The concept of “cultural work” gained traction in literary studies during the era of the New Historicism. In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Literature (1985), Jane Tompkins urged scholars to take up “the notion of literary texts as doing work, expressing and shaping the social context that produced them” (200). The premise of the proposed panel is that a great deal of such work has taken place in pedagogical contexts, in which teachers and students do cultural work with texts (without necessarily recognizing it as such). Inspired by the Presidential theme, the panel also engages with the idea that literary study, as the National Council of Teachers of English declared in 1961, entails participation in “what is most essentially human” (16). The presentations address the ambivalence of this view, as a universalist ideology (Newman) that has implications for access and social justice (Savonick and Appel).

Our further premise is that pedagogy remains a vastly understudied dimension of literary history. Our presider and our respondent are among the few specialists in this area. Rachel Sagner Buurma is the co-author, with Laura Heffernan, of a recent PMLA article on T.S. Eliot’s extension school teaching, and of the forthcoming The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study. Laura Fisher is the author of Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era (2019).

The first presentation, by Andrew Newman, draws on his current book project, a cultural history of the “high-school canon.” The presentation examines the trove of documents issuing from the “Anglo-American Conference on the Teaching and Learning of English” (1966) as a valuable assessment of the state of the discipline in that era and as an unusually explicit, still-relevant expression of the ideologies underlying literature instruction. Held at Dartmouth College and convened by the NCTE, the MLA, and their British counterparts, the “Dartmouth Seminar” was a watershed event in the development of the “New English,” which in secondary education marked a turn away from the intellectual, elitist focus of the New Criticism and towards a more inclusive emphasis on reader-response. In this framework, the literature teacher’s principal learning objective was to supply an experience – tantamount to life experience, without the risks – although in the New English the stated purposes of this “literary experience” remained vague and difficult to assess: fostering “inner growth,” sparking creativity, helping “young human beings form themselves” (Wilhelms 67). How does that work? The presentation will briefly illustrate the implementation of “The New English” with examples from published lesson plans and contemporary classroom editions.

Next, Danica Savonick will deliver a paper from her current book project on the teaching, writing, and activism of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich. In 1968, at the height of the Civil Rights, Black Power and Women’s Movements, and Vietnam War protests, these authors were teaching down the hall from one another at Harlem’s City College, in the SEEK educational opportunity program and during Open Admissions. At a time when faculty were accusing these democratizing initiatives of lowering academic standards and conservative politicians were calling art education an “intellectual luxury,” these teacher-poets were part of a groundswell movement of educators who understood language and literature instruction as a crucial skill for navigating and transforming the world. Best articulated by Lorde, the study of literature — in community college, Open Admissions, and remedial writing classrooms; in community centers; in weekend workshops; and around the kitchen table — was never a “luxury,” but a way of improving “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives,” (36) a necessary undertaking for those rendered vulnerable by the social order. As educators, they used literary texts as “learning devices” to help students better understand culture as a terrain of power struggle and a key site for intervening in the status quo. At the same time, their teaching fundamentally altered their own writing and, with it, the course of twentieth-century American literature. Considered together, their work suggests that literature instruction has not only passed down “the best which has been thought and said,” but has engaged students in imagining and building a more just, equitable, and pleasurable world.

Finally, Molly Appel will present her research on how testimonio both theorizes and models an anti-racist pedagogical practice for the college literature classroom. Though definitions of testimonios are fairly fluid, the genre is known for subverting traditional representative structures and categories of literary work and their associated indicators of truth and authenticity. While many scholars have addressed the juridical and historical role that testimonio has had over the past few decades, Appel highlights the urgency of turning to testimonio as a model of pedagogical praxis for educational communities invested in anti-racist work.Through an analysis of theoretical trends and classroom approaches at the intersection of teaching and testimonio, Appel proposes that it is testimonio’s literary qualities that enable it to have the potential to “connect people across social positions and build solidarity among both those who are familiar and unfamiliar with the experiences of the testimonio” (Delgado Bernal, et al. 6). In framing this research within her own classroom practice of using testimonio as a roadmap for anti-racist pedagogy, Appel highlights how testimonio can teach literary educators how to both support students of color in their classrooms and invite students from predominantly white and suburban backgrounds to confront the invisibilities of whiteness and begin a path toward their own conscientización.

Each presentation will be 15-17 minutes, followed by a 6-8 minute response by Laura Fisher, leaving at least 20 minutes for Q&A.

Works Cited:

Delgado Bernal, Dolores, el al. Chicana/Latina Testimonios as Pedagogical, Methodological, and Activist Approaches to Social Justice. Routledge, 2016.

NCTE. The National Interest and the Teaching of English. National Council of Teachers of English, 1961.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Wilhelms, Fred T. “English: Liberal Education or Technical Education?” New English, New Imperatives, ed. Henry B. Maloney, NCTE, 1971, pp. 61-70.