20th Century American Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 20th Century - Literary Criticism, Teachers (by subject or specialization) - Biography, Critics & Historians - Literary Biography

English Papers: A Teaching Life

Name: English Papers: A Teaching Life
Author: William H. Pritchard
ISBN: 9781555972349

by William H. Pritchard

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Overview

English Papers

"Could one, after all this purposeful work, have become an anachronism? A dinosaur? Replaceable?"
--from English Papers

Well-known critic William H. Pritchard reviews his life as a passionate student and teacher of English in the classrooms of New England's Amherst College. Pritchard takes us from the era of the all-male college, where "conduct befitting a gentleman" was the only rule, through the political and social turmoil of the late 1960s, when the teaching of T.S. Eliot had to compete with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Ironically, as Pritchard finds his own voice as a critic and teacher, he finds also that his literary and pedagogical aims seem increasingly marginal. The book's later chapters recount the fragmentation and diversification of both the student body and an English department.

This lucid account offers a much needed personal chronicle of the issues involved in the contemporary debate surrounding the teaching of English literature. Pritchard not only observes, but dramatizes the teaching situation, and from both sides of the desk. With a candid mix of apology and nostalgia, Pritchard describes and evaluates changing circumstances in both the professor and the profession.

"Pritchard's discriminating intelligence is tough love at its best."--Newsweek

"William Pritchard is one of the most valuable people we have at the present time writing about poetry. His scholarship is formidable, his taste impeccable, his analyses of poetry quietly brilliant."--National Review

William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College. He is the author of two important biographies, Frost: ALiterary Life Reconsidered and Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. He reviews regularly for the New York Times Book Review, and his literary criticism is published in the New Republic, Hudson Review, American Scholar, and the Boston Sunday Globe. His most recent book, Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews, has been well received.

"Playing It by Ear is an attractive selection of Mr. Pritchard's work, high-spirited and exhilarating, written with grace in a style unclogged with theoretical argot."
--The New York Times Book Review

"An insightful and lively collection."
--Boston Globe

About the Author, William H. Pritchard

William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College. He is the author of two important biographies, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered and Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. He reviews regularly for the New York Times Book Review, and his literary criticism is published in the New Republic, Hudson Review, American Scholar, and the Boston Sunday Globe. His most recent book, Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews, has been well received.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Pritchard, critic, biographer (Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life), book reviewer and professor of English at Amherst, recalls his 30-plus years of teaching in this very densely written account of life in academia, about half of which is devoted to his own education. As a student at Amherst in 1949, where, he was told, ``conduct befitting a gentleman is expected at all times,'' Pritchard was exposed to the ``new curriculum'': a series of required courses conducted in all-male classes with a student-teacher ratio of 10:1. After graduate school, Pritchard abandoned his philosophy studies in favor of a career teaching English literature, and, in 1957, he accepted a faculty position at Amherst. He describes how his rarified world was changed by the social turmoil of the 1960s. Antiwar activism, feminism and new literary movements exploded on the campus. Amherst began admitting women and ethnic minorities, course offerings were modernized and English classes began discussing current events. Although Pritchard has accepted some changes as necessary, he is nostalgic for a traditional curriculum taught in a more insular atmosphere. (Oct.)

Library Journal

In this finely crafted memoir of his teaching and writing life, Pritchard (Playing It by Ear, LJ 12/94) traces the changes wrought in the study and teaching of English. Through his encounters with some of the greatest teachers and critics of the 20th century, Pritchard develops a critical sensibility that combines close reading of the New Critics with the moral criticism of Trilling, Poirer, and Leavis. Such sensibility, as well as his love of a clearly turned phrase, leads him into the world of professional book reviewing, where he begins to fashion the measured and evocative prose style for which he is so justly famous. Admittedly, the author's journey is a rather charmed and privileged one. However, what shines through here is Pritchard's passionate commitment to literature and writing in an impoverished academic world. This is a clear-minded and judicious tale of one critic's quest to situate his critical identity in a world that has largely left his kind behind. For libraries with large literature collections.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio