Comments for Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

Comment on Teaching Romanticism in a…Library? by Kate Singer

Kate Singer — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:02:04 +0000

Roger,
I was thinking yesterday, in a slanted way, about the questions you raise at the end of your post, especially the first one about a teacher’s role in the age of Google answers. I sometimes ask for anonymous feedback from my students (especially in my Romanticism survey courses) to find out what kinds of review they’d like on conceptual terms, historical context, or approaches to reading. This time around, many of them asked for “more history” or for information on things like Blake’s views on religion and Revolution. My sophomores and juniors have been reading _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ and have been getting frustrated. I think this “eternal struggle” is pretty standard for one’s first run-in with Blake’s longer works, but it was interesting to think that my students so quickly wanted alleviate the tension, rather than to dwell in (im)possibility.

They could find this kind information on Google–pretty easily–if they took the time to look. Maybe they didn’t have time (and as we approach the paper-crunch before Fall break, I’m willing to believe that) or they didn’t know how to find this information or they wanted me to narrate it, filter it, digest it for them. On one hand, I do think it’s my job to sketch Blake into some sort of historical, theoretical, literary field that is palatable and digestible for them. On the other hand (and this is the argument I perhaps too earnestly tried to perform of at the beginning of class yesterday), what would be the fun of me telling them Blake’s views? (Not to mention he might rise up from his grave and haunt my small New England backyard, shouting, “Urizen! Urizen!”) Though Blake scholars have long compared Blakean nodal logic to the web, I’m coming to wonder whether the teacher/professor/librarian should be not anti-context but anti-information?

Comment on Gustatory Romanticism Course Begins! by Ron Broglio

Ron Broglio — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:27:45 +0000

This sounds like a wonderful course. Food is where nature and culture (high and low) meet. If I may, there are other complex food issues:
- the role of meat in culture. See Beef and Liberty by Ben Rogers
- potatoes vs wheat. See the well known Katherine Gallagher essay on potatoes in her Practicing New Historicism.
- Beer (vs wine) and esp. homemade beers. William Cobbett makes much of this in Rural Rides. The whole of the rides involves eating and politics. John Barrel touches on ale houses in his reading of George Moreland’s paintings in The Dark Side of the Landscape.
- Anything on the Highland Clearances. You mention Hogg. His Shepherd’s Calendar has a brief essay on Storms (see the Douglas Mack edition) and the role of sheep in culture. Essentially the clearnances where sheep vs. people (growing wheat) on arable land.
- milk and cheese in Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy (Spring) and if you wanted to go later in the 19th c period then dairies, gender, etc. in Hardy’s Tess.

I’ll not that much of what I’ve listed does not fall easily into aesthetics (except perhaps the picturesque of agriculture or the sublime of feed populations). However, it does demonstrate the entanglement of taste, politics, and human and animal and plant bodies.

Best wishes with your course. I would be interested to see how it plays out. Keep blog readers posted. Feel free to email me any time.

Comment on The inheritance of classroom culture by Erik Simpson

Erik Simpson — Thu, 19 May 2011 02:29:20 +0000

Roger, I just (belatedly) spent some time looking at your Blake site. Thank you very much for sharing it (both from the beginning and now with me). I have used WordPress as well (as in http://prairiebloom.wordpress.com/) but you have explored its capabilities more thoroughly, and I look forward to getting more deeply into it. I’m doing everything I can at Grinnell to move the faculty away from reflexively adopting closed systems for course content.

Katherine, I think your last question will answer the others: if the later instantiations stay invigorating, the rest will fall into place. That excitement will have to come from the sensation of building something as part of a community that any one class would be unable to create. I don’t know how well that will go over with students, but I want to use my recurring seminar on Ulysses to try it out. What better text to make apparent the benefits of communal input? I’ll be interested to hear about your experience.

Comment on Putting Together my Fall Class: Visualizing 19th Century British Poetry by Roger Whitson

Roger Whitson — Tue, 03 May 2011 14:42:26 +0000

I’ll check it out. Thanks Katherine!

Comment on Putting Together my Fall Class: Visualizing 19th Century British Poetry by Katherine Harris

Katherine Harris — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:30:19 +0000

Oh yeah — reading more closely now. Of course Haggard wouldn’t fit. But the Tours of Dr. Syntax is written in cantos. Might be fun to do.

Comment on The inheritance of classroom culture by Roger Whitson

Roger Whitson — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:17:34 +0000

Erik,

I’m one of those people who would rather run a LMS on Drupal or WordPress than use closed systems like Blackboard. My William Blake and Media class ran on a WordPress site: http://media.blake2.org – and I found that to be a really useful experience for my students. It was a pretty easy install – basic WordPress, Buddypress with widgets.

Here’s a great article by David Parry about using WordPress as an LMS. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/wordpress-a-better-lms/23050

I seem to remember someone developing a Drupal module to create an LMS, but I can’t remember if that was MediaCommons or another academic site.

Comment on Putting Together my Fall Class: Visualizing 19th Century British Poetry by Roger Whitson

Roger Whitson — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:42:34 +0000

Eric,

Awesome idea about Shelley’s and Landon’s poems. I’ll definitely have to look into those resources. And I’ll look up the Looten essay. Thanks!

Comment on Putting Together my Fall Class: Visualizing 19th Century British Poetry by Eric Eisner

Eric Eisner — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 15:36:21 +0000

Roger, this sounds like a great class! If you haven’t happened across Tricia Lootens’s essay on commodity gothicism in the MLA _Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction_, you might check it out–it opens with a very interesting and suggestive discussion of a lit & the visual class along these lines, and might give you some ideas for your course. Also, since we’re here blogging at Romantic Circles, I can’t help but think of all the great RC electronic editions that would suit such a course well, at least from the poets interacting with the visual side—e.g., Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci” http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/index.html or L.E.L.’s “Verses” and the Keepsake http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/lel/index.html. Let us know what you end up teaching and what electronic resources you end up using for this!

Comment on Scribd, the Collaborative Classroom, and the Paperless Blake Class by Roger Whitson

Roger Whitson — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:15:23 +0000

Thanks! Let me know what you come up with.

Comment on Putting Together my Fall Class: Visualizing 19th Century British Poetry by Roger Whitson

Roger Whitson — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:50:42 +0000

Haggard and Dr Syntax are interesting, but I wanted to keep it to poetry for the fall class.