Q: What first inspired you to teach literature? A: I have always loved to read, and when I learned about "close reading," it suggested lifelong intimacy with books; teaching seemed like a natural career. My first teaching experience was at a Quaker private school in Philadelphia, where I taught 9th and 11th grade English.

Working with these bright students made me understand for the first time that literature could be even more rewarding when it was shared and dialogic than when it was a private communion between myself and a book. I also learned that teaching, like writing, was an activity of total presence, much more exciting, alert, and creative (in my educational history) than being a student. Ever since, I've been trying to figure out how to make the experience of being a student as productive, intense, and energizing as the experience of being a teacher.

Q: What are the key issues or obstacles facing teachers of literature in higher education today?

A: For years, the humanities have seemed to be in crisis-falling enrollments, loss of prestige, low funding, no jobs. (It's like the old joke about the restaurant-the food is terrible, and such small portions!) There are as many explanations as there are experts, and a lot of them contradict each other too. I would like to find a way to make the teaching of literature more of an intellectual collaboration, and to bring teachers together in real or virtual space to think of ways to make literary study yield cumulative and progressive skills. Teaching those skills is our work--the task that gives our profession value--as well as our job-the task that pays our salaries. The intelligence, imagination, and ingenuity that now goes into devising research projects could also be applied to devising ways to use both traditional methods and new technologies to enhance and improve learning.

Q: What made you want to write Teaching Literature?

A: In 1998, I started to teach a seminar at Princeton on literary pedagogy for graduate students in English and Comparative Literature. I discovered a lot of stimulating books about teaching in higher education. But they were also very generic, dealing with broad questions of lecturing, handling discussion, grading, and so on. There were also excellent books and articles about teaching composition and writing. I was looking for a kind of text that did not exist, that talked specifically about the demands and practice of teaching poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, but also related literary pedagogy to some of the central issues in learning theory. So I decided to try to write one.

Q: How do you think the book might help other literature professors, or teaching assistants?

A: As one of my graduate students said about our weekly seminar meetings, "they build esprit de corps; one never feels alone with one's problems, frustrations, and anxieties." For almost all my friends and colleagues, teaching is a private enterprise, which we conduct as best we can, but all too often we teach unto others as was taught unto us, for better or for worse. Obviously, there are many ways to be a good teacher; we don't all have to use the same methods. Nevertheless, teaching is an activity which profits from collaborative investigation, from shared ideas, and from open discussion of goals and techniques. I hope TEACHING LITERATURE will be a starting point for discussion and self-reflection.