“Don’t smile until Christmas.” I was given this advice when embarking on my first forays into teaching undergraduates. Offered by a well-meaning older colleague as part of a wider discussion about how to gain the “respect” of my students, this advice has stuck with me for almost two decades, not because it was useful – it wasn’t – but rather because it was so unhelpful that it reminds me, when I am nervous, anxious, confused, or overwhelmed in the classroom, to smile. As Joanna Davis-McElligatt notes in her essay in this timely and thought-provoking volume, we are “taught both tacitly and explicitly to close [ourselves] off emotionally in the classroom and to expect [our] students to do the same” (203). However, as all the essays in this collection argue, it is only through engaging, feeling, and connecting with our students – and they with us – that learning can be transformative. As editors Christopher Lloyd and Hilary Emmett explain in their introduction, “theories of pedagogy need to reckon with affect much more practically than they currently do” (2). This book successfully does just that, and much more.

The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies, as the title suggests, draws together teachers of literary studies in higher education in Britain, the US, and Japan to discuss the role that affect plays in their pedagogy. With sixteen essays separated into four sections, the collection covers much ground, exploring reading practices, feelings, identities, and cultures. There is much that will be of relevance here for literary scholars interested both in affect and in the “method wars” (35), but the editors and authors tread lightly around the complexities of affect theory, and their arguments have resonance well beyond the teaching of literary analysis.Footnote ¹ Readers of the Journal of American Studies, whether based in literary studies, American studies, cultural studies, history, politics, or elsewhere, will find much to think about in these pages. Those of us who teach in higher education will have experienced, and witnessed our students experience, a range of emotions in our classrooms. Whether it is confusion, excitement, discomfort, joy, anxiety, or pain, the editors point out that our classrooms are spaces of “radical instability” (7) in which affect serves as “an interplay between that which we can pinpoint and that which we cannot” (10).

This book asks its readers to reflect on their pedagogical practice and offers a range of ways in which we can take our teaching forward. Encouraged by each of the authors’ deep and critical reflections on the emotional worlds of their pedagogies, I tried to take note of my own feelings as I read each chapter. I smiled knowingly as Hannah Lauren Murray described a seminar that feels “like a terrible party where the tutor is the only one on the dancefloor” (62) in her chapter on “Confusion.” I was inspired by Alex Rajinder Mason’s discussion of the desk as an affective object of white dominance, and I’m already thinking about how I might rearrange my classroom. I was excited by Christopher Lloyd’s approach of writing in fragments to signify the way that his reflections on pedagogy jostle and interlock. I felt a little triggered as I empathized with Crystal Harris’s experience of patriarchy and misogyny from a colleague. I was deeply moved by Davis-McElligatt’s approach to the pedagogy of Black grief and pain. Whilst reading another essay, I realized that I had dozed off (it was late afternoon; it was a comfortable chair; it simply didn’t speak to me). Finally, Emmett’s Coda, “Where do we go from here?”, made me scribble furiously, whilst exclaiming “yes!” and “this!” as she articulated the importance of collectivity, vulnerability, and care to achieving the perfect amount of “whelm” in our classrooms.

In noting what I describe above as my feelings but what are also (or actually) my bodily responses to the text, I realize that I am demonstrating the point of this book. Texts (be they literary, pedagogical, or otherwise) cannot be read without evoking affect. My emotional responses are a result of my experiences and my contexts; other readers will have different reactions, different chapters will speak to them. The same is true of our students: they will respond affectively both to us as teachers and to the texts that we teach, in different ways and as a result of their wide variety of experiences. It is therefore only by “writing the body back into theory and teaching practice” (7), by examining the role of affect, that we can begin to engage with our students, as bell hooks put it, as “whole human beings” (204).

Of course, the fact that we and our students are whole human beings was never more obvious than during the COVID-19 pandemic.Footnote ² As we (tried to) teach on screens, behind masks, at a “social” distance, and our students (tried to) learn in the midst of fear, death, and loneliness, the contributors to this collection were also writing, editing, and rewriting a book about affect and pedagogy. The impact of the pandemic permeates the pages of this collection; it might have been a very different book without that wider context. Just as the pandemic forced us to “pivot” (212) to a different kind of pedagogy, we are now forced to reflect on what is meaningful as we return, tentatively, to the physical classroom. For those seeking feelings of inspiration, solidarity, and just the right level of “whelm” as we move towards a post-pandemic pedagogy, this book is a must-read.