"Death by Misadventure": Teaching Transgression in/through Larsen's Passing

"Death by Misadventure': Teaching Transgression in/through Larsen's Passing" provides college literature teachers with a detailed historical, theoretical, and critical analysis of Larsen's popular novel. Using bell hooks' groundbreaking approach to "transgressive" education, as described in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, the article illustrates the means by which Passing can help teachers achieve hooks' radical vision of learning. To this end, the author situates Larsen and her novel within an inclusive, kaleidoscopic vision of modernism and folds into this discussion Larsen's modernist stylistic strategies. Related to these subversive strategies are the critical debates surrounding Larsen's use/interrogation of "passing," tragic mulatto, and (potentially) lesbian narratives. In addition to these "transgressive" interpretations of the text, the author reads Clare Kendry as a New Woman anthropologist figure and illustrates how our inability to decipher the cause of her demise is a testament to Larsen's success as a "transgressive" modernist author.