Abstract
This chapter provides a context for those which follow. A re-examination of university English pedagogy takes place in the context of fundamental change in higher education systems in Britain, North America, and across the world. Yet as a border subject, Literature (like English itself) has always been characterised by vibrant pedagogic traditions and by a fluid curriculum. This chapter makes a case for the need to return to those pedagogic traditions, and—in an era of the ‘student experience’—for recognising the importance also of the teacher’s own self-aware experience. As a subject and discipline, English Literature, it is suggested, takes place and is constantly reshaped at multiple intersections, not least those between ‘ordinary’ and academic reading. In different ways, all the essays in this book aim to explore the literary education as a process as well as or as much as the acquisition of a body of knowledge.
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Further Reading
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (Sage) is an indispensable forum for articles and debates traversing the borders of subject knowledge and pedagogy. An online selection of articles in the English Studies field is available at http://ahh.sagepub.com/site/includefiles/vsu2.xhtml.
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Bruce, Susan. 2013. Using your Profanisaurus: Comparisons, Analogies, and Cultural Capital in two English Literature Seminars. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 12 (1): 53–69.
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Suggestion for Further Reading
Austen, Jane. 1975. Mansfield Park, ed. Tony Tanner, 41. Penguin: Harmondsworth.
Barthes, Roland. 1974. Théorie du Texte. Encyclopedia Universalis. Paris: Encyclope[acute]die universalis.
Brontë, Charlotte. 1973 [1847]. Jane Eyre, ed. Q.D. Leavis, 141. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Brontë, Charlotte. 1974 [1853]. Villette, 96. London: Everyman’s Library.
Davies, Tony. 1982. Common Sense and Critical Practice: Teaching Literature. In Re-reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson, 32–43. London: Methuen.
Eagleton, Terry. 2001. The Gatekeeper: A Memoir, 142. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2003. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed., trans. rev. by Joel Weinsheimer, and Donald G. Marshall, 303. New York: Continuum.
Harrison, Tony. 1987. Selected Poems, 2nd ed, 122. London: Penguin Books.
Joyce, Simon. 2007. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Kaplan, Cora. 2007. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Mill, John Stuart. 1977. The Subjection of Women. In The Rights of Woman and John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. Mary Wollstonecraft, 238–239. London: Everyman’s Library.
Mousley, Andy. 2013. Literature and the Human: Criticism, Theory, Practice. Abingdon: Routledge.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1998. Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sweet, Matthew. 2001. Inventing the Victorians. London: Faber and Faber.
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Knights, B. (2017). Introduction: Teaching? Literature?. In: Knights, B. (eds) Teaching Literature. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31110-8_1
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