Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

I , like Katherine, have also been teaching Frankenstein, in my case in the “Romantic Poetry and Prose” survey I’ve been conducting since September. It’s hard to imagine a version of that course that could dispense with Frankenstein.

For a start, the novel itself enacts a kind of retrospective postmortem on the Romantic period, with its quotations from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Tintern Abbey” and Percy Shelley’s “Mutability.” At this stage in the academic year, I’m urging my students to look back and survey the literary history we’ve covered and, wonderfully, Shelley herself can look to be doing just wht I’m asking them to do.

Frankenstein is also–as all of us who have taught it know– capable of seeming forever timely and relevant. This year, in my lecturing I followed, as I often do, the many scholars who have described the novel as Mary Shelley’s critique of the myth of solitary authorship and individual genius –a critique she enacts in the 1831 Preface especially as her recollections of the group ghost story contest, the books that fell into their hands that inspired it, the conversations about science to which she was “a devout but nearly silent listener,” all combine to diffuse authorial authority and sideline singular identities. (Mary Favret’s chapter on Frankenstein Romantic Correspondence still strikes me as the indispensable interpretation of Shelley’s project in these terms.) But this year I was able to refer to the film “The Social Network” as mounting a similar critique while it traces the lawsuits that call into question an account of Facebook as Mark Zuckenberg’s “baby” and nobody else’s. And, of course, rather more grimly, in thinking about Shelley as prescient critic of the costs of scientific progress my students couldn’t help but draw connections to the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan.

BUT . . . I also feel very slightly suspicious of my own attachment to the novel and worried about how often it’s taught in all manner of courses (with the result that very few of my students this year were Frankenstein-virgins.) So here is my question: what other novels do readers of this Blog assign or refer to alongside Romantic-period poems? What route do others take to supply the Prose for Romantic Poetry and Prose classes? In the autumn term I taught Castle Rackrent–a tonic dose of irony to offset all the sincerity of 1790s verse!. There are also great connections to be made, I think, between Edgeworth’s Preface and Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. But Edgeworth didn’t shape our subsequent discussions the way it’s clear Shelley will be shaping them.

I am not nearly as media-savvy as some of the contributors to this blog (Crystal and Roger and Katherine have reaffirmed for me my old-fogey-dom at the same time that they have taught me a lot!).  But I can say with conviction that my undergraduates so far this year have seemed to be at their very best when I ask them to think about Romantic poetry in relation to a Romantic-period history of media, mediation, and re-mediation. Is this the case for other visitors to this blog?

One of the most successful class sessions we had in fall term was on ballad-collecting and on the Tour to Scotland that William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge took in 1803–a session that resulted in an energetic discussion of the Romantic period’s nostalgia for poetry as sonic experience and the Romantics’ awareness of the gains and the losses involved as sung and chanted ballads were re-mediated as printed artifacts. This past week, as we began the second term of our year-long course with the poetry of John Clare, mediation has once more come  to be at issue, and our discussions have once again been wonderfully energetic and thoughtful. I from the get-go have stressed the controversies that attend on the presentation in print of those poems of Clare’s that in manuscript tend to flout the conventions for standard English orthography punctuation. (And I have taken pains in designing the reading assignments for these two weeks  to give the class various editors’ versions of the poems–Eric Robinson’s, vs. Jonathan Bate’s, vs  J. W. Tibble’s.)  The flashpoint for those controversies is, of course, readers’ ambivalence about the role in the production of our reading matter that is played by that mediator and middleman (or middle-woman), the editor.

The  intensity of the students’ engagement with these topics makes sense, I think, because (as the students in ENG308Y were themselves quick to recognize) they themselves have a stake in the controversies over the editing of Clare as well as in the controversies over copyright in the manuscript material that have become entangled with those debates about editorial practice. Clare’s corpus is a work in progress, and they sense that they can shape that progress. I have the advantage, too, that as some one who is preparing a new selection of Clare poems for the 9th edition of the Norton Anthology I can talk about the choices I’ve had to make as I’ve punctuated, or not puncutated, and the sleepless nights I’ve experienced after making my decisions. This generation of students seem interested by just the issues of textual criticism that to previous generations might have felt like a distraction. I half suspect that this is because they are so aware that their schooling is happening at a moment of media shift, when the relations among print artifacts, digital text, digital sound files are being unsettled and rearranged.

Let me give an example of some of the moments in discussion when students made connections that indicated that awareness.  In the class session last term in which we treated ballad-collecting and Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” we got a lot of mileage from the passage in James Hogg’s Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott when he listens in on his mother’s response to Scott’s ballad-collecting:

there war never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, an’ ye hae spoilt them awthegither.  They were made for singing an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never sung mair.  An’ the worst thing of a’, they’re nouther right spell’d nor right setten down.

When we talked about this moment my students came up with some terrific analogies for the problem: recording artists who thwart their audiences’ desires for lyric sheets, for instance. The recent project of a colleague here at Toronto, Andrew Dubois, coeditor of the recent The Anthology of Rap for Yale U.P., has been much in my mind as I’ve thought about why it feels so right for us right now to zero in on this aspect of Romantic culture– odd as it is to think of Margaret Laidlaw as a forerunner of Chuck D!

P.S. Re. my December post:  I still haven’t prepared those slides of my own note on poems–embarrassment about handwriting , not to mention about my proclivity for statements of the obvious, has been holding me back!

As is all too apparent, time got away from me this semester (luckily the undergraduate Romantics course at the University of Toronto is a two-semester course, so I will have plenty of opportunities to make up for my silence). I have a backlog of topics to address. Right now I’m thinking hardest–because I’ve just handed back the first set of papers and because we’ve just had a review session for the “term test” that will conclude this semester– about my undergraduates’ relation to poetry and the panicky feelings many, though not all, have when invited to understand a poem as something other than a piece of prose arranged eccentrically on the page.

One thing I have been doing since the start of the class is to insist that poetry is written to be heard and sounded. That teachers of Romantic poetry should do such insisting will not be controversial for any visitors to this blog, but the good news is that, maybe in Canadian universities at least, there is a chance that more of our students will come to us already accustomed to think of the poem as an occasion for recitation. Scott Griffin, the benefactor and founder of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry has just announced a generously funded contest called “Poetry In Voice/ Les voix de la poésie” . The contest is intended to encourage the memorization and recitation of poetry. “The students will carry these gifts inside them for life,” Mr. Griffin says, a statement chiming serendipitously with the last lines of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper”. (In a follow-up posting, I want to talk about the class session in which that poem figured–and in which it generated an intense amount of discussion). When my students expressed concern last week that they wouldn’t remember the poetry we’d studied long enough to succeed in the test (never mind “for life”), I told them that retention becomes easier if you have enlisted to that end other senses beyond the reading eye –if your ear has encountered the sounds and rhythms, and you’ve had the feeling of the poem’s words in your mouth.

But what I mainly wanted to post about is my belated realization that my students need a lot of direction about how to take notes when they read poetry–and boost their powers of retention by that means. For years my syllabi have included this notice: “Please read with a pencil or pen in your hand. Prepared students are, in fact, usually those who write in their books and write a lot.” (It takes a leap of imagination for teachers to remember that our younger selves believed that neatness counted. And of course anthologies especially– so like Bibles, books of books–can make readers’ marginalia seem desecrations. ) But only during the last couple weeks, as the test approaches and office hours gain popularity, have I realized that many students don’t know why their use of their pink and yellow highlighters wasn’t exactly what that instruction was promoting. They don’t know what it is one might be writing in the margins of poems. Because note-taking is (as the historian of the book Ann Blair has observed) “a hidden phase in the transmission of knowledge,” it was actually a challenge to give explicit guidance–to instruct them, variously, to e.g. take note of the words that repeat; mark the moments when the poem’s argument or mood shifts; look for the moments when the poem deviates from its previously set form; speculate about the word choices; scan the meter and mark the rhyme scheme. And my New Year’s resolution (the luxury of a two-semester long course is that one actually has opportunity to implement them) is to display some powerpoint slides made from photocopies of the pages in my own copies of our anthology to indicate what note-taking looks like, though I’ll feel a bit exposed by showing them. I’d of course love to hear about other teacher’s methods for making poems memorable (and–alas for this necessity!– examinable).

I very much enjoyed the conversation about William Blake’s contemporaneity that Roger and Crystal commenced in the “comments” section that follows her posting “Wordsworth in a Math Bubble.” Further evidence supporting Crystal’s remarks on Blake’s power to inspire the present is offered in this rather charming series of interviews with contemporary musicians that the Guardian newspaper has put together to celebrate National Poetry Day in the U.K (today). (Yes, “Bard Reputation” is a terrible title. And I admit that “contemporary” is not quite the right word, given that the interviews include one with Neil Peart from Rush, who is even older than I am!) Anyhow, Blake, Coleridge, and Percy Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy all get a shout-out.

I think of myself (still) as a historicist critic, and I consistently bring that historicism into the classroom: in part as a context for reading Blake (he’s on all our minds right now!) and reading the Songs, my students have learned in the last week about late eighteenth-century chimney-sweeping, about the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, about the Sunday School movement, etc. But I agree strongly with what Crystal and Roger say about how contemporary writing can provide students with openings onto Romantic poetry, and it has seemed increasingly important to me to make time amidst the contextualization for that writing. I have been seeking to make room in particular for poetry from later eras, our own included. (I’m prompted by my sense that traditional English department curricula like my Department’s own sometimes seem to present poetry as though it were something that faded from the scene along with horse-drawn carriages.) In the past Marianne Moore (“Poetry”) has helped me introduce some of the Lyrical Ballads; Wallace Stevens (“Anecdote of the Jar”) has given them, or at least me, a way into “Mont Blanc,” and I am looking forward to seeing what happens a couple weeks from now when I bring in Robert Pinsky’s amazing, troubling “Last Robot Song” as a contemporary analogue to “The Eolian Harp.”

The contemporaneity of Romantic poetry has been on my mind, as well, thanks to a student in my survey class who last week educated me on how the issues that had been raised in our discussion of William Cowper’s abolitionist ballad “The Negro’s Complaint” are also at stake in (astonishingly) the poetry that poets in Singapore have written to protest the lot of the workers on Malay oil palm plantations. (She is just back from an exchange semester at the National University of Singapore–and she has promised me a reading list.) There’s something depressing about hearing this–hearing that the global idiom of feeling-at-a-distance developed in the age of Britain’s Second Empire retains its relevance. But also something exhilarating about the moments when our students make those connections.

How to begin?  According to scary statistics that are always quoted by my university’s Centre for Teaching, students are frighteningly quick to make up their minds about a course –and make their first impressions of the first quarter-hour of the first class bear heavy evidentiary weight.  That is not the only reason to steer clear of the defeatism that Arthur Lovejoy models in one passage in his “The Discriminations of Romanticism” essay (1924): “When a man [sic!] is asked, as I have had the honor of being asked, to discuss Romanticism, it is impossible to know what ideas or tendencies, he is to talk about, when they are supposed to have flourished, or in whom they are supposed to be chiefly exemplified.”   Competing definitions of the “Romantic” are arcane material with which to begin the academic year, but doing a Lovejoy, so to speak, and throwing up our hands in despair isn’t an attractive option either.  So we have to say *something* about why (as in my case this past week) the course we are embarking on is entitled, e.g. “Romantic Poetry and Prose.”

It is embarrassing to admit this–but it took me years of teaching before I began remembering in my inaugural comments to take into account what it is that  ”romantic” (in the lowercase) connotes in everyday contexts.  It turns out, I’ve learned, that it’s generally worth saying outright in the opening class that, whereas Romantic poetry and prose might include love poetry and love stories (though it doesn’t very often), it is not limited to love poetry and love stories.  It’s also worth acknowledging how easy it is for this nomenclature for a literary period and/or movement to mislead (if not the students who’ve actually signed up for that class–no one in that group has ever actually admitted to me to ever having been misled– then the “friends” or the “parents” who have taken an interest in their course selections). Even the Wikipedia entry on Romanticism doesn’t engage the relation between what is upper-case Romantic and what is lower-case romantic!  Still, I think that acknowledgment can provide a really great starting off point for a course.

One way to begin might be with this wonderfully suggestive comment by Elizabeth Fay, introducing an edition of Romantic Circles:  “Romantic poets, at least those of the canon, do not make love to women in their passionate pleas, but instead make love to nature and natural objects.”  (Fay was introducing here a collection of essays that, as subsequent events showed, managed to put passion back on the scholarly agenda of Romanticists.)  I’ve been taking a different tack lately and have often begun my Romantics courses by having the students think with me about how the Victorians’ retroactive identification of an earlier period as “Romantic” built upon the meanings that had previously been attached to “romance” in that prior era of romance revival.  Keats’s apostrophizing of romance as “Queen of far away” in the sonnet on reading King Lear speaks volumes as well as speaking for and to volumes–and I’ve often made this little phrase serve as a kind of notional epigraph for the semester.  Or there’s this fabulous moment from Wordsworth’s Prelude that I’m gearing up to discuss on Wednesday–introduced onto the syllabus as a bit of necessary leavening of our discussion of Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, and the Revolution Controversy:

                                                O times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a Country in Romance

This is a long way of directing the scary question with which I began at YOU. How do other teachers of the romantic-period survey BEGIN?