You've got to be carefully taught : learning and relearning literature / Jerome Klinkowitz ; with a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Klinkowitz, Jerome.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Klinkowitz, Jerome.

English teachers--United States--Biography.

English teachers.

United States.

English literature--Study and teaching.

English literature.

Literature--Study and teaching.

Literature.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

167 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, [2001]

Summary:

When veteran English professor and internationally renowned scholar Jerome Klinkowitz appraised his own education from grade school through graduate school, he was singularly unimpressed. Nor was he enamored with the miserable job literature faculties are doing today. Seeking radical change, he elected not to follow blindly down the well-trodden pedagogical path, which, he understood, could lead only to the slaughter of his students' love of literature.

Drawing on his own experience in the profession, Klinkowitz sorts out the wrong ways of teaching literature before devising a new, successful method. Specifically, he concludes that a historically based "story of English" is precisely the wrong narrative approach to making sense of what literature does. Instead, Klinkowitz proposes a new method focused not on the product of literary writing but on the process of writing. Long involved with the making of contemporary literature, Klinkowitz shows how his classroom approach draws on the same strengths and inspirations writers use in the creation of literature. He involves students in the literary work as production.

Despite almost universal agreement that literary studies fail both writers and students, solutions have been limited to suggestions by superstar theorists teaching cream-of-the-crop students at elite universities. Klinkowitz aims not at the elite but at the ordinary student in an introduction to literature class. His goal is to introduce teachers to a new philosophy of teaching literature and to further deepen students' natural love for the subject. He also seeks to revive the love of fine writing in those whose joy in the subject fell victim to obtuse teaching methods.

Klinkowitz devotes a full chapter to a critique of his own education in literature. He allocates a second chapter to his experience as a professor of English, discarding the methods learned in school and instead schooling himself in more effective ways of avoiding the destructive atmosphere of academic politics and developing a production-based approach to understanding how literary writers do what they do. Culminating his autobiographical investigation into the current state of literary studies, Klinkowitz examines the success of his own introduction to literature course. He explains his approaches and methods over a semester. Uniquely, his is not an esoteric theory developed by the best academics for elite students but a commonsense approach that works well in the kind of schools most students attend.

Contents:

1. Education 9

2. Home Schooling 48

3. Teaching 90.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-167).

ISBN:

0809324032

OCLC:

45667654