Resistance to Teaching

• Published in: Australian humanities review no. 68; p. 1
• Main Author: Pask, Kevin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bundoora Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 31.05.2021
• Subjects: Anxiety; Archives & records; Classrooms; Criticism; Critics; Judgment; Literary criticism; Novels; Poetry; Politics; Popularity; Public speaking; Reading; Research subjects; Seminars; Spenser, Edmund (1552?-1599); Students; Teaching
• ISSN: 1325-8338; 1325-8338
• DOI: 10.56449/38751097

In this brief response, I focus on what is less often an explicit item on the course syllabus, but which nevertheless informs many syllabi: the critical judgment which underlies the canon of university study. [...]the transition from 'criticism' to 'critique' to describe the productions of academic interpretation seems to justify them as political interventions.) My own experience, both as a student and as a teacher, suggests that students are less willing to abandon their other reading culture for the university one than I was forty years ago, sheepishly expunging (or at least marginalising) my own literary bad taste standing in the way of the fuller appreciation of the literary syllabus of the time: the mighty battles of anxiety and influence in the Marvel Literary Universe c. 1980. In Richards's application of experimental method to the art of literary criticism, a significant aspect of the appeal of the lectures, students themselves were the experimental subjects. [...]students might not belong to the history of literary criticism, but they belong to the history of reading as well as to the teaching archive.