The Affect-Discursive Practices and Pre-Service Teachers’ Engagements with Literary Texts

Abstract

Both Affect Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis have been used by scholars as tools to interrogate a wide variety of texts. Thus, for this paper, I draw on intersections between Norman Fairclough’s linguistic analysis of the “constructive effects of discourse” (Fairclough, 1992a, p. 64), and Sara Ahmed’s “cultural politics of emotions” (Ahmed, 2004b, p. 4), to investigate the connections between discursive practices and affective responses.  To explore these relationships, I analyse two Caribbean texts used by two groups of year three students of the University of Trinidad and Tobago (Centre for Education Programmes). The Impossible Situation by Cicely Waite-Smith is a one act play that pre-service primary school (generalist) teachers choose for drama while Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is favoured as a prose text by the pre-service secondary school (specialist) teachers. An analysis of these texts show how discursive practices facilitate distinct performative acts of emotions of the various characters within, which in turn were able to evoke parallel emotional responses in the students (recorded in weekly journal writing). I argue that students’ interactions with the texts simulated imagined and/or actual experiences of power relations, supported by the (unconscious) influence of “past histories” and characterized by notions of “community” and “other” (Ahmed, 2004b, p. 5). The pre-service teachers in the study were also asked to examine their own assumptions of particular characters and events of the texts as well as the sources of their emotional responses as a way of developing their critical language awareness.