Literary Interpretation as Poetic Translation: Envisioning a Rancièrean Emancipatory Framework for Literature Instruction

Although the aims of literary study have often been spelled out in ethical terms, scholars have tended to discuss the how of literary interpretation in more ethically neutral terms. Reading pedagogical enactments of two predominant theories of literary interpretation—New Criticism and reader response—through the lens of Rancièrean ethics, I argue that pedagogies of literary interpretation are in need of a more explicitly ethical commitment to readers' emancipation. I, therefore, make the case for an alternative paradigm—poetic translation—that, in its commitment to equality and its resistance to the explicative order, upholds literature's conduciveness to readers' emancipation. I conclude by demonstrating what poetic translation might look like in classroom spaces, noting that a pedagogical framework of poetic translation has the potential to reconfigure more than students' interpretations of texts. As an ethical means to accomplishing what are often claimed to be ethical and emancipatory aims of literary study, poetic translation can function as a profound intervention into pedagogical relations within the English language arts classroom and even human relations at large, thereby expanding ways literature can be understood as possessing ethical potential.