Date: Sat, 26 Mar 1994 00:13:41 -0500
Subject: JRNL: WHAT NEW PEDAGOGY?

************* Introducing THE T-AMLIT JOURNAL *************************

The two postings below should help us get the conversation started. In the first posting, Libby Rankin asks "What does it mean to 'teach' the American literatures?"; Jeff Finlay's posting discusses his frustration at getting his students to engage with the literature. Both point toward the larger question that underlies everything that we do: what exactly is it that we are teaching? In examining a large number of introductory syllabi from American lit courses around the country, one thing has really stuck me: the shift from a "canon of authors" to a "canon of issues." This shift from "authors & periods" to "issues & rhetorics" seems largely to define the field's changing notions of "coverage" and "literacy."

What then, as the postings raise below, does that mean for what we practice in the classroom?
RB

I keep hoping we'll get a conversation started on this list--not just queries and responses (though of course those are valuable too) but a different kind of conversation. May I try to start one?

I'm teaching a class this semester called Literature and the University. It is a class that grows out of my own deep questioning. What are we teaching when we say we "teach literature"? Not just what texts are we teaching, but what does it mean to "teach" a text? Gerald Graff suggests that all our agony over the canon is misplaced, that what is really at stake is whether our students will read anything, and our failures to draw them into any serious intellectual conversation. (Well, I'm probably not doing the best job of making his argument here, but perhaps you've heard or read him.) I've had similar concerns, I guess, about what it means to "teach literature"--though I'm not really satisfied with Graff's own answer to that question ("Teach the conflicts.") nor with Robert Scholes' notion that we should change our English Departments to Departments of Textual Studies. So I'm curious:
what are people out there thinking?

What does it mean to "teach the American literatures"?

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Folks, I'm wondering what experiences people have had with actually teaching Am Litt in their classes. Bit of an open question, you say? Well, sure, but I thought it would be interesting to get some broad feedback.

My particular problem this semester has been that everything I touch turns to dust in my student's eyes. I've been using the Prentice-Hall Concise Anthology (concise meaning you can stun a donkey with it)--a huge mistake, with hindsight. I should have just picked 4 or 5 of my favorite works and rode my hobbyhorse, instead of trying to teach representative literature. But that's beside the point. What is causing me to come to grief is that the things that are of abiding interest to me are of extremely limited concern to my students. If "the meaning of the text is not in the text," and if one is then encouraged to come to personal terms with one's reading, what can result, rather than the personal process of meaning-making one hopes for, is narcissism, resistance, rejection, a general wave of sentiment that the old fogeys of the 19th century are irrelevant and "uncool."

Sample of what I mean: the last week, I've been doing Whitman's Song of Myself with the students. I can't imagine how any Am Litt or Litt course could omit Whitman, and I've been amazed by how rereading the poem has again thrown up for myself a variety of new impressions. We've had one extremely successful class, where I had them write Whitmanesque, and what came out in the choric reading afterwards was amazing stuff, moving dialogues about death and self and living--the kind of thing I'm always searching for my students to produce (I really felt like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, a film I despise). BUT--getting the students to connect with Whitman as the poet of a certain vision of America, that was the impossible, because most of them are entirely disaffected with and unable to appreciate that politics of innocence which takes both Jacksonian democracy and manifest destiny under its wing. This is not the result of an ignorance of history--it is that they have no political consciousness, and even though as people of this culture their behavior represents many of its tropes, they don't know what they are doing and are highly resistant to engaging that dialogue with themselves.

I do try to structure assignments that will cause them to look at themselves as writers and that will see the writers they read as commenting on the same things they themselves think about, and indeed consume. But I'm finding T-ing Am Litt hard, hard, hard, an uphill cycle all the way. Anyone got any anecdotes of their own, want to compare notes? Be interested to hear.

Jeff Finlay

York College - CUNY
finlay@ycvax.york.cuny.edu

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Date: Tue, 29 Mar 1994 17:00:49 -0500
Subject: JRNL: POLITICS & PEDAGOGY

***T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

Here are FIVE responses to the first issue of the T-AMLIT JOURNAL, in which the two postings raised questions about "what it is that we are teaching" within a changed American literature. That question encompassed both the "object" (what kind of text, what kind of knowledge) and the "subject" of that teaching (what kind of student, what kind of interest).

The posts that came in fell into two groups: those that addressed notions of politics and pedagogy; and those that more specifically addressed the problem of student motivation and interest. Below are FIVE responses related to matters of personal politics, canon, and pedagogy.
RB

I was glad to read the first two entries in the T-AMLIT journal since they focus on the how and why of teaching instead of the what.

My own take on this is that we all fail to fully "live our politics" in our own teaching, as Jane Tompkins puts it. More specifically, we explicitly pay lip-service to values like open-ended inquiry, democratic process, education as exploration, as culture-creating rather than just culture-transmitting. And yet our own teaching is often mired in the institutional conventionalities of lecturing, grading, testing, proceeding in a lockstep manner to "cover" the "material."

When I was editing the MLA volume on Moby-Dick one of the questions I asked was "How does your vision of the book inform your own teaching of it?" Most respondents blew this question off, so let me put it to all of you about the general issue of teaching American literature.

Marty Bickman
Associate Professor &
President's Teaching Scholar

University of Colorado, Boulder

bickman@spot.colorado.edu

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Toward the conversations suggested, I'd like to respond to part of Jeff Finlay's quandary over his students' (lack of?) response to Whitman. He writes, if I understand correctly, that the students' lack of political consciousness made them unable to appreciate the "politics of innocence which takes both Jacksonian democracy and manifest destiny under its wing."

Are you saying that Jacksonian democracy, which included the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and that manifest destiny, which then pushed Indians out of their Indian Territory, as well as into reservations throughout the continent -- were both "innocent"? Whitman's idealism certainly was blind, as D. H. Lawrence and many others suggest, to Americans who do not fit his particular image of "manliness." My term for Whitman's enthusiastic oversights is "amative imperialism," which permeates his catalogs. When he hears the redwoods, in Song of the Redwoods, chorusing that they are willing to accept the loggers' axes and to lay down their lives for a superior race, Jacksonian democracy and manifest destiny take on sinister tones. No? Social Darwinism was too eager to explain American expansionism. And Whitman was too eager to embrace these unquestioningly.

Whitman is fascinating, a prototypical American as always, when you examine his blindnesses as well as his visions. Perhaps JF's students are more sensitive -- politically -- to these overtones than he is, and what seems to be a rejection as "uncool" is actually a recognition that those 19C politics are indeed racist. Late 20C students, whatever their orientation, are alert to racism by force of the history of the last four decades. Perhaps the class can come alive if the students are allowed to articulate why they reject Whitman.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++
David L. Moore
dlm1@crux1.cit.cornell.edu
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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A few comments on the "Teaching AmLit" topic from someone who teaches it as a foreign literature:
1. Canon revision is not particularly important to me, because it is external to me. Perhaps those of you who wish to reflect contemporary attitudes in a syllabus should remember you are teaching a "national" literature with a significant history to it.

2. I always teach AmLit within the comparative context of British and Canadian literature. Canadians largely define themselves by what they are not (e.g., not American, not British, etc.) and this leads me to see what is absent in AmLit as well as what is present.

3. The self-doubts that torment me about teaching literature are more generic than "what books should I teach." I'm not sure the decision for The Scarlet Letter or The Marble Faun is all that significant. The doubts I have go to the value of literature as a field of college or university study. I would read what I read whether I taught the literature or not, and what is my pastime has become my vocation. Perhaps this disturbs professional athletes as well when they see the seeming importance to others of what they know, in their hearts, is a game.

3a. The responses I give to those doubts are the same sort that artists use. It is a matter of preserving culture and sensibility. I also solace myself with the utilitarian value of reading, regardless of what is read. Teaching literature means introducing students to the vast array of reading materials available and giving them the ability to pursue understanding. A colleague of mine is quite insistent that the whole purpose of a B.A. is to teach students to read and write. He may have a point.

4. Which brings me back to what to teach in AmLit. My advice is to combine the classic and the eclectic. Certain cultural documents have an inertia that cannot be denied. Expose students to these. Include personal choices and favourites for contrast and to shape the course to your own personality. I always tell students *why* I have put texts on the syllabus. It helps them to comprehend a larger (con)text.

Blair Hemstock

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All of the issues brought up in this particular posting are, as we say in the sports world, HUGE. But I am so excited about the general call that I shall risk the illusion of coherence and just dive in.

I teach at a community college in Southern California. Such a cultural environment invites--nay requires--the open acceptance of "other" American voices. I do my best. For the first semester of the survey of American Lit. course I offer a core selection of the grits I was brought up on: New England Puritanism. But I make it a point to add other voices (a la Heath). I try to present the notion of ideology, and the class and I work out why we think New England Puritans felt and thought the way that they did. My doctoral research comes in handiest in the eighteenth century, which allows me to work with students regarding female voices and the cult of sensibility (I use Charlotte Temple for that). I take full advantage of the Heath Anthology in this half of the survey.

For the second half of the survey, I am totally a product of my undergraduate environment. But this is not entirely bad either, even though it may very well be politically incorrect. In this survey I still focus on ideology at the beginning, and have the class read Uncle Tom's Cabin with an ideological slant: we try to read the readers while we read the novel, noting of course HBS's own implicit (and sometimes explicit) racism. I realize that there are other things to bring into the discussion, but for an introductory course, I am satisfied with this approach.

The rest of the course also resembles my formalist upbringing, and I refuse to be convinced that I am doing my students a disservice by dealing with the literature in this fashion. I do the traditional realism versus romanticism story, using Jewett, Freeman, Chopin, Twain, James Howells to prove my case. Then the typical move into Naturalism with Crane, Norris, and Perkins-Gilman. After that we do the alienation literature of the early twentieth century, and then into the literature of the thirties, forties, and early fifties.

My question is this--thank you for putting up with all this background--how can I maintain my "epochal" approach (which I like very much so don't anybody expect to take it away from me) and still integrate non-Anglo voices into the curriculum? I know it can work because I believe in it.

I need help, not sermons. I teach a very significant population of non-white students, and I talk to them about how I handle the literature. They do not seem at all neglected in terms of hearing their own interpretive voices expressed in the class. What I am concerned with is that they are not hearing their expressive, artistic voices expressed in the literature. What I need is a smooth transition that respects my perspective on epoch with a comensurate respect for voices of American literature that speak to an experience beyond the traditionally accepted experience.

My particular needs lie in late nineteenth-century American fiction, poetry, and drama and with the first half of twentieth-century poetry, fiction, and drama (for example, are there any non-Anglo American imagists of the "early" twentieth century? or am I really living an ideological myth constructed and controlled by my own race and gender?)

My issues are large. My language is vague. My logic is fuzzy. But my kids are really cute. Honest.

Bruce

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I think the entire idea of the canon has run its useful course. There aren't a hundred great books, or a hundred great poems, and I doubt that any human being can read all the worthy literature in a single lifetime and leave any time for living. So to say there's a canon that everyone should read, while it might have had some merit a couple centuries ago, is simply false now. We face a surfeit of riches, and we must select.

I notice that those who call for teaching of the canon are seldom actually teachers of literature putting together a syllabus. More likely it's some columnist who vaguely remembers reading The Faerie Queene in college, or at least being assigned to read it, and figures the experience must have contributed to him becoming the great fellow he is, so thus must be applied to every subsequent generation. Those of us faced with a 15-week semester and students with meager textbook budgets can't afford to be so nostalgic.

And students with meager textbook budgets can't afford to be so nostalgic.

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***T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

Here are SIX more posts generated by the first issue of T-AMLIT JOURNAL: these responses all focused specifically on some aspect of "student engagement". A number of problems are raised as obstacles between students and the literature: "illiteracy" (as the first post puts it), lack of interest or appreciation of issues, lack of historical context, and so on.

The lingering question is, then: if an expanded American literature is premised on new kinds of literacies, the primacy of issues, and the renewed importance of social, historical, and cultural contexts, then where is the bonding between constituency and curriculum? At the risk of sounding unduly divisive: how do we make what matters to "us" matter to "them".
RB

In answer to your call for other ideas about the experience of teaching AmLit, and trying to teach the "experience" of AmLit, herewith some thoughts.

I've been teaching "survey" AmLit courses for some years, and all the problems mentioned here I have encountered, especially the appalling illiteracy of most students. They just haven't read very much, even the honors students. As a result, when they encounter a work they like they can't place it in a context of other works and authors and concerns. There is no "pattern" to them--whether of genre or ideology or artistic style--but rather isolated moments which they like for what they feel are idiosyncratic and "personal" reasons. I think there is, too, a problem with a general lack of historical knowledge, and thus they have no real feeling for the period issues various authors were engaging. For instance, they cannot see Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" as a response to the Romantics. This is to say they have little sense of the dialogic in AmLit. And in those instances when I've pushed for seeing works in these contexts, their resistance grows. As has been mentioned, they (most, not all) react as though everything but the work itself is irrelevant, boring, old fogey stuff.

In a sense we could see this as the irony of the triumph of New Criticism. For them, there *is* only the text. Or as the result of the rampant laziness we hear so much about. And I have to ask myself: is my fervor for getting them to see the wider context for the texts really just a nostalgia on my part? Am *I* becoming an old fogey? *Is* there any revelance to these "other" factors, or should we just be teaching texts, not issues?

I'm in the midst of an interesting experience this semester that suggests some of the problems and possible solutions. I'm teaching for the firts time a course in Modern Latin American Fiction: Lispector, Borges, Marquez, etc. It's all utterly new to them, and much of it is fairly new to me, so some of the "issue" stuff we're discovering together. And I've found them very enthusastic and motivated, not only to discuss wider contexts, but to go out and find texts on their own that give them more information about those contexts, even to reading up on some fairly difficult literary theory stuff.

I'm not completely certain what this tells us about the problems of teaching AmLit issues consequent with AmLit texts, though the lack of preconceptions on the part of both class and instructor seems to play a role, as does the sense they seem to have that they are actually capable of discovering connections rather than just being forced to receive connections.

I'd be interested to hear if other AmLit teachers have had similar experiences when they've taught outside that realm.

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Jeff's letter addressed many of my own concerns and problems, particularly the point that he made about the student's concerns often not being those of the teacher. I have an Am. Studies degree, and so teach in both the literature and history depts. One thing I've notices is that students have less and less of a sense of history, particularly of the recent past. In the intro to Am. Lit. this spring, I had them read short fiction that I hoped was so different from what they were used to that they wouldn't complain about being bored with the same old thing. Malamud, Baldwin, Hurston, to name a few, and now we are plowing through

Toomer's Cane. Throughout all of these works most of the students have confused their own vision with that of the author's because in many cases they have no sense of the historical period that frame the stories. For example, several students couldn't understand James Baldwin's anger in The Fire Next Time, because they look around their integrated class room and cannot comprehend the obstacles of a black teenager in Baldwin's Harlem (or for that matter,today.) Part of my problem, and perhaps this is true of others, is to frame history and literature in such a way that student's can enter into the world of the writer, without always having to make it relevant or even similar to their own. Then perhaps they can move on to some universal truths that apply to their lives and make connections to the writing.

Benay Blend blend@nsula.edu

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The idea of discussing teaching Am. Lit., the teaching itself is fascinating to me, especially since I am student teaching right now in an Am. Lit. class (11th grade). My MA is in English, not teaching, and although I've had several ed. school courses, I don't find they help me much with the essential question--how to get kids turned on enough to the literature to have interesting discussions and inspired essays and, hopefully, some kind of retention of the material after the June exodus.

Randall Bass talked about a switch from a canon of authors to a canon of issues--a great way to describe the current trend. I do see lots of currently in vogue issues being raised in high school classes, watered-down versions of feminism and ethnic issues, but I don't always see kids responding to these topics in anything more than the style they've adopted from their teachers--not much independent thinking going on.

Since high school kids, and to some extent entering college students are still developmentally self-absorbed, I think that the best "hooks" into the literature are psychological--especially issues they are grappling with like relationships with lovers and parents, feelings of isolation, sexuality, maturation, making choices and hard decisions. I guess that is why the catcher in the rye has been so popular for so long.

I feel like I'm doing a kind of schizophrenic lesson as I begin the Modern Period. I will introduce concepts of alienation and experimentation with form (Stein, Faulkner, etc.) as a way to express psychological states of being, but I know that when I get into the texts (Cather's The Sculptor's Funeral, Hemingway's Big two-hearted river, Eliot's Prufrock, Faulkner's Spotted Horses and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, etc.) I will be addressing more personal, individual issues. I think I can link them together, but I really want to get them interested in the cultural context of works and not just their pyschological import.

I am really looking forward to comments from people with more experience than I have.

Carole Hamilton
Univ. of Virginia

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This is a difficult question. I've been a T.A. for professors who are successful in reaching students and professors who are unsuccessful (and miserably unpopular). The successful professors seem to share an approach that is problematic--they approach the literature from a personal standpoint, and share their enthusiasms with the students. The task becomes to examine a work that is exciting and has real relevance for us in our real lives. While the benefits to this approach are obvious, it is also very limiting, and often results in skewed readings and understandings (we can all relate to the isolation Maxine Hong Kingston describes in Woman Warrior because we've all felt left out at one time or another, for example). Students do not seem interested in the historical/political context of the work, and I can't say that I especially blame them. But to focus on one's personal engagement with a text can leave a lot left out, and gets more and more difficult the further in the past you go. What do the old fogeys have to do with us?

Tim Springfield, English Dept.
University of Wisconsin
spring@macc.wisc.edu

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Stimulating notes from Jeff and Libby. Deeply empathetic with Jeff's lament. I'm chicken to teach anything from the 19th century. Can't imagine making contact through that material, but I love the idea of getting students to write Whitmanesque. My venture into 'early' material was to teach Thoreau's Cape Cod and Henry Beston's Outermost House. Nice comparative stuff there, and the field trip was great! Also used Melville's Encantadas a couple of times. I've had recent success with Indian topics and settings, probably because of recent movies: Frank Waters, The Man Who Killed the Deer; Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War, Faulkner, The Bear. Walker Percy's The Second Coming, which is, to me, one of the greeat love stories, goes over very well. I teach NONE of these things under the rubric of 'American Lit', but in a course called Lit. of Nature. I yearn to include The Scarlet Letter in that course but fearit's been done in their secondary school classes.

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Only a minority of our students will read for pleasure, and so it's sort of hard to know what to do with them. Seduce them? "Here, read this incredibly hot poem by Thomas Carew! See, literature is sexier than PLAYBOY!" Ignore them and concentrate on the few who already love literature? Tell them it's for their own good and they'll appreciate it later? I don't know. I think this is where "teach the issues" comes in. They're used to discussing issues, to taking stands, so put literature study into a confrontational mode-- not too hard to do, considering the various critical wars out there-- and present the various positions available. You might even get a debate going: "Resolved: Poe's first-person narrators are reflections of himself" vs. "Resolved: Poe's first-person narrators should be considered completely separate from their creator." Of course, what might be lost in taking sides is that realization that both the above might be true at the same moment.

And Jeff, that's what I am finding most difficult about teaching right now. My students hate ambiguity. I think I know why-- they're deeply cynical, don't trust what authority says, and yet they long for certainty while recognizing its improbability these days. The result-- ambiguity is terribly threatening. It says that two or three or four supposedly mutually exclusive thoughts may all be true-- and that such a paradox is pleasing, not painful. Well, it's painful to them. I read them Browning's "My Last Duchess," dutifully warning them not to imagine that Browning himself was like the duke (I've taught this poem before, and many students are horrified that we anthologize a murderer's poem). Instead of seeing this as a delicious detective search-- what happened to the duchess, and why, and what does the duke think about that, and what does it say about him that he thinks that-- they are annoyed at the opacity of the duke's confession. I try to say that the opacity is the point, that it reflects his moral opacity, but they want transparency. The poems they like best are the most straightforward of all-- greeting card stuff, without any "tricks". "This one says what I feel. And it says it the way I'd say it."

But the tricks are the point.... I think they'd rather read bumper stickers than poetry. If you can boil a poem's point down into 6 words, well, go ahead and boil it down! That there might be more than one meaning, that the process of getting to the meaning might be more important-- many of my students resist that.

I have slightly better result with the beauty argument, which breaks down somewhat with all that deliberately un-beautiful literature we've had lately. But I can say frankly that even if Keats had nothing of the least profundity to say, I'd read him for the sheer beauty of the language. They can go along with that, even if they don't find his work particularly beautiful.

I sympathize with the desire for certainty, and I believe they have good reasons, many of them, for fearing chaos. But that's not what literature offers-- its ambiguity isn't chaotic usually. It's symmetrical in some way, and expansive.

What's ironic is this is one issue that really gets the students aroused. Some get plain angry at the thought that this poem or this story isn't to be taken literally. The notion of subtext drives them wild. "You're making that up! You're -putting- it in there!" It leads to great discussion.... but I don't know if it increases their appreciation of the works we read.

Has anyone else come across this problem? I know it's not confined to students of this generation, because I just read an essay about a Poe story which demands that the tale be read literally and concludes that those who read it otherwise "don't like the story that Poe wrote." And that was from 1966, from a literary critic, not a conservative columnist.

Sorry to go on at length, but the prospect of next week's discussion of the depths of that deceptively simple Frost poem is giving me hives. "What do you mean it's about suicide????!! It's about SNOW! You're inventing all the rest!!"

Alicia Rasley
arasley@indyvax.iupui.edu

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***T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

NOTE: Let me thank Kenny Mostern of the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group at UC Berkeley for writing in to remind people that when you are talking about a teaching situation, be sure and identify your teaching context with some precision: type of institution, format of class, class level, kind of racial, ethnic or other kind of mix, and so on.

RB

In response to questions about what we are teaching, I am a medievalist and I am a teacher of American Indian Literature. In the latter, which seems to fit more nearly what is being called American Literature, my notion is that if the course does not change their lives then it has failed and I have failed and they have failed to see its point. I regard the discovery of America as not taking place until Americans discover Indians. I regard this as essentially the ability to see American history and literature as not merely Jefferson, Whitman, Puritans, but Osage and Pawnee and Navajo (et al) ceremonial, ideological, and social versions of the continent and its beings. I regard the Louisiana Purchase and its notions of America as half the history of that occasion, the other half being the peoples whose land was sold from beneath them by a French dictator to an American ruler without consultation or compensation or notice of any sort really. I regard the books and views of those who then did in literature essentially what Jefferson did in economic and political invasion as still only half the story. When Whitman speaks of the free and flowing savage it is a nice attitude but not a nice knowledge spoken from. When students hear about, read work by, think in a first-time way of this other half of America, the native half, then they will have to see America as a place of many holocausts, a place of silencing, building over bones and words and keeping those in the basement of awareness. And if we look briefly at novels and poems and stories of contemporary American Indian writers, using European forms and genres but turning these to LOOK at the America that was and is here, then we see things differently from before.

Carter Revard

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In response to David Moore's objection to the "innocence" of Whitman's Redwoods/Red men vis-a-vis Jacksonian "democracy" and social Darwinism--hear hear! (Or is it "here here"? I've never seen the phrase written. I guess I'll cover the bases with "hear here.") I'm also taking into account Blair Hemstock's declaration that the canon is "external" to him (her?), and that we should remind ourselves that we're teaching a "national literature." Personally, I never forget that I'm teaching a national literature--and that as such, it is integrally tied to national politics, which included Jim Crow and Indian Removal as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe and the traditional host of "great whites." I might be guilty of mixing politics and history with literature; after all, we of all people are supposed to be "disinterested," concerned with truth and beauty rather than domination and filthy lucre. But if that's the case, why include The Federalist in Am. lit. anthologies? Or Jefferson's Notes on Virginia? It seems to me we often talk out of both sides of our professorial mouths. We teach early political rhetoric/documents as part of/representing "American lit," but somehow we become radicals--or at least historicists--if we include later historical documents (the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? Korematsu v. United States? Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866?). Why? Because the Founding Fathers are sacro sanct, or because that misty period of history is so far removed that it's "safe"? How can we teach an "expanded," more ethnically inclusive selection of American lit. without being honest about the power structures which provided their historical foundations? Which is my rather windy way of asking, as David Moore points out, how we can teach Whitman's Song of the Redwoods without including a discussion of the costs of Manifest Destiny and Jacksonian "democracy"? How democratic was Indian Removal? (This all comes out of yesterday's class with my American Lit II students, which consisted of a discussion of Frederick Jackson Turner in the context of Indian Removal, all of which we funneled through the truly awful Ron Howard film Far and Away, with its epic depiction of the Oklahoma Land Run.)

--Sharon Delmendo

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I'd like to follow up on Blair Hemstock's useful and articulate comments about teaching AmLit as a "foreign" field. Teaching U.S. literature (oh, for a better adjectival form!) in a comparative context can be a heuristic device, a tool for dismantling one of the most crippling assumptions that our students bring to the classroom. That is: *they think they already know what "America" means*. I can't count the number of gifted students I've talked to who are hesitant about taking an AmLit course because they sense it will be less challenging to their nascent literary sensibilities than, say, a course on British Romanticism. Or the number of students who approach the same classroom with an unwarranted confidence in their prior knowledge of the subject, coupled with an absolute lack of interest in attaining a *critical* understanding of it. I think in saying this that I am only restating a sentiment various people on the board have already expressed.

A comparatist approach would strive to instill that critical distance by leading students to see "American" literature newly as a *foreign* literature-- something that, rather than being boringly proximate to their previous experience, is excitingly Other. To shock, surprise, the senses into a new way of understanding: that's the force, I think, behind Blair's advice to seek *contrast* in composing a syllabus. (If you talk about "shock", I guess this becomes a Surrealist theory of teaching-- or perhaps the formalist "defamiliarization" is less threatening.)

But I wonder whether we can/should inject that sense of foreignness or Otherness into the familiar stuff simply by recourse to a multiplicity of materials-- the United Colors of Benetton approach to syllabus-building. I hasten to add that I *teach* a "multicultural" version of the 19th-century AmLit survey; and I use, with only minor reservations, the Heath Anthology. But what frustrates me is that students seem prepared to take *that* perspective glibly and familiarly, too: many, if not most, of them have already absorbed multiculturalism from MTV, if not from previous college coaching in that Essential American Value-- tolerance of diversity. It's losing its capacity to -e'pater les bourgeois-, to surprise into critical awareness. (I'd be curious to hear protest or corroboration of this observation from teachers elsewhere.)

It seems to me that the solution is to be found, if anywhere, in the *process*, and that's where I return to the heuristic value of comparatism. Isn't what we're really seeking through the recourse to "multiculturalism" a new way of teaching, rather than a new syllabus? Since I have a background in Latin American Lit, I teach a comparative course called "Literature of the Americas"; but I'm actually more preoccupied at the moment with refining my "straight" course, "American Renaissance". I can't, and won't, shirk Transcendentalism to talk about Sarmiento in that course. But I *have* spent half a class, for instance, on an exercise the students either love or hate: after we read Emerson, I give them a handout with three or four excerpted paragraphs titled "Our America", which I tell them is a late piece by Emerson, and ask them to locate the key Emersonian ideas (unified, reliant self; poetic originality; naturally derived nativism). They do this, and I tell them Jose' Marti' wrote this essay in 1891, and then I point out the different valence of military metaphors in Marti', and we circle back from there to ask whether Emerson's is an "imperial self". I don't dwell, necessarily, on the political-- although that's always a risk when one departs from the expected. But that's one quick example of what I'm getting at; I've gone on too long. Comments?

---Kirsten Silva Gruesz, College of William & Mary

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***T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

Here are two more contributions to the discussion about pedagogy and student engagement. Both of these posts picked up on the side of the discussion concerned with student literacy and the issue of relevance to student lives, especially in the context of younger students.

RB

To all of us frustrated with our students' inability to engage the text: I have come to the conclusion that one of our problems is our