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Clues toward an Introduction, or How We Are All Ethnographers

This symposium emerged from several panels chaired by the Division on the Teaching of Literature at the 2004 Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia. The significant attendance at these panels and the lively discussion following the presentations demonstrate the professional interest in exchanging information on teaching literature in the context of difference. As the title of the symposium suggests, Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe served as a conceptual and thematic point of departure. Our first panel commented on Graff’s book, challenging the author and inviting his response. The next two panels sought to push Graff’s views beyond the pedagogy of composition and rhetoric to the teaching of literature. Rather than contesting Graff, the presenters explored alternative “cluelessnesses” that arise in teaching literary texts around issues of difference. Expanded versions of two of those presentations follow here, revealing some of the conditions, pressures, and innovations of the literature classroom in the current arena of identity politics. Difference, whether posited as gender preference, cultural particularism, linguistic or religious or racial identification, or geopolitical hotspot, Pedagogy