The Common Core State Standards prompted particularly vigorous debate and handwringing around the role (and future) of literature in the US secondary English classroom. The rise of the knowledge economy in secondary English, along with an increasing obsession with scientific measurement, resulted in the marginalization of literature, which has and continues to be instrumentalized to the myriad other aims of English teaching: to improve morality, cultivate a productive workforce and intelligent citizenry, perpetuate an elite class, and counteract social inequality. Put differently, literariness has little do with these justifications and so with literature's place in the secondary English curriculum, though literature-for now-does. In this study I turn away from the familiar literature and towards the strange literariness in order to think about what the latter may offer secondary English teaching and scholarship. I understand literariness as a question of texts' value, how they come to matter (and not) in persons' lives. Each of the chapters in this study takes up literariness in order to think and write about English teaching in ways that embrace the aesthetic and relational potential of the work. The dissertation opens with an introduction to literariness, situating the project within broader conversations of English teaching and scholarship. The second chapter examines how literariness emerges through a close reading of a single text and my own experience with it as a teacher, student, reader and writer. I analyze the implications of this approach to a more ethical close reading - how it animates literariness in the context of a life - and advance literary resonance as a concept of value for English teachers and researchers. The next chapter moves beyond my experience to examine literariness in the lives of four practicing secondary English teachers. The text is comprised of a series of vignettes which literarily weave together interview data, participant-authored essays, and language drawn from fiction and poetry. I read across the four stories to considering literary possibilities that emerge for teaching life; the complicated intersections of teachers' experiences as students, readers and writers; the political obligations of English teachers in the classroom, and the role literary writing can play in "singing" the lives of teachers and their students. The fourth chapter turns towards the writing of scholarship, considering the (un)literariness of English teaching research and in the process addressing two crucial questions: Literary for whom? By whom? As the story of the chapter's writing unfolds, I reveal the problematics of a literary framing: how the frame may reflect less the literary value of scholars' writing than my own particular positioning. The chapter concludes pointing to the limitations of a too-formalist literariness for achieving the varied goals of education researchers. The dissertation's final chapter plays with the notion that the failures of English teaching and research create conditions by which we might envision and enact more beautiful, just, human and humane English teaching going forward. Reading across chapters and implicating them within major conversations in the field, I offer insights into how literariness helps educators and researchers position themselves usefully for the future unknown.
Read
