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Countee Cullen: How Teaching Rewrites the Writer

Hans Ostrom
University of Puget Sound

I. More than most literary movements, the Harlem Renaissance continues to resonate and symbolize in our literary and political consciousness. This is so because the movement was at once contrived and spontaneous, potent and blighted, timeless and short-lived_and especially because it either confronted or foreshadowed most of the key conflicts among race, writing, politics, canon-building, gender, and class that were to define American literature and African-American literature during the rest of the century (Lewis; Rampersad).

That this movement remains alive and significant is certainly good news. One piece of bad news is that the further we writers, teachers, and critics travel from such a crucial point in literary history, the more likely we are to accept hardened, simplified definitions of the writers who were and the writing that is "the Harlem Renaissance."

Thus, almost reflexively, we are likely to think of Countee Cullen as the conservative poet among that number when the saints came marching in. (Later I'll take pains to define "conservative" poet, as well as to suggest the limitations of the term). and we are likely to contrast him, not favorably, with Langston Hughes, whose work seems more various and flexible; more politically charged; less constricted by the tenets of a bourgeois American perspective or a staid Anglo-European literary tradition.

To elaborate on the contrast between Cullen and Hughes, it may be useful to review part of the latter's contribution to the Harlem Reniassance and subsequent movements. When Hughes wrote the essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" in 1921, there can be no doubt that he laid claim to distinct African- American territories of literature and art, and moreover that he prefigured the politically robust Black Aesthetic of the 1960s, as well as features of "multiculturalism" in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. When he published his short-story collection, The Ways of White Folks (1934), he was, to a degree, opening a territory to be explored by James Baldwin and Alice Walker (among others), one involving the confluence of race, class, erotics, and gender in American society. and when he published "Dream Deferred" and poems like it, he was functioning as nothing less than a prophet, telling his nation in plain English cats and dogs could understand that, yes, your cities will explode and continue to explode as long as you mislabel, misunderstand, and defer solving the American dilemma (Gunnar Myrdal's term) of race_that is, until you 'fess up to the single most virulent problem throughout the history of colonial and republican "America" (Myrdal, Bell, and Hacker, among others, are excellent at showing how persistent and destructive racism has been and continues to be in the United States.)

During the Harlem Renaissance, Cullen's stature as a poet was equal to that of Hughes (Lewis 75-78), but since then Cullen's work simply has not been accorded the same value in literary history, nor has it been seen to exert the influence Hughes's work has. Hughes is constantly cited as a crucial precursor to the Black Aesthetic that emerged in the 1960s; Cullen is not. For the last decade or so, Hughes has undergone widespread republication and scholarly reconsideration that far outstrips interest in Cullen. The conventional wisdom seems to be that Hughes deserves such continued, multifaceted examination in ways Cullen does not.

II. What is not part of the conventional wisdom or the received "headnote biography" of Cullen is that he taught middle-school English for a number of years in Harlem, and that a subtantial record of his teaching exists, chiefly at Tulane University (Amistad). What does this have to do with his literary status and his place in the canonical scheme of things? and what does this have to do with teaching creative writing in this day and age?

Good questions, if you don't mind my saying so. They are questions I'd like to try to answer here, and not in a way that will interest only those familiar with Cullen, or with the Harlem Renaissance, nor only in a way that will bear on African-American literature. They are questions that implicitly complicate, if not entirely alter, the contrast between Hughes and Cullen reiterated above.

Such questions also provide one potent way for us to confront our profession's current era, which I would label The Age of the Teacher-Writer. The fact is most writers these days teach, and more teachers than ever write--poems and stories, I mean. We can bemoan, decry, celebrate, or deny this condition, but the condition obtains (Bishop). However, when we "study" writers, we tend to treat the teaching part of their lives and careers either as never having existed or as having been sealed off from "the real work." We tend to do this for some fairly obvious reasons: We are convinced that, in fact, the poems and novels (or whatever) ARE the real work; that teaching is either play or the unreal work. When it comes to the practice of lit. crit., who cares if Robert Frost taught? This attitude carries with it New Criticism's haughty dismissal of biographical criticism, naturally, but it also carries with it the idea that when Frost (for instance) taught, he was merely allowing people to be in his presence, his writerly presence. He wasn't really a "teacher." To play a riff on Archibald McLeish's infamous edict (in the poem "Ars Poetica") a writer should be, not teach.

and of course, when it comes to our own lives as writer- teachers or teacher-writers, we are just as mightily conflicted--as the awkward, hyphenated terms themselves symptomize. For example, we may live to write, but we teach to live: Alienation 101.

More specifically, here are some points I want to pursue in order to answer the broad questions just outlined:

1. Countee Cullen led a double literary life, the ostensible "non-literary" (teaching) part of which we dare not ignore if we are to understand his work, his milieu, and his poetics fully.
2. In allowing his Harlem students certain literary maneuvers he did not always allow himself, Cullen dramatized key conflicts within the Harlem Renaissance; prefigured important developments in composition studies; and gave us a lens through which to (re)read his work. To some extent, my argument here is that the sustained teaching career of a writer is in itself an intellectual, critical, epistemological "act"--a working out of ideas about literacy and literature; therefore, what we know about such teaching adds a dimension that is every bit as telling as letters, essays, memoirs, diaries, and so forth in the study of writers and their work.
3. The case of Countee Cullen can instruct all of us as we make our costume changes from Writer to Teacher to Theorist to Compositionist to Critic to Self-Critic to Master to Apprentice; the case can teach us about our teaching, and about interpreting the costumes into which we madly change in our fragmented one- person shows. If his teaching can be a lens through which to view his work, it can also be a lens through which to view our work.
4. In literal and figurative terms, Cullen was also a student, and a black student in white-supremacist America. In his teaching and writing, he compensated for losses and humiliations suffered as a student_just as we do, even if some of our sufferings are much less considerable, not racial, and so forth. I will not insult you or Cullen by suggesting that we all need to get in touch with our inner student or that all sufferings are equivalent; however, when we focus on power, the hard barriers supposedly separating teaching, learning, and writing evaporate, and in significant ways, our "studentness" sticks with us, sometimes in most unhealthy, conflicted ways.
5. And finally, Cullen's teaching helps focus questions of genre, especially questions about appropriate genres and about revealing differences between what writer-teachers assign to their students in the way of genres and what writer-teachers themselves write.

III. Before I explore these points, let me, as promised, touch briefly on Cullen's literary conservatism, which applies to his work chiefly on two counts: subject matter and linguistic choices. These are hopelessly relative counts, of course, but in relation to other Harlem Renaissance writers, Cullen seems to favor universal subject matter, as opposed to writing more explicitly about material conditions, concerns, and predicaments more explicitly African-American. Further, he seems less inclined to remake the traditional forms in which he writes--ballad or sonnet, for instance--than Hughes, and here is an obvious place where questions of genre and questions of literary politics converge. Finally, Cullen is more inclined than Hughes to employ formal standard English that sometimes appears even to have more in common with British English than American English.

I acknowledge how imprecise the term "conservative" is in this context, but it still seems applicable in the sense that Cullen's work retains many longstanding elements of British lyric poetry, many "genre-characterisitics," if you will. By contrast, Hughes's poetry deliberately, frequently, irreverently improvises upon such characteristics and sometimes even abandons them altogether. Consider one stanza from the Cullen poem "From the Dark Tower":

We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap; (Williams)

The message here is not meek, the way with words not inconsiderable. But in the company of works by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, such writing seems extremely reserved, buttoned down, forced, occasionally antique. Reticence, formality, blandness--these are among the characteristics associated with Cullen's verse and supportive of the term "conservative." Contrast "From the Dark Tower" with Hughes' "Dream Deferred" or even the Madame poems, and you will likely see merit in the characterization. David Lewis writes, "Sometimes Cullen must have set even Harlem's teeth on edge with Crisis [magazine] throwaways lisping of a 'daisy-decked' Spring with her `flute and silver lute'" (Lewis 77). The term "throwaway" implies the idea that Cullen's poetry was weakest when certain poetic manners I have been calling "conservative" became formulaic--easily tossed, thrown, and therefore easily dismissed--tossed out.

The nature and function of Cullen's conservative choices, including choices of genre and within genre, are more complicated, however, than this basic sketch and the earlier contrast with Hughes reveal. For one thing, not all of his poems are the same--an obvious point but one that's easy to misplace. In "Saturday's Child" (Williams 616), for instance, Cullen seems to inhabit the form--in this case, a ballad--more successfully, finding a way to drive the verse with a more self-possessed diction. By "inhabit," I mean a kind of maneuver in which writers impose power or authority over a genre, as opposed to the maneuver to which Lewis refers in the paragraph above--a detached, unassertive, self-defeating manipulation of stock techniques or genre elements. Here is one stanza from "Saturday's Child":

Death cut the strings that gave me life,
And handed me to Sorrow,
The only kind of middle wife
My folks could beg or borrow.

One reasonable reading of such a representative stanza is that Cullen successfully exploits the tension between and among three genres--monologue, ballad, and lyric. In its own way, such a poem is both conservative (attentive to tradition) and improvisational in the way Wordsworth's most successful "lyrical ballads" are. There are too many pitfalls to count in representing Cullen as the Wordsworth of the Harlem Renaissance, but drawing a momentary parallel between the two writers is instructive, helping to illuminate how writers, how Cullen, interacted with genres.

One point to stress, then, is that "conservative" by its very nature is an extremely broad term, and that even when we take pains to narrow its application we must recognize that a writer may be both ineffectively conversative (writing "throwaway" poems, for instance) and effectively conservative (exploiting tensions between traditional genres, for example).

The scope and direction of this essay are such that, for more extensive explorations of what I've labeled as Cullen's "conservatism," its complexity, and its limitations, I would refer readers to the work of Avi-Ram, Lomax, and Shucard.

Let us move now to the more central concern of this essay, which is that the circumstances of Cullen's writerly choices, including choices concerning genre, are perhaps most startlingly complicated by what we know about his teaching.

IV. When, in the mid-1930s, Cullen joined the faculty of Frederick Douglass Junior High School (P.S. 139) in Manhattan (Harlem), he did so chiefly to make a living. But however simple his reasons may have been, to enter that world was to enter a bewilderingly complex matrix of political forces, personal choices, and competing agendas. It was also to enter a public education system that from the vantage point of the late twentieth century looks all too disappointingly familiar.

For in addition to Cullen's personal teaching materials, the Amistad Collection contains school-board and municipal documents that show how underfunded the Harlem schools were in contrast to other New York City districts; how narrowly obsessed the school system was with standardized testing; and how often teachers in such a system had to serve numerous masters: parents, colleagues, principals, board members, educational philosophers, mayors, et al.

To this complicated matrix, Cullen brought his own complicated background. He was a poet who had gained renown, but with the coming of the Great Depression and the decline of the Harlem Renaissance, he was--as a black poet--a writer for whom renown did not bring its own momentum.

The many teaching materials that have survived tell us much about Cullen's adaptability and courage as a teacher, and much about how a writer's and a teacher's choices converge. One remarkable fact, for instance, is that Cullen's English classes enviably integrated literature, composition, and creative writing--even as they had to pretend to satisfy the school board's bizarre demands, which included teaching grammar, academic-essay development, marketable skills, and canonical literature in one fell swoop. (Sound familiar?)

Cullen's plan books show that he negotiated these almost- impossible circumstances and created an integrated writing class using two key pedagogical moves. First, he always adapted--one might even say deconstructed--received curricular edicts. To sift through the materials is to observe a teacher absorbing and transforming exterior strictures of the educational environment, a teacher making the material his (in this case) own. Second, he centered most of his choices on students, their aptitudes, conditions, and interests--a concept that remains radical and threatening to this day because of its breathtaking simplicity and practicality. That is, he wanted to make the students' education their own--wanted them to "inhabit" it the way Cullen, at his best, inhabited the institution of lyric poetry he chose to join.

For example, a plan book from early in his career (February 1935) shows him struggling to adapt the requirement of teaching "practical" writing. First he decides to have the class write "a letter ordering a magazine." Then he decides to have them write "a friendly letter on "My Ambition In Life'". A strange assignment? Well, yes--but the method of Cullen's madness begins to emerge, especially in the adverb "friendly," which the middle- schoolers would have understood, and which would have implicitly introduced ideas of audience and the writer's self. The adverb encodes a deceptively sophisticated rhetorical move.

A month later, faced with task of teaching such wildly different literary pieces as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," A Midsummer Night's Dream, and "The Celebrated Jumping Frog . . .," Cullen becomes even more student-centered: On March 8 he decides to have the students "write a letter to a friend telling what interested you in the A.M. ["Ancient Mariner"]." By December 3, he's having them write "stories my mother and father tell of us children," an assignment that seems to mix narrative, fiction, autobiography, ethnography--perhaps even a little folklore.

For a ninth-grade composition class in the early 1940s, Cullen integrated poetry-writing, autobiography, the notion of a "thing poem," the notion of a monologue, reading, speaking, and revision. Here is his note:

"Class 9A(2)
Composition

Theme: Original verse: subject: Identify yourself with your favorite toy, and write a poem in which the toy speaks.

Treatment: Class discussion, poems written at home--brought in, read, corrected, re-written. (Box 11, File 13, Amistad)

Naturally, the word "toy" seems a little dated in the context of a ninth-grade class, at least from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, when ninth graders seem more jaded than Philip Marlowe. But otherwise, the assignment seems remarkably current and progressive, using creative writing in a composition class, embodying a student-centered approach, staying attentive to revision, and above all integrating a variety of elements in a rhetorical situation. Here are some lines from student Luke Ramsey's poem, "My Ball Speaks":

I am the one, who takes the beating,
Because I'm bounced, all over the place.
I sometimes can have my revenge on them
By knocking them right in the face.

What a nice surprise--of a male, middle-school sort--there in the last line. Notice, too, how Luke is working with and hearing the rhythm within the rhythm; his ear tells him to put in commas in the first half of the quatrain to slow down the lines. and it seems that Luke is able to transcend the exercise and inhabit the form by bringing forth an image he knows well: having the basketball bounce unpredictably. The autobiographical element empowers him, one might say--gives him room to maneuver.

Here are lines from Harold Killough's poem, "The Train":

My name it is Electric Train.
In the house always, sunshine or rain.
I don't have a bit of fun.
All I do is run and run.

There is an interesting empathetic move here; Harold sees something of Sisyphus in the train, chooses not to see the train as his toy anymore.

Two years later, Cullen puts a historical spin on the assignment, having students write poems on such figures as Lincoln and Douglass. Notice the hint of Rap and Hip-Hop in the lines from James Boffman's "Lincoln and Douglass":

Lincoln was needy for advice, Douglass' counsel he sought.
Wisdom and guidance is what Douglass brought.

Is poetry appropriate for a compositon class? (For a particurlary illuminating recent discussion of composition "versus" literature, see Lindemann.) In the way Cullen uses it, it seems to have been. He offers an avenue by which students can come to own the poem; he uses the assignment to access issues of voice, revision, and precision. Are the assignments too labyrinthine--Rube Goldberg conconctions? A fair question, though Cullen did seem to know what his students could and could not achieve, and he seemed almost always to think through the purposes of assignments, and to construct them in ways that did not bewilder the students. (Would that we had videotapes of his oral, in-class elaborations on the assignments.) All in all, the level of integration and improvisation Cullen achieves remains enviable. After some fifty years, the worth and inherent logic of such assignments endure. Will our teaching materials hold up as well after fifty years?!

Nonetheless, Cullen could not fight City Hall, as it were. He could not make the funding fairer, the classes smaller, racism less monolithic, or educational standards less surreal. But he could and did create productive pedagogical zones for his students. Moreover--and here is a crucial point--he did so through innovative writing assignments, the existence of which one could not have predicted based on the implicit ethos of Cullen's own writing, an ethos this essay provisionally labeled "conservative" earlier.

One way to interpret this unpredictability, I think, is not to say that Cullen the teacher and Cullen the writer were two different entities (a self-defeating reliance on a tired dualism), but rather to say that Cullen the writer recognized all too well how marginalized his students were and created pedagogical spaces for them which were rarely if ever created for him. This interpretation assumes a fair amount of empathy on Cullen's part.

This is a good place, then, to discuss a telling bit of evidence about Cullen the student, evidence which applies to the "empathy" argument. Among the Amistad Center materials is a graduate paper Cullen wrote for Irving Babbitt during a brief stint at Harvard: "Walter Pater as a Romantic Critic." It is an accomplished piece of criticism, notable in part for the maturity of its argument, its understanding of romantic poetics, and its confident prose style. Professor Babbitt gave it an A-, with this comment:

"A good formulation of Pater from a distinctly modernistic point of view. The best corrective of your tendency to overestimate Pater would be to build up your background (Aristotle's Poetics, etc.)."

This is a quintessentially aloof, unhelpful response to Cullen's essay, of course. Aside from two words ("good formulation"), in fact, it is not a response to Cullen's writing but a kind of express delivery of hidden agendas and coded messages: You like Pater too much. You aren't aloof enough in your rhetorical stance. You have not read what I have read. What about Aristotle, what about Aristotle? Your "background" is lacking. Whereas Cullen's middle-school strategy is to give students power and create pedagogical space, Babbitt's university strategy is to close almost every door along the corridor. His comment isn't exactly mean or bullying; he closes the doors gently. Nonetheless, they are shut and locked. For the strategy of his teacher's discourse (shifting metaphors now) is to circumvent the piece of Cullen's writing before him and, in a way, to force Cullen to fight a rear-guard action concerning excessive enthusiasm, modernist tendencies, and "background," that loaded term.

After leaving Harvard upon receiving his M.A., after seeing the socioeconomic foundation of the Harlem Renaissance get wiped out by the Great Depression, after seeing his early literary fame bear meagre fruit, did Cullen rush to Frederick Douglass Middle School determined to become Irving Babbitt's pedagogical opposite? No, it's not that simple, of course. On the other hand, his lack of power as a student and a writer must have been palpable to Cullen in a variety of ways, large and small. And the abundant evidence of how he operated as a teacher tells us that he chose not to visit the sins of the dominant culture on the sons and daughters of a marginalized one.

V. All well and good, but what does Countee Cullen in Harlem have to do with us--the M.A.'s, the M.F.A.'s, the Ph.D's of contemporary North America, the citizens of CCCC, MLA, NCTE, and AWP, the teachers of College Writing in its many forms? Let me count a few of the ways.

1. The example of Cullen gives us a different, more realistic, and therefore more useful model of the writer/teacher from the one that has dominated our professional consciousness since World War Two. This dominant model is that of the writer-in-residence, the writer who has "made it" (whatever that means, and it has usually meant a book or a prize or some other cultural anointing) and on the basis of making it is invited to teach at a college, except that the teaching is usually accompanied by a wink and a nod. Cullen, a black writer in Great Depression America, couldn't "make it" in the usual sense. For black writers, early success did not predict later security. For Cullen, publishing books and winning prizes and even attending Harvard didn't pay off as it might have if he had been white. Therefore, when he taught, he really did teach: every day, all day, at a school in impoverished Harlem. He taught in ways significantly different from the way most well-published writers-in-residence of his and subsequent generations taught. He taught to a markedly different set of students in a markedly different set of socioeconomic circumstances.

   For almost all of the writer-teachers or teacher-writers currently making the transition from M.F.A. or Ph.D programs to college jobs, Cullen's experience is much closer to reality than the experience, for example, of John Ciardi, Randall Jarrell, or Karl Shapiro, to choose writers associated with the 1940's and 1950's; and it is closer to reality than that of a shrinking handful of famous writers in residence, such as Rita Dove or Gary Snyder.

   Cullen embraced his circumstances with pedagogical creativity, quiet subversiveness, and not a little productive empathy for the disempowered. That is to say, he confronted and made use of a rather brutal fact: He had more in common with the students of Frederick Douglass School than he did with Irving Babbitt or Ernest Hemingway. He did not deny the fact. To reiterate a point made early in the essay, "reading" Cullen's teaching in this way helps us productively complicate our reading of Cullen's poetry; it adds texture and complexity to comparisons between his work and that of Hughes, for instance. It does so not in the usual way biography informs a writer's literary work, but in distinct ways that concern literacy as negotiation, literacy as power, teaching as power. Put another way, seeing how Cullen helped middle-schoolers negotiate writing may well demystify different ways Cullen negotiated his own writing and inscribed himself on traditions of lyric poetry.

2. When Cullen wasn't just trying to get by from day to day, he was trying to confront the socioeconomic injustice that was killing Harlem and its schools. The literary conservative was, at the very least, an educational progressive, perhaps even a radical. Labels aside, he confronted questions of power and injustice.

   We teacher-writers and writer-teachers should continue to help each other to do the same. How well are M.F.A. programs equipping their graduates for the real work of teaching that these graduates will do? What are MFA and PH.D. programs doing about the horrendous job market in English? How well is the Associated Writing Programs looking after the interests of students? Why do such hard barriers exist between M.F.A., Ph.D.- literature, and Ph.D.-rhetoric students when almost all of them will end up with jobs that include the teaching of first-year writing? and so on.

3. To paraphrase the bandits in "Treasure of Sierra Madre," Cullen didn't need no stinking genre boundaries. Poetry, essays, stories, autobiography, cumulative sentences, sentence combining, letters, prosody excercises, parody exercises: the students of Frederick Douglass School wrote it all. Cullen's class was a great Cajun gumbo of genres. Although virtually all of the theoretical, pedagogical and practical evidence suggests that our classrooms should be the same, our curricula remain excessively genre-bound. Ph.D. students write "papers"; MFA students write stories and poems; the deans running the show write memos. Instead, everybody should be writing everything, particularly at the undergraduate level, but also in graduate programs. MFA students should write nonfiction prose about teaching and theory. Ph.D. students (and deans) should write poems and stories.

   A broader, related point is worth emphasizing here. It is that Cullen's maneuvers within a literary tradition are parallel to maneuvers his students made within an educational tradition. Cullen's pedagogical strategies highlight this parallelism for us: Cullen the teacher enables his students to negotiate genres in the same way Cullen the poet negotiates (in "Saturday's Child," for instance) genres of lyric poetry he has received from the Tradition. To put the matter in even broader terms, pedagogy can be seen--ought to be seen--as a vibrant site where writers', students', teachers', and theorists' notions of genre and genre- mastery converge and often collide. Pedagogy "reads" genre and struggles of genre-power in ways we should not neglect--as theorists, as writers, as teachers, as hybrid entities combining all three roles.

4. As noted earlier, real and apparent differences exist between Cullen the writer and Cullen the teacher. Such differences exist for us all: Perhaps we give ourselves advice about writing that is completely different from the advice we give students. Perhaps, as MFA students (for example), we take one sort of course in the afternoon and then teach one the next day that is based on completely different pedagogical assumptions. Just as knowing Cullen's teaching enriches our knowledge of his writing and of issues central to the Harlem Renaissance, exploring the commonalities and conflicts between our own teaching and writing can only enrich us. Probably all graduate students in writing, rhetoric, and literature should keep ethnographic journals or do other sorts of writing that explicitly integrate their experiences as writers, students, teachers, and theorists_as well as parents, workers, spouses, and whatever. That is to say, we need to address not just issues of power but also the insidious compartmentalization of genres, subject matter, and the often alienated, competing roles of writer, student, and teacher.

VI. Teaching rewrites the writer. It complicates a writers' relationship(s) to genre in general and genres in particular. Studying the teaching of a writer who taught rewrites our notions of the writer, of his or her writing, of his or her maneuvers within traditions of genre. Teaching should be seen as part of the whole, in our lives and work and in the lives and work of writers who came before us. Teaching is a site and a text, not just a job. It enacts theory and exposes contradictions--if we allow it to do so. These are some of the issues Countee Cullen the teacher has helped me consider.

I think the teaching histories of countless other writers can do the same for other teachers of writing and writers who teach. Such teaching histories should become more greatly accepted sites of research for graduate students of creative writing, rhetoric, and literature. By reintegrating teaching histories into ongoing professional inquiry, we are more likely to integrate pedagogy into literary history and genre-theory. We are more likely to integrate teaching, writing, and learning in our own lives. Countee Cullen in Harlem was a kind of unwitting beacon for this sort of work.

Also, in English-studies graduate programs of every stripe, courses should integrate varieties of writing, varieties of genre. Graduate students just embarking on their teaching careers should write about that teaching in a variety of ways, should present that writing or ideas from it in their seminars and workshops, should be encouraged to conduct meta-analysis of their double and triple lives as writers, teachers, and students, tearing down boundaries and dried-up dualisms between theory and practice, "TA-ing" and studying, writing and teaching, and so forth. What was good for Countee Cullen's Harlem ninth graders could be excellent for our own graduate programs, where issues of power, ownership, masters and apprentices, discourse codes, "background," and hidden agendas are everywhere. As a socioeconomic site and as a crucible of competing discourses, pedagogy is every bit as complex and influential as publishing, but mostly it is not treated as such. The same theoretical models that have helped us examine genres in relation to publishing, canon formation, and discourse communities (feminism, new historicism, social-constructionist rhetorical theory, multiculturalism, and so on) can help us examine genres in relation to pedagogy; in relation to the pedagogical histories of writer-teachers; in relation to ethnographies and self-studies of teachers; and in relation to pedagogy's attendant issues of power, discourse, silence, and reinscription. Elsewhere in this volume, Allison Giffen refers to genre as a "kinetic site." We might profitably depict pedagogy in similar terms--that is, as a place with its own integrity, its own identity; as a place with stories to tell about writers who teach and teachers who write.

To a degree, then, this consideration of Cullen is meant to be a way of showing how the invisible (a teaching-history) can be made visible, can be interpreted, can open up other dimensions. To teach is to create a work; it is to work within, and to inscribe oneself upon, genres of pedagogy.

Works Cited

Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. [The teaching materials are contained in Box 11 of the Cullen papers, which are organized according to correspondence, literary manuscripts, etc. Whole plan books have survived, as have many samples of students' writing.]

Avi-Ram, Amitai. "The Unreadable Black Body: 'Conventional' Poetic Form in the Harlem Renaissance." Genders (March 1990): 32-46.

Bell, Derrick. Faces At The Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Bishop, Wendy. Released Into Language. Urbana: NCTE, 1991.

------. "On Learning To Like Creative Writing," in Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy, ed. by Bishop and Hans Ostrom. Urbana: NCTE, 1993.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and George Houston Bass. Mule Bone. New York: Pantheon, 1992. [This reissue of the play on which Hughes and Hurston collaborated contains a detailed discussion of their artistic and personal differences.]

Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. New York: Charles Scribners, 1992.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was In Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981. Reprinted by Oxford University Press, 1989.

Lindemann, Erika. "Three Views of English 101." College English 57, 3 (March 1995): 287-302.

Lomax, Michael. "Countee Cullen: A Key to the Puzzle." The Harlem Renaissance Reconsidered. Ed. Victor A. Kramer. New York: AMS Press, 1987.

Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem & Modern Democracy. Two Volumes. New York: Harper & Row, 1944.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Two Volumes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 and 1990.

Shucard, Alan R. Countee Cullen. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Williams, Oscar. A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry. New York: Scribners, 1970. 616.