The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study

by Rachel Sagner Buurma, Laura Heffernan

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered the reading methods and expanded canons that came only belatedly to the Ivy League. It reminds us that research and teaching, which institutions often imagine as separate, have always been intertwined in practice. In a contemporary moment of humanities defunding, the casualization of teaching, and the privatization of pedagogy, The Teaching Archive offers a more accurate view of the work we have done in the past and must continue to do in the future.

Genres: Literature, Teaching, Nonfiction

316 pages, Paperback

Published December 4, 2020

Reviews

[Suhaib · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best archives of teaching literature in the 20th century. The book chronicles a select number of scholars/teachers and the ways they managed the classroom, arranging and designing their syllabuses in different ways to accommodate their students and their objectives. The list includes the classrooms of Caroline Spurgeon, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, J. Saunders Redding, Cleanth Brooks, Edmund Wilson, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz.

I am impressed by the way T. S. Eliot designed the reading list for a literary survey class around a shared topic, and not in a chronological list of individual authors, to help his working-class students write better essays.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for my grad level Teaching Literature course. This historical account of the evolution of university-level teaching really enlightened me to aspects of university life that I had no idea about! Pretty good book.

[ChelseaRenee Lovell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished this for my Teaching Literature class in Grad school and it was actually not soul sucking. It was super informative, but often read as a history textbook and was long winded. Other than that, I really enjoyed it, but I’m glad it’s over 😬😂

[Kathleen Quaintance · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is actually kind of a banger and not a boring dry pedagogical treatise! It's been helpful and interesting and does a great service, which is digging up old interesting things one may not have come across before and putting them in concert as tools for the reader as opposed to tools for the author's argument.

[amia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this in my Intro to Graduate Studies in English class. A lot of my classmates really enjoyed it for its historical information about how literature is taught in the post-secondary classroom. I didn't love it, though. I can see the value in keeping a record of those things, but this book just left me bored.

[Kalysta Fern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buurma and Heffernan use archival methods such as teaching notes and syllabi to argue that teaching-- increasingly separated from research and undervalued in comparison-- has in fact supplied core research ideas, methods, and insights, in the lives of several prominent academics.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

fab book that is really, really about writing and teaching, together, and not just at yale