Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

This past August I was hired by Emory University as a Mellon Fellow for their Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC). The Commons is funded by a grant, and is charged with increasing the opportunities for digital scholarship on campus. We also help develop two large-scale digital projects per semester. This semester, for example, we are involved in “Lynching in Georgia 1875-1930″ (a project chronicling the many lynchings that took place in the state of Georgia) and “Commonwealth” (an update to the Postcolonial Theory website maintained by Emory University).

All of these developments are extremely exciting for me, and yet I have wrestled with the problem of what it means to teach Romanticism in my current position. My role as a Fellow doesn’t cancel out my identity as a Romanticist. As one of my colleagues says “I’m a historian, who just happens to work in a library.” Well, I am a Romanticist who just happens to work in a library. I don’t teach formally, but I also feel that what it means to “teach” is being questioned in a University that simply hasn’t recognized how radically social media has already changed education.

One of the things I mentioned in the job talk for my current position is that the role of the librarian has to change as well. The library is often seen as a place where knowledge is held, where professionals help students and academics find the knowledge they need. It’s an important space, but a space nonetheless. What would it mean, I asked my audience, to think of the librarian as an advocate for digital scholarship? as someone who sits on dissertation committees or tenure and review boards? as someone who teaches?

I’m not someone who thinks that disciplinarity is over, yet I also feel that the future will force many of us to think of disciplinarity in novel ways. And I also feel that something dramatic happened in 2006 when Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig can created H-Bot, a computer that can answer basic history questions with Google. H-Bot, they claimed, makes multiple-choice tests obsolete.

So I write this post for two reasons. First, a provocation: what sort of role do teachers, and specifically teachers of Romanticism, take when many answers are available to students anytime and anywhere? Second, a reflection on my current delimma: what does it mean that I, a digital humanist and Romanticist working at the library, participate in the teaching of Romanticism? I hope to use the next series of blog posts, with conversations sparked along the way, to help answer that question.

Inspired by Katherine’s discussion of her graduate class, I decided to chart the development of my fall 1102 undergraduate class. I’d appreciate suggestions on readings, projects, etc. The course deals with the entire 19th century, not just the Romantic period and was developed in conversation with Leeann Hunter. I’m planning on having this class be a paperless class, so any reading has to be available for free online.

Visualizing Nineteenth-Century British Poetry
The literature and arts of the nineteenth century were highly engaged in questions of vision and visuality. In this course, students will study poets and artists who contributed to the evolution of British visual culture, from the poetry of the picturesque and the sublime to the poetry of decadence and the grotesque. Along the way, we will examine how various visual artists imagined the poetry of the nineteenth century.  Projects will include a visual picturesque narrative, a multimodal analysis of poems and their illustrations, and a video reimagining a single poem from the course.

Currently, I’m looking at Wordsworth, Gilpin, Blake, Byron, Charlotte Smith, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Edith Nesbit, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, and Tennyson. However, I’m still in the early stages of thinking through this course.

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.

For my Spring class on “Blake 2.0,” I’ve decided to engage in collaborative learning and model forms of collective intelligence. I like my assignments to have two separate characteristics. First, I like to show students that they can accomplish great things if they work together. Second, I like my students to produce something of value, something that they can be proud of after the end of the semester.

To this end, I’ve decided to take the three sections of my course and have a slightly different emphasis in each section. The first section will focus exclusively on William Blake himself and the historical context around which his poetry emerged. The second section will focus on the reception of Blake by authors and artists who lived after the Romantic period. The final section, a special section set up to be populated exclusively by computer science and computational media majors, will focus on Blake’s relationship to textual studies and the digital humanities – moving from the print theories of figures like Essick, Viscomi, and Michael Phillips to the critical work surrounding digital initatives like The William Blake Archive, The Blake Digital Text Project, and (as suggested by Rachel Lee) Jon Saklofske’s data visualization tool.

In order to facilitate collaborative and decentered learning, I’ve decided to allow students to define course content. One of the major research projects of the course, therefore, will be the opportunity for students to teach a major topic of the course. These topics will be laid out by myself beforehand, but students will choose the reading assignment and will present their research to the rest of the class. They will also provide a document that sketches objectives and outcomes for their teaching session, and support why their readings will achieve the objectives. I determine their grade based upon how well they argue for their readings and outcomes, and how skillfully they conduct their teaching session.

Ideally, I would like for them to present to all three of my sections. This way, students can show their own individual skill and add to the collective intelligence of the course. In the book Convergence Culture (2008), Henry Jenkins defines collective intelligence through the work of Pierre Levy:

On the internet, Pierre Levy argues, people harness their individual expertise toward shared goals and objectives: ‘No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity.’ Collective intelligence refers to the ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members. What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now be able to do collectively. (26-7)

Following Jenkins and Levy, I propose that collaborative learning can model forms of collective intelligence – and that collective intelligence can enable students to achieve what individual students listening to lectures and writing individual essays, cannot.

My course for the next semester is heavily involved in the “digital humanities.” Recently, Alex Reid wrote a fascinating post on his blog “Digital Digs” about what he called the “strong” and the “weak” versions of the digital humanities. The weak definition, Reid says “is one that draws some fuzzy and arbitrary line among digital technologies and says if you use these technologies to study humanistic content then you are a digital humanist.” The strong version, on the other hand, “has two main components. There are makers, who build various digital tools for use in humanistic research and teaching. Then there are researchers, who study humanistic aspects of digital media and culture.” Reid admits that this second definition might be too limiting, since the digital humanities are becoming more inclusive, and suggests a third category “adapters, who are taking emerging technologies and developing new scholarly and pedagogical methods. The difference being that adapters would be see disseminating knowledge about new digital methods and adapted tools as part of their scholarly work rather than simply using the tools to create familiar scholarly products.”

Reid’s third category is particularly interesting to me, since I feel that Blake held an “adapter” role in the development of a mass print culture during the Romantic period. In Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2003), Janine Barchas cites Blake as an author whose combination of verbal and visual elements shows the need to move beyond the traditional bibliographic vocabulary used to describe “illustrations” and “design.” In fact, along with writers like Alexander Pope and Laurence Sterne, Blake “include[s] a far wider variety of graphic designs (for example ornamentation and punctuation) which the scholarly community is just beginning to recognize as textual phenomena with interpretive impact” (9). Blake, Pope, and Sterne inhabit a transitionary period between manuscript and mass print culture in the eighteenth century, one that was slowly giving way to the woodcuts and the novelistic illustrations that would become more central as the novel emerged as the dominant middle-class form of narrative in the nineteenth century. Blake’s designs, however, also allude to medieval forms of illumination, and in this capacity, they inhabit an adaptive role for both the visual and the textual aspects of modern print culture.

I want to use my course to see if Blake can be used in a similar adaptive capability for digital and participatory culture. My thesis isn’t very new. Marcel O’ Gorman, for example, uses Blake as a “pictoral schema for organizing and generating knowledge,” specifically for what he calls a “hypericonomy:” a series of icons used to “encapsulate an argument and present it pictorially.” My course would push O’ Gorman’s hypericonomic project into the realm of social and collaborative media.

With this in mind, I consulted the extremely useful DH Questions and Answers message board hosted by the Association for Computers and the Humanities. You can find a record of my conversation with the digital humanities community here. To summarize, I mentioned my desire to have my students create a DH tool over the course of the semester – and that I’d like the tool to rearrange William Blake’s textual corpus according to specific tags. The responses were wide and varied. Patrick Murray John, for example, suggested that I have the students build the project three times: in WordPress, in Drupal, and in Omeka. WordPress and Drupal are both content management systems (CMS) that build websites around blog-based designs. Users can upload plugins and modules to expand the basic functionality of the site. Omeka is also a CMS, but it is built specifically for publishing online exhibitions.

I got many great suggestions for the class, including one from Dorethea Salo that suggested I look specifically at how different media platforms use different forms of programming, but I felt by the end of the discussion that I was getting away from my core-interest in applying William Blake and Romanticism to concerns in the digital humanities. That being said, I would suggest that anyone who is interested in the digital humanities or digital pedagogy visit DH Questions and Answers. It’s an invaluable tool for learning about and experiencing the breadth of knowledge and experience held by the digital humanities community.

I’d like to turn my question it to the RC community. What are some suggestions for tools that will help scholars, students, even non-academic admirers of Blake to understand his work? I’m not looking for the programming-specific advice I got on the digital humanities board. Rather, I’d like something akin to a wish list. What do you want, as a scholar or a teacher, that could help you explore the world of William Blake?

References

Barchas, Janine. Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

O’Gorman, Marcel. “The Fourfold Visions of William Blake and Martin Heidegger.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series. (2005). Web. 07 November 2010.

Reid, Alex. “Weak and Strong Defintions of Digital Humanities.” Digital Digs. 03 November 2010. Web. 07 November 2010.

Diedre, Eric and Crystal have all given compelling reasons for a contemporary “in” to Romantic literature. Diedre’s stunning example of a student connecting “The Negro’s Complaint” to poets in Singapore was complemented by her admission that she is “(still) a historicist critic.” Crystal’s argument that we should not let contemporary texts replace the focus of the course on “primary sources themselves,” is an important rejoinder to keep historicism at the core of what teachers of the Romantic period do.

How do we, though, justify a Romantics course when we aren’t primarily teaching survey or period courses? Is there, in other words, a purpose to teaching Romanticism that isn’t contained within a historical survey?

Here’s my reasoning.

At Georgia Tech, we are tasked to teach topical courses as what our program director calls a “vehicle” for introducing multimodal composition. We don’t just teach writing at Georgia Tech, we also teach other modalities: oral, visual, electronic and non-verbal. Part of my interest in collaboration is the way that social media applications can provide exciting challenges to the traditional image of the English student isolated at a desk, reading poems and writing alone. I am convinced that teaching multimodality can open up new ways of approaching Romantic texts that are collaborative and creative.

As I prepare my Spring sections of “Blake 2.0: William Blake and Digital Culture,” I am struck by the different projects that Blake helps to inspire in Twentieth-Century culture both within and without digital culture. In the collection I edited for the journal ImageTexT on “William Blake and Visual Culture,” I found a comic artist named Joel Priddy who wanted to create a short comic on both the visionary travels of William and the relative sense of isolation Catherine felt during his reveries. He called his short “Mr. Blakes Company.”

Similarly, the do it yourself (DIY) magazine Make recently published an article where Gareth Branwyn researched Joseph Viscomi’s work to conduct a series of “Relief-Etching Experiments” designed to allow people to make prints using a close approximation of Blake’s method. I find each project refreshing alternatives to the standard academic essay. Furthermore, I feel that each provides innovative ways to discuss the conjunction of participatory culture and collaboration, and the individualism embodied in both the myth of the Romantic genius and the DIY movement.

But I also feel that, should I engage in projects like these, I need to conceptualize the purpose of such projects. Do I really feel that the technical projects offered by Branwyn and Viscomi get me closer to Blake’s technique and, thus, to Romantic-era printing? And if so, to what end? I’m not a commercial printer or a graphic designer. Do I have my students read Priddy’s comic to get a better sense of how comic artists envision his domestic life? Why?

Obviously, I have many questions here. I do feel that the organization of my department, and its emphasis on creating multimodal forms of response to literary texts provides new opportunities for understanding just what we do when we teach Romanticism. I also like my students to feel that they are not simply critically analyzing a work, but that they are also actively engaging in a constructive response to the work. On some level, I like my students to get the sense that Romantic authors can give a set of practical guidelines for students’ own work. At the same time, I’m not an MFA teacher.

I feel that Blake, along with many other artists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, can provide an interesting case for a practical or a pragmatic pedagogy for the Romantic period. In my pragmatic model, the history of the period is only one part of Romantic education. Another part is finding a way to understand the reason why Blake inspires creative responses, and to engage in such responses in a thoughtful and critical way. I want my students to do something with William Blake, or other Romantic visual and literary artists.

Despite my attempt at a definition, I don’t really have my pedagogy fully worked out. I would welcome any suggestions for improvement, either by making my project more historical or by making my project more “practical.”

As a scholar and a teacher, I enjoy experimenting with both individual and collaborative projects. I tend to feel that the humanities are unique in their ambivalence about collaboration. On the one hand, the web is offering humanities scholars many opportunities for collaboration; on the other hand, I always find myself wondering how much a collaborative article, project, or book will “count” when it comes to hiring or tenure.

The topic is especially interesting for someone who teaches the Romantic period, since Romanticism is often associated with individualism. And yet, Romantic authors also expressed collectivist sentiments. As Beth Lau points out, even famously individualistic male Romantic writers struggled with individualism:

In a number of poems, Wordsworth describes his initial penchant for solitary nature worship giving way to love of other human beings. [...] Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the most powerful works ever written on the horrors of solitude and the problems inherent in overwheening individualism, and Shelley’s Alastor is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of solopsism. John Keats increasingly wished to do ‘some good in this world’ instead of merely writing lush, escapist poetry. Even Byron, whose early poems featured such gloomy, misanthropic, solitary heroes as Childe Harold, the Giaour, and Manfred, ended his career with the comic satire Don Juan, which is very much concerned with people in society. (224)

I feel that a similar argument could be made about William Blake. While he frequently celebrated his individual vision and the originality of his work, Blake also stressed the importance of “self-annihilation,” elaborating in his poem Milton that “We are not Individuals but States: Combinations of Individuals” (32.10; E131). And we must not forget the frequent, though often unmentioned, participation of Catherine Blake in the production of William Blake’s illuminated books.

The problem with emphasizing collaboration and collectivity in Romantic courses is not only the historical association of Romanticism with individualism, but also the institutional makeup of the humanities. Most humanities courses still overwhelmingly favor individual success and failure. As David Parry recently noted on the blog AcademHack, collaborative projects are extremely difficult to assess but enormously important to teach. “I want to encourage and evaluate students for who they are,” Parry explains, “but on the other hand I see as part of my job to teach students how to work in groups.”

Parry’s proposed solution to this delimma is to give each group the ability to fire one of their members. The rejected member is then required to complete the group assignment alone. While I feel that Parry’s plan could work quite well for his course, I would like to move in a different direction that I feel is more conducive to the ambivalence many writers had with individualism during the Romantic period.

I’d like to use this blog to plan a course around digital culture and Romantic Individualism. My central focus in this course will be William Blake, since I am primarily interested in the artists and critics who have transmitted Blake’s work from the Romantic period to the present and their impact on the image of Blake as an individualist writer. I would also like to use the course to experiment with collective subjectivities: in the content of the course, in the course’s exploration of the William Blake’s subjectivity, and in the makeup of the assignments and their assessment. Future posts will chart possible assignments, readings, ideas for discussion and class projects. I would also like to hear suggestions and criticisms from teachers, scholars, or anyone who visits this site. What are your thoughts about the usefulness of collaborative projects? Do you have any successes or failures to share?

Reference
Lau, Beth. “Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.” A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 219-26.