their pleading is to reconceal negative affect of all types such that the pleader’s elite status remains unthreatened.
Works Cited
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Engels, Jeremy. “The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority: Rethinking Victimage for Resentful Times.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, Oct. 2010, pp. 303–25.
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Gannon, Kevin M. Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. West Virginia UP, 2020.
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Gerrard, Nicci. The Last Ocean: What Dementia Teaches Us about Love. Penguin, 2020.
Jamison, Leslie. “The Empathy Exams.” The Empathy Exams: Essays, Graywolf Press, 2014, pp. 1–26.
Jasper, James M. The Emotions of Protest. U of Chicago P, 2018.
Kamola, Isaac. Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023. American Association of University Professors, 2024, www.aaup.org/article/manufacturing-backlash. PDF download.
Nyong’o, Tavia, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins. “Eleven Theses on Civility.” Social Text Online, 11 July 2018.
Solomon, Robert C. The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Hackett, 1993.
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Douglas Dowland is professor and chair of the Department of English, Philosophy and Religion at Ohio Northern University. His second book, We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2024.