The Very Idea of Pedagogy

Abstract

164 The occasion of this paper, the change in scope of the MLA Bibliography to include more fully the teaching of language, rhetoric, and literature, is very welcome and surely to be celebrated by members of our profession. But as I have been asked to represent the teachers of literature in responding to this occasion, I feel compelled to mix my celebratory refrain with a note of caution addressed to teachers in my field. This caveat lector arises from my own lack of expertise in the subject about which I am asked to comment, a lack that is fairly representative of the teachers of literature. If the study and teaching of literature describes what I and so many other members of the MLA do, very few of us study or write about the teaching of literature as such, about pedagogy. For that reason it seems to me that the MLA bibliography for the teaching of literature is likely to be, at least for the time being, different from its other two teaching bibliographies, about which it must be said that they address teaching as the primary focus of their fields—the teaching of writing and of language acquisition. The bibliography of scholarship on the teaching of literature is, by contrast, likely to consist of scholarship produced, as it were, with the left hand, as Milton famously said of his prose polemics. Literary scholars consider themselves to be expert in writing about literature or teaching literature but not necessarily in writing about the teaching of literature. The latter field is likely to be thin, in both senses—less productive of scholarship than the fields of rhetoric and language and less conceptually developed.