Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Punishment and Pedagogy : The Casual Future of Teaching Literary Studies
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'I could follow Justin Clemens’ pointed question in his ‘Manifesto for an International University’ with a rhetorical ‘or both?’ It seems to me that to pick either debasement or disposability would bypass the combined insult and injury of working as a casual teacher in a state of offense to the University; I mean you—if you are a casual teacher—carry an unwelcome status as simultaneously the University’s disobedient citizen, near-superfluous to its educational structure and its legal liability. The problem of casual teaching remains a postscript to the bulking literature of cri de coeur about the ‘crisis’ of the corporate University (for example see Connell). This crisis has launched hordes of ‘defences’ for literary studies on the grounds of its shifting relevance to labour-capital relations, characterised by the erosion of institutional guarantee, and the perpetuation of precarity. It is hardly a head-scratcher that it remains within the domain of the hypothetical ‘rare tenured critic’ to strive for ‘different answers’ to questions about what constitutes the program, and how the classroom can keep it alive (Kornbluh). As for answers, think of a whole book of lamentations for the loss of the discipline’s cultural repertoire, appeals to its economic contribution to the ‘creative industries’, and counsel on how to repurpose the transmission of literary knowledge—often all at the same time. In one recent example, Rita Felski has called for new ‘justifications for the costs of the humanities’ by focusing on the alliterative sequence of ‘curating, conveying, criticising, composing’ (Felski).' (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon Australian Humanities Review True, Impossible Teaching Archive no. 68 May 2021 21939138 2021 periodical issue

    'Inspired by ideas organising Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2021), this AHR forum also takes its title from one of the book’s introductory passages:

    'The true history of English literary study resides in classrooms… most of the study of literature that has happened in the university has happened in classrooms. Counted not just in hours and weeks, but in numbers of people, stacks of paper, and intensity of attention, the teaching of English literature has occupied a grand scale. More poems have been close-read in classrooms than in published articles, more literary texts have been cited on syllabuses than in scholarship, more scholarship has been read in preparation for teaching than in drafting monographs. Within institutions of secondary education large and small, numberless teachers and students have gathered to read both an astonishing number and an astonishing range of texts together. If it were possible to assemble the true, impossible teaching archive—all the syllabuses, handouts, reading lists, lecture notes, student papers, and exams ever made—it would constitute a much larger and more interesting record than the famous monographs and seminal articles that usually represent the history of literary study.' (Monique RooneyAHR Forum: ‘True, Impossible Teaching Archive’, Part One, Introduction)

    2021
Last amended 1 Jun 2021 07:45:16
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