The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered the reading methods and expanded canons that came only belatedly to the Ivy League. It reminds us that research and teaching, which institutions often imagine as separate, have always been intertwined in practice. In a contemporary moment of humanities defunding, the casualization of teaching, and the privatization of pedagogy, The Teaching Archive offers a more accurate view of the work we have done in the past and must continue to do in the future.
Author(s): Rachel Sagner Buurma; Laura Heffernan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Year: 2020
Contents
List of Figures
A Note on Authorship
Introduction: A New Syllabus
Chapter 1. Caroline Spurgeon, The Art of Reading (1913)
Chapter 2. T. S. Eliot, Modern English Literature (1916–19)
Chapter 3. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1925), and Edith Rickert, Scientific Analysis of Style (1926)
Chapter 4. J. Saunders Redding, The Negro in American Literature (1944) and American Biographical Literature (1976)
Chapter 5. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry (1963), and Edmund Wilson, Literature of the Civil War (1959)
Chapter 6. Josephine Miles, English 1A (1940–55)
Chapter 7. Simon J. Ortiz, Native American Arts (1978)
Conclusion: The Past We Need Now
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Archives and Collections Consulted
Notes
Bibliography
Index
