Addresses the question of what graduate students should know about fields of English in which they are not specializing. Finds the best answer is to teach "the classics." Illustrates with the example of a course on "The Faerie Queene" and "Paradise Lost," to show students how to work with texts and what can be…

A graduate student who was the only composition person in a two semester teaching seminar experienced the dilemma of defining and establishing that identity in the midst of a classroom struggle between cultural studies and literary theorists on one side and creative writers on the other. The factious teaching seminar mirrored the fact that English…