The Discipline

Kate Stanley

Contributors

Notes on the State of Indigeneity; or Turning South Again

Melanie Benson Taylor

My subtitle deliberately echoes Houston Baker’s pivotal monograph, Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism, Re-reading Booker T , which—when it was first published in 2001—fundamentally altered the course of Southern studies....

Simone Weil and the Text as Organ of Perception

Thomas Sorensen

Literature is a protean phenomenon. Nobody seems quite sure how to classify it. Is it an object, immutable and self-contained? Or is it an event that happens when a self makes contact with a line of letters on a page? Nowadays, critics regard the...

The Pedagogical Potential of the Eco-Epic

Kate Stanley

What resources can literature from the past offer when confronting the urgent present-moment reality of climate crisis? What function should the humanities classroom serve when the future of human life seems increasingly precarious? Anne Raine’s...

No Children, Only Tasks: Reflections on Cruel Pedagogies

Benjamin Hagen

I had not heard of ProctorU software until October 1, 2020 when I noticed that several folks on Twitter, whom I follow for their thoughts on pedagogy, had retweeted and responded to the same upsetting TikTok video I had come across earlier that...

Where the Letters Lead: the Appalachian Prison Book Project

Katy Ryan

In 1994, Renaldo Hudson was on death row in Illinois. As we became friends, I knew where I stood in relation to the place where the plan was to kill him. I was not interested in starting a book club there or teaching a class. I was not interested...

Modernism, Cybernetics, and Systems Theory: Disciplinary Relevance in a STEM-focused World

Heather A. Love

In 1926, Gertrude Stein delivered the lecture “ Composition as Explanation ” to the Cambridge Literary Club at Oxford University (fig. 1). The talk couches a description of her own evolution as an experimental author within a broader discussion...

Modernism’s Queer Pedagogies

Todd G. Nordgren

How did people learn to be queer in an era before stable identities, lifestyles, or representations of sexual outsiders were readily available or, for that matter, before they even existed?

Varieties of Educational Experience

Kate Stanley

In my first stab at drafting an inaugural post as the new editor of this forum, I went the Raymond Carver route, writing “What We Talk About When We Talk About the Discipline” across the top of a blank page. When that imagined dialogue hung fire...

On Global Modernism and Academic Precarity: A Reply to Claire Barber-Stetson

Alys Moody, Stephen J. Ross

In the Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on “ Modernism’s Contemporary Affects ,” Claire Barber-Stetson writes probingly of the relationship between the precarious existence of graduate students and early career academics in English...

Secret Societies!

Morgan Day Frank

“If it’s secret and elite, it can’t be good,” intones Luke McNamara, played by Joshua Jackson, the guy from The Mighty Ducks and Dawson’s Creek , in the final moments of the now forgotten movie, The Skulls (2000). The...

The World of Close Reading

Angus Connell Brown

Cambridge, King’s College Library (1865). A. D. White Architectural Photographs, Cornell University Library.

When a convener adds Things Fall Apart (1959) to their syllabus something strange happens. If all goes well the class will read...

The Discipline

Mar 2, 2016 By: Kate Stanley

Tags:

interdisciplinarity

history

"The Discipline" explores untold histories of literary study in the twentieth century. What futures for our discipline do these new pasts make possible?

To contribute or submit an idea, write to Kate Stanley at kate.stanley@uwo.ca.