Teaching Texts Materially: The Ends of Nella Larsen's "Passing"

College English Jul 2004

Teaching Texts Materially: The Ends of Nella Larsen's "Passing"

John K. Young

Abstract

ella Larsen's Passing has become one of the most widely read New Negro Renaissance novels in recent years, but no one really knows how it ends. By this I do not mean critics have not determined how much guilt to assign Irene Redfield in Clare Kendry's fatal fall, or to what extent the narrative is actually a lesbian story as a racial one. I mean the ending is actually unknowable, because the original last paragraph disappeared from the first edition's third printing, and no extant evidence can explain this change. There is no conclusive answer to the question of presenting this textual crux correctly-despite assumptions to the contrary by Larsen's editors-but I argue this textual problem itself bears an important lesson: the best response to a gap in textual knowledge is to acknowledge the absence and its causes, not to produce editions and teach classes gloss over such gaps, thereby passing on the social and cultural elements of these textual histories. More generally, I argue students and teachers can always benefit from attention to textual scholarship, and minority texts particularly need such study for what it reveals of the social and cultural interactions between minority writers and predominantly white, male publishers. The unbalanced power dynamics of this relationship produce what Gilles Deleuze terms a literature: that which a minority constructs within a major language (152). By focusing on the production history of the texts themselves, we can study the material evidence of this minor language.

Journal: College English
Published: 2004-07-01
DOI: 10.2307/4140744
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multilingual writers