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Get Up, Stand Up: Teaching Civil Disobedience in the Literature Classroom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kathryn Miles
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Extract

In his presidential address at the 1970 MLA convention, Maynard Mack sounded a warning bell concerning activism and the future of literary studies. Faced with a seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam and a national student body growing polarized in its response to this war, higher education, including language-based pedagogy, was in crisis. Of particular concern to Mack was a growing generational disconnect over the role of activism in the literature classroom. He cited a landmark study in which nearly two-thirds of all professors over the age of thirty maintained that any foray into politics should be avoided, if not altogether prohibited, in formal course work. The younger generation disagreed: two-thirds of them, in fact, felt a moral and pedagogical obligation to use colleges and universities as loci for social change. This ideological divide, Mack predicted, would soon create “a crisis of authority in the offing beside which all current manifestations would look pale” (365).

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 3 , May 2009 , pp. 864 - 869
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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