The Hidden Aesthetic of English Teaching

  • Ben Knights
Chapter
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Abstract

The first part of this chapter continues the exploration of the invisible pedagogy of the subject. Traditionally, students have been expected not only to recapitulate for themselves the threshold concepts shared by their teachers, but also to perform in their own written or spoken work the linguistic vivacity and density of the source texts. The practice of the subject therefore comes into collision with ‘efferent’ assumptions about mining text for propositional meaning. Even where the subject is scholarship-based, it has still tended to re-enact its own subject matter in aesthetically satisfying ways. The second half of the chapter investigates another and complementary aspect of the hidden aesthetic: while the subject has a complicated relationship to English nationalism, it is (and despite its cosmopolitan modernist legacies) nevertheless haunted by collective memories of forms of rural and small-town Englishness. These are seen as carrying on an influential half-life in the margins of the subject.

Keywords

Cultural Capital Literary Criticism Creative Writing Methodological Pluralism Educational Subject 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Ben Knights
    • 1
  1. 1.Teesside UniversityMiddlesbroughUnited Kingdom

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