Prologue: No Place Like Home Introduction: The Depressed 1. We’re All Screens 2. Early Warnings 3. Learning Management 4. Against Sheep 5. Trigger U. 6. Ecophobia 7. Environmental Humanities? 8. Public Humanities? 9. Skimming the Surface 10. Autotheory 11. Beginnings 12. Chance Meeting 13. Theory Today 14. END MEETING FOR ALL 15. Night Writing 16. Less Grading 17. Tenure 18. Exhaustion 19. Well-Rounded 20. Turning Kids into Capital 21. Writing Together 22. Adjusting 23. First-Year Seminar 24. Pitt’s Law 25. Into the Unknown

What readers may not anticipate and should be delighted by the presence of, is a vast range of topics—seemingly randomly interspersed throughout the book—that break up the chapters of both theoretical musings and practical applications of managing the college literature classroom in the early twenty-first century world of pandemic lockdowns, changing university concerns, and the post-Postmodern world of businessmen in the White House. The honest tone of Schaberg’s prose is refreshingly welcome—he is continuously questioning what he is doing, why, and how is it affecting his students as well as providing critiques of what is wrong with higher education. [...] The optimism and pessimism of our current teaching mode alternate throughout Pedagogy of the Depressed. Schaberg's deepest concerns mirror many of ours. That administration will not see moving online as a fearful, temporary situation, but rather as a new efficient system that eliminates all sorts of issues, including those of class size limits or scheduling issues. We are depressingly isolated from our colleagues and valuable impromptu discussions and collaborations. A bonus? Throughout the book, Schaberg also talks about other texts that speak to the issues he is addressing. This is a great, and much appreciated, way to increase our academic TBR piles.

This is a book about teaching and learning in the early 21st century, especially in a higher education context where instructors are exploited, students are exhausted, classrooms are eviscerated, and the machine of capitalism grinds on.