*Emma* and the English Literature Survey
Wrapping up the *Emma* Challenge, in three parts. Part 1.
Dear Reader:
As we hurtle towards the end of July, and the news bombards us with bombshell after bombshell, I know the question that is at the forefront of your mind: how is Halbrooks going to wrap up the Emma Challenge?
Well, first, this week, we will feature a three-part series on teaching Emma in the context of an undergraduate survey course in English literature. The first two parts of the series are reworked essays that I published a good while ago about my approach to the survey course, and the final installment will be a new piece on how Emma fits into the course specifically.
Then, next week, we will publish the final installment of our chapter-by-chapter analysis for premium subscribers, on Volume Three, chapters 10-19.
Finally, last but certainly not least, we will publish our long-anticipated guest post by
on the classic cinematic reworking of the novel, Clueless.Meanwhile, we will also wrap up our Schubert Listening Challenge with a double-helping: the late symphonies and the late string quartets.
Yes, that’s a lot for the waning days of this crazy month, but I think we’re up to it. And don’t worry if you can’t keep up: everything will remain in the archive for you to read at your leisure.
I hope that you enjoy it all!
John
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to teach more than a thousand years of literature in about three and a half months. This message will self-destruct in five seconds…
I have taught the first half of the English literature survey many, many times over the years. It's a course that mandates the impossible. Here is the course description in the university bulletin: "This course introduces students to the cultural heritage of the British Isles by studying representative literary works from the Middle Ages through the 18th Century." That's a thousand years, roughly, between Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People and 1800. Actually, it's more like 1200+ years if you consider how far back Bede is looking, but who's counting?
The latest edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, the standard textbook for this course, is well over 3000 dense pages with small print. We have fifteen weeks.
Do you feel intimidated yet? I know that the average college sophomore does, who generally doesn't read anything longer than 280 characters if given the choice. So, what to do? When I first started teaching this course twenty years ago, I thought that I had to pack in as much as possible, and I was the most over-prepared teacher on campus, with sheaves of typewritten notes. (I recently found my notes from the first time that I taught Chaucer's Knight's Tale: twenty pages, single-spaced; these days I go in with a list of bullet points on a scrap of paper.)
You see the problem. It's all too much (to quote The Beatles)—too many texts, too many pages, too many years to cover.
But the biggest problem comes with that infinitive, and the course's mandate: "to cover." What does that mean? It brings up philosophical questions and issues of canonicity: which writers make the cut? How do we decide? What is important for students to read? What are we trying to accomplish in this course in the first place? How is "coverage" in any complete sense possible? Well, it's not, obviously. It’s impossible. That's the nature of the mission, should you choose to accept it. It’s like those tours that promise to show you Europe in two weeks. We have to make choices.
Of course, the editors of The Norton Anthology have had to make many choices through the years as well, and mostly they have opted for expansion, with every successive edition bulkier than the last. This has the advantage of making the book more versatile for teaching, because there are lots of texts from which to choose, but the disadvantage of turning the physical object of the book into a piece of exercise equipment. The first edition of the first volume was published in 1962 and included exactly zero women writers and zero writers of color. (There were a few women in the second half of the anthology, which ran into the twentieth century, but only a few. Actually, my state legislature would surely prefer that edition, but that is a discussion for another time.) Those omissions, at least, have been somewhat rectified, and though it inevitably remains a very white male course, there are things that we can do to complicate this.
The other problem here, if we go back to the course description, is with the preposition through, as in "the Middle Ages through the 18th Century." Through suggests a chronological approach with an implicit teleology, a sort of "Whig theory" of literary history: Beowulf begat Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, who begat Chaucer, who begat Malory, etc., etc. This, of course, is nonsense. Literature doesn't work like this, as a kind of relentless progression from Bede to Dr. Johnson. Chaucer probably would not have been able to read Beowulf (his Middle English was so radically different from the older poem’s Old English) and certainly felt no influence from it. Of course, there are lines of influence that can be traced (Spenser to Milton, for example, or Wordsworth to Keats), but literary history is not a steady progression. It works in fits and starts, in trends, in eccentric eruptions. It’s closer to fashion than to evolutionary biology.
As Arnold Toynbee said of history, literature is not “just one damned thing after another.” And yet, that is the traditional approach to the survey course.
So, what to do? For years, I gradually whittled away at my syllabus, reducing the number of texts, mercilessly cutting some personal favorites that most students simply couldn’t abide (Spenser, Sidney’s Apology, Piers Plowman, Dryden—man oh man, they hate Dryden), and spending more class time on the remaining texts. Still, sometimes I would fall behind and would barely make it into the eighteenth century by semester’s end. But I was getting better results: it may seem obvious, but students were getting more out of, say, Paradise Lost by spending a few weeks chewing on it.
But I still wasn’t satisfied. At the end of each semester, I would think: “That should have gone better.” The problem was that I still had not dealt with the “through” problem. When I moved from Beowulf to the fourteenth century, I still felt the need to give a mini history lesson on what happened in the intervening years, to talk extensively about the texts that we were not covering, as if they had to know about Geoffrey of Monmouth in order to read Geoffrey Chaucer. I was still treating it like a march through the centuries, like one damned thing after another.
Again, what to do?
Some instructors elect for a thematic approach, in which they take a theme (say, gender or colonialism) and make a unit out of it, teaching texts from different periods but with similar concerns together. I tried this, and there were certain satisfactions, but I dare say it was more satisfying to me than to my students. After all, I have been trained to trace intertextual themes and ideas, but my students are just getting started. To them, it likely seemed something of a jumble. (Please note: I know that some instructors teach this way to great effect, and I applaud them; I just don’t have the knack for it in the survey, though I have done it effectively in some other courses—like my course on literary criticism, which I will tell you about next week.)
When I was putting together my syllabus for my course last spring, I thought back to the survey that I took as an undergraduate at Chapel Hill in, what? 1990? 1991? Anyway, it was taught by the brilliant Anne Drury Hall, one of the finest teachers I have known. (I’m happy to report, by the way, that she is still going strong and just published a new book last year.) Anne led off the semester with the eighteenth century, with Swift and Pope. She was upfront about her reason for this: she didn’t want these writers to get chopped off at the end of term after we inevitably fell behind schedule. But this chronological inversion had another effect: we began the semester with funny, (relatively) accessible writing. There is nothing intimidating about Gulliver’s Travels or The Rape of the Lock. They’re too silly to be scary, but they are also masterful and a better place to start than more forbidding, earlier texts. After we finished with Swift and Pope, however, we hit the rewind button and found ourselves in the Middle Ages, which, truth be told, was a bit disorienting, not to say whiplash inducing. It was still a great semester, but I wondered, in 2023, if I could take Anne’s funny, accessible beginning to the semester and push it even further.
I wanted to start with something relatively familiar. With which literary form are college students most familiar? Easy: the novel. Many of them have read the Harry Potter books or The Hunger Games even if they are not enthusiastic readers. Great! The modern English novel was invented in the eighteenth century, so start with a novel. The problem is that most eighteenth-century novels, while many of them are wonderful, may not be so accessible. There may be some exceptions, like Robinson Crusoe, but that’s not a funny book, and I wanted a least a bit of the funny.
Also, people like novels because they get inside characters’ heads, because we get to know and understand them as if they were real people. So, I wanted to find the eighteenth-century novel that did this best.
And then I thought of my favorite novel: Jane Austen’s Emma. (Actually, on some days of the week my favorite is Emma, but on other days it’s George Eliot’s Middlemarch; there’s probably a future essay in that little competition that is always ongoing in my brain.) But there’s a problem: it’s not an eighteenth-century novel. Emma was published in 1816, while the chronological boundary of the survey course is meant to be the end of the eighteenth century: 1800.
I decided that I didn’t care. I was going to violate the parameters of the course. I had tenure, so to hell with the parameters. We would start with Emma.
But still, I had to deal with that other problem, the problem with the through. If I didn’t want a chronological march or a thematic approach, then what would be the course’s organizing principle? I landed on what may seem to be a strange solution—which I will explain in the next post. Yes, that’s right: it’s a cliff-hanger . . . of sorts.
Post your guesses in the comments. (No spoilers from the five of you who read the earlier version of this essay!) I know, it’s not exactly “who shot J.R.?” or “who killed Laura Palmer”? But hey, I’m an academic. I’ve got to build suspense where I can.
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.
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! 💮
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?