Moving from the Margins

Teaching Literature. By Elaine Showalter. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003.

Most milestones are arbitrary, but they can give occasion to pause and look backward and forward. We are afforded such an opportunity by the publication of Elaine Showalter's Teaching Literature, which indicates a kind of a coming-of-age for literature pedagogy at the college level. One reason is the intellectual and institutional position of the author: she is a past president of the Modern Language Association, a Princeton professor, and the author of pioneering books such as A Literature of Their Own: British Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1982). Teaching Literature, then, is not a book written from the margins of the profession or one written with the left hand as a personal academic memoir. While the book draws heavily on Showalter's own classroom experience and reflections, it also collects and synthesizes a good deal of what has already been accomplished in the field and thus serves as a kind of compendium of some of the common wisdom and best work done so far. It is an explicit attempt to "reconceive our pedagogy to make it as intellectually challenging as our research" (11), and it offers the utopian but invigorating suggestion that "attention to pedagogy itself, and to learning theory, could offer a new direction for English studies for the new century. . . . We could make teaching [literature] our common cause, and teaching it well our professional work" (24).

But the book can serve as a milestone not because it simply surveys and summarizes but because of its particular stance: "There are many ways to be a good teacher, but I do think that active learning and interactive subject-centered learning makes the most sense for teaching literature, and that the genres of drama, poetry, fiction, and theory, with their emphasis on performance, memory, narrative, and problem-solving, offer guides to our task as teachers, and a way to see teaching and scholarship as organically related" (vii-viii). This clearly is Showalter's personal view based on her experience and reading, but it also represents the current consensus in the field: that learning is deepest when students construct their own knowledge, that activity and continual expression are more effective than passive absorption, that the processes of understanding literature should be analogous to the ways literature helps us understand the world through constant dialogue between the conceptual and the concrete, the communal and the personal.

But while the publication of Teaching Literature is an occasion to celebrate and this forum an appropriate place to do so—the continued success of Pedagogy being yet another marker of the field's maturity—we also have to ask why it has taken so long for such a book to be produced. Certainly teaching at the K-12 level has developed a vast pedagogical literature, as has our sister field of college composition. The most frequent answers tend to be about the nature of the profession: the greater prestige of research relative to teaching, its accompanying reward structure, and parallel hierarchies both within and among institutions. But two related factors are most intrinsic and substantive: (1) our inability to live our ideals in the immediacy of our own classroom lives; and (2) the intellectual isolation of literary studies from other fields relevant to our pedagogy, such as cognitive science, the history and philosophy of education, and the psychologies of individual learning and group process.

Both factors are dramatized in an incident recalled by Janet Emig (1990: 87). At a scholarly session on women's fiction, Emig asked, "What you've been talking about this afternoon is a feminist transformation of our tradition. Will transforming our tradition also transform our teaching?" The response from a noted feminist theorist was, "Are you talking about chairs in a circle and all that touchy, feely stuff of the sixties?" Emig explains her reaction to this patronizing response: "Here was a woman seemingly willing to entertain every possibility about theory but one: that there could be embedded in her...