AustLit

'In my poetry writing workshops I often teach ‘Wild Flowers’, a stunning poem by Yankunytjatjara author Ali Cobby Eckermann. Several years ago, my first-year students at Western Sydney University were reading ‘Wild Flowers’ alongside ‘Rise Again’ by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish. One student offered an electrifying reading of Eckermann’s poem that I’ve never forgotten. He began by recalling a trip to Beirut he’d made as a young adult, long after leaving the city as a child and migrating with his family to Western Sydney. How did the city appear to you, I asked? The same, he deadpanned, with more bullet holes.' (Introduction)

'In 2008, fervent public debate followed the announcement that the new national Australian Curriculum, then in early development, would mandate the study of Australian literature for all students ‘across the compulsory years of schooling’ (Davies, Martin and Buzacott 21). Conservative commentators welcomed what they saw as assurance that ‘young Australians’ would learn ‘to appreciate, value and celebrate this nation’s identity and history’ (Donnelly, ‘A Canon’). More progressive voices argued that rather than the texts to be read, focus should be on practices of reading that respond to ‘students’ needs, interests and experiences as national and global citizens’ (Davies 47-8). Conservatives were less enthused by the final language of the new curriculum: in Quadrant, self-proclaimed ‘culture warrior’ Kevin Donnelly complained that it had replaced the Western canon and Judeo-Christian morals with ‘politically correct perspectives’, likely the three cross-curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability (Donnelly, ‘The Ideology of the National English Curriculum 28, 27; ACARA, ‘Cross-curriculum Priorities’). Australian Curriculum: English is separated into three strands, ‘language’, ‘literature’ and ‘literacy’, each with an enormous set of extensively detailed descriptors, outcomes and performance indicators (ACARA, ‘English’). Teachers and educators worried that its unwieldiness would create a ‘culture of compliance and checking off… content’ that in turn risked extinguishing students’ capacity for ‘creativity and critical engagement’ (Moni 15; Davies, Doecke and Mead 22).' (Introduction)

'What does it mean to teach literary studies at a university today?

'Whatever form the teaching of literary studies takes where I teach, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, it clearly takes very different forms elsewhere and has taken very different forms in the past. In The Teaching Archive, Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan make an appealing case for the influence that classroom teaching has had, for more than a century, on the development of literary studies as a discipline. Buurma and Heffernan argue that teaching, rather than trailing meekly behind pioneering research, has been essential to the discipline’s persistent preoccupations, to its methodological transformations, and to the number and variety of the texts it addresses.' (Introduction)

'Disciplines are not simple things. They are mainly identified with the ideas and methods they produce, but ideas and methods can only be part of their overall constitution. Embedded in various kinds of institution, focussing on objects and topics that continually mutate, disciplines also professionalise and reproduce themselves by creating barriers to entry and hierarchising students. They legitimate themselves by ascribing particular cultural and social functions to themselves. They fracture into differing schools. And, of course, they teach.' (Introduction)

'Memoirs, obituaries, the recollections of students and colleagues are themselves part of the ‘impossible archive’. Notwithstanding the innate distortions of the genre—nostalgia, self-promotion, the decorum of eulogy—the remembered teacher (or colleague) can work against the fixed positions of disciplinary history. Joanne Lee Dow tells a lovely story about the critic, poet and University of Melbourne academic Vincent Buckley (1925-1988). He was about to take a trip away for a few weeks and requested from the Head of his Department that she, a favoured tutor, might teach his Honours Poetry course.' (Introduction)

'I could follow Justin Clemens’ pointed question in his ‘Manifesto for an International University’ with a rhetorical ‘or both?’ It seems to me that to pick either debasement or disposability would bypass the combined insult and injury of working as a casual teacher in a state of offense to the University; I mean you—if you are a casual teacher—carry an unwelcome status as simultaneously the University’s disobedient citizen, near-superfluous to its educational structure and its legal liability. The problem of casual teaching remains a postscript to the bulking literature of cri de coeur about the ‘crisis’ of the corporate University (for example see Connell). This crisis has launched hordes of ‘defences’ for literary studies on the grounds of its shifting relevance to labour-capital relations, characterised by the erosion of institutional guarantee, and the perpetuation of precarity. It is hardly a head-scratcher that it remains within the domain of the hypothetical ‘rare tenured critic’ to strive for ‘different answers’ to questions about what constitutes the program, and how the classroom can keep it alive (Kornbluh). As for answers, think of a whole book of lamentations for the loss of the discipline’s cultural repertoire, appeals to its economic contribution to the ‘creative industries’, and counsel on how to repurpose the transmission of literary knowledge—often all at the same time. In one recent example, Rita Felski has called for new ‘justifications for the costs of the humanities’ by focusing on the alliterative sequence of ‘curating, conveying, criticising, composing’ (Felski).' (Introduction)

'Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s new study The Teaching Archive both excavates and interprets the syllabi and other classroom-related archives of ten tertiary English-literature courses, providing in the process what the authors call a ‘true history’ of the literary studies discipline as it was taught by a variety of English and American teachers over the course of the twentieth century. Through its textual tracing of a selection of classroom-based materials, methods and practices, The Teaching Archive brings to light a diverse methodological history, revising in the process critical assumptions and platitudes about the discipline that extend from the twentieth-century to our present moment. After reading Buurma and Heffernan we can no longer say, for example, that the pre-1968 Anglo-American classroom was the bastion of canonical reading and writing practices that—upholding antiquated, narrowly technical or formalist methods complicit with hierarchical structures—only began to unravel once universities and other tertiary-education institutions conformed to social diversity and inclusion policies. After 1968, so the story goes, the New Criticism, with its championing of the close reading method that had previously dominated the teaching of Anglophone literary studies, was gradually replaced by thematic or area studies approaches with their culture- or identity-based methods. Along with the move away from close-reading as the core literary studies method, the post-1968 emergence of feminist and queer, race, ethnic and other area studies contributed to a movement away from the teaching of the English Literature canon.' (Introduction)