In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Jeffrey Lawrence, professor of 20th and 21st century American and Latin American literature at Rutgers University and author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño and the Spanish-language novel El Americano. Like me, Jeffrey has found himself intrigued by recent developments on Substack, where a growing literary scene is raising questions, debating issues, and engaging in conversations that don’t fit neatly into traditional academic venues. Our dialogue moves between the institutional structures that shape literary studies, the surprising public appetite for serious engagement with the humanities online, and what it might mean for secondary English education to reconnect with its disciplinary roots.
Key Concepts:
Public Humanities
- The distinction between community-engaged public humanities and public-facing writing that still operates through prestige networks
- What it means to invite people into a discourse rather than simply making that discourse more visible
- How Substack has opened space for a literary culture where thousands voluntarily participate in serious criticism outside the credentialing structures of the university
Disciplinary Fragmentation
- The silos within English departments (literary studies, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, etc.) and how those divisions shape what reaches K-12 classrooms
- How methods from rhet-comp and cultural studies seeped into secondary English education while literary studies seemed to turned inward
- The historical decline of cross-pollination between MLA and NCTE, and what that separation has cost both fields
The Canon Question
- The difference between treating the canon as a fixed inheritance and treating it as a living tradition that can be renegotiated in each moment
- Why refusing to engage with questions of canonization has its own costs — including leaving students without the tools to participate in, critique, and renew long-standing intellectual communities
- Framing canon formation not as culture wars but as an ongoing disciplinary practice students can and should be invited into
Defending the Humanities
- How the defense of the humanities can be seen as being too intramural and why that hasn’t worked
- What genuine heterogeneity might look like in literary studies, and why public platforms may offer something the academy currently does not
- The gatekeeping mechanisms that constrain academic publishing and hiring, and how they limit the range of voices and methodological commitments in the field
In what’s quickly becoming a theme in these conversations, we also discuss how the people best positioned to connect literary culture to a broader public (high school English teachers!) have often been alienated from it through regimes of high stakes testing and curricular standardization. For educators who share that sense that something essential has been lost in the way English is taught and structured since the neoliberal turn within K-16 education, this conversation offers both a diagnosis and a provocation.
Jeffrey’s Substack
Anxieties of Experience
El Americano
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