Entering the Classroom through the Archive

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis review of Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study praises the extensive archival research these authors performed to uncover the pivotal role of the classroom in shaping key works and theories of several central figures of literary studies in England and the United States in the twentieth century. Additionally, The Teaching Archive places such central figures as I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and Cleanth Brooks in the context of the work of their colleagues in classrooms down the hall, uncovering the important roles of collaboration, early digital humanities and distant reading projects, and the lasting and often far earlier than previously acknowledged contributions of women and faculty of color. This project to center the classroom in literary studies is one with potentially radical implications for our understanding and assessment of literary scholarship and the traditional teaching/research hierarchy.