Abstract This essay reports the findings from a study of undergraduate students’ audio reading habits. The study involved a series of surveys conducted between fall 2020 and fall 2023 and included over one hundred students from seven different British literature classes. The survey results are both quantitative and qualitative and provide a snapshot of how contemporary college students enrolled in literature classes view and engage with audiobooks. Overall, the study found that a majority of participants reported that they listened to audiobooks (77 percent) and more than half admitted to having used audiobooks to complete assigned reading in previous classes (67 percent). Based on these findings, this essay argues that while audiobooks may not be the ideal medium for literary study, they have become an essential supplement to this practice under the conditions of the contemporary college classroom. Ultimately, this essay makes the case for putting aside disciplinary skepticism regarding the legitimacy of audiobooks as a component of literary education and instead encourages educators to learn more about how their students are using audiobooks so that they can accommodate these texts in their classrooms and provide instruction on how best to employ this medium.

Bridget C. Donnelly is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her primary teaching areas include eighteenth-century British literature, the novel, and Gothic and horror literature. Her research has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality (2024). She is completing, along with a team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers, a critical edition of Elizabeth Meeke's 1796 The Abbey of Clugny, under contract with Routledge's Chawton House: Women's Novel Series.Kishonna Gray (she/her) is a professor of racial justice and technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan and director of the Mellon-funded Intersectional Tech Lab. Her research explores the intersections of race, gender, and digital technologies, particularly in gaming and platform culture. She is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming and Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live and coeditor of Woke Gaming and Feminism in Play. Gray is also a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.Ashley Nadeau is an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature and critical theory. Her current research project examines the role of audiobooks in undergraduate literary studies and studies on the Victorian novel. When not thinking about audiobooks, she studies the relationship between the social and architectural histories of built public space and the Victorian literary imagination. Her work has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorians Journal, The Gaskell Journal, Modern Language Studies, and Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.Eleanor Reeds is an associate professor of English at Hastings College in Nebraska where she enjoys teaching across genres and periods in a small but vibrant department. Her research has appeared in venues such as Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, American Literary Realism, and Twentieth-Century Literature.Tes Schaeffer (she/her) previously served as an advanced lecturer in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric and as the associate director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Central Oregon Community College. Her fields of scholarship include composition and reading pedagogies, affect studies, and phenomenology.Krysten Stein (she/her) is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College. She is a research affiliate with the Intersectional Tech Lab at the University of Michigan's School of Information and the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Her research explores reality television and social media, with a focus on identity, political economy, and wellness. She is completing her first book, And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health, and is a cofounding member of the Content Creator Scholars Network.Lisa Swan is an advanced lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in English education from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include writing studies, pedagogy, reading, teacher training, and equity.

Abstract This article describes a project taught in a British literature survey course, in which students navigate digital archives like Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) to find a “companion piece” to a literary text. The essay shares the goals of the research project, the assignment design, and specific successes and challenges students encounter. The piece additionally offers reflections about teaching the conventional British literature survey course for undergraduate English majors, particularly considering the ways in which digital archives and historicist methodologies can expand students’ understanding of literary canons and the interrelationship between literature and history.

Abstract Taking their cue from the internet and popular cultures in which they engage, college students are becoming more comfortable with the notion of intersectionality, a term first coined in the late 1980s by the critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. Drawing from her legal training as well as Black feminist precursors such as Sojourner Truth, Crenshaw shows how to best understand the experiences of the multiply marginalized, not through a simple process of addition (woman plus Black, for instance) but through a careful attention to the way in which the specific combination of those two identities can create new forms of marginalization obscured by single-vector frameworks. For those who teach undergraduate writing students, the proliferation of intersectionality in cultural conversation offers a unique opportunity: here is a densely theoretical concept that students are eager to think about and which, in fact, they may already be thinking about. This piece provides a pedagogical model for approaching intersectionality in the writing classroom. Using Langston Hughes's richly ambiguous short story, “Seven People Dancing,” which foregrounds the racial, sexual, class, and gender identities of its characters, the article guides instructors through a process by which students can use theoretical concepts to produce stronger analyses of complicated texts.

Jennifer L. Bay is professor of English at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in the professional and technical writing major and graduate courses in technical and professional writing, community engagement, experiential learning, and rhetorical theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.Felisa Baynes-Ross is an assistant course director of English 1014 (writing seminars) and senior lecturer in English at Yale University where she teaches courses in expository writing, creative nonfiction, and pedagogy. Both in her teaching and writing, she is interested in aesthetics of dissent, which she explores in medieval polemical treatises and poetry and historical narratives on the Caribbean. Her published work appears in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, and The Caribbean Writer.Caitlin Cawley is the assistant director of the writing program and an advanced lecturer of English at Fordham University. She teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, and film studies. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of American Studies, The Faulkner Journal, and The Oakland Review and has received generous support from the US Army Heritage Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Tracy Clark is a senior lecturer in the Professional Writing program at Purdue University. Research interests include accessibility and usability, public health communication, multimodal content development, and the intersection of gender identity and neurodiversity in technology use.Garrett I. Colón is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University and the assistant director of content development for the Purdue OWL. His research interests include technical and professional communication, user experience design, community engagement, and writing across the curriculum.Adrianna Deptula is a current doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University. Her research interests include science, technology, and medicine (STM); patient advocacy; and new materialism.Shelley Garcia is associate professor of English at Biola University where she teaches courses on race, gender, and culture in American literature, as well as composition and rhetoric. She has published on Chicana feminist authors who write across genre, focusing on the intersections of form, identity, and resistance. Additional research interests that have emerged from her teaching include the role of literary studies in developing intercultural competence, the theme of abjection in Toni Morrison's novels, and representations of the femme fatale in American modernist fiction.Eliza Gellis is a recent graduate of the Rhetoric and Composition doctoral program at Purdue University. Her research interests include comparative rhetorics, public and cultural rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and pop culture.Caroline Hagood is an assistant professor of literature, writing, and publishing and director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Resources for American Literary Study, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture.Emily Rónay Johnston is an assistant teaching professor in writing studies at the University of California, Merced, and a New Directions Fellow through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds a PhD in English studies from Illinois State University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a BA in women's studies from the University of California, Davis. Prior to academia, she worked in a domestic violence shelter and an addiction recovery center for women. She has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy in the face of adversity, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere.Pamela B. June is associate professor of English at Ohio University Eastern, where she teaches women's literature, American literature, literature and social justice, and writing courses. She is the author of two books, Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature (2020) and The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern, Feminist, and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Pérez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker (2010). In 2021, she earned the Ohio University Outstanding Professor Award in Regional Higher Education.Nate Mickelson is clinical associate professor and director of faculty development in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is author of City Poems and American Urban Crisis, 1945 – Present (2018) and editor of Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time That Isn't (2018). Nate's scholarly writing has appeared in Criticism; Journal of Modern Literature; Journal of Urban Cultural Studies; Learning Communities Research and Practice; and Journal of College Literacy and Learning.Ryan Michael Murphy is an assistant professor of business communication in the department of business information systems at Central Michigan University. He completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2022. His current research focuses on the transfer of knowledge and skills between academic and nonacademic settings with a special interest in the ways business communication pedagogy can better recognize the experiences and knowledge students bring into the university.Jenni Quilter is executive director of the Expository Writing Program and assistant vice dean of general education in the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University (NYU). She is author of Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology (2022) and Painters and Poets of the New York School: Neon in Daylight (2014). She's currently writing and publishing about silent cinema, bodybuilding, Zeno's paradoxes, Afro-futurism, North African piracy, Norway, and animal migration. Quilter won NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2014.Sahar Romani is a clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University (NYU), where she teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has published poems and essays in Guernica, Poetry Society of America, Entropy, The Offing, The Margins and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from Poets House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and NYU's Creative Writing Program.Megan Shea is a clinical professor and faculty mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tisch School of the Arts. Shea is the author of Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance (2025). Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Shea is also an actor, director, and playwright. Her gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare's ten-minute play contest.Christina Van Houten is a clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tandon School of Engineering. She is completing her first book Home Fronts: Modernism and the Regional Framework of the American Century. Her articles have been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Women's Studies, Politics and Culture, and Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.Bethany Williamson is associate professor of English at Biola University, where she teaches courses in British and global literatures, literary theory, and academic writing. Her current interests include ecocritical approaches to the long eighteenth century and articulating the humanities’ value in the age of artificial intelligence. She is the author of Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century (2022), as well as articles in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Review, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Elisabeth Windle is senior lecturer of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches advanced writing courses and introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses on queer US literature, true crime, and contemporary fiction. She formerly taught in the College Writing Program. Her work has been published in MELUS and Camera Obscura.Mira Zaman is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research centers on representations of the devil in eighteenth-century British literature, and she is also passionate about teaching composition and rhetoric. Her scholarship has appeared in Persuasions, ANQ, Marvell Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Life.

Stephanie Bower is a professor of teaching at the University of Southern California, where she teaches upper- and lower-division writing classes as well as a seminar on climate fiction for first-year students. Her publications have included research on integrating community engagement into composition classrooms as well as reflections on a writing workshop she has cofacilitated with the formerly incarcerated.Elizabeth Brockman earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University and an MA and PhD in English from the Ohio State University. Before her tenure began in the English Department at Central Michigan University in 1996, Brockman taught middle and high school English. Upon retirement from CMU, she earned emerita status. Brockman is the founding FTC editor for Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and she is a founding codirector of the Chippewa River Writing Project.Carly Braxton is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching instructor studying English with a concentration in rhetoric and writing studies. As a teacher of writing, Carly assists students in developing their writing skills by leaning on key pedagogical concepts that reinforce the rhetorical and situated nature of writing. However, Carly also does this by dismantling preconceived notions of what writing is and what writing should look like at the college level. Antiracist pedagogy and linguistic justice is integral to Carly's research and teaching practice.Roger Chao is the Campus Director for the Art of Problem Solving Academy in Bellevue, WA. He specializes in community literacy projects.Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday is an assistant professor of English at University of Minnesota. Her research, teaching, and service are situated at the intersection of composition studies, feminism, and critical race theory.Olivia Hernández is an English instructor at Yakima Valley Community College. Her research, teaching, and service work toward culturally responsive, punk-teaching pedagogy.Betsy Klima is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses on American literature and pedagogy. Her books include Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City (2023), At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850 – 1930 (2005), the Broadview edition of Kelroy (2016), and Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin (1999), with coeditor Melody Graulich. She serves as associate editor of the New England Quarterly. Her current research explores the surprising role women played in Boston's early theater scene.Chloe Leavings is a PhD student studying rhetoric and composition. She is also an adjunct English professor and former middle school English teacher. With a bachelor's in English and a master's in English and African American Literature, she prioritizes using culturally relevant pedagogy through Hip- Hop Based Education. Her research interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, Black feminist theory, and linguistic justice.Claire Lutkewitte is a professor of writing in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts at Nova Southern University. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses including basic writing, college writing, writing with technologies, teaching writing, research methods, and teaching writing online. Lutkewitte's research interests include writing technologies, first-year composition (FYC) pedagogy, writing center research, and graduate programs. She has published five books including Stories of Becoming, Writing in a Technological World, Mobile Technologies and the Writing Classroom, Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, and Web 2.0: Applications for Composition Classrooms.Janet C. Myers is professor of English at Elon University, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, British women writers, and first-year writing. She is the author of Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (2009) and coeditor of The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (2016). Her current research explores the role of women's fashion in fin-de-siècle literature and culture and has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and Victorians Institute Journal.Scott Oldenburg is professor of English at Tulane University, where he specializes in early modern literary and cultural studies and critical pedagogy. He is the author of Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (2014) and A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty and the Household in Shakespeare's London (2020). He is coeditor with Kristin M. S. Bezio of Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace (2021) and Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (2022); and with Matteo Pangallo of None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage (2024).Michael Pennell is an associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies at the University of Kentucky. He regularly teaches courses on social media, rhetorical theory, ethics and technical writing, and professions in writing.Jessica Ridgeway is a licensed 6 – 12 English/Language Arts teacher, with a wealth of experience in alternative, charter, magnet, and public schools. Currently, she works as a graduate teaching assistant, where she instructs Basic Writing, First-Year Composition, Intermediate Composition, and Intro to African American Literature. As an English teacher for eleven years, her passion for African American literature has flourished, including for her favorite writers Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. She recently completed an English and African American Literature Master of Arts program, and she is currently working toward achieving a PhD in rhetoric and composition. Her research interests include cultural rhetorics, African American rhetoric, Black digital rhetoric, culturally relevant pedagogy, composition pedagogy, and Black feminist pedagogy.Fernando Sánchez is an associate professor in technical and professional communication (TPC) at the University of Minnesota. He currently serves as the coeditor of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. His current book-length project examines participation in TPC.Tom Sura is associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI, as well as the director of college writing and director of general education. His most recent scholarship on writing-teacher development appears in Violence in the Work of Composition.Kristin VanEyk is assistant professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her most recent scholarship has been published in American Speech and Daedalus.

Abstract Middle English literature has not traditionally been a focus for ecocriticism, with the exception of a few texts — such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — that lend themselves to this conversation due to their wilderness settings and the contrasts they make between nature and human culture. Nonetheless, ecocritical readings of Middle English texts have the potential to provide undergraduate students with new perspectives and tools for their own environmental ethics — and even activism. This article suggests assigning medieval readings alongside more accessible twentieth-century science fiction that shares some of the former's formal traits, specifically concatenation (interlinked series) and adubbement (abundant ornamentation). This alignment of new and old texts, combined with a teaching strategy that incorporates close reading, translation, and adaptation, helps students read difficult Middle English texts ecocritically and then employ similar strategies in their own thinking about the environment. Studying a literary text is not entirely different from “reading” the material environment — and thus one is good practice for the other. Medieval poetic structures can teach students about reading and navigating complex ecological spaces and human entanglements with them.

Abstract This article explores the benefits of introducing undergraduate students to the genre of Afro/Africanfuturism as an entryway for a survey of medieval Africa. By first exploring fiction written by and about African and African diasporic people, students can become oriented to both the unique aspects of African literature and the common elements of the human experience that exist across time periods and geography. The short story “Egoli” by Zimbabwean author T. L. Huchu is an example of Africanfuturism that incorporates medieval African history, literature, culture, language, and heritage as an integral characteristic of its storytelling. Reading and analyzing this story as well as the genre more broadly allows students to identify aspects of African culture that they will then find connections to as they continue on to study medieval Africa and texts such as the Malian Epic of Sundiata. They become more confident in encountering literature from a time and place that may be unfamiliar to them.

Megan Behrend is a lecturer at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, where she teaches writing and literature in the Sweetland Center for Writing and the Department of English Language and Literature. Her writing on the multilingual literary culture of medieval England has appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Her scholarship and teaching thematize linguistic politics and diversity, translation, and adaptation across historical locations.Thomas Blake is associate professor of English and director of gender studies at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he teaches courses on medieval literature, gender studies, and fantasy. He is currently a principal investigator on the college's Pathways to a Just Society Mellon grant. He coteaches faculty learning groups on issues like gender identity and sexuality, and on strategies for teaching controversial topics and systemic thinking.Gina Brandolino is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She teaches and writes about medieval and early English literature, working class literature, comics, and horror.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her teaching and scholarship engage with medieval literature, disability studies, comics studies, and the history of the English language.Natalie Grinnell is Reeves Family Professor in the Humanities at Wofford College. Her areas of research include Middle English and Old French romance. Dr. Grinnell is currently president of the Southeastern Medieval Association, a section editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages, and a member of the editorial board of the New Queer Medievalisms series by Medieval Institute Publications.Sonja Mayrhofer is an associate professor of instruction at the University of Iowa, where she has taught English, rhetoric, and business communication.Laura Morreale is a medievalist and independent scholar who lives in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian historiography, medieval French-language writing outside of France, and digital medieval studies. She is the cofounder and coeditor of Middle Ages for Educators, based at Princeton University.Courtney E. Rydel received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. She is now an associate professor of English at Washington College, a small liberal arts college in Chestertown, Maryland, where she has the delight of learning alongside her students every day.Rachel Linn Shields is a PhD candidate in English literature at Saint Louis University. Her dissertation project explores transhistorical medieval eco-poetics through juxtapositions of Middle English poetry and modern fiction. She is also working on a book-length collection of translations of medieval poems and has published sections of this project, including “False Fiends: Middle English Lyric Poems in Translation” (Subtropics) and “John's Knot” (Poetry).Kisha G. Tracy is professor of English studies and chair of the General Education Program at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. She specializes in teaching early British and world literatures and in researching medieval disability, especially mental health. Tracy's recent publications are Why Study the Middle Ages? (2022) and two open access textbooks for the Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens project.

Zachary C. Beare is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. His work, which studies how identity and emotion mediate rhetorical activity, appears in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, the Journal of Cultural Research, Reflections, Writing on the Edge, and in edited collections.Miriam Chirico specializes in dramatic literature and comedy studies at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is professor of English. She is the author of The Theatre of Christopher Durang (2020) and coeditor of How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays (2020). She has written articles about humor for Studies in American Humor, Text & Presentation, and Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.Chris W. Gallagher is professor of English and vice provost for curriculum initiatives at Northeastern University. He has published widely on the teaching and assessment of writing and on educational innovation in K–12 and higher education. He is author or coauthor of five books, most recently College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World (2019).Bev Hogue serves as McCoy Professor of English at Marietta College in southeastern Ohio, where she teaches courses in American literature and writing. She recently edited Teaching Comedy (2023), a collection of essays published by the Modern Language Association.Erika Luckert is a PhD candidate in composition and rhetoric at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her research focuses on writing pedagogies at the intersection of composition and creative writing, with an emphasis on social and collaborative practice. Erika's recent work includes articles in JAEPL, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and Writing on the Edge, as well as poems in Room Magazine, South Carolina Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.Nancy Mack is a professor emeritus of English at Wright State University and author of Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects and two volumes about teaching grammar with poetry. She has published articles and chapters about teaching memoir, emotional labor, and working-class and first-generation students. She has won state and university teaching awards. Her community service projects include partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, Dayton Public Television, and the Ohio Department of Education.Jessica Masterson is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Washington State University Vancouver, where her work examines youth literacies and democratic possibilities in K–12 school settings. Her work appears in Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Democracy and Education.Peter Wayne Moe is an associate professor of English and the director of the University Writing Program at Whitworth University. He teaches first-year writing, creative nonfiction, composition pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and a course on the sentence. He is the author of Touching This Leviathan, a Seattle Times favorite book of 2021.Shari J. Stenberg is professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her most recent book is Persuasive Acts: Women's Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century (with Charlotte Hogg). Her work appears in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, and in edited collections.Luke Thominet is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. His work examines rhetorics of health and medicine, user experience in video game development, and applications of design thinking to pedagogy and academic program development. His research has appeared in Patient Education and Counseling, Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and the Journal of Technical and Business Communication, as well as in the edited collections Effective Teaching of Technical Communication, Keywords in Design Thinking, and User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice.

Abstract This article discusses best practices for teaching text encoding in undergraduate literary studies courses. It examines learning outcomes associated with text encoding and ways of incorporating encoding into the teaching of literary analysis, as well as advantages and challenges, concluding that encoding activities and assignments offer unique opportunities for learning.

Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.

AbstractRecent advocates of postcritique urge scholars not to read texts suspiciously but instead to regard texts as capable of saying what they mean and, accordingly, to take those meanings seriously. While a suspicious disposition underlies much of introductory composition pedagogy, especially the teaching of argument, postcritique has made little entry into discourses of undergraduate instruction. Attending to the New Sincerity movement in American literature, film, and music after 1980, this essay examines how teaching texts that emphasize their own sincerity (and the difficulty of achieving sincere expression) can encourage students to regard argument and interpretation not as suspicious practices but as means for a generous mode of description that does not sacrifice the complexity of a given text.

Ryan Baxter graduated from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2017 with a BA in English language and literature. Following this, he completed a master of letters on the Gothic imagination at the University of Stirling in 2019. He is currently a master's student in English at Central Michigan University on the lookout for opportunities to gain teaching experience. His research interests include the Gothic from the late eighteenth century to the present, cinema and broadcast cultures in Britain and Ireland, theories of haunting and spectrality, epistemology, landscape studies, and spatial theory.Kelly L. Bezio is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where her research and teaching intersect with and inform the fields of cultural studies, biopolitical theory, American literature before 1900, critical race studies, literature and science, and health humanities. Her interdisciplinary scholarship foregrounds how insights from the past help us understand how to combat inequity in the present moment.Mark Brenden is a PhD candidate in writing studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he also teaches writing classes. His current research investigates the digital transformation of higher education, particularly as it relates to writing pedagogy.K. Narayana Chandran currently holds the Institution of Eminence Research Chair in English and Cultural Theory in the School of Humanities/English at the University of Hyderabad, India. An occasional translator and writer in Malayalam, he has been teaching a wide variety of courses and publishing papers in Anglo-American literatures, critical and reading theories, comparative and translation studies, and English in India—its history and pedagogy.Tyler Jean Dukes is a doctoral candidate and graduate instructor at Texas Christian University. She specializes in early British literature and the medical humanities. She is also a childbirth doula, a role that informs her scholarly pursuits as she investigates the connections between storytelling and healing. To attend one of her in-person or virtual narrative medicine workshops, please visit https://dfwnarrativemedicine.com/.Sandy Feinstein's scholarship ranges across early literature, most recently on Margaret Cavendish and Marie Meurdrac in Early Modern Women; and on Mark Twain and heritage management forthcoming from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. She has also published creative non-fiction on reading Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court during COVID-19. Cowritten articles with Bryan Shawn Wang appear in New Chaucer Society: Pedagogy and Profession, CEA: The Critic, and Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, among others.Ruth G. Garcia is an associate professor of English and Core Books at CUNY and cocoordinator at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes “Fanny's Place in the Family: Useful Service and the Social Order in Mansfield Park” in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory.An experienced teacher, scholar, and administrator, Sara M. Glasgow has served in higher education for over twenty years. She is currently dean of liberal arts at North Central Michigan College. Prior to coming to North Central, she was professor of political science at the University of Montana Western (UMW), where she was honored as the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year for the state of Montana (2013). While at UMW, she taught core courses in American government, theory, international relations and strategy, and political economy, as well as basic and advanced courses in research methodology. She also offered depth learning opportunities in Norse history and culture as part of the university honors program, and majors’ courses in the history and politics of illness, her research focus. She holds a BA in international studies and Spanish from Virginia Tech; an MS in international affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology; an MA in English language and literature from Central Michigan University; and an MA and PhD in government and politics from the University of Maryland.Dana Gliserman-Kopans is professor in and chair of the Department of Literature, Communication, and Cultural Studies at SUNY Empire State College. Her research centers on the literature and culture of late eighteenth-century Britain, though the pandemic and eighteenth-century epistemologies have been a recent (and necessary) focus. Her teaching interests are far wider, spanning from Gothic literature to the medical humanities. She also serves as the associate editor of The Burney Journal.Eva Sage Gordon teaches writing at Baruch College, CUNY. She has book chapters forthcoming in Innovative Practices in Creative Writing Teaching, edited by Graeme Harper; and Authorship, Activism, and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature, edited by Ruth Scobie and Sandra Mayer.Jennifer Horwitz received her PhD in literature from Tufts University and is a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research focuses on representations of education in multi-ethnic US literature that help envision and enact the teaching needed in this time of climate crisis.William Kangas returned to college after twenty years as a journalist to complete his MA in English composition and communication at Central Michigan University, while working as a high school substitute teacher and consultant at CMU's Writing Center. He currently is an adjunct instructor candidate for a local community college and will be entering his second year of study for an MA in strategic communication from Michigan State University.Robert Kilgore is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB). He is currently the president of USCB's chapter of the American Association of University Professors.Kristopher M. Lotier is associate professor of writing studies and rhetoric at Hofstra University, where he teaches courses in first-year writing, professional communication, and digital rhetoric. He is the author of Postprocess Postmortem and has published articles in Pedagogy, Enculturation, and College Composition and Communication.Xiomara Trinidad Perez is a junior studying journalism at Hofstra University, with a minor in fine arts. She hopes to work in the publishing and news industry, as well as in any area that deals with visual media. She finds enjoyment in creative writing, curating visual media, and conducting research.Aidan Pierre was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a junior at Hofstra University, majoring in film and minoring in history. He has produced, written, and directed numerous short films and is a teaching assistant for an Introduction to Film Production course. He is a part of the Rabinowitz Honors College and has been on the provost's list for two semesters. Outside of class, he enjoys spending his time reading literature and baking bread.Timothy Ponce holds a PhD in English and a certificate in teaching technical writing from the University of North Texas. In addition to serving as an associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA), he also serves as the coordinator of internships and coordinator of technical writing and professional design in the Department of English.Elizabeth Porter is an assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. She is a scholar in the fields of eighteenth-century British literature, women's writing, and composition pedagogy. Her work has been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Jody R. Rosen is an associate professor of English and OpenLab codirector at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes the coauthored “Supporting Twenty-First-Century Students with an Across-the-Curriculum Approach to Undergraduate Research” (2020) in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Prameet V. Shah is a sophomore at Hofstra University. He is majoring in pre-medical studies and minoring in biochemistry.Christy Tidwell is associate professor of English and humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She teaches a wide range of classes, including composition, STEM communication, science fiction, environmental ethics and STEM, and introduction to humanities; and her writing most often addresses intersections between speculative fiction, environmental humanities, and gender studies. She is coeditor of Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (2018), Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2021), and a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on creature features and the environment (2021).Bryan Shawn Wang is an associate teaching professor in biology at Penn State Berks. He has a background in protein engineering and synthetic biology. He has recently published on student choice and learning in Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments; on reviving ecologies in South Central Review; and, with Sandy Feinstein and Samantha Kavky, on interdisciplinarity and de-extinction in Comparative Media Arts Journal.Rachael Zeleny is assistant professor of English and integrated arts at the University of Baltimore. Her early research is dedicated to the multimodal rhetoric of the nineteenth-century actress. Her current research explores ways to gamify the classroom using virtual escape rooms and methods of incorporating experiential learning into virtual spaces. She conducts workshops on integrating these methods into the classroom.

Abstract This essay argues for shifting the focus of a literary theory and criticism course to the institutional, social, and historical forces that shape English studies. Rather than promoting disciplinary introspection, the authors understand their approach as raising questions regarding elitism and the long historical entanglement of knowledge making with the interlocking forces of racism, colonialism, and sexism.

Abstract This piece is a reflection on spatiality as critical approach in the classroom. The article focuses on a seminar taught during spring 2019, in which cognitive mapping and thirdspace were used as tools to analyze twentieth-century American literature. Through the elaboration of thirdspace provided by Edward Soja in his seminal work Thirdspace: Journeys through Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places and Fredric Jameson's definition of cognitive mapping found in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, this study offers examples of how literary cartography can be used as a tool in the classroom to reflect on the social and historical conditions that informed specific literary narratives.

The title of this book is concerned with the axis between pedagogy and theory, creating a productive interaction and synthesis of the two, and so this review also focuses on these interrelations. Of all the major figures involved in the advent of theory on the American shores, Robert Scholes was the only one who had a burning concern with connecting the new ideas with teaching. When Jonathan Culler, acclaimed for his Structuralist Poetics (1975), visited my campus shortly after his book was published, I invited him to my graduate pedagogy seminar. He was tactful and gracious in talking to the future teachers, but he made it clear that at that point theory could and should not be applied to pedagogy any more than quantum mechanics should be taught to beginning physics students. Scholes, on the other hand, is in the line of pragmatic thinking that maintains abstract ideas have existence and meaning only when applied to concrete situations, where they can be clarified, tested, and revised. His early tetralogy, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974), Semiotics and Interpretation (1982), Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985b), and Protocols of Reading (1989) all deal with this back and forth movement. At the end of Textual Power, Scholes writes, “My enterprise in this book has been to take the teaching situation as a theoretical position from which to look at other theories that impinge upon the study and teaching of texts. Large sections of my own text were written first to clarify things for myself, my students, and my colleagues” (166). Later he places as his inscription to Protocols this sentence of Roland Barthes: “And no doubt that is what reading is: rewriting the text of the work within the text of our lives” (1). This approach resonates with John Dewey explaining to his wife that he was creating a school for children because the classroom is to philosophy what a laboratory is to scientists. Scholes's later works further entwine critical theories with educational structures and forms: The Rise and Fall of English (1998), The Crafty Reader (2001), English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality (2011), and Text Book: An Introduction to Literary Language (1988), coedited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer.One service that Ellen Carillo has performed for us in this well-edited and conceptualized volume is to include—and this is unusual for a Festschrift—generous examples of the subject's best work, not isolating them in an appendix, but strategically placing them among the essays most relevant to Scholes's concerns in his own. In rereading Scholes's pieces in this context, I am somewhat mystified that a writer as clear and persuasive as Scholes was not able to affect any widespread practical change, especially since his own writing outshines everyone else's in the volume. Although Scholes was able to create a new department, Modern Culture and Media at his home institution, Brown University, this department remained separate from the English department, and there seemed to be little interaction or collaboration between the two entities. At the end of After the Fall (2011), Scholes wistfully admits that he does not know of a single university that has adopted his suggestions for reshaping the teaching of English (142). This is partially due to the glacial rate of change in our educational institutions, but more because so many of those in the profession either have biases against his vision or do not fully comprehend it. Put briefly, that vision is what we would now call constructivist, student- and reader-centered, and radically democratic. The last two words are rarely put together but relevant now when too many politicians and Supreme Court justices appear to find universal suffrage obsolete.Scholes's vision is based more on immediate experience and process than definitive formulations and axioms and attempts to transcend or reconcile binaries such as theory/practice, consumption/production, analysis/creativity, concepts/specifics, and writing/reading. In this sense it is wholistic in the tradition of other educational thinkers such as bell hooks, who writes in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994: 85), What forms of passion make us whole? To what passions may we surrender with the assurance that we will expand rather than diminish the promise of our lives? The quest of knowledge that enables us to unify theory and practice is one such passion. To the extent that professors bring this passion, which has to be fundamentally rooted in a love for ideas we are able to inspire, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears.Ironically, Scholes's own commitment to the primacy of teaching is a central reason that his works have not found wide acceptance among many traditional academics, although most of them are teachers themselves. To begin with one of the apparent dichotomies, we can take one that Carillo embeds in her title, Reading and Writing, and quotes from the introductory chapter of an early Scholes book, Semiotics and Interpretation (1982): There is a significant difference between the states of consciousness involved in receiving a text and producing one. Specifically, the text we produce is ours in a deeper and more essential way than any text we receive from the outside. When we read, we do not possess the text we read in any permanent way. But when we make an interpretation, we do add to our store of knowledge—and what we add is not the text itself but our own interpretation of it. In literary interpretation we possess only what we create. (4)Before it is written or spoken, our knowledge remains in our own subjectivity, shadowy and inert. As we shape it into words, it becomes objective, something external to scrutinize, examine, revise. This understanding of the interweaving of reading and writing echoes through Scholes's corpus, reappearing in a later book: “In all of this, I have assumed that reading is a constructive process, a kind of writing. . . . Learning to re-weave the texts we encounter in the texts of our lives is the process I have been trying to describe, and, in particular, I have tried to show how teachers may share the process with students” (2011: 14). This resembles what Dewey meant when he urged the necessity of having any intellectual proposition “reinstated into experience” to be realized.Several of the pieces in Carillo's volume seek to place Scholes's work in its place in the historical contexts of our disciplines. In the best of these, “How Scholes Helped English Departments Confront the Death of the Author, the Loss of Readers, and the Emergence of Intertextual Literacies,” Thomas P. Miller describes Scholes's career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism and his intellectual commitment to using pedagogy to validate theory in practice. The pragmatic perspective was fundamental to his integrated model of literary and literacy theories. . . . Scholes pointedly critiqued the self-validating binaries that structured the “arche-institutions of English”: the hierarchy of literature over non-literature that positioned consumption over production in ways that divorced academic inquiry from the “real world.” (171)Miller goes on to note, Scholes's engagement with the creative potentials of work with literacy is critical to understanding the distinction between his pragmatic concern with knowledge in the making and the rather disengaged stance that often has been assumed by cultural studies and literary criticism. Scholes's pragmatic engagement with the creative process of reading to write was fundamental to his efforts to reform the discipline to connect with the interactive literacies that have given rise to the maker movement and the active learning pedagogies that have become a mainstay of curricular reforms in the last decade. (175)In other words, Miller's work can lead us to view Scholes as a connecting link between a powerful but often subterranean current in our past educational history running through Transcendentalists like Emerson and Alcott, pragmatists like William James and Dewey, and the Free School movement of the 1960s and 1970s forward to current trends like reader response criticism, constructivism, and active learning strategies such as the “flipped classroom.” In his more extensive earlier study, The Evolution of College English: Literary Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns (2010), Miller elaborates in more detail: The marginal standing of teaching helps to explain why the theoretical challenges of the 1970s were rarely translated into new programs of undergraduate study. One proposal for curricular reform was Scholes's Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Scholes acknowledged that the “apparatus” of the discipline needed to be rebuilt from the bottom up, because it was founded upon binaries that had broken down—most notably the hierarchies of literature and “non-literature,” consumption and production, and the academic and “real” worlds. According to Scholes, once the autonomy of literature was called into question, the boundaries of the study came to seem contrived. . . . For an alternative framework, Scholes developed a pedagogically engaged vision of the transactional relations of writing and reading. . . . To break out of the “institutional sedimentations that threaten to fossilize” college English, Scholes looked to the classroom as a site of collaborative inquiry, with the model being the stance of the reader as a composer of meaning. (229–30)Although Miller does not make this connection, I see this marginalization of Scholes's viewpoint as similar to what happened to Louise Rosenblatt's progressive early work of reader response criticism, Exploring Literature (1938), which was buried by the increasingly hegemonic acceptance of the New Criticism and its master textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, published in the same year. Rosenblatt, fortunately, has come back in fashion. The MLA has now republished the fifth edition of her book and a later work of hers adopts the term transaction as the central relation between reader and text. So there are hopes for Scholes's work too, not just as a citation in the history of theory, but as a living force in restructuring our disciplines.To circle back to the first quotation from Miller, I want to underline his comment about Scholes's “career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism,” an aspect of Scholes's work that has not been given the attention it deserves in Carillo's collection. Text Book gives us the most specific sense of how Scholes applied his vision to the daily work with students and also suggests that this kind of work is best done in collaboration with both student feedback and with colleagues: all three editions were co-edited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer. Text Book intersperses literary works with creative exercises focusing on the students’ own lives, tracing how their experiences can be transformed into narrative structures and vice-versa. The achievement is elaborated in rich detail in Robin Dizard's “Stranger than Friction: Learning and Teaching Literary Studies Using TEXT BOOK” (2010). The article's extensive use of selections and assignments from the book is supplemented by extended responses of students and Dizards's teacherly work with them in deepening and interpreting these responses. Contrasting this article with Scholes's own writing suggests one fault in the latter; Scholes rarely includes student voices either in the classroom or from their writings to further clarify and support his ideas. He does quote from students in The Crafty Reader to show that they are befuddled by New Critical expectations, but he does not demonstrate the positive reverse of real students encouraged to connect poetry to their own lives. There is some of this in Carillo's volume, but too often we hear more from the somewhat hermetic dialogues of academics conversing with each other in staking out their own positions than an attempt to speak directly to teachers, administrators, parents, and even students. I call this style “Dissertationese,” where this writing is often found, but some critics have yet to outgrow it.To unfairly choose just one example, I find particularly hard to read Kelsey McNiff “From Argument to Invitation: Promoting Empathy and Mutual Understanding in the Composition Classroom” (117–32). The essay is a sound empirical analysis of an essay assignment designed to test Scholes's ideas on using reading and writing to extend empathy. But the writing is clogged by passive constructions and the almost compulsive need to use citations from the academic literature in support of almost every assertion, such as “Like Scholes, many have argued that educators therefore should seek to cultivate students’ empathic imaginations (Von Write 2002; Fleckenstein 2007; Gerdes et al. 2011; Leake 2016; Damianidou and Phtiak 2016; English 2016; Tomlinson and Murphy 2018; Mirra 2018) and that the humanities in particular encourage this habit of mind (Nussbaum 2010; Jurecic 2011, 13–15).” This reminds me of a colleague's spouse who once said, “Howard thinks I should speak for myself.” McNiff has done a solid piece of work, but I must ask, as I do often in dissertation defenses, who is the intended reader and what kind of work is it supposed to do in the world? A good counterexample to this kind of writing is that of Alfie Kohn, whose more professional books appear in mainstream presses but are also offered as articles in the popular press or turned into shorter audio versions that can be played in the car by teachers and parents.In contrast to McNiff's article, I would like to mention Douglas D. Hesse, who wrote an “Afterword” (253–60) using a much more accessible and personal style but just as insightfully rigorous as anything else in the volume. His appreciation of another of Scholes's textbooks, The Practice of Writing (1981), coauthored with Nancy Comley, is articulate and concise: What's remarkable to me about the book is the way it invites students to exercise the full range of language with a creative mélange of texts of all sorts with experiments whimsical and serious and serious, at levels from sentences to self-contained texts. It challenged, already forty years ago, the kind of fractured model driving English departments, not only in literary but also in writing studies. In the name of specialization and expertise, literature and writing kept genres and purposes and historical periods separate, leaving students to figure out (if they wanted, and most didn't) what any of these highly defined courses might have to do with one another—or the nonacademic world beyond. Scholes challenged those divisions and wasn't afraid to use tools of serious play to engage student writers. If students learned anything canonical, it would be an indirect effect of the main enterprise: cultivating textual power through interpretation and production intertwined. (255)In this deft description of only one of Scholes's projects, Hesse suggests how he reconciled all of the dualities discussed in this review and the volume itself. Further, Hesse's penultimate paragraph provides a helpful guide to the best insights of the other contributors to this volume. In his last paragraph, Hesse sees himself tending toward pessimism, “a consequence of having been long enough in the profession to see Scholes's ideas roll in, then out, like waves on Dover Beach,” but is also able to eloquently endorse Scholes for his enabling and constant optimism: “It was an optimism born of plentitude and play, impelled by a multitude of texts to be interpreted and texts to be made, those basic yet inexhaustible activities of reading and writing” (260). It is this optimism that helped sustain Scholes through his long and varied career, elaborating a fairly constant vision through a variety of materials and perspectives.We are at an inflectional point in educational reform now where radical innovators have to face the forces of anti-intellectualism and timidity. In a book that has become “conventional wisdom”—an oxymoron to my mind—Tinkering toward Utopia, the historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) argue that teachers and parents have a basic conception of school—graded classrooms, separated subject matters, high-stakes testing, and so on. And to violate any more than a small number of these elements is to be charged with something other than “education.” I think exactly the opposite approach is called for. For one thing, the authors suppose in their use of utopia that the current system is getting incrementally better, when it is clear that the opposite is true. But more seriously, that it is a “system” and not a historically fossilized set of practices that often do not fit together. We can begin to scrutinize every aspect of what we do in terms of viability, effectiveness, and humane concern and begin to rebuild from the ruins through better thinking in constant dialogue with actual practice.

Hannah Armstrong graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2018.Anna Barattin teaches American literature, world literature, and undergraduate writing classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Both her teaching and her scholarship focus on geocentrism, spatial literacy, and language variation. She worked as an editing contributor for the literary journals Studies in Literary Imagination and The Eudora Welty Review.Barclay Barrios is professor of English and the associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. His work focuses on queer theory, writing program administration, pedagogy, and computers and composition. He is the author of the freshman composition textbooks Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers (2010), now in its fifth edition, and Intelligence (2021).Martin Bickman is professor of English and President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches courses in pedagogy and American literature. His book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (2003) won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. He has also edited Approaches to Teaching Melville's Moby-Dick (1985) and Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education (1999) and authored American Romantic Psychology (1988) and Walden: Volatile Truths (1992). Next fall he will teach a course in the new Writing and Public Sphere minor, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education.Mark Bracher is professor of English and director of the Neurocognitive Research Program for the Advancement of the Humanities at Kent State University.Ellen C. Carillo is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014); A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading (2017); Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018); The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021); and the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (2019). She is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks and collections. Ellen is cofounder of the Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and has been awarded grants from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), CCCC, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).Owen Farney was an honors student at Central Michigan University (CMU) where he earned a BS in education with teaching credentials in English/history 6–12. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked as a CMU Writing Center consultant and served as president of the CMU affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. As a CMU honors student, Owen completed a senior honors capstone project addressing the current state of queer young adult literature. Owen completed his student teaching at Allendale Middle School teaching 6th grade English.Kaylee Henderson is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature, women writers, and transatlantic political movements. Her previous courses include The Victorian Novel: Crossing and Patrolling Borders with Linda K. Hughes and From Work to Werk: The Politics of Women's Writing. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Words of Mass Destruction: Verbal Militancy in Nineteenth-Century Women's Political Writing.”Andy Hines is associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He researches models of the university posed by Black writers and Black social movements. His book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (2022), recounts how mid-twentieth-century Black writers defined literature and critical thought through and against the institutionalization of literary studies in predominantly white universities. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly (2020), Public Books (2018, 2015), Criticism (2017), Blind Field (2016) and other venues. Hannah Armstrong and Kassie Moore attended the University of Southern Indiana and assisted with the production of “On Being Brought In.”Sofia Prado Huggins, a PhD candidate in English literature at Texas Christian University, has taught courses such as Bestsellers and the Business of Books, Women's Writing, and a composition course, Adapting Austen, which she discusses in her essay, “Teaching POC Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice at a PWI in 2020,” in Persuasions OnLine. Sofia's research and teaching interests include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century global anglophone literatures, periodical studies, and the geohumanities. Her dissertation, “Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831–1833,” historizes the geographic and conceptual centering of whiteness in liberal progressivism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antislavery archives. Sofia is the editor-in-chief of Teaching Transatlantacism and the transatlantic Digital Anthology.Jason Maxwell is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (2019) and coauthor, with Claire Colebrook, of Agamben (2016). His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Rhetorica.Kassie Moore graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2019. She currently teaches English in Evansville, Indiana.Clare Mullaney is assistant professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American literature, histories of editing, and disability theory. Her current book project, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” argues that acknowledging texts as made objects brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with physical and mental impairments at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic.Jacob Stratman is in the middle of his twenty-third year as a teacher, at both the high school and university levels. He learned under a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, and he was trained, mostly, under a “student-centered” pedagogy. But it was on an airport shuttle in Pittsburgh at the beginning of his university teaching career, after a College English Association conference, where a fellow conference goer said that he learned long ago to resist those binaries and focus more on “truth-centered” pedagogy. Those insights during that fifteen minutes on the shuttle with that teacher, whose name Stratman never knew, haunt him each semester. Whether he's lecturing or conducting a class conversation, he asks how he is demonstrating virtues that lead all of us nearer to truth, instead of further away.Amish Trivedi is the author of three books of poetry, most recently FuturePanic (2021), as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems also appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, and other places. His critical work on poetry and music appear in the Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Trivedi has a PhD from Illinois State University and an MFA from Brown University.Angela J. Zito is teaching faculty with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs, where she currently serves as associate director of WAC and Madison Writing Assistance. She earned her PhD in English literary studies, which continues to inform her scholarship of teaching and learning. Her recent research has investigated the teaching and learning of close reading practices in composition courses and the design of writing assignments across disciplines to assess non-writing competencies.

Jaclyn Carter is an educational development consultant at the University of Calgary and coeditor of Women and War from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (2020).Michael Tavel Clarke is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America (2007) and coeditor with David Wittenberg of Scale in Literature and Culture (2017). He coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Faye Halpern.Maura D'Amore is professor of English at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. She is the author of Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (2014).Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author, most recently, of an article in Narrative called “Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention.” She coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Michael Tavel Clarke.Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (2021) and the coeditor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019).Rachel McCabe is an assistant professor and director of writing at La Salle University. Her research focuses on the affective experience and its importance to the reading and viewing of texts and how doing so impacts the student writing process. She also considers how positions of power and privilege influence the interpretation process. Her scholarship has been published in Composition Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and Compass.Jessica Nicol is an educational developer at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and author of the recent chapbook Can I Ask You a Question? (2020).Zack Shaw is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where he studies rhetoric and composition, film and media studies, and animation. He has taught upper- and lower-division courses, covering diverse topics such as film analysis, argumentative writing, technical writing, first-year composition, and media composing. He designs each of his courses with the ultimate goal of creating a multimodal, inclusive, and accessible educational experience for all students. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Northeastern University, and his work has previously appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.Anne Shea is associate professor and chair of the Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts. Her fields of teaching and research include twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American literature and composition. She has published essays in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, MELUS, and Women's Studies, among others.Nathan Shepley is associate professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches rhetoric and composition courses at all levels. The author of Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive (2016) and articles in journals including Reflections and Composition Studies, he studies interactions among place, history, and college student writing. He remains active in creating pedagogical resources for and otherwise assisting his fellow instructors at the UH Department of English.William Stroup is professor of English at Keene State College, New Hampshire's public liberal arts college. He teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and on environmental literatures in many traditions. He has presented on Jane Austen and pedagogy at MLA and his essays have appeared in The Wordsworth Circle, ISLE, volumes on Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, and elsewhere. He is currently editing an unpublished play by the poet Amy Clampitt about Dorothy and William Wordsworth and serving as a Thayer trustee of the Keene Public Library.Morgan Vanek is assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is currently at work on a book titled “The Politics of the Weather, 1700–1775.” Research related to this project has recently appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.Paul Walker is a professor of English at Murray State University, where he teaches rhetoric, writing, and literature. His published work has primarily focused on composition, assessment, environmental rhetoric, and archival research. He is the founder and editor of Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, and is currently working on a monograph about the rhetoric of ordinary heroism.

The previous special issue of Pedagogy, “Undergraduate Research as a Future of English Studies,” featured institutional and pedagogical strategies for helping undergraduate students make original intellectual and creative contributions to the fields of literary studies, writing studies, and linguistics. Authors in this special issue described large-scale, multi-institutional strategies for promoting undergraduate research, and they used traditional definitions of undergraduate research from the Council on Undergraduate Research: students are mentored by faculty or more experienced researchers, they use research methods widely accepted in their discipline, they make at least modest contributions to their discipline, and they circulate their work beyond a classroom audience (Hakim 1998: 190). These characteristics are part of what marks undergraduate research as a high-impact practice, and this cluster of articles highlights how the spirit of undergraduate research—original, primary, and secondary research that aims to answer meaningful, authentic questions in a discipline—invigorates individual courses.Undergraduate research offers students and institutions clear benefits around success and retention: students who participate have higher retention rates, grade point averages, and graduation rates (Bowman and Holmes 2018). It further promotes student learning as students make demonstrated gains in independent critical thinking, the ability to integrate theory and practice, and oral and written communication. The articles in this cluster highlight the ways in which course-based undergraduate research can also foster learning gains in information literacy, particularly the information literacy practices required in English studies. Information literacy is often associated with first-year writing courses, but these courses are simply the beginning. Information literacy should extend vertically through undergraduate majors, and it can be effectively paired with undergraduate research experiences.The authors in this cluster demonstrate how novel, course-based undergraduate research experiences can foster growth in information literacy. First, Angela Laflen and Moira Fitzgibbons, a composition professor and a medieval literature professor, describe how a multimodal, digital research project—the Graphic Narrative Database—gives students an authentic context in which to develop writing, literary analysis, and information literacy skills. Second, Laci Mattison and Rachel Tait-Ripperdan, a literature professor and an academic librarian, share their work in the digital archives with the Journals of Queen Victoria. By working with this archive, students deepened both their knowledge of Victorian culture and their primary research skills, including the skills needed to navigate an extensive digital archive. And finally, Michael Gutierrez and Sarah Singer argue for the value of primary and secondary research in the creative writing classroom, demonstrating how an autoethnography assignment is deepened with attention to information literacy. At Pedagogy, we hope this cluster provides readers with examples of innovative, course-based undergraduate research projects that can be adapted to multiple contexts and that promote information literacy in the undergraduate English curriculum.

Ilana M. Blumberg is professor of English literature at Bar Ilan University in Israel and author, most recently, of the memoir Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American (2018). She has won teaching awards from University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University and is currently a recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant entitled Postsecular George Eliot.Rosalind Buckton-Tucker studied at King's College, London, and the University of Leicester, UK, and holds a PhD in American literature. Her main research interests are twentieth-century British and American literature, travel literature, and the pedagogy of literature and creative writing, and she has published a variety of articles and book chapters in these fields as well as presenting numerous papers at international conferences. She has taught in universities in Kuwait, Oman, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and has also worked as a freelance journalist and editor in the UAE and Oman. She enjoys writing fiction, memoirs, and travel articles.Elizabeth Effinger is associate professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, where she teaches British Romanticism with special interests in William Blake, the intersections of Romantic science and literature, the Anthropocene, and human-animal studies. She coedited (with Chris Bundock) William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (2018). She was principal investigator of Erasing Frankenstein, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council)-funded public humanities outreach activity that transformed Shelley's 1818 novel into a book-length erasure poem in collaboration with incarcerated and nonincarcerated citizens. For more on the project, visit erasingfrankenstein.org.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College. Her most recent work includes an edition of “The Merchant's Tale” in The Medieval Disability Sourcebook (2020).Michael Keenan Gutierrez is teaching associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Trench Angel (2015) and his work appears in the Guardian, the Delmarva Review, the Collagist, Scarab, the Pisgah Review, Untoward, the Boiler, Crossborder, and Public Books.Angela Laflen teaches digital rhetoric and professional writing at California State University, Sacramento. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition and Assessing Writing, among other venues.Laci Mattison is assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University in the Department of Language and Literature, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century, Victorian, and contemporary literature. She is one of the general editors for Bloomsbury's Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series. For this series, she has coedited volumes on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Alongside Derek Ryan, she has also coedited a special issue of Deleuze Studies titled Deleuze, Virginia Woolf, and Modernism (2013) and has published articles and book chapters on Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, H. D., Mulk Raj Anand, and Vladimir Nabokov.Kelly Neil is professor of English at Spartanburg Methodist College, a small liberal arts institution located in the upstate of South Carolina. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis, where she studied early modern literature and gender. She has published in such journals as Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and This Rough Magic. She is currently coediting a collection of essays on teaching Shakespeare to nonmajors.Sarah Ann Singer is assistant professor in the Department of English at University of Central Florida. Her work appears in College English, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Peitho.Rachel Tait-Ripperdan is associate librarian at Florida Gulf Coast University. She received her master's degree in library science from Florida State University and her master's degree in history from Florida Gulf Coast University. She serves as library liaison to the Departments of Language and Literature, History, Communication, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research interests include information literacy instruction, collection development, and graphic novels and manga in the academic classroom.Theresa Tinkle (she/her/hers) is a medievalist by training, a teacher committed to supporting students’ development and ambitions, and a disability studies scholar. Her most recent book is Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (2010). She has published widely on medieval English and Latin literature, gender, religion, and manuscript culture. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is engaged in antiracist work, writing to learn, writing in the disciplines, and writing program assessment.

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.

Heather Brook Adams is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Greensboro. Her research investigates discourses of gender, reproduction, and shame as well as decolonial/intersectional methodologies. Adams's work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her monograph, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction, is forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. Adams has been granted funds for implementing undergraduate research while teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage as well as at UNC Greensboro. Currently she teaches courses on contemporary rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine, and advocacy and argumentation.Brian Cooper Ballentine is senior vice president for strategy and senior adviser to the president at Rutgers University. His research focuses on humanistic notions of value within the context of the modern universities, student debt, and the pressures of economic valuation and market forces. He has served as chief of staff to the president at Rutgers, as the director of the university's office for undergraduate research, and as research director at a global consulting firm. He holds a PhD in comparative literature, with a focus on classical reception in the English Renaissance, from Brown University.Laura L. Behling is provost at University of Puget Sound. She edited the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans (2014) and Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (2010). Publications in literary studies include Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature (2008); Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (2005); and The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (2001). She taught at Palacky University, Czech Republic, as a Fulbright scholar and served as a Fulbright specialist at the American University of Bulgaria.Hassan Belhiah is associate professor of English and linguistics at Mohammed V University in Rabat. Previously, he held the positions of chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mohammed V University, associate professor of English and education studies at Alhosn University in Abu Dhabi, assistant professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, and lecturer/teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His publications have appeared in Classroom Discourse, Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Language Policy, and Applied Linguistics. He has coedited a book entitled English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education (2020).Andrea Bresee is a recent graduate of Utah State University with a degree in English teaching and a composite in writing. While at Utah State University, Andrea served as an undergraduate teaching fellow for three upper-level English classes, as well as an undergraduate researcher for three separate studies. She was named the English Department Undergraduate Researcher of the Year in 2019 and has presented at three undergraduate research symposiums and conferences. Andrea now teaches seventh-grade English at Space Center Intermediate School in League City, Texas.Kendra Calhoun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the intersections of language, race, and power in face-to-face and social-media contexts. Her dissertation analyzes diversity discourse in US higher education and its effects on graduate students of color. She served as a research mentor and instructor to undergraduate students in the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program, and she recently published on Black-centered introductory linguistics curriculum in Language.Anne Charity Hudley's research and publications address the relationship between English language variation and K–16 educational practices and policies. She is the coauthor of three books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017), Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011), and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (2013). She is the author or coauthor of over thirty additional articles and book chapters. She has worked with K–12 educators at both public and independent schools throughout the country. Charity Hudley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).Dominic DelliCarpini is the Naylor Endowed professor of writing studies and dean of the Center for Community Engagement at York College of Pennsylvania, where he also served thirteen years as writing program administrator and five years as chief academic officer. He founded and administers the annual Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research and is coeditor of the Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020) as well as other articles on this topic. DelliCarpini served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, secretary of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and as a member of the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Mariah Dozé is a 2020 graduate of Emory University, where she received a BA in African American studies and sociology. While at Emory, she served as a research assistant studying racial disparities in capital punishment and a writing tutor, among many other positions. Dozé’s research exploring the intersection between rhetorical studies and social justice was awarded publication in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Young Scholars in Writing. For this accomplishment, she was recognized as an Emory Undergraduate Research Program featured researcher. She is now a Georgetown Law 1L and intends to specialize in human rights law.Cecily A. Duffie is a PhD student in English literature at Howard University. She graduated cum laude from the University of Florida with a BA in African American studies with a concentration in journalism. Her master's thesis was on cycles of postmodernism in the work of contemporary Black women writers, particularly Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison. She has been selected as an UC/HBCU Initiative scholar, NeMLA panelist, and Howard University Research Week panelist and presenter. She has also been published by the Miami Herald. She writes Tudor-era historical fiction and southern Black gothic fiction.Jeremy Edwards is a PhD candidate in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines higher-education practices and policies that impact college access and student development. His dissertation explores the relationships between Black students and the UC system in thinking about levels of support and advocacy for Black students on recruitment, retention, and postgraduation career plans. He was a co-instructor for the UCSB Engaging Humanities Initiative, was a 2019 graduate fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and served as a coordinator and mentor of the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program.Jenn Fishman, associate professor of English and codirector of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University, is a widely published, award-winning scholar and teacher whose current work addresses community writing and listening, longitudinal writing research, and undergraduate research in writing studies. She has edited special issues of CCC Online, Peitho, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020), and contributed national professional leadership through various roles, including inaugural cochair of the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research and president of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.Lauren Fitzgerald is professor of English and director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center at Yeshiva University where she recently chaired the Yeshiva College English Department. With Melissa Ianetta, she edited Writing Center Journal (2008–13) and its first undergraduate research issue (2012) and wrote The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research (2015). She has also published on writing center undergraduate research in Writing Center Journal (2014) and the edited collection How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates (2014).Hannah Franz is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Her scholarship focuses on equity and inclusion in high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and writing-intensive courses. She is coauthor of The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017) and has published in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Collie Fulford is professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Her recent work on writing program development, writing across the curriculum, and the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Pedagogy, Composition Studies, Across the Disciplines, and Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education.John S. Garrison is professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. He is coeditor of three essay collections: Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (2015), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (2020), and Making Milton (forthcoming). His books include Shakespeare at Peace (2018), Shakespeare and the Afterlife (2019), and Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (2020).Ian Golding is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. He is the editor of Queen City Review, an international journal of undergraduate research. His research addresses student agency, archival practices, and visual media.Kay Halasek is professor of English and director of the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Halasek's research spans a range of topics within rhetoric and writing studies: feminist historiography, teaching writing at scale, collaborative learning, writing program administration, portfolio assessment, and basic writing. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (1999), which received the CCCC Outstanding Book award. As director of the Drake Institute, she leads enterprise initiatives in instructional support for faculty and graduate students and research on and policy development related to teaching and learning.Abigail Harrison graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in 2020. Her area of focus is English with minors in rhetoric and public advocacy and communication studies. While at UNCG, she participated in hands-on undergraduate research highlighting rhetoric in both historical and contemporary media. Her scholarship on rhetorical theory within university media centers can be found in the Communication Center Journal.Rachel Herzl-Betz (she/her) is the Writing Center Director and assistant professor of English at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. Her research focuses on intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access. Most recently, she has pursued projects centered on equity in Writing Center recruitment and the impact of “access negotiation moments” for disabled writing instructors. In 2017, her first novel, Hold (2016), received the Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.Katherine Hovland is an undergraduate student at Marquette University, double-majoring in writing-intensive English and data science. She was a member of a research team in the Ott Memorial Writing Center that studied the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Kristine Johnson is associate professor of English at Calvin University, where she directs the university rhetoric program and teaches courses in linguistics, composition pedagogy, and first-year writing. Her work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. An associate editor of Pedagogy since 2019, her research interests include writing program administration, teacher preparation, and undergraduate research.Rachael Scarborough King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is also principal investigator for the Ballitore Project, a project combining archival research and digital analysis at UCSB Library's Special Research Collections.Joyce Kinkead is Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University. In 2012, she was named a Fellow of the Council on Undergraduate Research. As associate vice president for research, overseeing undergraduate research, she instituted University Undergraduate Research Fellows, the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, and Research on Capitol Hill. Dr. Kinkead is a scholar of writing studies and undergraduate research; her titles on undergraduate research include the following: Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods Undergraduate Research Offices and Programs (2016), Advancing Undergraduate Research: Marketing, Communications, and Fundraising (2010), Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010), and Valuing and Supporting Undergraduate Research (2003).Danielle Knox is a Black creative writer who graduated from Howard University with a bachelor's degree in English. A prospective graduate student, her research interests include gender and sexuality across the African diaspora while noting the ways Black queer communities define and express themselves outside of a white Western context. She also desires to help challenge systemic inequalities, promote funding for public libraries, and support all forms of Black literature and art.Addison Koneval (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University. Her work in rhetoric, literacy, and composition primarily focuses on culturally sustaining pedagogies. Most recently, she has been working with grammar education in first-year writing settings.Susan Lang (she/her) is director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and professor of English at The Ohio State University. Lang has extensive experience in teaching online and hybrid courses in technical communication at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She and colleagues at Texas Tech also developed Raider Writer, program-management software for large writing programs. Her research examines aspects of writing program administration, writing analytics, and technical communication. Her work has been published in College English, College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, and Technical Communication, among others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Kenneth Bruffee Award for Best Article in Writing Program Administration and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Writing Analytics.Bishop Lawton is a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Pan-African Intellectual History, the history of precolonial African civilizations, and twentiethth-century Black movements. In further pursuit of his interests, in June 2020, Bishop became a writer for blackpast.org, the largest online encyclopedia of African American history.Ali Leonhard is an undergraduate at Marquette University, double-majoring in forensic science and philosophy. She was a part of the Ott Memorial Writing Center's research team that looked at the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Hayden McConnell is an Elon University alumna. She graduated with a major in professional writing and rhetoric as part of the English Honor Society. Her research addresses the lack of video content that addresses the topic of rhetoric in an engaging manner while also using successful rhetorical strategies. Her work has many intentions, but the overarching goal is to begin providing more visually stimulating content that discusses rhetoric and its many branches for both new and current members of the field.John Henry Merritt is a senior English major and Mellon Mays fellow at Howard University. His research interests include African American fiction, postmodernism, literary theory, and the digital humanities. Currently, he is interested in using Twitter data to develop reader-response based analyses of blockbuster movies. His senior thesis examines the function of the underground as a setting throughout African American fiction. In his free time he likes to write code and study languages. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a PhD in English literature and get a puppy.deandre miles-hercules (they/them), MA, is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are originally from Prince George's County, Maryland, and obtained a BA in linguistics with minors in anthropology and African American studies from Emory University. Their research focuses on language as a nexus for the performance of race, gender, and sexuality in the domains of sociality and power, specifically as it pertains to Black, femme, queer, and trans communities. deandre currently holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Jessie L. Moore is director of the Center for Engaged Learning and professor of professional writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Elon University. She is the coeditor of three books, including Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (2018). Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, the writing lives of university students, and high-impact pedagogies. She served as Secretary of the CCCC, founded the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session, and currently cochairs the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Jamaal Muwwakkil (he/him), MA, is a PhD candidate in the department of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jamaal is originally from Compton, California, and transferred from Los Angeles City College to University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in linguistics. Jamaal's research focuses on political discourse, African American language and culture, and linguistic practices in educational and university contexts.Angela Myers is a professional writing and rhetoric alumna of Elon University. She was an honors fellow and a Lumen scholar, a two-year, competitive grant award earned by only fifteen Elon students each year. Her research addresses the rhetorical strategies of sexual violence prevention courses for undergraduate students.Sunaina Randhawa is a Marquette University alumna. She graduated in 2020 with a BA in English literature and minors in writing-intensive English, anthropology, and digital media. Along with a team of researchers from Marquette's Ott Memorial Writing Center, she worked in conjunction with the Office of Disability Services at Marquette. With their help, she and her team determined both the ways in which they could make writing more and the ways in which the writing center could help that Michael associate professor of English at the University of North as codirector of first-year composition and senior faculty fellow with Center for and He The Writing of (2018) and coedited Perspectives on and Writing He is currently and with undergraduate students that are on curriculum and is a of 2020 graduate of Grinnell College, with a major in English. He is a Undergraduate a research project on of by contemporary of the of the of the he has presented at and participated in a research at the University of in He to pursue a PhD in has a PhD in literary and studies from Mellon University, where she teaches courses on literature, and gender studies. Her current research explores can writing in the humanities. Her work on literature examines the ways in which and discourse the of gender as a modern of has a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Texas University. She Emory University as director of the Writing She has also been associate professor at College, associate professor and chair of English and language at University, and associate professor and chair of communication studies at King University. Her research in the intersections between literature and rhetoric as well as in teaching and She is a book on the in the She also coedited the Journal of the on Perspectives on Learning for is an undergraduate student in and in English and at Nevada State College. As an undergraduate writing and his work and code is professor of English and dean of the College of Arts at University. He taught undergraduate writing and graduate in the Rhetoric and Composition His scholarship focuses on writing program and the teaching of writing.

Abstract This article showcases a guided research project that explores Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015) as an adaptation of Hamlet. A digital component to the project further visualizes the reach of Shakespeare's work into that of contemporary writers of color. The discussion underscores how an undergraduate research experience in canonical English literature opens new connections to contemporary depictions of a globalizing world, as well as how digital tools can visualize those connections and grant the student a valuable set of skills.

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she oversees the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include women publishers and booksellers, zines, and self-publishing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures: Texts, Contents, and Interpretation.Craig Carey is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, book history, media theory, and game studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the relationship between authors, archives, and invention in the age of realism.Moira A. Connelly is associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN. She has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research interests include equity in collaborative writing, writing transfer, writing about writing, responding to the writing of multilingual students, community college teaching, and applying ideas from the academy to activist spaces.Jathan Day is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research explores how writing instructors’ organizational and design decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways their students write and learn.Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she teaches an introduction to literature, literary theory, romanticism, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) and Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on literary theory, phenomenology, romanticism, working-class writing, and liberal arts education. She has edited or coedited five collections and special issues.Paul Feigenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, public rhetoric, and the intersections between rhetoric and psychology. His scholarship has appeared in journals including College English, Reflections, and Composition Forum. His first book, Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, was published in 2015.Dustin Friedman is associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019). His writings have appeared in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2019), the Journal of Modern Literature (2015), ELH (2013), Literature Compass (2010), and Studies in Romanticism (2009).Helena Gurfinkel is professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches primarily critical theory and Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (2014; paperback 2017) and is currently writing a book on the Soviet television and film adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde. She has published extensively in pedagogy, literary and film studies, gender studies, and critical theory. She is editor of PLL: Papers on Language and Literature.Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.Andrew Moos is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how writing instructors can and are using antiracist assessment and feedback practices in writing classrooms to empower students.Julie Sievers is founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, where she also teaches. At the time of this research, she was teaching literature and writing courses at St. Edward's University, where she also directed the Center for Teaching Excellence. Previously, she taught English and composition on the tenure-track at Denison University and in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on literature, pedagogy, and faculty development in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, the New England Quarterly, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, and the Journal of Faculty Development. She is currently studying annotation pedagogy in the context of first-year seminar courses.Danielle Sutton is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University. She works at the intersections of life writing, children's literature, and memory studies and is especially interested in comics and verse memoirs of childhood. She lives in Normal, IL.Kathryn Van Zanen is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on ethical negotiation in writing and writing instruction, particularly among raised-evangelicals writing back to their home communities on social media.Crystal Zanders is a poet, educator, activist, and public speaker from Tennessee. As a Rackham Merit Fellow in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, her research focuses on Black teachers’ use of African American English in pre-integration classrooms in the South.

AbstractThis article identifies in contemporary literary theory a new optimism about the power of literary texts. The medium of this power is not language, ideology, or form but readers open to being changed. Drawing on phenomenology, the article discusses methods for making literary theory students open to and aware of such change, suggesting that hope is the grounding condition for any effective teaching act as well as an effective ground for reading in an era of globalization.

AbstractSelf-publishing is a topic not typically discussed in the literature classroom, yet it can provide an opportunity to highlight voices and works from the margins, think critically about the publishing methods, and promote the study of the book as a cultural artifact. This article provides a case study on using special collections materials to teach undergraduates about self-published American literature. It includes suggestions about how to find and select materials, details about facilitating a discussion and a hands-on activity on the topic, and recommendations for adapting these ideas for other teaching contexts.

This article examines Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “Wilshire Bus” in light of its pedagogical effectiveness in the contemporary cultural moment. The author argues that “Wilshire Bus,” published in 1950, resonates with many students today by evoking issues such as bullying, racist stereotyping, bystander responsibility, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

This article describes a collaborative effort by faculty at two very different institutions to integrate the study of language change into surveys of early British literature. Using a series of structured assignments, the Word Project engages students directly in linguistic research, literary analysis, and the making of literary history.

This article dwells on the “I” who arrives in the university classroom by offering an earnest assessment of the vulnerabilities that one teacher-scholar of African American literature and culture brings with her into the classroom. Observations unfold by way of a critical, reflexive engagement with theories of haunting and Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, in order to account for some of the roots and routes, histories and inheritances, that call this I into being.

Students entering an introductory survey course on African American literature have uneven background knowledge on the history of slavery in the United States. Given this, one of the key challenges in teaching the slave narrative is helping students appreciate the rhetorical intervention that these narratives made in antebellum debates about the slaves’ humanity. To highlight the urgency of these humanizing claims, it is necessary for students to understand how slaveholders viewed their property. This article describes how I use eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wanted advertisements for runaway slaves to frame classroom discussions about the slave narrative. This lesson enhances skills of careful observation, critical questioning, writing to discover, and comparative analysis as it deepens students’ knowledge of African American literature.

The military historian Yuval Noah Harari accounts for the enduring allure of war by calling attention to a change in soldiers' memoirs that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. Soldiers began to describe how they felt rather than what they did. Harari introduces the term flesh-witnessing to distinguish inner experience from eyewitness testimony. Flesh-witnesses speak of combat as a transformative and indescribable experience comparable to the sublime. This view is often attributed to militarists, but Harari shows that it also motivates pacifists. Even antiwar arguments like those of Erich Maria Remarque are based on the authority of the flesh-witness. To test Harari's claims, I invited ROTC officers to speak to students enrolled in a course titled British Literature: The Twentieth Century about their military experience. The juxtaposition of Harari's research and the officers' comments provided a framework for teaching All Quiet on the Western Front and other texts about war. Whether war is portrayed as painful or exhilarating, degrading or ennobling, it is widely idealized as a crucible for the development of the self. This view makes war stories irresistible, whatever political views writers and readers may hold.

This essay discusses how and why one instructor uses a wiki as a space for students in a partially online American literature survey course to construct a class time line of American literature and history. Through participation in the class wiki, students are able to engage with course content in more expansive ways and to play active roles in creating course content; as such, the wiki is a space where the traditional teacher-student hierarchy is dismantled, as students and teacher collectively share the responsibilities of developing, assessing, and revising timeline content. In discussing the learning opportunities a wiki offers in a literature survey course, the author also argues that instructional technology and online tools should not be incorporated into courses merely to follow trends in digital humanities. Instead, digital and technological components should be thoughtfully integrated into humanities courses in ways that enhance and expand learning while furthering the objectives of the particular course.

This essay describes a graduate course, The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context, that I developed and taught in fall 2011 at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The essay was developed from an oral presentation that was part of a teaching panel at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association annual conference in the spring of 2013. The course was my final effort to “go wide” in teaching Victorian literature in its larger context, a desire that grew increasingly difficult to satisfy as the canon of Victorian literature became enlarged and thus somewhat unstable. I also wanted to organize the readings so that my students might get a sense of the literary context in which Victorian readers might have experienced the individual texts when they read them in the nineteenth century. In an effort to describe how I got to the syllabus for The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context (included as an appendix), I give a personal sense of the history of the field of Victorian literature over the last fifty years, tracing the development of the field of English literature in general and Victorian literature in particular. I end with my evaluation of the course I developed, its strengths and its weaknesses, and what I learned from it.

Those of us who teach English literature are familiar with the wide range of skills and capacities of our students. It remains a challenge, though, for English students to demonstrate the applicability of those skills beyond the academy, for instance, to prospective employers. This essay argues that creative education through experiential learning provides important opportunities for students and enhances their development as independent individuals who make their own decisions. To examine the pedagogical benefits that such learning can have in the humanities, this article draws on two extracurricular projects that we coordinate, NuSense, an undergraduate online journal, and Shakespeare after School, a community drama program for children. The skills the student volunteers draw upon to complete these projects include research, editing, writing, analysis, dramaturgy, and time management. In other words, NuSense and Shakespeare after School utilize the core skills of English studies and help students both hone and demonstrate those skills in a practical and public setting.

This article presents a three-stage critique of the “schools approach” to teaching literary theory at the undergraduate level. First, it demonstrates the continued dominance of this approach both in teaching programs and in the textbook literature. Second, it discusses the approach's pedagogical shortcomings. Third, it presents a teaching approach better suited to encourage active theoretical reflection.

This article addresses the teaching of Amy Levy's “Xantippe” (1880), a poem 279 lines long, in an upper-division survey of British literature from 1800 to the present focused on life stories. Though the poem is short enough to be read in a single sitting, it is also long enough to pose the pedagogical challenges common to teaching all long poems: asking students to read both closely and at length, to discern unifying tropes or themes across manifold details or narrative episodes, to engage in sufficient discussion commensurate with the long poem's complexity, and to discover the pleasures of the long poem (deep immersion, sweep of vistas, narrative propulsion, and more). Since Levy is not anthologized in most survey textbooks, the article also concerns teaching noncanonical poetry. The methods presented include prompts posing questions and explaining the work's poetic and cultural contexts, and student reading diaries listing what students found challenging and what they learned. The article thus incorporates real-time student responses, as well as discussion of teaching strategies.

This article argues that the short-story cycle should be central to teaching American literature, because the genre crystallizes major tensions of American literary history: marginality and inclusion, the individual and the community, and the formation of a national literature from transnational and local materials.

This essay, focusing on Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s 1930 play and infamous literary collaboration, explores the possibilities of combining new digital tools with traditional scholarly approaches to better understand how the multilayered racial discourse of African American literature in the early twentieth century informs this signal collaboration. Moreover, Christian outlines the benefits of including African American literature in digital humanities projects.

By incorporating the eleventh-century colloquies of Benedictine monk Ælfric Bata into first-semester British Literature survey courses, instructors can efficiently and entertainingly confront and complicate many of the preconceived and reductive views of the medieval period that students often possess (and that canonical texts can unwittingly reinforce).

The author discusses a Middle English literature course she centered on the array of noncanonical texts in one fifteenth-century manuscript, Ashmole 61. In reading only noncanonical texts, students acquired a broader understanding and experience of what Middle English literature is, while expanding their sense of the methods and purposes of literary research.

Recent scholarship has emphasized the multilingualism of the medieval British Isles, but this has yet to translate into a fully integrated teaching practice free of anachronisms or stereotypes, particularly in the treatment of Irish and Welsh literature. This article suggests both theoretical and practical responses to this situation. Appendices offer specific guidance for teaching the Celtic-language texts now in the major anthologies of English and British literature.

The essay describes a pedagogical approach to the rich poetic ground of the Commedia through a sustained artistic effort on the part of the students. In daily class preparation, students craft small-book “reflectories” that combine analytical interpretation with artwork and Danteinspired poetry, whether the students’ own or authored by others. Joining a tradition of “conversations with Dante” that began, in English literature, with Chaucer, students develop creative abilities and attitudes through reflection upon and disciplined participation in the creative process. Course assignments and discussion methods foreground the mutually reinforcing integration of creativity and analytical precision.

This article argues that teaching Asian American literature should include immeasurable and nontangible factors that accompany racial grief, such as cultural betrayal, the trauma of belonging interstitially, and the sensation of displacement. I propose that these be introduced via a gothic motif, such as the double, haunting, and possession by ghosts. Such motifs have the advantage of familiarity (or, if not, are quite easy to explain) and being psychoanalytically informed.

Many students in American universities are unable to absorb information from a Shakespeare text in the lecture-discussion format. Consumption of electronic media has both absorbed increasing amounts of their time and encouraged passive modes of learning. My response is to seek a pedagogy that produces, on the one hand, in active interpreters of complex language, and, on the other, a participatory, collegial classroom through a pedagogy fusing traditional modes of literary criticism with active modes of learning.

Courses on ethnic American literature can unintentionally reinscribe students' preconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic American subgroups or create the false impression that each ethnic group is homogeneous. A student with limited experience with people of color might think she now understands an ethnic group after reading an ethnic American novel, for example. By using fiction and non-fiction film, teachers can destabilize students' oversimplified views of ethnic groups and of the concepts of race and ethnicity themselves. The course described here started with Toni Morrison's short story, “Recitatif,” which ingeniously leads readers to examine their own racial preconceptions. Then, novels (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Sent for You Yesterday by John Wideman, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen) are paired with films to demonstrate that greater diversity exists within any ethnic group than between any two. Students also engage a few key articles about canon formation so they can understand ethnic literature in the context of American literary traditions. By the end of the course, students have a healthy uncertainty regarding race and ethnicity, their oversimplifications having been undermined by their work with diverse texts.

Little helps students see that the vitality of the first chapter of Thoreau's Walden inheres not in a suggestion that people live in the woods by subsistence farming and occasional wage labor, but rather in a challenge to readers to perform cost-benefit evaluations of their modes of living. Central to this effort is a writing assignment that asks students to (1) offer a research-based description of the economics of their postgraduation lives, assess on the basis of evidence drawn from Walden what Thoreau might think of their plans, then respond to Thoreau's probable views, or (2) explain and respond to what Thoreau might say about the U.S. Department of Labor's most recent table of average annual expenditures and characteristics from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This assignment trades away one of the few opportunities that many students have to engage in literary criticism at a level beyond what is typical in freshman English, but an advantage is that students with a wide range of academic interests can produce competent discussions.

This article argues that introducing undergraduates to literary criticism and theory can be most effectively accomplished through the teaching of children's literature, fantasy literature, and Disney films alongside traditional literary criticism. We discuss a series of assignments we use in Pursuits of English, our department's introductory theory and criticism course.

��� I must begin with a confession. When I last taught Literature of the Holo caust, I cut Wiesel’s Night from the reading list. Teachers are always making hard choices. There’s just too much compelling literature to teach in this class. I teach only texts written by survivors. That narrows the field somewhat — so, no Cynthia Ozick, no Anne Michaels, or Ursula Hegi, or Art Spiegelman. I sneak in Nathan Englander’s short story “The Tumblers” as end-of-semester reading and for the final exam, but that’s a closing flourish. Eliminating Night carries a hint of heresy and a measure of guilt. But with Oprah Winfrey as champion, and 10 million copies sold, Night’s dominance in discussions of Holocaust literature has long been secured. Less pervasive texts, such as Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses, Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar, and Imre Kertesz’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child, claim my class’s attention. Perhaps you hear too in the opening of this review of Alan Rosen’s edition of essays on Wiesel’s Night, in the Modern Language Association’s series Approaches to Teaching, the echo of Kertesz’s 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature lecture, “I must begin with a confession” (604). Kertesz’s confes sional, analytical literature tackles the need to understand and even explain the Holocaust, as well as the totalitarian oppression to which Auschwitz

This essay discusses the history of American literature anthologies from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century; examines their racial and gender inclusions and exclusions; and argues that literary anthologies have played an important role in the production of the American, and more recently multicultural, national narrative.