Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Trigger Archive : What Is a True, Impossible Teaching Archive?
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s new study The Teaching Archive both excavates and interprets the syllabi and other classroom-related archives of ten tertiary English-literature courses, providing in the process what the authors call a ‘true history’ of the literary studies discipline as it was taught by a variety of English and American teachers over the course of the twentieth century. Through its textual tracing of a selection of classroom-based materials, methods and practices, The Teaching Archive brings to light a diverse methodological history, revising in the process critical assumptions and platitudes about the discipline that extend from the twentieth-century to our present moment. After reading Buurma and Heffernan we can no longer say, for example, that the pre-1968 Anglo-American classroom was the bastion of canonical reading and writing practices that—upholding antiquated, narrowly technical or formalist methods complicit with hierarchical structures—only began to unravel once universities and other tertiary-education institutions conformed to social diversity and inclusion policies. After 1968, so the story goes, the New Criticism, with its championing of the close reading method that had previously dominated the teaching of Anglophone literary studies, was gradually replaced by thematic or area studies approaches with their culture- or identity-based methods. Along with the move away from close-reading as the core literary studies method, the post-1968 emergence of feminist and queer, race, ethnic and other area studies contributed to a movement away from the teaching of the English Literature canon.' (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 07:47:51
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