SOURCE: Ratcliffe, Krista. “A Rhetoric of Classroom Denial: Resisting Resistance to Alcohol Questions While Teaching Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine.” In The Languages of Addiction, edited by Jane Lilienfeld and Jeffrey Oxford, pp. 105-21. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Ratcliffe considers Erdrich's portrayal of addiction in Love Medicine and discusses some of the difficulties she had teaching the novel—a problem she refers to as “classroom denial.”

In pedagogy scholarship, the term “resistance” functions as an antanaclasis; that is, the term has two very different definitions that emerge from competing theories. In post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, “resistance” describes “a subject's refusal to admit the hidden meaning of his symptom” (Grigg, 102). This usage has entered pedagogical lore, referring to students' refusals to critique their own commonplace assumptions about race, gender, class, and other cultural categories (Aronowitz and Giroux; Chappell; Freire; hooks; Luke). In neo-Marxist theory however, “resistance...