Literary Learning: Teaching the English Major, by Sherry Lee Linkon

Sherry Lee Linkon. Literary Learning: Teaching the English Major. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. xvi, 163p. ISBN 9780253223562. $24.95.As the lone instructor of our department’s Introduction to Literary Studies and Capstone courses (the only two courses we teach exclusively for English majors), I was comforted and excited to find a practical study devoted to seeing literature pedagogy through a literary lens, not an assessment rubric! Sherry Lee Linkon, a professor of English and American Studies at Youngstown State University, exposes the very ways English “experts” (literature professors) employ “literary knowledge” in their own scholarly and pleasurable interactions with texts. She goes on to suggest that professors can advance student learning and an appreciation for the complexity of literary analysis by appropriately employing this knowledge in assignment and course design. The value of Linkon’s book resides in its confident application of “literary thinking” to the literature classroom and even to the professional exigencies of faculty scholarship and assessmen