In 1874, Harvard University, frustrated with the inconsistency of incoming students’ composition skills and literary knowledge, established its first entrance exam for high school students to ensure their readiness for…
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Contemporaries Essays, The Specter of High School English
Contemporaries Essays, The Specter of High School English
Teaching Writing in the Digital Age
Teaching writing has long been considered a central aim of the high school English language arts classroom. Yet what counts as composing has shifted rapidly over the past three decades….
Contemporaries Essays, The Specter of High School English
Introduction: The Specter of High School English
There is a specter haunting contemporary literary studies—the specter of high school English. This specter appears most often in moments of anxiety: when college instructors lament students’ inability to read…
Contemporaries Essays, The Specter of High School English
The Institution(s) of High School English
When it comes to the history of American education, Clifton Hillegass has not gotten his due. In his decades-long career, Hillegass’s name graced the cover of hundreds of books, works…
C.D. Wright in Context, Contemporaries Essays
Relative Poetics: On C.D. Wright, Appropriation, and the Decentered Self
Winter outside of Providence; winter in northern lower Michigan. Light like a gnat crawling the walls of a milk-glass jar — between snow and cloud cover, the sun’s pale ricochets…
C.D. Wright in Context, Contemporaries Essays
On the Inside: Prisons and Paratexts in One Big Self
Continuing in the documentary-poetic tradition established by poets like Muriel Rukeyser and Daphne Marlatt, C.D. Wright collaborated with a photographer and conducted field interviews to gather an archive of material…
C.D. Wright in Context, Contemporaries Essays
C.D. Wright: University Poet
Thinking on the work and career of the poet C.D. Wright, I return, in my own elliptical fashion, to two quotes (and one idea) from two writers who write about…
C.D. Wright in Context, Contemporaries Essays
Introducing “C.D. Wright in Context”
The question I had when I began the process for this cluster, “C.D. Wright in Context,” at its heart had to do with influence, but not exclusively in the way…
C.D. Wright in Context, Contemporaries Essays
“Moving Under My Dress”: C.D. Wright and Clothing
In Just Whistle (1993), Tremble (1996), and One Big Self (2003),1 C.D. Wright treats clothing as a liminal space or a semipermeable membrane between the self and the world. We…
C.D. Wright in Context, Contemporaries Essays
The Dialogue of the Eye: Wright, Truitt, and Martin
Not to know but to go on.Anything is a mirror.There are two endless directions. In and out.1 — Agnes Martin In The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a…