The Teaching Archive

A New History for Literary Study

The Teaching Archive
Rachel Sagner Buurma, Laura Heffernan
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Paperback
Not defined - 320pg
18 Dec 2020 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226736136
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The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. In Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan' s literary history, we watch T. S. Eliot and his working-class students revise their modern literature syllabus at the University of London' s extension school during World War I. We read about how Caroline Spurgeon, one of the first female professors in the United Kingdom, invited her first-year women' s college students to compile their own reading indexes in 1913. We see how J. Saunders Redding taught African American memoirs and letters to his American literature students at Hampton Institute in 1940. I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, and Edmund Wilson figure prominently in Buurma and Heffernan' s study, as do poet-critics Josephine Miles and Simon J. Ortiz. Throughout, the authors draw on what they call "the teaching archive"-the syllabi, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments-to rewrite a history of literary study grounded in actual practice. ? ? ? With this innovative study, Buurma and Heffernan give us an urgent literary history for the present moment. As English departments look to an uncertain future, they also look to their past. In The Teaching Archive, they will find a revelatory history of the profession.
"The distinction between teaching and research is a key organizing principle of academia, and the hierarchy implicit in that distinction affects the rankings of universities, the careers of professors, and the public perception of higher education. The revisionist history of literary study offered by Buurma and Heffernan brilliantly explodes this false dichotomy, showing that the college classroom provided a dynamic laboratory that was fundamental to the development of the twentieth century' s most influential modes of critical theory. With the materials of classroom practice as archival evidence, Buurma and Heffernan restore a lost history of intellectual experimentation in which professors and students of all levels collaborated in the creation of the field of literary criticism. At the same time, they offer a compelling defense of the humanities as an active, integrated, and broadly accessible mode of education. " -- "Alison R. Byerly, President, Lafayette College" "The Teaching Archive shows us what we should always have known: the history of English is not the history of big books of criticism talking to other big books of criticism. Instead it is the history of students and teachers talking to each other in the classroom, where what goes on has often been quite different from what conventional histories of the discipline have assumed. Buurma and Heffernan reanimate the twentieth-century classroom, and in the process they reanimate our understanding of the profession. "-- "Louis Menand, author of ' The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University' " "This remarkably well-researched, beautifully written, wise, and moving study offers the discipline of English literary studies a new account of its twentieth-century history. What would happen if we understood disciplinary history as unfolding in classrooms where literary critics worked as instructors, as well as through the field-changing books they authored? What would happen if we saw those books as themselves shaped by the everyday life of teaching? The Teaching Archive makes untenable much of the received wisdom about twentieth-century English studies; it makes silenced classroom voices audible once more. "-- "Deidre Shauna Lynch, author of ' Loving Literature: A Cultural History' "
Rachel Sagner Buurma is associate professor of English literature at Swarthmore College. Laura Heffernan is associate professor of English at the University of North Florida.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226736136
Published: 18 Dec 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Weight: 470g
Pages: 320

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