On the edge of my seat to find out this cliffhanger (and I don't even teach literature courses, I'm just nerding out)! Your essay reminds me something I'd forgotten, just how exciting it was as a student to be assigned to read novels for class. I guess it's an excitement I'm still tapping into - self-assigning myself deep reading and essays! Thank you for the wonderful community you create for those of us tapping into that excitement of reading novels, John! 💮
Thanks! Agreed... I think that much of "literature Substack" is about people who miss those days of getting the syllabus at the beginning of the semester and diving into the reading.
I’d say Austen is part of what historians call the “long 18th century,” so there’s an out for you. This must explain why she was left out of that first Norton Anthology. But was she included in the first Norton for 1800 onwards?
Oh, yes, "long 18th century"! I'm totally going to use that if anyone ever asks.
I think that there may have been a brief excerpt of Austen in the first edition, but I can't remember for sure. There used to be a website that had a useful table of all of the past editions and the texts that they included, but I can't seem to track it down now.
What a great discussion of 'making a course'! I grapple with this question in different ways - to do all without making it meaningless...how to reduce to something wonderfully inspiring while also delivering the history / artistic movements / aesthetics / etc. But I am not surprised you found your way through Emma, John! This is both because it is a great (and important) novel and because you love it. I think so much of our own passion for literature can be felt by the students, who might then find their own passions.
PS the start of the essay had me thinking back to preparing for the horrific literature GRE. It should not be about memorizing all these characters but about understanding in the way you teach your students. I guess this is difficult to quantify in a standardized test, however. For some reason I was telling my (British) husband about this test last night. He was properly freaked out.
PPS I have your other Emma posts saved up but just need to finish rereading the novel first!
Yes, I try to teach only texts that I love for that very reason! And yes, I remember the GRE subject text very well. I lucked out because there happened to be extended sections on George Eliot and John Donne, both of whom I had studied in depth in the previous semester. We don't even require the GRE in our graduate program any more, because we find it has little predictive value for how students will perform, and it prevents a lot of less privileged applicants from even applying.
I rather want to take the opposite tack from a theme. Throw things at the wall, as it were, to see what sticks. Let students understand that the classics are there because people liked them. Show them that much of literature is dirty, and violent, and snarky . Give them tastes of different styles and times and motives.
Yes, I've done plenty of throwing things at the wall over the last couple of decades. Some things stick more than others, but sometimes texts will surprise you. Lots of students, for example, love *Beowulf*, if they are properly introduced to it.
I can imagine that. I donated a chain maille shirt to the teacher at my son’s high school who taught it. The kids loved trying it on and speculating about swimming in it.
And back when I was in high school, the rowdy and not very academic girls loved the bits of Canterbury Tales we got.
If I were teaching , at some nice private school, I would try to teach Beowulf to a small group in a dark room, huddling by the fireplace.
My guess is organization around recurring literary allusions or themes.
I do feel for the student cramming all that literature into a one year course and the professor having to teach beloved texts at lightening speed. I have spent three decades reading classic literature just for fun, and I have yet to fully tap all the resources of the modern English language, never mind translations of great works from other languages.
Yes, it's not ideal. For the English majors, they will have a chance to revisit much of the material in upper-level courses, but the for the non-major, this is our one shot to introduce them to these texts, so I want to make it count.
On the edge of my seat to find out this cliffhanger (and I don't even teach literature courses, I'm just nerding out)! Your essay reminds me something I'd forgotten, just how exciting it was as a student to be assigned to read novels for class. I guess it's an excitement I'm still tapping into - self-assigning myself deep reading and essays! Thank you for the wonderful community you create for those of us tapping into that excitement of reading novels, John! 💮
Thanks! Agreed... I think that much of "literature Substack" is about people who miss those days of getting the syllabus at the beginning of the semester and diving into the reading.
I’d say Austen is part of what historians call the “long 18th century,” so there’s an out for you. This must explain why she was left out of that first Norton Anthology. But was she included in the first Norton for 1800 onwards?
Oh, yes, "long 18th century"! I'm totally going to use that if anyone ever asks.
I think that there may have been a brief excerpt of Austen in the first edition, but I can't remember for sure. There used to be a website that had a useful table of all of the past editions and the texts that they included, but I can't seem to track it down now.
What a great discussion of 'making a course'! I grapple with this question in different ways - to do all without making it meaningless...how to reduce to something wonderfully inspiring while also delivering the history / artistic movements / aesthetics / etc. But I am not surprised you found your way through Emma, John! This is both because it is a great (and important) novel and because you love it. I think so much of our own passion for literature can be felt by the students, who might then find their own passions.
PS the start of the essay had me thinking back to preparing for the horrific literature GRE. It should not be about memorizing all these characters but about understanding in the way you teach your students. I guess this is difficult to quantify in a standardized test, however. For some reason I was telling my (British) husband about this test last night. He was properly freaked out.
PPS I have your other Emma posts saved up but just need to finish rereading the novel first!
Yes, I try to teach only texts that I love for that very reason! And yes, I remember the GRE subject text very well. I lucked out because there happened to be extended sections on George Eliot and John Donne, both of whom I had studied in depth in the previous semester. We don't even require the GRE in our graduate program any more, because we find it has little predictive value for how students will perform, and it prevents a lot of less privileged applicants from even applying.
I rather want to take the opposite tack from a theme. Throw things at the wall, as it were, to see what sticks. Let students understand that the classics are there because people liked them. Show them that much of literature is dirty, and violent, and snarky . Give them tastes of different styles and times and motives.
Yes, I've done plenty of throwing things at the wall over the last couple of decades. Some things stick more than others, but sometimes texts will surprise you. Lots of students, for example, love *Beowulf*, if they are properly introduced to it.
I can imagine that. I donated a chain maille shirt to the teacher at my son’s high school who taught it. The kids loved trying it on and speculating about swimming in it.
And back when I was in high school, the rowdy and not very academic girls loved the bits of Canterbury Tales we got.
If I were teaching , at some nice private school, I would try to teach Beowulf to a small group in a dark room, huddling by the fireplace.
My guess is organization around recurring literary allusions or themes.
I do feel for the student cramming all that literature into a one year course and the professor having to teach beloved texts at lightening speed. I have spent three decades reading classic literature just for fun, and I have yet to fully tap all the resources of the modern English language, never mind translations of great works from other languages.
Yes, it's not ideal. For the English majors, they will have a chance to revisit much of the material in upper-level courses, but the for the non-major, this is our one shot to introduce them to these texts, so I want to make it count.