Teaching the Politics and Practice of Textual Recovery with DIY Critical Editions

Abstract

In this chapter, Caroline M. Woidat describes how classroom “archival explorations” transform the ways that students think about literary texts, American history, and their roles as scholars. Animated by feminist scholarship and pedagogy, Woidat describes a course that aims to recover the roles that literary editors, critics, and communities perform—the vital work that is often effaced or demeaned as “secondary” and peripheral—along with “primary” texts by women authors. Students in Woidat’s class become editors engaged in literary recovery to reevaluate the canon and its primacy.