The Way We Talk about the Way We Teach Now

In this paper, I consider the question of teaching in the light of the crisis in the humanities. This crisis comprehends not only the threatened situ ation of the humanities in terms of resources and cultural value but also the related problem of the seeming abstruseness of humanities scholarship relative to the aesthetic values and experiences of the broader public. In this context, discussions of pedagogy tend to be inherently justificatory for the discipline?that is, discussions of how we teach, far more than discus sions of how we do our scholarship, heighten and focus the question of how we explain what we do and why it matters. Conversely, justifications of the discipline tend to require, at some point, a discussion of teaching. That is, explaining the importance of what we do is typically seen to re