Workshops: Pedagogy

Workshop 32: Instructional Tales:
Teaching Non-Fiction in the Literature Classroom

Conveners:

• Caroline Bicks, English, The Ohio State University
• Sujata Iyengar, English, University of Georgia
• Jennifer Summit, English, Stanford University
  

This workshop focused on the challenges and rewards of teaching works of non-fiction by early modern women in the context of a literature course, focusing on how women imported literary topoi and methods into apparently non-fictional texts for the purpose of instructing their audiences. Colleges and universities increasingly rely upon literature departments to teach sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cultural studies courses; instructional works comprise a fruitful body of texts through which we can explore methods for creating such courses while interrogating modern taxonomies of "literary" and "non-literary" writing. What does it mean to teach "literature"? How can all of us expand our notions of how a text operates by attending to different disciplinary approaches? By turning to the creative and wide-ranging methods by which early modern women attracted and instructed their readers, we hoped to generate new pedagogical methods of bringing these women and their texts to our students.