Why Literature Matters

Identity and Selfhood

Teachers at any grade level are familiar with the varying ways in which students struggle to determine selfhood; throughout the course of a year, teachers may observe students struggle through varying phases of cultural, ethnic, or gender identity.  The search for and the forging of one’s identity have significant academic implications for students. Research has shown that “ethnic identity development is linked to students’ academic achievement, interpersonal relationships, and most importantly, self-esteem.”⁸ Much of the research on identity development is centered around James Marcia’s work on adolescent development. Using Marcia’s work as a foundation, Jean Phinney developed a three-stage model for ethnic identity formation. Phinney categorizes the initial stage as Unexamined Ethnic Identity.  In this stage, adolescents neglect to explore their own identity, but instead,  “accept the values and attitudes of the majority culture.” In the second stage, Ethnic Identity Search/Moratorium, “adolescents encounter a situation that initiates an  ethnic identity search.” The final stage, Ethnic Identity Achievement, occurs when adolescents accept who they are and have a “clear confident sense of one’s own ethnicity.”⁹

When teachers consider Phinney’s model for ethnic identity formation, it is important to recognize the role that literature can play in helping students through the progressive stages.  At adolescence, many students of color are so focused on assimilation into the “majority culture” that they have never explored their own ethnicity, or, more simply, many students are indifferent to the exploration of their own identity.  The second stage requires the encountering “that initiates and ethnic identity search.”  The text, the work of literature that asks students to examine their own ethnicity, “initiates” the exploration of their own ethnic identity. And it is through the analysis of the literature and the process of exploring their own identities through a thoughtful, culturally relevant curriculum that students can hopefully reach  the ideal stage.  Bruns further illustrates this point by highlighting literature’s unique ability to promote students’ exploration and understanding of  their own identity.  “Seeing or discovering something of ourselves in a literary work can come with a shock when the resulting insight is troubling or as a relief when we find that some part of our self is shared with another.  These experiences of recognition are important for self-knowledge and at times for comfort or consolation, but they can also serve an even more valuable function as the words of texts can give tangible shape to aspects of our own experience that we can’t otherwise grasp.”¹⁰

For many students of color, their otherness in American society allows society to determine their identity before they are allowed to go through the process of discovering  it for themselves. To put it differently, Johnathan Culler, in his article “What is Literature Now?”, makes this point by referencing Tzvetan Todorov’s article for New Literary History, “The Notion of Literature,” in which he acknowledges, “Whatever else literature may be he concludes, ‘it is one significant determinant of the contents of selfhood.’” ¹¹ When the literature is relevant to students’ own experiences, the ability to see themselves in the “actions and reflections of literary characters”¹² the construction of selfhood becomes more expedient.  The literature in the classroom may afford one of the few opportunities for students to develop a deeper self-awareness, and it is important that the literature speaks to their experiences.

It is interesting to note that Andrew Pham’s search for identity parallels the three stages that Phinney outlines in her theory of ethnic identity formation: Pham begins his journey accepting and claiming that he is simply an American; not until prodded does he acknowledge his ethnicity as a Vietnamese-American.  It is this situation among others that initiates Pham’s “ethnic identity search.”  Finally, it is Pham’s accepting and embracing his ethnicity as a Vietnamese-American, with emphasis on the American, that he achieves in the final stage.