Teaching Historically: Some Limits to Historicist Teaching

Abstract

This essay explores the necessity of a historicist pedagogy, and outlines what it might look like—and indeed, already does look like in many seminar rooms in the contemporary academy. It then asks whether such a pedagogy is in any way sufficient, or whether it needs to be framed by some other account of the teaching of ‘English’ more fully able to speak to the place of the subject in the curriculum, and indeed in the lives of our students. Broadly speaking, it argues that the reference to historical context (and how we understand this) is a necessary but not sufficient pedagogical gesture; and that we do indeed need to place this gesture within a more ambitious ideological frame. This essay suggests strategies for inciting a reading that is not objectifying, which is not premised on the ultimately dismissive ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’—that allow otherness to act upon us. In pedagogical terms, we have therefore to let the force of those older texts act upon our students, always allowing them to acknowledge or resist the validity of the claims that they make upon us.