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LOOKING BACK IN 1975 on the history of the New Criticism, Hugh Kenner dismissed the movement as glorified pedagogy: “The curious thing is how a classroom strategy could come to mistake itself for a critical discipline.” For Kenner, literary study was properly defined by its landmark works of scholarship, still today the view of most scholars. In their important new book, The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study, Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan contest the notion that the history of the discipline is best represented by the “famous monographs and seminal articles” that are disseminated “outward” and “downward” to the classroom. They believe that “the opposite is true,” and that “the teaching archive overturns nearly every major account of what the history of literary studies has been.” The revisionism here is a familiar gesture in scholarship; but the authors argue strongly for the urgency of their “new history” of the discipline. It is, as the title of their conclusion has it, “the past we need now.”

In Buurma and Heffernan’s new version of the discipline’s history, even methodological conflict is dislodged from its obsessional place in scholarly discourse. When we descend from the battles in the sky to the humble venues of pedagogy, we discover that “method wars” have little real impact there. Their archival history of 20th-century English pedagogy reveals that what goes on in the classroom today is for the most part what has been going on since vernacular literature was first taught in the colleges and universities: a peaceful and largely collaborative labor, in which teachers and students work together to makes sense of literature: “In classrooms, teachers and students have invented and perfected the core methods and modes of literary study.” Kenner mocked New Critical pedagogy as “the cult of the blackboard.” Buurma and Heffernan celebrate everything that happens in the classroom as the true history of the discipline.

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