Teaching English literature in 2004: An Australian comment

Writing from their Australian experience, the authors compare ways of teaching undergraduate literature that have traditionally been associated with 'humanism' and those that have recently derived from 'theory'. They suggest that, despite obvious losses, the shift this has entailed from an 'immersive' to an 'extractive' way of reading has enabled a pedagogical explicitness and straightforwardness, the lack of which was problematic in the previous humanist paradigm. Nevertheless, they argue, a re-thinking of the antithesis of the 'immersive' and the 'extractive' could enhance the explicit communicability of humanist teaching and thus restore its viability for the contemporary, more democratically expanded student intake.