The 'sweet tyranny of creating one's own life': Rethinking power and freedom in English teaching

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THE SWEET TYRANNY OF CREATING ONE’S OWN LIFE:RETHINKING POWER AND FREEDOM IN ENGLISH TEACHING

Jory Brass

School of EducationUniversity of Cincinnati

Abstract. In this historical study of English teaching, Jory Brass adopts a governmentality perspectiveto highlight the contingency and limits of pedagogical arguments that construct an oppositional relationbetween power and freedom. In the first part of the essay, Brass historicizes contemporary critiques oftransmission pedagogies by comparing them with touchstone pedagogical texts of the 1890s through the1920s. Next, he revisits two early twentieth-century pedagogical frameworks to identify links amongpower, freedom, choice, and social norms that are obscured in contemporary pedagogical writing. Finally,Brass examines a popular contemporary text, Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in High SchoolEnglish, to highlight how its strategy to foster adolescents’ freedom and empowerment inscribes socialpatterns of power and regulation. The study denaturalizes oppositional accounts of power and freedomso that scholars and teachers may scrutinize how power circulates when English is positioned to governhow students understand and conduct themselves as free, responsible, and empowered subjects.

Introduction

Pedagogical writing in English education has been articulating concerns aboutpower relations in English classrooms for over a century. While these concernshave been historically continuous in English’s pedagogical literature, the exerciseof power in English has been described and critiqued in discontinuous ways.This historical study of English teaching highlights some changing constructionsof English through history to note the contingency and limits of contemporarypedagogical arguments that posit an oppositional relation between power and free-dom. In particular, it considers the social relations and norms put into play whenEnglish is positioned as a site to govern how students might comport themselvesas free, responsible, or empowered subjects. In this study I adopt a governmentalityperspective to break from more familiar accounts of English teaching that assumean oppositional relation between power and freedom in order to highlight howfreedom has been, and remains, a key object, instrument, and effect of power inliberal democracies.

Power and Freedom as Oppositional

Much of the pedagogical writing that has circulated through English educa-tion across the past several decades has assumed and constructed an oppositionalrelation between power and freedom. Many texts have argued, implicitly or explic-itly, that power works to constrain, coerce, or dominate individuals or groups;conversely, freedom is thought to be made possible by the absence, or removal, ofconstraint, coercion, or domination, which allows individuals or groups to expressor assert their subjective wills.1 Within this mode of argument, teachers have

1. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, United Kingdom:Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.

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been constructed as opposing power relations and fostering students’ freedom, orempowerment, when they limit or remove impositions upon students and insteadmake provisions for their activity, choices, and self-governance.

This construction of power versus freedom does not exhaust English’spedagogical literature, but it is embodied in several pedagogical constructs anddistinctions that are prominent in the field. Peter Smagorinsky, for example,has noted that teacher education in English largely has been organized arounda critique of transmission (for example, ‘‘teacher centered’’ or ‘‘text centered’’)pedagogies.2 Transmission pedagogies, it is argued, impose teachers’ own interests,perspectives, and interpretations upon students in ways that limit students’authority, engagement, and active learning. In contrast, many English educatorshave argued in favor of more ‘‘student centered’’ pedagogies that make provisionsfor students’ interests, choices, active learning, and social interaction. The latterapproaches, it is argued, not only work against potentially controlling relations inthe classroom but also foster students’ engagement, academic skill, and personalautonomy.

This mode of oppositional reasoning is not limited to mainstream accountsof English teaching. Many accounts of critical pedagogy also ascribe to power andfreedom an oppositional relation. Paulo Freire’s often-cited critique of ‘‘bankingeducation,’’ for example, constructs power and freedom as reasonably distinctand oppositional.3 Banking approaches are described as working against students’humanity, or liberation, by seeking to control their thoughts and actions, inhibitingtheir creative power, and rendering them as no more than passive receptaclesinto which teachers deposit knowledge. Similar to Freire, bell hooks’s ‘‘engagedpedagogy’’ also embodies the power versus freedom opposition in describingeducation as the practice of freedom.4 Teachers should not confine students to arote, assembly-line approach to learning, hooks wrote, nor should they enact ritualsof control; instead, the practice of freedom was constituted by a holistic pedagogythat educated the union of students’ minds, bodies, and souls. A less controllingand more engaged pedagogy would enable students to produce texts and knowledge(not only consume them) and claim active (not passive) roles in the classroom.

These oppositions do not encapsulate the important work of the scholarsmentioned here, nor do they account for all of English education’s pedagogical

2. Peter Smagorinsky, ‘‘Time to Teach,’’ English Education 32, no.1 (1999): 50–73; and Peter Smagorinskyand Melissa Whiting, How English Teachers Get Taught (Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1995).

3. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).

4. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge,1994), 13–15.

JORY BRASS is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box210022, Cincinnati, OH 45221; e-mail: <[email protected]>. His research draws upon sociocultural,critical, and Foucauldian methods to explore political, ethical, and moral dimensions of English teaching,literacy practices, and schooling.

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literature. At the same time, such pedagogical constructs and modes of oppositionalreasoning have been important because they have helped construct, shape, andcoordinate the ways in which English has been understood and approached inclassrooms, in teacher education, and in educational research. Their influenceis apparent in the organization and analysis of teacher education in English,5 inthe ways in which teachers have narrated their pedagogical fears and desires,6

and in the modes of political action and critique sanctioned or not sanctioned byeducational scholars, activists, and practitioners.7

A Governmentality Perspective

Despite their familiarity and appeal, oppositional accounts of power and free-dom are not inevitable. Michel Foucault, for example, did not posit an a prioridistinction between power and freedom, nor did he define them in essential oruniversal terms. Rather than articulating any general theory of power or freedom,much of Foucault’s work examined through history the ways in which relationsof power were constituted in a particular time and space. In doing so, Foucaultinvented a number of concepts that changed the ways in which it is possible tothink about exercises of power and freedom, especially in modern democracies,where freedom has been constituted as an objective, instrument, and effect ofpower relations.

Foucault’s notion of governmentality, for example, traces the historical emer-gence and transformation of specific networks of relations that have been integralto democratic governance.8 Governmentality refers to more or less calculatedattempts to work upon and through people’s choices, aspirations, and beliefs inorder to guide their conduct toward particular, multiple, and shifting ends (andwith relatively unpredictable consequences, effects, and outcomes).9 This wayof understanding and exercising power has been central to liberal democracies,which have sought means of ‘‘governing at a distance,’’ or enlisting the consentof the governed rather than forcing particular interests; in relations of governmen-tality, power is exercised by inculcating knowledge and ‘‘self-steering’’ techniquesthrough which individuals’ thoughts and conduct might be attuned to particularnorms of health, enlightenment, responsibility, productivity, citizenship, and so

5. Smagorinsky and Whiting, How English Teachers Get Taught; and Michael Moore, ‘‘Where We AreNow,’’ English Education 40, no. 4 (2008): 271–272.

6. Joseph Trimmer, ed., Narration as Knowledge: Tales of the Teaching Life (Portsmouth, NewHampshire: Heinemann, 1997).

7. Janet Alsup, Janet Emig, Gordon Pradl, Robert Tremmel, and Robert P. Yagelski, ‘‘The State of EnglishEducation and a Vision for Its Future: A Call to Arms,’’ English Education 38, no. 4 (2006): 278–294; andSuzanne Miller, ‘‘Reconstructing English Education for the Twenty-First Century: The Action Agenda,’’English Education 38, no. 4 (2006): 394–399.

8. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality,’’ Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5–22; and GrahamBurchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

9. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), 11. AsDean notes, ‘‘governmentality’’ can also refer more generally to any ‘‘mentality of government.’’


on.10 Thus, discourses of liberal democracy have not constituted freedom as anescape from social norms but as a capacity to understand and conduct one’s selfwithin socially normative rules and boundaries.11

A governmentality perspective draws attention to the limits of pedagogicalframeworks that construct power and freedom as reasonably distinct and neces-sarily oppositional. Foucault’s work enables us to recognize an apparent paradoxof governance in liberal democracies; rather than denying or suppressing freedomfor individuals and populations, the exercise of power has required and workedthrough their freedom:

Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only in so far as they are free. By this we meanindividual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which severalways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized.12

Influenced by Foucault, my study uses history and concepts from the gov-ernmentality literature to denaturalize familiar distinctions between power andfreedom in order to draw attention to power relations and normalizations thatcirculate through accounts of English teaching. I begin the essay by historicizingEnglish education’s long-standing critique of transmission pedagogies through acomparison of contemporary accounts with two of the first influential texts inU.S. English education, Percival Chubb’s The Teaching of English in the Elemen-tary and Secondary School and Hiram Corson’s The Aims of Literary Study.13

This comparison illustrates the historically variable meanings attached to variouspedagogies and suggests that contemporary scholarship has naturalized practicespreviously described as affording teachers more invasive and comprehensive meansof governing students’ lives. Next, I revisit two early twentieth-century pedagog-ical frameworks — ‘‘teaching for power’’ and Chubb’s discussion of ‘‘the sweettyranny of creating one’s own life’’ — to highlight how they identified importantlinks among power, freedom, choice, and social norms that are now obscured incontemporary pedagogical writing. Finally, I draw upon this historical and con-ceptual work to examine a best-selling contemporary text, Deborah Appleman’sCritical Encounters in High School English,14 to highlight how its strategies tosecure individuals’ freedom and empowerment inscribe power relations and nor-malizations that are not made apparent when power and freedom are conceived as

10. Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, Governing the Present (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2008).

11. James Donald, Sentimental Education: Schooling, Popular Culture, and the Regulation of Liberty(London and New York: Verso, 1992), 4.

12. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Truth and Power,’’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 119.

13. Percival Chubb, The Teaching of English in the Elementary School and the Secondary School (NewYork: Macmillan, 1902); and Hiram Corson, The Aims of Literary Study (London: Macmillan, 1895).The former work will be cited in the text as TE for all subsequent references.

14. Deborah Appleman, Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory toAdolescents (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000). This work will be cited in the text as CE for allsubsequent references.


necessarily distinct and oppositional. My goal is to illustrate the historical contin-gency and limits of familiar ways of reasoning about power and freedom in Englisheducation scholarship, to explore how power may work through people’s freedom,and to draw attention to social patterns of power and regulation obscured by morefamiliar conventions for writing and talking about English teaching. In doing so, Ihope to denaturalize, shift, and expand the terms by which teachers, scholars, andactivists engage educational interventions that seek to develop and shape students’capacities to govern themselves as free, responsible, and empowered persons.

Historicizing English’s Transmission Critique

Much of what has been written about power and freedom in English teachinghas been organized around a critique of didactic, or transmission, pedagogies.Contemporary accounts of English largely take for granted that transmissionpedagogies are controlling and undermine young people’s autonomy, or freedom.However, this section illustrates the historical contingency and limits of sucharguments by revisiting two touchstone texts in English education in the UnitedStates: Percival Chubb’s The Teaching of English in the Elementary and the Sec-ondary School and Hiram Corson’s The Aims of Literary Study. First publishedat the turn of the twentieth century, these texts were among the first attemptsto define English teaching in the United States, and they were highly influential,as both were reprinted regularly into the 1920s and were cited for decades asvisionary guides for twentieth-century literary education.15

Chubb’s text is pertinent to my inquiry because it also problematizedtransmission approaches to English — but in ways that work against present char-acterizations of English teaching. Chubb’s critique drew a distinction betweenteaching English as knowledge and teaching English as art. Literature and lan-guage were not knowledge studies, it was argued, and teachers and students failedto grasp the significance of art if they approached literary texts as objects of mereintellectual comprehension, handled them grossly for their factual knowledge,or puttered over philological microscopy, grammar, and allusions (TE, 372–373).Another major pitfall of teaching English as knowledge, Chubb reasoned, was thepropensity of ‘‘preachy’’ teachers to impose their own arguments and morals uponstudents: ‘‘There is one pitfall, however, that awaits those who are eager in thepursuit . . . of forcing the didactic note. A work of art is not a sermon or a pulpit;and we wrong it when we compel it to argue, or use it to enforce our own littlemoralizing text’’ (TE, 381).

This concern about proselytizing, imposing upon students, and limiting theiraesthetic pleasures might ring true for contemporary English educators. However,Chubb’s critique of didactics largely reversed present sensibilities: ‘‘We do noteducate primarily for knowledge; for the possession of knowledge affords noguarantee that it will be worthily employed’’ (TE, 380). In other words, Chubb

15. Arthur Applebee, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History (Urbana, Illinois:NCTE, 1974).


argued that English teachers should reject didactic approaches to English becauseknowledge alone was limited in its capacity to influence how people conductedthemselves. In order to increase teachers’ capacities to determine how young peoplewould live their lives, Chubb argued that English should be taught as art because

musical and imaginative products would lodge more memorably and fatally in the hearts andminds of children than anything else, and determine their life-long habits of seeing and feelingand . . . more than their powers of thought and of knowledge, control their being. (TE, 29)

Chubb was not alone in embracing more imaginative and aesthetic approachesto English as a strategy for determining how students ‘‘saw,’’ felt about, andcontrolled their being. Hiram Corson’s The Aims of Literary Study similarlyclaimed that didactic pedagogies were limited because a disciplined mind did notdetermine people’s active powers — that is, their capacities to choose and actintentionally: ‘‘Attempts at direct rectification or adjustment of [people’s activepowers], must be more or less failures . . . [because this] ignores the determiningpower back of the intellect.’’ Given the perceived limits of didactic teaching,Corson argued that literary education needed to work indirectly in order toaugment, rectify, and adjust people’s souls: the ‘‘vast and mysterious domain’’ thatdetermined the particular standards by which people would think, feel, and act.16

In this formulation, it was only by working upon and through the soul, or ‘‘whatis,’’ that literary education might steer the ‘‘what does’’ and the ‘‘what knows’’toward righteous ends.17

Thus, for Chubb, Corson, and other writers of the time, more aesthetic,holistic, and indirect pedagogies did not remove impositions or circumventrelations of control in order to free the union of minds, bodies, and souls.Conversely, such approaches were described as providing English teachers withmeans to effect a more invasive, comprehensive, and potentially life-long disciplineof not only students’ minds, but also their imaginations, emotions, sympathies,hearts, and souls — what Chubb called the ‘‘springs of character.’’ If teachers andtextbooks no longer tended toward what was ‘‘preachy’’ in English and no longertreated literary art like they would the Ten Commandments, Chubb argued, thesensuous appeals of art would work upon and through the springs of character tosecure lasting moral effects and profoundly influence the ways in which youngpeople thought about, felt about, looked at, and acted upon themselves andtheir worlds (TE, 381–382). In short, it was reasoned that English teachers wouldmagnify their influence and authority to the extent that they abandoned pedagogiespremised on purveying knowledge and instead worked upon and through youngpeople’s souls:

Our danger is less that of unduly magnifying our teaching office than of dropping to the levelof a commonplace professionalism. We should come nearer to being priests than purveyors;and indeed, it is in the growth of the feeling that is beginning to pervade our ranks of ourbeing a lay priesthood, called to the cure of young souls, that we have cause for highest hope.(TE, 392)

16. Corson, Aims of Literary Study, 9 and 14.

17. Ibid., 13–14.


The historical fragments explored here should trouble the ease with whichmany contemporary texts have drawn self-evident distinctions between transmis-sion pedagogies and less didactic, more aesthetic approaches to English. While acritique of transmission pedagogy was already present in the earliest accounts ofEnglish teaching in the United States, influential writers like Chubb and Corsonreversed present conventions of thought by suggesting that the problem withtransmission approaches was not that they were too controlling but that theyprovided limited means of influencing and controlling how individuals under-stood and conducted themselves. This analysis suggests that many contemporarystrategies to mitigate the presumably controlling aspects of English teachingironically entered English’s pedagogical literature as strategies to increase — notdecrease — teachers’ authority and their capacities to influence and control youngpeople’s lives.

‘‘Teaching for Power’’ and English’s ‘‘Sweet Tyranny’’

However, this is only part of my argument. In addition to noting how peda-gogical distinctions have been constituted differently through history, this essayillustrates how oppositional accounts of power and freedom may provide a limitedand misleading means of addressing the ways in which power circulates throughpedagogical accounts premised on governing students by getting them to governthemselves. More nuanced relations among power, choice, social norms, and self-fashioning are made apparent, however, by revisiting two long-forgotten constructsof early twentieth-century English pedagogy: ‘‘teaching for power’’ — which wasprominent in the first volume (1911–1912) of the English Journal, the long-standing professional journal for primary and secondary English teachers in theUnited States18 — and Percival Chubb’s account of the ‘‘sweet tyranny’’ of creatingone’s own life.

While contemporary texts may position students’ capacities to govern them-selves as oppositional to power, the inaugural volume of the English Journalironically described approaches that fostered students’ self-governance as ‘‘teach-ing for power.’’ Teaching for power was not predicated on mastering subject matterbut on self-mastery — that is, on creating, augmenting, and shaping young peo-ple’s capacities to think, feel, and act without coercion.19 To provide studentswith a sense of ‘‘power,’’ they needed to be made conscious of their capacity tomake choices and regulate their own thoughts, feelings, and actions. For example,English teacher Edna Williams described teaching for ‘‘real power’’ as helpingstudents recognize, embrace, and develop the capacity to work out problems inde-pendently, or to govern their past, present, or future choices by assessing and

18. Published by the National Council of Teachers of English, the English Journal remains the centralpublication targeting K–12 teachers of the English language arts; this section examines articles fromvolume 1 of this publication (November 1911–1913) that offered programmatic visions of the subjectEnglish.

19. William Owen, ‘‘The Educational Opportunity of High School English,’’ English Journal 1 (1913):200–201. This work will be cited in the text as EO for all subsequent references.


acting upon their real or imagined consequences.20 In Chubb’s text, teaching forpower included fostering self-mastery in the affective realm; students of Englishshould learn to attend to their subjectivities in order to decipher and manage theirown feelings, impulses, aims, emotions, and relations with others. In short, asEnglish teacher William Owen noted a century ago, young people’s capacities toexercise authority over their own choices and to remake themselves were not theantithesis of power, but ‘‘the fundamental index of power’’ (EO, 201).

Teaching for power exemplified what Foucault and others have analyzed asgovernmentality. Rather than signaling control, passivity, deception, or the denialof individuals’ capacities for choice and action, teaching for power presupposed,encouraged, and was productive of students’ choices and capacities to actintentionally. It was argued that English needed to work through ‘‘the actualthinking and acting of pupils,’’ so they might recognize their capacity for choice andexercise it responsibly.21 The point was not only that young citizens should choosewithout coercion, but that they should ‘‘gain power for the right interpretationof their experiences’’ so that their independent choices and ways of acting uponthemselves, others, and the world embodied what was positive, noblest, and best.22

This posed a problem, however, as English teachers reasoned that it was notnatural for students to govern themselves in ways that appealed to mature minds.Instead, it took an unnatural intervention — the inculcation of knowledge anddiscipline — to develop and shape young people’s capacities to understand theirchoices and regulate their own conduct. It was no longer desirable for Englishteachers to use threats or overt force, wrote teacher Herbert Bates; instead, theproblem of English teaching was coaxing students, bit by bit, to desire literarydiscipline and to seek it of their own accord.23

Chubb’s influential text turned to art, and especially literary art, as a strat-egy to develop young people’s willingness and ability to govern their own livesin accordance with particular norms and ideals. Chubb reasoned that narrative,dramatic, visual, and poetic texts could be deployed to connect to young people’slived experiences and infuse their imaginations, minds, pleasures, and imitativetendencies with the right sorts of aims, desires, and ideals. The goal was to cre-ate noncoercive conditions in which young people voluntarily assented to definethemselves and others in specific terms of likeness and difference, to judge theirexperiences in relation to those of real and imagined others, and to take an activerole in fashioning their own lives around particular norms, ideals, and markers ofpersonal identity and social solidarity. Chubb characterized these now signatureapproaches to literary study as subtly and sweetly tyrannizing:

20. Edna Williams, ‘‘How to Make English Literature Teaching Utilitarian as well as Cultural,’’ EnglishJournal 1 (1912): 151.

21. Jesse Davis, ‘‘Vocational and Moral Guidance Through English Composition,’’ English Journal 1(1912): 458.

22. Williams, ‘‘How to Make English Literature Teaching Utilitarian as well as Cultural,’’ 151.

23. Herbert Bates, ‘‘The School and Current Fiction,’’ English Journal 1, no. 1 (1911): 17 and 18.


[Literature must be employed] to bring the child under the sway of noble ideals of manhoodand womanhood . . . types of life . . . deeds . . . feelings and thoughts about the duties andopportunities of living. To read great books with one’s heart and imagination . . . [to] invest[particular kinds of life] with an imaginative halo . . . [and to] provoke admiration andlonging — is so important because it sets into motion the imitative tendencies that carry usinto action. We all tend to become what we admire; to copy the men and women to whomwe have given our heart away. It is through these, as embodying ideals that have hypnotizedus and have spread a subtle, sweetly tyrannizing influence through our beings, that we arecreating our own life and shaping our own destiny. (TE, 380)

This ‘‘sweet tyranny’’ hinged on students’ voluntary adoption of schemesof individual and collective identification that embodied established modes ofthought, affect, and action. Thus, power was not prohibitive, but productive,because it did not deny choices or action but instead encouraged them, shapedthem, and imbued them with desire. In Foucault’s words, ‘‘If power . . . never didanything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?. . . [It] doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but . . . traverses andproduces things . . . induces pleasure.’’24 The tyranny was ‘‘subtle’’ and ‘‘sweet’’in the sense that impositions were not accomplished by force, but by sanctioningrational principles and inculcating self-disciplinary techniques by which studentscould identify and interpret their ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘others’’ and exercise a measure ofcontrol over their own thoughts, desires, beliefs, and actions. In the sweet tyrannyof creating one’s own life, the self exercised power over the self by being thesubject of, and subject to, particular forms of knowledge, expertise, and discipline.

Variations of this sweet tyranny were articulated across the first volume ofthe English Journal as teachers like Cornelia Hulst and William Owen reasonedthat the subject English could ‘‘humanize’’ young people and secure a ‘‘true socialculture’’ by acting upon individuals’ capacities to make decisions, interpret theirworlds, and govern themselves. English class first needed to ‘‘rouse souls fromtheir passive states’’ and make students ‘‘conscious of their own control overthemselves’’ (EO, 200).25 Curricular experiences, texts, and pedagogical environ-ments also needed to be selected and ordered in a manner ‘‘capable of bringingto bear on pupils that kind of experience, indirect though it might be, by whichtheir forming minds and souls may be organized’’ (EO, 202). Hulst, for example,called for English teachers to ‘‘stimulate, and in some fashion to control’’ themeans by which young people could define themselves and others and ‘‘base theircomparisons of life and ideals in the different ages.’’26 Similarly, Owen was clearthat the course in literature should privilege

not all kinds of experience, but that kind that we need most in youth, in manhood [sic], andin old age to enable us to identify ourselves with our kind, to detect a particular likeness ofanother’s life to ours, to find the revelation of our yet unformed resolves in the governingideals of another’s mind. (EO, 199)

24. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (NewYork: Pantheon, 1980), 119.

25. See also Cornelia Hulst, ‘‘The Organization of the Course in Literature,’’ English Journal 1 (1912): 75.

26. Ibid., 73 and 75–76.


Thus, the English curriculum embodied a selective ordering of the symbolicas a strategy to order and govern students’ subjectivities. In the 1900s and 1910s,these governing ideals were constituted by Christian moral teaching, overlappingnarratives of ‘‘American’’ progress and exceptionalism, and the emerging truthclaims of the educational and psychological sciences. For example, Chubb’s textsought to infuse and guide young people’s self-fashioning with the ‘‘splendidanimating and elevating impulse’’ of a ‘‘new type of national culture’’ — one thatwas distinctly ‘‘American’’ but also linked ancestrally to the ‘‘scientific and artisticlaurels’’ of the British, as well as to groups of German, Celtic, French, and Norsedescent that were ‘‘justifiably of our population’’ (TE, 6–7). Similarly, Hulst’s ‘‘TheOrganization of the Course in Literature’’ called for teachers to order the Englishcurriculum selectively to guide young people to identify, appreciate, and interpretthemselves and others in relation to the ‘‘fruits of the struggle from pagan toChristian, from medieval to modern . . . [and] the riches . . . wisdom and beautybequeathed the American race . . . by its [European] sister-nations.’’27 Owen’saccount sought to organize young people’s minds and souls around ‘‘new criteria ofvalue’’ — the English curriculum would no longer be guided by classical literatureand philosophy but by ‘‘scientific [psychological] methods of investigation’’ andthe ‘‘standards of taste . . . ethical and spiritual ideals . . . permanent judgments . . .

and highest resolves . . . of ‘Americans’’’ (EO, 198–202).

In short, the subject English was positioned to define, legitimate, and inculcatethe means by which ‘‘American’’ citizens — individually and collectively — mightrecognize and develop the thoughts, ideals, desires, skills, and disciplines thatwere marked as central to early twentieth-century moral, cultural, economic,and civic life. Organized around select print artifacts, progress narratives, andinvented constructs of personal identity and social solidarity, these curricular andpedagogical practices were clearly normative and implicated in the selection,production, and regulation of historically particular kinds of rationality andsubjectivity. However, these patterns of authority and social regulation werenot accomplished by overt force or the suppression of choice; rather, ‘‘teachingfor power’’ and Chubb’s ‘‘sweet tyranny’’ worked by structuring possible fieldsof thought and desire and by acting upon young people’s actions with thehopes that they would voluntarily align their own lives and destinies withparticular regimes of truth — such as scientific rationality, Christian morality,and various racial, gendered, and national imaginaries — and larger bureaucraticconcerns — such as socializing populations (especially immigrants) into Anglo-American tastes and values, compensating for the presumed decline of ProtestantChristianity, developing an industrial workforce and economy, and forming apatriotic, democratic citizenry.28 It was through these strategies of nation-building,

27. Ibid., 75.

28. Stephen Ball, Alex Kenny, and David Gardiner, ‘‘Literacy, Politics, and the Teaching of English,’’ inBringing English to Order: The History and Politics of a School Subject, ed. Ivor Goodson and PeterMedway (London: Falmer Press, 1990); and Thomas Popkewitz, A Political Sociology of Educational


subjectification, and governmentality that the teaching of literature took on ethicaland political importance by the early twentieth century.29

The ‘‘Sweet Tyranny’’ of Critical Encounters

Pedagogical scholarship no longer refers to students’ ‘‘souls,’’ and the phrases‘‘teaching for power’’ and ‘‘sweet tyranny’’ dropped out of English educationscholarship in the first half of the twentieth century. However, contemporaryaccounts of English also seek to act upon and through students’ choices, desires,and actions in order to secure a variety of objectives understood to be desirable forthe individual and society. In this section I draw upon the historical and conceptualwork done across this essay to examine one such contemporary text — DeborahAppleman’s Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theoryto Adolescents — in order to illustrate how its strategies to secure adolescents’freedom and empowerment inscribe power relations and normalizations thatare not made apparent when power and freedom are conceived as opposites. Thisreading of Appleman highlights how English has been — and remains — a trainingin how to say ‘‘I’’ among the multiple and historically variable forms of subjectivityinscribed through the English curriculum and pedagogical practices.30

First published in 2000, Critical Encounters has remained a best-selling textwithin U.S. English education. Written for preservice and practicing teachers,Appleman’s text makes the case that four literary theories — reader-response,Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction — should be taught explicitly in sec-ondary English classes. The guiding assumption of the book is that contemporaryliterary theories provide teachers and students with a variety of interpretive strate-gies to not only read and reflect upon a range of canonical, contemporary, andmulticultural texts, but also interpret their own lives and the world around them(CE, 11).

Appleman’s text draws familiar distinctions between approaches to Englishthat impose upon students and those, such as Critical Encounters, that make provi-sions for students’ interests and capacities to act and construct meaning. Applemanargues, for example, that the explicit teaching of literary theories should not beanother form of ‘‘cultural transmissiveness,’’ where the teacher is the primaryexplicator of meaning and texts are presented as cultural treasures not to bequestioned. Further, the goal of Critical Encounters is not to turn adolescents intocritical theorists, but to encourage them ‘‘to inhabit theories comfortably enoughto construct their own readings and to learn to appreciate the power of multipleperspectives . . . [and] to approach texts with curiosity, authority, and initiative’’(CE, 9). Lastly, Appleman marshals arguments from other pedagogical texts to

Reform: Power/Knowledge in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Research (New York: Teachers CollegePress, 1991).

29. Donald, Sentimental Education, 53.

30. Robert Morgan, ‘‘The ‘Englishness’ of English Teaching,’’ in Bringing English to Order, ed. Goodsonand Medway, 203.


reason that contemporary literary theory can ‘‘redistribute interpretive power inthe classroom’’ and enable students to control texts rather than be controlled bythem (CE, 138–139). Through these familiar oppositions, Appleman’s provisionfor adolescents’ comfort and active meaning-making is framed as ‘‘a friendly anti-dote to the tyranny of the text that characterized some earlier approaches to theteaching of literature’’ (CE, 54).

At the same time, we can examine how Appleman’s text also embodies aversion of the ‘‘sweet tyranny’’ that was central to Chubb’s text and, more gen-erally, to modern rationalities of government. As was true of emergent accountsof English teaching,31 Critical Encounters has privileged literature as a tool toproduce and shape how young people experience and act upon themselves asself-governing subjects. Thus, power is not exercised through acts of coercion orthe suppression of choice, but it is exercised through the norms and principles thatguide teachers’ and students’ decisions and the means by which they are incitedto relate to themselves, to others, and to the world:

As teachers, we want our students to critically read the world; we want them to be able tomake personal decisions (or at least adopt a stance) that reflects a keen understanding of theirlocation (and degree of complicity) within a variety of competing ideologies and possibilities.(CE, 126)

Appleman’s strategy authorizes individuals to act and choose freely, but italso links subjectivity to power when they understand and discipline themselvesunder particular descriptions. Teachers and adolescents are not simply revealingan essential inner truth by defining themselves in terms of their ‘‘social location’’or ‘‘critically’’ assessing their ‘‘degree of complicity within a variety of competingideologies.’’ Rather, the discourses of contemporary literary and cultural theoryprovide teachers and students with expert-mediated languages and techniques forunderstanding and regulating themselves.

Attending to these terms and techniques enables us to recognize how Apple-man’s text simultaneously extends and breaks with power relations that haveinfluenced more than a century of pedagogical writing in English education.Clear continuities among Critical Encounters, ‘‘teaching for power,’’ and Chubb’s‘‘sweet tyranny’’ suggest that contemporary accounts of English have adapted andextended earlier pastoral pedagogies as a strategy to create self-reflecting, self-disciplining individuals who steer their own lives toward specific sets of (oftenunacknowledged) norms.32 However, these norms have shifted through historyamid ongoing struggles to define a ‘‘professional’’ knowledge of education andestablish particular truths about one’s ‘‘self,’’ others, and the world.33 At the turn

31. Robin Peel, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Questions of English: Ethics, Aesthetics, Rhetoric and the Formationof the Subject in England, Australia, and the United States, ed. Robin Peel, Jeanne Gerlach, and AnnettePatterson (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 16.

32. Annette Patterson, ‘‘Shaping the Specialist: Initial Teacher Training for English Specialists inAustralia,’’ in Questions of English, ed. Peel, Patterson, and Gerlach, 299.

33. Thomas Popkewitz, ‘‘Professionalization in Teaching and Teacher Education: Some Notes on ItsHistory, Ideology, and Potential,’’ Teaching and Teacher Education 10, no. 1 (1994): 1–14.


of the twentieth century, psychological discourses were enjoined with discoursesof Christianity, race, gender, and nation to justify and organize the English cur-riculum around sanctioned modes of individuality and social solidarity. A centurylater, Critical Encounters has marshaled the truth claims of critical literary the-ories to construct, order, and legitimate how teachers and students should readacross and between cultures, interpret sociopolitical relations, and explore thedifferences between and among individuals and social groups (CE, 2–3). Thus, asJulie McLeod has argued, critical theories can now be understood as implicated inprocesses of governmentality; Marxist, feminist, and poststructural theories havebeen harnessed to guide the work of curriculum, teaching, and learning and toeffect new norms of sociopolitical conduct and self-reflexive modes of subjectiv-ity.34 These relations of governmentality are central to Appleman’s project, whichseeks to influence how adolescents ‘‘see,’’ interpret, feel about, talk about, and actupon themselves, others, and the world:

Critical lenses provide students with a way of reading their world; the lenses provide a wayof ‘‘seeing’’ differently and analytically that can help them read the culture of the school aswell as popular culture . . . [and] help them learn to adopt the intellectual perspectives andlearning styles required by other disciplines. . . . Students can see what factors have shapedtheir own world view and what assumptions they make as they evaluate perspectives of others,whether a character from a text, an author or literary movement, an MTV video, a shampoocommercial, peer pressure, or the school system in which they find themselves. (CE, 3)

Across Appleman’s text, disciplinary rationality and theory is regarded asnecessary for ‘‘reading’’ texts and worlds, evaluating assumptions and perspectives,and exercising one’s choices responsibly in the domains of schooling, popularculture, and democratic citizenship. Theoretical knowledge is productive herein the sense that it has invented, structured, and authorized possible fields ofthought, ‘‘vision,’’ critique, and social action. The discourses of contemporaryliterary theories provide the vocabularies, categories, and techniques by whichteachers and adolescents are incited to ‘‘see’’ and think of their worlds, the normsby which they assess themselves and others, and the practices through which theyare acted upon, and act upon themselves, in order to be made free, enlightened,or empowered. For example, Critical Encounters calls for teachers to use conceptsand techniques of Marxism and feminism to help students ‘‘see’’ literary charactersand themselves not as ‘‘individuals’’ but as ‘‘players in a large social and economicsystem.’’ Theory is also described as helping teachers and adolescents recognizeand evaluate the ways in which their experiences have been ‘‘socially constructed’’and ‘‘shaped by cultural forces and prevailing ideologies’’ such as capitalism andpatriarchy. Appleman contends that young people would remain ‘‘powerless overthese forces’’ and ‘‘limited in their interpretive choices’’ without the developmentof such ‘‘critical lenses’’ (CE, 4 and 8).

At the same time, Critical Encounters embodies social patterns of power andregulation by drawing clear distinctions between ‘‘theoretical’’ and ‘‘atheoretical’’

34. Julie McLeod, ‘‘When Poststructuralism Meets Gender,’’ in Governing the Child in the NewMillennium, ed. Kenneth Hultquist and Gunilla Dahlberg (New York and London: Routledge Falmer,2001), especially 259 and 273.


ways of knowing the world and conducting one’s self. Among many possibleregimes of truth, critical literary theories are sanctioned to ‘‘redefine what countsas knowing in literature classrooms’’ and to ‘‘reshape the kind of knowledge thatstudents and teachers might have of texts, themselves, and the worlds in whichboth reside’’ (CE, 138–139). Thus, the text constructs students’ more familiar(‘‘atheoretical’’) ways of reading words and worlds as in need of expert-mediated(‘‘theoretical’’) intervention, stipulates in advance what constitutes free andempowered conduct, and also reifies the role of research universities in governingpersonal, economic, and civic life. Adolescents are constituted as politicallyenlightened, intellectually deft, socially responsible, and no longer complicit withdominant ideologies when they embody the analytical rationality and techniquesof academic disciplines and theory. Within Appleman’s argument, subjects cannottruly know themselves or their worlds without ‘‘theoretical’’ knowledge, cannotfree themselves (from ideological complicity or limited interpretive choices)without the tools provided by academic research and theory, and cannot conductthemselves in free, responsible, or empowered ways without the experts ofsubjectivity. However well intentioned, Appleman’s approach nevertheless seeksto constitute and regulate subjects whose conduct, goals, desires, and ways ofrelating to themselves, others, and the world are bound to the expert knowledgeand tutelage of university researchers and theorists.

This close reading of Appleman illustrates how its strategies to foster adoles-cents’ ‘‘freedom’’ and ‘‘empowerment’’ depend on exercises of power/knowledge,discipline, and training. Thus, Critical Encounters does not work by simplyremoving impositions or constraints in order to free preexisting selves thathave been blocked, distorted, or dominated; rather, in Foucault’s terms, thetext works by inventing, selecting, and inculcating particular ‘‘technologies ofthe self’’ — rationalized techniques by which adolescents, with or without help,can decipher, judge, transform, and monitor their own thoughts, commitments,desires, and actions.35 In this early twenty-first-century text, the discourses of con-temporary literary theories delimit the knowledge and self-techniques by whichadolescents can know and refashion themselves, conduct their lives in relation toantiracist and antisexist norms, and experience the truth clams of contemporarycritical theories as personal beliefs, desires, and political commitments.

Rethinking Power, Freedom, and English Teaching

At this point, we can call into question progressive and critical accounts ofEnglish teaching that construct reasonably clear distinctions between control,passivity, social norms, and cultural transmission, on the one hand, and freedom,choice, activity, and self-governance on the other. These oppositions have attaineda degree of self-evidence in contemporary pedagogical scholarship. However, thisstudy has illustrated that these pedagogical distinctions have been constituteddifferently through history, and they fail to recognize how power works throughpeople’s freedom, choices, actions, and capacities to govern themselves.

35. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Technologies of the Self,’’ in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with MichelFoucault, ed. Luther H. Martin and Huck Gutman (London: Tavistock, 1988).


The notion of governmentality illustrates historically how the moderndemocratic subject has been constituted as simultaneously the governed andthe government. Therefore, neither freedom nor subjectivity is antithetical topower because, as Nikolas Rose reminds us, power is also exercised throughpractices that make up free persons:

Modern forms of subjectivity, contemporary conceptions of agency and will, the present-dayethics of freedom itself are not antithetical to power and technique but actually [are] theresultants of specific configurations of power, certain technological inventions, more or lessrationalized techniques of relating to ourselves. One cannot counterpoise subjectivity to powerbecause subjectification occurs in the element of power; one cannot counterpoise freedom totechnology because what we have come to understand as our freedom is the mobile outcomeof a multitude of human technologies.36

Given these arguments, it may be useful to view English as a human technologythat works by inculcating and inventing more or less rational means of constitutingindividuals and populations capable of exercising their freedoms within sociallynormative boundaries.37 Since its emergence in the late nineteenth century, thesubject English has not been organized as a field of academic study so muchas an assemblage of invented concepts and techniques — vocabularies of self-description, codes and images of normal or enlightened conduct, rationalizeddistinctions for marking relations of sameness and difference, ways of ‘‘reading’’words and worlds, and techniques of self-reflection, self-problematization, self-discipline, and self-monitoring — that produce and shape people’s willingness andability to exercise authority upon their ‘‘selves’’ and steer their own minds, bodies,souls, and conduct toward sociopolitical objectives. As such, English has beenperennially caught up in relations of governmentality and historical struggles overlanguage and identity, culture and power, and personhood and nationhood.38

To conclude, the concepts and analytical strategies adapted from Foucaulthighlight the variable and historically contingent ways in which free and respon-sible conduct has been constituted in English’s pedagogical literature. Eschewingcommon oppositions that presuppose a hierarchical, impositional model ofpower — and a corresponding negative conception of freedom — draws atten-tion to the discourses that construct, order, and coordinate the ways in whichteachers and students have been incited to ‘‘see’’ and think of their worlds, thenorms by which they have assessed themselves and others, and the practicesthrough which they have been acted upon and have acted upon themselves. Indoing so, pedagogical scholars, activists, and practitioners can begin to accountfor power relations and normalizations assumed and put into play when Englishis positioned to govern the ways in which young people understand and conductthemselves as free, responsible, and empowered persons.

36. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: Shaping the Private Self (London: Free Association, 1999), 55.

37. Peel, Gerlach, and Patterson, Questions of English; Donald, Sentimental Education; and Ian Hunter,Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988).

38. Bill Green, ‘‘English, Rhetoric, Democracy; or, Renewing English in Australia,’’ English in Australia43, no. 3 (2008): 35–44.

The 'sweet tyranny of creating one's own life': Rethinking power and freedom in English teaching

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