The Grace of Revision, the Profit of "Unconscious Cerebration"; or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play

Academic study generally highlights the work of consciousness, which operates in terms of a few variables, simple causal relations, and coherent stories. A course on "Big Books of American Literature" brought to the foreground the activities of the more generally neglected unconscious: an extraordinarily rich repertoire of behavior that operates in terms of complex multidimensional values, and so is more likely to provide grist for interesting, productive, open-ended conversations.