Housekeeping #3

I have been a bad housekeeper. It seems like a good time now, before our second collaborative reading, to take stock of the status of The Long Eighteenth.





(Click the graphic to enlarge.)


Our upcoming reading will include posts by myself, Dave Mazella, Jen Golightly, Bill Levine, Alex Seltzer, Carrie Hintz, "KW," Shayda Hoover, and Blanford Parker, as well as anyone else who chooses to jump in. (Don't be shy!) I met with Blanford this morning and he is looking forward to our conversation.

Please feel free to publicize this event to your colleagues.

What would you like to see in new editions of novels?

Strictly hypothetically, if a publisher were to produce a new line of 18c novels, what would you like to see in terms of editorial policy?

There are of course a dozen ways to buy, say, Robinson Crusoe. The market is competitive. You have the Penguin edition, the Norton, the Oxford World's Classics, the Bedford Cultural Edition, and the Broadview. There are still others for general readers--Signet, Barnes & Noble, Everyman, etc.

If there were to be one more available, what would you like for it to include or exclude that would set it apart from the other editions? Do you and your students actually use the substantial textual and critical support routinely included in the Nortons and the Broadview editions? Do you find the current scholarly editions limiting or overwhelming? Are your students happy with their prices, the format, etc.?

Specifically, how would you feel about the return of the hardback edition? If Penguin, for example, were to publish the same text, introduction, and notes in a hardback edition with more durable paper within $5 or so of their paperback price, would you order that book for your students instead and do you think they would be glad you did?

Dates Finalized for Parker

I've heard from Professor Parker and he's verified that the week of December 3rd is good for the group reading, so I will put it in our sidebar and send another note to C18-L. Please feel free to publicize this event wherever it is you publicize things! The conversation that comes out of this book should be useful to scholars at all levels and in most areas of interest in our era of English literary studies.

I also would like to remind the assembled that we still have twoone chapters ("Transitional Augustan Poetry" and "Johnson and Fideism") available for anyone who'd like to lead discussion on those days. If we don't have a volunteer, I will go enlist one of my colleagues, or, especially in the case of the Johnson chapter, I may just do it myself. Also remember that, as with the McKeon discussion, anyone should feel free to jump in with a post at any point in the conversation. The purpose of the schedule is merely to ensure we cover the whole book, not to stifle any other ideas that come to mind.

(Isn't it nice not to be doing this with the constraints of either print or a conference panel?)

Also, Bill Levine, if you're reading this, please send me an email at carrieshanafelt at gmail.com so I can add you to our roster of contributors. Done.

Finals bad! Hulk smash!

Briefly, I will note that I've updated the Parker reading schedule here. There is just one chapter up for grabs, though I encourage any of our contributors to feel free to post at any point during the reading alongside the scheduled posts.

As I think about things coming up in December, I realize I have to give a final exam to my British Literature Survey students. I am dreading both writing the exam and grading it, as both will make me come face-to-face with the problem of what different groups of students are actually learning from my class.

This is, as I've mentioned before, my first class whose focus is on absorbing a body of literature, as opposed to learning about writing or analytical methodologies. (My evaluator seemed to think I had turned my Brit Lit Survey into a methodology course, which I think was a compliment.) At the end of the semester, I not only need evidence that my students are able to analyze poems and do a lit-crit research paper on a novel, but I also require proof that they, like, read the stuff on the syllabus. I can't pass someone who can't name some Romantic poets.

In the past, when I've been told to give a final exam, if my students seemed to be keeping up just fine with the material during the daily writing, I've followed the example of one of my favorite undergraduate professors and cancelled the final, asking them all instead to read a shortish novel of my choice and to lead a discussion during the allotted final hours. I would grade them on their ability to focus on passages, come up with interesting interpretations, and respond to one another's ideas. Usually, I bring a nice red velvet cake and some nut brittle. It's a pleasant way to end a semester, and everyone goes home feeling good about themselves.

But this semester, there have been too many students, too many readings, and too many absences for me to keep up with who is doing the reading. Every day, when they come into class, I ask them difficult analytical questions as a little seven-minute writing prompt. When I get their responses, it is easy to tell who the best students are because they have clearly read the material to a depth that allows for this level of thought. The rest of the responses I get are usually so off-base that I simply cannot tell whether they've not done the reading, or whether they have, but need help knowing what it means. There is a level of difficulty that allows the best students to shine, but levels out the rest of the students to the point of unevaluability.

So in order to give some kind of credit for just having followed along at a basic level, I have to give a quizzy final. Of course I'd rather do an analytical thing where I ask for differences between Renaissance and Augustan aesthetics, but not all of my students are really able to follow along at that level. Some of my students will feel cheated because sitting around memorizing the syllabus isn't going to help them, and the students who missed a lot of classes will certainly fail, since they've missed so much lecture and discussion content. On the other hand, if I give a quizzy "who/what/when" final, the better students in the class, who are keeping up marvelously with the sense of the passage of time and the changes in prose and poetry, may not remember what the titles of the poems we read are, and they will wonder what all that heavy-duty talk about aesthetics and ethics was about.

Is it possible to balance the two? Who here has written final exams for lit surveys before? What did you do? What worked? What didn't?

Upcoming reading of Parker

All systems are go for a group reading of Blanford Parker's The Triumph of Augustan Poetics. I think we decided that things are very busy for people around Thanksgiving, but sometime in the weeks that follow would be good. I think Prof. Parker is flexible then. What about the first week in December? We could start Sunday, Dec. 3rd and carry it through the week.

For those who'd like to volunteer, let us begin choosing specific chapters. I am happy to cover whatever anyone doesn't volunteer for, but Parker writes extremely interesting things about people I don't feel like much of an expert on, like Butler and Thomson. If you see something in your area of study here, don't be too shy to lay a claim on it. Below are the chapters and their subtitles.

Please volunteer in the comments so we all know what you'd like to do, and I'll update this post with the names (or pseudonyms) of participants. Likewise, I'll post this to C18-L to see if there are any of our other colleagues who'd like to jump on board.

Introduction (Shanafelt)

1. Samuel Butler and the end of analogy (Mazella)
The curious man, Butler and the formula of exclusion, The low road of the Augustan

2. Transitional Augustan poetry
The eclipse of analogy, The cases of Cowley and Dryden, The transformation of prose style, The reinvention of nature, Benlowes: the survival of conceit

3. Pope and mature Augustanism (Golightly)
Belinda alone in the world of things, Pope's spatial art

4. Thomson and the invention of the literal (Levine)
The new objects of poetry, Augustan naturalism, The anxious eye: Thomson's Summer

5. The four poles of the Christian imagination in relation to Augustanism (Hintz)
Introduction, The four poles of Christian poetics, The logist, The analogical, The mystical, The fideist

6. The fideist reaction (KW)
Fideism in Restoration and eighteenth-century culture, Prior's fideism, Solomon and David, Young's Night Thoughts

7. Johnson and fideism (Hoover)
Fideism and humanism, The two Johnsons, Johnson and the critique of analogy, Epilogue

What makes a successful discussion?

In light of a meeting I am having tomorrow with the faculty member who observed my class this semester, I have been giving some thought to the problem of deciding whether a class discussion has been successful. I'm beginning to think our measurement of success is almost completely dependent on the subject matter and goals of the course.

When I was taking composition pedagogy back at Case Western Reserve, I read plenty of material arguing that the only good class discussions are ones in which the students themselves are creating questions, addressing one another, feeling free to analyze relevant personal experience, and so forth. That is, in the ideal composition classroom, students are creating the content, leading discussion on the content, and responding to one another's comments. The instructor should, after modelling this behavior, barely be in the room at all. In order to create this kind of environment, there has to be almost constant sharing of their written content, an appropriate model and direction for the conversation, and trusting relationships between class members, usually created in group work. If the class gets off-topic, then and only then is it up to the instructor to figure out how to reinterpret the ongoing conversation in a way that will result in learning.

And when I teach composition, I shoot for this model. They do lots of peer review and are responsible for leading most of their own discussions of the reading. I try to assign readings that are immediately translatable by them into useful writing skills, like essays from Dave Eggers's Best American Nonrequired Reading series. They're current, they cover a wide variety of subject matter, they clearly demonstrate various rhetorical and creative strategies, and they require very little prodding by me to get students to relate to them and respond to them as models of writing. Also, in the composition classroom, emerging with a clear understanding of all the readings is not as important as being able to use the readings as a model for written work.

But when I started teaching Intro to Lit, I realized the difference in the content of the class made a huge difference in how I conducted class discussion. I tried putting them in groups to discuss the readings, but I noticed as I walked around that, since discussion wasn't about their own content, only a few students in the class were participating in the group conversations. And though I tried to insert a few comments and questions here and there, the readings were simply too difficult for them to lead the conversation on their own. I found their personal anecdotes in relations to texts to be mostly irrelevant, and I saw some eyes going dull with frustration when a student held onto the conch too long. The more I taught Intro to Lit, the more I found myself removing those opportunities for the class to guide itself. I went from a model in which five groups each chose one of five books to discuss and research to a model in which everyone read Les Liaisons dangereuses and I led the discussion. Everyone seemed happier, even if it wasn't following the more desirable model of a "successful conversation."

In my current British Literature survey, I have finally become a tyrant. We still sit in a circle, and I give them seven minutes at the beginning of each class to answer a few written questions and get their heads in gear for the day's discussion, but now most of the class is me reading passages, asking questions, calling on everyone who raises a hand, responding to their comments, providing a little historical/biographical background, suggesting connections with other authors we've read, trying to repeat as boldly as possible anything fruitful that comes up, returning to comments made during previous weeks, and even giving a little personal content of my own. My students seem to really love the class, and they have developed into quite sophisticated readers and thinkers about literary history, but I can't help but feel something has been lost.

My observer told me he was extremely impressed by the sophistication and excitement expressed by my students, and that he liked how they came up with difficult connections between authors and eras on their own, but he challenged me to think of ways to move away from the question-answer-evaluation model of class discussion. I'm worried about the groupwork thing, partially because I hated groupwork in lit classes myself, and partially because some of my students are really hostile to one another. They're juniors and seniors, mostly, and they've been around each other for years. At this point, I feel more like letting them express their competitiveness through class discussion than like watching them eyeball each other in repressed-hostile groupwork.

There's also the possibility of making them do presentations. I've said this before, here, but I really hate undergraduate presentations. They take up valuable classtime, they're never very good even when they're done well, and no one gets the information they need when they need it. Hence the wiki.

Especially when teaching historical literature to undergrads, it seems like the elusive instructor-free model is almost impossible to achieve in class discussions. If I leave them to their own conversational devices, we'll never get around to talking about aesthetic differences between Augustan and Romantic poetry; we'll be too busy talking about which literary characters our ex-boyfriends remind us of.

One thing that has decentered the class a bit is that a few of my students are already experts of a sort on different topics their research has led them to. One woman has taken several classes on the Romantics, and she's been able to ask the class quite complex questions for discussion. Another woman who has been researching the racialized discourse of pre-Dracula vampirism has been able to bring up her research to the class. A few paid really close attention in their Milton class and are able to suggest interesting connections there. The problem is that not many of my other students have done historical thinking of this kind before and are still in "I liked it; it reminded me of me" territory.

I'd love to know what kinds of discussion methods you use. How do you lead (or not lead) the discussion? How do you bring out certain kinds of analytical responses? What preparation do the students have, beyond reading the primary material? How do you deal with off-topic (or even wildly inappropriate) responses? Do you find, as I do, that the more the class is about reading and understanding a particular historical literature, the less ready you are to drop the reins?