AustLit

'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)