Overview

In Schools of Fiction, Morgan Day Frank considers a bizarre but integral feature of the modern educational experience: that teachers enthusiastically teach literary works that have terrible things to say about school. From Ishmael's insistence in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that ""a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,"" to the unnamed narrator's expulsion from his southern college in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the most frequently taught books in the English curriculum tend to be those that cast the school as a stultifying and inhumane social institution. Why have educators preferred the anti-scholasticism of the American romance tradition to the didacticism of sentimentalists? Why have they organized ""African American literature"" as a discursive category around texts that despaired of the post-Reconstruction institutional system? Why did they start teaching novels, that literary form whose ""very nature,"" in Mikhail Bakhtin's words, is ""not canonic""? Reading literature in class is a paradoxical undertaking that, according to Day Frank, has proved foundational to the development of American formal education over the last two centuries, allowing the school to claim access to a social world external to itself. By drawing attention to the transformative effect literature has had on the school, Schools of Fiction challenges some of our core assumptions about the nature of cultural administration and the place of English in the curriculum. The educational system, Day Frank argues, has depended historically on the cultural objects whose existence it is ordinarily thought to govern and the academic subject it is ordinarily thought to have marginalized.

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9780192867506

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Reviews

In this brilliant new study, Morgan Frank offers a sharp challenge to the current institutional focus of literary scholarship. American literature and the American education system grew together less in harmonious partnership than in dysfunctional collaboration. What's more, the American system of schooling has never been as powerful as its promoters or critics imagine. A work of rich scholarship and keen critical insight, Schools of Fiction compels us to see the history of literature and education in entirely new ways. * Sean McCann, Wesleyan University * With broad ambitions and in fascinating detail, Morgan Day Frank has given us a compelling account of the important and intricate relations of the literary and educational systems, one that is centered on the late 19th and early 20th centuries yet has implications for the present. * June Howard, University of Michigan * Schools of Fiction returns us to the shaky beginnings of US higher education to tell the compelling story of how novels about the real world helped legitimize these nascent institutions. In this expansive study, detailed microhistories of secret societies, publicity offices, credit hours, and course electives illuminate both popular and canonical works of American and African American fiction. Sailing through the Scylla of institutionalism and the Charybdis of literary formalism, Day Frank shows us how to write literary and educational history together-how what was on the syllabus mattered to the young universities in which American literature was first taught. * Laura Heffernan, University of North Florida, author of The Teaching Archive *

Author Information

Morgan Day Frank is a lecturer in the History and Literature program at Harvard University.

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