Abstract This article addresses a pervasive but undertheorized literacy practice: ghostwriting. Drawing on a five-year interview study with undergraduate students, I describe the many ghostwriting tasks that participants were asked to perform for their co-op jobs and how they perceived those tasks. Overall, students were bewildered by ghostwriting and found it very different from, and in some ways at odds with, their academic writing. Given the ubiquity of ghostwriting and the likelihood that much of it will be offloaded to artificial intelligence in coming years, I call for and begin to outline a critical pedagogical approach to ghostwriting grounded in critical language awareness.

Abstract This essay maps the logistics and advantages of reading and teaching texts in their original installments as a means of theorizing seriality in the undergraduate literature classroom.

AbstractDeclines in undergraduate enrollments in English literature are well documented, and departments need to develop a coherent set of productive, practical responses to enrollment pressures. Drawing on studies of undergraduate research in STEM disciplines, this article explores how undergraduate research experiences in English literature can be envisioned not as unique, one-on-one experiences for motivated and interested students but as a curricular intervention that spans the undergraduate academic experience, fosters scholarly identity, and promotes inclusivity in scholarly training. Rather than functioning “by arrangement,” undergraduate research in English should be a coordinated enterprise that is established as an expectation for incoming students and a feature of every level of the major.

This essay addresses education's paradoxical binding to disciplinary and hierarchical formulas and to social change and personal transformation, an irony uniquely extreme within the prison classroom. It juxtaposes two pedagogical models — one conventionally liberal, the other significantly more radical — to question the purpose and potential of prison education. In the process, the essay measures close reading, a textual practice that is also the hallmark of literary study, against the highest possible liberationist goals of the prison abolition movement.

Corley argues that college faculty can more effectively instruct student veterans by renewing their commitment to widely acknowledged hallmarks of excellent instruction: welcoming all students; giving clear and direct feedback; approaching self, subjects, and students with moral seriousness; teaching with integrity; relating the subject matter to everyday concerns; and holding all students to high standards. Through classroom anecdotes and descriptions of military life, Corley demonstrates numerous points of connection between military culture and the best instructional practices described.

With the long-term decline in the cultural capital of literature and a steep decline in tenure-track hires in literary studies, faculty across English are rethinking their relationship to writing. As interest in digital media grows, together with rising enrollment in courses in creative, civic, and professional composition, can the figure of writing provide a sense of disciplinary coherence? What will it take for literature faculty to agree that they, too, are interested in writers and writing?