In 1955, The American Scholar published a discussion among influential writers and editors titled “What’s Wrong with the American Novel.” In the symposium Ralph Ellison remarked that “I just feel that we are called upon to do a big job, not because someone is going to give us a star on the report card, but because this is America and our task is to explore it, create it by describing it.” His conviction came from his success in communicating a creative vision for self-determination in his novel Invisible Man three years earlier. From experience, he knew that writing into a conversation about the nation’s identity could change the ways other people understood their lives and commitments. Widely read and acclaimed, the book draws together and intervenes in multiple cultural conversations. It is a virtuosic celebration of dynamism and fluidity. When I started teaching English in a public school in 2016, just after finishing a dissertation on American literature, I was happy to see worn class sets of the novel in the book room. I have taught it most years since. I am lucky to have a choice. In New York City, as in other districts across the country, public elementary and middle schools, and some secondary schools, have given up on novels altogether in favor of canned, test-aligned English curricula with proprietary textbooks. Instead, I teach to external exams that require no knowledge of writers or books. This framework could allow for a lively, decentralized approach to literature instruction if other infrastructure supported such a thing. But with good reason, even teachers with some degree of autonomy give up on long, old novels. Excerpts are easier. Working through Invisible Man in this climate, I began to think about what it might look like to teach it as though I had
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