The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study by, Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study by, Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan Ana Quiring Sagner Buurma, Rachel, and Laura Heffernan. 2021. The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. $95.00 hc. $30.00 sc. 320 pp. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study is an ambitious new disciplinary history that reframes the study of literature through its pedagogy. Built on exhaustive and wide-ranging archival research, this monograph traces major methodological developments in literary studies through their manifestations in the classroom. By locating the origins of disciplinary lodestars from New Criticism to the digital humanities in their classroom lives, Sagner Buurma and Heffernan revise conventional wisdom about strict hierarchies of intellectual value in those fields. The result is an illuminating refiguring of the discipline, one that follows scholarly ambitions to their interpersonal, workaday implementations. In their emphasis on pedagogy, Sagner Buurma and Heffernan aim to deflate longstanding intellectual battlegrounds. Rather than reiterating conventional wisdom about the wars between scholars and critics, formalists and historicists, or Marxists and psychoanalysts, the authors explore teacherly archives that demonstrate the integration of many methods of literary analysis in the classroom. In a related move, they identify longer histories for many disciplinary developments we perceive as newfangled. Women instructors like Caroline Spurgeon and Josephine Miles, they write, used [End Page 163] the classroom as the original digital humanities supercomputers. J. Saunders Redding, the first endowed Black professor of literary criticism in the Ivy League, introduced Black authors into his survey syllabi long before the advent of critical race studies in the 1970s. Each revelation arrives with abundant archival evidence—syllabi, lesson plans, dedications to students, course descriptions, and worksheets—that have rarely been read before. In consequence, The Teaching Archive gives an abundant and heterogenous history of the discipline. The compilation of this vast pedagogical archive ultimately produces an antihegemonic argument as well. Sagner Buurma and Heffernan follow discipline-defining teaching far outside the confines of Oxbridge and the Ivy League. Many pedagogues shaped the future of literary studies in community colleges, women's colleges, and historically Black colleges. Even T. S. Eliot, the most famous name here, derived the inspiration for his canon-forming scholarship from his time teaching working-class adult students at Yorkshire and London extension schools. Foregrounding these figures supplies highly straightforward form of political argument; turning to the teaching archive in the most open-ended way produces a far more diverse and decentralized discipline than many existing studies allege. The Teaching Archive's seven chapters take the reader chronologically through seven decades of the twentieth century, featuring one or two teachers in each chapter. The first chapter, on English early modern scholar Caroline Spurgeon, benefits from Spurgeon's elegantly bound teaching notes. Spurgeon's work reinforces one of the authors' primary arguments, that the classroom is the primary site of critical meaning-making. "Spurgeon and others like her," they write, "invited their students to plunge into the center of scholarly research by reading and interpreting the sources for themselves" (28). Spurgeon also presaged data collection in the digital humanities by recruiting her students to help her collect all of Shakespeare's metaphors into her last book, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us. This work demonstrates her interest in making this most canonical writer, "temporarily, into an everyday man walking around in the world" (39). Subsequent chapters on Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Edith Rickert explore the development and testing of canonical texts in the classroom. The Teaching Archive considers Eliot's perhaps surprising receptiveness to his students' interests, as he amended his syllabi to [End Page 164] pursue their preferred texts. Richards, for his part, experimented with the teaching of literary judgment and evaluation, "how to read a poem and judge its merits" (67). Rickert taught her students to use quantitative methods on classic poetry, graphing scansion and imagery, placing her in continuity with the quantitative methods put forth by Spurgeon. The Teaching Archive moves into midcentury with the fourth chapter on J. Saunders Redding. He responded to many decades of segregated reading...