This article argues that a public education in method—specifically, close reading—is the only viable role for literary studies within the public humanities. Drawing on recent discussions about the uses of the public humanities—and setting itself against recent interventions that have proclaimed a different public role for public literary studies—this article takes the form of an overt but minimalist manifesto: it tries to make the minimal case for public literary studies that is sufficient to give it a public usefulness. In so doing, it breaks down previous efforts of understanding the utility of literary studies as related to literature’s utility, but also to large-scale interventionist ideals such as climate-change activism. It proposes close reading as training in public debate, as an exercise towards better public meaning-making, and thus as a signal contribution to the making of better democratic citizens in a deliberative public sphere.

What does it mean to decolonize the literature classroom? This short paper is intended as a personal reflection on teaching as an engagement with the social forces that bring neocolonial relations into the classroom, drawing on my experience teaching literature and literary theory in South Africa and Canada. I explore the idea of decolonizing the classroom as the production of an “outside” that provides meaning for the classroom’s “inside.”