The principal methodological challenge for reception study is the scarcity of records of reader responses. The challenge for the study of High School English is the opposite: the glut of information as to what was taught, how, and why. “If it were possible to assemble the true teaching archive,” write Laura Heffernan and Rachel Sagner Buurma in their literary history of college English, “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” (2). The “teaching archive” for high school English has a still greater scale and influence. Unlike, for example, much of the literary criticism published in academic journals, the pedagogical interpretations published in the introductions, afterwords, and headnotes in textbooks and school editions, in teaching articles and curricula, and reflected in discussion questions and examinations reach into every community in the United States.
This research is especially important today because it helps recover a vision of humanities education as a public good at a time when the humanities are marginalized at all levels of education. A premise of the proposed panel is that the study of high school English as a dimension of literary history contributes useful knowledge - that educators at all levels have much to gain from engaging with past psychological, social, and civic aims of literature instruction, and with the often tacit assumptions about what literature does.
In “The Institution(s) of High School English,” Alexander Manshel will address the methodological challenges of studying the American secondary school English curriculum. Given that “high school English” entails thirty thousand schools and over seventeen million students, one way to begin to pry open that massive black box is (somewhat counterintuitively) to study the various co-curricular institutions—from teacher training programs and textbook publishers, to Advanced Placement and CliffNotes—that draw together those people and communities. While the aims of American education may be subject to the caprice of local authorities, these organizations often dictate classroom practice far more. For literature scholars, the study of high school English poses fascinating methodological questions about scale, causality, quantification, and representativeness. When the “institution” in question is not a single institution but a class of them, are we more interested in the typical or the exceptional—and how exactly can we tell the difference?
In “Rebellious Subjects,” Andrew Newman will draw on interviews and archival research to illuminate the curricularization and the teaching of Romeo and Juliet. Once too racy for many schools, today it is by far the most frequently-assigned work in English Language Arts - taught ubiquitously to ninth graders. To teach it is to enact an allegory: the students can identify with the young dramatis personae, while the teacher is implicitly cast as one of the grownup allies who understands the kids and enables their rebellion. Perhaps every English teacher is a Nurse or Friar Laurence at heart. But what have been the academic, social, or ethical aims of teaching Romeo and Juliet? Has getting students to like Shakespeare been an end in itself?
In “Morrison on Goodness,” Annie Abrams will consider conflicting arguments about literature’s potential for moral edification in the American public high school classroom. Contemporary justifications for literature in schools sometimes gesture towards imbuing students with empathy or as a means to introduce students to canonical heroes and villains. In this paper, Abrams will read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in the context of the writer’s essays, letters, and talks about notions of virtue. In 2012, Toni Morrison gave a lecture in which she explained her commitment to literary depictions of “knowledge on display in the language of moral clarity”--a definition of “goodness” distinct from the aforementioned three. This paper will ask what we might learn from literature and from writers about the ways in which reading and discussion can help students think about “right” and “wrong” in democratic classrooms that invite a variety of perspectives.
Cited:
Buurma, Rachel Sagner, and Laura Heffernan. The Teaching Archive: A New HIstory for Literary Study. University Of Chicago Press, 2021.
Machor, James L., and Philip Goldstein, editors. “Introduction.” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, Psychology Press, 2001, pp. ix–xvii.