This paper will use a brief exploration of the concept of ‘context collapse’ to sketch a sense of the problems involved in teaching literature to undergraduates in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
To do so, it will use the forms of literary criticism as both material and object – material in the sense that the history of these forms enters into our seminar rooms in multiple ways, and object in the sense that if we are to produce more generative, democratic and engaged seminar discussions, we need to revisit the forms of literary criticism we rely on.