"`Wandering Between Two Worlds:' The MLA & English Department Follies"

(Forthcoming in Style 34.4)

ABSTRACT

This essay reviews the MLA's new book, Preparing a Nation's Teachers,

focusing on English department programs, and intersperses that

conversation with brief discussions of the 1997 volume of PMLA (112.1)

devoted to "The Teaching of Literature." I argue that the traditional

separation of literary study cum theory and its practical application in

both secondary school and university teaching is itself a theoretical

model whose reconsideration is long overdue. This model has long kept

separate teaching, research, and teaching teachers, a triple boundary

where few professors move both easily and frequently. Thus the practical

(if not theoretical) separation of the English faculty and Education

faculty during a) usually, the methods class and, b) student teaching may

be found to one degree or another in all of the English programs being

considered. Some English departments relieve their guilt feelings about

this state of affairs by pointing to the supposed "transfer" of skills

learned in the college literature classroom to novice secondary teachers.

Few specify what those skills are or describe how such transference is

made, in spite of major investigations of this matter in education. I

then go on to detail briefly selected skills in reading poetry and

teaching literature, and conclude by discussing some issues (TA training,

textbook analysis and others) that both the MLA volumes did not, but

should have, addressed.