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I’ve just now had the chance to read Heather Jackson’s engaging essay “What’s Biography Got to Do With It?” in the June 2011 ERR (this was her plenary at the 2010 NASSR, a conference I sadly had to miss; from the papers in ERR, it looks like it was extraordinary!). I’d been meaning to get to this article since the issue arrived and I’m glad I finally did. Jackson looks back at the world of Romantic-era literary biography in order to think about why our own students (and the general public) often seem so stubbornly invested in talking about writers’ lives when we want them to talk about literary works, and she comes up with some provocative answers—for instance:

What we normally think of as literary biography, the large-scale, original, comprehensive, authored account of a writer’s life, has less to do with the evolution of any writer’s reputation than you might think, but the short, derivative, introductory, often anonymous summary that appears in prefaces and works of reference has more. […] When we ask why readers are not satisfied with the works just as they come and why they turn to biographical sources when they want more — why biography should be the default solution —we have […] the fact that ancient prefatory traditions have always organized information that way and thereby formed a habit that it may be impossible to break. (370)

“Is that a problem?,” Jackson wonders. I’ve been thinking myself a good deal about the role of biography in our (my) teaching of Romanticism, and it’s been a topic particularly on my mind this week: the bookstore’s been nagging me for the booklist for the honors seminar on “Romantic Lives” I’m teaching this spring, and we’ve just been doing The Prelude in my graduate British Romanticism seminar and “Tintern Abbey” in my undergraduate Romantic Poetry survey, so the idea, or problem, of the authorial life has been front and center in our discussions and in my planning for class. Reading Jackson’s essay prompts me to post some of my own thinking on the topic here, and to invite readers of this blog to conversation: what role does the biography of writers—either biography as a literary genre, or the idea of the writer’s life—play in your teaching of Romanticism? How is the writer’s life, or even the writer as personality or character, an element of the way you present the writer’s work to your students, or the interpretative frames you put into play? Do you assign biographies, or teach biography or autobiography as a genre, or talk about how and why the writer’s life became an object of interest? How do you deal with the power of mythic versions of author’s lives? How do you combat the rush to Wikipedia or other internet capsule biography as an answer to anything and everything?

Like many of us I’m sure, I find myself often frustrated by the way students wield as very blunt instruments supposed biographical “facts” they’ve gotten by googling, or heard from friends, or vaguely remembered from high school. What disturbs me is not so much the recourse to biography itself as the eagerness to reduce not only the complexity of the work, but also the complexity of the writer’s life, to a single determining biographical fact or myth. It’s strange, really, that students can imagine anyone’s life in the monodimensional terms in which they sometimes seem to imagine the lives of the authors they read. This retreat from complexity is no doubt partly an anxiousness about the work of interpretation (they’re worried they don’t know how to do it) but it also has parallels in the media attention given to each latest diagnosis granting a long-dead writer or artist a medical or psychological condition that “explains” his or her “genius”—an impulse to pathologize and explain away creativity that reflects both a lack of imagination and a fear of imagination. Still, I’ve come increasingly to think that in answer to what Jackson calls “our biographical woes in the classroom” (365) we need more biography in the classroom, not less. If students too often rely on reductive biographical readings, it might be because they don’t have enough exposure to more sophisticated, complex versions of biography, nor enough experience with more nuanced understandings of the interactions of life and text. In other words, if students are all too eager to fall back on biographical fallacy or weak biographical criticism, this might be an effect of the institutionalization (at the high school as well as college level) of a pedagogy so hyperanxious about the possibility of biographical contamination that it pretends to rule biography itself out of court. I say pretends because the author’s life persists as an organizing principle of our pedagogy in many often unacknowledged ways, as Jackson argues, and because of course we don’t presume any such strict separation of biography and criticism in our own work as critics. In our effort to convince students not to read everything as directly self-expressive, we give them the confusing message that the author’s life isn’t something to be read.

Curiosity about writers’ lives isn’t a bad thing for students to have if they know how to research those lives capably, if they can understand that writers were real people—and so not fully “knowable”—living in real historical circumstances different from their own, and if they can recognize that the authorial personality they imagine they encounter or the authorial voice they imagine they hear is a fiction, a product of specific reception histories and of particular desires and needs (their own, the writer’s, a culture’s). So how then to help students become more savvy about the uses of biography, and how to make curiosity about the author’s life work for us, as teachers of literature?  Here, we have an advantage as Romanticists, since so many Romantic literary works blur the boundaries between life and text in ways we can use to get students asking better questions about how life and work connect. For example: Frankenstein refuses straightforwardly autobiographical readings yet on so many levels seems to refract or transpose aspects of Mary Shelley’s own experience as writer, mother, daughter, and wife—and then reflects in such complicated ways on the problem of telling, or hearing, a life story—that it can lead marvelously into rich discussions of the complexity of the competing pressures Shelley experienced and the complicated nature of the way autobiography is woven, along with many other strands of meaning, into the web of the novel. Don Juan’s extraordinary along these lines as well. Conversely, explicitly autobiographical texts such as The Prelude or “Lines…Tintern Abbey” gain in significance for students when they think about the choices (of genre, of emphasis or omission, of language) the poet makes in presenting experience in a particular, public form, and when they come to see the poem as an argument about what that experience has been and what it means. This helps them shake their biographical literalism. In teaching “Tintern Abbey,” I usually foreground the dialogue with “Frost at Midnight,” and we consider Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal writing alongside these poems to help students think about public and private modes of writing the self.

I agree with Heather Jackson’s suggestion that students would benefit from a greater familiarity with biography as a literary genre, and I think full-length biographies of writers can be a useful contextualizing tool. In some smaller seminars, I’ve experimented with asking students to choose from among a list of modern biographies of writers we’re reading; in the assignments I give them for reports on these biographies, I ask them to pay attention to formal and rhetorical aspects of the biography, and we compare how different biographers represent the same episodes from a subject’s life. The goal is to have the students understand biography as representation, interpretation, and argument, rather than something simply to be mined for facts. The better biographies also gave students a vivid sense of the historical and intellectual contexts of the writers we were studying, and a sense of their existence in a particular time and place.  In larger classes, I’ve found myself using more biographical anecdotes about writers—which can feel kind of donnish, but which works both to help situate the writers in a historical context and as a lure for students, who might then feel engaged by the idea of the writer as a person who works through, in his or her writing, particular sets of more or less urgent personal and political and philosophical concerns, even if not necessarily in the mode of self-expression.

However, I still find all of this kind of tricky. There’s a part of me that’s very uneasy about giving authorial personality too much presence in the classroom, even if it’s in a more deconstructive mode emphasizing the textualization of the life. There’s the recognition that neither as an undergrad nor in grad school was I ever actually assigned even an excerpt from a biography as far as I can recall, so now I feel a bit on shaky ground when I try to do it. There’s the problem of time on the syllabus and in class discussion: how can we squeeze it all in? There’s the risk that students will still reach for biography as reductive explanation, or that they’ll want to turn class discussion into a debate, daytime-talk-show-style, on whether the writers we’re studying were good or appealing people, or that we’ll be reinforcing mythologies of the author or of genius. Then there’s what I’ve come to think of as the “five summers with the length of five long winters” problem—if you’re teaching, say, “Tintern Abbey,” practically speaking, in the limited discussion time you have, what do you do to describe that five-year gap? Do you talk about the gap between WW’s first visit and his return solely in terms given by the poem itself (entirely possible and effective)? Do you talk about the gap by discussing his evolving philosophical or political thinking in biographical terms, or do you place the poem in wider intellectual or cultural contexts? Do you talk about what he did and where he was specifically in those five years—how literal do you get about the “lonely rooms” or the “fretful stir/unprofitable” (in my experience, students often ask for more detail here)? Do you emphasize the historical resonances of the date (e.g., Corday/Marat)? Ideally, one pulls together these various registers, so that students can think about how Wordsworth negotiates a relationship between his life and broader sweeps of history. When that works, it’s great, but it’s hard not to feel like either the individual life or the historical sweep gets the short end of the stick. And I haven’t yet taken on a class where we talk substantially about the history of literary biography—though that will come in the spring, with the “Romantic Lives” class, and I’m wondering how it will work. More on that upcoming class–and on this topic–soon, I hope.

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

A recent episode of This American Life includes the account of David MacLean, who loses his memory in India. It’s a terrific story for many reasons, and want to pick up on a detail that comes up along the way.

Having regained some of his memories and visited his family in Ohio, MacLean returns to his apartment in India.

I was alone, and lonelier than I thought I could be in a room filled with things that I had selected. There were books. I opened them and found my handwriting in the margins. Still nothing. I had read these books. And now I had to read them again. But why bother? If I lost my memory again, all that work would be futile.

I have a related feeling about undergraduate teaching, at the level of the class rather than of the individual. With greater and lesser degrees of tinkering, I use most of my syllabi at least twice, sometimes more. The first group of students and I spend a semester reading together, developing a slow-developing conversation in which we compile a set of shared readings of passages, understandings of how each person in the room reacts to texts, and so forth: a collective version of MacLean’s marginalia, some of it recorded (in papers, message board conversations, and so forth), most of it not.

The next group of students, however, inherits none of that classroom culture, and to me, starting the new class feels like forgetting. I appreciate the pleasures of discoveries that feel new; for example, I love watching class after class find their own ways of talking about the narration of Wuthering Heights as a function of Lockwood’s relationship to Ellen Dean. But must we forget everything a class has learned when the semester break comes? I wonder whether our courses can, like Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” recognize the wonder of “first looking” while also prizing the community implied by appreciating what has come before.

Our current practices enforce forgetting. Grinnell, for instance, is a Blackboard school; as far as I know, that software has no way to pass message board discussions from one group of students to another. Even if it could, institutional protections of student privacy would raise serious barriers to such sharing.

What, then, do I need to cultivate a new approach that allows both for new insight and for inherited classroom culture, that allows for the celebration of primary and secondary discovery?

My main answer is this: to be the teacher I want to be, I need to become a better computer programmer. I need to be able to create environments where students can record their learning, share it, build on it, structure it so that it welcomes and grows from the participation of their successors. I also need to work with institutional authorities to make good-faith sharing of academic thoughts easy for students and professors.

My first, modest effort to create this effect involved The Transatlantic 1790s, a database-backed site created by a small group of students and me (they writing content, I writing code) in 2004. The following year, a seminar read some of those students’ work and contributed to the site’s bibliography as part of the work the class. That all went well enough to make me want to do more: with more skill and experience, I could routinely bring together the learning of students in multiple classes, and then the learning of others, to inspire the cultural evolution that stems from inherited thoughts.

What happens when a group of students can recall the work of previous students they may not have met? I look forward to finding out.

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

Like Kate Singer, I too have been thinking about the rise of the Digital Humanities at MLA 2011. I agree, largely, that making should be a hallmark of identifying as a digital humanist but – like Kate – I wonder if making is limited to coding. Building or making may refer to the construction of scholarly and student communities.  Matt Kirschenbaum in “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” makes the following claim:

Whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend upon networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online. Isn’t that something you want in your English Department?

One way I try to engage in the collaborative infrastructure that Kirschenbaum imagines here is by publishing my syllabi on Scribd. Scribd is a website that allows you to upload, share, and embed .pdf files. Here is a copy of my syllabus:

Scribd reformats your documents to allow them to be read on smartphones and tablets like the iPad, and any document type may be uploaded (.doc, .docx, .pdf, .ppx (for PowerPoint), xml, OpenOffice). Readers can, furthermore, share whatever documents they find on Scribd by “readcasting” them. Readcasting generates Facebook updates and Tweets with links to the document being read. Readcasting can, for example, be a useful way to have students engage in peer review and collaborative research.

Of course, copyright does become a problem with Scribd. Users have in the past violated copyright by placing protected documents on the server. However, I do feel that Scribd opens up some really interesting possibilities – especially for classrooms that wish to do away with paper.

I say this in response to a recent post on the NASSR listserv by Adam Komisaruk:

I’m slated to teach a graduate “readings” course in Blake this summer, and book orders are due soon.  As I contemplate and reject several alternatives (the Dover facsimiles are too sporadic, the Princeton facsimiles are too expensive, the Erdman/Bloom lacks illustrations, etc.), I’m wondering about the viability of “going paperless.”  I’ve already requested a fully wired classroom–i.e., with individual iMac terminals, overhead projection, and a high-speed Internet connection–so, assuming my students have similar equipment at home, I could conceivably use the Blake Archive and eE as my texts.

The majority of respondents mentioned using the Johnson/Grant Norton edition in conjunction with The Blake Archive. While I largely agree that this is a great way to go (I’m currently using the Johnson/Grant edition in my Blake class), I feel that the current generation of students is too savvy with the internet and social media to passively accept the edition we order in the bookstore. For example, I ordered the Johnson/Grant edition, but I know that many of my students use the free Erdman edition of Blake on the Blake Digital Text Project, supplementing it with the Archive and tagging websites and .pdfs using Diigo or A.nnotate. I initially resisted this development in my class but inspired by Komisaruk’s comment, an article by Leeann Hunter, and a revealing expose on the textbook industry by Anya Kamentz, I’ve decided to encourage the digital revolution percolating in my students.

Instead of assigning individual papers, I maintain a WordPress site called William Blake and Media as a hub for my collaborative classroom. On the site, you can find my Scribd syllabus, a description of the first and second projects, a group blog maintained by my students, and a Twitter feed. I use these, in conjunction with papers distributed by Scribd, as a way to reduce (if not currently eliminate) paper in my Blake class. Check out the site and give me some suggestions.

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

When I teach Wordsworth’s  “Tintern Abbey,” I give students a handout with excerpts from three essays about the poem:

“Everyone knows that “Tintern Abbey” is a sad poem…” Quinney, Laura.  “Sensibility, and the Self-Disenchanted Self in ‘Tintern Abbey.’”  ELH 64.1

“Tintern Abbey” has a temporal structure of absence and presence which is folded upon itself and projected into the future as we move from memory to imagination: grammatically, the poem moves from the “present perfect,” where the “past” is recuperable, to the “future” tense at the poem’s close, where the present situation is imagined as already “past.”

Lawder, Bruce. “Secret(ing) Conversations: Coleridge and Wordsworth.” New Literary History 32.1 (2001) 67-89.

The romantic critical tradition has read Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” as a poem about aesthetic contemplation, and about the “personal myth” of memory as salvation.  In this line of thinking, the poet’s aesthetic contemplation entails both an objective focus on the natural setting of the Wye Valley, the Abbey’s surroundings, and a subjective focus on perception and imagination, between what the “eye, and ear. . . half create, and what perceive” (lines 105-7). The poet’s use of memory details a shift from past to present, from the loss of childhood’s “glad animal movements” (line 74) to the “abundant recompense” of a mature imaginative sensibility. Likewise, it details another shift from present to future, a projected continuity wherein the poet’s sister Dorothy represents for him a remembered existence even in his anticipatory absence; toward this end, the poem concludes in his final entreaty to her:
with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations!

Hadley, Karen. “The Commodification of Time in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey.’”   Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42.4 (2002) 693-706.

The first excerpt cracks some of them up while it annoys and confuses a few others, and we all note how tricky it would be for one of them to a write a sentence in their essays that begins “Everyone knows.”   It also forces the group assigned to this excerpt to instantly rethink their feelings about the poem. I am always pleasantly surprised by the discursive space Quinney’s bold claim opens up. They assume Quinney is describing the tone of the poem, a reasonable place to begin.  Students who might not answer the question “what is the tone of the poem?”—either because they hadn’t noticed it or wouldn’t have the language to describe it—suddenly have very strong opinions about this element of it.  The poem isn’t “sad,” they argue, but “happy.”  The most this group will allow, at the beginning of their work, is that the poem might be contemplative and bittersweet but they are emphatic in their belief that the poem is not sad.  Most of the time, someone will wonder what Quinney actually means when she describes the poem as sad. Is it sad in its tone? Is it sad in its subject matter?  Is it sad throughout or just in parts? Is it sad that Wordsworth wrote it? And, if things go well, someone asks about the introduction of the Dorothy figure and the language in that part of them poem, and I see students frantically flipping back and forth between the pages trying to sort through it all.  Their impulse is to read the introductory, biographical information at the start of the Wordsworth section, and someone will offer to do that, but then someone else remembers what I’ve been repeating every class and says, “textual evidence” (and I realize that I might be more like Cleanth Brooks than I care to admit).

Each excerpt provides its own challenges, but even students who struggle mightily with poetry enjoy this entry into the text.  I think they find it so satisfying for a number of reasons.  On a practical level, there is safety in numbers, so even if they’re overwhelmed by the longer excerpts, they are overwhelmed together. Each excerpt is so different that it also allows space for them to ask questions about specific lines and passages and to pay careful attention to Wordsworth’s language. They also like puzzling out what the critic is actually trying to say.  When the group working with Lawder finally works out what he means when he points to the poem’s “temporal structure,” they happily start seeking out the shifts in tense in the poem. Lawder gives them the tools to breakdown a poem whose length is overwhelming while offering a theme they might have noticed without knowing how it contributes to a fuller interpretation of the poem.

Hadley’s assertions allow them to recontextualize their initial response to the poem. For reasons that have a lot to do with the very term “Romanticism” in general and Wordsworth’s subject matter in particular, I find that my students read him with an incredibly sentimental eye.  They also project onto him their own experience, so they see the poem as happy because they imagine how happy they would be to revisit a place from their past.  This is a fine place to begin, but my goal is to push them into the poem and its language (this partly out of fear that I’ll get journal entries with titles like “My Own Private ‘Tintern Abbey’” rather than critical essays when they turn in their first full writing assignment ), and Lawder’s work with the poem moves them to a place where they can consider its philosophy against their own world view—one that works differently in real time than it does in their heads. Hadley’s argument asks them to rethink the pleasure of memory, and they do that by paying close attention to how Dorothy is addressed in the poem.

I teach poetry and fiction in my Romanticism class. Students tend to be more comfortable with the prose than the verse, and I’ve been trying to work out ways to give them more of a foothold with the poetry while still leaving them plenty of space to work with it on its own terms.  I’ve found that these critical tidbits lead to productive work, particularly in helping students solidify their own sense of the poem; because when they finally “get” the critic, what they are really understanding more concretely is their own initial responses to the text.

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

In a couple of weeks I’m going to take a group of students from Deidre Lynch’s Romantic Poetry and Prose course to the E.J. Pratt Library to show them some rare material in the Library’s collection.  Pratt has a particularly strong Romanticism collection, including such gems as the holograph of Christabel, many of Coleridge’s notebooks, numerous Blake prints, and a diverse collection of color prints by George Baxter.  Indeed, there is so much interesting material that it is proving difficult for me to select what to show students.  Yet in considering what specific items I will show the class, a more fundamental issue has arisen.  In the end it may matter much more how I show them things rather than what I show them.

I think it is fair to say that the majority of students in the class have not worked with, handled, or even seen rare books and manuscripts, and I hope that their first experience will be an exciting and memorable one.  I realize that there is a danger of making a trip to the rare book library seem like a demonstration about neat curiosities rather than a scholarly exercise.  However, it would be silly to deny the fact that rare materials do have a certain “wow” factor.  I remember fondly my own first experience working with manuscripts while researching Lady Caroline Lamb’s correspondence.  Sitting in the Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies Office just north of London, I could not believe that the librarian gave me a box (an entire box!) of letters (her letters!) to read.  It was a good half hour before I could actually compose myself enough to do any real work.  I do not think my experience is unique, and one of the exciting things about our field is the chance to work with materials that sometimes take our breath away.

As Walter Benjamin’s work reminds us, certain objects, whether they are works of art, letters, or rare 200-year-old books, have a powerful aura.  It seems only sensible, then, to acknowledge to our students that, at a very basic level, a lot of the manuscripts, letters, and books that we study are not only of scholarly interest but are also downright cool.  Indeed, the curiosity so central to bibliophilic impulses has been the foundation of countless libraries and collections that are now valued for their scholarly import but were once privately collected.  I think that to downplay these aspects of research would be doing students a disservice.  Acknowledging the thrill of certain rare materials can be helpful in making both us as scholars and the material we study more accessible to students.

My own research is book historical in its approach and focus, so to me it seems self-evident that one may wish to consult the actual edition readers may have been reading.  Similarly, it seems obviously useful to trace a reader’s engagement with a book through his or her marginalia or to compare two different editions of the same work that were sold at different price points.  I think the key to making the library excursion interesting and valuable for my students will be to get them to infer the scholarly ways the materials I will show them could be used.  Rather than show them Coleridge’s marginal notes and tell them how and why I find them useful, it seems best to let them tell me.  A letter or a book is not a single purpose academic tool.  Like the modern edited texts of the Romantic works that we teach, there is more than one reading and more than one way of using primary resources.  Getting students interested in and engaging with rare materials through early exposure is the first step towards getting students to recognize them as valuable resources rather than simply cool old things.

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog