What Are Literary Studies For?

The present article addresses the nature and purposes of literary studies in secondary and upper secondary English teacher education programmes in Sweden. It is based on a study of syllabi from all programmes nationally and for the academic year 2017-2018. The article maps the goals formulated for literary studies as well as the literary and disciplinary repertoires foregrounded in these documents, and so provides a snapshot of the kinds of literary studies that student teachers of Englishhad access to. It situates literary studies in the context of steering documents for English teacher education, and it shows that, whilst literary studies were a given part of English teacher education in the studied period, they relied on a narrow conception of the discipline. Literary studies mainly attended to twentieth and twenty-first century prose fiction and regarded literature primarily as a source of worldly knowledge. Indeed, the repertoires mediated seemed based on their potential to cover curricular ground in relation to steering documents for Swedish schools. Given the relative freedom institutions had to define the subject-specific content of teacher education, the results prompt a discussion about the knowledge repertoires that student teachers need as part of their higher education and as preparation for professional practice.