Literacy Pedagogy and Literary Study (MLA)
Event: MLA
How might attention to literacy pedagogy reshape the study of literature? This panel invites historically grounded and theoretically engaged papers that place literacy instruction at the center of literary inquiry, and that consider questions such as: how have pedagogies of reading shaped what counts as literature, interpretation, and aesthetic judgment? What happens when literacy is understood not as a preliminary skill but as an ongoing formative practice? What institutional structures, generic conventions, educational movements, and cultural formations determine what counts as literacy? And how have these understandings of literacy and its many cultural, formal, and pedagogical valences changed over time? We welcome work that examines earlier moments in the teaching of reading (classical oratory, religious instruction, Enlightenment childhood, common schools, progressive education, etc…), as well as projects that move beyond alphabetic definitions of literacy. How might oral, visual, material, embodied, or digital modes of literacy illuminate the sensory and social dimensions of literary experience?
Topics may include:
· Literacy instruction and the formation of literary canons
· Recitation and memorization in literary education
· Childhood reading practices and their afterlives
· Illustration, book design, and format
· Commercial publishing and advertising as they influence literacy pedagogy
· Comparative or global histories of literacy pedagogy
Please submit a 250–300 word abstract and brief bio (1–2 sentences) by March 15 to egowen@fas.harvard.edu.
Emily Gowen