Overview

In this lesson plan I detail the 100-level composition course, “Imagining Identity,” which I have taught in the Expository Writing Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Rather than centering literary analysis and adaptation as frameworks, the course is grounded in feminist theory, especially Black feminist theories of intersectionality, and autoethnography as a compositional practice.

The course is organized around three texts: Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2015), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Bong Joon Ho’s film Parasite (2019). These mutually illuminating narratives ground students’ investigations into intersectional identity and its imbrication in communities, which is carried out through discussion and autoethnographic writing, as well as podcasting (see Example Assignments and Assessment).

I owe the pairing of Re Jane and Jane Eyre to Olivia Loksing Moy’s (2020) inspired article in the “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” special issue of Victorian Studies. On the surface a Korean-American adaptation of Jane Eyre, Re Jane is also a sophisticated and relatable novel about hybrid identity, gender performance, and cross-cultural comparison. It is relatable in a few important ways: it uses clear, contemporary language that students won’t struggle with, compared to Jane Eyre. It is also culturally legible to students from Asian American communities, and those from outside them find familiarity in the early-20s life scenarios it depicts. Re Jane is not just an intertext for the “canonical” novel, but rather a lens which focuses transcultural and transhistorical issues of gender, race, and social class, as well as a formally supple example for students to refer to in their own autoethnographic writing.

Connecting Victorian and twenty-first century imaginaries of race undisciplines normative Victorian studies practices by reorienting toward a critique of “White time,” in Charles W. Mills’ (2014) phrase. Scholarship and teaching on nineteenth-century literature and culture extensively critique imperial, liberal, and “exploitative bourgeois class temporal regime[s]” (28). But this pair of texts facilitates discussions about the limits of “normative discourse of the non-enslaved, the non-expropriated, and the non-victims of genocide...whose normative temporality need pay no attention in determining questions of justice to [the] past” in Victorian studies (40).

Screening Parasite at the end of the course brings the discussion right up to date in the 2020s and, uncannily, closer to the concerns of Jane Eyre. The film facilitates a synthesis of the course readings and writing assignments. Parasite allows me to frame Re Jane and Jane Eyre as fantasies about social mobility across discrete social spaces propelled by individual will. Both novels propose that, if you are able to become your authentic self, you will be able to navigate the hierarchies of unequal societies.

But Parasite is about economic forces so overwhelmingly unequal that the types of mobility Jane Eyre and Jane Re engineer for themselves are only possible through deceit. In the film’s (and our own) radically segregated world of post-Great Recession capitalism, you have to become an inauthentic self in order to survive. Together, these texts implore students to consider their own privilege and the hazards of an individualist outlook.

Learning Outcomes

It is important to clarify the difference between the course’s learning outcomes and my goals as a Victorianist. My intellectual aims – decentering and reframing the white canonical novelist while investigating how (and if) Brontë’s novel still speaks to students now – inform every choice I made in designing the class. But these aims are necessarily subordinate to the learning outcomes for students: first, developing a critical perspective on lived experience and society by thinking about their multivalent identities and, second, complicating students’ sense of identity’s transcultural and transhistorical connections.

The readings and assignments facilitate what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) calls strategic essentialism: a temporary and self-aware focus on one aspect of identity for the purposes of analysis and, ultimately, political community building in order to redress inequalities within subcultures and society at large (202-207, esp. 205). I am mindful of how problematic essentialist thinking can be; indeed, Parasite can be read as a cautionary tale about strategic essentialism adopted in bad faith.1

In discussions and feedback, I encourage students’ own sense of the inadequacy of static definitions of identity, emphasizing instead flux and contingency while maintaining the analytical value of isolating a variable to consider it singly without losing sight of its intersectional affiliations. Extended first-person narratives, like the novels we read in class, become a useful model for understanding the fluidity of identity formation and reformation in time and between social/cultural spaces.

Rationale for Cluster Groupings

My goals as a scholar and a teacher align and become flush thanks to Moy’s ingenious strategy of reading Re Jane before Jane Eyre in the course. In other words, the simple act of reversing the text-adaptation sequence – using Re Jane as a lens through which to view Jane Eyre – keeps me (especially) and my students from unthinkingly genuflecting to Jane Eyre as a Great Novel.

In the classroom, I tell students I’m not interested in Jane Eyre as a canonical “classic of Western civilization”: I’m interested in what the novel in part as a tool to think with. I try to get students to “buy in” to the reading these books by saying that, if this book seems to have nothing to do with you, first, let’s discuss that, because it’s important and interesting. Second, in the case of Jane Eyre, we live in a “global Anglophone” socioeconomic system contoured by the nineteenth-century British world-system.

For those reasons, it is worth examining that world-system’s cultural artefacts from students’ own subject positions. This is a starting point for critiquing that world-system and its lingering grip on the planet. In the context of a 100-level composition course, modeling this disposition toward literary texts builds toward “close reading” of students’ own experiences.

Re Jane is not just a set of binoculars for Jane Eyre, however. It does important work all its own, which is easier to see when it is put first on the syllabus. One reason I thought this pairing would work well in my institutional context is because a significant proportion of my students are from Asian-American and Asian backgrounds.

The experiences described in Re Jane align and pull against students’ own experiences in productive ways. This facilitates identification with the novel’s characters as well as the subtle delineation between cultural identities, which is helpful in understanding a concept as variegated as “intersectionality.” But as with any interesting novel, identification is only the beginning. Re Jane’s narration is both approachable and conducive to articulating fundamental narrative concepts like “diegesis” and “realism.”

As readers of this lesson plan think about how to migrate this cluster of texts to other institutions, care must be taken to make sure Asian American and Asian students are not put in the position of acting as bridges to understanding for white students. In my own situation, I emphasize my own responsibility as a white person in intersectional spaces and the collective nature of the work of understanding identity, as well as undisciplining our scholarly practices.

Key Idea: Realism and the Politics of the Everyday

Realism in particular becomes a through line in the course, linking the novels to the autoethnographic writing assignments via a politics of the ordinary. Realism makes the radical political point that the ordinary experiences of ordinary people are of social and aesthetic significance.

But I don’t turn to George Eliot, the Lyrical Ballads, or even Jane Eyre to illustrate this at first. Instead, we spend time talking about the culturally-specific Korean concepts that shape Re Jane’s ethics, including nunchi (intuitive interpersonal awareness), jung (deep-seated regard for another person), and “good family education.”

In making connections between the novel and the writing assignments, we talk about the culturally-specific lenses students know from their backgrounds, how they might be applied by critically interpreting experiences using the methods learned from examining cultural texts, and what the unstated social assumptions underlying those lenses might be – that is, what they reveal about the values of those communities. Re Jane exposes students to literary sophistication while also modeling how to develop a critical subject position all their own in the autoethnographic writing assignments.

Key Idea: Using Literary Texts to Teach Critical Positionality

Adaptations do also have a way of “shed[ding] light on what was suppressed in their antecedents,” as Aviva Briefel (2021) puts it. Moy points out that Re Jane critiques gynocentric feminism through the character of Jane, who intuits that this type of abstract, white feminism is inadequate to her lived experience as a working-class Korean-American woman (414-15). This critique becomes an optic for Jane Eyre, in which the white heroine’s individual freedom is scaffolded on the subjugation of Bertha Mason as well as that of the Black and brown people whose forced labor produced the Eyre and Rochester families’ generational wealth.

Together, Re Jane and Jane Eyre permit discussion of what liberatory politics and ethics look like, which emerge from real communities and are equal to their complexities. Students perform a double movement, developing their own interpretive practices as they apply them to cultural artefacts and their own experiences.

Both novels, viewed through the frameworks discussed below and paired with the writing assignments, reinforce the idea that critical perspective emerges from the student’s own subject position and is augmented, but not determined, by concepts like intersectionality, rather than by adopting my type of critical positionality as the instructor. I want students to see that their critical understandings of society emerge from the lived experiences of being individuals in communities and are refined by theory, rather than learned by rote from some sort of predetermined set of discipline-specific lenses (“this is how we do things in literary studies,” “this is how we do things in anthropology”).

Framework for Class Discussions: Intersectional Feminism and Cultural Comparison

In order to think with these texts about identity and its imbrication in communities, I frame the course through the concepts of intersectionality and autoethnography. Early on, I articulate two main points about intersectionality. First, intersectionality is a concept that has high political stakes for addressing inequality and legal legibility in society. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) classic example of the legal invisibility of Black women makes this starkly clear: the contrast between the “multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences” (139). Quite frequently, this core concept of intersectionality is one that students have heard of in popular culture or conversations about social justice.

Second, intersectionality is also a way to understand the complexity of identity: how the individual sense of self is rooted in multiple intersecting communities, and how privilege is accumulated but also mitigated in dynamic ways. I try to disabuse students of a notion that can follow from the first point, which is that intersectionality itself “is a problem in our society.” Instead, while making sure the political consequences never disappear, I describe intersectionality as a neutral framework for articulating a critical understanding of things students already know. Their identities are complex, the dynamics of their communities are complex, and – by teasing apart aspects of those identities and dynamics without losing sight of their interconstitutiveness – students can gain insight into big social questions including race, nationality, gender, and class.

One student wrote about being a discriminated against as a racially minoritized American, interrogating the idea of being a “real American” and acknowledging the positionality that came from being considered a “model minority” and thus more “real American” than others:

My experiences were unfair, but these experiences instilled a passion to be educated about social issues. It is important that I recognize the privilege I possess as well: I am a U.S. born heterosexual Asian woman who is pursuing higher education. I am less likely to be killed by police, I am less likely to experience hate crimes, I am more likely to be given job opportunities. While I have these privileges, I will not say that issues like unequal access to education, police brutality, and unequal unemployment are not my problem. If I were to ignore these issues, I would only be contributing to the problem. America itself, American systems, and the American idea of being a real American should not be the same as it was centuries ago. Change begins with the recognition and education about America’s prevalent social issues.2

Framework for Writing Assignments: Autoethnography

If intersectionality is the paradigm for our class discussions of identity, then autoethnography is the method we use to investigate it through the writing assignments. The notion of the “participant observer” is a point of connection between nineteenth-century social sciences and realist novels including Jane Eyre, as James Buzard (2005) has shown. Autoethnographic writing allows students to develop a critical sense of their own “insider’s outsideness,” honed by reading the literary texts (209). Rhetoric and composition scholars teach us that autoethnography is also a versatile framework for academic writing because it activates the connection between the personal and the critical. Melissa Tombro’s (2016) scholarship was particularly formative for me in designing this course.

Through two short sketches and two versions of a medium-length essay (the second extensively revised – see the Example Assignments and Assessment section) students begin by describing how being a part of a particular subculture has shaped their identities and steadily develop a critical perspective on these experiences. The goal of this process, culminating in the medium-length essay, is to step back to reflect on and analyze what your experiences mean by asking, for example: where do values or practices come from in the subculture? What might be some of the unstated cultural or social assumptions that this subculture is founded on? For example, the implicit relations in terms of gender, race, or class on which the idea of “normality” in this community is based? How and why experiences, attitudes, and practices differ from dominant American culture?

Recently, ethical issues with autoethnography as a social science research method has created controversy (see, e.g., Mohammed et al., “Open letter”). As a composition practice, Tombro provides advice on helping students feel comfortable with disclosure of personal information and ethical practices in engaging with their chosen subcultures. She emphasizes that instructors should help students navigate how to pick an autoethnographic topic which “interests them and increase their understanding of the subculture while staying within their comfort zone” (Tombro 43).

The first rule of such writing should be “do no harm,” both personally and within the subculture. In assignment prompts and discussions with students I remind them that they are always in complete control of what they disclose and that I want them to feel secure in this knowledge. Following Tombro, I emphasize students’ agency in choosing to write about triggering topics and experiences:

When students decide to write on a topic such as abuse, sexual violence or experiencing the death of someone close to them, I try to have a one-on-one conversation about the choice of topic early in the drafting process. In no way do I wish to discourage students from choosing a topic if they feel this is a good time to explore it. Instead, in these meetings, I invite them to write about these topics and also advise them that sometimes exploring these topics can be difficult because they will relive them again and again as they revise their writing. They will even be critiqued on how they recount something very personal and painful, which can be difficult. Ultimately, I leave the decision to the students. (62)

These issues should be addressed at the outset of the assignment sequence and repeatedly throughout the course.

Extensibility is a key feature of autoethnography as a method in the writing classroom. The formal and analytical possibilities of autoethnographic writing are diverse, as are the ways that questions can be posed. I have only ever taught “Imagining Identity” during the Covid-19 emergency, so the types of autoethnographic writing students have undertaken has been relatively modest in terms of “embeddedness,” as the assignment prompt summaries show. But in an extended assignment sequence, or one made up of more short assignments, the sky is the limit. Tombro gives examples of writing assignments involving interviews with community members, about significant spaces or events, about forms of deep observation, and so on.

Throughout the term, I describe discussing the novels and writing the autoethnographic essays as linked processes of close reading. In the writing, I ask students to transfer the habit of slow, curious attention from the literary to the social, close reading their communities and experiences the way we have been close reading the books.

The Hallyu Wave, Korean Feminisms, and the Politics of Transnational Cultural Identity

The conversations that Re Jane and Jane Eyre provoke about intersectionality, transcultural adaptation, privilege, and identity could be productively resituated in a course dealing more extensively with contemporary Korean/American culture.3

The Hallyu or “New Korean” Wave of music, television, film, and games provides a framework and a wealth of media through which to investigate the politics of cultural production and the transnational dynamics of neoliberalism (Jin 2016). These themes are readily tied to questions of identity, hybridity, and belonging in and between multiple cultures. Discussions of Anglo-American white feminism and Jane Re’s exploration of what it means to be a feminist could profitably engage with the history and theory of contemporary Korean feminisms.

Anchored by Re Jane and Parasite, and under the same umbrella of cross-cultural comparison outlined above, students could explore Korean feminist critiques of a normative family-centric society, resistance to beauty standards, the amplification of misogyny online, and the misogynistic alienation of young men (Seo and Choi 2020).

Finally, tying back to autoethnography, an emphasis could be placed on different forms of first-person narration by pairing this cluster with recent Korean-American memoirs including Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart and E.J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others.

The Handmaiden and Fingersmith: Further Transcultural Encounters

This pairing could take the shape of an adaptation-focused course with more reason to develop an analytical vocabulary for film. Sarah Waters’ 2002 neo-Victorian novel Fingersmith renders nineteenth-century queer subtexts sensationally literal. Park Chan-wook’s film The Handmaiden (2016) transposes the story to Korea during the early twentieth-century Japanese occupation, accumulating colonial resonances while analogously subverting and exposing the decadence underlying rigid patriarchal power.

Re Jane

Jane Eyre

Parasite

Final Discussions

The final class discussions tie together the texts and writing in preparation for Assignments 4 and 5, which are reflective on the course as a whole in different ways. We discuss:

• How has reading Re Jane and Jane Eyre and watching Parasite made you think differently about your own experiences and identity? The ways identity is shaped by ethnicity/race, socioeconomic class, gender, or other considerations? How did the books resonate (or not) with your experiences of juggling multiple aspects of your intersectional identity (e.g., American but also Pakistani, being a woman in a traditionally male field, striving for independence but wanting to keep close ties to family)?
• And vice versa: how has your unique perspective and background led you to interpret these texts in particular ways? What insights have you had into these novels that perhaps no one else could, and why?
• Finally: what is one idea or way of thinking (or reading or writing) that you will take away from our class?

Autoethnographic Sketch #1: Being Yourself, in a Subculture

In this set of assignments, you will begin a process of qualitative inquiry into how your individual identity is situated in culture and anchored by objects. In this particular assignment, you will think about how currently belonging (or not belonging) to a community shapes your sense of yourself.

I’ll use the term subculture to distinguish the type of community we’re interested in from, say, referring to your best friends or roommates as your “community.” Subcultures share distinctive ideas, beliefs, or ways of life. Subcultures can be unique (your particular neighborhood; the UW Deutsch Klub) or one group affiliated with others (the church you grew up in; South Asian immigrants in Seattle, or in Portland, etc.). This can be a subculture you are a part of by choice (cosplaying; social activism; Starbucks employees; YouTubers) or not by choice (an ethnic group; working class; the place you grew up in).

An outstanding essay will address all of the following, adjusting according to your individual case:

• Remember that you are an authority on this topic, just from your own experience. The key is to reflect on your knowledge and to communicate it to an outside audience, translating for readers who are unfamiliar with your particular subculture.
• What are the particular experiences, attitudes, or practices that define this subculture? How and why might they differ from dominant American culture? Be specific in your description, and choose with overall rhetorical effect in mind. You probably won’t have space to cover everything, so think about how this fits into the story you’re telling as a whole. It’s your ethical responsibility as a writer to convey multiple facets of this subculture and your own experience without being reductive
• How does your particular position in this subculture affect your understanding of it? Do other people occupy different positions, perhaps with more or less power? How do people relate to one another, and how does this affect interpersonal relationships?
• How has being a part of this subculture defined your sense of individual identity? Why? Has there been alignment or tension? Has that changed over time? How would you describe your connection to it now?

Autoethnographic Sketch #2: Objects and Identity

Some objects are so much a part of our day-to-day reality that we barely notice them: when is the last time you really contemplated your cast-iron skillet, or your bike? And yet significant memories, feelings, and connections to other people can repose in those same objects. Maybe that cast-iron skillet belonged to your great-grandmother; you might ride in the bike brigade that protects activists at a protest. Relationships like these make objects great vehicles for storytelling. Their concreteness creates a clear connection for readers that allows them to understand the ideas, memories, and feelings of being a part of your subculture more readily.

Your task in this assignment is to write about an object of significance to you that represents your connection to your chosen subculture in some way. You should describe the object as well as attempt to critically understand and communicate its meaning in your life and subculture to an audience that is outside the community (that is, your instructor and classmates).

An outstanding essay will reflectively and critically address all of the following, adjusting according to your individual case:

• As you think about the criteria below, always keep in mind that, in answering them, you should use writing about the object to reflect on your own identity and your relationship to your chosen subculture, to the values and practices which make it distinct.
• Take the time to describe the object itself thoroughly: what does it look like? What is the experience of handling it like? What is it made out of? How heavy is it? How does it feel? Does it have a smell? It might even have a particular taste: it’s your object!
• What is the object’s history, both in your life and in general? When and where did you get it? How old is it? Did someone in your subculture give it to you? Does the object itself give any indication of when and how it was made? Is it handmade or mass-produced, and does that affect its significance?
• What memories are connected with this object? What does it allow you to say about where you came from, your identity, and your values, and how those align (or differ) from your subculture’s values?
• What feelings are connected with this object? Try to describe the feelings and analyze them; we all know what nostalgia for the past feels like for us, for example. But this is a chance to understand that feeling more deeply, and why it reposes partly in this object.
• Why is this object important? Why should your reader think it interesting and important? How does it reveal links between you and your subculture? Between your subculture and dominant culture, or the wider world in some other sense? What is at stake in understanding it more thoroughly, for you and for your reader?

Note: a useful way to frame this assignment in class is to ask students to bring their chosen object to class for “show and tell” (if that’s feasible). We also discuss what object Jane Re might choose to write about if she were assigned this essay during her studies at Baruch College.

Autoethnographic Essay

In the first two assignments, you began a process of qualitative inquiry into how your identity is situated in a particular subculture and anchored by objects. In this essay, you will continue that process by developing ideas you have sketched and by articulating a critical perspective on your experiences, giving your audience insight into what they might mean to them.

An outstanding essay will address all of the following, adjusting according to your individual case:

• Respond to the initial motivating questions from Assignment 1 by synthesizing (recombining), transforming, and adding to the ideas, details, and insights you have already sketched out in the first two assignments.
  • Adding: are there rituals or routines specific to the subculture, particular types of language used, or other subtleties that you can describe and analyze to give your audience a clear understanding of what being involved in it is like?
  • Synthesizing/transforming: As you plan, ask yourself questions like: could an insight I came to by writing about my object be decoupled from that object and put in conversation with details from the first sketch to make a new point? (These questions are examples, not strict requirements.)
• Focus your efforts on developing a critical perspective on the experiences you are writing about. As you rewrite and add new material, think about descriptively responding to the motivating questions (the what) and also – even more importantly – the how.
  • The essay should step back to reflect on and analyze what your experiences mean. Ask yourself: where do values or practices come from in the subculture? What might be some of the unstated cultural or social assumptions that this subculture is founded on? For example, the implicit relations in terms of gender, race, or class on which the idea of “normality” in this community is based? How and why experiences, attitudes, and practices differ from dominant American culture? How and why have these experiences shaped your particular identity? This line of questioning could also potentially mean that you begin thinking through how to address problems in this subculture for you or other members.

Podcast Group Discussion: Imagining Identity and Community with Re Jane and Jane Eyre4

At the beginning of this class, we talked about how humanistic ways of thinking are especially useful for seeing connections between apparently disconnected ideas or aspects of life.

How might feminism look different for a young Korean American than for a white American intellectual? How might the history of slavery and imperial oppression be hiding in plain sight in a rural English mansion (or in our daily lives in Seattle)? We needed Re Jane and Jane Eyre to help us make those connections and change how we think about seemingly disparate topics.

What insight can we gain on big social issues like economic class, gender, race, and global migration from the life experiences of UW freshmen? You have found those insights by writing with a critical perspective on your own complex, intersectional identity, and how you fit into the communities that shape your world.

In this short, 10-12 minute podcast episode, you and your writing workshop group will synthesize together these two main elements of the course by discussing how reading Jane Eyre and Re Jane and the writing you’ve done have affected your thinking about identity, and how your own experiences have given you critical insight both into the literary texts and society itself. Think of it as one last small-group class discussion that you get more time to prepare for – and that happens to be recorded!

An outstanding podcast episode will address this prompt substantially, thoughtfully, and in conversation with each other.

Your conversation should respond to the following guiding questions, adjusting how thoroughly you respond to each according to your individual cases and what is most thought-provoking to each group:

• How has reading Re Jane and Jane Eyre made you think differently and more analytically about your own experiences and identity? The ways identity is shaped by ethnicity/race, socioeconomic class, gender, or other considerations? How did the books resonate (or not) with your experiences of juggling multiple aspects of your intersectional identity (e.g., American but also Pakistani, being a woman in a traditionally male field, striving for independence but wanting to keep close ties to family)?
• And vice versa: how has your unique perspective and background led you to interpret these texts in particular ways? What insights have you had into these novels that perhaps no one else could, and why?
• What connections did the novels and writing make more apparent for you? For example, between ethnicity and gender, class and gender, family values and individuality, how our identities are in some cases scaffolded on the oppression of other people (perhaps without you really knowing it)
• How do the forms of interconnectedness these literary texts describe relate to your own thinking about your identity and the communities you belong to?
• Have these texts and your writing changed your perspective on what it means to belong to a society? What it means to have a critical perspective on society?