Consequences of Academic Reading? Teachers Training, the German Public High School System, and Tom Franklin”
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, I delineate the ways in which scholars read and how academically sanctioned practices of reading sustain the idea of academic freedom as a core principle within modern day English departments and the Humanities at large. Drawing on work by Michael Warner, Gerald Graff, and John Guillory, amongst others, this first part is mainly theoretical in scope and designed to uncover the bounds of institutional protection that shield the work of academic readers from other interpretive communities and reading publics clustered along the public-‐academic divide. As I will argue in this section, we can explain the continued dominance of this divide from a historical perspective by two entwined trajectories: the history of higher education itself and the evolution of a (shrinking) cultured middle-‐class.
The second (and longer) part of my paper delivers a field report in which I present research material and data derived from a new inter-‐institutional study and teaching project situated at the interface of my home institution (the English Department of Heidelberg University), the federal institute for teachers training and pedagogy (Staatliches Seminar für Didaktik und Lehrerbildung, Baden-‐Württemberg), and a selection of local high school classes starting to get prepared for their A-‐Level exams in 2019. The long-‐term goal of this project is to make academic and non-‐academic reading knowledge adaptable across and beyond reading publics and their specific social and professional identities: English students with the goal to work as high school teachers, high school teachers preparing their classes for a future possible university education, pupils seeking to become English students, as well as university instructors working as scholars and in teachers training.
To illustrate my findings and the professional areas involved in this endeavor I focus on Tom Franklin’s Mississippi-‐based crime novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. The novel was chosen by the federal ministry of education as a mandatory text for the two graduating years of high school (11th and 12th grade) under the general theme “The Ambiguities of Belonging”; the book has been immediately appropriated within the context of school book production and general didactics, while it also figures prominently, if unexpectedly, within academic readerships as part of a recent interest in contemporary genre fiction. Owing to their neat institutional separation and their different practices of reading, there has been little exchange between the public high school system, on the on hand, and the academy, on the other, which seems all the more surprising, since teachers training in Germany still relies chiefly on an university education, bringing together students with both academic and non-‐academic career pursuits. Here, I wish to report on—or at least mention—concrete efforts undertaken to facilitate a non-‐hierarchized transfer of reading knowledge between the individual institutional contexts: (1.) my own co-‐teaching project, (2.) a joint one-‐day conference by high school teachers and academic English instructors, (3.) a new teaching program within the recently established Heidelberg School of Education (HSE).
Inspired by Ellison and Eaton’s Scholarship in Public (2008) and related essays, I conclude by speculating on a broader scale about the uses of academic reading outside of the university classroom and about whether or not public reading concerns need to be incorporated into the national and transnational infrastructures of academic research. One question that I would like to address in particular concerns the applicability of public humanities vocabulary/concepts to institutional and/or political contexts outside of the US. The public humanities discourse has been and continues to be shaped by projects and initiatives that have developed in response to a particular US context of higher education, including an equally particular understanding of the public-‐academic divide and the public sphere as such. Given these particularities, I would like to use my paper as an occasion to suggest a number of consequent methodological questions (for the second part of the panel) concerning the very idea of the public both within and outside of the US.
Philipp Löffler is assistant professor of American literature at the University of Heidelberg. His book Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War was published with Camden in 2015. For his second book project he is currently working on a cultural history of US literary education in the nineteenth century. Philipp is co-editor of the books Reading Practices (Narr, 2015) and Reading the Canon: Literary History in the 21st century (Winter, 2017).