Education scholars Jan Meyer and Ray Land describe threshold concepts as core ideas that are both “troublesome” or counter-intuitive for novices within a field of study, but “transformative” and “integrative” once they’re understood—and once understood, not likely to be forgotten. For more on Meyer’s and Land’s articulation of this, see https://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds.html. (See also Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge, Routledge, 2006.)
What follows here are Brian’s suggestions for potential threshold concepts not only for the study of language, literature, diversity, and culture generally, but also in particular for this Ethnic Literature course focused on “Latinx” writers. Consider how “troublesome” and/or “transformative” you find these ideas — and how confidently you would say you understand them.
- Texts (and genres of texts) are rhetorical: forms of human interaction shaped by social situations and contexts. Because of this, critical interpreters usually seek to interpret texts in light of the contexts that created them (but see also #3 below).
- Audiences respond to texts intertextually, which is to say that audiences construct a text’s meaning in conversation with other texts, ideas, and experiences. (There’s always another possible interpretation.)
- Texts are processes: by their very nature, they live beyond their originating contexts and meanings, unhindered by authorial intentions, free to be read and understood in a variety of ways by a variety of readers in a variety of places and times.
- Texts both reflect and shape a community’s values, norms, ethics, ideologies, and intersecting constructions of class, (dis)ability, ethnic, gender, national, racial, religious, sexual, and other identities. There is no unbiased, power-neutral, ideology-free interpretation because all interpreters stand somewhere, immersed in both the ideologies that shape our perception and the hierarchies that structure our society.