Despite not being that overly serious about my academic career at this point, somehow I’ve parlayed a sparsely attended conference paper last December into a slot on an all star invited symposium at the same organization’s annual conference.  There’s a dude who invented his own department and has published 20 books, a couple of shit hot affect studies / education researchers with massive ARC grants, someone who’s publishing a ridiculously good looking book on youth, multiculturalism and affect in Australia, and me.  Oh, and the discussant is one of the doyens of Cultural Studies.

Here’s my abstract:

“Poetry, the New Formalism and the Possibilities of Post Critical Literacies”

To think through the possibilities of post critical literacies, one must look at the legacies of critical literacy. With its emphasis on the sociopolitical nature of language practices, critical literacy has been most influential in the English classroom.  Despite this success, critical literacy practitioners have often had an uneasy relationship with literary texts, especially poetry, due to its presumed reliance on the reader’s affect and personal experience over the potential to interrogate its political and historical resonances.  Misson and Morgan (2006) have argued that critical literacy practitioners should turn to what they call the aesthetic, which prioritizes the reader’s personal experience of the work over its other important textual features such as form. “The aesthetic turn,” to use a phrase from Sawyer (2006), though obscures both the sociopolitical nature of literature, and its formal and stylistic features, due to its direct attention to experience.  This paper considers how modes of studying literature, such as a New Formalist approach to poetry, can contribute to pedagogies of English in a post critical literacy classroom. The New Formalism is a movement of literary criticism of the past decade that, reconstituting and reformulating the lessons of the New Criticism, focuses its attention firmly back towards poetic form and reaffirms it as essential to the study andteaching of poetry.  A New Formalist pedagogical method can build upon the successes of critical literacy in promoting social and political consciousness in students and teachers, whilst eliding critical literacy’s tendencies to obscure the reader’s personal experience, affect, and the importance of the literary features of the text.  I argue that attention to form is not necessarily just a dry, mathematical approach to the minutiae of poetic rhythm and meter, but can be a dynamic approach to reading texts in depth in order to investigate what they do (both in the literary but also sociopolitical sense) and how they do it.