Building upon the approach to reading literature pioneered by Bruce Gardiner at the University of Sydney for over four decades, Literature and Pedagogy is devoted to the way that texts – literary texts in particular – seek to instruct us.
Bruce Gardiner has inspired generations of teachers and scholars in the field of literary criticism. He stands for a scholarly ethos which is at risk of disappearing. His distinctive academic career, which was entirely devoted to research-led teaching, invites us to think about the relationships between literary studies and pedagogy. It also invites us to ask what role a unique pedagogical style plays in the evolution of a discipline.
This collection explores these questions, while also documenting Gardiner’s methods of scholarly as much as professional resistance to the neo-liberalisation and neo-conservatism of contemporary academic culture. Contributors draw from inspiring encounters with him to reflect upon the rhetoric and motifs of pedagogy within literary works. They put Gardiner’s mode of reading into practice by offering new interpretations of pedagogical mechanisms employed within important literary works, from the seventeenth century to the present, and of cultural phenomena, like colonial interpretations of the Australian lyrebird’s song. The volume also offers pieces inspired by Gardiner, such as poetry, art, translation and creative non-fiction, as well as three unpublished lectures by Gardiner himself.
Techniques and methodologies of literary education are traditionally believed to offer students the keys with which to unlock the secrets of texts and foster their appreciation. Literature and Pedagogy offers a new perspective, showing teachers and students of both education and literature how literary works present their own methods for reflecting critically upon how and why we learn, read and teach.
Edited by:
Anthony Cordingley
Imprint: Sydney University Press
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions:
Height: 254mm,
Width: 178mm,
ISBN: 9781761540011
ISBN 10: 1761540017
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 01 May 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
ELT Advanced
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: “Follow thy Bruce” by Anthony Cordingley Part I Bruce Gardiner en acte 1 The Antimanager by Nick Riemer 2 Revolutionary Tradition by A.J. Carruthers 3 They Danced by the Light of the Moon: Edward Lear, Bruce Gardiner, and Learning Ways to Mean by Dr Christopher Richardson 4 Navigating, Networking, Nurturing:The Research, Teaching and Leadership of Bruce Gardiner by Adam Gall, Benjamin Miller, Susan E. Thomas 5 Human Voices, and a Bruce Gardiner Lecture by Peter Godfrey-Smith 6 “My Wretched Dragon Is Perplexed”: Scenes of Submission and Response by Rodney Taveira 7 Marks in the Margin: Reading Benjamin Reading Baudelaire by Brett Neilson 8 The Windhover in Him by Peter Banki Part II Imagined Pedagogies: Poetry and Play 9 “Triptych” by Toby Fitch 10 “Street Library (A–Z)” by Michelle Kelly 11 Bruce Gardiner’s Emily Dickinson by Monique Rooney 12 Play as Structure by Émile Benveniste, translated by Jack Cox Part III Bruce Gardiner, Original Teachings 13 “To Entertain This Starry Stranger”: Jane Taylor, William Blake, Edward Lear and Mem Fox in Martha Nussbaum’s Classroom by Bruce Gardiner 14 Lectures on Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Bruce Gardiner 15 Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger: Seminar Commentaries by Bruce Gardiner Part IV The Poetics of Pedagogy 16 Lyrebirds by Alexis Harley 17 The Queer Optimism of Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” (for Bruce Gardiner) by Kate Lilley 18 Teaching Interpretation :The “Genuine Sense” in Bruce Gardiner’s Lectures by Marc Mierowsky 19 The Nonsense of Knowledge: A Reading of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind by Jessica Lim 20 Virtue or Villainy? Mrs. Grose in “The Turn of the Screw” and The Haunting of Bly Manor by Liz Shek-Noble 21 Djuna Barnes’ Modernity: Addition, Subtraction, Failure, Fantasy by Melissa Hardie 22 The Last Man: Literature and Survival by Peter J. Hutchings Contributors Appendix 1 Bruce Gardiner: Educational and Academic History Appendix 2 Bruce Gardiner: Record of Teaching and Supervision, 1981–2021
Anthony Cordingley is is Robinson Fellow at the University of Sydney, on secondment from the Université Paris 8, France, where he is Associate Professor in English and Translation. He teaches across modernist literature, comparative literature, translation studies, and his work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Modern Philology, PMLA, Twentieth-Century Literature and Translation Studies.
