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Pedagogy 4.1 (2004) 155-160



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Sweet Dreams

Christine Chaney

[Works Cited]

Teaching Literature. By Elaine Showalter. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003.
As there are hospitality rituals for beginning a class and a course, there should also be some for saying farewell.
—Elaine Showalter (2003: 141)

So begins the final chapter of Elaine Showalter's Teaching Literature, a chapter fittingly devoted to the idea of endings, both in the classroom and in her book itself. I don't know if similar rituals exist for editors, but it is my hope that this roundtable essay will serve both as my hospitality ritual and my "ending" as I finish my multiyear term as Pedagogy's Reviews editor. It also seems fitting that Showalter's book so literally describes the work that has occupied many of us, myself included, at the most fundamental level of our day-to-day academic lives. I know that when I first faced a literature classroom back in the mid-1990s, Teaching Literature is a text I would have been grateful for, had it existed then. That it does exist now speaks volumes about the "coming-of-age" of literary pedagogy, as my fellow reviewer Martin Bickman has so aptly put it. However, Teaching Literature's gaps and elisions also show us where the next steps need to be taken to further this pedagogical work, especially for those of us in the "post-theory" generation.

But where there may be gaps there are also connections, especially between this book, Teaching Literature, and this journal, Pedagogy. Showalter says that she wrote Teaching Literature partly in response to a challenge set forth in the first issue of Pedagogy. George Levine's powerful and "eloquent" (vii) essay "The Two Nations" (2001: 10) states that our profession "badly needs a whole new orientation toward the question of the relation between teaching and scholarship, and a whole new genre that would make it possible to see discussions of teaching as integral to the development of knowledge." Both Showalter and Levine have been active and vocal supporters of the movement to improve teaching in English studies, as is well known, and for that they are both to be commended—perhaps most especially (and most personally) for the support and encouragement both have given to Pedagogy as one site for that work. Specifically, Showalter tells us that her book responds to Levine's challenge in three distinct ways. First, by speaking of teaching as [End Page 155] both "an activity as well as a philosophy" (vii), Showalter intends to take seriously and intellectually the material practices of this work, one of the most neglected areas of inquiry. Second, she tells us that she has "read the extensive research coming from educational psychology and applied it to the special situation of teaching literature at the university level" (vii), an activity hitherto not just ignored but scorned by many in our profession. Third, she tells us that literature itself provides a model for the integration of teaching and scholarship. As she says, literature's "emphases on performance, memory, narrative, and problem-solving offer guides to our tasks as teacher, and a way to see teaching and scholarship as organically related" (viii). These three lenses, then—the practical, the educational, and the literary—are useful shortcuts to seeing where Teaching Literature's strengths and weaknesses lie and also to showing how another new book, Close Reading: The Reader (Lentricchia and DuBois 2003), can be seen as a stimulating and provocative counterpoint to it.

As Martin Bickman and Beth Kalikoff have already highlighted so well, Teaching Literature is strongest on "teaching as an activity" and is indeed best seen as a practical and immensely useful guidebook. I will even say that every graduate English department should simply give this book to their TAs in training. Showalter's strength lies in culling innovative ideas in syllabus and assignment construction, along with classroom teaching tools and techniques, from excellent teachers across the country and addressing the specifics of classes from across the spectrum of English department offerings. The voice of her book is that of the pragmatic mentor. Showalter early...

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