Teaching Literature: A Companion

Literature departments enter the twenty-first century with a deepening sense of crisis and growing need to defend the value of their work in the face of understaffing and poor job prospects for graduate students. Teaching Literature offers a practical guide to teaching literature, with accounts of how daily experiences in the classroom grow out of engagement with dynamic fields of study. By uniting the theoretical and the practical consideration of what it means to teach literature, this book widens the current conversation about pedagogy just beginning to take place in the field. Until recently, teaching has played second fiddle to literary research as a mode of knowledge and a sign of academic prestige. Now, literature departments are beginning to realize the importance of articulating what it is we do in the classroom.