Isn’t the avant-garde always pedagogical, she said, I mean altruistically bugbearish —Lyn Hejinian, My Life [1] I’d like to begin this essay with an experimental “deformance” of a literary text, reversing Lyn Hejinian’s terms in the epigraph above to ask “Isn’t the pedagogical always avant-garde?” By posing this question, I certainly don’t mean to imply that all pedagogy is inherently innovative. I agree with Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr who find that “[c]ontemporary literary pedagogy is...