Literature and Pedagogy Seminar Series 2014-15

‘This seminar addresses English and literary studies as practice. Its subject is what I have been coming to think of as ‘Pedagogic Criticism’. Pedagogic Criticism involves reading texts through teaching, and teaching through texts. In examining text-based teaching as the staging of dilemmas and predicaments, it proposes a reflexive, self-aware pedagogy. While so much of pedagogy obeys invisible rules, this approach seeks to locate and listen to the pedagogic voice within a discipline whose history can best be understood as being as much about practice as about the transmission of ‘subject knowledge’. The subject acts out forms of re-contextualisation and estrangement, and the rhythms of disintegration and re-integration are mirrored between the text and the occasions on which it is discussed or studied.

This seminar will take a tripartite form: a presentation, followed by a short spell of group activity around a text, and then dialogue.’

Biography

A graduate of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Ben Knights has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Durham, and Teesside, where he was subject leader for English and Cultural Studies. From 2003 to 2011 he was Director of the (HE Academy) national English Subject Centre. Recent books include Masculinities in Text and Teaching (Palgrave 2008, editor), and (with Chris Thurgar-Dawson) Active Reading: Transformative Writing in Literary Studies (Bloomsbury 2006). He edits the Palgrave seriesTeaching the New English. His Pedagogic Criticism: Reconfiguring University English Studies will be published by Palgrave in 2015.

For more information on the Literature and Pedagogy Seminar Series please contact Richard Jacobs, School of Humanities, University of Brighton. Tel: 01273 643394.

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This seminar series is a new initiative from the University of Brighton which seeks to engage teachers of literature in Higher Education, and post-16 teaching and transition to Higher Education, in round-table seminar discussions led by leading practitioners.

We aim to discuss and share best practice in relation to questions such as these:

• How best can literature and the teaching of literature continue to speak to the needs of the diversity of 21^st century students
• What role can literature play in the development of a full range of reading and writing practices and in the connections between those practices.
• Is there anything distinctive to the discipline of literature that calls for specifically different practices in its teaching?
• Which issues and emphases in contemporary pedagogical theory engage most productively with the teaching of literature at Higher Education?
• What are the current characteristics of literature teaching in Higher Education and where is it going?
• What kinds of histories and lessons from history does literature teaching in Higher Education offer?
• Can literature and its teaching continue to claim any wider humanitarian mission in today’s Higher Education environment?
• What are the continuities and/or discontinuities between experiences of literature and its teaching in Higher Education and at post-16?