Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

UPDATE (12/13/11)

Last night, the Gustatory Romanticists met for a dinner party and attempted to adhere to the “Man of Taste” virtues and follow the decorum dictated by our various cookery and social experts. (Food is always an incredible way to gather people.) After we dined on red-wine braised short ribs, challah bread, mango salad, black bean salad, apple butter & ginger cookies, egg salad, mashed potatoes, some good wine, we moved to the eggnog, brownies, and a synopsis of final projects.

Though this graduate course attempt to infuse a little of Digital Humanities with a GIS/mapping collaborative project (that fell through), it turns out that Digital Humanities methodologies were already natural to these graduate students. One participant produced a short video of Presumption (very well acted and produced!), another studied Angelica’s Ladies Library (with the help of UC Boulder’s Kirstyn Leuner and Google Books), another looked at erotica and pornography (but I won’t show you those images!), another focused on botany and women, several others used research from various disciplines (theology, child psychology, etc.).

After this super fabulous array of projects was thoroughly discussed, I ventured to query them about other types of courses, perhaps even one on late 20th-21st Century writing. Anne Carson’s Nox and Jonathan Safron Foer’s Tree of Codes came up; after a quick look at the visual aspects of these books, we talked about a class that focused on history of the book to ground discussions about these two texts.  Hmmm…..  They also asked for a graduate course on the Gothic, or to take an undergraduate course on the Gothic. Since I’m teaching that course now and it won’t come back for rotation for another 2 years, it looks like they’re on their own. Our graduate program struggles somewhat with the number of courses we can offer; this means it’s unlikely we could hold a course on the Gothic.  Hmm….but it’s got me thinking.

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Original Post:

We’ve concluded our semester in this crowd-sourced graduate course on Romanticism, gustatory pleasure, aesthetics, and travel. It was a wild ride. But, I found that we lapsed into the old readings and the old paradigms fairly quickly. The mapping assignment went away because I couldn’t find us a computer lab. And, the participants really, really enjoyed literature that I thought they would surely hate (The Prelude, The Vindications, for example!).

In the end, I realize that I could have offered them a course on Gothic Romanticism or Feminist Romanticism to their delight (hindsight, you know).  But, we did do something that I’ve never done before: This semester, I began inviting students to my apartment for dinners. A regular group of students is doing some non-credit bearing work on the Beard-stair Project. I cook for them; they eat; we talk. Worked well. So I decided to try it with our Romantics participants — after all, most of the literature that we’re reading extols the virtues of communal food consumption.

I introduced the class to my personal collection of British and American literary annuals and their precursors. Most of them had already visited our Special Collections and heard me chat about history of the book and New Historicism as methodologies for some intriguing research.

We spent an evening noshing in my apartment and gathered around my coffee table littered with only half of my private collection. The only imperative was to read, wander, query through the books and talk to one another. To focus some of their searching, I supplied them with the Faxon and Boyle bibliographies (one with a list of authors, the other with bibliographic descriptions of literary annuals). They read through my PBSA article femininity and the material object as well as a draft of my forthcoming collection of Gothic short stories from British literary annuals. I lamented the fact that we don’t have an adequate database of all the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, images, title pages, authors, publishers, etc. of the literary annuals. Looking at the books sitting on my coffee table was daunting when I asked them to dig in.  Where do they start?

We used the Poetess Archive Database and the Forget Me Not Archive to search for famous authors or other poetry of the same theme. One student found a very unflattering engraving of Byron (which dashed all of their thoughts about his attractiveness). Others found references to Shakespeare intriguing within a severely truncated playbook of Romantic-era productions. Yet others found silly poetry and insipid engravings. But, we were traversing these literary annuals as a moment to decipher this concept of aesthetics, taste, pleasure, leisure in the Romantic Era. Who decides the literariness of Literature? Are there some gems buried in the annuals? (My answer is, yes, unequivocally.) And what’s the difference between reading these poems and writings in an anthology versus read them in their original? (We had to haul in extra light so everyone could read.)

I’m not quite sure how they perceived that day’s gathering or the efficacy of handling this type of collection. But, the final projects (as they’ve hinted at so far) are really interesting, far-reaching, exploratory, and a good portion delving into New Historicism strategies coupled with close readings. And a good time was had by all….

The Romanticism course that you all helped to craft is live online and scheduled for its second meeting on Monday:

Course Description: The newly-established restaurant quickly became the preferred meeting place where critics, poets, artists, authors of the British Romantic Era discussed aesthetic standards. Then, they travelled abroad on the Grand Tour to discover the gustatory delights of foreign lands. Some returned from exotic locales with opium-induced, waking nightmares. Others indulged in dinner, opera, and artwork. Denise Gigante attributes this zest for taste to a quest for pleasure, a state of mind that the Romantics decidedly embraced. During the semester, we will read through, look at, map, and visualize the journey of the Romantic literary “(Wo)Man of Taste” through canonical and non-canonical authors alike, including Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, Coleridge, DeQuincy, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Keats, Clare, Hogg, with quite a bit of visual pleasure included from Gilpin, Combe, Rowlandson, and Blake – all to reveal the relationship between aesthetic taste and appetite in Britain 1770-1837. Our discussions will be governed by Denise Gigante’s theories of gustatory pleasures and supported by readings on the sublime, picturesque, and beautiful early in the semester — in turn, leading us into the establishment of physical gustatory pleasures of taste in contrast against artistic definitions of literary taste. After an initial meeting in which we crowd-sourced what the students want to read, the schedule came together with primarily non-fiction essays and Shelley’s Frankenstein as the pinnacle of our travel rewards. (Though some requested lots of Blake, some Charlotte Smith sonnet sequences, I couldn’t quite get them to fit into our theme.) Our final days will be spent reading actual gourmands who were writing during the Romantic period — most definitely authors outside our canonical Big 6.

The initial description and title for this graduate course were crowd-sourced via my Twitter community, made up of Romanticists and Digital Humanists, as well as the grand community of former NEH participants in Summer 2010.  As the semester moves along, I will regularly post to Teaching Romanticism: A Romantic Circles Pedagogy Blog, since that community was also helpful in crafting this course.

Since Digital Humanities and interesting digital projects are part of my work, I queried the students about introducing a mapping project similar to the project described in Erin Sells’ article on ProfHack/Chronicle of Higher Education about “Mapping Novels with GoogleEarth.” I couldn’t obtain adequate computer lab time to create a mapping project for our class, but I left a single day open to see if we could make it happen. That project will collaborative and class-driving; I’m not even sure it will be graded. This is another area that I’d like to leave open to the course participants to discuss/decide. In any event, the mapping project (say of The Grand Tour by Mary Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, or the Shelleys) would be really incredible to visualize. Also, these are teachers and teachers-in-training. Giving them permission to be creative and then providing them with the skills to take these kinds of projects to their students is the real-world kind of skills that I believe our program should be offering our students.

Books:

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 2^nd ed. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Longman, 2007.
Mellor Anne and Richard Matlak. British Literature 1780-1830. Wadsworth, 2005.
Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. Yale, 2005.
Gigante, Denise, ed. Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy. Routledge, 2005.

Check out our Reading Schedule.

I invite comments and contributions (or anyone want to Skype in on any night?)

This Fall, I’m teaching a graduate course in Romanticism. The last time I offered a graduate course (2 years ago on William Wordsworth), it was cancelled for low enrollment (only 7 signed up; I needed at least 10). This means that an entire generation of our MA graduate students haven’t had any Romantic-era literature for their comprehensive exams. (The last class I taught in the graduate program was in 2008 and that was on Madness & Romanticism, based on an article I wrote for an Alexander Street Press database.) Most of the time, I hear them say that they had a Romantic-era survey in undergrad and don’t need a grad course in Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, or Coleridge to pass the exams. Grad courses specifically do not cater to the comprehensive exams, but it’s been difficult erasing this culture from our program.  They will take a Victorian course and read all of Middlemarch and 3 or 4 Dickens novels, but Romanticism falls flat. For the Fall, I have no shame; I will resort to bribery and pop culture-isms to attract students to this course.

Yes, dear Teaching Romanticism Collection, I am asking for your help. I want to teach a course on the development of aesthetics in Romantic-era literature — based on the summer NEH seminar with Stephen Behrendt. The readings will be based on those from the seminar plus any travel diaries, travelogues, ships’ manifestos, letters that involve this idea of travel. The title:

Eat, Look, Go”: Romanticism, Aestheticism, and the Sensualism of Travel

All of the usual suspects appear in the primary reading (MWS, PBS, STC, WW, DW, MW) but who else? Any suggestions? Perhaps we could create a map of their travel (staying with the digital theme that I typically incorporate). Or maybe I should kick it old school and just have them read, interact with the literature.  I’m not quite sure how to get eating in there, too.

Any suggestions?

I posted a blog last month about re-instating Frankenstein into my British Literature Survey course 1800-present. With most of our blogs here, that one was more fully formed than what I’m about to post. So, this constitutes my foray into brainstorming blogging rather than essaying blogging:

You may be interested in the following considering that many Digital Humanities projects have come from Romantic-era studies and considering that we’ve been skewing some of our discussions here towards digital projects and whatnot. Please consider submitting, dear readers and contributors!

*Electronic Roundtable Demonstrating Digital Pedagogy*

*MLA 2012*
*Seattle, Washington*
*January 5-8, 2012*

Discussions about digital projects and digital tools often focus on
research goals. For this electronic roundtable, we will instead demonstrate
how these digital resources, tools, and projects have been integrated into
undergraduate and graduate curriculum in alignment with the MLA 2012
Presidential Theme: Language, Literature, Learning. Proposals may include
demonstrations of:

-  successful collaboration with undergraduates on your digital scholarly
project;
-  specific assignments, including student learning goals, teaching
strategies, successes/failures, grading rubrics;
-  integrating digital assignments with general education requirements;
-  assessment of student digital projects;
-  constructing syllabi with digital-focused assignments;
-  portals for collecting digital-focused syllabi and assignments.

This Roundtable session will contain up to eight presenters. Presenters
will engage in informal discussion or offer interactive electronic
demonstrations. Electronic roundtables allow attendees to circulate among
eight stations that will be set up around the meeting room with appropriate
audiovisual equipment.

Presenters are welcome from a broad range of institutions with a range of
contexts and budget demands. Selection of participants will be based on a
cross-spectrum of styles, classrooms, student experience, successes, and
failures. If possible, we will try to submit two electronic roundtables;
however, this is a Special Session not yet accepted by the MLA.

300-word proposals by March 1 to Katherine D. Harris (
katherine.harris@sjsu.edu). Please email with questions.

The semester has blasted off, and I’m already revising my British Literature 1800 [1780]-Present reading list. Of course, I overload on the Romantics because, well, it’s the Romantics. This is probably a pitfall for all Romanticists teaching survey courses, though. There are numerous issues to cover in conjunction with the literature, which means often I find my syllabus littered with non-fiction prose, introductions, and histories more so than poetry and short stories, at least in the early years. By the time I round the corner to the Victorians, my students are relieved to be leaving behind so much poetry. It’s not until the end of the semester that they understand the subtitle to this course has some meaning: Aftering, Parody & Pastiche. You see, we look at the revisions to Romantic and Victorian literature, even Romantics within the Victorians, as the decades progress until we end with Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Endless Nights, on the last day of class — really a treatise in the Gothic tradition and early 19th-century print culture.  By that last day or two, they get it; they really see it.  But first, they must suffer through a hard mid-term exam where I ask them to memorize much about the Romantics and Victorians (including Wordsworth’s famous phrase).

This semester, I’ll contrast Wordsworth’s authorial production theory against Mary Shelley’s “creating out of chaos” production theory. Despite having assigned Shelley Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl” CD last semester, I didn’t assign Frankenstein. I like to reserve that novel for my TechnoRomanticism course where we languish over the novel for 10 weeks and read Romanticism into its narrative (ergodic and radial reading methodologies).  10 weeks — 10 weeks! on a single novel! I did this twice and enjoyed the conversation and results immensely. We even built a digital edition/archive as a class project. But, in the British Literature survey, we don’t have time to do this. And, quite frankly, I had become tired of teaching about the good (or bad?) Dr. Frankenstein. I had run out of ideas for engaging students in the production of the narrative and the progress of technology. I have to admit, I was leaving out Frankenstein in favor of more canonical works. I wanted them to immerse themselves in Lyrical Ballads and Biographia Literaria, or Keats’ lyrics and Shelley’s politics. Though we all consider Mary Shelley to be canonical now, in a survey how much of the Big 6 do I sacrifice to include her highly politicized, relevant novel? As long as I’m confessing, I was feeling guilty about not exercising my traditional literature chops of late, having become immersed in so much Digital Humanities work. I felt like I needed my street cred back in Romanticism. (Alan Liu has talked about his struggle to maintain his Romanticism focus while becoming a leader in Digital Humanities.)

Well, this semester, all be damned. I welcome Frankenstein back and realize how much I’ve missed this sickly, fainting doctor and Mary Shelley’s long sinuous descriptions of Nature. I’m anticipating that Jackson’s later hypertextual novel will make much more sense to students, as will Gaiman’s graphic novel.  (We even have a treat here at San Jose State: it turns out that one of the artists who collaborated with Gaiman teaches in our animation/illustration department!)

We begin the novel next week and spend a mere 3 days on it: 1 per each volume. It’s not enough time, I know. But, then again, this is a survey course, a course for piquing student interest for other upper division courses in their favorite areas. Like last semester, this semester’s group of 25 is inspired and inspiring already. Perhaps it’s budget cuts or the dwindling number of classes; whatever is happening, I have mostly senior English majors in this lower division course. They have some savvy about their ideas and are enthusiastic, even during our evening meeting time.

So, Frankenstein, 1818 edition with the 1831 introduction, you are permitted entrée into our parlour.

These posts on Teaching Romanticism have been intriguing and thoughtful. Thank you for putting this together!

I always find that Romanticism and textual studies are good segue into Digital Humanities for teaching and research.  I began teaching at San Jose State University 5 years ago and opened with a very traditional Romantic-era survey of Romanticism.  We followed the timeline, began with Blake and ended with Mary Shelley. We ranged over the slavery issue and working class poets, though there were very few of those poets being printed.  The Mellor & Matlak anthology was my guide because it offered thematic arrangement of materials while still including the women poets who, I felt, were integral to the understanding of collaborative creative moments among our canonical Big 6.  But, the course wasn’t satisfying. The only assignment where students actually engaged with the material at some depth was the recitation, and even then they were fearful instead of fearless and playful.  Considering who I have become as a researcher and how involved I am in Digital Humanities work, I wanted to bring a sense of passion and engagement to my teaching.  Textual studies and Digital Humanities seems to do that for me, allowing me time to play with the material, see patterns, extrapolate theses that haven’t been otherwise contemplated in the field.  In constructing this type of course, I had to first determine what would be considered playful by my students.

In Digital Humanities circles, we often talk about collaboration between disciplines, among scholars, and with technologists. While progress in the field is nurtured certainly by this type of research, what of our students? How are we shepherding Digital Humanities to those undergraduates who could most benefit from exposure to collaborative tools or humanities computing strategies? Happily, HASTAC has been addressing pedagogy, most specifically with Cathy Davidson’s post “Research is Teaching” and the wildly successful forum “Teaching with Technology and Curiosity.”

Collaboration, shared knowledge, open access, extra-disciplinarity. These are the major tenets of Digital Humanities. However, what is missing in this list is something required of all digital projects: play. Roger Caillois qualifies this type of unstructured activity as “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill” (Man, Play and Games 2001; 6). This lack of structure, leads to exploration, discovery, and production of knowledge in ways that were only imagined twenty years ago. Typically though we don’t allow our students this sense of play in their traditional studies. Especially in literary studies, we supply students with the end-product but don’t expose them to the theories and the methodologies always.  We separate those kinds of issues into other courses (e.g., Introduction to Literary Criticism or Introduction to Research Methods). When faculty bring a particular perspective, for example textual studies or feminist theory, to a classroom setting, the methods for exploring and discovering aren’t exposed to students. Instead, we’re offering them the one big major tool, close reading, for their arsenal.  Students then live with some anxiety that there’s one way to read a text and, more often, ask “how does the professor want me to read this?”  It becomes a guessing “game” instead of an exploration and discovery of the literature. In the final essay, we expect students to offer a discovery, a research paper, or an analysis.  But, if we haven’t exposed them to the methodology and the theory, how can they adequately achieve a true exploration of the literature? In this way, the course becomes a game with an outcome, consequences, and rigid rules. Using Digital Humanities strategies, I want to instill a sense, even if it’s artificial, that literary studies are a “free and voluntary activity, a source of joy and amusement” as Caillois defines “play” (6).

To this end, I combined textual editing with technology in my Romantic Literature Survey course. We had the use of a spectacular room, filled with hardware and software everywhere:

TechnoRomanticism: We created our own digital edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Along the way, we created a collaborative timeline using MIT’s SIMILE & Timeline script. We didn’t even begin to create a website until some of the preliminary assignments are done — assignments that look at the construction of this novel, both linguistically and bibliographically. Every 2 weeks, we held a workshop on some digital assignment and acquired 1 new skill, not even necessarily a new tool, but a skill. We practiced radial and ergodic reading by taking on only 2 chapters of Frankenstein each week.  However, we read other literature into the novel.  For instance, at one point “… Tintern Abbey” is quoted in the novel, but if students haven’t had a chance to read or study this particular poem, they would have a difficult time understanding its interruption of the narrative.  So, we studied the poem as we were studying that very chapter. By not overloading undergraduate students with readings, we were really able to spend an entire class meeting on both the poem and the novel’s page.

That strategy gave way to self-interruptions in constructing their digital editions — what did it mean to provide a hyperlink in the middle of a paragraph? How does it interrupt the musings on Nature, the soul and science?  All of it, all of it went back to Romanticism’s major ideas.

Is anyone else performing these kinds of interruptions and collaborations in their own courses?