The topographies of literary study

Knights B (2017) Pedagogic Criticism: Reconfiguring University English Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pedagogic criticism, Ben Knights argues in this wide-ranging and thoughtful book, is an attempt to “bring into focus the transactions between the study and interpretation of texts and the social forms and rituals of pedagogy” (1). Knights draws together a historiography of the rise of English Studies in the UK, literary criticism, close readings of writers from Henry James to Annie Proulx, as well as critical reflections on pedagogy. Entangling both the study of literature and teaching demonstrates how “pedagogic criticism involves reading texts through teaching, and teaching through texts” (1). This simple formulation is the book’s key strength: it is across the topography of the teaching–reading relationship that Knights mounts his thesis.

Pedagogic Criticism argues that the study of English should be “conceptualised as a border subject” (9). The shape and substance of this discipline—caught on the edges of other subject areas, rooted in networks and spaces of learning, built from a variety of perspectives and orientations—is such that Knights’ book traffics in images of spatiality: from “topographies” and “boundaries” to “landscapes,” (158–159) and “places on the fringe” (188), as well as corporeal geographies like “interiority,” “membranes” and “excised tissue” (198). The “energies generated at and across borders” (9) drive the book’s intellectual journey. Knights maps numerous of historical, theoretical, literary and pedagogic encounters: for instance, he argues that “The space of teaching is a threshold, a liminal or transitional space” (6). As middle space, the classroom mirrors the discipline of English, which is multivalent.

In chapter 1, Knights argues that pedagogic discourse has led us to see “Education as a ‘becoming’” (3), both at an individual and group level. Such ongoing transformation plays out in the relationship between student, teacher and subject. Knights suggests that many academics in English resist educational discourse for various reasons (my own experience teaching attests to this statement), but the subject enables us to think more reflexively about pedagogy. Citing psychoanalytic thinkers like Deborah Britzman and Wilfred Bion, Knights posits the developmental change necessary to education often is the result of (yet can also be stymied by) “the painful emotional experience of helplessness and frustration” (3). As Britzman (2009) argues in The Very Thought of Education, “In any learning one feels pressure, without knowing from where it comes, to make knowledge certain and so to stabilize the object” (ix). That desire for certainty, for locking down the object, is part of the larger project of Pedagogic Criticism. Knights argues that we must confront the negative and confounding emotions of the educational setting—especially of literary study—because they run so counter to contemporary pressures of a more “packaged and streamlined” (6) university education. Facing English’s “obliqueness,” and the ugly feelings that come along with it, is the key role of literature educators everywhere.

Chapter 2 offers an English historiography, tracing the cultural development of the subject. Knights points to ways that English has always engaged with the larger “debate within the liberal tradition about the contrary social tendencies of stasis and innovation” (20). Indeed, the constantly shifting nature of English (its topographies) has always been part of the subject. In the early twentieth century, English was a “diverse and varied federation,” driven by “critics, textual scholars, biographers, medievalists, and historical philologists” (35). Yet even in this fluidity (or, indeed, because of it), the seriousness of the subject was fought for. English became a “project of cultural reprogramming” (46) that aimed to “mould” readers into ethical citizens. The good English student was transformed, through literary education, into responsible sociocultural subjects.

At the same time, chapter 3 explores the divergent paths of English. Borrowing from educational sociologist Basil Berstein, Knights suggests that there is a tension between axes of the subject: those of the “sacred” and the “profane” (54). The dominant hierarchy of literariness confronts the horizontality of the learning encounter. Locating another moment of the subject’s history in the formation of the Birmingham Centre for cultural studies in the 1970s, Knights argued that a “recalibration of textual pedagogy” (56) took shape. The triad of teacher, student and subject matter was “reoriented” by the new focus of cultural studies, so that a “revolt against hierarchy” (56) meant that students brought their own knowledge and experiences to the classroom. Upending that vertical axis of institutional expertise, cultural studies began to influence how English was taught. Knights credibly suggests that, while the radical content of an English curriculum is impacted by cultural studies—so that we can study Beyoncé alongside Faulkner and Trumpism in one literary class—our pedagogy has become blunt. The “edge” of cultural studies is lost. Combating this, Knights argues that we focus on difficult reading, on interpretations that frustrate students as they develop them.

Elaborating further on education’s internal pressures, chapter 4 considers the “obstacles encountered by students in understanding what it is they are supposed to do” (86). Knights’ book works best when it links theory to lived pedagogical encounters. For instance, Knights draws connections between teaching/learning “English” and texts that a student might read. Writing that “the medium of teaching is in actuality no more transparent than the modernist text,” Knights suggests the discipline of English “not only studies the aesthetic but also performs it in its day-to-day practice” (108). He draws out ways that English students are drawn into a “counter-intuitive leap” whereby answers might be deferred, latent meaning is preferred over patent, and the “unsayable” (108) is translated into speech. Like the elusive lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s famous novel, teaching English “stage[s] progress into the unknown” (103). In its suspicion of “codification and reduction” (103), the subject stands in counterpoint to much of the systematisation of contemporary British higher education.

Chapter 5 elaborates further, drawing attention to the unknowable and the “unsayable” (108), not only of literary encounters but also the classroom experience of students. Like many other disciplines, English depends on “largely unspoken rules—a hidden pedagogy” (111) that we expect students to pick up. Our desire for students to be open to text’s radical ambiguity, or to engage multiple interpretations simultaneously, depends on a secret learning practice. Like an omniscient narrator, teachers “are looked upon to provide coherence, closure, a safe structure” (117). But, if English is by its nature a shifting topography, our job is to help students traverse those landscapes.

Following this spatial metaphor, chapter 6 engages the educational journey via W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995). If close reading is central to English, then its “affinities with walking” (138)—its methodical traversal of textual landscapes—feed into the subject’s contours. While knowledge is frequently figured “as a territory, and the learner as a traveller” (144), Knights worries that the reductive nature of linear university programs with learning outcomes obliterates this metaphor and its classroom counterpoint. Sebald’s Rings is a lesson in resisting narratives of “progress” and “outcomes”; rather, our desire for “the overview always needs to be complemented by close, meditative attention to the detailed, haunted, and overdetermined local habitat of knowledge” (151). Sebald’s foregrounding of the peripatetic mirrors Knights’ configuration of English as well as his meandering monograph.

Chapters 7 and 8 also elaborate textual-pedagogic dialogues, via Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) and Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997). Both chapters ground the discussion of literary education in the body, in lived material spaces and in border territories. Using notes from his time in adult education, Knights proposes yet another of English’s liminal spaces. As adult education developed across the twentieth century, it shaped the curriculum of the “orthodox” university subject. If these classes taught Knights anything, it is that adult education could offer the transformation (161) of lives that a university humanities degree hopes for. It is perhaps the border-ness of adult education—both within and without the institution, inside and outside subject area—that makes it so exemplary of English. Building on this borderland, chapter 8 examines Annie Proulx’s fiction which explores people and places on the fringe. Her contemporary Westerns, like “Brokeback Mountain,” are depictions of liminal spaces. Knights draws “correspondences” between text and reader, between landscape and body, and between psychic and textual interiors. Again, Knights is attuned to the ways in which the student, teacher and text are caught in endless pedagogic feedback loops. It is in Knights’ attention to the ways that the literary texts we teach also teach us things about learning itself, that Pedagogic Criticism is most successful.

The final chapter returns the book to its key argument, that pedagogy is “cultural production” (211). Knights turns to a particular learning setting: the professional skills, or teacher-training, workshop. He examines how creative writing activities are not as prominent in UK English classes as they could be. With literature’s emphasis on the essay as the dominant mode of student assessment, creativity and the practice of imaginative writing can be lost. Yet, as Knights explores, “experimental and sociable writing can generate pedagogic as well as literary and cultural insight” (214). To make this case, Knights narrates the story of a teacher-training workshop he ran in Poland. There, he made the attendees (other professors and lecturers) engage in writing activities that foregrounded the unknown. Using a scene in Mark Haddon’s novel A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), where the protagonist finds himself in the melee of a London train station, as a springboard, Knights asked participants to write a list of places of arrival. From there, the list was transformed into small poems and then into prose paragraphs. This activity not only reflexively foregrounded the anxieties and confusions at play in every teaching setting—students arriving into a space, feeling overwhelmed—but also Knights’ own apprehensions about “teaching” other teachers. However, by outlining the productivity of writing as an exploratory, semiconscious and experimental act, Knights reveals the processes of translating the implicit to the explicit in all teaching settings.

The book ends with a thoughtful and perhaps anxious afterward, reflecting on the “pressures of the neoliberal order” that dominate our daily lives in the twenty-first century. But, as Knights suggests, teachers “cannot protect students from the future of precarity, debt” and so on (236) that come with it. As the “outcomes-based” educational system takes hold, both teachers and students veer toward shutting down and closing the process of education. Indeed, with the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework dominating higher education discussions, what room is there, Knights asks, for the kind of pedagogic reflection his book has articulated? Thinking “aloud,” he writes, “may appear simply as a form of decadence or a confession of weakness” in this marketised future. However, given the English subject’s life on the borderland, it is to the peripheries that we must look. English’s future, Knights suggests, will have to be a “hybrid” one (241)—as it always has been—and thus English university teachers should engage more with school teachers and curricula, with English language programs and with creative writing and assignments. The creativity of the subject should not disappear. Moreover, in making both our students (and ourselves) more reflexive, our discipline can be of service in an ever-consumerist world. “Uncomfortable as we may sometimes feel,” Knights argues, “we cannot, as teachers, entirely protect our students from the pain and frustrations of learning—nor is it right that we should. In a world relentlessly commodified, this warning against such collusion … takes on a renewed urgency” (243). Knights’ warning is important to us all as teachers, no matter our field, discipline or role. English still has the power to transform and inspire, if only we excavate its life on the borders. It is a topography we can never fully map, but Pedagogic Criticism nonetheless begins that important work.