The Resistance to History: Teaching in the Present

Abstract

Should we actually teach theory at all? Put this way, one suspects, the question appears to be too provocative and conservative. But the problem we have all faced as literature teachers in higher education is how to fit everything into the curriculum. Something cannot be allowed in without something else being taken out. This works at the level of micro-content. For example, the rise of Virginia Woolf has been at the expense of Ezra Pound; the triumph of Seamus Heaney meant that no one studied Philip Larkin any more, especially once his reading tastes became more widely known. More significantly, the rise of theory has probably been at the expense of close reading. How many teachers, let alone students, understand prosody? Or even know what it is? Can anything be done other than to teach less theory?