Dr. Alexander Manshel Talks High School English & the Making of American Readers

In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Alexander Manshel, English professor at McGill University and author of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon, to explore the under discussed history of the high school English classroom—a space that is simultaneously the most influential literary institution in America and the most overlooked by literary scholars. Drawing from his recently published article “High School English and the Making of American Readers” and his forthcoming book High School English: A History of American Reading, our conversation traces how the interpretive practices we take for granted in English classrooms (like reading for character, reading for theme) were shaped by specific historical forces, from Cold War anxieties to the rise of New Criticism. Xander and I wrestle with what it means that these inherited methods quietly structure not just how students read, but how they understand themselves in relation to each other, society, and the very idea of America.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

High School English as Literary Institution

• The high school English classroom as the place where more people read more literature more often than anywhere else—and yet largely ignored by literary scholars
• A persistent gulf between secondary and post-secondary English educators, despite shared students, shared problems, and a shared intellectual tradition
• How testing regimes and institutions like the College Board have come to mediate (rather than facilitate) cross-institutional dialogue

Genres, Methods, and the Pedagogy of Individualism

• Reading for character and reading for theme as products of post-WWII Cold War imperatives and New Criticism, not timeless defaults
• How the high school canon, from Catcher in the Rye to 1984, consistently frames literature through the lens of “individual versus society”, functioning as a pedagogy of individualism

The Canon Revisited

• Despite decades of canon war debates reshaping university syllabi, the most-taught texts at the high school level have remained remarkably stable
• The case for a living, evolving canon rather than an abolished one: these shared texts function as a national literary mythology with real cultural and political power
• How the canon wars at the university level has tended to elevate writers of color primarily for works set in the historical past, effectively disincentivizing studying the works of authors writing about the present

Continuing the trend of this series, our dialogue explores the structural issues plaguing English education (particularly testing regimes, standardization, and institutional isolation) that have narrowed what English can be, while insisting that the discipline’s shared texts, practices, and people offer a power we have yet to fully seize or realize. For teachers who want to know more about the history of their discipline and its methods, and for literary scholars who have yet to reckon with the place where most reading actually happens, this conversation offers both a historical accounting and a call to collective action. We hope you’ll join us in our quest to seize the means of curriculum! (T-shirt incoming).

High School English and the Making of American Readers (article — open access) How The Great Gatsby Took Over High School (New Yorker article)

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