Of What Use . . . ?

The essays appearing below continue a two-part forum on “Teaching 1860– 1910,” prompted by the dramatic global and national events of 2020. In the present number of American Literary Realism and the one preceding it, nine scholars of late-nineteenth-century American literature reflect on the teaching practices and questions in the forefront of their thoughts during a global pandemic and amid widespread political unrest in the U.S. In the essays gathered in the winter number, contributors addressed what Kathryn Wichelns called the nation’s “overdue reckoning” with systemic racial injustices. They also documented the effect of the COVID pandemic on their teaching of American literature between 1860 and 1910, a period whose lessons at times seemed freshly written for the present. Below, the last three essays in this forum continue the conversation with additional authors, texts, technologies, and teaching strategies, as well as some challenges to the meaning of the word “realism,” which continues to have conceptual prominence for the writers who share their reflections here.

The abiding question for this half of the forum seems to me the one posed by both the first and last essays in this cluster, in their different contexts. Kenneth Roemer asks, “Why is historical contextualization valuable?” and Sherita L. Johnson, quoting the Colored American Magazine, asks, “[O]f what use is [literature] to the colored race at the present crisis in its history?” Every contributor to this forum seems to agree that there is value in teaching late-nineteenth-century literature now. In their diverse and local ways, these essays document the effort of teachers to pass that sense of value to students. In the dark days of COVID death counts and campus furloughs, protests over racist policing and protests over mask mandates, and—perhaps most disturbing of all to those who study the Civil War—the refusal of national leaders of one party to acknowledge the legal election of the presidential candidate in another party, the space for affirming any shared value seems a precious thing.

In the first essay of this cluster, “Teaching Utopia During Dystopian Times,” Roemer sketches a plan for a course on the utopian literature of the late-nineteenth century. Beginning with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), his syllabus not only teaches students how contemporary American inequalities have “historical roots in the late 19th century” or earlier; his critical approach to texts also helps students to assess the significance of each book’s “insights and blind spots” for readers today. He asks “how far we have or have not come in addressing 19th-century problems and fulfilling our hopes” and, based on his decades-long study of the utopian genre, suggests a list of readings to investigate the question.

Craig Carey’s “Realism and Recording: Remixing Literary and Media History” opens upon the grim note that courses in American realism were “not exactly prime real estate on your average English degree plan” even before the COVID emergency slashed university budgets. He proposes an approach to the study of realism that he hopes will have renewed appeal with students. Situating his essay in “contemporary developments in science studies, actor network theory, new materialism, and media studies,” as well as the later thought of Roland Barthes, he describes a materialist theory of realism that grounds the archival praxis of his realist seminar, the emphasis on “recording” rather than “representation.” With projects in digital and physical archives, his method of “multimedia engagement with realism” aims to bring students “closer to the material histories recorded by different writers and writing machines” so that they can recognize how the “formal, technical, and stylistic materiality” of recording “plays a significant role in shaping . . . cultural representation.”

In “Teaching Realism of Jim Crow America,” Sherita Johnson offers another way to rethink the meaning of realism, in this case, rooted in the teaching of African American literature after Reconstruction. Her account of realism centers on the way various writers “introduced into the canon the real-life experiences of being ‘black’ in segregated America.” Following W. E. B. Du Bois, she asks whether African Americans continue “to be a problem” if a leading textbook—the current...