Illness Narratives in the Writing Classroom: Creating a Compassionate Space for Rhetorical and Literary Analysis

In her article “Empathy and the Critic,” published in a 2011 issue of College English, Ann Jurecic reviews two opposing perspectives about the concept of empathy as a teachable skill in the college writing classroom. She explains that, on the one hand, “teachers of literature, including medical humanists, claim that reading will nurture empathy, making college students and medical practitioners more humane” (22). On the other hand, she continues, post-humanist affect theorists warn that “the fellow feeling associated with social emotions, such as empathy, sympathy, compassion and pity…can be expressions of power, appropriations of others’ experience, and falsely oversimplified understandings of social and cultural relationships” (11). Jurecic reconciles these perspectives by arguing that, although it is difficult to “teach the transfer from reading to empathy and then to action” as well as to measure whether or not a class or specific book actually made students more empathic, the process of reading is important because it “provides a rare opportunity for sustained focus, contemplation, and introspection” (24). Thus, even though reading might not automatically make students more empathic, the experience will help them to become more thoughtful scholars, thinkers, and members of their communities.

In her discussion, Jurecic acknowledges that narrative empathy, generated through the private experience of reading, is limited by the fact that people usually choose to read texts containing characters with whom they already identify. She elaborates, “because reading is a private transaction between a reader and a book, readerly empathy differs profoundly from social empathy. . . . Listening in the social world entails understanding expectations and negotiating responsibilities, neither of which matters as one sits in a quiet corner with a book” (15).

However, I believe that we can bridge the distance between readerly empathy and social empathy by helping our students develop rhetorical analysis skills so that their emotional responses can develop alongside a growing sense of social awareness. In other words, I want my students to acknowledge and serve as witnesses to the suffering of others in ways articulated by Arthur Frank and Rita Charon. However, I also want my students to view narratives—whether printed and published, or verbally told to one’s doctor—as purposeful, important, rhetorical objects through which writers seek to do work within society. The classroom space can help students see narratives in this way, and therefore offer a powerful supplement to the quiet corner where one reads a text and may or may not connect emotionally with the story presented. We should draw on the interactive and dynamic potential of the class seminar as a way to help students understand, analyze, contextualize, and derive significance from emotionally resonant texts. Reading alone is fundamentally different from discussing a text with one’s peers. As Gail Ivy Berlin argues in her discussion of how to teach Holocaust literature, “compassion does not unfold unbidden in a vacuum. Our job as teachers and readers of literature of the extreme is to work at creating the space, time, and conditions for fostering compassionate imagination” (401). I would go one step further to suggest that our job as teachers is to foster compassionate imagination informed by rhetorical consciousness.

In this paper, I extend the work of Jurecic and Berlin by arguing that a rhetorical approach to emotionally resonant texts—in particular, illness narratives—can allow instructors and students to avoid the pitfalls of appropriation and oversimplification of social and cultural relationships. By treating an illness narrative as an object both of literary and rhetorical inquiry, we can mitigate the potential for students to become so wrapped up in the emotions of the text that they begin to minimize or ignore the context of the text’s creation, publication, and dissemination within society. As Jurecic admits, the study of literature is not a quick fix that changes our brains, hearts, souls, or political convictions (24). Reading about others’ experiences does not necessarily make us more empathic. But, through class discussions and a focus on rhetorical analysis, teachers of writing can help students understand not only the emotions, viewpoints, and struggles of someone else but...