What Imaginative Literature Can Teach Us About Bullying
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
What Imaginative Literature Can Teach Us About Bullying Kevin Williams 1 Published online: 27 August 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract This article firstly addresses the methodological challenge in drawing on imaginative literature as a source in understanding bullying. This is followed by a general survey of the profile of bullying in literature. Two key insights from literary accounts of bullying are then explored, namely, its cyclical nature and its roots in childhood. Charlottte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is offered as an extended case-study in how a family enables the shaping of a bully. The next section deals with bullying in the school context with detailed reference to the works of James Joyce and Roddy Doyle. Attention is drawn throughout the essay, where relevant, to the class, race, and gender dimensions of bullying. The conclusion affirms the consistency between the insights from imaginative literature and the findings of empirical research on the nature of bullying. Keywords Class . Race . Gender . School . Shame . Methodology
To explore the phenomenon of bullying is to let down a shaft into human nature itself. This article is an attempt to do precisely this and thereby contribute something new to the literature on the subject. The challenge for me was to add to the field and to make available to other researchers and practitioners insights derived from several decades as a philosopher of education and of literary education in particular. The main part of this essay draws on literary sources to illustrate the nature and processes of bullying and foregrounds its class, race, and gender dimensions. But before demonstrating the potential of imaginative literature in accessing the nature of bullying, some methodological matters need to be clarified.
Some Methodological Matters Some readers may question the appropriateness of using literature to teach about bullying, while others will argue that imaginative literature cannot replace the provision of hard data via empirical research. But there is no necessary conflict between the different conduits to knowledge, understanding and insight. An important theoretical point needs to be made here. The interpretative task that literature demands of us is also * Kevin Williams [email protected] 1
Centre for Evaluation, Quality and Inspection, Institute of Education, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
required in more conventional research. Empirical research studies do not exist in a realm of pure theory, and the claims to truth that they make are not like proofs in mathematics. Research does not occur in a perfectly controlled universe which, in the words of John Keats (1969, pp. 123), is “[a]ll breathing human passion far above”, but is rather the outcome of activity by human agents, sometimes involving other human agents. The design, construction, and implementation of empirical research demand acts of judgement that are embedded in the lives of human beings who make decisions regarding aims, relationship to previous resea
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