Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

Shirley Geok-lin Lim opens her commentary in this issue with an anecdote about the first graduate course she registered for at Brandeis University in 1969. She uses this creative writing seminar and its instructor, J. V. Cunningham, as metaphors for what she calls the “strangeness” of creative writing in a research university. This small picture drawn by Lim also illustrates two themes we want to highlight in this issue: the value of taking stock of the profession and its past and future, and the need to focus our gaze carefully on the particulars of the classroom. Several authors look out on the state of a field (Lim on creative writing; Sheila T. Cavanagh, Judith H. Anderson, Daniel T. Lochman, Susannah Brietz Monta, and John Webster on Spenser studies) or of a critical issue (Steve Benton, Jane Tompkins, Jeffrey Wallen, Robin Valenza, David R. Shumway, Craig Stroupe, and Gerald Graff on “teaching the conflicts”). Others focus on specific classroom practices and the theoretical issues that undergird pedagogical choices (Laurie Grobman on the multicultural writing classroom; Irvin Peckham on the teaching of “liberatory pedagogy”). Some of the pieces do both (see, in particular, the Spenser symposium). But Lim’s evocation of her graduate writing seminar (especially her instructor’s powerful intellect and personality, which serve now as lenses through which to study the position of creative writing in English departments and universities) reminds readers of their own educational histories. It also reminds us of the classrooms we construct and inhabit today as teachers. What effects will our curricular and pedagogical decisions have on our stu-