Further study: Teaching unfamiliar texts

Drawing on the experience of teaching an introductory course in university-level practical criticism, an argument is made for the importance of an element of professional improvisation in the teaching of English Literature undergraduates, based on the discovery and demonstration in the classroom of an unfamiliar text's formal arrangement, rather than a schematically prepared reading or more specialist extratextual knowledge. Poems by Tom Raworth, John Ashbery and Ron Padgett are briefly cited.